One afternoon in middle of the May, 1972, in the fog of time between me being taken off the medication and the most powerful effects of the medication wearing off within me, Mother and I were taken by Mrs Hunt in her mini to see the new school that she, and her superiors whom we knew little about, proposed for me.
The appointment was arranged so that dad could have come with us if he had wanted to. He could have got the time off, but he chose his work instead. He had already disowned the idea of sending me to a school far away without him quite saying so when it was put to him directly in a conversation in which he was meant to be engaged.
One of his luxuries as the nominal head of the household was to selectively disown decisions made by/for the household and individual members of it. This choice of disownership was particularly used when a decision had to be made and every choice had consequences that included downsides that he did not want. The best way of declining the downsides was choosing to deny what he could not accept. He knew alright, but for him the less knowledge other people could claim he knew then the better he felt, and the more he could blame others for the consequences of what he would claim was the wrong decision in the first place.
The appointment was arranged so that dad could have come with us if he had wanted to. He could have got the time off, but he chose his work instead. He had already disowned the idea of sending me to a school far away without him quite saying so when it was put to him directly in a conversation in which he was meant to be engaged.
One of his luxuries as the nominal head of the household was to selectively disown decisions made by/for the household and individual members of it. This choice of disownership was particularly used when a decision had to be made and every choice had consequences that included downsides that he did not want. The best way of declining the downsides was choosing to deny what he could not accept. He knew alright, but for him the less knowledge other people could claim he knew then the better he felt, and the more he could blame others for the consequences of what he would claim was the wrong decision in the first place.
To get to this new school took about an hour. Well before we left Mother made the first preparations; I had to take a pill to stop me wanting to be sick in the car. Neither of us had much experience of being passengers in cars, though Mother surely had some experience of being driven around when single. Some her several boyfriends had cars and she would have used public transport often enough to overcome all symptoms of travel sickness. I got car sick quite easily in few short car journeys that I had made up to that point in my life. With hindsight I would think it quite predictable if one of the side effects of the anti-depressants was a hyper sensitivity to being in motion. But since I was rarely a passenger in any vehicle it was a symptom that rarely showed up. Mother and I were used to walking to get places. So an hour in a car felt a lot longer, stranger, and mildly disorienting than a normal hour was given how we usually travelled. As the eyes and ears of Social Services Mrs Hunt surely knew all this better than we realised. She tried to be the distracting and entertaining host whilst she drove, and we felt slightly cramped given the lack of space in the car.
When we arrived we stopped a mile short of a small market town, took a sharp left turn up a half-mile long drive and parked in front of a 1920's style three storey house. The top floor had mock Tudor black beams against a white background. It looked both welcoming and impressive from the outside. We piled out the car, took in the fresh air after our journey and were greeted by a member of staff at the main door which was up four wide stone steps. After formal introductions the social worker separated from us and went into some other part of the building, leaving Mother and I to be shown around the place by the teacher who had greeted us at the front door.
Being shown round took nearer two hours than one because the staff talked a bit about the routines of the school as we were shown the rooms. Inside the main building I was mildly put off for seeing the drabness of the walls for what it was. Where ever we looked there were minor variations in the different shades of pastel green on the Anaglypta wallpaper that went on farther than the eye could see. At that point I did not know the phrase 'hospital green' to describe said pale colour, but if I had then it would have come to mind instantly. This was how the corridors and dormitories were decorated, there were two floors of dormitories. We were shown round both floors, and saw a series of rooms off the main corridor on each floor, some rooms had three single beds in them, some had four and two had five beds, each room also had a chest of draws, some rooms had a small wardrobe. Also upstairs, slightly away from the dormitories, were the showers and bathrooms, toilets, the sick room. Finally upstairs there was the laundry room where clothes were ironed and returned to the boys by them being put in in numbered lockers in said room.
On the ground floor there was the hall which we came into the building through with it's wide staircase, a television room a staff room, a dining room and the back stairs all of which looked nice partly because there was no human activity there and everything was clean. I say 'looked nice', my mind did wander when I began to wonder how much Anaglypta and green paint had been used through out the place, it was there everywhere we looked and with so little variation that where was a variation-the headmaster's office-the sense of finally finding some character in the place was quite striking. Later we saw more lockers with numbers on them, and down a passage with a sliding door on it which opened out onto the neatly trimmed lawns there was an assembly hall which doubled as a gymnasium. In it the sound bounced off the brick of the walls with just the three of us there. Finally, near the assembly hall, there was the small room where the boys polished their shoes. The headmaster's bungalow was next door to the main building, next to the kitchens. It looked neat and busy from the distant view we got of it.
