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I was eleven years old and my brother, Bob, was twelve when the copper stopped us and made it clear he didn’t believe our story. That worried us because our oldest brother was, as they say, ‘well known to the police.’ But he was doing his national service in the army and it had been a long time since the police had called at our house. Bob and I were the law abiding sons. We’d never been picked up by the police, well, apart from that time we demolished a wall outside the Anglican Church Hall. But kids were all over that wall when we got there and we just joined the fun. So we didn’t count that. We pinched things, of course, but no more than everyone else we knew. Okay, maybe not everyone else. Still, the time I’m talking about was the early fifties, when food was still rationed, including flour and sugar, and we were always on the lookout for something extra to eat.
Apples and pears from orchards, and carrots, peas and hard white turnips from farmers’ fields gave me a lifelong appreciation of fresh fruit and raw, earthy vegetables. I’m tempted to embroider the story here, a picture of two mischievous but starving urchins, but that would mean leaving out the bit about us having a sweet tooth.
When we were grown up and reminiscing about our childhood I used to blame Bob for my childhood delinquency. “You were fifteen months older than me,” I’d accuse, knowing there was no answer to that. But Bob was never stuck for an answer. He always came back with, “Yeah. But who started all the fights and who had to finish them?” True. In fact we were more like twins than older and younger brother. Bob was the sensible one and I was the impulsive one but we were alike in many things, including a salivating response to cakes in shop windows.
In my mind I still have an images of a plate-sized cream sponge in a cake shop window, and working out a plan with Bob to get our teeth into it. Since Bob had the convincing patter and I was a pretty good runner we decided Bob would distract the woman behind the counter while I grabbed the cake. I can still see myself rushing out of the shop like a serious contender in an egg and spoon race, holding the big cake out in front, Bob pelting after me and a howl of outraged voices at his back. But we were quick and once we were in the clear we stopped to walk. A nice old lady passed us. “Oh,” she said, “that’s a big cake for a little boy.”
“I don’t like small cakes,” I said, and walked on. I expect Bob would have come up with a more plausible answer but he was still panting. Not that we were pinching cakes all the time. We were careful. On numerous occasions when the shops were shut we’d stare into shop windows coveting the shiny toys. “I bags that one and that one,” we’d shout, trying to outdo each other as we laid claim to various toys we knew we’d never own. Sometimes We’d talk about smashing the window, grabbing the toys we’d ‘bagsed’ and rushing off, but we never did. Fear of being caught was one obstacle but I think the more practical consideration of having nowhere to hide the loot influenced our restraint too.
But the sight of cakes behind a counter was harder to resist. Penny buns were the cheapest, of course, but although they were still called penny buns they cost three pennies to buy. One day when we were gazing through a shop window at the mouth-watering sugary glaze over plump currants on a tray of penny buns I showed Bob the two farthings I had in my pocket. We both thought it unfair that you couldn’t buy a penny bun for a farthing, even though we knew farthings had ceased to be legal tender many years before, probably in our granddad's day. We’d get thrown out if we offered the shopkeeper farthings. We looked at each other and, as so often happened, the same idea occurred to us both simultaneously.
It was lunchtime and the place was busy. In his most innocent voice Bob said, “Two penny buns, please.” I stood by his shoulder reaching up to the counter with the two farthing concealed in my fingers. The distracted shopkeeper passed the buns over to Bob with one hand while taking the money from me with the other hand. The time it took her to stare at the two farthings in her hand and realise she’d been had was all we needed to run like hell.
But we had moved away from petty thieving when the copper pulled us up. By then we could occasionally earn money spud-picking, pea-picking, helping out on a milk round, cutting hedges around posh houses in summer, and in winter shifting snow from paths and drives. And Bob got a paper round.
He was delivering papers that winter when he came across an empty house. Well, almost empty, the last tenants had left coal in the coal bunker outside the back door. When Bob came home he told us about this heap of abandoned fuel just sitting there begging to be taken. Our mam was not so enthusiastic. She didn’t want policemen knocking on the door again. But it would be silly to ignore a heap of free coal in the middle of winter. Be careful, she warned.
When it was dark we got the big pram out - there was always a baby on the go in our house - and set off for the coal. It was a big, deep pram, the hood had long gone and it had taken a battering all round really but it still worked, even if a couple of the wheels wobbled a bit. Our destination was a half-hour walk away.
We remembered the torch but forgot to bring a shovel. So our hands were black by the time we’d finished throwing the coal into the pram. And with mucking about in-between, throwing coal at each other and smudging each other’s faces, we looked as though we’d been up a chimney.
The pram was heavy so we both pushed it along the quiet street. All the streets were quiet; it was a cold, wet night and the only people out were those who had to be. We were sweating before long and our conversation had dried up when we heard the shish of bike tyres coming up behind us. Then a big copper on a big bike stopped beside us and put his hand on the pram.
“Hello, lads. Bit late for you to be out. What have you got there, then?” He shone his torch.
“Coal,” Bob said.
“Aye, I can see that. Where’d you get it?” This was Bob’s territory so I kept my mouth shut and tried to look angelic.
“Me aunty,” Bob said.”
“Oh aye. And where does she live?”
Bob never hesitated. “Just by the church in Roby.” The copper gave us a hard look. Bob didn’t blink. Roby was a bloody long walk. Long enough, as Bob had been shrewd enough to work out, for the copper to hesitate before thinking about taking us back there to check our story.
“Funny time of night for your aunty to send you off with a pram full of coal,” the copper said. “Why didn’t you get it straight after school?”
“She works all day,” Bob said, “and me mam said this was the only time we could go.”
“Where does this aunty of yours work?”
“Don’t know.”
“Aye, I’ll bet you don’t,” the copper said, easing the chin strap on his helmet. But he didn’t look mean, just firm. Even then I could see he was finding all this a pain in the neck and that he’d much sooner get back to the station and go home for his supper. He pushed on the handle of the pram, testing the weight. “That’s a heavy load,” he said. “How far are you going?” Now this was dangerous territory but Bob was up to it.
“Finch Lane,” Bob said, and I marvelled at his inventiveness. Finch lane was as far away as Roby.
”What number?”
“Eighty seven.” That brother of mine, he was quick, I had to give him that. I couldn’t see the copper walking his bike for an hour at this time of night. But he surprised me.
“Right, you’d better take me there,” he said. “And I’ll ask your mam about sending you out for coal at this time of night. Come on!”
We started pushing the pram, me imagining what the people at eighty seven Finch Lane would say when they opened the door to us. It was a mess. We’d have to run, either then or before we got there. I wanted to whisper to Bob to make a run for it when we got to the corner of Boundary Road but the copper was right beside us. I didn’t know what to do.
No one said anything as we made our way through the dark to the sound of the coppers boots, the whrr of his bike and the creak of the pram. The longer it went on the more worried I became. Bob would have a plan but what? I’d have to make my own plan. I decided that as soon as we got to Boundary Road I’d run for it, lose the copper behind the shops and over back garden fences. Bob would take off as soon as he saw me go. Even if we did lose the pram and the coal at least we’d get home without the copper knowing where we lived.
As we got closer and closer to Boundary Road I got more and more nervous. It was like when you put your fists up just before a fight. You’re afraid of throwing the first punch in case you get clobbered but the waiting is even worse. Still, wouldn’t be long now, I told myself. Another minute and we’d be there. About twenty more steps. Ten...
The copper stopped. “Okay, I’ll take your word this time. But don’t let me find you out at this time of night again. You hear Me?”
“Yeah. No. We won’t, honest!” we chorused, hardly able to believe our luck. The copper put his foot on the pedal, pushed off, cocked his leg over the saddle and pedalled off into the night. And as the small red light on his bike began to fade we doubled up with relieved laughter.
We forgot the weight of the pram as we made our way home, laughing, interrupting each other as we talked, going over and over what the copper said, what Bob said and how it could have ended. Then Bob said something that made me grab his sleeve and look at him. He said, “I was all ready to run for it. I was just waiting until we got to the corner of Boundary Road.
The End.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
BELATED ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I noticed him because he was alone. His mates had long gone and he was going to be late for school, but he was in no hurry. Hands in pockets, head down, walking so slow you just knew he didn't want to get there. Everything about him reminded me of a time long ago when I was a boy of thirteen. I was glad it wasn't me scraping my heels along the ground and dreading the long hours ahead. I had been rescued from the most miserable time of my school days by a boy my age. He came into my life suddenly and we became inseparable. He made the long days bearable yet I never did get around to thanking him, in my mind yes, many times, but not properly, not out loud. It's time I did.
In 1946 on my first morning at St Margaret Mary's, the Maggie's we called it, I was six years old. Wedged between a desk and chair, learning not to laugh or speak without raising my hand for permission. Then, when play-time finally came, I was whacked twice with
the cane for punching the boy who shouldered me out of line. I wanted to go back home and play in our street but that time of my life had gone.
Yet despite the confinement and the cane, I enjoyed much of those early years. We were children of working class catholic families. Our destiny was to be manual workers or mothers. Jacqueline was the exception. She was a well groomed middle class girl who talked confidently to teachers. I fell in love with her shining face and well brushed hair, and
the fluffy white bobbins on her knitted socks. But she kept her distance, as though she could tell I slept in my shirt.
