In the mid-1970's Mother still got only two nights out of the house a week out of seven. She got no more evenings out than she had got ten years earlier. Neither night, unlike Dad's five nights out, involved either alcohol or great expense. One night out was visiting her sister, the other night was with St John Ambulance Brigade. In the school holidays I got roped in with both. Whilst I stayed at the parental house Mother had be sure my time was fully used up and I had keep a distance from dad. With the visit to her sister in particular Mother said that she felt safer at night walking the streets with me than she did walking on her own.
The walk took forty minutes and, like the visits to the allotment, the further away from the house we were the better we felt. This was proved by how much we could not stop talking on the way, and the way our conversations were more relaxed the near our destination we got. When we arrived we were received with an informal welcome. The settee that we would be offered was sometimes simultaneously claimed by the family Alsatian dog 'Lady', who like Mother's sister was rather large and was good at intimidating displays of 'being nervous'. Lady only sat on us once as we sat on the settee, but it was enough. I liked Uncle Terry, he was the first man I saw who did not shave regularly. There a friendliness in his manner, a smile in his voice and eyes, he faintly reminded me of the television actor Jimmy Edwards. When he mildly swore there was no anger in it. There was more suppressed anger in those who tutted him and said that minors like me should never hear such words. He was a self-declared Socialist, which was rare for where we lived. Rare for both being both self declared and a Socialist.
He robustly dismissed the red top papers as being too like 'The Beano' to be news. He wore metal rimmed glasses. As a working class intellectual who dressed down at home I found in him a lot I would later admire and copy. He turned the television off for robust discussions in which we had to try to use reason to maintain a position, not that reason persuaded anyone to change their opinion. When the television was on it was often set for us to watch BBC2 with him and for us all to enjoy entertainingly arch programmes like 'Call My Bluff', chaired by Robert Robinson, a presenter who's aspiration was to address the viewer calmly as an individual-something which I admire to this day.
The other night out was to St John Ambulance Brigade, attending it was like stepping into a past that kept intruding into the present, without it ever being asked to. Being proficient in amateur first aid was a good idea. It still is and it always will be. But in the St John Ambulance that I attended first aid was yoked with uniforms, military drills, kit inspections, hierarchies through titles, and more. St John Ambulance had all sorts of quasi-military social baggage that gave the organisation social structure. In the public duties we performed we were window dressing for the event 99% of the time, a fake public service that nobody asked or paid for that was self sustaining. We did the first aid on site, in the rare cases we were needed. But public emergencies were extremely rare and the professional emergency services did a far better job than we ever could because they were paid to and we were mere volunteers. St John Ambulance were no doubt very useful up to and during World War Two, when the whole of civil society were engaged at varying levels in the war because of the bombs that dropped and the government propaganda that created public unity that it was surely difficult to avoid. Also doctors were private then and being poor meant sometimes being weak and ill from poverty, so St John Ambulance might temporarily alleviate an individual's pain for free where a doctor would charge a fee for same and do a better job because it was his business to but the patient could not afford it.
If our voluntarism had been compared with rationing, as part of a continuation of the public values that came to the fore during, and soon after, World War Two-when there was no National Health Service-then I would have understood the appeal of St John Ambulance a lot more clearly. I would also have a better understanding of World War Two, because what it was about would have to be explained better than it ever was to me too. But there was no explanation of our voluntarism which contextualised it as part of a history of individuals giving their time because the world was a poorer and meaner place than it admitted to being. If giving our time and volunteering were openly seen as 'political', or 'radical' then Uncle Terry would have approved of such transparency, and the actions it inspired, now any such radicalism seemed a faded remnant of the organisation's former role.
If our voluntarism had been compared with rationing, as part of a continuation of the public values that came to the fore during, and soon after, World War Two-when there was no National Health Service-then I would have understood the appeal of St John Ambulance a lot more clearly. I would also have a better understanding of World War Two, because what it was about would have to be explained better than it ever was to me too. But there was no explanation of our voluntarism which contextualised it as part of a history of individuals giving their time because the world was a poorer and meaner place than it admitted to being. If giving our time and volunteering were openly seen as 'political', or 'radical' then Uncle Terry would have approved of such transparency, and the actions it inspired, now any such radicalism seemed a faded remnant of the organisation's former role.
