ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD (CHAPTER FOUR) part one

Chapter Four (part one)

Hull

So my implied reader, are you still with me? Should we make this point a beachhead -- our base camp? Shall I put up a flag? I feel we are walking in the foothills, and I can feel the slope of the book under my feet, and an egress into something else. The book may be slowly becoming a pilgrimage...
‘The past is not dead, it’s not even past’ as Faulkner says. Everything lives through us, and I am a long story. I am the link to a past that is not petrified. I’m perched on the windowsill of the present looking back. I see all the people I’ve have been through the eyes of the person I am now. I know that the timing of this journey is correct.
But what is it from my past that calls to the present? Something that wont lay still? My reveries have awakened a small living creature, which clings to me for warmth, but it is not warm to my touch, it is cold, and it is a porcupine with spines as sharp as needles and daggers, it bristles with many stabbing questions. It is a ball-grasping recall that brings tears to the eyes. But you must touch the past to capture it.
And as for the writing I have discovered there is a great difference between remembering something, and writing about it. When I’m writing about my dodgy childhood I have to get into the right psychological state. This state is really beyond my powers of description. It is like being lost somewhere between angels and beasts.
They say Jack Kerouac used to get down on his knees and pray before he could start to write. Praying to his lamby Jesus. I would rather wing it. I’m just trying to put all the stuff in -- the good the bad and the ugly. I’m not so aware of what I’m doing, I’m not so analytical, and wouldn’t want to be. To remember, and tell it – to tell it for, and through me – tell it to clear it – to move it – tell it because it must be told -- to tell what’s never been told. When I write something down it really seems to make it concrete. I relive it. I have to deal with being back there – still unable to effect anything – no ju ju for it – no mojo working to disarm it. My childhood seems to scowl at me like an enemy with a drawn dagger, as if seeking revenge.
As I once more enter the slum’s savage and jagged edges I’m swallowed up into its jaws – its hunger is not yet satiated -- it lives again and must eat to live.
I hope the reader doesn’t think I’m playing the martyr; I'm not shouting, ‘woe is me!’ Though my childhood was hell, my later life has been far from a vale of tears.
The stuff we call memory comes from wherever it resides – laid still as dust somewhere until we blow it up into a morphemic cloud -- super charged swarming images which form into the resemblance of the original impressions. As if on a strange blue wind they flow around me – flapping my thoughts like wet washing, impelling me to look into the smoked-glass mystery of myself. They come in eerie eddies in the inner eye, cubist jumps, cat quick shifting planes of faces, names and events colliding in my head. I roam the rooms of my memory With words I’m trying to remake that world -- to turn words into the flesh and blood of time. I am beginning to realise that ‘the truth’ is actually the search for truth. Maybe watching this struggle will be interesting for the reader.
*****
Old Tolstoy the Wise proclaimed: ‘All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ And many, are want to say: every kid needs a father. But, I don’t think that is strictly true. I think it depends on many things: the father and kid to name but two. Some kids are real heroes -- quite able to accept that their fathers are not of the living, or simply not there. While others might be a bit more curious -- might wonder what it would be like to have a father like all the other kids... And being without such a thing might make him or her sad, or might not. But what is far, far harder for a kid is getting a horse’s arse for a stepfather.
So, now you have it! I was that kid. I’m sure, not having my real father around made little difference to me. But getting a horse’s arse really did: but more of that later.
While growing up I always considered that I hadn’t been born for that slum-scape of Hull Under A Stone. I felt I had been slung there; metaphorically, I was dragged there by fate at one-year-old, along with my older brother, Peter, and my mother.
Apileius thought bad luck was contagious. Maybe he was right, for there seems little justice in providence. And with us it did seem as if an usual host of gods and fates, if you will, had become hostile to our good fortune. It was as if we had been fixed there like nailed wood by a tragic occurrence of events: a contrivance of my vanished father, and a bigoted society. Would that feeling of being fixed later be responsible for my wanderlust, which seemed to have come from my very essence, like the urge that runs the birds south every winter?
My mother’s family had rejected her after she had met my father, got pregnant with my brother. She was forced to leave the family home. For my super straight grumpy grandfather there would never be any going back. He refused to have anything more to do with her. So my mother was pressed into another paradigm.
After my mother and father were married they lived here and there, moving around as my father went from job to job. My mother suddenly found she was pregnant again, with yours truly. And then my father just took off – legged it.
