When Mother wanted to be speak clearly then nothing would serve her better than a pithy hostile phrase. She had plenty of them. When she was aware that she had not supervised me closely whilst getting me to do some job she needed done well, rather impatiently she would say 'Let the dog see the rabbit'. She was a country woman at heart so it was a natural simile for her to use. But the nature of the phrase was more aggressive then she would surely admit. Dogs usually killed rabbits when they saw them in the wild.
It was a phrase the froze me and shut me down more often than she realised. But then again my being half-frozen a lot of the time was sort of useful to her, it meant she could control me as and when she needed control because the space she had put me in was due for a different use. So I had to move. If only I could have gotten out my own way and out of her way more easily than she suggested, and found a space for myself that nobody else wanted. But, as Mother would have admitted if it seemed a quite logical and reasonable thing to say, part of why I was still at the boarding school was about me avoiding being in her way. The fact that the government ordered it was just coincidence.
The longer the government insisted I stay in boarding school the more I hoped that some friendly member of staff in the school would be the enlightening dog to my nervous rabbit and explain what 'being maladjusted' meant in such a away as gave it a decent future. Then we'd both know why I was there, rather than in a more academically inclined school, a job, or an apprenticeship. Some boys had left early, in spite of the government's new regulations. He might help me find the right exit out of the place. I could never complain about how well I was kept, materially, but between the lukewarm affections of family and whatever the school was meant to be I felt trapped.
This was obvious to anyone who wanted to see it. Nobody wanted to see it, and if the school was meant to be 'a holding place'* for me, then I did not feel held. I felt like multiple failures from elsewhere were being heaped upon me, and other boys. Whilst those in charge said 'We are doing our best' and their best was getting them quite far in life, and me nowhere.
The school was like the small voluntary organisations I'd been in, and left due to my age. It had systems to process people with. But for the processed, part of the process was to rendered unable to understand what being processed meant, what the proper rewards for being the processed might be in the end, and who or what was at the top of the chain of command whilst I was seemingly at the bottom. It was true, there was a national recession coming and this seemed to render more opaque how adults talked about the future. From how opaque the staff of the school seemed with me I could have deduced that the future was now, and this latest now seemed to be a place of uncertainty, waiting, and feeling stuck.
I say that there was a recession coming. The boys did not read the newspapers at the school, but could follow television news headlines. We knew this most closely by how the food budget of the school was being squeezed. There were fewer second servings at mealtimes. Then there was the preparations for the visit of the schools inspector, where the headmaster made the teachers hide a hoard of school exercise books from the schools inspector that he had bought cheaper much earlier than the inspectorate knew about, lest the inspector cut the future budget for our education.
This was obvious to anyone who wanted to see it. Nobody wanted to see it, and if the school was meant to be 'a holding place'* for me, then I did not feel held. I felt like multiple failures from elsewhere were being heaped upon me, and other boys. Whilst those in charge said 'We are doing our best' and their best was getting them quite far in life, and me nowhere.
The school was like the small voluntary organisations I'd been in, and left due to my age. It had systems to process people with. But for the processed, part of the process was to rendered unable to understand what being processed meant, what the proper rewards for being the processed might be in the end, and who or what was at the top of the chain of command whilst I was seemingly at the bottom. It was true, there was a national recession coming and this seemed to render more opaque how adults talked about the future. From how opaque the staff of the school seemed with me I could have deduced that the future was now, and this latest now seemed to be a place of uncertainty, waiting, and feeling stuck.
I say that there was a recession coming. The boys did not read the newspapers at the school, but could follow television news headlines. We knew this most closely by how the food budget of the school was being squeezed. There were fewer second servings at mealtimes. Then there was the preparations for the visit of the schools inspector, where the headmaster made the teachers hide a hoard of school exercise books from the schools inspector that he had bought cheaper much earlier than the inspectorate knew about, lest the inspector cut the future budget for our education.
