Views

Any time now I expect to be cut off from home internet service while Telecomms does its laborious adjustments from one provider to another. I won't be able to upload photos from the internet cafe so here are two views: the first from the main bedroom window of my new old house and the second from the back bedroom. To the right of the mosque is the Oakridge Baptist Church.

I was going to replace the above by a proper post but it seems more likely that further content will be posted in the comments section!

Settling in

In a previous post I described how, aged 12, I used to do my homework on a Singer sewing-machine table in the room next to the kitchen, when I first arrived in a Victorian house on the Isle of Wight.

Fifty-three years later, I move to another Victorian house - this time a little worker's cottage - and yesterday bought a Singer sewing machine (its capacity to sew not guaranteed) as a computer table for K, my beloved Muse. Here she can preside over the household, and should she so wish, gaze over the garden fence at the Pastures up on the hill: pastures no longer, for in the late twentieth century, housing was needed more. My own computer will be upstairs, from which I can gaze out on the same view; for if I cannot be actually in the open air, I always wish to be aware of it sensually. Let me see the shared world, breathe its scents, hear its sounds, feel its vibrations! I shall miss the way the other apartment shook slightly when a long freight-train passed. Here, in Mafeking Road, it's a one-way street and you hear little traffic noise, but the sound of children: there is a public playground at the end of the tiny backyard. At the front, neighbours greet one another. The mosque is down the street and it being Ramadan there is much activity there. It is a working-class street and some of the backyards are wastelands of discarded junk, sign of troubled families, illness, poverty or all three. We are dependent on one another in various ways. If I have a water leak, there is no stop-cock to switch it off in my house. I have to turn off a tap down a little hole in an alley that leads to several backyards, and it will turn off the water to the three houses on either side as well as my own. The street is narrow with scarce parking, so if you have a van unloading your goods, it blocks other vehicles: but everyone is patient and forbearing. I keep my parking spot when I can and walk to my destination. A nearby street has most of what I may need: computer shop, pizza, post office, stationery store, internet cafe, chinese take-out food, laundromat, bakery, Polish delicatessen, car spares, real hardwood furniture, custom-made sofas, the best old-fashioned ironmonger in the country, etc.

On this first day that K goes back to work, I have the Internet at home, through the kindness of the previous owner in letting me use his account, and the infuriating complexity of Telecomms provision. Dear friends, I have missed you. Bear with me: the house still needs my time to paint its walls, shift boxes of junk that I cannot throw away, arrange furniture, clean carpets . . . Memoirs will be resumed as soon as possible. Oh, and I discovered some old photos whose existence I had completely forgotten.

The school yard

Me; the bullied boy; Rasmussen

That aerial photo of the school helped arouse many memories, which in my life seem to be fastened upon places more than upon people. In that respect, I am more of a cat than a dog. I’m more introverted, solitary, not made to hunt in packs and defer to the leader. There was a tribal feeling in this new school, with its various uniforms and boundary lines and competing areas of influence; like the barons in Norman England under the overall control of the King. Our King (the Headmaster) was benign and subtle, but he ruled.

As soon as I had discovered the parameters of my new existence, I was able to revert to my dreamy way of being, a little detached from the more feverish social interactions. The friendships I formed were of the temporary kind, though sometimes intense while they lasted.

I hardly remember what I did in the school yard at various ages: more what I observed. We spent our breaks between lessons there and were not allowed to run. The surface was uneven and 180 boys in a confined space could get many grazed knees. As it was I knocked poor Walters’ front teeth out with a hockey stick. I was practising my swing, surrounded by a small crowd – fooling around I suppose. He happened to be standing behind me. He must remember that incident even more than me, for he needed expensive dental work. We met at a reunion ten years ago and he seemed still wary of accidental injury if he got too close. I remember Nicholls, a boy with an easy laugh who later joined the Navy. “You shitbag!” he called to someone in the yard playfully. I had never heard such an expression before and it shocked me, especially uttered so casually. At the reunion dinner only eight of us were present, not including Nicholls but I felt strongly the exact feeling I had at school, that I was a prude compared to them. For example my neighbour in Form III was Rasmussen, one of four sons of the Danish proprietor of a milk processing factory in the town. I’m sure it was his older brothers who had made his language sexually precocious, for he spoke a lot of “shagging”, an English term now familiar internationally as in “The Spy who Shagged Me”. He taught me a number of riddles, e.g. “What’s the definition of a period? A bloody waste of fucking time.” “What’s the heights of aggravation? Two fat bellies and a short cock.” “What’s the definition of a perambulator? Last year’s pleasure on wheels.” “What’s long and thin and covered in skin, pink in places and sometimes put in tarts? Rhubarb.” And so on.

