Chapter Twenty Tree - Using Up Time Cheaply.

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. 

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.

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. 

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.

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 '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.    

Find Chapter 24 here  

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.

Chapter Twenty Four - Too Bloody Soft

 When Mother wanted to be speak clearly then nothing would serve her better than a pithy hostile phrase. She had plenty of them. When she was aware that she had not supervised me closely whilst getting me to do some job she needed done well, rather impatiently she would say 'Let the dog see the rabbit'. She was a country woman at heart so it was a natural simile for her to use. But the nature of the phrase was more aggressive then she would surely admit. Dogs usually killed rabbits when they saw them in the wild.

It was a phrase the froze me and shut me down more often than she realised. But then again my being half-frozen a lot of the time was sort of useful to her, it meant she could control me as and when she needed control because the space she had put me in was due for a different use. So I had to move. If only I could have gotten out my own way and out of her way more easily than she suggested, and found a space for myself that nobody else wanted. But, as Mother would have admitted if it seemed a quite logical and reasonable thing to say, part of why I was still at the boarding school was about me avoiding being in her way. The fact that the government ordered it was just coincidence.

The longer the government insisted I stay in boarding school the more I hoped that some friendly member of staff in the school would be the enlightening dog to my nervous rabbit and explain what 'being maladjusted' meant in such a away as gave it a decent future. Then we'd both know why I was there, rather than in a more academically inclined school, a job, or an apprenticeship. Some boys had left early, in spite of the government's new regulations. He might help me find the right exit out of the place. I could never complain about how well I was kept, materially, but between the lukewarm affections of family and whatever the school was meant to be I felt trapped.

This was obvious to anyone who wanted to see it. Nobody wanted to see it, and if the school was meant to be 'a holding place'* for me, then I did not feel held. I felt like multiple failures from elsewhere were being heaped upon me, and other boys. Whilst those in charge said 'We are doing our best' and their best was getting them quite far in life, and me nowhere.

The school was like the small voluntary organisations I'd been in, and left due to my age. It had systems to process people with. But for the processed, part of the process was to rendered unable to understand what being processed meant, what the proper rewards for being the processed might be in the end, and who or what was at the top of the chain of command whilst I was seemingly at the bottom. It was true, there was a national recession coming and this seemed to render more opaque how adults talked about the future. From how opaque the staff of the school seemed with me I could have deduced that the future was now, and this latest now seemed to be a place of uncertainty, waiting, and feeling stuck.

I say that there was a recession coming. The boys did not read the newspapers at the school, but could follow television news headlines. We knew this most closely by how the food budget of the school was being squeezed. There were fewer second servings at mealtimes. Then there was the preparations for the visit of the schools inspector, where the headmaster made the teachers hide a hoard of school exercise books from the schools inspector that he had bought cheaper much earlier than the inspectorate knew about, lest the inspector cut the future budget for our education. 

I should have recognised this hoarding/saving script from the parental house. But I didn't want to, it had followed me around all my life. Apart from my sister, I was the youngest of the thirty odd cousins in my extended family on my father's side. My father was the youngest of his five brothers and four sisters, and the last to marry. His family discreetly understood that for many reasons, his physical health high among them, that he was 'the runt of the litter' in his family. He had survived against the odds. When I was born there was no Family Allowance for the first child, but the allowance was given for both children on the arrival of a second child. So hand-me-down clothing was my 'normal'. When my sister was born the rules changed to family allowance for every child even in whatever order they came, so she got better than me and I was meant be glad for what I had got with less government help.

All my cousins were normal and went to local schools for normal children. Here normality means being bullied in school, but rapidly being supported against the effects of it after it happened. One story of a cousin being bullied stayed with me. A female cousin was held down in school and her hair which was in pigtails, covered in all purpose glue. She was thirteen and in secondary school when it happened. She survived having her long hair cut very short, it grew back and was a minor loss compared with the trauma I endured where the help I got helped others more than me. Hair regrows but few can successfully redevelop momentum by using lost time and lost opportunities. 

Somehow I turned fourteen in Summer of 1975 and emotionally the parental house was oddly quiet. The biggest surface change was that Dad traded in the black and white television and got his first colour set. Beyond recognising that it certainly made Top Of The Pops seem brighter and more engaging I could not say why he got it. I would guess that he got it because nearly all his mates had colour sets and he did not want to be the last person among those he knew to have a black and white set. Mother took delivery of it during the day, when dad was at work. She gave me the job of tuning the set after it was unpacked put in it's place, and turned on. My second job was to take the box out in the the yard, which was quite difficult with dad no-longer-working motor scooter in it, and carve it into little pieces to disguise what the writing on the box said, rather more than to get the cardboard to fit in the bin. She feared that we would be burgled and the set stolen if we left out a cardboard box with the words 'colour television' on it's side in the yard. Dad had bought the moped off one of his mates and it had worked for that summer at least, but not much after. Dad had been pleased to get out and about on it with 'L' plates front and back but he had not been out on it lately. Our cat, now elderly, got the most out of it by sitting on the seat on sunny days.

