If I felt disappointed when I left the school in July at the idea of having to return there in September then my disappointment did not show, nor was there much response on the part of my parents after the minibus bus dropped me, my suitcase and my records off at the front door of the parental house. When I was through the door and everything that I'd brought with me was put away temporarily it was business as usual, tea and quiet because watching the television was the order of the day.
With my partially overcoming a sense of discomfort after the adventures outdoors I might well have felt that I had something to report. But my family did not think so, to them it was the stuff of letter writing, nothing more, one sided sharing by me in where the contents of the page piqued their interest more than who wrote it. Anything more I tried to say to about it to make it seem personal to me was me 'showing off' because the education system had not offered them the same, this seemed particularly true when dad was in the parental house. The welcome I got was the usual response, indifference that resisted being read for what it was. Only the Sooty, the cat, actively welcome me when I sat down and that was because I was a new choice of knee for him to sit on.
So I was squeezed back into the old weekly routines, complete with their Summer variations. For being slightly longer legged I noticed my knees knocked a little closer to the support end of the table when the four of us ate together, and the house seemed to be little more like an obstacle course than previously with how nearly every room in the house had multiple use, sometimes simultaneously, as in my room was always a store room as well as where I slept, sometimes sequentially as in when Mother did the household accounts on the living room table off which we normally ate, late every Thursday night. The kitchen and my parents bedroom were rooms which had to be passed through to get to other rooms. Managing a sense of privacy in such a cramped house inevitably came down to reduced observations of the lives of others.
It was part of the values of the parental house that we never discuss sex, politics, religion, or money with each other, or with anyone else. We discuss nothing with anyone that might give us an opinion which puts us in any way at odds with other members of the family, however important the discussion might seem to us. We cannot even discuss why what might seem important to us might also be what divides us, it is too close to discussing subjects that are banned. The television and The Daily Mirror' present us with all the opinions we are meant to need and they never argue with themselves, particularly not when the television listings are the most important part of the newspaper for us and when the channel remains the same which is what dad tries to reinforce when he is in the house.
Every Saturday night we sat down together to watch 'The Two Ronnies' on the BBC, mainly because as light entertainment it so well done that it slips down very easily. It such a well made programme that in among the funnier absurdities that Messrs Barker and Corbett deliver it hard to explain that there is a quite large amount of humour that references sex, particularly women's sexuality as related to by sexist and presumptuous men in the sketches. And these sketches do not exactly send up the male presumption to gloat and stare etc at the women or make the men appear to be weak. That sort of material is much nearer the needling machismo that passes for humour on ITV at times than it first appears to be.
Since nothing stops us watching, then watching the way the women are acceptably rendered as having no depth leaves me mildly perturbed. I too have been the recipient of apparently thoughtless male sexual attention of boys other than Colin and Peter, thankfully with less aggression than they used. Boys who when I was an Intermediate or Senior thought that they both had a right to demand sex from me for the space I was in with them, with nobody else about, and who enjoyed the arrogance of being assertive. They also thought it funny that I should be so obliging to them, as if i did not have my own reasons. Watching the more sexist side of 'The Two Ronnies' leaves me in an odd place. What I did next was even more odd. I found, and started to buy the cheap paperbacks with their comedy sketches and jokes in them as if I were a fan, including the sketches with self obsessed men in them.
On the same cheap paperback market stall I found my vice-du-jour, as regards personal reading at least, for years to come. I discovered the Russ Tobin series of books as written by Stanley Morgan. By the time the time the last one was published in 1979 it became a series of eighteen books. Many of them had 'Tobin' in the title followed by a short phrase like 'Takes Off', 'On Safari', 'In Paradise', 'In Trouble' etc with the later books having more innuendo in the titles, when he is unemployed and a kept man he is 'Hard Up'. The series started with Russ Tobin, aged 22 in 1968, as 'The Sewing Machine Man' and throughout the series he is in different jobs in different countries where he keeps on finding himself in sexually opportunistic situations with attractive women, as if opportunity follows him. With a new profession for each new book, the books are not merely infinite immature sexual fantasy, but they are about a fantasy economy that never stops offering the lead character choices of profession as well. He no more wants or needs to settle down with anyone than he wants to keep any job, as long as there is another girl another country and another trade to be found. Russ Tobin's right to be restless could never be quenched.
The sexual writing in the books sets up a situation of intimacy in which somehow all the actual close personal detail of who puts what into where, and the effect it had, is repeatedly avoided, apparently for reasons of sociability. Since I was fifteen and my understanding of sex was not much beyond the opacity of sex education booklets then Stanley Morgan's writings seemed alright to me. His entertainments were the missing link that I could not resist between the top-shelf porn in the newsagents which I browsed when out in the town from boarding school with Kevin, now alas gone back to live with his single mother for good, and popular fiction. The way the books set up sexual situations that as the text progresses they then completely avoid describing in proper detail echoes Mother's way of describing situations that went wrong in her life, by her with-holding vital details as she describes the events, details that would have explained how the situation was set up and why it went wrong.