The simplest explanation was that St John Ambulance Brigade was a good way for people with more time than money to use both up, virtuously. It had an eight pointed Maltese star for their main symbol with all the qualities expected of volunteers listed at the tips of star, they were Tact, Perseverance, Gallantry, Loyalty, Dexterity, Explicitness, Observation, and Sympathy. They claimed a distant heritage from the knights of St John in the 11th century. Nobody told the actual truth which was that they were formed in 1887 and they were the very model of the non-state-sponsored charities, typical of the period they started in. We also denied the depths to which the original organisation had moulded themselves and their mission around The British Empire, which was at it's peak size and wealth when St John's Ambulance were formed. Since they were formed at height of Empire what we were doing during what seemed like the nadir of The British Commonwealth, so far, was guess work for all of us.
St Johns Ambulance Brigade sold itself to it's members as 'being useful and practical' and as a secular help to society. But they were happy to swell the ranks in the churches and cenotaphs every Armistice Day. For assisting the newly Royal British Legion* on Armistice Day S.J.A.B. gained some sort of secular patriotic moral value. Nobody ever said that knowing how to put a sling on a broken arm was nearly as good as confession and receiving communion in church had once been seen as being, when such habits were expected, but it was clearly implied. The fact that arms rarely broke in public and rarely needed slings applied to them surely encouraged these abstract virtues to adhere to the training in first aid, by never testing them. And anyway the in-house training for arm slings, splinting broken legs, and mouth to mouth resuscitation were as ritualistic and repetitive as many of the verbal responses in churches would have been.
I was in single figures and barely out of short trousers when I first attended St John Ambulance, Mother took me with her on the easiest public duties she performed as 'a day out' for me. I officially joined aged ten, after finishing leaving Cub Scouts. Mother saw that I needed another uniform to wear and another set of badges to learn and so I followed her fully into St Johns Ambulance, from the parental house. When I went to the boarding school Mother made sure that I joined the nearby branch of St John Ambulance Brigade there. I joined this new brigade for not knowing how not to join, or how to say 'No' to Mother, and resist her the way the school staff did with several other ideas where Mother thought I should have something and they did not. The oddity was how closely Mother's efforts echoed the efforts her mother had made at a distance for me to go to Sunday School which Mother herself had scuppered because she saw it as interference.
Ian and I not only joined the school at the same time, had locker numbers next to each other and early in the first term we both joined the local St John Ambulance together as well. Early on we must have been collected to go to their practice rooms and returned to the school after because for being juniors we did not have enough privileges to have the right to walk to and from the St John's headquarters on our own, thought the fact that we went together and the staff knew where we would be might have given us more choice. Being there felt strange at first, I barely knew Ian and knew nobody else. Not having Mother to watch me or connect with gave the pseudo-militaristic parts of being there, the falling into line/rank, and the commands to stand to 'Attention' and 'Stand Easy' a sort of bathos. It was as if none of us really meant what we were doing or knew quite what it was all for.
But the practice work was good, we bandaged different parts of the body, used splints, and even learnt how to do mouth to mouth resuscitation using their near life size training doll Recusci Anne, around which there was plenty of jokes on the side, after, about what a real romance and a real kiss might be like. The trick with resuscitation was remembering the number of breaths to give to number of compressions to the chest, a ratio I have long since been unable to remember. When we stood to attention we stood well enough, when we were stood at ease we much more ourselves, and much less useful for it.
But the practice work was good, we bandaged different parts of the body, used splints, and even learnt how to do mouth to mouth resuscitation using their near life size training doll Recusci Anne, around which there was plenty of jokes on the side, after, about what a real romance and a real kiss might be like. The trick with resuscitation was remembering the number of breaths to give to number of compressions to the chest, a ratio I have long since been unable to remember. When we stood to attention we stood well enough, when we were stood at ease we much more ourselves, and much less useful for it.
I always misunderstood points based reward systems and status games. I only understood the system when I understood the end point, and nearly every explanation I heard explained the end point rather poorly. It was no different with St John Ambulance, we were meant to volunteer for public duties for the sake of it, but to incentivize us there was a 200 hours badge to sow on our uniforms for us to aim for. We wore a uniform similar to a school uniform, but in addition we had small white wipe down plastic satchels which contained bandages. The satchels were slung from the left shoulder to the right hip and tucked in tight at the waist behind broad white belts. Ian, from the school, joined with me and we both went to weekend motorbike races duties together. Most important to the reward system was the book that recorded our hours performed which was also kept in our satchel.
At seventy hours a year, assuming I was to leave school at fourteen, the badge was doable. So I volunteered in pursuit of it, though the number of times when I was on my holidays at the parental house reduced the number of hours that I could volunteer.
