Chapter Twenty Seven - At Home Indoors And Unwelcome Out.

 Winter term in boarding school was when the school was at it's most most shut down. Even with our return to the school in the minibus, after the Christmas break in the first week of January the journey seemed longer for it being mostly in the dark. I felt the relief when the minibus turned that last right turn up into the private drive and we finally turned left to see the light on outside the back of the main house, through the bay window we could see the dining room being set for the next meal. Then the minibus was parked next to the laundry room and the back door through which our suitcases went before we reported for first roll call of the term.

The drawn in nights, the cold outside, and the snow when it happened, all served to limit our movements. With the snow we were not allowed to have snowball fights. Before assembly in the sports hall a member of staff would clear a path from the main house to the entrance of the school. The headmaster made it key part of assembly to personally instruct us to walk single file in the path that had been cleared for us and not to deviate to the left or the right. I knew how easily I could confuse my left from my right at the mere mention of them, and knew how quickly the shoes I wore could became slippery and wet, and I could slip and fall, however often I cleaned and polished them to preserve them. It was well that there was no spontaneity allowed in the wet snow, for all that I was now a senior I would have come off the worse for it and against people of lower rank than me as well.

Winter became the time to watch films at weekends, often films on television but also real, or should I say reel, films. The school owned an 8 mm film projector and films they got to show us looked fine on the painted white Anaglypta of the common room wall. They were always British made films and we would watch them on Saturday nights, when not only were they a treat for us, but, unlike television, the staff had control of their scheduling and how to combine the start of the film with serving supper, so we could have our cocoa in the dark. The younger the boy the bigger the treat it was to be allowed to stay up late enough to see the end of these films.

As I look back I find it hard to imagine how these films came to the school and what sort of film industry it was that sold these commercial standard 8mm films to the education department, and why the film distributors sold them to the Department of Education. Were the films sold to private film clubs and the education dept bought them as if they were a private film club? Private film clubs for serious films that were in no way connected with the porn industry were one known way of getting around censorship laws in the England at the time. But these films were standard fare, as shown in cinemas but in 8mm prints rather the 35mm of the movie house. I understood that Department of Education bought them for the entertainment of us and other boys in other schools, but what seemed affordable to the department but we had been told that austerity was coming. Watching these films, life did not feel like austerity was coming to us. 

Other boys would have had different favourite films among those that were shown. For me the best film by a country mile was 'The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie', a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith, Gordon Jackson of 'Upstairs Downstairs' fame, and Celia Johnson as the headmistress. It was a proper 1930's drama about a pretentious and controlling teacher who does not even see her downfall as being hers even as it happens to her. That the teacher paraphrased Spanish fascist leader General Franco and Italian wartime leader Mussolini was quite lost on us. History, even popular recent history, was on the list of subjects that was more covered by television than ever it was covered in the class room. To most boys World War Two was something that had happened to their parents and their parents were part of the opaque reasoning that had got them to the boarding school,  which was just as opaque about the war.

Whatever understanding we may have gained from the film we did not know how to process it but the school preferred it that we did not know how to process complex entertainments. The staff had no problem with the Mussolini references but did need to have a discussion among themselves to decide whether the brief sight of a pair of women's breasts in one scene might be too risque for the younger of us innocents to see. They decided that the film contextualised the incident well enough that bearing of breasts on a film in front of us was okay, just this once.

Day boy, John, missed the fun of watching the films but he had much more than we had in so many ways. He had his own bed to sleep in at night and the right to be as untidy in pursuit of electronics, his hobby, as he wanted to be. His parent's flat felt like a home to me. As a senior I used my privileges to maximum effect and visited it as often as it seemed friendly for me to visit because I liked John and because when I took an interest in his hobby I also quietly sustained the fiction that had been foisted upon me that 'Amateur Electronics' was my hobby also. John was happy for me to be around him so much.

