It was New Year's Eve. Mother and dad were getting ready to go out together. This night was the one night of the year that they went out together with other couples as apparent equals. Every other night dad and his mates would insist on each others company, to the exclusion of all wives and girlfriends. Dad made sure that Mother sought out her own entertainments for the rest of the year, and made sure that she paid for them out of her own money. Tonight they were sharing out his money and dad did not look that perturbed at the expected largess. Mother looked slightly nervous and expectant, unsure of what to expect though she had been out with dad before, on last year's New Year celebrations.
I was staying in to look after my sister. I knew nearly nobody in the town my own age, so I had no friends to see the new year in with. I say nearly nobody. I knew of two other boys in the town who went to the same boarding school as me, but I was quite distant from them in the school and their parents were like my parents. They were all for keeping their boy apart from as many ordinary people their own age as possible, lest one particular fear of the school be realised and we attract the attention of the police because we nearly become criminals. We also had to be cheap to please our families. I made myself of value to my family by staying in new Year's eve to mind my sister. Mother's nerves appear to be calmed by the last thing she did before they left. One of her drinking rituals is to have a full glass of milk 'to line her stomach' with. It supposedly limits the effect that alcohol has on her. If there is any science in what she does it is not in her explanation.
My sister and I get our party the Saturday after New Year's eve. We are both delivered to the works children's party which was put on in the works canteen near the huge factory by dad's employers. It is for the children of the all the employees of the factory. I am sure with hindsight that the unions had a hand in setting it up. It is a dire and randomly noisy affair where fruit juice, sandwiches, cake and crisps are served in generous quantities. Taking part in competitive games is encouraged. The children range in age from 10 to 16 and don't particularly know what they are doing. The more noisy we get the more the sound we make bounces back at us off the brick walls and hard floor back at us. The less I know where to comfortably place myself. The most fascinating part of the event for me was the rarity of seeing a band play music live, I had been to previous parties where a band had played. Here was the only place I saw anyone play what sounded like proper music in real time in front of me, even if what they played was only covers of the day's pop songs. They normally played in the working men's clubs and were used to being ignored and talked over by men drinking, they did not exactly grab our attention that easily, though I remember their bouncy version of the once popular country pop number called 'Yellow River'. Apart from my sister I did not know any of the kids there so to stand apart from what I didn't know I stood still on the edge of the cloud of children moving to the music where I was mildly awestruck by the drummer who was not wearing a shirt, but drummed in his vest because it was hot work, hotter for him than the rest of the band. I was always drawn more towards adults than to children my own age or younger, that event was no exception.
The following day it was back into the routine. My first task was helping Mother change the sheets on all the beds and then helping her remake the beds, complete with hospital corners. Then we packed my suitcase. Mother's silence was telling as we both observed how worn my school trousers were. And yet there was no point in me saying anything to Mother about replacing them. If I asked for more she would lie and say that they would last another two terms, though we both knew that the trousers were likely to fall apart before that. Mother would have done almost anything to not have to buy me more school clothing. I knew more than her that I would be the one to be complained at by the staff that Mother either did not care much for me, or had no regard for them as the laundry and repairs service. Either way the consequences of Mother's lie were going to land on me. My silent lies to her as we packed were my training for more silent lies to the staff as I unpacked later and the laundry staff cast a weary eye on my tired looking school clothes.
One of the better things to have happened to me is that with the frequency of the five hour journeys in the school minibus to and from the school I seemed to be cured of the motion sickness that used to regularly get when I had to do these journeys. My return that January confirmed this, but what I was returning to, more of the same routines with variations, was not inspiring. But there was something that looked new, careers advice. The term from January to April was when I was meant to be preparing to leave, and when my parents were meant be preparing for my return to their house full time. Within the rules of the school I was holding steady and doing what was right for my age correctly, albeit with the lesser confidence of somebody younger than I was. The times I enjoyed the most were with John the day boy in his parent's flat. They were the times when the least amount of pressure was put upon me and I helped him do his electronics and watched but rarely touched as he read 'Practical Electronics' and other magazines and set out try the experiments they showed were possible. It got no stranger than in one experiment taking the FM signal for BBC Radio 3 and with a few wires and connections moving it to another frequency. Then we walked out and around the block tracking the signal strength of Radio 3 on this new frequency. We, or rather John, had temporarily turned a radio receiver into a radio transmitter. I had been his human sounding board in this experiment and others. I was a useful person to have about partly because I knew my place in his space, and it was still all his space but he was less controlling of it than most anyone I knew therefore sharing it with him was to experience the least amount of possessiveness I had known up to that point.