The pound in dad's pocket kept shrinking, he knew this mostly by how the rounds of drinks it bought in the pub got smaller. To him it was no excuse that the pounds in his mates pockets also shrank by the same degree. Nor did it matter to him when he gave Mother less housekeeping whilst expecting it to go further than more housekeeping money had gone before, and with the same degree of deference towards him as before, more than we could ever offer each other. He still had to have his steaks whilst we had sausage, he had to have butter when we had margarine. Since the internal logic of dad's argument was inconsistent then there was no real answer to it, there could not be. The ultimate argument was with his temper and nobody wanted to raise that. But we still wanted something with a consistent internal logic to it to hold on to. We were not yet grown, we were still growing up.

When dad looked like he was not going to get bad tempered Mother tried to engage him in conversation about his decisions, tried to argue back with him and reset his arguments, flawed internal logic and all, within her own, more positive, terms. She spoke in faux feminist terms of her having the buying and making skills of making dad's money stretch as far as he expected it to but if he gave her a bit more then she would do even better. But even when she made her skill the thing that made the difference, not his shrinking money, he was not moved. She also tried to use 'feminist humour' with gentle put-downs like 'You've got me, I've only got you'. The more this went on, over the summer holidays, the more likely it was that there would be a big argument. And there was, and it was horrible. In the end nothing came of it except the silent retrenchments of all the old arguments where dad was as detached and illogical as he thought he needed to be to assert himself. Nothing we said could make him seem more attached to us than he permitted, improve how he saw our lives, or make him rethink how thoroughly he thought through his ideas.

How dad thought certainly added a new pressure on Mother, and changed the conversations we had on the way to the charity shop as we looked for new second hand clothing to fit out the still-growing me for the autumn term and next year of boarding school. It was clear that the recession had hit the supplies to charity shops too, but more time to have to search meant more time to talk over the difficulties of the parental house en route. I was in luck, Mother found me what seemed to be an actual hair shirt, a shirt with coarse black hair on the outside of the shirt which was dark grey, it was quite hideous. But in school I wore my recessionary garment underneath my school jumper with all the pride in being poorer that I, small as I was, could muster.

When I return to boarding school in the September I was unprepared for how much the lessons were going to be as shoddy as my clothing. The formula for my pocket money remained the same too, I got half of what other boys my age got. Thirty five pence a week. One Saturday afternoon during the summer I was in the parental house when dad wanted to sleep off the excess drink. I was oblivious to how he was. He told me to take fifty pence from the loose change in his ash tray and go and buy myself an ice cream, or something. I took the money and left as he suggested. But I did not know how to spend money, I knew Mother and the house needed it more. I felt guilty, as if I had stolen it. I put the money back when he was not looking.

At the boarding school the school rooms were ten yards from the main house. There were five classrooms all off a large in indoor assembly area with a shiny black floor. Two of the classrooms are up a broad flight of stairs with a rail. These upstairs classrooms share a flat roof and each room has a door onto a balcony with steps down to the ground floor. The playground is small. The small swimming pool is nearby, next to a woodwork workshop. Behind the woodwork shop there was a large vegetable patch and the electricity generator for the school and main house in the event of emergencies all of which we were meant to avoid. It was for the recreation for the staff who lived on site. 

The classrooms were light, airy and modern. Black Formica was the standard look for the fixed surfaces near the windows, many of the surfaces have science equipment built in to them. Classes were divided by age; the older we got the looser the structure of the classroom, the further we sat apart.

The school seemed to be a dry run for new teachers, fresh out of training college, who came and went with great rapidity. Because of teacher turnover, beyond maths and English language lessons (disguised as letter writing day), the school devised it's own curriculum based on the talent set of which ever staff were present that  term. When a new teacher spoke and wrote french we got french lessons, though he did not last long when his English was no match for our capacity to play up in class. Art lessons were always short when setting the class up and tidying before the end took up so much time. I had ideas in the art class but I  was too slow a painter for them to explore them properly. Maths and English were taught as if what we knew, or didn't know, did not matter to the staff. In English the school saw nothing wrong with me being left handed and did nothing about it. We were never going to take even the most basic of exams like a GCSE so it did not matter. 

I could follow basic maths. Addition subtraction multiplication and division. I was good at mental arithmetic as well, but in the classroom showing our workings was important so mental arithmetic meant nothing a skill. Where I could not follow the lesson was when the teacher put a random real life situation around the numbers to be processed. The sum that stumped me was £24 gross wages with £18 deductions. If I had been able to speak I would have asked the teacher 'Given the deductions are you sure this fictional job is worth doing?', but I was struck dumb. The sum seemed unfair. A minefield had opened up in my head about where the arguments about money that had gone on in the parental house through the summer about what was fair, cruel, and a necessity repeated themselves until I could not think how to do the sum or what to say. It was no longer a simple sum, it was mental torture.

Teaching 'gay' boys was a problem to the staff. Kevin and I were better with words than we were at following orders. We processed information differently to how other boys did. Woodwork was classic for this. The woodwork shop was a  normal workshop at every bench there were two vices. Stored away were chisels and other sharp tools that the staff watched us all use very carefully, lest one school boy gouge another's eye out in anger. My mistake was simpler, I used the wrong pencil. When marking a piece of wood with a ruler for sawing I used a 2B pencil when I should have used a finer HB pencil. The teacher shouted at me in front of the class of ten '2B means too bloody soft'. Everybody knew he meant I was too bloody soft, my choice of pencil was merely a symptom of what the teacher disliked in me.