When I was seven, I was sitting next to my mate, Jimmy, trying to decipher the secrets of a basic reading book, when, just like that, the letters clicked into words, and the the words suddenly made sense. "Miss! Miss!" I shouted, "I can read." Jimmy gave me his long-suffering look.
Jimmy and I, and a boy called Lucas became best friends. We were B stream material and never going to win any prizes for scholarship, but we could run and fight and kick a soccer ball, and we didn't cry when we were caned. Robin Hood was our favourite story, but we had a different version to the one Miss read to us. We shut out the boring bits about Maid Marion, and we knew it was a lie about Robin being an Earl. Our Robin was poor and he could beat all those Earls and Lords and Sheriffs in a fair fight anytime. Lucas liked being Will Scarlet while Jimmy and I alternated between Robin and Little John.
Jimmy's mother had died of TB and he often roamed around after school. When he told us of a way into the Men's Club behind the church, we followed. He led us round the back and up on the low roof where we dropped down through an open-air urinal. It was easy.
In the gloom of old cigarette smoke and stale beer, Jimmy broke open a black money box. We weighed our pockets down with pennies and halfpennies. Then had an orgy of lemonade, potato crisps, and a few sips of bitter beer to give our falling-about-drunk act some credibility. When the laughter died on Jimmy's face, I turned to see Father Mguire standing at the door, looking at us. We dashed back to the urinal, frantically trying to shin up the smooth walls but we were trapped like frogs in a jam-jar. Father Mguire looked sad and disappointed. He didn't say much, and sent us home without telling us what was going to happen to us. I was full of shame and fear. We decided to run away, far away where no one would ever find us, especially the police. We’d pinch turnips, catch rabbits, fish. We could live in the forest and kill deer with bows and arrows ... and everything. We
wouldn't come back until we were grown-up, when everyone would have forgotten about us stealing from the church.
We walked on, becoming tired and confused and hungry. It would be dark soon. No one suggested it but somehow we found ourselves walking home. It was almost ten o'clock when I walked up our street and saw me Mam outside our house talking to Mrs Murphy. I held my breath. I'd get the hiding of my life now for bringing the priest and the police to the door, not to mention stealing from the church.
"Get up to bed before your father sees you," me mam said in a strange, quiet sort of voice. I went straight up and eased under the blankets besides my sleeping brothers. I heard me mam say goodnight to Mrs Murphy and I waited with my eyes open. The stairs creaked. Me mam came into the room. "Here," she whispered, shoving a jam butty into
my hand. Then she went downstairs again.
The next day nothing was said, except by Jimmy and Lucas. We sweated, waiting for something terrible to happen. A glimpse of Father Mguire about the school was enough to freeze my insides for minutes at a time. I started going to church every morning, promising God I'd be a good catholic for ever if given this one last chance. But as the weeks went by uneventfully, my attendance at church tapered off.
Not long after our burglary, Jimmy told us they were sending him to Blackmore School. Lucas and I told him how lucky he was, with Blackmore being by the shops and everything. We didn't say anything about it being a backward kid's school, neither did Jimmy. Lucas and I were angry when they sent Jimmy away. They wouldn't dare do that if his mam was alive, we said.
We missed Jimmy but time passed and things were happening. I was busy competing in swimming races but it was soccer I loved. I played with Lucas in the school team and never missed a game. We were winning our way to the cup when we were beaten 3-1 in the quarter final. That score would come back to haunt me.
At the end of the final term, Lucas and I separated. We were eleven years old. He was off to the local secondary school. I was to follow my brothers to a place they said was worse than Colditze. And suddenly, as I began to realise what was passing from my life, I found myself walking up the hill to my new school, a new boy all over again.
St Edward,s, was commonly known as ‘the Eddies.’ It was hidden from the road by a high fence darkened by overhanging trees. Wooden gates at the end of the drive
opened to a barren concrete yard; the playground for three hundred and fifty boys. The playground boundary was guarded by four-story Victorian buildings, linked by iron catwalks on every floor. It was no surprise to learn that before the war the place had been an institution for mentally subnormal men. I'm tempted to say I was full of pity for them, but it was myself I was thinking of. I longed for the cosy familiarity of my oId school.
The Headmaster and the core of his teachers were Christian Brothers, clad in ankle length black robes. Loops of black rosary beads swayed from their wide black belts. Among the lay-teachers were men who qualified for teaching by completing a one-year teaching certificate after the armed forces were done with them. The lone female in this masculine community was as hard as any of the men.
I was assigned to class 1 b. Of the thirty or so other boys only one was from my oId school, the rest were from St Dominic's. They knew one another but to me they were strangers. I tried to concentrate on the Teacher.
Mr Maudsley was a tall ex military man with leather patches sewn on the elbows of his brown tweed jacket. Perhaps as a boy he had enjoyed ‘William’ stories. That's the only reason I can think of for his desire to inflict them on us. He used the ‘William’ books as readers, but particularly enjoyed reading aloud himself. To me, William was a bossy little posh kid who said "Jolly good show," and "Gosh" and that kind of thing. His family used napkins at dinner and wore dressing gowns before bed. No one in our street wore a
dressing gown. I'd never owned underpants. William's dad looked down his nose at what he called "those tradespeople." In our street tradespeople were an envied class. William wasn't for me, not with a hat stand in his hallway. I preferred stories about Sherwood Forest but Mr Maudsley pressed on with great enjoyment regardless.
Some of the boys in my class seemed to be having fun, enjoying the excitement of being in a new school. I felt awkward and lonely, so lonely I was on the point of asking someone to be my friend. Only pride and fear of rejection prevented me. So I struggled on, trying to adjust without much success, desperately hoping to make friends. But instead, I got into a fight.
Suddenly I was someone of interest. Only later did I discover that my opponent, Terry O’connor, was a renowned fighter. When we shaped up outside the school gates an excited crowd of older boys formed a ring. Terry, who was smaller than me, adopted a low,
crouching stance and waited. I moved in confidently, poking out my reliable straight left. He responded with a barrage of fast punches. I was soon staggering like a drunk. He bobbed and weaved and jabbed and poked in all the right places, his hard fists stabbing at me from all directions. When he finally knocked me down, my older brother appeared and quickly dragged me away, relieving me of the choice between taking another hammering or slinking off.
"Come on, get on the bike," he said, tugging me through the crowd. We rode off down the hill, me on the cross-bar, blubbering excuses, he pedalling with his knees poking out. He didn't say anything more. There's not much you can say about getting a hiding from a
better fighter.
My shame didn't last long. Terry O’connor seemed as embarrassed by victory as I was by defeat. He made an effort to show he felt no sense of superiority. Like me, he was from a poor family and we may have become good friends if he hadn't drifted out of school. Although my challenge was more from ignorance than courage, I had earned some respect. But I wanted more than that, I wanted to show I could win. I yearned for the sports to start so I could really show my stuff.
Because of the distance from the public swimming pool, swimming was out. Soccer was the only sport regularly practised at the Eddies, so soccer would be my salvation. My confidence was not misplaced on this occasion because I was able to test my soccer skills in
the school yard at playtime.
Soccer balls were banned. Balls of any size were banned, probably to protect the windows of the buildings around the yard. A poor excuse in the soccer mad world of working-class Liverpool. Nothing could stop us playing soccer, baIl or no ball. At play-time we fought over small blocks of wood pinched from the woodwork class. We adopted the names of our heroes from our famous city teams, Liverpool and Everton. Piles of coats and jerseys represented goal-posts. A seething mass of boys struggled for the honour of sinking a wooden substitute ball into an imaginary net.
I was impatient for the soccer trials, then I would show them. In the meantime I fought for control of the wooden block. On the way home from school I dribbled an old tennis ball, re-living the exploits of my favourite comic characters, a bunch of raggedy back street soccer players who against all odds usually beat the better dressed opposition.
When the day came, a tweed-coated lay teacher designated sports master, marched us to the playing field. He carried a proper soccer ball, panelled leather gleaming with Dubbin. This prized object was not allowed to touch the ground until we had crossed the white lines of the soccer pitch. I played my favourite half-back position in the weaker of the two teams. We lost by three goals to one,that score again, but I had a good game. I felt that
pleasurable, sweaty weariness you get, win or lose, when you have given your best. The teacher, who until then had made little impression on me, wasted no time after the final
whistle to tell us who had been selected. He picked the entire winning team. I walked off in disgust before he picked the reserves. For a long time after the so-called trial, I believed he was stupid, unfair and incompetent, not to mention a lot other things. Yet now I realise he was not necessarily any of those things, but merely lazy. From then on my childish outrage prevented me from ever again taking part in school sports, even on sports day when my bones cried out for it.
I came to hate the confines of class 1 b. I thought about Jimmy and Lucas, and longed for those far away afternoons back at the Maggies, listening to the tales of Robin Hood, and I sulked as Mr Maudsley droned on about that twerp William.
I was ever alert for the four o’clock bell and tore out of the place like a greyhound, down the hill, my lungs bursting. Freedom. Our street. Our house. Fighting my six brothers and two sister for chairs in the crowded living-room. When things got too heated in the house there was always someone in the street wanting to play. It didn't matter who went to what school, if you were catholic or protestant, whose mother you hated, or if your dad rolled up the street rotten drunk. The important thing was that you lived in our end of the street.