As fake worlds go the content of the books was very attractive. I could be in that world and simultaneously walking with Mother down the street on a Saturday night in a new custom Mother has just started. She decided that she had to 'buy a bottle of lemonade and a bottle of cocoa cola' and get the money back on our empty bottles on Saturday night when we could have got them anytime. What Mother really wanted was a break from the television screen and I walk with her because she assumes that I need a break as well. She had a point, there is something mildly suffocating about watching too much well made light entertainment.
There are limits to what light entertainment helps us avoid noticing. We could not miss the declining health of Sooty, our cat. He was full grown when Mother found him in the wild over ten years before and he had gotten slower since half term. He had lost much of his appetite and taken to hiding behind chairs around the house. If he could have hid outside and got lost forever he would have. Dad never reacted to suffering and signs of decline in anyone except himself so did not notice what Sooty was going through, Mother appeared to be frozen, for not wanting to react in a way that might seem wrong with dad. I felt quite distressed about it and was not as much in thrall to the fear of how dad might react as Mother was. So one midweek evening I proposed to her that we get the cat put down properly by a vet. I led the way too. I found Mother's mid brown shopping bag, putting some old newspaper in the bottom and get the cat in the bag. The ease with which Sooty went into the bag as if it were her last hiding place stayed with me a long time after that evening. It was a sure sign that the time was right. The walk to the vets was brisk but still the better part of thirty minutes. The walk back was much slower and as reflective on what we had done as you might expect. I reflected back to Snowy, the dog who Sooty had replaced when he arrived. With Snowy's illness and death our resistance to recognising illness in animals and how quickly we resorted to the blame game was much worse. Mother said that the death of the dog was fault of the Jehovah's Witnesses who had called at the back door and left the back gate open thus allowing the dog to escape and seek adventure when there were several stages after that at which his absence might have been discovered and caught before he drank the dirty water that poisoned his liver and ended his life.
There would not be any similar never ending repetitions of old blame games with the loss of Sooty. He was taken to the allotments the following day. Mother left me to dig a small hole near the hedge, big enough to receive him in a shoe box and we put him in the hole and shared a few words of thanks for the happiness he had given us. No more was said, no more needed to be said or done.
Summer 1976 was first time I rode dad's bike. It was adult size and that was the first year that I was tall enough to ride it comfortably. The understanding on which rode it was that I was never going to have one of my own, and since dad had lost interest in his bike then his bike remained his, just like everything else he owned. But it was his to let me use sensibly. He'd had it for over twenty years before it became mine to use. It had a solid frame, so it was very heavy, three Sturmey Archer gears, a pump, and a dynamo attached to the front fork of the bike that generated electricity for the rear and front lights from the wheel that was moved by the tyre going round. It was painted dark blue. It was a very tough bike. The limits of my engagement with maintaining it were that I knew how to keep it clean, how to remove and adjust the chain, how to remove the front wheel the hub of the back wheel being where complicated gears were, how to adjust the seat which was made of a durable hard leather. But fixing punctures was something I left dad lead in, more or less at his insistence.
He knew how much I could be all fingers and thumbs. For years I was allowed to watch him take the tyre off and detach the inner tube from the wheel before doing the same myself. I was allowed to pump the inner tube up, though. But he was the one to put it in the water to discover where the puncture was and apply the chalk to dry around where the hole was. In some ways the shared times fixing punctures was the nearest I had to a shared sense of understanding with him about anything. It was the nearest I got to a 'birthday card moment' where I shared an idealised sense of unity with dad. But it was not active trust in me, in either it's broadest or narrowest sense.
There was more trust between my and my sister than there was between me and dad. In the holidays when Mother was working in the second hand shop we would walk out around the town together, in theory to go and see one of our aunts but actually to get out of the house and out from under our parents feet. We were out together without Mother one day and a car stopped and asked us for directions. The driver was somebody we recognised from his being on television. He was a reporter from a local news programme and he had been told that there was potato blight in some potatoes that had arrived at the docks but could not find the docks, they were not signposted. I said to the man 'Give us a ride in your car and I will direct you to the docks'. My sister and I got in the back of his car and I was as good as my word. We were also nearer the aunt we were meant to see when he dropped us off. We both went to my sister's school during the day in the summer. It had opened for children to play non-competitive sports with each other. It was surprising how much more fun sports could be with fewer teachers to run it, I felt this quite strongly as I discovered how much more I wanted enjoyed sport and playing games then than normal.