I should have recognised this hoarding/saving script from the parental house. But I didn't want to, it had followed me around all my life. Apart from my sister, I was the youngest of the thirty odd cousins in my extended family on my father's side. My father was the youngest of his five brothers and four sisters, and the last to marry. His family discreetly understood that for many reasons, his physical health high among them, that he was 'the runt of the litter' in his family. He had survived against the odds. When I was born there was no Family Allowance for the first child, but the allowance was given for both children on the arrival of a second child. So hand-me-down clothing was my 'normal'. When my sister was born the rules changed to family allowance for every child even in whatever order they came, so she got better than me and I was meant be glad for what I had got with less government help.
All my cousins were normal and went to local schools for normal children. Here normality means being bullied in school, but rapidly being supported against the effects of it after it happened. One story of a cousin being bullied stayed with me. A female cousin was held down in school and her hair which was in pigtails, covered in all purpose glue. She was thirteen and in secondary school when it happened. She survived having her long hair cut very short, it grew back and was a minor loss compared with the trauma I endured where the help I got helped others more than me. Hair regrows but few can successfully redevelop momentum by using lost time and lost opportunities.
All my cousins were normal and went to local schools for normal children. Here normality means being bullied in school, but rapidly being supported against the effects of it after it happened. One story of a cousin being bullied stayed with me. A female cousin was held down in school and her hair which was in pigtails, covered in all purpose glue. She was thirteen and in secondary school when it happened. She survived having her long hair cut very short, it grew back and was a minor loss compared with the trauma I endured where the help I got helped others more than me. Hair regrows but few can successfully redevelop momentum by using lost time and lost opportunities.
Somehow I turned fourteen in Summer of 1975 and emotionally the parental house was oddly quiet. The biggest surface change was that Dad traded in the black and white television and got his first colour set. Beyond recognising that it certainly made Top Of The Pops seem brighter and more engaging I could not say why he got it. I would guess that he got it because nearly all his mates had colour sets and he did not want to be the last person among those he knew to have a black and white set. Mother took delivery of it during the day, when dad was at work. She gave me the job of tuning the set after it was unpacked put in it's place, and turned on. My second job was to take the box out in the the yard, which was quite difficult with dad no-longer-working motor scooter in it, and carve it into little pieces to disguise what the writing on the box said, rather more than to get the cardboard to fit in the bin. She feared that we would be burgled and the set stolen if we left out a cardboard box with the words 'colour television' on it's side in the yard. Dad had bought the moped off one of his mates and it had worked for that summer at least, but not much after. Dad had been pleased to get out and about on it with 'L' plates front and back but he had not been out on it lately. Our cat, now elderly, got the most out of it by sitting on the seat on sunny days.
The pound in dad's pocket kept shrinking, he knew this mostly by how the rounds of drinks it bought in the pub got smaller. To him it was no excuse that the pounds in his mates pockets also shrank by the same degree. Nor did it matter to him when he gave Mother less housekeeping whilst expecting it to go further than more housekeeping money had gone before, and with the same degree of deference towards him as before, more than we could ever offer each other. He still had to have his steaks whilst we had sausage, he had to have butter when we had margarine. Since the internal logic of dad's argument was inconsistent then there was no real answer to it, there could not be. The ultimate argument was with his temper and nobody wanted to raise that. But we still wanted something with a consistent internal logic to it to hold on to. We were not yet grown, we were still growing up.
When dad looked like he was not going to get bad tempered Mother tried to engage him in conversation about his decisions, tried to argue back with him and reset his arguments, flawed internal logic and all, within her own, more positive, terms. She spoke in faux feminist terms of her having the buying and making skills of making dad's money stretch as far as he expected it to but if he gave her a bit more then she would do even better. But even when she made her skill the thing that made the difference, not his shrinking money, he was not moved. She also tried to use 'feminist humour' with gentle put-downs like 'You've got me, I've only got you'. The more this went on, over the summer holidays, the more likely it was that there would be a big argument. And there was, and it was horrible. In the end nothing came of it except the silent retrenchments of all the old arguments where dad was as detached and illogical as he thought he needed to be to assert himself. Nothing we said could make him seem more attached to us than he permitted, improve how he saw our lives, or make him rethink how thoroughly he thought through his ideas.