We played cricket with a baldy tennis ball, a stick, and sods of earth for stumps. Rounders we played too, and hopscotch and skipping and marbles and soccer. Night was the signal for hide and seek. Then finally we quietened under the glow of the street light to talk
and tell stories, hanging on to the last hour of freedom until, one by one, we were yelled home for bed.
Behind his back, we called our second year teacher Paddy, I can't remember why. He was a short neatly dressed man, proud of his twenty years army service. At first he seemed refreshingly friendly and witty, always ready for a joke. But we soon discovered he was a man of moods whose wit could turn to withering sarcasm or violence. We learned he had cancer and suffered from painful gums . He spoke slowly and deliberately like the
actor, James Mason, and like Mason he could be sneeringly superior. I think his sense of superiority affected his taste in books. He thought ‘Billy Bunter’, the fat owl of Greyfriars, was just hilarious, therefore we should think so too. Harry Wharton's famous five were
everything that English schoolboys ought to be. Perhaps they were, but not in the England I lived in. What intrigued me about Billy Bunter was not that he could spend a pound on cream buns, chocolate rolls and jam tarts, any boy boy could do that, it was that he had a pound to spend. Poor old Bunter imagined he was looked down on by the famous five because his family could only run to one full-time cleaner, a part-time gardener and a humble saloon car. It was almost oikish, and we all knew who the oiks were.
With the second year half over, I realised I was drifting deeper into the bottom third of class 2 b. Although still holding my own at English, every other subject was slipping away, especially arithmetic. I pretended not to care, hiding my anger and hurt pride behind aggressive humour, but I was struggling. And then Paddy unexpectedly announced an arithmetic test. As the groans rumbled around the room I felt the stirring of competitive excitement. I think there are special days when something in the air brings the body and brain to a perfect union, when the muscles sing and the mind whistles clear and sharp,aching for a challenge. This was one of those days. I bubbled with quiet anticipation as the papers were handed out. Grunts of indignation greeted the questions.
"No talking! And no looking around," Paddy ordered, quietening us. I surged through the questions with a confidence I hadn't felt for a long time. When the papers were collected I knew without doubt that I'd done well. I was buzzing with success, and my marks would show it. They would not be the best, but good enough to give Paddy a shock.
As he quietly marked the papers I couldn't help looking at him, waiting for his response. I wanted to see his face when he counted my marks. But when he finally looked up, it was Tommy Doyle he was looking at, a daft looking, clumsy footed boy who could hardly read.
"Doyle! Stand up boy!" Paddy said. Poor old Tommy got to his feet, his eyes everywhere but on Paddy.
"Tell me Doyle, why is it that your correct answers and your mistakes are identical to Sweeny's, who just happens to be sitting next to you?"
"I donlt know Sir," Tommy said, trying his best to look innocent.
"You stupid, stupid boy," Paddy said, reaching for his cane. "You cannot even cheat intelligently. Paddy crooked his finger, and when Tommy hesitated, went for him. He grabbed his ear, yanked him to the front and gave him two on each hand. I usually felt sorry for Tommy but not now. He got what he deserved, I thought. Now let's get on with it. But Paddy was still holding the cane. His knuckles white as he pulled it through his hands. "Cheating is the the lowest of the low," he said, his chest moving. "Guttersnipe behaviour. A rotten, stinking infection." He looked around the class for signs of contamination. And of course, we all looked guiltily around at everyone else. He held us like that until the pressure was almost unbearable, then his face broke into a sinister, James Mason smile. “Very well, you can all do the test again, with a different set of questions this time.”
A couple of crawlers nodded their heads in agreement with Paddy but the rest of us were sullen. My success was oozing away. The new test defeated me. I couldn’t look at Paddy, but I was thinking about him. I was thinking about his cancer and saying to myself, "Die you bastard."
Once or twice before, when he had humiliated me about the shabbiness of my clothing, I had stuffed my anger deep down where he couldn't see it. I was afraid any sign of my smouldering hatred would provoke him. For Paddy was the only teacher I'd ever seen who
occasionally resorted to caning boys on the buttocks. Perhaps he thought of himself as ‘’Mr Quelch’, "swishing" Bunter. But to me it was a gross invasion which held me in fear.
Paddy's illness frequently kept him at home that year. His replacement was Brother Timothy, or, Timmo, as we called him. Timmo was a younger man who also had a nasty temper. But he tended to fly into a panic and and that made him vulnerable to our mocking laughter. We never laughed at Paddy, not openly.
For a Christian Brother, Timmo had a wide taste in literature. He thought both ‘William’ and ‘Bunter’ were excellent books, and therefore good enough to satisfy the needs of the twelve year old ruffians in class 2b. Perhaps he had the famous five in mind when he told us to write about how we had spent our Easter holidays. Bunter was always angling to spend his ‘hols’ at Wharton Lodge or Maulerverer Towers with some of the other chaps from Greyfriars. But the lads in class 2b groaned in disgust. "Mucking about at home," seemed all most of my class-mates could think of writing. Since pleasurable anticipation would do no good for my image, I too groaned as mutterings and spitefully bent pen nibs marked the beginning of the session. This gave way to the sound of pens dipping into ink-wells and scratching paper.
I decided on a golden beach under a hot sky in a foreign land. A place were zebras roamed, pulling little carts full of Bellisha beacons, where I spent my holiday lying on the warm sand, frolicking in the clear-blue water, having fun with the girls, and eating grapes and bananas. I was flying, soaring far from Timmo and the deadly boredom of the Eddies.
I was alive.
At the end of the session we were reading to ourselves more or less quietly as Timmo looked through our papers. It was not an important composition, more a time-filler before the lunch-bell. Soon our compositions would be just another detail of forgettable school history. Then Timmo yelled at us to keep quiet, his face red and agitated. He scribbled on a piece of paper and stuttered for a boy to take a message to Brother Fergus, the headmaster. Someone was for it, but who? And what for? We waited silently. Brother Fergus was a huge, dour-looking man with a well-deserved reputation for brutal and merciless caning. The cane he wielded was unusually thick and had never been known to break. When his black frame filled the doorway the class, already quiet, became breathlessly still. Timmo rushed to the door with one of our compositions in his hands. Whose? He seemed as frightened of Brother Fergus as we were. They conversed in undertones just outside the window-paned door, their faces the only clue to the grave nature of their discussion. Then they came into the classroom. Brother Fergus stood quietly for a moment looking us over. Then in that silky-soft voice of his said, “Horan, come with me child.”
I could feel the tension leaving the room with me as I followed him, wearing my couldn’t-care-less face. He didn’t speak as he led me along the corridor then up the stone steps to his office. A feeling of enormous guilt was growing in me as I tried to remember what mischief had been found out. He closed the door softly and said, “Hold out your hand, child.” I obeyed, afraid to ask why. The cane was a part of my life, but not his cane, and until the first of those four strokes I did not understand the meaning of pain. Like bigger and tougher boys before me, I crumpled in whimpering tears, barely able to hold out my hand for the last stroke.
Lurching down the stone steps to the yard, I swore obscene curses on our hated Headmaster. I wanted him to suffer as I was suffering, and I wanted him to die a painful lingering death.
Some days after the thrashing, I learned from a boy with an enviable bush of pubic hair, that "having fun" with the girls on the beach could have only one meaning. I smirked back uneasily when he congratulated my daring. I would have suffered another beating rather
than admit I had written those words in innocence.
Mid way through the third year, time had slowed to the pace of madness. I was pinned like a spinning fly to a desk in class 3b. By now I had earned a reputation for entertaining my classmates by calling out ironic or outrageous comments. A desperate antidote to boredom. Our teacher, a sixty year old Christian Brother with a figure like Friar Tuck and a personality like the Sheriff of Nottingham, was rarely amused. He was quick and strong despite his age. He used the cane, the strap, the back of his hands, and sometimes his closed fists, anything to keep control. Billy, we called him, perhaps after Billy Bunter. Which reminds me, there was one good thing about Billy: He didn't read boys stories to us. He never once mentioned William, or Billy Bunter, or any of the famous five. I could say he didn't read to us because he was sensitive to our deprived, working-class culture. But I think the truth is Billy didn't trust us long enough to look down.
"Blessed Guttersnipes!" he'd yell, almost frothing whenever missiles found the target of his turned back. And he was probably right. In our fourteenth year we had become ardent teacher-baiters. We were bitter about our incarceration and it took all of Billy's strength
to keep the riot at bay.
In between bouts of clowning defiance, I was morose. From the windows of Billyl s class I could see the slate roofs of the other buildings and a patch of sky. Yet when I had the rare opportunity to escape the classroom for sports, I stubbornly refused to join in. I was past joining in anything ‘they’ wanted me to do, even when my body ached for it. I was burrowing inside myself for nourishment, feeding myself on hatred, spinning towards the edge.
I like to think that Mr Edwards, the only teacher known by his proper name, identified my torment. He was the science teacher we went to for an hour a week. Balding with a domed forehead, he came to school on a bike and often forgot to remove his bike clips. He had two astonishing characteristics: he didn’t use the cane and he seemed to like us. That made him a sitter for our frenzied exploitation yet, remarkably, no one teased him or disobeyed him. We liked him, respected him, didn’t want to upset him.
