Chapter Twenty One - The Skeletons Of Tomorrow.

My previous year in the school was restless and uncomfortable. Of the four dormitory moves only the last move had settled me. Even after I was rescued through that last move nobody knew what was damaged about me and what was safe. Nobody wanted to know, and that included me if I was to be like other people. At the start of my second year in the school I was moved down to the middle floor and moved up a rank to become an Intermediate, I was going in the direction of having some responsibility over others whether I felt I was fit for it or not. With the damage endured I was unsure. I was given the move because of my age, relative to newer boys, rather than my sense of command or maturity.

The biggest responsibility that the upgrade came with was getting Junior and Middle School boys to serve at mealtimes. The head of the table is the person who asks for one of the other seven of the pupils there, most of whom will be younger, which of them will collect the food and plates and jugs of water etc from the kitchen for that meal. Asking was relatively easy. Most pupils volunteered. But a few pupils were more resistant if others thought it was 'their turn' and they did not think that. Also resistance could become collective, something that put me on edge much more than it annoyed them. I was just not into 'being in authority'. Sometimes, when I gave orders out I wished I were anywhere but where I was, being the mouthpiece of the school. But since I had nowhere else to be, and I was in my second of three years of being an instrument of the school in order to be part of it then I set out their orders with as much authority as I could muster.

My reluctance at giving orders was something with my father. We both  found an unwelcome sharpness in both being told what to do and telling others what to do. We preferred indirect orders. But dad was a grown up and could make his own exits when it suited him, I could not. He make sure my exits were blocked whilst his were kept clear for him to use as and when he pleased. When dad did not want to deal with people or situations he would point blank refuse, I couldn't. If aggressively cornered he could fight back hard, with his fists, I know I would be blamed if I tried that. He gave every sign of being happy to destroy whatever he was co-dependent upon, I did not. I had seen him fight and felt gutted by the sight of it. But thankfully he mostly he took flight, leaving others to deal with the conflicts that he openly ignored.

Dad seemed never to lose face in win/lose situations because however he responded he never seemed to be defeated. I froze in open competition at the drop of a hat. I had long seen how much fighting was like school sport. In both the greater number of losers made me uncomfortable. I did not want life to be 'heads-I-win-tails-you-lose' which was how it seemed it was to me, with me being one of the losers.

The middle floor consisted of seven small dormitories, four with three beds in them, the rest two beds or one. A major attraction of this promotion is that we can stay in our rooms more between the end of class and teatime. We can also invite other boys to our room and be invited to their rooms as seems mutually agreeable. This rule makes it a fine time and space to have our own record player and records, both albums and singles, in our room. We have time to play the the albums and ex juke box singles that we buy on the local market. This vastly reduces previous minor disagreements over use of the record player in the staff room which is connected to a speaker in the hall, or having play what is agreeable to others when you could only play your record player in the hall. I have some records, music is one diversion I like that my parents are okay about with me, it comes at a price they accept. So, I have lots of Beatles singles but also other glam rock singles with false middles which proves that they are ex juke box that I bought as they left the charts. My favourite album, perhaps the only album I had at the time, was 'Band on the run' By Paul McCartney and Wings. The tunes on it are still strong, and the lyrics are agreeably eccentric. I played the album that much that, unaware I was doing it, I sang the lyrics on that album out loud verbatim as I went around the main house seemingly on my own, but within other people's earshot.