Living behind the curve of expectation as I preferred to, I was surprised when I was offered an appointment with a teacher for careers advice. All I could conclude from the offer was that since every boy was being offered it then that was why I was being offered it. The offer was not made to me because I was worth advising, nor was I likely to have a great future. But it was yet another duty to be performed where any disengagement in the process was well hidden. Indeed, it was easy to hide disengagement. Perhaps because of how unreal the work experience I was getting on the one day a week seemed, the world of real work seemed far enough from me that it could have been sent from the planet Mars and organised by martians. Also for my getting what amounted to loose change for pocket money and nothing else I was disengaged from money. I had no idea what it did, and should do, for people that earned it and owned property because of it. The careers advice was meant to produce a plan that would be put in effect well before parents open day in the spring. Everything was meant to be arranged with the parents by the time of the open day so that on the day the school could agree with the parents that all sides had crossed the t's and dotted the i's of the child's future, and make all discussion between teachers and parents on the day a small formality.
So when the careers advice teacher asked me for my interests I told him the lie Mother had instilled in me since the age of ten. I told him I had 'an interest in electronics', when my real interest was in some space where I could be myself. The low pressure friendship I had with John provided that. He had already been offered a job in a local television repairs shop, starting in the summer with a one day a week 'day release' training scheme attached to the job which would start in the September. I could not picture him being interviewed for the job. I could not imagine the hackneyed and deferential phrases that he must have had to been taught to parrot before this new employer. His real interest was in electronics, not people. I knew what electronics was like I was not that interested in people. He would have got the job because of how gracefully his parents spoke on his behalf as they revealed their own efforts at catering for his vocation within their home.
I was not horrified when the careers officer got me a place on a college course studying how televisions were made and repaired in the town where the parental house was. I would have preferred a job in a repair shop and to have studied on day release like the deal John had got but nobody was interested enough in me to make the efforts to arrange that choice for me. My reaction was more to feel mildly numbed, as if when we had started to talk and he had asked me what I wanted to do I'd said the only words that I could. But in the moment after I'd said them I knew that much later those words were going to come back at me and have consequences that would prove awkward. My parents must have foreknown quite a lot about the decision, but kept quiet about what they knew.
When I told them about what I was going to do they each responded with a different stock reaction. Mother was pleased at me getting a year in college because it preserved the status quo and deferred my becoming an adult. I was going to be under her control in the parental house for a long time. Dad's response was to complain somewhat generically that either the careers adviser should have directly found me a job that would pay me properly, like dad's job did or I should have been advised to look for a real job that paid real money, but not supported towards that the better to find the job all by myself. Either way I should not have been offered the easy college place in lieu of having to look for a job. Not that he expressed himself anywhere near as clearly as that, if he had it would have broken the parental house rules about talking about money. I could have predicted dad's muffled response, what I could not have predicted was the level of multiple and wilful misunderstandings of modern employment for young that he showed. The statistics were appalling and the reality was worse, how much worse I had yet to find out, but dad was of the old school 'suffering never hurt me, it should not hurt anybody' school of not thinking. If something did not hurt him it was the because his alcohol consumption, in plain sight in front of us, masked most of his feelings. But I had a better clue when I went with Mother and sister to my sister's school on their open evening. Apparently I still had to be minded so they took me along. it was the sort of school where there was the tang of despondency in the air and pupils would make jokes about being proficient in reading and writing so that when they left school they would be able to sign on and claim their dole money with more skill.
The odd thing about dad was that he had been ill, but only physically ill as far as I knew. Nobody knew what mental health conditions his frequent drinking hid. He had started drinking and smoking at the age of fourteen, and smoking and drinking were what adulthood were all about to him. The only time he was forced to be sober and not smoke was in the TB ward and sanitorium after his operation to remove a lung around 1952. This was after he was invalided out of national service for drinking tuberculosis contaminated milk. He had survived the removal of one lung for twenty five years up to the time he was forced to bed. He had spent most of the spring half term that I was in the parental house for in bed, unable to get up or stand. Even as his friends visited him he was restless and awkward. His condition was serious enough that the doctor had come to visit him several days running, he had a serious chest infection and with only one lung for the other being removed he was in no position to fight off the infection with any vigour. The doctor wanted him to give up both drinking and smoking, he got one out of two. Dad was convinced enough to abandon his beloved roll ups. It meant that he could stop stealing ashtrays from the pubs he drank in as well.
When I heard nothing about me leaving the school before the Easter holidays that April I knew that whilst the school might want me out, but the decision for me to leave had to be made by my parents. They would want me in the school for longer. Nobody knew how much longer because my parents were silent on the matter. As Spring became Summer in the boarding school more and more of what I did became tinged with a sense of marking time in a rather empty way. The things that attached me to the school, being there for roll calls, following the rules, using my privileges responsibly and wearing the uniform I was meant to wear meant less and less to both me and the staff. The staff were there to keep the boys in check, I left them nothing to criticise me for when that was a key part of how they related to us. I even became better at losing in sport for caring less about how much I fitted into the spirit of what I was doing.