About five miles from the town there was a nationally famous motorbike racing track. When I volunteered for that duty it was hardly with the purest of motives. As youths we wanted to go to not just to collect our duty hours towards the badge, but it was the nearest we knew to glamour. We went to collect as many tour programmes as we could, and if we could get them signed by the men who we thought rode the bikes themselves then it was a bonus. Not all the signatures we collected were genuine.
Ian and I would leave the school with one packed lunch, meet up with that day's volunteers at the practice rooms in the town. There we would be given a second packed lunch by St John Ambulance and be taken to the racing circuit in their ambulance, a vehicle that was over twenty years old but not quite a museum piece. We spend the day listening to the buzz of noisy motorbikes and watching for when any bike might stop or crash from our five observation posts. Lunch time was when I collected the programmes for the days I was there and got the people I took to be riders and asked them to sign the programmes for me. I had quite a collection at some point, though many of the signatures I had in them were not necessarily from the riders.
The best point for simply viewing the racing was on a hill where the track went in circle around the foot of the hill. The only disadvantage of this spot was that from the top we could not see all of the circuit track below us, the track dipped in tight and the hill was too steep to see the track. Ian and I were often stationed there with two older female volunteers. We did not have much in common with them, the boarding school implied we should not fraternise with the the opposite sex and we were too young for them to be interested in us anyway.
One Saturday when it was hot and I was being watchful but was easily distracted we watched as a bike went in to the tight bend at the foot of the hill where we could not see and realised soon after that it had not come out. This was our moment of glory, it took the four us five minutes to realise that the biker had slid and fallen of his bike. We scrambled down and got the man into our station, there the two young girls took control and got him on the bed. Ian went to tell the ambulance to come. I stood at the back of the station as the two young girls loosened the front of his leathers by pulling the zip down and gently extracted the bikers injured right arm. I noticed that he had a slightly hairy chest and he was lean rather than muscular. The biker flirted with the girls and said that they pull the zip down further if they wished, they declined to do so. My thoughts ran riot at the idea and I was not in the scene.
Then the adults came in and took over, and took him away in our elderly ambulance, which took him to hospital. It was the first real moment where I felt I should have seized the initiative. But I didn't. Other people took over, I had been a slow watchman as well. All the drama happened way above my head and my doing. The adults left the station after the ambulance had taken the biker away saying nothing to me and Ian and not much to the girls. I felt as if I had utterly failed because of the time we took to recognise that the biker had not come out of the deep bend and because I had not recognised that his arm was broken, not that i could get close enough to diagnose that. Because of the distance I felt I was kept at I felt so ashamed that dared not volunteer duty at the bike races again for over a year. I felt a complete loss of nerve about all duties and was glad to let others rack up their hours and compete with each other for what duties there were to do.
It took a long time to sort through my feelings of utter failure about noticing the injured rider too late, and then failing to recognise that his arm was broken arm. By the time my nerves were partially recovered, sufficient to volunteer again I knew I had blown my chances of getting the badge. I volunteered again but I ceased to care about signs of recognition or merit. By an unfortunate means I could have succeeded had I tried harder. As I approached the school leaving age it was raised from the fourteen we had previously been told it was, to fifteen**. I stayed in St John Ambulance and did a few more hours. But still I was meant to be returning to the parental house full time. And then the school leaving age was raised one last time to sixteen whilst I felt like I was still nearer thirteen because what we were taught changed so little. I put a last spurt on with the volunteering with St John Ambulance and reached 140 hours over five years when I was meant to have done over 200 hours in three years.
At seventy hours a year, assuming I was to leave school at fourteen, the badge was doable. So I volunteered in pursuit of it, though the number of times when I was on my holidays at the parental house reduced the number of hours that I could volunteer.
About five miles from the town there was a nationally famous motorbike racing track. When I volunteered for that duty it was hardly with the purest of motives. As youths we wanted to go to not just to collect our duty hours towards the badge, but it was the nearest we knew to glamour. We went to collect as many tour programmes as we could, and if we could get them signed by the men who we thought rode the bikes themselves then it was a bonus. Not all the signatures we collected were genuine.
Ian and I would leave the school with one packed lunch, meet up with that day's volunteers at the practice rooms in the town. There we would be given a second packed lunch by St John Ambulance and be taken to the racing circuit in their ambulance, a vehicle that was over twenty years old but not quite a museum piece. We spend the day listening to the buzz of noisy motorbikes and watching for when any bike might stop or crash from our five observation posts. Lunch time was when I collected the programmes for the days I was there and got the people I took to be riders and asked them to sign the programmes for me. I had quite a collection at some point, though many of the signatures I had in them were not necessarily from the riders.