How dad thought certainly added a new pressure on Mother, and changed the conversations we had on the way to the charity shop as we looked for new second hand clothing to fit out the still-growing me for the autumn term and next year of boarding school. It was clear that the recession had hit the supplies to charity shops too, but more time to have to search meant more time to talk over the difficulties of the parental house en route. I was in luck, Mother found me what seemed to be an actual hair shirt, a shirt with coarse black hair on the outside of the shirt which was dark grey, it was quite hideous. But in school I wore my recessionary garment underneath my school jumper with all the pride in being poorer that I, small as I was, could muster.
When dad looked like he was not going to get bad tempered Mother tried to engage him in conversation about his decisions, tried to argue back with him and reset his arguments, flawed internal logic and all, within her own, more positive, terms. She spoke in faux feminist terms of her having the buying and making skills of making dad's money stretch as far as he expected it to but if he gave her a bit more then she would do even better. But even when she made her skill the thing that made the difference, not his shrinking money, he was not moved. She also tried to use 'feminist humour' with gentle put-downs like 'You've got me, I've only got you'. The more this went on, over the summer holidays, the more likely it was that there would be a big argument. And there was, and it was horrible. In the end nothing came of it except the silent retrenchments of all the old arguments where dad was as detached and illogical as he thought he needed to be to assert himself. Nothing we said could make him seem more attached to us than he permitted, improve how he saw our lives, or make him rethink how thoroughly he thought through his ideas.
How dad thought certainly added a new pressure on Mother, and changed the conversations we had on the way to the charity shop as we looked for new second hand clothing to fit out the still-growing me for the autumn term and next year of boarding school. It was clear that the recession had hit the supplies to charity shops too, but more time to have to search meant more time to talk over the difficulties of the parental house en route. I was in luck, Mother found me what seemed to be an actual hair shirt, a shirt with coarse black hair on the outside of the shirt which was dark grey, it was quite hideous. But in school I wore my recessionary garment underneath my school jumper with all the pride in being poorer that I, small as I was, could muster.
When I return to boarding school in the September I was unprepared for how much the lessons were going to be as shoddy as my clothing. The formula for my pocket money remained the same too, I got half of what other boys my age got. Thirty five pence a week. One Saturday afternoon during the summer I was in the parental house when dad wanted to sleep off the excess drink. I was oblivious to how he was. He told me to take fifty pence from the loose change in his ash tray and go and buy myself an ice cream, or something. I took the money and left as he suggested. But I did not know how to spend money, I knew Mother and the house needed it more. I felt guilty, as if I had stolen it. I put the money back when he was not looking.
At the boarding school the school rooms were ten yards from the main house. There were five classrooms all off a large in indoor assembly area with a shiny black floor. Two of the classrooms are up a broad flight of stairs with a rail. These upstairs classrooms share a flat roof and each room has a door onto a balcony with steps down to the ground floor. The playground is small. The small swimming pool is nearby, next to a woodwork workshop. Behind the woodwork shop there was a large vegetable patch and the electricity generator for the school and main house in the event of emergencies all of which we were meant to avoid. It was for the recreation for the staff who lived on site.
The classrooms were light, airy and modern. Black Formica was the standard look for the fixed surfaces near the windows, many of the surfaces have science equipment built in to them. Classes were divided by age; the older we got the looser the structure of the classroom, the further we sat apart.
The large assembly space in the school building had several functions, one was to put up art done by the boys in class. Another use was a general meeting place, by the map of the county where when idling we looked for where we were and where our families lived and wondered at the distance on the map, not thinking, for not being able to think, about the emotional distance we were from those who 'loved us' whilst we were so 'maladjusted'.
The most notable use of that space was always the Annual Christmas Party/Disco. It was the time when we were officially allowed to let our hair down and be noisy and messy and as near being real teenagers as we were allowed to be. For it being official it was also the time when we were most the artificial teenagers you could ever imagine. Sure we wore the clothes we wanted to, the flared bright coloured trousers and strangely patterned nylon shirts. Some of us even wore the least suitable shoes for dancing, the multicoloured platform shoes with stack heels that were the height of fashion at the time too. And the singles chart music was played loud enough that we could not hear ourselves or each other in the space that was now lit only by moving disco lights as well.