The flat, and his room, were places that were free from the emotional baggage the school made seem normal where of everything was made to feel that quite large bit less personal. As if even what we had brought from our parents houses was ours, but ours to use, but still more the property of our parents, who seemed rather detached from us whilst owning what they did, than ours. Everything that did not belong to our parents belonged to the school, nothing, no physical space and no material object was ours in our own right, off limits of the school's or our parents' idea of what was their property. Effectively we were their property, albeit graciously treated property. And for the limits put on how personal the space we shared could be made, our main public expression of doubt was admitting to, in the cliche, 'mixed feelings'. These were feelings that were 'mixed' because they were the feelings that were very direct in us, anger, fear, elation and more, but they were severely diluted because of where we were and who, benignly, owned us. To me it seemed worth sustaining the fictional interest in amateur electronics simply to be allowed the experience of the relative directness and normality of John's household.

John had anger and communication problems. When he was angry he literally could not say why he was angry because he would automatically put the finger next to his thumb of his left hand in his mouth, by the middle joint, and he would bite hard around this joint until where he'd bitten his finger was utterly calloused, discoloured a dark brown, and very hard. He would growl rather than speak and his right hand would be shaped into a fist with which he would be banging the table. At the time there was an early evening local news programme which had a theme tune that he felt was particularly good for almost ritually releasing his anger in this frustrated way. By the time he left the school most of the hard skin on his finger had softened for his having ceased to bite it. I can't remember his back story, what initially made him chew his finger and bang his fist, but his parents seemed to be rather nice. 'Seemed' is the clue, I doubt they knew what it was of their reasoning that diverted his personal development so he got so angry so easily, and it came out in such contorted ways.        
Winter mid week nights in the school were often times times for playing games with the newest boys. When I was new enough to be engaged by the card games and board games I remembered the staff playing them with us, now they seemed to be there to play the games less often and as a senior who was hoping to leave in the summer I stood in for the now more distant staff. One game that I avoided both as an organiser and player, and not always successfully, was 'Monopoly'. This was partly because I never won a game, not even once. Ultimately, the di always seemed to be cast against me. Partly I avoided that game because it took hours to complete a game and all the players who had started the game wanted to be there when the winning player bankrupted the bank. I preferred more strategy and skill based games like Majong a game where sets of tiles were exchanged from a pile, until they formed a hand, a series of sets similar to a Poker hand. At an aesthetic level I liked the colours and abstract designs that the many tiles were decorated with. 

That the school want to slow down our maturing seemed obvious to me. Our maturity-or the lack of it-was something for us to discover when we left the school. Our relative immaturity was useful for us cohering to the school values better. But sometimes glimmers of light poked their way through the limits set upon our education. The school had an early video recorder, the first I ever saw such that I did not know what it was or that such things existed. In one media studies lesson a teacher put together forty five minutes of adverts back to back so that we could forget the usual logic about the programmes being the point of television and look at the adverts that paid for it all on the commercial channel, and therefore see a little of how commerce and industry 'gave us choice'. It was the nearest we were going to get to a lesson in how politics worked. The class agreed that in the adverts for toys there was always a lot more space for the toys than there was in a real life house, and toys were the central attraction in that space, which was an equally false picture of where the toys went into. In adverts for more grown up subjects like drinks openly fake airs and graces being punctured  by humour was the norm. The adverts for smoking were the most difficult to decode, the pleasure in them seemed the most abstracted that anyone could imagine. I forget how the teacher dealt with the sexual humour and content in the adverts. I am sure that when mid-lesson we referred to adverts that coded sexual behaviour he did his best to lead us away from that content,  as if the adverts were temptation and he was applying the values of The Lords Prayer upon us without us being aware of it. He left the subject of real lust and the constant reference to sex/seeing women partially unaddressed in the advert until last when the class was running out of time. It was as neat a way of dealing with the subject as any. Like the adverts, the teacher left the subject up in the air, pretend-dealt-with but clearly not actually dealt with in any depth at all.