Another time a teacher set a test for Kevin and I. I don't know whether the teacher was testing us for our level of physical co-ordination or wanting to give the boys a good laugh by picking out examples of absurdity from among them. We were given a tent to put up on the lawn between the school and the main house. We failed. However we tried to assemble this tent it would not go up in the way it was meant to. One of us always seemed to sabotage any combined effort. We could laugh, and did at the time. It was all that there was left to do.  

And then there was sport, where the line between shared sadism/masochism and Esprit d'Corps got very thin. Doing anything because we were told to do it, without help, did not make us any better at it when we were bad in the first place. Nor did we improve the game and provide challenge for those who were already good at it for being forced to play, regardless of how bad we were. Being 'gay' and poorly coordinated I had a further problem. Whether they were staff or other boys, the most sporty and physically attractive males were also the ones with the most narcissistic and cruel senses of humour. Close up they repelled me for my being gawky and gay. I admired them distantly, but keeping the right distance from them within the goldfish bowl that the school was becoming was a constant and inexact science which often left me feeling quite insecure. 

Men with beards always attracted me, they had done so on television and the effect worked even better in real life. They had a masculinity I knew I lacked. Part of me was relieved that so few members of staff had beards, life was simpler when what attracted me and made life seem better was not there. 

One man was a positive exception to that simplicity. He was called Mr O'Rourke. He was a big teddy bear of a man with short curly white hair and a short off-white beard. He was a published children's author and his gift to us was his storytelling skills. He captivated me, and not just because he told us stories that he made up on the spot about us as we were, but because he made the most difficult elements of my life seem more bearable. Being discreet about what I thought was my sexuality was impossible. When I was widely ridiculed for it he held a storytelling session and made my experience into a fiction in which the character survived the verbal cruelty of other boys and found his own space. His tone of voice made the narrative he told a large group of us seem relatively asexual. This helped me a lot. Alas he stayed at the school for only two terms. Then he was gone. But the positive effect he had on my life with the story he told the boys who gathered round him stayed with me.

It was rare for us to be addressed individually. One of the few regular times it happened was when our 'case conference' came up, once, maybe twice, a year. Case Conference happened every Thursday after lunch. In it all the staff filled the staff room and spoke about which ever boy was the subject that day, as staff they came to a consensus about him. Usually it was one boy per week, sometimes if a boy had a close friend it was two. A day or so before a member of staff would say to us 'You are the subject of case conference this week, is there anything you would like said in the meeting?'. It was an odd thing to ask. As boys we simply did not reason the way the staff did. So when I was asked I was at a loss to suggest what consensus they might form about me. I knew that my reasoning was not great, my coordination was poor and at best I was an awkward fit in the school, but I would probably be an awkward fit where ever I went. All I could hope for was that with staff like Mr O'Rourke about, if they could make the consensus among the boys more positive and defuse potential hostilities over difference, then they could make the staff meetings more positive too. 209/10

The large assembly space in the school building had several functions, one was to put up art done by the boys in class. Another use was a general meeting place, by the map of the county where when idling we looked for where we were and where our families lived and wondered at the distance on the map, not thinking, for not being able to think, about the emotional distance we were from those who 'loved us' whilst we were so 'maladjusted'.

The most notable use of that space was always the Annual Christmas Party/Disco. It was the time when we were officially allowed to let our hair down and be noisy and messy and as near being real teenagers as we were allowed to be. For it being official it was also the time when we were most the artificial teenagers you could ever imagine. Sure we wore the clothes we wanted to, the flared bright coloured trousers and strangely patterned nylon shirts. Some of us even wore the least suitable shoes for dancing, the multicoloured platform shoes with stack heels that were the height of fashion at the time too. And the singles chart music was played loud enough that we could not hear ourselves or each other in the space that was now lit only by moving disco lights as well.

This was meant to be fun, particularly when to make the event seem more like a real disco the staff invited  the girls from a local school for the maladjusted to join us and we were allowed to try to talk to the girls over the noise of the music. There was an interval, where sandwiches, crisps, and fruit juice were served in one of the classrooms. To nudge the shyer ones among us to talk to the girls in the first half of the evening we were told that to go into where the food was we had to pair off with a girl and get in the queue, two by two for entry. Somehow I seemed to find the same girl to go into refreshments with several years running, not that we knew what to say to each other when we could actually hear each other had think what to say. I remembered her name at the time too, it is long gone now. I probably got an address where I could write to her and tried to write. But her memory of who I was was what sustained and limited all contact between us. 

The pseudo-heterosexual atmosphere the staff created by inviting the girls also multiplied how much the staff watched us and worried over us all. However much they had to watch other boys with who they went into refreshments with my company for going into the food was safer going into refreshments with me than anyone could ever suspect. I had more in common with Kevin for us being both gay and sort-of-asexual than either of us shared or felt for the school, or for any girl we were meant to attach ourselves to at short notice.

*This phrase was devised by psychologist John Bowlby to attribute to home-making mothers a strength of maternal bond, as opposed to a father who worked provided the materials for making the home for the child. That 'my holding place' was well away from Mother I will say less about here.


Find Chapter 25 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.

Chapter Twenty Five - Good Neighbours Are The Best Investment In the Present.