This was meant to be fun, particularly when to make the event seem more like a real disco the staff invited the girls from a local school for the maladjusted to join us and we were allowed to try to talk to the girls over the noise of the music. There was an interval, where sandwiches, crisps, and fruit juice were served in one of the classrooms. To nudge the shyer ones among us to talk to the girls in the first half of the evening we were told that to go into where the food was we had to pair off with a girl and get in the queue, two by two for entry. Somehow I seemed to find the same girl to go into refreshments with several years running, not that we knew what to say to each other when we could actually hear each other had think what to say. I remembered her name at the time too, it is long gone now. I probably got an address where I could write to her and tried to write. But her memory of who I was was what sustained and limited all contact between us.
The pseudo-heterosexual atmosphere the staff created by inviting the girls also multiplied how much the staff watched us and worried over us all. However much they had to watch other boys with who they went into refreshments with my company for going into the food was safer going into refreshments with me than anyone could ever suspect. I had more in common with Kevin for us being both gay and sort-of-asexual than either of us shared or felt for the school, or for any girl we were meant to attach ourselves to at short notice.
The classrooms were light, airy and modern. Black Formica was the standard look for the fixed surfaces near the windows, many of the surfaces have science equipment built in to them. Classes were divided by age; the older we got the looser the structure of the classroom, the further we sat apart.
The school seemed to be a dry run for new teachers, fresh out of training college, who came and went with great rapidity. Because of teacher turnover, beyond maths and English language lessons (disguised as letter writing day), the school devised it's own curriculum based on the talent set of which ever staff were present that term. When a new teacher spoke and wrote french we got french lessons, though he did not last long when his English was no match for our capacity to play up in class. Art lessons were always short when setting the class up and tidying before the end took up so much time. I had ideas in the art class but I was too slow a painter for them to explore them properly. Maths and English were taught as if what we knew, or didn't know, did not matter to the staff. In English the school saw nothing wrong with me being left handed and did nothing about it. We were never going to take even the most basic of exams like a GCSE so it did not matter.
I could follow basic maths. Addition subtraction multiplication and division. I was good at mental arithmetic as well, but in the classroom showing our workings was important so mental arithmetic meant nothing a skill. Where I could not follow the lesson was when the teacher put a random real life situation around the numbers to be processed. The sum that stumped me was £24 gross wages with £18 deductions. If I had been able to speak I would have asked the teacher 'Given the deductions are you sure this fictional job is worth doing?', but I was struck dumb. The sum seemed unfair. A minefield had opened up in my head about where the arguments about money that had gone on in the parental house through the summer about what was fair, cruel, and a necessity repeated themselves until I could not think how to do the sum or what to say. It was no longer a simple sum, it was mental torture.
Teaching 'gay' boys was a problem to the staff. Kevin and I were better with words than we were at following orders. We processed information differently to how other boys did. Woodwork was classic for this. The woodwork shop was a normal workshop at every bench there were two vices. Stored away were chisels and other sharp tools that the staff watched us all use very carefully, lest one school boy gouge another's eye out in anger. My mistake was simpler, I used the wrong pencil. When marking a piece of wood with a ruler for sawing I used a 2B pencil when I should have used a finer HB pencil. The teacher shouted at me in front of the class of ten '2B means too bloody soft'. Everybody knew he meant I was too bloody soft, my choice of pencil was merely a symptom of what the teacher disliked in me.
Another time a teacher set a test for Kevin and I. I don't know whether the teacher was testing us for our level of physical co-ordination or wanting to give the boys a good laugh by picking out examples of absurdity from among them. We were given a tent to put up on the lawn between the school and the main house. We failed. However we tried to assemble this tent it would not go up in the way it was meant to. One of us always seemed to sabotage any combined effort. We could laugh, and did at the time. It was all that there was left to do.