As Winter gave way to Summer  so we older boys were taken outdoors at weekends, whether we like it or not. I don't know whether our being taken outdoors was to reduce the food bills and staffing levels of the school at weekends or whether they meant it as part of a package 'for our personal development', probably both reasons were strong motives. It started with a seven mile hike to the nearest YHA youth hostel. Walking was fine, going with Kevin made the walking even better for me, though the journey did disrupt the fine flow of conversation between us as if we had reversed the priority of the exercise to engagement with each other rather than get there at same speed as everyone else. The hostel was primitive but homely. I was quite relieved to be away from the school. With how the school both provided for us and limited our contact with everyday local society we seemed to be kept in some sort of bubble. In the youth hostel the bubble seemed thinner, and the basic reality of the place seemed closer for us sharing it with people who were not from the school. A few weekends of this was quite pleasant.  I had never been shown how to read a map, not for myself nor for a group but with some simple instruction the route became easy enough to remember by sight. One small 'gift' I did have was that I could remember routes by sight. It was a fallible gift, and at worst I got there slower for the odd missed turning and steps retraced.

Then the local education authority decided to have their own youth hostel in which they reduced the risk of us being treated like the ordinary public that we so enjoyed being part of. One Saturday morning, out of nowhere appeared walking boots, rucksacks, warm clothing and cagoules for up to ten boys. I was one of the ten who were volunteered. Our new hostel was the same distance from the school as the YHA hostel, much less than half a day's firm walk, and the route there used some of the same narrow roads as the route to to the official YHA hostel. Our new destination was an ex-farm building in it's own site next to a road. It had a small derelict looking 'garden' outside the single room structure but inside three sides of low stone walling. Outside the wall there is a large field. The building felt isolated because it was, it was a mile from the next nearest abandoned looking building with very few trees between here and there. 

The education authority had put bunk beds and single blankets in the building, and a rough table or two near a sink that in total passed for a kitchen area. There was a single tap for cold water well away from the sink area and that was more or less it. The first weekend was the worst, between five and ten of us arrived with our lunch and an evening meal to heat up and means to heat it early in the afternoon. It felt like a dump soon after we settled in, after finishing our packed lunch. The two staff members were okay but the mix of boys who were there that weekend was the wrong one, myself included. When we arrived and stopped at our new hostel we were poorly motivated to be sociable with each other to try to overcome the flat atmosphere of the place. If the aim was some sort of team building exercise then it failed. The place itself was that minimal in it's resources we did not know what sort of team we could be, or to what purpose. Mostly we shrank into ones and twos, the usual level of cliquey disengagement with each other, where we avoided who we did not get on with. We did not even bring anything as simple as a pack of cards to help while away the hours more agreeably. Tea came out of a tins, heated in a pan on the gas stove that the staff had carried with them, and we had a lie in on the Sunday. We left the hostel late Sunday morning and we were back in the school mid afternoon. The routine improved over several weekends as we went better prepared, but the autonomy we had going there and coming back were the best parts of the whole idea. What we did not realise was these weekends were part of a bigger plan where the simple autonomy we thought we had would taken from us by the scale of the exercise.

There had always been trips organised away from the school. The first was a visit to another school in the south of England which culminated on a day return ferry trip to France, I missed that one. It was expensive and my parents refused to stump up the money. The second was cheaper a day visit to Grimsby and a go on the ferry to Hull and back which I liked. Then there were the annual days at the seaside arranged with the girls from the nearest girls school. On them a staff member stood in the sea up to his waist to indicate that we could go no further than where he stood. When the waves buffeted us further then where he was we were told to get out of the water. I was not in the sea very long before I had to get back on land. There was more grit in the sandwiches than there was in each of us. 

The big plan was for a group of ten of us us who were fourteen and fifteen were to go camping  in The Lake District for a week in June. This was meant to the holiday of a lifetime for me. I am not sure how much I wanted to go. I liked walking but I was hard to organise, if something went wrong to anyone in the group then it usually happened to me first. I was the test of the teachers planning skills, their canary in a coal mine for my being physically awkward, uncompetitive and less team oriented than other boys. But this holiday that was within my parents budget and it was rare that the school and my parents actively agreed about much. Mother had never been camping in her life, and the only time dad might have slept in a tent would have been in his army training, which he never completed. That side of his life was for him to keep to himself. So I had permission to achieve something they had never done. But, knowing myself even partially, I was not going to excel in it on the terms that the school wanted.

Ten of us filled the minibus seats and underneath and between our seats was bunged with rucksacks, food, and camping equipment. Three staff members sat at the front, which was also full up with stuff, two staff on the passenger seats, one driving. One of the staff was going to return the minibus to the school when everything and everyone in it had been unloaded. Then we were on our own. The staff member who drove the minibus away to a school with ten fewer pupils in it surely knew that he had got the best part of the deal, and the staff who were there with the tents, the rest of the kit and the boys to sort out knew it too.