Our tour was broken in two, and between the two parts we had tea in the headmaster's office. When the tour resumed, for being empty of pupils the school itself seemed even less interesting than the main house, though the woodwork room seemed to have some character about it.
When we arrived we stopped a mile short of a small market town, took a sharp left turn up a half-mile long drive and parked in front of a 1920's style three storey house. The top floor had mock Tudor black beams against a white background. It looked both welcoming and impressive from the outside. We piled out the car, took in the fresh air after our journey and were greeted by a member of staff at the main door which was up four wide stone steps. After formal introductions the social worker separated from us and went into some other part of the building, leaving Mother and I to be shown around the place by the teacher who had greeted us at the front door.
Being shown round took nearer two hours than one because the staff talked a bit about the routines of the school as we were shown the rooms. Inside the main building I was mildly put off for seeing the drabness of the walls for what it was. Where ever we looked there were minor variations in the different shades of pastel green on the Anaglypta wallpaper that went on farther than the eye could see. At that point I did not know the phrase 'hospital green' to describe said pale colour, but if I had then it would have come to mind instantly. This was how the corridors and dormitories were decorated, there were two floors of dormitories. We were shown round both floors, and saw a series of rooms off the main corridor on each floor, some rooms had three single beds in them, some had four and two had five beds, each room also had a chest of draws, some rooms had a small wardrobe. Also upstairs, slightly away from the dormitories, were the showers and bathrooms, toilets, the sick room. Finally upstairs there was the laundry room where clothes were ironed and returned to the boys by them being put in in numbered lockers in said room.
On the ground floor there was the hall which we came into the building through with it's wide staircase, a television room a staff room, a dining room and the back stairs all of which looked nice partly because there was no human activity there and everything was clean. I say 'looked nice', my mind did wander when I began to wonder how much Anaglypta and green paint had been used through out the place, it was there everywhere we looked and with so little variation that where was a variation-the headmaster's office-the sense of finally finding some character in the place was quite striking. Later we saw more lockers with numbers on them, and down a passage with a sliding door on it which opened out onto the neatly trimmed lawns there was an assembly hall which doubled as a gymnasium. In it the sound bounced off the brick of the walls with just the three of us there. Finally, near the assembly hall, there was the small room where the boys polished their shoes. The headmaster's bungalow was next door to the main building, next to the kitchens. It looked neat and busy from the distant view we got of it.
Our tour was broken in two, and between the two parts we had tea in the headmaster's office. When the tour resumed, for being empty of pupils the school itself seemed even less interesting than the main house, though the woodwork room seemed to have some character about it.
There was a long sloping vegetable garden next to the school, at the foot of which was a small swimming pool with small changing rooms at one end, for the boys' use under strict staff supervision. Lastly on the second tour there as a small football pitch and some neat lawns with borders of low growing flowers, and a 'play area' in some woods with a car tyre on a rope in deep shade, which passed for a swing. The latter drew my interest because it was the least manicured of the spaces we were shown, though with the bare earth of the ground there was nothing left to manicure.We could not process what we had been shown round. Our only comparison was with the cramped terraced house we lived in and the overcrowded Primary school that I disliked being at. The size of the site made it seem extremely generous, but with no sign of human activity and no evidence of what house rules there were and how they worked it was hard to imagine what being there might be like. The main house was probably south facing, the light coming through the many windows into the rooms in the main house was quite striking compared with the north facing terraced house we lived in.
As we stood close together on steps in between the grass I was asked 'Do you think you might like it here?'. 'I might' I replied, vaguely sensing that any choice in the matter was not mine to make. As I was asked I looked down and noticed how tidy, short and well kept, the bedding plants were on the edge of the lawn. I wondered if their neatness and how controlled they seemed in the larger scale of things was a metaphor for the schooling I was going to get there. At the time that the idea was just my attention span wandering off from what I was being shown. I was meant to be impressed, but I was not convinced. But my being convinced was not the point anyway-Mother was the one who had to like it.
A few days later some paperwork was sent to Mother from Social Services for her and dad to agree with and sign. There were minor disagreements between my parents before the papers were eventually signed by Mother to send me to the school. my dad had tried to argue that I should not go but had left himself in no position to bargain for any other choice for me, he had carefully avoided looking at every other choice sufficient to have let it pass. Every other choice was gone. With nearly all of the other, former, choices he would deny point blank that he had long since let them pass, unexamined.