 One difference between dad and I was that he thought that commercial broadcasting was brilliant and I usually preferred BBC programmes. I thought that even when the BBC showed american imports like 'Star Trek' then the BBC television programmes were more formal, informative and engaging than their equivalent programmes on ITV. But since the television was dad's and the new and expensive colour license was paid for out of his wages then his view, that ITV did light entertainment better and with less condescension than the BBC, always won when he was around. I was often tempted to get out of the armchair I was in and leave the room when he changed the channel mid BBC programme in front of us, but that looked like sulking. I had to careful to not be seen to sulk at other people's choices. It was 'bad form' to appear to sulk whilst I was being kept in comfort that I could not pay for myself, where I could not choose differently. My leaving the room when dad changed the channel would have made dad mildly aware of opinions he did not share, but not uncomfortable enough for him to regret his choice of entertainment at that moment. Other people were contrary, for not being like him. He was always himself.

As for me, I hated the adverts for the same reason that dad liked them. He could afford the goods advertised, and get them if he wanted to. Particularly the beer that was advertised with great machismo. For being kept on half the pocket money of other boys, both in the parental house and at the boarding school I could never afford anything that was advertised. Though with the pocket money, my four years younger sister was probably on  the same money. The idea was that we should be treated as equals. The fact that my contemporaries were different to her contemporaries meant nothing to Mother. We were both children, therefore not adults, therefore we were both the same inside regardless of our actual age or different gender.  

It was hard to accept being squashed into the parental household in the many different ways that there were to shrink us, none of which seemed to apply to dad. My understanding lagged well behind my reactions. When I felt angry then the anger itself actively crippled me. One of my parent's commandments, which they flouted when it suited them, was 'thou shalt not be angry'. If any one said 'It's not fair' in the parental house then another person would pipe up 'Well it is not raining, so what is your problem?'. We sure knew how to make heavy weather out of life for each other when we wanted to.

Some of my sense of frustration came from simply feeling trapped, watched to make sure my responses pleased my watchers. In theory I had a future where I could choose for myself, not feel watched, and not feel frustrated. That future existed somewhere outside of the present binary choices of pressure from the boarding school or pressure from the parental house. But how that future was could be found could only be guessed at. Where I was gave me no clues how to get there. In both places children were rather passively talked to as of they were seen and not heard. Decades later I would later I would rephrase this binary bind of 'being cared for' as a more active 'being watched and not listened to'. But at the age of fourteen, going into being fifteen, my forced passivity and my forced understanding of everything in passive terms seemed to be the only understanding that there was.

For being at the boarding school for three quarters of the year whatever I knew about Gran and Grandad came in letters and phone calls from Mother. Mother always interposed herself between me and them. After going to the boarding school I rarely went to stay with them, or saw them in themselves. I still treasured the memory of staying with them at age ten and finding a push bike my size in the farm sheds next door. I remembered how good I felt for finding my balance/learning to ride a bike 'on my own' and going round in small circles in that farmyard. The last bike I'd had was from my parents.  It was a blue and white bike for a six year old with an extra small wheel either side the rear wheel so I could not fall off it. I had outgrown it quite quickly. With my grandparents I could, and did, change in myself. I could see my parents on slightly different terms from how they wanted to be seen, with me firmly subordinated as a small part of their unit.

But at the boarding school Mother was my sole connection to the parental house and beyond. Nobody else wrote or rang. Whatever was actually going on in the town and with family I was locked in to by what Mother's version being the only version of events I could get. In the parental house I was her helper and she was my minder, so I was just as trapped there. There seemed to be no way of loosening the grip Mother had on me, partly because when Mother seemingly did so well out of the arrangement and dad got what he wanted-having nearly as little to do with me as he wanted, then even as I was openly losing my sense of choice that was all that was open. Nobody could get close enough for long enough to question my parents wisdom over me.

The near-neighbours close to my parents house who were most open towards us were always the newest people to live on the street. They were the people who were least aware of all the old grudges between families that had accumulated down the years through which everyone shut down good will with each other. But change was coming, and with it came some small hope. A new childless couple moved in to the house opposite ours across the street in the last year. Bill and Marion were younger than Mother and dad. But they were close enough in age that the age difference became a positive force. They had an optimism and easy charm about them. Mother took a shine to them and sought welcome in their home soon after the arrived. Dad was more neutral about them, but he noted how their presence on the street had made Mother feel better which eased his mind. They stayed on the street for only four years. Billy worked in a steel works twenty miles away. Marion seemed to be quite glamorous, down to earth but not downtrodden because she worked in a job where she got paid. Clearly, for not being a mother, she looked after herself better than motherhood had left many of the women of the street, Mother included, able to do to look after themselves.

Billy and dad had one thing in common, both had jobs that were being newly automated. Bill worked at a steelworks, dad in the local factory. Both places were changing their work practices. Both Bill and dad got new jobs and new work titles, to replace old jobs. Both places of work were now owned by the government. When the government bought up many old industries to keep manufacturing going through reinvestment, it had tried to do away with the messiest and dirtiest of the old jobs that these factories had done in the past under different owners. 

For dad it meant going from being a plater's mate wielding bits of plate metal for large boilers so that the plater could solder and bolt the plates of metal dad moved to dad becoming a machine operator, pressing buttons as required to on large machines, covered in plate metal where I doubt he knew what went on behind the cover. Because nobody knew. He was more reassured to have a job then he was curious about what was going on behind the scenes.