While growing up I was always aware that my father had left before I was born – just three weeks before in fact – the swine! I was aware of it because my stepfather constantly threw the fact in my mother’s face, and later Peter’s and mine.
My desperate mother, now left alone with two small children, unable to work or find child care, took a live-in-house-keeping job for a widowed fish filleter, John Benson, who lived in that tumble up, tumble down house in that dammed street, and to whom she would later marry. He had two children of his own: Tommy and Jane -- ten and eight years old – who had been running wild for a couple of years since his first wife's death.
But the full details of just how we came to be in that street is a little tale of horror -- a tale that would tear the bottom out of your pants, which I think I’ll save for another place. It’s enough to say here, that we three naive souls, dupes of that cruel mocking fate, following no dam star found ourselves were we did not belong -- like birds hatched in a viper’s nest.
*****
At a certain age -- I don’t know how old -- it must have just slowly crept up on me with great stealth, like one of those wind-feigning tarantulas, but whenever it was, I began to feel that this world was not all that it seemed – not quite right -- a sort of mock-up – a fabrication -- a rubber show which everyone seemed to be going along with unconsciously. It was this phoniness -- this duplicity of the people, which really put the finishing touches to the ugliness in the life of the street. Everything seemed at odds with everything else. I didn’t trust the ground I walked on. What was this pretending? Was it the people or the whole thing? Was it the meaning that was at odds with itself – the poetry failing – being killed by the ugliness imposing itself?
But, as a squib, I didn’t have the foggiest. I hadn’t really mastered joined up thinking, so it was nothing I could really figure out or speak of. I remember strange kinds of thoughts coming over me in those moments we call daydreaming. I would weird-out into some kind of alpha state -- a peculiar kind of testing of the quality of the moment. I would suddenly catch myself observing myself. Weird kid eh?
I’m sure any lay psychologist will now be saying: ‘there it is: the first speck of suspicion – the kid without a proper father.-. But who can really say if those feelings and thoughts were negative. But I’m also, not quite yet ready to thank my absconded father for having heightened my consciousness to all the dammed phonus-bolonus around me. I see those states of mind as an early communing with the self – a little awaking, my inner voices playing counterpoint in my kiddie-brain. Maybe I was just trying to put all the ducks in a row.
Over these last months, I’ve spent a lot of time struggling to trace the sauce of that initial mistrust -- to place its origin in the boy’s mind -- reversing from one seemingly relevant event to the next. I find, here and there a clue, an incident or piece of information I feel is maybe of importance. But in the end the root always fades into the fog and fuddle of the never-regions of the primordial mind under that small kid’s cranium.
*****

At five years old there was school. O my liquid eyes -- wounds bleed into wounds – a phenomenon -- a cultural deprivation tank – an absurd singularity insultingly referred to as education. It was no more than an ink smudge on an already empty social page. I do believe our first feelings of insecurity begin very early – at the latest in the infant school, where our very first lessons are graded with gold, silver, red, blue, and yellow stars, stuck on our tests papers as carrots; large and small carrots, which slowly become combined with small and then larger sticks.
My mother moved me and Peter from our first school, Scarborough Street, after a few months to a another school, when the school’s parsimony had reached its very obvious bottom: our crayon drawings we brought home were suddenly no longer on white paper, but on newspaper. This was a stab in the heart for my mother: her coming from a middle-class family in which education had meant so much. She herself had been studying medicine until she got pregnant. So hoping it would be an improvement, we Rigly kids were sent to West Dock Avenue Infants School (Kipper College) five dangerous streets away. And there, by Sod’s luck, waiting to pounce was the infamous Miss Trot! Who had been there as long as anyone could remember. A carthorse of a woman with big flat flapping feet, who always wore a large flowered bell shaped gown, which made her look like a giant lampshade. I can still see her hell-spitting eyes, the peevish frown, and her grey mop tossing from side to side like Tarzan’s discarded vines, as she toweringly strode down the aisles between our tiny desks like a conquering Roman Emperor. And I can still hear her animal voice booming and thundering, as if she was speaking in tongue and scaring the hell out of us kids!
We soon found out she was completely mad to the middle. If anyone put one of their little foot wrong she would lose her gear and go into remote chaos. Like a raging storm she would rush down on us, pull us over the desks like sacks, and pour blows down on our backs, so hard that we would be left gasping for breath through our uncontrollable sobs -- our little hearts broken. We would howl like banshees for our mothers, and beg to go home.