I felt guilty because although Mr Edwards was kind and enthusiastic, science bored me. I couldn’t stay awake. Sometimes I’d put my head on my arms on the desk and go to sleep. He never mentioned it. Perhaps he knew that the greatest gift he could give me was respite.
Back in class 3b we had what were supposed to be quiet reading periods. A box of books was delivered to the class from time to time. (Only the A classes were allowed to visit the school library.) We had a brutal but effective way of selecting books from the box. This consisted of punching, kicking shins, kneeing thighs, elbowing rib-cages, and snarling demands for whatever had the best pictures. Not that there were many in that category. I
read ‘Tom Sawyer’ half - heartedly, thinking Tom was nothing but a show-off. I was more interested in Indian Joe and Tom's friend, Huck, but the show-off always got the attention. Still, reading Tom Sawyer was better than doing sums.
My arithmetic had not improved. One day Billy suddenly lost patience with the standard of my work. To the delight of the rest of the class, he tore my exercise book into bits, symbolically threw the bits into the waste basket, and yelled that my work was hopeless, a disgrace to the class, and a waste of his time marking it. Then he calmed down a bit and
muttered, "From now on you can just damn well sit at the back of the class and read."
Billy's outburst surprised me, but nothing more. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I was beyond feeling embarrassed for failing in the eyes of teachers. Yet the other boys looked on with pity, as though my isolation was cruel and unjust. Nobody seemed to envy my extended reading periods. Yet to me, sitting at the back of the class reading was a reward. not a punishment. But what would I read? That problem was solved when my class-mates realised they could get rid of the unpopular ‘fat’ books on my desk. I had a lot of time to fill in. When ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ was dropped in front of me, I turned to the first page with some interest.
"You don't know about me, it began, "without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. But that ain't no matter ... " From that moment the classroom disappeared behind a cloud. I was away with Huck, a real boy at last. A boy who had no shoes and no money in his pockets, a boy who spoke my language. Even if he couldn't get past his seventh multiplication table, he made sense to me. And when he said, “l don't take no stock in mathematics anyway." I knew I'd found a friend for life.
Huck didn't like being stuck in a classroom either, so he took off down the Mississippi in a canoe, leaving the classroom far behind. I could hear the water lapping when he stole away. And when he made his first camp-sight, I could smell the fish cooking slowly on the
fire. I read the fat book slowly, savouring every page. Life in 3b swirled around somewhere up the front of the class, but I was at the back with Huck, paddling down the Mississippi.
The distant literary figure who created Huckleberry Finn died before I was born. An American with a southern accent, yet he captured my attention, spoke my language and earned my lifelong loyalty. Mark Twain. thank you.
The End
1
In 1946 on my first morning at St Margaret Mary's, the Maggie's we called it, I was six years old. Wedged between a desk and chair, learning not to laugh or speak without raising my hand for permission. Then, when play-time finally came, I was whacked twice with
the cane for punching the boy who shouldered me out of line. I wanted to go back home and play in our street but that time of my life had gone.
Yet despite the confinement and the cane, I enjoyed much of those early years. We were children of working class catholic families. Our destiny was to be manual workers or mothers. Jacqueline was the exception. She was a well groomed middle class girl who talked confidently to teachers. I fell in love with her shining face and well brushed hair, and
the fluffy white bobbins on her knitted socks. But she kept her distance, as though she could tell I slept in my shirt.
When I was seven, I was sitting next to my mate, Jimmy, trying to decipher the secrets of a basic reading book, when, just like that, the letters clicked into words, and the the words suddenly made sense. "Miss! Miss!" I shouted, "I can read." Jimmy gave me his long-suffering look.
Jimmy and I, and a boy called Lucas became best friends. We were B stream material and never going to win any prizes for scholarship, but we could run and fight and kick a soccer ball, and we didn't cry when we were caned. Robin Hood was our favourite story, but we had a different version to the one Miss read to us. We shut out the boring bits about Maid Marion, and we knew it was a lie about Robin being an Earl. Our Robin was poor and he could beat all those Earls and Lords and Sheriffs in a fair fight anytime. Lucas liked being Will Scarlet while Jimmy and I alternated between Robin and Little John.
Jimmy's mother had died of TB and he often roamed around after school. When he told us of a way into the Men's Club behind the church, we followed. He led us round the back and up on the low roof where we dropped down through an open-air urinal. It was easy.
In the gloom of old cigarette smoke and stale beer, Jimmy broke open a black money box. We weighed our pockets down with pennies and halfpennies. Then had an orgy of lemonade, potato crisps, and a few sips of bitter beer to give our falling-about-drunk act some credibility. When the laughter died on Jimmy's face, I turned to see Father Mguire standing at the door, looking at us. We dashed back to the urinal, frantically trying to shin up the smooth walls but we were trapped like frogs in a jam-jar. Father Mguire looked sad and disappointed. He didn't say much, and sent us home without telling us what was going to happen to us. I was full of shame and fear. We decided to run away, far away where no one would ever find us, especially the police. We’d pinch turnips, catch rabbits, fish. We could live in the forest and kill deer with bows and arrows ... and everything. We
wouldn't come back until we were grown-up, when everyone would have forgotten about us stealing from the church.
We walked on, becoming tired and confused and hungry. It would be dark soon. No one suggested it but somehow we found ourselves walking home. It was almost ten o'clock when I walked up our street and saw me Mam outside our house talking to Mrs Murphy. I held my breath. I'd get the hiding of my life now for bringing the priest and the police to the door, not to mention stealing from the church.
"Get up to bed before your father sees you," me mam said in a strange, quiet sort of voice. I went straight up and eased under the blankets besides my sleeping brothers. I heard me mam say goodnight to Mrs Murphy and I waited with my eyes open. The stairs creaked. Me mam came into the room. "Here," she whispered, shoving a jam butty into
my hand. Then she went downstairs again.
The next day nothing was said, except by Jimmy and Lucas. We sweated, waiting for something terrible to happen. A glimpse of Father Mguire about the school was enough to freeze my insides for minutes at a time. I started going to church every morning, promising God I'd be a good catholic for ever if given this one last chance. But as the weeks went by uneventfully, my attendance at church tapered off.
Not long after our burglary, Jimmy told us they were sending him to Blackmore School. Lucas and I told him how lucky he was, with Blackmore being by the shops and everything. We didn't say anything about it being a backward kid's school, neither did Jimmy. Lucas and I were angry when they sent Jimmy away. They wouldn't dare do that if his mam was alive, we said.
We missed Jimmy but time passed and things were happening. I was busy competing in swimming races but it was soccer I loved. I played with Lucas in the school team and never missed a game. We were winning our way to the cup when we were beaten 3-1 in the quarter final. That score would come back to haunt me.
At the end of the final term, Lucas and I separated. We were eleven years old. He was off to the local secondary school. I was to follow my brothers to a place they said was worse than Colditze. And suddenly, as I began to realise what was passing from my life, I found myself walking up the hill to my new school, a new boy all over again.
St Edward,s, was commonly known as ‘the Eddies.’ It was hidden from the road by a high fence darkened by overhanging trees. Wooden gates at the end of the drive
opened to a barren concrete yard; the playground for three hundred and fifty boys. The playground boundary was guarded by four-story Victorian buildings, linked by iron catwalks on every floor. It was no surprise to learn that before the war the place had been an institution for mentally subnormal men. I'm tempted to say I was full of pity for them, but it was myself I was thinking of. I longed for the cosy familiarity of my oId school.
The Headmaster and the core of his teachers were Christian Brothers, clad in ankle length black robes. Loops of black rosary beads swayed from their wide black belts. Among the lay-teachers were men who qualified for teaching by completing a one-year teaching certificate after the armed forces were done with them. The lone female in this masculine community was as hard as any of the men.
I was assigned to class 1 b. Of the thirty or so other boys only one was from my oId school, the rest were from St Dominic's. They knew one another but to me they were strangers. I tried to concentrate on the Teacher.
Mr Maudsley was a tall ex military man with leather patches sewn on the elbows of his brown tweed jacket. Perhaps as a boy he had enjoyed ‘William’ stories. That's the only reason I can think of for his desire to inflict them on us. He used the ‘William’ books as readers, but particularly enjoyed reading aloud himself. To me, William was a bossy little posh kid who said "Jolly good show," and "Gosh" and that kind of thing. His family used napkins at dinner and wore dressing gowns before bed. No one in our street wore a
dressing gown. I'd never owned underpants. William's dad looked down his nose at what he called "those tradespeople." In our street tradespeople were an envied class. William wasn't for me, not with a hat stand in his hallway. I preferred stories about Sherwood Forest but Mr Maudsley pressed on with great enjoyment regardless.
Some of the boys in my class seemed to be having fun, enjoying the excitement of being in a new school. I felt awkward and lonely, so lonely I was on the point of asking someone to be my friend. Only pride and fear of rejection prevented me. So I struggled on, trying to adjust without much success, desperately hoping to make friends. But instead, I got into a fight.