The best point for simply viewing the racing was on a hill where the track went in circle around the foot of the hill. The only disadvantage of this spot was that from the top we could not see all of the circuit track below us, the track dipped in tight and the hill was too steep to see the track. Ian and I were often stationed there with two older female volunteers. We did not have much in common with them, the boarding school implied we should not fraternise with the the opposite sex and we were too young for them to be interested in us anyway.
One Saturday when it was hot and I was being watchful but was easily distracted we watched as a bike went in to the tight bend at the foot of the hill where we could not see and realised soon after that it had not come out. This was our moment of glory, it took the four us five minutes to realise that the biker had slid and fallen of his bike. We scrambled down and got the man into our station, there the two young girls took control and got him on the bed. Ian went to tell the ambulance to come. I stood at the back of the station as the two young girls loosened the front of his leathers by pulling the zip down and gently extracted the bikers injured right arm. I noticed that he had a slightly hairy chest and he was lean rather than muscular. The biker flirted with the girls and said that they pull the zip down further if they wished, they declined to do so. My thoughts ran riot at the idea and I was not in the scene.
Then the adults came in and took over, and took him away in our elderly ambulance, which took him to hospital. It was the first real moment where I felt I should have seized the initiative. But I didn't. Other people took over, I had been a slow watchman as well. All the drama happened way above my head and my doing. The adults left the station after the ambulance had taken the biker away saying nothing to me and Ian and not much to the girls. I felt as if I had utterly failed because of the time we took to recognise that the biker had not come out of the deep bend and because I had not recognised that his arm was broken, not that i could get close enough to diagnose that. Because of the distance I felt I was kept at I felt so ashamed that dared not volunteer duty at the bike races again for over a year. I felt a complete loss of nerve about all duties and was glad to let others rack up their hours and compete with each other for what duties there were to do.
It took a long time to sort through my feelings of utter failure about noticing the injured rider too late, and then failing to recognise that his arm was broken arm. By the time my nerves were partially recovered, sufficient to volunteer again I knew I had blown my chances of getting the badge. I volunteered again but I ceased to care about signs of recognition or merit. By an unfortunate means I could have succeeded had I tried harder. As I approached the school leaving age it was raised from the fourteen we had previously been told it was, to fifteen**. I stayed in St John Ambulance and did a few more hours. But still I was meant to be returning to the parental house full time. And then the school leaving age was raised one last time to sixteen whilst I felt like I was still nearer thirteen because what we were taught changed so little. I put a last spurt on with the volunteering with St John Ambulance and reached 140 hours over five years when I was meant to have done over 200 hours in three years.
However much I recovered my nerve to volunteer, my susceptibility to adult masculinity remained the same. In 1974 the then new Labour Government were having problems with the unions. The economy was not responding well to government controls and stikes were forecast. The red top press were painting the conflict between the government and the unions in the baldest, most macho, and most sexual of terms. I was reading The News Of The World on my own, thankfully, and there was the image that floored me. The paper had a political cartoon that portrayed Harold Wilson as Prime Minister as a tiny figure atop a huge flexed bicep labelled 'Union Power'. The sheer helplessness with which Wilson was characterised went through me faster than I could stop it. Looking the cartoon in my nightwear in my parents house my mind went back to Colin and Peter, and my own feelings of helplessness in their hands when nobody was watching. In the parental living room reading that cartoon I had the same reaction that I had when I first saw Peter and Colin naked; I got an erection that would not go away, sat in just my pyjamas. I put the paper over my pyjamas to cover up the erection, thankful for the cover it gave me, and tried and failed to stop looking at the cartoon. I felt ashamed for my apparently involuntary response. I knew without being told that the only safe place for an erection was in bed when I was alone and nobody knew about it, not even me after it had subsided.
*The 'Royal' in Royal British Legion was added in 1971.
**The official school leaving age for normal schools was fifteen at the time. The key question that we left unasked at the time was where we were going when we left. Back to a normal school for a conventional 'finishing off', into a job, into College, or into an apprenticeship. Since we never and never left it was a moot question.
My nerves were like the politics of the day, fragile. Many would say long after the 1970's that both my nerves and the politics of the 1970's may have been moved on by events, but they never really recovered.
**The official school leaving age for normal schools was fifteen at the time. The key question that we left unasked at the time was where we were going when we left. Back to a normal school for a conventional 'finishing off', into a job, into College, or into an apprenticeship. Since we never and never left it was a moot question.
Find Chapter 24 here
Find the introduction and chapter guide here.
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