I was once in a fight in the yard. It was on behalf of a timid soul in my class whose parents were dedicated evangelists of the Salvation Army. He was being jostled or teased and I saw him on the point of tears, for he wasn’t the type to defend himself at all. I told the tormentor to stop and he challenged me to a fight, illustrating his point with the imitation of a boxer’s footwork and a few quick jabs. I was scared but a circle formed around us to watch and shield the view from roaming prefects whose task it was to prevent these contests. I had to hand my glasses to a spectator and I think I think I got two punches in before the fight was broken up. It was gratifying that the crowd was on my side though it was partly from amusement that a bookish dreamer should take on Goliath.

Brian Turner ; Dan Bligh*

In the Form IV, housed in the Nissen Hut, I sat next to Brian Turner who became a close buddy. We shared a subversive and satirical streak. Such were our whispered comments and drawings passed from one to the other that we had to be separated eventually: one in Form IVa and one in IVb. His genius was to relate everything to the viewpoint of the country bumpkin, a role he proudly adopted for himself. Every time his village of Shorwell was mentioned, he would cheer, even in front of the Headmaster in Assembly. He spoke in the broadest Isle of Wight dialect, though he could speak “the Queen’s English” when he wanted to. Together we elaborated his public persona into a comic world of the Shorwell bumpkin: primitive, opinionated, full of Old Testament imprecations upon the ungodly. Anything that couldn’t be found in Shorwell was an abomination. Instead, the bumpkin relied upon the farmer’s universal fix-it: binder twine. In this fictional world, it was good for shoelaces, keeping up your trousers and a thousand other uses. Our closeness became a silly habit hard to break. It took me away from seriousness in my studies and our japes disturbed the class. I was relieved at being split up, but the urge to subversion stayed with me. I’ve always been an idealist, secretly passionate to change the world, but this yokel satire was aimless.

One day I infringed some minor rule at break on a Thursday, when we wore uniform for the Cadet parade which started at 3 and continued till 5 with various types of instruction: drill, cleaning rifles, stripping down and reassembling Bren guns etc.

It was during the lunch break, and our CO Captain Bradley stopped me for some minor infringement as he passed through the yard. While he was at it, he criticised some aspect of my uniform: boots not shined or some such. I was furious and started to tell him that killing was wrong and I was a pacifist. With disdainful formality, he said I was free to join the Pioneers and clean toilets and wear dirty shoes. At that moment I decided on “revenge”. (1) I would be so smart he could never humiliate me again. It didn’t occur to me that this made him the winner. (2) I would inwardly despise and revile all warmongering. At the annual Service of Remembrance on November 11th, a “Church Parade” where the Cadets marched with Scouts and guides and Brownies and the Boys’ Brigade and bemedalled veterans, I was privately disgusted at the glorification of war. The Government had never admitted its role in getting millions slaughtered in the trenches of World War I. The Army staff officers had never apologised for shooting in the head “cowards” with shell-shock and so on. I was influenced by a radio dramatisation of R C Sherriff’s famous play, Journey’s End and by Eric Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front. But we seek out the influences of our choice!

*Not are not their real names. Dan Bligh became my closest buddy later.

Uniforms

At the school there was a Scout Troop in addition to the Cadet Contingent. At some point in my bookish diversions I had read Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys and been seduced by it just like millions of others world-wide. The essence of this seductive power was contained in the bush-hat, the neckwear and the badge-adorned shirt with its military-style pockets. I’ve heard that the Girl Guides liked their version of the shirt because you could stuff those pockets with useful things like string and your breasts would appear more developed.

It was Mr Bradly the maths teacher who ran the troop and I had to see him in order to join. Apart from asking if I would do my duty to God and the Queen (what if those duties pulled different ways?) he asked the killer question: why do you want to join the Scouts?

I had only one answer and became tongue-tied and red in the face. I could not tell him that I had thought of nothing beyond wearing the uniform. The more I was nervously silent the more he sternly repeated the question. All I had in my mind was an admiration for Clive, the leader of Kingfisher Patrol. Eventually I stammered out something.

Blackett consulted his work colleagues and brought back some cast-off scout kit: the hat too small, the shirt too big, the belt (with its neat buckle) well-worn. We went to the shop which sold scout things for the rest: the green-trimmed garters and so on that Blackett had been unable to acquire from the fathers of other Scouts whose interest in this great Movement had waned shortly after joining. I stayed six weeks or possibly less.