Suddenly I was someone of interest. Only later did I discover that my opponent, Terry O’connor, was a renowned fighter. When we shaped up outside the school gates an excited crowd of older boys formed a ring. Terry, who was smaller than me, adopted a low,
crouching stance and waited. I moved in confidently, poking out my reliable straight left. He responded with a barrage of fast punches. I was soon staggering like a drunk. He bobbed and weaved and jabbed and poked in all the right places, his hard fists stabbing at me from all directions. When he finally knocked me down, my older brother appeared and quickly dragged me away, relieving me of the choice between taking another hammering or slinking off.
"Come on, get on the bike," he said, tugging me through the crowd. We rode off down the hill, me on the cross-bar, blubbering excuses, he pedalling with his knees poking out. He didn't say anything more. There's not much you can say about getting a hiding from a
better fighter.
My shame didn't last long. Terry O’connor seemed as embarrassed by victory as I was by defeat. He made an effort to show he felt no sense of superiority. Like me, he was from a poor family and we may have become good friends if he hadn't drifted out of school. Although my challenge was more from ignorance than courage, I had earned some respect. But I wanted more than that, I wanted to show I could win. I yearned for the sports to start so I could really show my stuff.
Because of the distance from the public swimming pool, swimming was out. Soccer was the only sport regularly practised at the Eddies, so soccer would be my salvation. My confidence was not misplaced on this occasion because I was able to test my soccer skills in
the school yard at playtime.
Soccer balls were banned. Balls of any size were banned, probably to protect the windows of the buildings around the yard. A poor excuse in the soccer mad world of working-class Liverpool. Nothing could stop us playing soccer, baIl or no ball. At play-time we fought over small blocks of wood pinched from the woodwork class. We adopted the names of our heroes from our famous city teams, Liverpool and Everton. Piles of coats and jerseys represented goal-posts. A seething mass of boys struggled for the honour of sinking a wooden substitute ball into an imaginary net.
I was impatient for the soccer trials, then I would show them. In the meantime I fought for control of the wooden block. On the way home from school I dribbled an old tennis ball, re-living the exploits of my favourite comic characters, a bunch of raggedy back street soccer players who against all odds usually beat the better dressed opposition.
When the day came, a tweed-coated lay teacher designated sports master, marched us to the playing field. He carried a proper soccer ball, panelled leather gleaming with Dubbin. This prized object was not allowed to touch the ground until we had crossed the white lines of the soccer pitch. I played my favourite half-back position in the weaker of the two teams. We lost by three goals to one,that score again, but I had a good game. I felt that
pleasurable, sweaty weariness you get, win or lose, when you have given your best. The teacher, who until then had made little impression on me, wasted no time after the final
whistle to tell us who had been selected. He picked the entire winning team. I walked off in disgust before he picked the reserves. For a long time after the so-called trial, I believed he was stupid, unfair and incompetent, not to mention a lot other things. Yet now I realise he was not necessarily any of those things, but merely lazy. From then on my childish outrage prevented me from ever again taking part in school sports, even on sports day when my bones cried out for it.
I came to hate the confines of class 1 b. I thought about Jimmy and Lucas, and longed for those far away afternoons back at the Maggies, listening to the tales of Robin Hood, and I sulked as Mr Maudsley droned on about that twerp William.
I was ever alert for the four o’clock bell and tore out of the place like a greyhound, down the hill, my lungs bursting. Freedom. Our street. Our house. Fighting my six brothers and two sister for chairs in the crowded living-room. When things got too heated in the house there was always someone in the street wanting to play. It didn't matter who went to what school, if you were catholic or protestant, whose mother you hated, or if your dad rolled up the street rotten drunk. The important thing was that you lived in our end of the street.
We played cricket with a baldy tennis ball, a stick, and sods of earth for stumps. Rounders we played too, and hopscotch and skipping and marbles and soccer. Night was the signal for hide and seek. Then finally we quietened under the glow of the street light to talk
and tell stories, hanging on to the last hour of freedom until, one by one, we were yelled home for bed.
Behind his back, we called our second year teacher Paddy, I can't remember why. He was a short neatly dressed man, proud of his twenty years army service. At first he seemed refreshingly friendly and witty, always ready for a joke. But we soon discovered he was a man of moods whose wit could turn to withering sarcasm or violence. We learned he had cancer and suffered from painful gums . He spoke slowly and deliberately like the
actor, James Mason, and like Mason he could be sneeringly superior. I think his sense of superiority affected his taste in books. He thought ‘Billy Bunter’, the fat owl of Greyfriars, was just hilarious, therefore we should think so too. Harry Wharton's famous five were
everything that English schoolboys ought to be. Perhaps they were, but not in the England I lived in. What intrigued me about Billy Bunter was not that he could spend a pound on cream buns, chocolate rolls and jam tarts, any boy boy could do that, it was that he had a pound to spend. Poor old Bunter imagined he was looked down on by the famous five because his family could only run to one full-time cleaner, a part-time gardener and a humble saloon car. It was almost oikish, and we all knew who the oiks were.
With the second year half over, I realised I was drifting deeper into the bottom third of class 2 b. Although still holding my own at English, every other subject was slipping away, especially arithmetic. I pretended not to care, hiding my anger and hurt pride behind aggressive humour, but I was struggling. And then Paddy unexpectedly announced an arithmetic test. As the groans rumbled around the room I felt the stirring of competitive excitement. I think there are special days when something in the air brings the body and brain to a perfect union, when the muscles sing and the mind whistles clear and sharp,aching for a challenge. This was one of those days. I bubbled with quiet anticipation as the papers were handed out. Grunts of indignation greeted the questions.
"No talking! And no looking around," Paddy ordered, quietening us. I surged through the questions with a confidence I hadn't felt for a long time. When the papers were collected I knew without doubt that I'd done well. I was buzzing with success, and my marks would show it. They would not be the best, but good enough to give Paddy a shock.
As he quietly marked the papers I couldn't help looking at him, waiting for his response. I wanted to see his face when he counted my marks. But when he finally looked up, it was Tommy Doyle he was looking at, a daft looking, clumsy footed boy who could hardly read.
"Doyle! Stand up boy!" Paddy said. Poor old Tommy got to his feet, his eyes everywhere but on Paddy.
"Tell me Doyle, why is it that your correct answers and your mistakes are identical to Sweeny's, who just happens to be sitting next to you?"
"I donlt know Sir," Tommy said, trying his best to look innocent.
"You stupid, stupid boy," Paddy said, reaching for his cane. "You cannot even cheat intelligently. Paddy crooked his finger, and when Tommy hesitated, went for him. He grabbed his ear, yanked him to the front and gave him two on each hand. I usually felt sorry for Tommy but not now. He got what he deserved, I thought. Now let's get on with it. But Paddy was still holding the cane. His knuckles white as he pulled it through his hands. "Cheating is the the lowest of the low," he said, his chest moving. "Guttersnipe behaviour. A rotten, stinking infection." He looked around the class for signs of contamination. And of course, we all looked guiltily around at everyone else. He held us like that until the pressure was almost unbearable, then his face broke into a sinister, James Mason smile. “Very well, you can all do the test again, with a different set of questions this time.”
A couple of crawlers nodded their heads in agreement with Paddy but the rest of us were sullen. My success was oozing away. The new test defeated me. I couldn’t look at Paddy, but I was thinking about him. I was thinking about his cancer and saying to myself, "Die you bastard."
Once or twice before, when he had humiliated me about the shabbiness of my clothing, I had stuffed my anger deep down where he couldn't see it. I was afraid any sign of my smouldering hatred would provoke him. For Paddy was the only teacher I'd ever seen who
occasionally resorted to caning boys on the buttocks. Perhaps he thought of himself as ‘’Mr Quelch’, "swishing" Bunter. But to me it was a gross invasion which held me in fear.
Paddy's illness frequently kept him at home that year. His replacement was Brother Timothy, or, Timmo, as we called him. Timmo was a younger man who also had a nasty temper. But he tended to fly into a panic and and that made him vulnerable to our mocking laughter. We never laughed at Paddy, not openly.
For a Christian Brother, Timmo had a wide taste in literature. He thought both ‘William’ and ‘Bunter’ were excellent books, and therefore good enough to satisfy the needs of the twelve year old ruffians in class 2b. Perhaps he had the famous five in mind when he told us to write about how we had spent our Easter holidays. Bunter was always angling to spend his ‘hols’ at Wharton Lodge or Maulerverer Towers with some of the other chaps from Greyfriars. But the lads in class 2b groaned in disgust. "Mucking about at home," seemed all most of my class-mates could think of writing. Since pleasurable anticipation would do no good for my image, I too groaned as mutterings and spitefully bent pen nibs marked the beginning of the session. This gave way to the sound of pens dipping into ink-wells and scratching paper.
I decided on a golden beach under a hot sky in a foreign land. A place were zebras roamed, pulling little carts full of Bellisha beacons, where I spent my holiday lying on the warm sand, frolicking in the clear-blue water, having fun with the girls, and eating grapes and bananas. I was flying, soaring far from Timmo and the deadly boredom of the Eddies.
I was alive.