I was a good boy save one thing and that was of Mothers doing, not mine. The arse of one of the two pairs of school trousers I had wore so thin that when the trousers were put through the wash one too many times the arse in them gave way totally, gave way to the point where there was nothing to repair. The trousers should have been thrown out. But since by then they were one of only two pairs that I had left after the third pair had already gone the way of all flesh, then this arse-less pair of trousers had to be repaired somehow. And they were repaired, with a job so crudely done that I was mightily glad that most of the time I hid the repair by sitting on it.
As the rest of the older boys had left before me with each end of term and half term never to return I became one of a dwindling bunch of older boys who felt increasingly strange. I sometimes wondered if the staff even let me grow my hair a little longer than was school policy to save them the barbers fees on a Monday night because by then it seemed like I was clearly in the school by accident. One upside to this gradual disconnection came when I was in the school on the date of my birthday. Every boy who had a birthday in the school term date was given a quite large rather sticky and sweet cake which they were meant to divide up and give to their friends and whoever else they thought deserved a piece. Since they had to feed us with cake anyway it was no skin of anyone's nose to allow the distribution of a cake to be made personal to the birthday boy. With most of my older friends gone I had fewer claims to a piece of the cake than previous. This simplified deciding who to give pieces of the cake to no end. And I did not have to make the pieces I gave away absurdly small. I could be fair to who I wanted to be on my own terms, rather than terms foisted upon me.
There was one last new experience for me to have that I did not expect. I went to the movies on my own. I had noticed that there was a small cinema in the town. By now I was used to having to do things on my own as I used my school privileges. I discovered a film that it was legal for me to see which was playing in a matinee time. Perfect. The film was called 'The Big Bus'. It was a precursor to the 'Airplane!' series of films only in this version the mode of transport was a privately owned nuclear powered pleasure coach that travelled from New York to Denver. The nuclear power privately owned bit was easy enough to understand, I had sat through enough episodes of 'Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea' with dad to get it's political Cold Warrior messages to get that part of the plot. But I have no idea now of what I made of the very American 'screwball' humour that was meant to power the plot and make it a more sophisticated parody of the American disaster movie genre than it seemed at first.
Perhaps I should have seen a darker design in the film, one where beneath the sight gags and the laughter at cheap jokes disaster is much less funny subject than I am permitted to allow myself to think. The end of term came mid July, that was when the school minibus took me for that last five hour journey. Being sat in the bus, to return to living in the parental house full time did not feel like the closing of the chapter that it actually was. This was because I had been waiting to leave for between several months and two years to leave and to discover what future there was in store for me.
The morning after my return there was one immediately joyous and cathartic experience; disposing of every item of the school uniform that had worn for the last year. It was all past it's 'wear by' date and it all went in the dustbin. Getting rid of the clothing felt like shedding a skin, if not several skins laden with frustration. As I put the clothes in the bin little did I think that the school might have been doing the same to me as I was doing to the clothes. In their leaving me off at my parents never to darken their door as a pupil again. But to an extent it was true. The school was a bland place, but it had provided me with material comfort, excellent food, safety-sometimes from myself, a sense of social equality with others my own age that even half-knowing my parents as I did I would never have found with in a 'normal' school. And they did more.
They gave me strong routines to follow that I could not have created for myself or found as easily in the town where my parents lived. But the school's blandness also deceived. Between the school and social services who had got me there I had done no testing academic school work for five years and I still wrote with my left hand which I changed with the nervous breakdown I'd endured at age ten. My hand writing was appalling. But illegible writing was normal in my family. The handwriting of both my parents was also illegible, to the point where their spelling would never be criticised, reading their writing was too much like hard work. Both my parents disliked their handwriting whilst refusing to accept how bad it was or improve how they wrote. Where they could, they both avoided writing altogether which was part of why their parenting became a problem to me. They would give me instructions to follow verbally to avoid me seeing their handwriting. I would forget some vital detail in what they said then they would be repeatedly disappointed in me to the degree that they would not trust me again. For all that the school was limiting I could uphold the school's rules better than do what my parents wanted because the internal logic of the school's rules was more consistent. My parents were contrary.
I did not know about the letters that Social Services would have sent to my parents to prepare them for when the school returned me to the parental house for good that last time. Nor did I know that there were lots of files in Social Services offices, close to us, which had my name written at the top of them where how I had behaved in the boarding school was extensively written up by the teachers. In the files I was consistently described in the third person for so many local mental health experts to understand. I had absolutely no idea that I had just spent five years 'in care' because the phrase 'in care' was so adroitly avoided by everybody who knew me that I had no way of converting words they used, like 'special school' and 'maladjusted' into an understanding of me being 'in care'. I would remain utterly naive about this for a long time, and naive to how everybody behaved as if nobody ever went 'in care' and social services did nothing.
This is the last chapter of this memoir. To read the summary of the previous sixteen years and twenty eight chapters please click here.
To return to the introduction and chapter guide, with links to every chapter, click here.
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