We walked for two hours to the site that the staff had chosen, according to his map. Setting up several several three man tents at a distance from each other and we slept two to a three man tent. Arranging who slept where seemed easy enough. It was nice to have somewhere to put our rucksack down and arrange our sleeping bags. Next came sorting out food and making the evening meal which went smoothly enough, what felt slightly odd was how we were both in school but out of it for us being away but still organised by the staff. The first two days were easy, light local walks where we travelled only short distances. The staff even had postcards and stamps set side for us to write postcards to our families with. There was no shirking communications to our parents, everything had to be seen to be right.

 Day three was the big event when  the teacher planned a day long hike up one of the steeper peaks. The teacher lined everyone up to instruct them to empty their rucksacks of clothing that they were not going to need and carry their rucksacks on their back. This where my capacity for mishearing or mis-remembering instructions came into it's own. I did not remove the spare clothing from my rucksack, everybody else did. I got very hot carrying all the unnecessary weight. I was as disappointed with myself as the staff member was angry at me for this latest mistake. But all was not lost, when one boy tore his trousers on some bushes I could lend him some get down the hill with in greater comfort. Worse was to come on our return, somebody, we did not know who, had left open the flaps of the food tent and some cows had been, tramped about, and gone. We had enough food to cover if we were to wasteful but the teacher who was organising us was the same one who shouted at me that I was 'Too bloody soft' for using a 2B pencil, I did begin to wonder why teachers who could be so easily short tempered continued to put themselves in the path of temptation to anger, us. Or was the whole idea of the staff designing exercises in leadership for others meant to prove how difficult we were to lead in the way they expected? The jury ran out on that question, there was no further incident that week. Maybe I should have predicted one blow up on the week even if we all proved to be model pupils all the time. The teacher needed it.     

Canoeing became another reason for the school to take us off campus for a whole day at a time, I preferred it much more over camping or waking to the school youth hostel to stay there overnight. I don't know where we were taken, but I remember it being narrow streams rather then broader deeper waters. It became something to look forward to. For several weekends running the minibus was loaded with towels, life jackets and half a dozen boys, the trailer with the canoes hooked to the back and off we went. Canoeing was a relatively solitary activity which made me take to like, well, a canoeist to water. I really enjoyed the feeling of moving within a landscape at distance where I could see other boys but I as not with them directly. Since I could not swim I was nervous of capsizing and nervous of the bully boys I was out with. But that was dealt with quite well. When one of the half serious bullies approached me, it was natural for him to threaten to capsize me, and I did feel afraid, but also I practically dared him to do it, the better to lose my fear of the water. I felt emotionally buoyant, particularly after the second time which he had nothing to do with. 

Finally there was the day spent picking strawberries on a local farm, Kevin and I both decided that this was another day away from the school and one that was more on our terms, and we could each earn some money at it. We were dropped off at the farm by a teacher and left for the day. We did not pick as much as we had hoped to, nor did we earn as much. We left the farm half past three or so, after we could work no more nor eat any more of the strawberries. We walked together part way and I put my thumb out for a lift, I had temporarily stopped thinking of myself as being in, and part of, the school. Nobody knows what might have happened if a stranger had picked me up and I had said where I wanted to be. Suddenly a teacher appeared in his mini with Kevin already in the back. I was ordered to get in the back of the car in mildly annoyed tones as if I had offended my keepers, whom I should have had more deference towards. But I felt highly unsure of what I could learn from deference.

The final seal on the school year came when it became obvious that amid all the character-building outdoors activities something rather large was missing. The careers advice that would have signalled my exit from the school was simply not there. By default and deference it was settled that I should be returning to the school in September. Kevin got the green light to leave that summer because he was older than me so when I returned it would be with few, if any close friends left. Still I could always try writing to maintain contact......

Find Chapter 28 here

Find the chapter guide here.

Chapter Twenty Eight - Check Out How You Like, You Are Not Leaving.

 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.

Chapter Twenty Nine - Forced Entries And Exits.

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.