At the end of the session we were reading to ourselves more or less quietly as Timmo looked through our papers. It was not an important composition, more a time-filler before the lunch-bell. Soon our compositions would be just another detail of forgettable school history. Then Timmo yelled at us to keep quiet, his face red and agitated. He scribbled on a piece of paper and stuttered for a boy to take a message to Brother Fergus, the headmaster. Someone was for it, but who? And what for? We waited silently. Brother Fergus was a huge, dour-looking man with a well-deserved reputation for brutal and merciless caning. The cane he wielded was unusually thick and had never been known to break. When his black frame filled the doorway the class, already quiet, became breathlessly still. Timmo rushed to the door with one of our compositions in his hands. Whose? He seemed as frightened of Brother Fergus as we were. They conversed in undertones just outside the window-paned door, their faces the only clue to the grave nature of their discussion. Then they came into the classroom. Brother Fergus stood quietly for a moment looking us over. Then in that silky-soft voice of his said, “Horan, come with me child.”
I could feel the tension leaving the room with me as I followed him, wearing my couldn’t-care-less face. He didn’t speak as he led me along the corridor then up the stone steps to his office. A feeling of enormous guilt was growing in me as I tried to remember what mischief had been found out. He closed the door softly and said, “Hold out your hand, child.” I obeyed, afraid to ask why. The cane was a part of my life, but not his cane, and until the first of those four strokes I did not understand the meaning of pain. Like bigger and tougher boys before me, I crumpled in whimpering tears, barely able to hold out my hand for the last stroke.
Lurching down the stone steps to the yard, I swore obscene curses on our hated Headmaster. I wanted him to suffer as I was suffering, and I wanted him to die a painful lingering death.
Some days after the thrashing, I learned from a boy with an enviable bush of pubic hair, that "having fun" with the girls on the beach could have only one meaning. I smirked back uneasily when he congratulated my daring. I would have suffered another beating rather
than admit I had written those words in innocence.
Mid way through the third year, time had slowed to the pace of madness. I was pinned like a spinning fly to a desk in class 3b. By now I had earned a reputation for entertaining my classmates by calling out ironic or outrageous comments. A desperate antidote to boredom. Our teacher, a sixty year old Christian Brother with a figure like Friar Tuck and a personality like the Sheriff of Nottingham, was rarely amused. He was quick and strong despite his age. He used the cane, the strap, the back of his hands, and sometimes his closed fists, anything to keep control. Billy, we called him, perhaps after Billy Bunter. Which reminds me, there was one good thing about Billy: He didn't read boys stories to us. He never once mentioned William, or Billy Bunter, or any of the famous five. I could say he didn't read to us because he was sensitive to our deprived, working-class culture. But I think the truth is Billy didn't trust us long enough to look down.
"Blessed Guttersnipes!" he'd yell, almost frothing whenever missiles found the target of his turned back. And he was probably right. In our fourteenth year we had become ardent teacher-baiters. We were bitter about our incarceration and it took all of Billy's strength
to keep the riot at bay.
In between bouts of clowning defiance, I was morose. From the windows of Billyl s class I could see the slate roofs of the other buildings and a patch of sky. Yet when I had the rare opportunity to escape the classroom for sports, I stubbornly refused to join in. I was past joining in anything ‘they’ wanted me to do, even when my body ached for it. I was burrowing inside myself for nourishment, feeding myself on hatred, spinning towards the edge.
I like to think that Mr Edwards, the only teacher known by his proper name, identified my torment. He was the science teacher we went to for an hour a week. Balding with a domed forehead, he came to school on a bike and often forgot to remove his bike clips. He had two astonishing characteristics: he didn’t use the cane and he seemed to like us. That made him a sitter for our frenzied exploitation yet, remarkably, no one teased him or disobeyed him. We liked him, respected him, didn’t want to upset him.
I felt guilty because although Mr Edwards was kind and enthusiastic, science bored me. I couldn’t stay awake. Sometimes I’d put my head on my arms on the desk and go to sleep. He never mentioned it. Perhaps he knew that the greatest gift he could give me was respite.
Back in class 3b we had what were supposed to be quiet reading periods. A box of books was delivered to the class from time to time. (Only the A classes were allowed to visit the school library.) We had a brutal but effective way of selecting books from the box. This consisted of punching, kicking shins, kneeing thighs, elbowing rib-cages, and snarling demands for whatever had the best pictures. Not that there were many in that category. I
read ‘Tom Sawyer’ half - heartedly, thinking Tom was nothing but a show-off. I was more interested in Indian Joe and Tom's friend, Huck, but the show-off always got the attention. Still, reading Tom Sawyer was better than doing sums.
My arithmetic had not improved. One day Billy suddenly lost patience with the standard of my work. To the delight of the rest of the class, he tore my exercise book into bits, symbolically threw the bits into the waste basket, and yelled that my work was hopeless, a disgrace to the class, and a waste of his time marking it. Then he calmed down a bit and
muttered, "From now on you can just damn well sit at the back of the class and read."
Billy's outburst surprised me, but nothing more. I couldn't see what all the fuss was about. I was beyond feeling embarrassed for failing in the eyes of teachers. Yet the other boys looked on with pity, as though my isolation was cruel and unjust. Nobody seemed to envy my extended reading periods. Yet to me, sitting at the back of the class reading was a reward. not a punishment. But what would I read? That problem was solved when my class-mates realised they could get rid of the unpopular ‘fat’ books on my desk. I had a lot of time to fill in. When ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ was dropped in front of me, I turned to the first page with some interest.
"You don't know about me, it began, "without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer. But that ain't no matter ... " From that moment the classroom disappeared behind a cloud. I was away with Huck, a real boy at last. A boy who had no shoes and no money in his pockets, a boy who spoke my language. Even if he couldn't get past his seventh multiplication table, he made sense to me. And when he said, “l don't take no stock in mathematics anyway." I knew I'd found a friend for life.
Huck didn't like being stuck in a classroom either, so he took off down the Mississippi in a canoe, leaving the classroom far behind. I could hear the water lapping when he stole away. And when he made his first camp-sight, I could smell the fish cooking slowly on the
fire. I read the fat book slowly, savouring every page. Life in 3b swirled around somewhere up the front of the class, but I was at the back with Huck, paddling down the Mississippi.
The distant literary figure who created Huckleberry Finn died before I was born. An American with a southern accent, yet he captured my attention, spoke my language and earned my lifelong loyalty. Mark Twain. thank you.
The End
1
A HOT TIN SHED
As the two black men loaded the gear in the back of the truck the boss gave me my first instructions. “Listen! It is their job to fetch and carry things for you. You must not not lift or carry anything. Nothing, eh. And don’t let them use a paintbrush; painting is white man’s work. His tone was matter-of-fact, as though talking of pay rates and holidays.
He closed the cab door and started the engine. Sweat trickled down my neck and back. I fidgeted on the scorching vinyl of the passenger seat, lifting the immigrant-white skin at the back of my thighs. I felt foolish in short pants but that’s what everyone was wearing. My tanned, middle-aged Afrikaner boss seemed unaffected by the heat and cooly turned the steering wheel with his strong brown hands.
As we were driving out of the depot, he put his head out and yelled instructions to the two men on the back of the truck, The language was foreign to me. I wondered if it was Afrikaans. I looked at him. “Fanagolo,” he explained, tossing a booklet of that name in my lap. “Sort of bastard language.” Almost as an afterthought, he went on, “Made up from Zulu, Basutu and all the others. Lots of different tribes work at the mine.” He jerked his thumb to the back of the truck. “These two don’t speak English. They’re from different tribes too, so I don’t think they know much of each other’s language either.” He reached over and prodded the booklet with a finger. “It’s mostly instructions. You’ll get used to it.”
I flicked through the incomprehensible pages of text while trying to appear unconcerned. There was much I wanted to ask but he seemed hurried and preoccupied, and I was unsure about his attitude to me. Britain had --most inconveniently as far as I was concerned --just cut defence ties with South Africa. Did he resent me because I was English? He didn’t seem very welcoming. Yet he didn’t seem deliberately unfriendly. I would learn when I got to know him better that his natural sense of hospitality had been eroded, not by his attitude to the British but by the relentless turnover of tradesmen. I came to think of him as a relatively fair man considering the distorted outlook of the average white South African.
I looked out of the window at the dry Transvaal landscape. They called it the veld, pronouncing the v as an f. It was flat except for the glaring white mountains of gold-mine tailings that were now falling behind us. I was really in Africa, I told myself. I could almost feel the throb of a million black feet drumming the hard brown earth.
The dusty unsealed road eventually led to two houses. Modest, single story, identical, divided by a wire fence. They were the only buildings in sight. Each had a glaring, unpainted tin shed at the back. The houses seemed to have been plonked down on the parched grassland and forgotten. No trees to shade and soften, no dark cultivated earth or green watered plants. Nothing to indicate fertility or pride of personal ownership. They were staff houses, rented for a modest sum to lure white workers from the cities. On closer inspection, the furthest of the two houses had washing on a line. But I would be concerned only with the first house, the empty one.
I followed the two black men crunching across brown grass and hundreds of noisy crickets, whose high pitched chorus, oddly enough, made this alien world seem deathly quiet. The men who were now my labourers, appeared to be middle-aged. I wished they would smile but instead they darted suspicious glances at me. I could understand their resentment. I had just turned twenty-three. I looked back at the trail of orange dust following the boss’s truck and felt abandoned.