The Cadet Force was another matter. On our annual camps where we met boys from other schools, I discovered that unlike us, they were volunteers with a keen interest in the Army and Air Force, whereas we were the ones too cowardly to risk the Headmaster’s displeasure and be punished by unblocking drains under the kindly eye of the school’s full-time handyman. I think I would choose differently now!

I’m jumping ahead till I was 14 or 15 now, but my preparations on Wednesday evenings for our cadet parade became fanatical. I got the toecaps of my boots to a mirror-shine with the “spit-and-polish” technique, after breaking-in a new pair with a hot iron to get rid of the natural bumps in the hide. Then I worked on belt brasses – six parts – with Brasso until they gleamed. Again, the brass had to be hammered and filed in the first instance to provide suitable surfaces. Then I put Blanco on belt and gaiters to acquire a perfectly matt shade of pale-khaki. The blouse had to be ironed in a particular way to give the appropriate creases on sleeves and back. Most elaborate of all were the trousers. If new, they had to be shaved a little to ensure the creases were razor-sharp. Applying dry soap to the inside of the creases before the hot iron helped in this. Then there was the correct hanging of the trousers to make your legs look long, lean and manly. This involved the use of “weights”: either a length of bicycle chain or lumps of lead strung together, to pull the trousers down over the gaiters.

Photo via flickr

The man who was not my father

Photo via flickr

I’m clearing things out and waiting to move to another house and it’s a jittery time for there are delays and dramas, so I cannot write anything coherent. On the other hand I can’t do anything practical till things clarify. Meanwhile I discovered this photo whilst gathering old papers together and deciding what to throw away.

When I was describing the man who my mother told me was my father, (see How I came to be born Part 2), I compared him to Rudolph Valentino but in a contest of smouldering stares he could have out-brooded Valentino himself as my photo shows. He was six foot seven.

Compare this photo of him at age 28 with mine in the previous post aged 13. Can you see the resemblance? Of course not! There is none. This did not stop me from believing he was my father till 1987, when Margery (who appears in Beach Party) told me the truth.

What was this Dutchman, Jan Jacobus, doing in Shanghai in 1931? I don’t know. He was an international man of mystery, even after my mother snapped him up as her photogenic husband. On my birth certificate (which has also resurfaced after being lost for years, in the turmoil of clearing old drawers) his occupation is given as “merchant”. Merchant of what? I was never told.

As a child, when my mother told me he went missing in the war, probably killed by the Japanese forces in Indonesia - a story which eventually convinced the Netherlands Government enough to give her a widow’s pension - I used to have a fantasy that he had used the war as an excuse to run away from her, and was still in Djakarta or Shanghai, having changed his name.

Even his sister thought he was my father, for I stayed with her several months when I was five and again when I was nineteen in the summer holidays.

If he were alive he would be 104, and why should I go looking for him anyhow? He was not my father.

In 1955

From a school photo in 1955
Posted on flickr by Vincent

In the front row are the Latin master, Mr Vickers; Mr Gaskin, who taught History; Lt Col Ilton who taught English and Geography.

Vincent in the middle.

The Paradox of Memory

Latin Class 1956
Photo courtesy of Jane Erith & Flickr

Too much is happening in my life at present to write a proper post. The process of remembering schooldays has been action enough, so here is a photo from the archive entrusted to me. It's a Latin class. I hardly remember the master: he must have left soon afterwards. The boy shown highlighted is me. Click to see full-size photo. I'm in Army uniform ready for the Thursday afternoon cadet parade. It's not that I had any interest in military matters: joining the cadets was almost compulsory. Otherwise you had to be in the Pioneer Corps and shuffle round sweeping dead leaves and unblocking drains, and be disapproved by the Headmaster.

I knew Latin from my previous school, so this class (for a few selected boys) was not too challenging.

This part of the school was built in 1610 and not much changed since.

My new school

a: headmaster’s lawn (archery & other photogenic activities for school prospectus)
b: school yard, cadets' parade ground etc
c: bicycle shed
d: WCs
e: urinals
f: Nissen hut (housing three classrooms)
g: Headmaster’s study
h: Form III (my first classroom)
i: Assembly Hall
j: kitchens
k: (off picture) the Cadet hut containing Quartermaster’s stores (rifles, boots, uniforms), instruction rooms
l: School gate: entrance for boys
m: library & Sixth form

The main school building dates from 1610. Charles I was held prisoner there for a while before his execution.