And then there was sport, where the line between shared sadism/masochism and Esprit d'Corps got very thin. Doing anything because we were told to do it, without help, did not make us any better at it when we were bad in the first place. Nor did we improve the game and provide challenge for those who were already good at it for being forced to play, regardless of how bad we were. Being 'gay' and poorly coordinated I had a further problem. Whether they were staff or other boys, the most sporty and physically attractive males were also the ones with the most narcissistic and cruel senses of humour. Close up they repelled me for my being gawky and gay. I admired them distantly, but keeping the right distance from them within the goldfish bowl that the school was becoming was a constant and inexact science which often left me feeling quite insecure.
Men with beards always attracted me, they had done so on television and the effect worked even better in real life. They had a masculinity I knew I lacked. Part of me was relieved that so few members of staff had beards, life was simpler when what attracted me and made life seem better was not there.
One man was a positive exception to that simplicity. He was called Mr O'Rourke. He was a big teddy bear of a man with short curly white hair and a short off-white beard. He was a published children's author and his gift to us was his storytelling skills. He captivated me, and not just because he told us stories that he made up on the spot about us as we were, but because he made the most difficult elements of my life seem more bearable. Being discreet about what I thought was my sexuality was impossible. When I was widely ridiculed for it he held a storytelling session and made my experience into a fiction in which the character survived the verbal cruelty of other boys and found his own space. His tone of voice made the narrative he told a large group of us seem relatively asexual. This helped me a lot. Alas he stayed at the school for only two terms. Then he was gone. But the positive effect he had on my life with the story he told the boys who gathered round him stayed with me.
It was rare for us to be addressed individually. One of the few regular times it happened was when our 'case conference' came up, once, maybe twice, a year. Case Conference happened every Thursday after lunch. In it all the staff filled the staff room and spoke about which ever boy was the subject that day, as staff they came to a consensus about him. Usually it was one boy per week, sometimes if a boy had a close friend it was two. A day or so before a member of staff would say to us 'You are the subject of case conference this week, is there anything you would like said in the meeting?'. It was an odd thing to ask. As boys we simply did not reason the way the staff did. So when I was asked I was at a loss to suggest what consensus they might form about me. I knew that my reasoning was not great, my coordination was poor and at best I was an awkward fit in the school, but I would probably be an awkward fit where ever I went. All I could hope for was that with staff like Mr O'Rourke about, if they could make the consensus among the boys more positive and defuse potential hostilities over difference, then they could make the staff meetings more positive too. 209/10
Teaching 'gay' boys was a problem to the staff. Kevin and I were better with words than we were at following orders. We processed information differently to how other boys did. Woodwork was classic for this. The woodwork shop was a normal workshop at every bench there were two vices. Stored away were chisels and other sharp tools that the staff watched us all use very carefully, lest one school boy gouge another's eye out in anger. My mistake was simpler, I used the wrong pencil. When marking a piece of wood with a ruler for sawing I used a 2B pencil when I should have used a finer HB pencil. The teacher shouted at me in front of the class of ten '2B means too bloody soft'. Everybody knew he meant I was too bloody soft, my choice of pencil was merely a symptom of what the teacher disliked in me.
Another time a teacher set a test for Kevin and I. I don't know whether the teacher was testing us for our level of physical co-ordination or wanting to give the boys a good laugh by picking out examples of absurdity from among them. We were given a tent to put up on the lawn between the school and the main house. We failed. However we tried to assemble this tent it would not go up in the way it was meant to. One of us always seemed to sabotage any combined effort. We could laugh, and did at the time. It was all that there was left to do.
And then there was sport, where the line between shared sadism/masochism and Esprit d'Corps got very thin. Doing anything because we were told to do it, without help, did not make us any better at it when we were bad in the first place. Nor did we improve the game and provide challenge for those who were already good at it for being forced to play, regardless of how bad we were. Being 'gay' and poorly coordinated I had a further problem. Whether they were staff or other boys, the most sporty and physically attractive males were also the ones with the most narcissistic and cruel senses of humour. Close up they repelled me for my being gawky and gay. I admired them distantly, but keeping the right distance from them within the goldfish bowl that the school was becoming was a constant and inexact science which often left me feeling quite insecure.