Up to the government buying up the factory there had been work on that factory site under the ownership of one extended family for nearly 100 years, until the family's leadership had been exhausted. Since they would be paying out either way the government bought the factory to stop the mass unemployment that would following any closure. The fears of the depression of the 1930's were strong enough at the time to justify the purchase. They also kept the unions happier and government statistics looking healthier, for a while at least. The factory was incorporated into an expanded British Leyland, a company that started out just making cars. Now dad's factory was under the umbrella of a group that was making many more vehicles than just cars, and it was even better at masking the losses it made.

Occasionally dad had to go on strike. His attitude to the unions was at best ambivalent, at worst deeply hypocritical. The union negotiated his pay whether he wanted them to or not. He would attend the meetings they demanded he attend, but more out of solidarity with his friends in the factory than any stance or personal conviction. He sometimes implied to his family that given chance he could negotiate his own pay rise with his bosses, by himself. He disliked the union negotiating for him. I was not going to be the one to point out that that what he said was false bravado on his part. He liked bravado and the more false it was the more he liked it. For being less physically demanding and much cleaner his new job left him physically healthier, which he would sometimes see as a licence to drink more.

Dad being on strike led to me first sight of the inside of a dole office for 'family relief' as Mother phrased it. The rules were that when a man was in strike there was welfare money for his wife and all the children and the bills, but not for him. The man who was on strike was meant to claim the money. My dad being my dad, he sent Mother to claim the money for everyone except him by herself whilst she was looking after us. So me and my near ten year old sister had to wait in side room whilst Mother went to this very pokey little office in a side street to find out what forms she had to collect, how she had to fill them in out, and where dad had to put his signature for her to get the money. She did it all but she was extremely embarrassed at having to ask for what she thought of as 'a handout'. 

Mother saw nearby this side street that there was a large car park and the town's first Kwik Save store. Soon after we ventured in there and the aisles were wide enough for me to almost waltzed with the trolley to the music from the loud speakers down them. The aisles were absurdly wide, there was not much that Mother could find that she wanted in this factory sized space, though she could have found more for looking further. But I thought that the space itself was wonderful compared with the cramped living space of the parental house and the waiting room in the dole office.    

As part of the new regime the factory had an open day where the public could wander round. I saw the factory, everything was in it's right place and absolutely tidy. For the sheer size of the place it looked impressive. But from the wide open spaces we all saw nobody could have any comprehension of how the factory worked or what went on there.

Dad could have said the same of how my school worked when he attended the annual open day there. But the entertainment was better. The school always chose Football Cup Final Saturday as their open day. For the sake of the pupils the school wanted give the impression of maximum parental unity. They knew that making working class fathers pay attention to the prospects of their boys was near impossible. Many of us were there because our father's attention span went anywhere but near us as we were. Whilst many fathers had black and white television sets at home the school had a colour television. There could be no better draw to attract them to the day than for them all to watch the cup final in colour with each other, with  a buffet of tea and sandwiches on hand for the hungry. This allowed the Mothers to see the staff and for the staff to bamboozle the mothers afresh with overused phrases about how well the boys were doing and what bright futures they had. The staff could do this partly because of how limited their present life was for many of the women who the staff were talking to. Open days everywhere were designed to be over-optimistic with the truth.

That summer Bill and Marion probably knew when Mother was coming to visit them by noting the speed at which dad left the parental house for the pub. The faster he walked the worse his mood and the sooner Mother would be over for some cup of tea and chat, and a break from me and my sister. Probably Bill excused himself when he sensed that Mother needed 'a woman's chat', and since he had to get on with dad anyway it was better he knew less of what was said behind our front door. Mother could say more to Marion when they were briefly alone than at any other time, not that she would have said much with the parental house looking back at her, across the road.

The point about the arguments that dad started was that usually his logic was false but the anger behind it was genuine. Once he started none of us could get him to separate the logic from the anger. This made us fearful and illogical in the end. It was his illogicality that made Mother argue before me and my sister, falsely in  my belief even then, that her allotment work was 'feminist' in nature. True she was the only female allotment holder, which was feminist as far as holding an allotment went. True it gave her a space that was her own when in the parental house dad controlled so much, but if feminism was about anything then it was about cutting down overbearing men so they were a more reasonable size. In that respect nothing, no action or idea, in the parental house was ever in any way feminist. The nearest we got to any sort of feminist belief was for the three of us to each quietly believe that dad was more childish than any of us were.

Previously Mother would have to had to have waited until it was time to go to the allotment for respite from dad being overbearing, but if Marion was in and able to receive Mother at shortish notice and be the friend Mother needed then it was progress, a big improvement. Maybe it came out of one of their chats that Mother was encouraged to start making other friends for herself too, albeit friends in need more than people she might lean on.

That summer Mother got her first paid job outside the parental house, her first job since she had been single and worked full time when was her own person. A local scrap yard owner, a very modest looking millionaire, saw the local future and decided to be part of making it work better. He bought the large end house of a street three streets away from us. The front looked out onto a busy main road and the ground floor was a business premises. The upper two floors were a very large flat with a living room bisected by a chimney with a passage either side of the chimney. A kitchen and bathroom were down a few steps at the rear of the house. Neglected and unloved as they were, they were still very easy to rent out in a tight housing rental market. 

