ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD (CHAPTER NINE)

As a child you are unable to disagree. Beyond the shallow mindlessness of conformity, my teachers hadn’t any great or small expectations of us, nor we of ourselves. Unless it was to become a fisherman or fish worker -- I would be a fisherman later for a short time, but everything in its proper place.
So, there existed a state of Gleichgultigkeit – who cares? We were only the livestock -- no more than nil – nada. We were being knocked into shape for the harness. I wonder now just how many kids those vision-violating bastards sank with their black ignorance? How small they made the world seem.
But as I said, it was 'almost' to the man; for there was one: Mr Fairweather -- mon ami! -- who never possessed one of those chastising ghoulish gadgets... and found no use nor reason for violence. His weapons were of wisdom -- his repartee was simply interesting stories, songs, jokes, poems, and love. Yes, I said love. All his lessons were couched in a fun and interesting way, and as gentle as the laying of butterfly eggs. The full class would be beaming like cherubs. He was no end of a fellow -- the singular oasis in that ten-year-long incubus.
He had a deep and resonant voice like a spool of silk -- mouthfuls of truth and silver. His lessons were like a flame warming my world. And I was charmed.... yes, by him the rough, rude boy was charmed.
Unfortunately, it was Fairweather for only one year, if you’ll excuse the pun. He went back to New Zealand... After he left it was as if the school had lost its brain. Yet, all I learnt from him I have held close in my imagination for all these years. Everything remains in place. The heart remembers best, they say.
O Mr Fairweather wherever you be, dead or alive, I want you to know you were a true penny, and I sing a dithyramb to you: O may your turf forever be lit.
So as he left the violence could continue its perfect round again. It went without stint or measure between school and street, and yes, also at home. The gangs roved the street and the school playground alike. It was all self-perpetuating, reinforcing, and institutionalised, with nothing below the poisoned surface. And I knew instinctively that nothing good would ever emerge from this dammed place.
Little did I know then that in just a few years this violence would be elevated once more, as would I. For at the age of eleven it would be up to the senior school, where we would be passed into the clawing hands of the jungle teachers (such hardened creatures...), who in their self righteous decent skins, while beating their own mental chests, would look down on us raggy lot – from their high moral stilts -- as if we were the scum of the earth. Then everything would go hell -- pure educated evil. We would be submerged into their black, black world, comparable only to a monstrous surreal game of murder in the dark.