Many of the singles I had I had collected in the last year. As juniors and middle school pupils we are taken in groups into town on Saturday mornings, supervised by a member of staff. As juniors we have to stay within sight of the staff. As middle schoolers we have to know where the staff were, within a short walking distance. A gaggle of us went into the covered market by ourselves and found the one stall full of boxes of cheap ex-chart ex-jukebox singles which were within my price range, me being on half the pocket money of other boys. There was a box either en of the stall for LP's That was where I first saw 'heavy' names like Black Sabbath and Nazareth. I got a weird feeling off looking at the covers of these albums. Browsing more than buying albums remained fascinating for as long as vinyl lasted. My singles collection then included more than a few Bowie singles, it was the first collection of anything that was mine; mine to own, mine to keep, mine to play and look upon as I pleased. The Bowie's singles had either rare B sides are were tracks from his albums which sounded quite strange on their own. This was the start of me becoming a B sides snob in future and try to like everything, particularly less popular music, to get the best out of all of it. Kevin is several stages on from me. He liked the glam of David Bowie but he has all eight of his albums, he must be have been on good pocket money. With him I following the lyrics via the inserts and decorated inner sleeves as he played the albums that made the world make a sort of sense to us.

For conversation we try to make sense of the intellectual crash course in the lyrics, where when Bowie name-drops Winston Churchill, Frederick Nietzsche, Alistair Crowley, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, The Velvet Underground and so many other names, along with big philosophical ideas which Bowie described in long words that we have barely heard of before and don't know what they mean. Reducing so much information into song form does mangle the references and make the songs hard work. But the tunes and arrangements carry the weight of our hopes. The albums could have been sold with commentaries. We never thought that Bowie might be merely name dropping because we would like to drop names like he did. I was thrilled by Bowie's recording of  'Amsterdam' by Jacques Brel as a 'B' side, amazed at how daring and louche it was. We got the passion of the vocal and arrangement for acoustic guitar. We had no idea who Jacques Brel was, is, or might have been. With Kevin I first heard 'Tubular Bells' on one of the 'tin boxes' Mike Oldfield suggests on the back of the sleeve should be handed in to nearest police station. That album would entertain with me for another thirty years. I can still listen to it now.

I was still only twelve when, with a few other of the less athletic boys, I joined the local public library. A staff member countersigned my application for me to get my three junior tickets. I joined because being an intermediate means I can go into town on my own if I have a definite destination and the library is as definite as the rules require. Also walking on my own, or with only one other boy, is an acceptably purposeful way of being nearly solitary, which I prefer over being lumped in with everybody else. Both the library and St John Ambulance are places I am trusted to find on my own in town. The library is better destination of the two, it is open more often and nearer the school than St John Ambulance who meet one evening a week and on different weekends. 

I was far worse at choosing books than I was at finding music. With music I had 'Top Of The Pops' and Radio 1 to guide me. The texts we read in school are for testing our reading age only, they were no help towards an interest in literature. Films shown on television were one guide that I followed. After we saw films like 'The Cruel Sea' and 'To Sir With Love', from the library I got the books the films were adapted from.  Odd as it may seem, because I was too young to grasp the themes of the writing in them, I still read every page of them. Since I lose things easily it was inevitable that I lost a book and endure the shame of having to report the loss both to the staff member who signed for me and the library. But I paid for what I lost.

Secondhand paper back book stalls also proved intriguing though far less reliable for reading matter. On one such stall I bought a book called 'The Sanity Inspectors'. In passing I overheard the headmaster mention the book title to a teacher. I discovered too late there were different books with similar titles by different authors. The book/author I have is not what the headmaster had read. But I got praise from the headmaster for the maturity of my choice of reading, which proved to be a light memoir of British men surviving a German war camp during World War Two. As I recollect it the tone of the book it was heavy on the heroism of individuals surviving against the odds. The was full of optimistic coincidences. I could have done with more such optimistic coincidences for myself in school.

One co-coincidence that never panned out was how I was connected to an older new boy. We were second cousins to each other. We were the only boys related to each other all the time I was there. Gary said he would 'protect me' when he arrived at the school aged thirteen and I was twelve. He didn't. Pupils left at the age of 14, so he spent his year learning routines he would never use again. He was tall, lean, blond haired, blue eyed, and pale faced. With the scar on his face he was quite tough looking. His smile always seemed slightly twisted. Whoever he protected, he would have been a good at it.