Mother started work in the shop two afternoons a week, cash in hand. The shop sold second hand white goods, fridges and cookers and whatever else came up at auction that was cheap and serviceable which would help families survive the next recession, the glimmers of which were already apparent. He had looked into the Dept of Social Security grants system and saw how claimants got grants for new-to-them basic white goods as they replaced worn out goods or moved house. He thought the goods he sold would attract the money of social security recipients, who more than any other sector in local society had to count their pennies to make their pounds go further. He thought that social security money was as good as money from any other source. He priced his goods competitively and made sure he was value for money to anyone who bought, including the price of delivering the goods to their new homes. Mother had to mind the shop, clean the dirty ovens and fridges that came in, and show customers round what new stock had been put out for sale. When he knew the stock was clean, he, rather than Mother, tested the stock to make sure it all worked. She also took deposits off people and details for the delivery of the goods. The shop premises was that under-developed that it did not even have a phone fitted, though there was a small back office, so she was saved the trouble of taking phone messages and having to write them down accurately which she might well have felt nervous about doing. She kept this job for decades, even during the time when much later she went on to officially work as a part time cleaner, she kept the shop work job. Allotments apart, the work she did minding the shop was the work position that she held the longest throughout her life.

What interested me and my sister when Mother started there was whether and when any second hand record players and records might come in. Mother was customer number one when the right ones arrived. And they did, Mother got a Dansette record player that played Long Players for the living room of the parental house, and my sister got a mini Dansette type record player for her sole use in her room that played only singles. Mother also found through the shop a battery operated singles record player that I could take to boarding school, where to play the discs they were dropped in vertically, and they played vertically. The first record I bought from the shop was a single, 'The Little White Bull' by fifties rocker turned all round entertainer Tommy Steele. More up to date pop music on cassette, and a portable cassette deck apiece eventually followed. 

Mother also made new friends in other places. She had been doing shopping and laundry for a nominal fee for our oldest next door neighbour since she arrived at the house newly married, fifteen years earlier. She found two recently retired ladies of limited mobility who lived in nearby in flats reserved for the elderly. One of them, Mrs Rumbold, had been my lollipop lady in infants school. It was not that much extra time for Mother to call by on the way to the shops and get a shopping list from them and money to cover do their shopping with hers. Their shopping was much less than hers was. When I was there I was sent from the parental house with their shopping, receipts, and any loose change that was due. Mother also did home baking for them along with baking for us. A ground rice tart with home made jam at the base was the pastry of choice for the ladies.

I don't know how we got through that summer. That no event gave way to outright violence did not mean that we felt far closer to violence than we wanted to be. The older I got the emptier the promise and purpose of life seemed to be. The thing that comforted me most was playing my own choice of music, on my own if possible. 

The most lasting and accurate expression of those times was a family photograph taken at a wedding for one of dad's relatives. It showed our family, the three of them, loosely grouped on the steps of a large church after the wedding service. They were stood stiff and awkward, only slightly apart from each other, with me stood some distance from them looking in a different direction whilst dressed at my best but still ill dressed for the occasion, as if I was kept by them. But only just.

Find Chapter 26 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.

Chapter Twenty Six - Your Life Is On Hold, Your Life Is.......

 It was with great relief that I packed my large suitcase under the seat and got in the school minibus when it stopped at the top of the street that September and this time I had something extra. My seven inch singles now had their own box, a sort of vanity box that was seven inches by seven by seven which had in it all the singles I'd want to play in school, even if they were played on other boy's record players by their permission. I got it as a birthday present earlier in the summer and it was one of  was one of the more thoughtful gifts on what was an otherwise underwhelming day.

This was my fourth year of being at the school and I did not know whether it would be my last, or what I would be doing the following  July. All I knew was at that point I was out of the parental house for another six weeks, and I was getting away from what was becoming a regular hothouse for domestic disagreement. The stuffy heat of the summer had not helped us all get on better, but now I was away from them, both the people and the tired arguments. The further the minibus went in the early evening light to pick up the fourth boy out of ten, who lived in a village deep in the countryside, the better I felt. And the second cousin who had gone to the school had left in the summer as well. now I could, in so far as it was required 'protect' myself when I need to, and hope that I did not need to because an intermediate I was the equal of every other boy in the school.

I also had got my smile back. For over a year I'd had different arrangements with a now missing front left tooth, I'd had a bridge what had broke/come loose, I'd had a tooth on a pin which went into where the root of the tooth used to be. This arrangement came loos three times and was twice glued back again. the last time it came out was during a lunch close to when summer term ended. I took the tooth out and put it on a side plate to finish the meal that I was enjoying, the headmaster was at the table and was surprised at my change of appearance. The more I tried to explain the more my change of appearance became apparent until he want to not know any more. At the end of the meal I slipped the tooth with it's pin into a paper serviette, and put both into my top pocket to give to one of the medical room staff for safe keeping after lunch. When Mother took me to the dentist he was disappointed that the pin/glue idea had failed and he was resigned to me having a false tooth on a plate. But it was strong and it worked, outwardly I smiled at least. It would take a lot more than good dentistry to coax a smile from the inside, from how I felt. One of the things that disappointed me was how often I was told that summer to square up my shoulders and stick my chest out, as that posture were enough in itself to make me the happy person other people waned me to appear to be.