Some kids, myself included, would sit in our little chairs and piss ourselves, too hazed even to raise our little hands to ask to leave the room. Oh we had so much to learn eh!
But I can also remember a Miss Brown, who was very kind. She made a little nature table with leaves, acorns and chestnuts, and such, which at that age and living on treeless Hessle Road really impressed me, not having yet had the pleasure of actually seeing those things growing
But, for some reason, and much to all the kid’s regret, Miss Brown left and the table lay bare. Maybe we should have put toenails and fingernails, hair, and stuff like that on it, these being the only organic things growing in the area.
Sometimes on my way home from school, I used to go to an unused factory at the bank-end of my street. It had a two metre high rough wooden fence around it, which I would easily climb. I discovered it was the only place in the whole area where grass grew, although, been nothing more than a narrow strip hidden behind some large sheds, it was like a secret garden. You must imagine these eighty year old stark streets -- everything concrete, brick, and the colour of slow rot. The nearest park was two miles away. The only open areas were large gaps, like missing teeth between some of the houses, where bombs had landed during the Second World War. But no grass could ever grow there through so much rubble, glass, and grey dust. Thinking back, by planting a bit of grass, and a few bushes and trees in those places would have been so easy, and inexpensive for the local Council of Pain to have introduced a bit of bottled moonshine, and would have brought a flash of colour and joy to an otherwise dismal place.
After nipping over that fence like Billy The Cat, I would sneak around the sheds making sure not to be seen. There I would crouch, and do nothing more than pull up handfuls of the lush green grass by the roots, just to see what insects were lurking under there. There were beetles, earwigs and such scurrying away, fat slimy slugs and worms sucking themselves back down their tunnels, and the damp smell of the exposed earth still hangs in my mind, as strong now as it was then. It must have been a childish subconscious urge in me to get to nature, to bury my fingers in that black rich earth, to find out how things worked under there, or maybe it was just to have the smallest access to another world – my own secret world. It made me wonder what lay under the street. Somewhere, under the broken flagstones, the patches of tarmac, and rubble was a clean, black, living earth -- the Promised Land trampled, buried beneath the feet of a ignorant lost tribe -- imagine that!
After two years of the mad Miss Trot, worse was to come. It was up into the junior school. Which was an all-boy’s school (where girls were now only in our imaginations). Boys will be boys, and without the civilising influence of the fairer sex (Miss Trot being the exception) boys (teachers included and thus responsible as the upholders of that institute) became beasts -- dirty, smutty, uncouth, bulling devils. It was a dehumanising experience from top to bottom.
The so-called teachers were borderline psychopaths who performed a much higher system of torture that made Miss Trot look like Little Bo-Peep. Almost to a man these mountebanks, churls, dastards, and valets had hatched, concocted, and adapted from somewhere in their perverse brains, weapons of all descriptions for the beating of children.
Every morning we would be gathered together singing hymns and praising God, the Prince Of Peace, and Love, and within minutes we would be getting hard and jolly hell with sticks and things. So, it can’t be said they were laying down heavenly foundations. Violence had become a mechanical itch – and boy did they scratch it. They had perfected it to a sport. From the headmaster, Mr Sykes, with his Chinese-cane, sinisterly named ‘The Bee-Sting’ to Mr Lee’s dreaded ‘Black Jack’: a twelve inch long, by five inch wide, by a half inch thick strip of black rubber, applied in three swift energetic strokes to each hand, which would leave them red and throbbing for the whole day. A beaten boy with liquid eyes, fighting back the tears, was for the teachers a symbol to be seen by all, to show the boy had learnt something… He had learnt to ’take it like a man!’ It seemed to be the reverse of the saying: ‘he who has a mind to beat his dog will find a stick.’ Their feelings for kids had atrophied. Their souls must have escaped their bodies and fled. Mr Lee and his Black Jack bruised my very being.
And the other lessons? Well they were as bland as knitting patterns -- flat as road kills, an unflagging, unbeatable boorish verbal soup of names, places, battles, etc. nailed into you like Luther’s partition. We kids were blank spaces, and waited only for something to be branded into our minds. If the school had had a motto it could not have been more fitting than: ‘JUST GET USED TO IT!’