If I read then Kevin had to go one better. He wrote. When Bowie released the LP 'Diamond Dogs', he listened to it that intently and so absorbed the direct dystopian influence of George Orwell in songs like '1984' that Kevin wrote his first novella. With all the other boys we watched 'Jason and The Argonauts' on television, he liked the moving skeletons that Ray Harryhausen made, and we played 'Diamond Dogs' in his room straight after. Inspired by the queasy descriptions of physical decay and casual urban violence in 'Diamond Dogs' and the film he bought a large scrapbook and filled it with writing. He wrote longhand. The story was called 'The Skeletons Of Tomorrow'. He read out to me what he wrote, chapter by chapter. I was his audience, I was enthralled. It was definitely taking the strange fantasies we had discussed before, over a supper of hot chocolate and heavy sticky cake, and going somewhere very different with them.

I never understood smoking as a means to rebellion. I could afford neither rebellion nor cigarettes,  not even when 10 Park Drive cigarettes cost ten new pence. I can see now that when the headmaster declared the he disliked the habit it was bound to be taken up, by boys who wanted to be contrary and annoying. As a new boy I told a staff member about some 14 yr old's I'd seen smoking. The staff member knew already and told me that he did not want to be told. The headmaster had made his mind up about smoking. One time he improvised a mock court in the common room, with arguments for and against smoking and a jury who quizzed a 'defence' and a 'prosecution'. Had I taken part I would have been no more than a bad listener. But, weirdly, my head was in the clouds when the instruction bell for us all to be in the common room for this great event was rung. I got to the common room door and it was shut, I was the wrong side of the door and I cried as I sat outside, not knowing what I was missing. I was let in quite late. Nobody had missed me but my late entrance when everybody else was there caused a very minor ripple. I forget what conclusions 'the jury' came to. Whatever it was it was yet another nine day wonder, boredom with being there caused a lot of forgetfulness and short term thinking.

I remained bad at following cues for team work, grumpy and bad at sport, and not that much more easily focused when the subject of individual attention from the staff, partly because the staff were more there to lump us together as they handed out collective criticism than were there to privately off individual praise. One place of respite I found was the home of a new day boy, and not just because I liked walking there and back alone either.

John had a real interest in electronics which took up all the space of his bedroom floor. It was quite a small space, and his interest was made all the more real for both him and me because his mother in no way tried to get him to tidy it up. She seemed to comprehend that proper hobbies will take up a particular space, and include the necessity of being messy. Tidy a boy way, take away their space, and their hobbies and interests exist only in theory.

Several aspects of electronics made a different hobbies to others. It was all new then. The language was as new as the components, as was shown by the instructions for how to assemble a different circuit boards in magazines like 'Practical Electronics'. In young boys hands when transistors, resistors, capacitors and diodes were put together in the right order they became something that changed their world. In the world of electronics parental authority seemed benign and distant, and we seemed to be more ourselves without having to get angry to rebel and keep adults at a distance. Our hobby was about quiet concentration and competence rather than noisy competition.154/15

Electronics was like any proper hobby, it demanded active parental support. John's parents had to pay for parts and magazines for him, as well as leaving John the floor space of his bedroom to be his workshop. In 1973 televisions were still made by human beings, and they were relatively simple electro-mechanical machines with replaceable parts. When they ceased to work they were repaired, rather than discarded and replaced. At age thirteen John was already half way towards a job in a local television repair shop under a day release vocational training scheme, and that was because his parents believed in him.

The support I got from my parents throughout the year pushed me much nearer a state of detached fantasy where the words for interests and hobbies were there, but there no room to make any hobby I supposedly had a reality. Mother had to make sure the house was tidy to please dad, as if in the parental household there were perpetual kit inspections being held. There was no space to make a mess in the pursuit of knowledge, nor was there the money invested in me beyond providing what the school required for my outward appearance. My tomorrows were going to be far more skeletal than ever Mother or I could have prepared for.

Find Chapter 22 here 

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.