With the new term my pocket money had gone up by five pence a week to forty pence, it meant that I was keeping pace with being on the half rate that other boys got, I was glad enough for at least not falling behind that half rate. Here, in the boarding school I feel more confident about how to spend my money than I did in the Summer win the parental household. Though even in school I still shivered a little when I remembered the look that my sister gave me when I told her about not being able to spend the money that dad wished upon me to get rid of me. She would have had the confidence to spend the money but I did not. But equally she would have recognised better than I did when to leave dad alone, she lived her all the time and would have been sensitive to that sort of thing. 

I started that term as an Intermediate with the same duties as I'd had when I left in the summer. But there was the vague expectation that I and and a few others might become Seniors when the staff had their meeting to sort out the boys ranks and bedrooms, mid-term. Intermediate to Senior was going to be a smaller 'step up' than Middle School to Intermediate had been, which was only to be expected. The higher the rank we were the less the difference between the top two ranks. Whatever my rank, I achieved it due to my age much more than my confidence or material means. Equally my age, always being the wrong side of the school leaving age as it kept rising, was what kept me there. So if I became a senior it was my reward for being disallowed the right to leave. As substitute for bigger rewards went it was worth having . Not that my clothes and my choice of amusements went up a rank with it. But I tried to make up in gratitude for what I was never going to have in style.

Lessons in proper subjects remained the same, we never studied chemistry, geography or science amongst many other subjects. Our lessons in the Maths and English went nowhere. At least the art lessons went somewhere when the art we made filled the wall space near the headmaster's and secretaries offices and the large map of the county that was always there where everyone of us pointed at where where they went back to in the holidays. Oddly woodwork came up good after my being shouted at for being so soft as well. The sculpture of Henry Moore was very popular in the early 1970's. It was almost the idea of publicly acceptable art with it's curves and abstract shapes. So the woodwork teacher that autumn term had us all in the short classes that we had for woodwork making miniatures in wood about eight inches high of his curvy shaped surfaces, with holes in them, to follow the style   of Moore. Mine was completed and with some small pride I presented it to my bewildered parents who would not recognise public taste in art if it got up and bit them.  

There was a new teacher this term and with it a new subject in school, music appreciation which was part of some sort of wider 'media studies' programme. Really it was a good sound system such as only the school could afford being set up in a school class room and the teacher playing records, but choosing records that we would not have to try open our ears a bit. Classical music featured quite a lot, Beethoven and Dvorak among others. We had heard classical music in short doses, Mozart had even been played on Top Of The Pops. And we found the lessons strangely quietening. But we would have learned more if we were told when the composers lived and the world that they were part of.  But either the staff had not got the time or they were afraid of weighing us down with too much detail. The new member of staff was a young man barely ten years older than the oldest pupil and he livened things up. He brought in 'Quadrophenia' by The Who to play us. It as the first time I'd heard The Who on a proper sound system and we probably only heard two sides of the double album but wow, what a change from trying to form impressions of distant narratives from classical music. This music was both more physical and much more cerebral, both at the same time. There was a story and characters that went through changes we could barely comprehend.

What I knew about The Who I knew via Kevin. Bowie who had covered one of the band's songs on his 'Pin Up's album. It was a tough R& B cover but with Bowie Kevin and I liked more the way he was almost freakishly oversold, when Bowie sang 'Cos Lennon's on sale again' in 'Life On Mars' we could have said 'Cos Bowie is on sale again', he was everywhere. Bowie was even played in the background underneath the continuity announcements on BBC1 television on Saturday night television. That Bowie had worked with John Lennon on his latest album 'Young Americans' and Bowie was still changing, still a fashion plate that led where others followed was something that Kevin and I were slow to absorb.   

I was still a big Beatles fan, I could not help but be. Having bought most of their singles ex-jukebox I was moving into the five years worth of solo albums and singles by different band members, all at the cheap end since I had to find them second hand. My understanding of the cultural force of The Beatles was apt for my experience of small town life and my age more than it was in tune to them being the agents of change that they were said to be by many. So the eastern mysticism and dry humour on George Harrison's albums washed over me, leaving no trace. I ended up admiring the slide guitar playing where there was any. I found the effect of hearing slide guitar transforming whenever I heard it. 

I had never heard words like 'counter-culture' or 'underground' as applied to music but I sort-of knew what they meant. One Lennon single I had was 'Imagine'. I was surprised when I played the 'B' side, a song called 'Working Class Hero'. With his solo albums John Lennon seemed to be different people according to the mood he was in when he recorded. This 'B' side was a depressed acoustic guitar driven dirge of a song which somehow I found it absolutely addictive. it was as if it spoke to me so directly that I did not know how to believe how it spoke. It became a song that I wanted to play again and again, but of course when I played it in any shared space it annoyed the staff and I had to play the lighter more airy and jokey side of Lennon, instead. Or better still leading singsongs of Beatles numbers on the school minibus when we were out as a class, and we did not know where we were going so we needed distracting. My triumph was knowing all the words to verses of 'Yellow Submarine' and singing them solo when the rest of the boys sang the chorus. 

When I was eventually promoted to being a senior there was no real change. I had greater permission to go into town without having to have an important reason. One point about being a senior that rankled with me was how much more often the boys my rank went to their parents houses for weekends compared with how often my parents accepted me back. But that difference between me and other boys was the part of the price of me being cheaper for my parent then other boys were for their parents. Oh, I dreamt of being collected by dad and whisked along the hour long direct journey that it was back to the parental house but dreaming was as far as I was going to get. What my wanting to see my parents more meant was not just me hoping to be like other boys my age but me naively hoping against hope that we could agree with each other better than we had before.