I walked through the empty rooms of the house and decided to start on the living-room. The ceiling was full of holes, as though, out of boredom, frustration or malice, the last tenant had poked it repeatedly with a metal rod. I was glad to have something to start on and was about to do what I would normally have done; spread the dust-sheets on the floor, mix the plaster, bring in a stepladder and start work. But with the boss’s instructions fresh in my mind I turned hesitantly to the two black men. I was not used to giving orders and couldn’t help wondering what these two men would think of me; a foreigner just off the boat and half their age, telling them what to do. They were looking at me, faces in neutral, waiting for instructions. I pointed to the ceiling and made painting motions. Then I pointed to the floor and spread my hands. They raised their eyebrows and tried out single words on each other until some understanding was reached between them. Then they brought in the dust-sheets and laid them out. Encouraged, I opened the booklet, looking for the right group of words to tell them to bring in the stepladders and plank. Finally, taking a deep breath, I tried out the first foreign words I had ever uttered. “Hamba lapa lo stepladder,” I said, trying to sound masterful while feeling silly. They looked at me. I cleared my throat. “Lo stepladder, please.” A glimmer of understanding but no movement. I performed a sheepish ladder-climbing-ceiling-painting charade. This proved effective. They brought in two pair of steps and a plank and erected my scaffold. I mixed the plaster myself then hopped on the plank and tried to lose myself in the familiar task.
The year was 1963. The newspapers were full of Nelson Mandella’s trial. I had known this before leaving England. But all I had been interested in was a free passage and adventure, not unsettling reports of apartheid. Yet I considered myself a liberal. A critic of England’s unofficial colour bar. More than that, I was a socialist for goodness sake. My favourite book was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I was one of the exploited working class, not an oppressor, until now.
So, to justify joining the master race I parroted the South African government’s refrain, which was that outsiders did not understand and until they had lived in South Africa they should not criticise. That seemed fair enough to me. That’s what I told myself and anyone willing to listen. But in my heart I knew I was a hypocrite.
I worked on the ceiling with excessive care, flicking the thin, springy steel of the broad knife across the indentations, leaving no excess plaster on the surface. It felt good, better than facing the communication challenge that would accompany the next stage of the job. My two labourers, seeing I had no use for them, had drifted off, leaving me to my artistic sweeps with the broad-knife. But my reverie was shattered when they rushed back inside gesticulating, eyes wide, alarmed. “Master!” one of them said, which was apparently the only English word he knew. They both began speaking, telling me of their concern but of course I could not understand them. They were pointing urgently. They wanted me to go outside with them. I hesitated, unwilling to leave the security of my ceiling. One of them reached up gently taking my wrist and pulled me after him.
They drew me to the glaring unpainted tin shed then stopped, pointing at the door, urging me to open it. By now I was scared. What was in there, a big snake? Some other dangerous wild animal? Why did I have to open the door? Maybe this is what they meant by the white man’s burden. Stiff with fear, I reached out for the doorknob and gingerly pushed the door open. Heat enveloped me as though from an oven. Then I saw the two children. They were maybe three and four years old. I think the older one may have been a girl. The were most beautiful children I had ever seen, clutching each other, staring at me with big, round eyes, trembling with terror. I had only ever seen a rabbit tremble like that. I moved closer to reassure them that I was not going to hurt them. They cringed. I backed off, painfully aware of my threatening white face. Had they been abandoned? I backed out of the shed. What should I do? I was the boss. The two black men were looking to me for answers. I returned to the house in a daze, walking from room to room.
After a few minutes I heard voices. A woman hurried into the house. An attractive black woman aged about twenty-five. A smile was fixed to the underlying panic in her face. As she approached me she began talking rapidly, hands reaching out, palms upraised, beseeching. I shook my head. Told her I could not understand her. Then to my relief she began speaking in English.
The children were hers, she said. She left home early in the morning and worked in the house next door cleaning, cooking and washing clothes from six in the morning until six in the evening. There was no one at home she could leave the children with but was not allowed to have them at work. Yet she needed the job to feed the children. She hesitated. We looked at each other. I began to imagine how she must have warned the children to be quiet, and they, knowing her desperation, obeyed. What had she told them would happen if the white people discovered them? I could not get their trembling out of my mind, or the fact that it was me they were terrified of. And they were still out there, imprisoned in that hot tin shed until the long day was over. Perhaps what I was thinking was reflected in my eyes, for the woman quickly assured me that she climbed the fence to see the children whenever she could, to give them something to eat and drink.
“Please, please, baas, don’t tell the missus. She’ll send me away and I have no other work.” I did’nt not know what to say. She stepped closer, her face frantic. “I’ll do anything for you.” I did not look any further into this invitation but I cannot say I would never have done so. Yes, I was appalled but there was also a part of me that was aroused, not only by her body but the exciting new aphrodisiac of absolute power. My first lesson in the reality of apartheid
Later, I would learn the dilemma faced by this young mother was commonplace for black women in South Africa. I also learned how easily the commonplace became acceptable to most immigrants. For working class Englishmen it was invigorating to suddenly move up a class. And in a country where millions of people were by law beneath you, this was a heady elevation. And despite seeing much in South Africa that sickened me, I learned to understand the addiction of privilege.
It would be comforting to think my decision to leave South Africa more than a year later was based entirely on my loathing of apartheid. And tempting for me to feel morally superior to the thousands of immigrants who adopted apartheid as though born to it. But that was not entirely true. For while the opportunity to employ desperate, poorly paid servants may have been a betrayal of my principles, it was also thrillingly decadent.
Because I happened to be white, I enjoyed a comfortable living in a perfect climate, walking freely under the avenues of Jacarandas in springtime. I was deferred to by a multitude of black people, it all added up to the irresistible appeal of exclusive entitlement.
When it came, my decision to leave was tied up with thoughts of my future, which included having children. I had visions of my own little bronzed South Africans growing up in the sunshine with accents like their friends, neighbours and teachers. That didn’t seem such a bad thing. What bothered me was that, unless they were exceptionally sensitive and strong-minded, they would also share the attitudes of their friends, neighbours and teachers. They would not understand how a white man could be deeply affected at finding two black children in a hot tin shed.
End.
He closed the cab door and started the engine. Sweat trickled down my neck and back. I fidgeted on the scorching vinyl of the passenger seat, lifting the immigrant-white skin at the back of my thighs. I felt foolish in short pants but that’s what everyone was wearing. My tanned, middle-aged Afrikaner boss seemed unaffected by the heat and cooly turned the steering wheel with his strong brown hands.
As we were driving out of the depot, he put his head out and yelled instructions to the two men on the back of the truck, The language was foreign to me. I wondered if it was Afrikaans. I looked at him. “Fanagolo,” he explained, tossing a booklet of that name in my lap. “Sort of bastard language.” Almost as an afterthought, he went on, “Made up from Zulu, Basutu and all the others. Lots of different tribes work at the mine.” He jerked his thumb to the back of the truck. “These two don’t speak English. They’re from different tribes too, so I don’t think they know much of each other’s language either.” He reached over and prodded the booklet with a finger. “It’s mostly instructions. You’ll get used to it.”
I flicked through the incomprehensible pages of text while trying to appear unconcerned. There was much I wanted to ask but he seemed hurried and preoccupied, and I was unsure about his attitude to me. Britain had --most inconveniently as far as I was concerned --just cut defence ties with South Africa. Did he resent me because I was English? He didn’t seem very welcoming. Yet he didn’t seem deliberately unfriendly. I would learn when I got to know him better that his natural sense of hospitality had been eroded, not by his attitude to the British but by the relentless turnover of tradesmen. I came to think of him as a relatively fair man considering the distorted outlook of the average white South African.
I looked out of the window at the dry Transvaal landscape. They called it the veld, pronouncing the v as an f. It was flat except for the glaring white mountains of gold-mine tailings that were now falling behind us. I was really in Africa, I told myself. I could almost feel the throb of a million black feet drumming the hard brown earth.
The dusty unsealed road eventually led to two houses. Modest, single story, identical, divided by a wire fence. They were the only buildings in sight. Each had a glaring, unpainted tin shed at the back. The houses seemed to have been plonked down on the parched grassland and forgotten. No trees to shade and soften, no dark cultivated earth or green watered plants. Nothing to indicate fertility or pride of personal ownership. They were staff houses, rented for a modest sum to lure white workers from the cities. On closer inspection, the furthest of the two houses had washing on a line. But I would be concerned only with the first house, the empty one.
I followed the two black men crunching across brown grass and hundreds of noisy crickets, whose high pitched chorus, oddly enough, made this alien world seem deathly quiet. The men who were now my labourers, appeared to be middle-aged. I wished they would smile but instead they darted suspicious glances at me. I could understand their resentment. I had just turned twenty-three. I looked back at the trail of orange dust following the boss’s truck and felt abandoned.