I went mostly short local distances on dad's bike. I had no real cause to far. The farthest I went was to see my Grandparents. It was a bracing seven mile ride one way, which could be done by road or on the path along the riverbank which went all the way there with a few short breaks. But I was keen and not the first to cycle to see them, they had a grown up adopted stepson who visited on his push bike which was much lighter than mine. He was a bit younger than Mother and her sister, and another person in the family who the more Mother explained who he was the less we really knew about him. Mother's differing accounts of him never matched up. But it was obvious to me that I owed my first name to him and Mother was never going to tell me this directly, nor would she mention that the fact that he was adopted by my grandparents and had this odd connection with them might explain how oddly I connected with my parents.
But then Mother could not even talk about the obvious; her failing eyesight and hot flushes. They were self evident to anyone who was close enough to be observant of her and both seemed to be long term symptoms of the hysterectomy she had a couple of summers ago combined with her hitting the menopause. She would not let anyone who might be able to say something useful to her close enough to listen, not even Marion from across the road who as a woman seemed to understand why and how women needed their own wisdom to take care of their physical health. The nearest Mother got to recognising the symptoms was the distance she kept from the fire which dad liked to almost to sit upon, and the holding of shopping lists at arms length whilst gong round the shop to read what she had written. The person Mother really wanted to hear from about and talk to about how she was was her grandmother who was twenty years dead, Grandma Clifton was a wise woman and had died in 1956. She would have both known what was wrong and what to take to fix it. As it was Mother eventually bought herself a supply of witch hazel from, of all places, our local photographic supplies shop.
I took over sewing tasks when I was there. I was already threading needles for Mother so it was not much more for me to do for me to sew as well. My first job was to hem the bottoms of the two pairs of second hand grey school trousers which we got cheap from the Cancer Research Charity Shop because the legs were too long. Sowing buttons on shirts becomes 'my job' as well. The odd part of it was that Mother would still knit jumpers and cardigans in Cable Knit and Aran style from very complicated patterns, but she did them more by feel and counting than sight. Knitting cardigans gave her something to do whilst the television was on and she was expected to enjoy it more she actually did. She could still use her electric sowing machine as well, as long as the skill in creating depended on feel and touch more than sight.
I had written to Kevin a few times in the holiday and he had written back. It was great to get post of my own but it was frustrating that his replies were often shorter than my letters to him. But they kept me hoping that we could stay in touch with each other somehow. As Autumn approached I began to doubt whether the the correspondence would continue, particularly if I had to motivate myself to write within the school. It could not be part of any agenda the school had already set up, like writing to our parents once a week was. The agenda that the school had for me was surely going to change anyway.
My first surprise with school was the new minibus that we were collected in. It advertised 'The Sunshine Club' in big red and green letters along each side, since they, or rather The Variety Club GB, an entertainers charity, had raised the funds for us to have it. The second surprise when we all arrived at the school was how many more new boys there were than previous. We had been told this was happening, but seeing the school reorganised in action was different. At times the changes made me want to hide and keep myself more private. The third change was that I was now on fifty pence a week pocket money, and there would be no more rises in pocket money after this. But then I reasoned that if I were not here and on pocket money then I would be somewhere else and earning my own money somehow.
The proof for this idea came to me when a boy who had left the school returned for the day. We were most surprised. Keith had a background of living in different care homes and having no one family home to go to in the holidays. Thus over the previous five years the school provided him with the greatest personal stability he had ever known. Aged sixteen, whilst still at the school, he had been accepted for The Army to the great joy of the staff. On leave from training he had returned to the school to see the staff because he felt a debt of gratitude towards them for their help in getting him the training placement. But the boys saw him too, he was one of the boys it was always unnatural for me to get on with. He had good physical co-ordination, he was tall and sporty, and he was not just a good team player but team captain material. When he visited the school I was polite to him but with his partial army training, that he was there to see the staff, and how definitively unsporty I was he more or less looked through me and said very little. He almost made me feel as if I were not there. But he was proof that the school was not quite the thick bubble which contained us in it's routines, from which there was no escape, that it had previously appeared to be.
The final surprise was being sent out on work experience. There were up to ten of us sent out on this new scheme. One of the activities that Senior boys were meant to do was to see their parents more at weekends more often. There were two reasons for this, the first was to start to reconnect better with where their future was going to be, the second was to reduce the food bill for the school at weekends. But there was no direct public transport link I could have used to see my family and my father did not have a car, or access to a car. So I did not go back more often, and this was apart from the fact that for all Mother's nice words they would rather I stayed at the school, they too had routines to stick to and economies to make.