  
I had difficulties enough when I went into town on my own. I did not particularly think where I got figures of speech or ideas from, particularly when they got me into conflicts. The town centre was small. It was one long street full of shops leading off the open market square, which was mostly used as a car park. There were several newsagents. In several of them Kevin and I browsed the heterosexual soft porn, looking for images of the occasional pert male member. But more generally browsing the music press section. My secret vice was in the independent record shop, where I fed my obsession with bodybuilders. The record that never sold the cover of which I browsed again and again was called 'Pumping Iron' by Alvin Lee. I did not need to hear the record, but I could quite easily go into a mild trance state near but outside the record shop, go in and by repetition find that sleeve to look at again and again. Woolworths was a more constructive territory, along with looking in the window of the expensive hi-fi shop with all the foreign names on the equipment like 'Bang and Olufsen'. Woolworths was where I bought batteries  for my small portable radio and stole the occasional single sweet from the pick and mix stand. Their stock of records was quite small. I bought some of the teenybopper music there, as inspired by Top Of The Pops. But other places had more choice and were more 'grown up' in their choice of records.

The most personal encounter was with the shopkeeper who ran a small sweet shop, and his shop was one of several haunts I went to on my own. There was a craze at one point where as schoolboys if we thought something or someone was being mean to wards us we would say 'That's Jewish'. I remember being short of money for lack of pocket money and wanting to buy sweets there. Instead of taking the usual humble pie attitude that I had to accept having less I used this phrase with the shop keeper. He took me to task for using it as if I were saying the Jews cheat people. What he said made obvious sense when he explained it, and I apologised too him. Apparently I had learnt something and the shopkeeper he struck a blow against the 'hothouse' atmosphere that the school was happy to let be part of, unawares. 

Since I liked being alone and walking, and my rank now permitted me this, then finding locations in the town to visit became progressively more possible. Less directly engaging than the talk from the shop keeper but equally opening out of me were the visits to the town museum with the bits of 1920's fire engines and locally found fossils, all the flotsam and jetsam of local life that had survived the last fifty years and been donated. What was best about the museum was that it was open on Sunday afternoons which was a particularly blank time in school, in fact it was a blank time everywhere. The museum was free to enter which added to the pleasure of my many visits there. 

Seeing how much more I could be trusted, I was sometimes tested. Never more so than when I was asked by the staff member who was 'the banker' and kept the records of who bought what in the tuck shop to get change for the tuck box float. I was sent in to the town with £25 pounds and given a list small coinage to get in return. I got the order right and kept the list to prove it. But there were too many bags of loose change to fit into all of the pockets of my now heavy nylon parka coat. I ended up carrying one £10 bag of change with the £10 clearly visible on the outside when I should have turned the bag inside out. The staff member worried that I might have been robbed when he saw me with the money bag. But he lacked the forethought there, not me. He should have given me a strong bag to put the £10 money bag in, to disguise that I was carrying loose change. His concern was like Mother's worries, at 'what might have been' rather than what actually did happen.

One teacher  must have wondered that given how I was now trusted in town on my own then how I might cope with being part of a group. He found a theatre project apiece for Kevin and I. Kevin's project was first that term. Built like a brick outhouse as he was, he appeared in full drag in the chorus of a local production of 1950 musical 'Call Me Madam' which was a apparently a satire on American politics. I never saw him in it, I probably could not afford one. My role was back room boy. I helped him learn his script by speaking the lines he had to respond for hours in his room. As a preparation for what was to come the teacher wrote several sketches for the school's Christmas celebration, after the big dinner in the sports hall. In one sketch I was in full drag, I played the wife, in a skit on a husband and his wife  being funny whilst disagreeing with each other. The female staff members helped me dress and made sure that I got the make up right. Both my best friend, day boy John who studied electronics properly, and his parents were guests at the Christmas dinner and saw me in that after the meal. His parents never guessed that I did the female part. Since I was by no means a great actor by any means they must have been inattentive and easy to convince. At the time I so enjoyed it that did not think about whether or how I might tell my parents about how good it felt to act, to be the centre of people's attention because they chose to be there. I could guess how dismissive they would be if I tried. 

My project proper came the following spring. It is now so many years on from me performing in the play that I don't remember it's title, but I remember the story behind me getting involved with it. A local amateur academic and teacher had somehow unearthed, intact, a previously unknown version of a play by one of the ancient Greeks. He had completed a working translation of it into English, and as a kind of inter-schools community play before they became popular he wanted to see it acted and performed. And he wanted this in a small gentle English market town in a shire county which was about as far from the atmosphere of Ancient Greece as it was possible to get. The teacher got me to join the cast of pupils from different schools because they needed a handsome youth as lead. The director took the teacher at his word, and accepted me.

I had a lot of slightly cod-dramatic lines to speak like 'Oh Heracles! how Odious', but I enjoyed being photographed in pseudo-Greek costume in the local newspaper to promote the play. I doubt my acting was of any great standard, but to simply remember the lines, say them in the right order and say them with the right sort of intonation would have been enough. It got good reviews locally as well, but then it was unusual fair for the time and place it was performed. I would like to have acted more, but no more roles came my way. I wish had understood better community plays, particularly for schools are nearly always one-offs. 

Find Chapter 27 here

Find the introduction and chapter guide here.