She order the name tags from the Co-op and busied herself sowing said tags into every item of clothing I was to take away to wear. Her sowing style was like her parenting, coarse but firm, secure but lacking finesse. With all the sowing involved she learnt how near she was to needing reading glasses when she could not see the thread and the eye of the needle clearly enough to thread the former in the latter. From Woolworth's she bought a large pale blue compressed cardboard suitcase which had to carry everything I was to take to the new school and bring it all back in. It made shopping seem almost glamorous for once. It was not as there was not a suitcase in the house, dad had travelled with one when he went to Ireland for work, and Mother surely had a suitcase of her own when she travelled to France and Belgium before she married, fifteen years earlier, but this new suitcase was bigger than what they had, and I liked the sense of a fresh start at when I learnt that it was to be mine. I liked the quilted dressing gown I got for the first time as well. Though I liked it less as the longer I had to keep it, the taller I grew and the more shorter it got until it was the length of a minis skirt on me. Mother refused to replace it with something longer and more suitable.
Mother found a new way to insert herself into my future when my membership of cub scouts ended in the July. She took a leaf out of her Mother's book, but where me going to Sunday School had failed for lack of home support, Mother chose to support me joining the junior St John Ambulance and going with her. Not only did she know where I, but I had an interest she personally approved of and she felt safer in the evenings walking to their headquarters and back to the parental house. She also planned ahead; I was to join St John Ambulance from the boarding school and attend their training sessions and meetings in the small town near the boarding school.
As the news of me going to the new school far away spread, dad protested to his gossipy neighbour Stan that 'There's nowt wrong with 'im', within my earshot, as if I was not there and was banned from saying what was wrong or right about me for myself. Theoretically it might have been half-true that there was 'nothing wrong' with me. How I was was merely the result of a particular logic and care, or carelessness. But something was wrong somewhere, and my being labelled and sent away like a parcel with nothing being admitted in the parental house was apparently going to fix whatever was was wrong when all wrong was clearly being denied.
I still had another term at Primary school. The summer term became a makeweight time to me. It felt good that it should be like that. With no school agenda my real, personal, agenda was partially recovering from having been on the medication so long. I felt fine for having little to do, for what I was doing to be unimportant. The highlight of the last term was winning the prize of a bottle of sherry in the school summer fair raffle. My parents gratefully collected the prize on my behalf and I never even got to get a sniff or a taste of it. Mother's hoarding instinct made sure it could not be found when it was wanted for sharing.
After the papers had finished being processed Mother's real job started. She was presented with was a list of the clothes that I would be required to take to this new school, some of which I was already wearing where they fitted me comfortably. The list consisted of three sets of everything, pyjamas, socks, underwear, school shirts, school jumpers, and school trousers. Then some casual clothes for weekends and other non-schooling times. Two pairs of good shoes, and complete sports kit. Plimsolls, football boots, three pairs of shorts and a football/cross country shirt.I still had another term at Primary school. The summer term became a makeweight time to me. It felt good that it should be like that. With no school agenda my real, personal, agenda was partially recovering from having been on the medication so long. I felt fine for having little to do, for what I was doing to be unimportant. The highlight of the last term was winning the prize of a bottle of sherry in the school summer fair raffle. My parents gratefully collected the prize on my behalf and I never even got to get a sniff or a taste of it. Mother's hoarding instinct made sure it could not be found when it was wanted for sharing.
She order the name tags from the Co-op and busied herself sowing said tags into every item of clothing I was to take away to wear. Her sowing style was like her parenting, coarse but firm, secure but lacking finesse. With all the sowing involved she learnt how near she was to needing reading glasses when she could not see the thread and the eye of the needle clearly enough to thread the former in the latter. From Woolworth's she bought a large pale blue compressed cardboard suitcase which had to carry everything I was to take to the new school and bring it all back in. It made shopping seem almost glamorous for once. It was not as there was not a suitcase in the house, dad had travelled with one when he went to Ireland for work, and Mother surely had a suitcase of her own when she travelled to France and Belgium before she married, fifteen years earlier, but this new suitcase was bigger than what they had, and I liked the sense of a fresh start at when I learnt that it was to be mine. I liked the quilted dressing gown I got for the first time as well. Though I liked it less as the longer I had to keep it, the taller I grew and the more shorter it got until it was the length of a minis skirt on me. Mother refused to replace it with something longer and more suitable.
Mother found a new way to insert herself into my future when my membership of cub scouts ended in the July. She took a leaf out of her Mother's book, but where me going to Sunday School had failed for lack of home support, Mother chose to support me joining the junior St John Ambulance and going with her. Not only did she know where I, but I had an interest she personally approved of and she felt safer in the evenings walking to their headquarters and back to the parental house. She also planned ahead; I was to join St John Ambulance from the boarding school and attend their training sessions and meetings in the small town near the boarding school.
Before finding out how much more reduced and rewritten the new me might fare in this new school far away please accept the following chapter. It is a true story of how surprise guests were received in the parental house. It illustrates quite well why I might prefer being far away from my parents much more than I cared to think at the time....
Find Chapter 12 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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