Men with beards always attracted me, they had done so on television and the effect worked even better in real life. They had a masculinity I knew I lacked. Part of me was relieved that so few members of staff had beards, life was simpler when what attracted me and made life seem better was not there.
One man was a positive exception to that simplicity. He was called Mr O'Rourke. He was a big teddy bear of a man with short curly white hair and a short off-white beard. He was a published children's author and his gift to us was his storytelling skills. He captivated me, and not just because he told us stories that he made up on the spot about us as we were, but because he made the most difficult elements of my life seem more bearable. Being discreet about what I thought was my sexuality was impossible. When I was widely ridiculed for it he held a storytelling session and made my experience into a fiction in which the character survived the verbal cruelty of other boys and found his own space. His tone of voice made the narrative he told a large group of us seem relatively asexual. This helped me a lot. Alas he stayed at the school for only two terms. Then he was gone. But the positive effect he had on my life with the story he told the boys who gathered round him stayed with me.
It was rare for us to be addressed individually. One of the few regular times it happened was when our 'case conference' came up, once, maybe twice, a year. Case Conference happened every Thursday after lunch. In it all the staff filled the staff room and spoke about which ever boy was the subject that day, as staff they came to a consensus about him. Usually it was one boy per week, sometimes if a boy had a close friend it was two. A day or so before a member of staff would say to us 'You are the subject of case conference this week, is there anything you would like said in the meeting?'. It was an odd thing to ask. As boys we simply did not reason the way the staff did. So when I was asked I was at a loss to suggest what consensus they might form about me. I knew that my reasoning was not great, my coordination was poor and at best I was an awkward fit in the school, but I would probably be an awkward fit where ever I went. All I could hope for was that with staff like Mr O'Rourke about, if they could make the consensus among the boys more positive and defuse potential hostilities over difference, then they could make the staff meetings more positive too. 209/10
The most notable use of that space was always the Annual Christmas Party/Disco. It was the time when we were officially allowed to let our hair down and be noisy and messy and as near being real teenagers as we were allowed to be. For it being official it was also the time when we were most the artificial teenagers you could ever imagine. Sure we wore the clothes we wanted to, the flared bright coloured trousers and strangely patterned nylon shirts. Some of us even wore the least suitable shoes for dancing, the multicoloured platform shoes with stack heels that were the height of fashion at the time too. And the singles chart music was played loud enough that we could not hear ourselves or each other in the space that was now lit only by moving disco lights as well.
This was meant to be fun, particularly when to make the event seem more like a real disco the staff invited the girls from a local school for the maladjusted to join us and we were allowed to try to talk to the girls over the noise of the music. There was an interval, where sandwiches, crisps, and fruit juice were served in one of the classrooms. To nudge the shyer ones among us to talk to the girls in the first half of the evening we were told that to go into where the food was we had to pair off with a girl and get in the queue, two by two for entry. Somehow I seemed to find the same girl to go into refreshments with several years running, not that we knew what to say to each other when we could actually hear each other had think what to say. I remembered her name at the time too, it is long gone now. I probably got an address where I could write to her and tried to write. But her memory of who I was was what sustained and limited all contact between us.
The pseudo-heterosexual atmosphere the staff created by inviting the girls also multiplied how much the staff watched us and worried over us all. However much they had to watch other boys with who they went into refreshments with my company for going into the food was safer going into refreshments with me than anyone could ever suspect. I had more in common with Kevin for us being both gay and sort-of-asexual than either of us shared or felt for the school, or for any girl we were meant to attach ourselves to at short notice.
*This phrase was devised by psychologist John Bowlby to attribute to home-making mothers a strength of maternal bond, as opposed to a father who worked provided the materials for making the home for the child. That 'my holding place' was well away from Mother I will say less about here.
Find Chapter 25 here
Find Chapter 25 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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