This affected my choice of placement. other boys' placements could happened mid-week the better to let them leave school earlier on Friday for the weekend. Since I was not going to be away early for that many Friday afternoons then a placement that took up more of the Friday was an obvious choice for me. I was sent to get work experience as a teachers assistant in a local school for the mentally and physically disabled run by an all-women staff. Since the mental age of the children was about five or six then it was a playschool for older infants in all but name. All the structure that there was for me to me learn from was seemingly more to reinforce the reserve of the female staff who wanted to keep their distance from a male volunteer who lacked confidence. From their point of view my lack of confidence was the thing they wanted to develop, that I should have no greater sense of self worth and usefulness at the end than I had when I started.
I was reliable in my attendance, I did the thirty minute walk from the boarding school to the placement school to arrive by 9 am and I would do what the teacher asked of me as the children played in the big main room. But I had no experience of how to interact with mentally and physically disabled children and as a maladjusted child myself how I mixed with relatively normal children and adults was surely seen as 'impaired'. I was at my most useful at the end of the lesson, when the tidying up had to be done. The times that I most enjoyed were lunch times, the food was good there. Lunch should have been the best time to get to know who I was working with, but there was a natural sense of reserve in which the staff, particularly the head esteemed each other which naturally froze me out. I left at four in the afternoon and was back at the boarding school for tea at five in the afternoon.
Many a time in the work experience I felt slightly 'frozen' as if there was some engagement or activity that I was meant to initiate but I didn't because I could not see how to. The most vivid moment in the whole of the thirty nine or so Fridays I was there was when the television had just been put on for the children. It was late in the morning when there were children's programmes being broadcast. The teacher went through all three of the channels to find the children's programme. As she did so, for a few seconds on the screen there appeared every member of a half naked rugby team having a very noisy and masculine looking communal bath after a match. That few seconds blast of sheer testosterone from the television screen cut through the feminised atmosphere of the school like a knife and for that reason it seemed quite scary to the teacher. I felt as if that few seconds masculinity woke me up. But it also proved how much the femininity of the work place sent me to sleep. But of those sent out on placement I was the one who was most accepting of this female narcoleptic effect, therefor the trainee most suitable for the place.
The effect of the 'work experience' was one of the bigger contributions to a nagging sense of my life being one continuous displacement activity. I was in the wrong place and if this was the right time then seemingly there was no right place to be. Whether it was school work, being friendly to the other boys my age and younger, volunteering to cover the motorcycle racing of a Saturday for St John Ambulance with Ian, going to the library on my own, going to see day boy John as a friend when he was free and home etc I was competent to the point of unexceptional in what I did. Whatever I was allowed to do, or was barred from doing, the money that enabled it changed hands well over my head in a way that meant that I could never grasp how it gave me choices, or as was more likely the case reduced my choices until they were at best pleasant obligations. It was as if a time was going to come when all I did was going to be seen as repeats of activities that were of little consequence in themselves which in the longer run were going to account for nothing, as if I'd never been young. 280
Christmas that year was not quite part of that vanished world yet, but when we were all left off the bus that December and I went into the parental house for three weeks part of me felt as if it might as well have been. I felt 'too old' for what felt like a season of over-rehearsed sentimentality. I did not mind that I got socks for Christmas, they have their uses. I doubt the presents I thought of for others were that inspired either. We were all too tired of each other to observe the lack of inspiration in our giving. If we had have tried to talk and listen then we knew that any one of us might have to end the conversation at short notice. As a family we were not allowed to talk about money, religion, sex or politics, because they were all subjects that might leave us divided if we formed different opinions.
The highlight of that particular season of good will was a communication from Kevin. He was still stuck in his own world, living on the coast of the county with just his mother unable to say very much. But he still liked his Bowie albums, and he read the music press which I not doing at the time. The more he tried to be open and personal in his letter writing the more apparent it became that there would be no more letters from him, not that either of us wanted that. But the worlds each of us lived in made sharing anything much impossible.
I looked at the family record player which was the best record player in the house, louder than the mono Dansette in my room, and still it was so quiet when it played anything. I later learned that that whilst the family record player was in stereo dad had disconnected and removed one of the speakers to make it quieter, rather than encourage use the volume control. He did not know that he was doing damage to the electronics of the channel with no load or speaker on it by his actions. Their indifference to music extended to their choice of records. They all liked very safe and cheaply sold music like 'Top Of The Pops' covers albums, old compilations of sixties female vocalists and a fair few of the more kitsch 1960's Elvis Presley albums that could be found cheaply anywhere. I realised that Kevin might as well have been as far from me and the parental house as our shared hero David Bowie was from both of us, for all the things we could say that might seem personal to each of us.
Find Chapter 29 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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