I walked through the empty rooms of the house and decided to start on the living-room. The ceiling was full of holes, as though, out of boredom, frustration or malice, the last tenant had poked it repeatedly with a metal rod. I was glad to have something to start on and was about to do what I would normally have done; spread the dust-sheets on the floor, mix the plaster, bring in a stepladder and start work. But with the boss’s instructions fresh in my mind I turned hesitantly to the two black men. I was not used to giving orders and couldn’t help wondering what these two men would think of me; a foreigner just off the boat and half their age, telling them what to do. They were looking at me, faces in neutral, waiting for instructions. I pointed to the ceiling and made painting motions. Then I pointed to the floor and spread my hands. They raised their eyebrows and tried out single words on each other until some understanding was reached between them. Then they brought in the dust-sheets and laid them out. Encouraged, I opened the booklet, looking for the right group of words to tell them to bring in the stepladders and plank. Finally, taking a deep breath, I tried out the first foreign words I had ever uttered. “Hamba lapa lo stepladder,” I said, trying to sound masterful while feeling silly. They looked at me. I cleared my throat. “Lo stepladder, please.” A glimmer of understanding but no movement. I performed a sheepish ladder-climbing-ceiling-painting charade. This proved effective. They brought in two pair of steps and a plank and erected my scaffold. I mixed the plaster myself then hopped on the plank and tried to lose myself in the familiar task.
The year was 1963. The newspapers were full of Nelson Mandella’s trial. I had known this before leaving England. But all I had been interested in was a free passage and adventure, not unsettling reports of apartheid. Yet I considered myself a liberal. A critic of England’s unofficial colour bar. More than that, I was a socialist for goodness sake. My favourite book was The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. I was one of the exploited working class, not an oppressor, until now.
So, to justify joining the master race I parroted the South African government’s refrain, which was that outsiders did not understand and until they had lived in South Africa they should not criticise. That seemed fair enough to me. That’s what I told myself and anyone willing to listen. But in my heart I knew I was a hypocrite.
I worked on the ceiling with excessive care, flicking the thin, springy steel of the broad knife across the indentations, leaving no excess plaster on the surface. It felt good, better than facing the communication challenge that would accompany the next stage of the job. My two labourers, seeing I had no use for them, had drifted off, leaving me to my artistic sweeps with the broad-knife. But my reverie was shattered when they rushed back inside gesticulating, eyes wide, alarmed. “Master!” one of them said, which was apparently the only English word he knew. They both began speaking, telling me of their concern but of course I could not understand them. They were pointing urgently. They wanted me to go outside with them. I hesitated, unwilling to leave the security of my ceiling. One of them reached up gently taking my wrist and pulled me after him.
They drew me to the glaring unpainted tin shed then stopped, pointing at the door, urging me to open it. By now I was scared. What was in there, a big snake? Some other dangerous wild animal? Why did I have to open the door? Maybe this is what they meant by the white man’s burden. Stiff with fear, I reached out for the doorknob and gingerly pushed the door open. Heat enveloped me as though from an oven. Then I saw the two children. They were maybe three and four years old. I think the older one may have been a girl. The were most beautiful children I had ever seen, clutching each other, staring at me with big, round eyes, trembling with terror. I had only ever seen a rabbit tremble like that. I moved closer to reassure them that I was not going to hurt them. They cringed. I backed off, painfully aware of my threatening white face. Had they been abandoned? I backed out of the shed. What should I do? I was the boss. The two black men were looking to me for answers. I returned to the house in a daze, walking from room to room.
After a few minutes I heard voices. A woman hurried into the house. An attractive black woman aged about twenty-five. A smile was fixed to the underlying panic in her face. As she approached me she began talking rapidly, hands reaching out, palms upraised, beseeching. I shook my head. Told her I could not understand her. Then to my relief she began speaking in English.
The children were hers, she said. She left home early in the morning and worked in the house next door cleaning, cooking and washing clothes from six in the morning until six in the evening. There was no one at home she could leave the children with but was not allowed to have them at work. Yet she needed the job to feed the children. She hesitated. We looked at each other. I began to imagine how she must have warned the children to be quiet, and they, knowing her desperation, obeyed. What had she told them would happen if the white people discovered them? I could not get their trembling out of my mind, or the fact that it was me they were terrified of. And they were still out there, imprisoned in that hot tin shed until the long day was over. Perhaps what I was thinking was reflected in my eyes, for the woman quickly assured me that she climbed the fence to see the children whenever she could, to give them something to eat and drink.
“Please, please, baas, don’t tell the missus. She’ll send me away and I have no other work.” I did’nt not know what to say. She stepped closer, her face frantic. “I’ll do anything for you.” I did not look any further into this invitation but I cannot say I would never have done so. Yes, I was appalled but there was also a part of me that was aroused, not only by her body but the exciting new aphrodisiac of absolute power. My first lesson in the reality of apartheid
Later, I would learn the dilemma faced by this young mother was commonplace for black women in South Africa. I also learned how easily the commonplace became acceptable to most immigrants. For working class Englishmen it was invigorating to suddenly move up a class. And in a country where millions of people were by law beneath you, this was a heady elevation. And despite seeing much in South Africa that sickened me, I learned to understand the addiction of privilege.
It would be comforting to think my decision to leave South Africa more than a year later was based entirely on my loathing of apartheid. And tempting for me to feel morally superior to the thousands of immigrants who adopted apartheid as though born to it. But that was not entirely true. For while the opportunity to employ desperate, poorly paid servants may have been a betrayal of my principles, it was also thrillingly decadent.
Because I happened to be white, I enjoyed a comfortable living in a perfect climate, walking freely under the avenues of Jacarandas in springtime. I was deferred to by a multitude of black people, it all added up to the irresistible appeal of exclusive entitlement.
When it came, my decision to leave was tied up with thoughts of my future, which included having children. I had visions of my own little bronzed South Africans growing up in the sunshine with accents like their friends, neighbours and teachers. That didn’t seem such a bad thing. What bothered me was that, unless they were exceptionally sensitive and strong-minded, they would also share the attitudes of their friends, neighbours and teachers. They would not understand how a white man could be deeply affected at finding two black children in a hot tin shed.
End.
GOOD AND FAITHFUL JERSEY.
What follows is for the eyes of blokes only. Women dare not allow themselves to understand this strange male obsession I am about to describe. For to understand would be to threaten the foundations of the economy devoted to women’s clothing. To be precise, I am not talking about all blokes either, only those of a certain age who have for some decades been out of the hunt for women. Blokes who, even if they were still in the hunt would not stand a chance of pulling a woman, any woman. In other words, blokes who are past it.
I want to talk about my brown, woollen jersey that has, with considerable regret, just been laid to rest. If I sit down and think hard, I can just remember all those years back when it was new. Of course, while its newness was a handicap as far as I was concerned, it impressed the hell out of the woman in my family, which is, I concede, the chief function of men’s clothing. I felt uncomfortable wearing my new jersey. So bright and so, well, new. Spotless. I couldn’t drink a cup of tea for fear of that first drip, that inevitable brown stain I would make worse by surreptitiously rubbing with my finger.
“Where’s your new jersey?” I was asked when I tried to glide around the place invisibly in my old jersey. Women notice these things immediately. Hairs growing out of your nose and ears. Eyebrows that are just beginning to enjoy a wild independence. Shirt collars that could, with understanding, go another day or two at least. But most of all, comfortable old jerseys that have, according to the oppressive discrimination of women, become fugitive overstayers.
So, as men do, I lost the battle and wore the new jersey more and more, and after a year or two when it was suitably stained and baggy with a little hole here and there, and no longer exposed to the searing examination of the beady female gaze, it began to feel comfortable. Years passed until my new jersey, it’s fibres pulled by poking nails, wool bleached by countless suns, aroma brewed to perfection by slaking rains, finally felt as though it had grown on me. Even after it had been dragged off my back to be washed from time to time, it was a joy to put on in the morning.
But sadly, the time came when even I found it difficult to distinguish the holes from the neck. That’s when I had to take a deep breath and say farewell to my good and faithful brown jersey. I gave it a decent burial, of course. But still, only the blokes out there will understand my grief.
I want to talk about my brown, woollen jersey that has, with considerable regret, just been laid to rest. If I sit down and think hard, I can just remember all those years back when it was new. Of course, while its newness was a handicap as far as I was concerned, it impressed the hell out of the woman in my family, which is, I concede, the chief function of men’s clothing. I felt uncomfortable wearing my new jersey. So bright and so, well, new. Spotless. I couldn’t drink a cup of tea for fear of that first drip, that inevitable brown stain I would make worse by surreptitiously rubbing with my finger.
“Where’s your new jersey?” I was asked when I tried to glide around the place invisibly in my old jersey. Women notice these things immediately. Hairs growing out of your nose and ears. Eyebrows that are just beginning to enjoy a wild independence. Shirt collars that could, with understanding, go another day or two at least. But most of all, comfortable old jerseys that have, according to the oppressive discrimination of women, become fugitive overstayers.
So, as men do, I lost the battle and wore the new jersey more and more, and after a year or two when it was suitably stained and baggy with a little hole here and there, and no longer exposed to the searing examination of the beady female gaze, it began to feel comfortable. Years passed until my new jersey, it’s fibres pulled by poking nails, wool bleached by countless suns, aroma brewed to perfection by slaking rains, finally felt as though it had grown on me. Even after it had been dragged off my back to be washed from time to time, it was a joy to put on in the morning.
But sadly, the time came when even I found it difficult to distinguish the holes from the neck. That’s when I had to take a deep breath and say farewell to my good and faithful brown jersey. I gave it a decent burial, of course. But still, only the blokes out there will understand my grief.
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