*****

‘When one has no character one has to apply a method,' said Camus. And the method becomes rules. But these rules of the street were without that rare commodity called dignity. And any sign of potential became a prisoner in the restricting mucus of routine. The teachers' aim was only to achieve an average silence. And it was all as depressing as Achilles’ tent.
But to back track, by the time we had reached the junior school we kids had already become narky scallywags, who went around like the beasts of Baal bullying, spitting, smirking, cursing, and threatening. But oh! we were on message... We were just not interested in school, and had no respect per se. We were merciless -- well, what did they expect? We put things into kid’s heads, and then hate it when it emerges to confront us... Madam Fortune had split the scene -- removed her smiling face before we were even born..., and had left her sister, Poverty to get on with doing her thing. Violence had spread from one to the other – some were caked in it, and some wallowed in it. And it robbed us kids of any sweets of childhood..
When I think of all the canings, clips, smacks, jabs, kicks, etc., and the general ache of squalor, and while sucking in all the nonsense, along with the pollution, and stink of fish, I’m surprised – despite it all, for it was enough to rattle anyone’s silverware – that a tadpole like myself, with an almost naked mind, was actually able to be suspicious... and would finally reject what had been offered as ‘normal’ reality.
*****
So enough of the time and place, you need more of the who. So what kind of boy was I? Well, by the age of eight or nine he was a thin blue eyed, yoke-coloured haired stick, but a stick that was constantly taking hard slants within himself, to a space just aching to be filled, a boy who watched his inner imagery, not knowing where it all came from, a boy who soon learnt not to be bored, a shy at first, self contained boy, yet enthusiastic to express himself. He loved making mock with attic salt of all the criss-crossed absurdities around him. He seemed wired for resistance. For him the bit never would sit comfortable in the mouth. He was an adventurer. He wanted things to happen, and every minute to be full, and not just go by unnoticed. When nothing happened he would try to make it happen, which could get him into all kinds of hot water. But more often than not, it was easier – and a lot more interesting – just to follow the images inside his head, than to get involved with the flat life that was offered outside. And in spite of all the dead air of the teachers, and thanks to Mr Fairweather, a little light of the world did leak in.
He would be set off whenever he picked up a book. Yet home was a one book house, an encyclopedia his mother bought for him and Peter for Christmas, which the boy constantly teamed over, and copied the wonderful illustrations it was adorned with. It didn’t take him long to discover the school and local libraries. He was a child of full fantasy -- a genial dreamer, dreaming his head off. And never feeling at home; but rather captured in that lost halfpenny world.
He was very different from his brother Peter, who was no dreamer – Peter was always more practical. Yet at first, the boy wanted to try whatever Peter was engaged in, until he found out if it really was or not for him...
Mr Fairweather had taken the boy on a rich journey around the World through time and space, and he had got as high as a kite on the delicious stuff... He had absorbed it all innocently, but with lust. Yet, he couldn’t relate to any of it in his own life -- he accepted it as it was... only in books, not in this world – on another planet. But none the less, it was his other planet. It was a place where he could hide when trying to escape all that grey deadness, which he saw all around him.
Without the layered cake of experience, there seemed nothing better to do than amuse himself by making up all kinds of absurdities to tell his friends -- pure jive. Such as: how those big sheds behind that factory fence were full of wild fierce animals: lions, tigers, elephants, and all. Well, that was when he was about six or seven years old, and learning to take a bit of entertainment by pretending. He was looking for the colour of adventure. Maybe by telling these fictions he was adding a bit more space to his life -- lies to maintain a kind of truth of himself.
Some lies are told to improve on life. Even now, I’m so happy when I meet someone who tells me, what is obviously a pack of lies, as long as they’re interesting lies. I just think, thank god they didn’t tell me the boring truth of their own boring lives.
But his little kid fibs were believed on all hands, it seems...or at least a group of kids wanted to go along with him, which in turn inspired and pushed him further. And as he got older the stories became more complex -- more sophisticated.
He’d start with just one or two kids in the school yard during the break -- spin a yarn about something which was interesting him at that moment – about horses for instance. I had a real thing for a while about horses... I used to have dreams of magnificent herds of thousands of wild horses in billowing clouds of dust charging across endless plains... And I would gallop around the streets slapping my backside. At those times I would somehow become both man and beast -- a kind of centaur... I seemed instinctively to know how horses moved with men on their backs, how men’s bodies looked when on horses, how they looked when the horses walked or trotted, or best of all when they galloped like a bullet, punching a hole in the wind. This knowledge could only have come from the few westerns I‘d seen at the local flea-pit, the Langham. After watching Hop-A-Long Cassidy flicks at those Saturday morning matinees, everybody was galloping home on imaginary horses...
So with the theme of horses chosen, I remember He kicked off one Monday morning by casually mentioning his wonderful weekend in the country visiting his uncle Jim. Who, just happens, to have some horses we ride about on. And how old Chestnut (named for his colour) is the boys favourite – and is the only one he rides, even though he loves them all: Snowball, Jet, Sandy, etc. After a few sessions of this improvisation, his audience of one, or two had now grown to three, four, or five. Then he would really get down to business, research his subject; take a book from the library and read up a bit, and weave some facts into his soap opera.
Now his wheeze expanded to another uncle; Uncle Alan in America, who has a ranch in Wyoming, where he’ll be off to work, just as soon as he was fifteen... As cocky as a metronome he started to language them up a bit. This uncle was a horse expert -- ‘knows his horseflesh.’ 'rides old Spot (a piebald gelding) wherever he goes, and how he knows every one of those black dots on old Spot -- a real 'equestrian' is Uncle Alan! Such words seemed to have a talismanic power over them. They were thrilled silly. At the sound of such words their big eyes suddenly became five star, and their mouths turned to big black zeros. With the bunch of them standing around him looking like a full array of those Russian dolls, he could have packed them all up, putting the smallest into the largest, tucked them under my arm, and simply strolled home with them, for they were his...
After a few more days of this, he would begin to lose interest, and so, shift the subject. He sometimes had to wonder just how smoothly this could go... as if on wheels. In one sentence he went smoothly from horses to the Sahara Desert via: just how his grandfather, while in a cavalry unit during the war, had taken the wavy dagger – which hangs on his wall at home --- from an Arab, just before he had sunk it into to his heart. And then he'd be off again -- blowing his soap bubbles of sculptured air -- Dr dope killing them softly.
I tell myself, taking everything into consideration, it isn’t surprising that being stuck in this void was enough to make the boy create..., to make everything look a bit like a whale, and that it would turn him into a hunter of the Snark.
Thought like water, if not used evaporates, or seeps into dry life. And did he feel bad telling such lies? Kind of..., but the deliciousness of making them up out weighed everything. It felt like a handful of heaven and a pinch of hell. He just couldn’t resist. His untruths seemed truer than their phoniness.
****
Another night falls, and the whole world turns over, and ticktocks and strains like a great over wound clock -- confused time, and time confused. And street-life turns its own wheel one more notch – the end of one more day of hopelessness grinding against decay – a collection of black happenings. Aggression kicked up like dust during the day, now hangs in the threatening air. Yes, another night, and with it the contaminated wind brings its smell of hell over the houses. The drone of snoring replaces the sound of the last mouth full of uncivil grunts. The tugboats’ hoarse hoots ride the incoming wind, and make them sound nearer. The grey gulls perched in long lines along the peaks of the factory roofs are now as silent as weather-vanes. The crumbling houses in the crippled street stare death-like across the road and terraces – leaning and sinking into each other like sculls decaying in a mass grave; future dust. The boy lays in the small bed, which he shares with Peter -- overcoats thrown over them for extra warmth. The breath of the boy’s consciousness backs up down the rabbit-hole – digs in -- returns to run the warren of its crazy self. His dreams tangle up with the myriad myths of his making, which he almost believes.