Welcome to my blog. I am delighted you have joined us. This week's topic is my early life.
I was talking to my brother today on the phone and I asked him about two childhood incidents that I’ve been meaning to speak to him about for many years. The first occurred when I was, well I don’t know how old I was, between 6 and 9 I guess. For some reason he and I were sent to a place in Broadstairs. It must have been some sort of camp for boys but we were in dormitories, not tents. There was a boy there, deaf and dumb I believe, who frightened me. That’s all I recall. And that he wore pyjamas. (But so did we all.) My brother, who is older than me by 3 years, remembered that we went to Broadstairs, didn’t like it, and grumbled so much that we were fetched home. Why we went or where it was, he didn’t know.
The second incident occurred in North Cheam, Surrey. The night before the house had been burgled and my mother seemed particularly annoyed that the burglar had eaten a banana and left the skin on the sofa. The next day my brother and I went to play in Nonsuch Park which was close to the house. It was very foggy. After a while a man approached us. I don’t know what happened but at some time my brother pushed the man and told me to run, which I did. When I got home, my parents were talking to the police about the burglary and they told me not to interrupt them. When the police had gone, I was allowed to speak. Today I asked my brother what had happened in the woods but he had no idea what I was talking about. I strongly advise you that if your parents are alive and there’s anything you think you may want to know more about one day, ask now, because when they go they take much of your memory with them.
I read somewhere, (probably in a book about brain research and children which I should go and find and cite properly) that the memory we have up to 18 months old is a sort of patterning, laying down tracks sort of memory, the specific events of which we can’t remember, and the memory after 18 months which is specific. Personally I can recall fuck-all about being under 11. Or maybe more than fuck-all, but not a lot.
I was born in Leeds, perhaps Bramley, in December 1952. According to my birth certificate I was born in Mount Carmel Nursing Home, although recently I tried to trace it and couldn’t find it. There’s a picture somewhere, unless I’ve lost it, of my mother with me in the local newspaper because I was the first baby born in the Home. My mother told me I was actually the second but the first kid was poorly and Polish so they picked me instead and I was especially baptized by the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds, Bishop Heenan. This last event being significant to my mother who was a devout Catholic whereas my Dad was a forced convert. I was the youngest and last of five with one brother and three sisters, the eldest of whom died in 1996(?), the same year as both my parents.
We left Leeds and moved South when I was about 7 or 8. I don’t remember anything about the time in Leeds except perhaps one day running home from school because I didn’t want to use the school toilets. In Cheam I went to St. Cecelia’s until I was expelled for throwing a stone over a fence and not owning up. I was then moved to a school near Guildford called St. Peter’s, run by a priest called Father Freed who more than once caned me for things I hadn’t done. Cunt. There I discovered I was good at sport, especially football. I remember also mentally torturing some kid one day at school and feeling very very sick afterwards. I was a tall strong boy with a bad temper alongside an attractive nature which usually made me popular or a leader. I passed my 11+ and then became fodder for the Jesuits of Wimbledon College – even bigger cunts.
My mother was the headmistress of Infant Schools and later a lecturer in Education at a teacher’s training college. My father was an Oxford graduate, had fought in the 2nd World War, and was a Civil Servant in the Home Office. Once a year, perhaps, we went to the theatre in London. I remember seeing Noddy and Brian Rix farces. The first two films I saw, apart from the silent movies show by my father at home, were Whistle Down the Wind and GI Blues – probably in 1961.
I was very fond of my grandparents and my great Aunt Bobbie, all of whom lived in Colchester. Staying with them was a treat. Also when they visited they gave us money, sometimes ten shillings. I’m a grandfather myself now. I usually cry when I think about the past. I’m not really sure why.
The one thing I can thank the Jesuits for is teaching me to abhor the catholic church and its religion. It’s difficult to understand how my gentle parents could allow the priests to be so merciless with their punishments. I arrived at the school a year younger than normal and was put in a class called Figures One. Only at the end of the first term, when I was put down into Figures Two, did I realize that I’d been in the top stream of three. Later I returned to the top stream and tried to learn Latin and Greek alongside the more usual arts and humanities.
My 14th year seems to have been a formative one in terms of my character and interests. I’m not really sure what happened. I fell in love with the sister of a friend of mine. Her name was Katy Kirby. Blond with a snub nose. Although I had 3 sisters I’d been to all boys schools for the previous 3-4 years and when girls came into my life I found out I had zero self-confidence and a crippling shyness, especially towards any I found attractive. I used to cycle five miles to Katy’s house just to stand outside and wish I had the nerve to ask her out. Ultimately I got a friend to pretend to be me and to my amazement she agreed to go to a film with me. When the day came I couldn’t think of a single word to say to her and so didn’t speak. We saw the film and went home. That was it.
At the same time I began to write a diary, thousands of words a day, and read Russian novels, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Solzhenitsyn, et cetera, and then Hesse, Mann, Laing, Jung, and others. Looking at myself, I saw myself as divided, multipersonalitied, dislocated.
At night sometimes I’d find myself being stolen from my body and dragged by black pigs towards the window as they tried to steal my soul. I’d fight to save myself and wake-up terrified.
Then what happened?
Come back next week.
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