When we got off the bus from East Cowes, Peter (see previous post Peter and Johnny) brought me to the school gates. The bell rang and each boy lined up by Form in the yard just outside the Hall. The Sixth Form prefects presided over this operation and kept us in line till we had ceased shoving and giggling and fidgeting and talking. Then we were released, quietest line first, to the Hall for morning Assembly. On stage came the Headmaster with flowing gown and noble forehead (see my last); the epitome of dignity and rectitude, the Head Boy at his side. In the background was a boy at the harmonium to accompany our hymns and play some processional piece as we filed in and out.

The Headmaster delivered a homily: courtesy, neatness, team spirit and striving for personal perfection were the attributes of the Christian gentleman, that glory of the English genius. It was our Christian duty, pleasing before God, to comport ourselves as gentlemen in the town, our schoolcaps properly on our heads, our ties knotted at the collar, our jackets buttoned, walking not running and so on. His saving grace was to be humorous and not obsessive about these matters; eternally tolerant of adolescent fallibility and understanding of the rough manners of boys on the Isle of Wight. It was a rural community where you could trace family names back over the centuries: Fleming, Oglander, Pittis. Many would inherit their parents’ business: drapers, farmers and brewers.

“The Old Man” ruled simply and cared not if he was laughed at for his sincerity, which I mistook for play-acting anyhow. You could joke behind his back but his presence inspired awe, as if he were above the petty snags of masters and small boys. He seemed preoccupied with surfaces (the grade of pencil that we used, the width of exercise-book margins that we drew) but his gaze saw through to your soul. Use of the cane was normal in the English private schools of those days, but not by him. The majesty of his rhetoric and bearing was more compelling than violence or punishment. He wasn’t frightening, just awesome. He didn’t teach the younger boys so it was three years before I was in one of his classes. He would know each boy all the same.

Morning assembly took about twenty minutes, everyone standing: the masters in a file down the left-hand side adjacent to the street. One morning the Head’s voice was drowned by the sound of pneumatic drills digging up the road outside. The Head Boy was despatched to ask them to pause till our “religious observance” had finished. Instant silence outside. The authority of the Presence worked even by proxy.

We went to our classes and the form-master would take the register, calling names: Bennett, Best, Cowley, Croft, Filby, . . . Rasmussen III, Smith, . . . But in case you might arrive in school late and miss some of Assembly, a prefect had been stationed at the school gate to take your name. It happened to me in my first week. A grinning Sixth-former with a gold tooth and greasy quiff told me to comb my hair and polish my shoes next time as he wrote my name in the “late” book. I was indignant.

Do not imagine that the school was a grand place like the English schools you may have seen in movies, perhaps Hogwarts, the academy for wizards. It was plain with bare walls and floor-boards. In Form III, the desks were in joined rows with backless benches attached like pews; the wood blackened and carved with initials and obscene designs from down the centuries.

It wasn’t an expensive school: £15 per term when I started, plus 2s 6d per week for school dinners. The food was much better than at my boarding school. The headmaster whilst awe-inspiring was approachable and kind: reassuring after my previous experience of the eccentric Monty Brummell-Hicks.

He was a veray parfit gentil knight*

I’d almost completed a first post about my new School, dominated by the personality of its Headmaster. I was looking for a piece of his writing to demonstrate his pompous English style, when I found a perfectly charming piece which demonstrates nothing of the kind. In homage to his memory and to introduce this man who must have influenced me as much as any male figure in my fatherless childhood, I reproduce it here in full from the School Magazine Standfast.

* There was a boy in the school named Parfitt. Bill Erith could never mention his name without repeating the quotation in my title, from Chaucer’s Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. It applies to Bill as much as to any man.

HEAD MASTER’S LETTER
The Head’s Study
30th October, 1957.

Dear Boys and Parents,

My letter this October will differ somewhat from the usual run. I want to give you some sound advice for your personal well-being ; and if I have to sit on the penitential stool awhile in the doing, doubtless I shall be the better for it.

What I have to say bears the authority of a Royal Commission and the backing of the Ministry of Education. It also has the seal of my own experience.

When I was at school I never so much as smoked a piece of cane ; I worshipped at the shrine of athletic fitness and had no urge to spoil my wind. On going up to University, however, I started to smoke a pipe, for reasons now much more clear. I quickly became an addict and my briar was rarely out of my mouth except during sleep. It is not an exaggeration to say that I would have sooner missed a meal than a pipe; and the time came when I could not study without puffing St. Bruno, my patron saint. And when I went overseas during the war among duty-free tobaccos an ounce a day became the rule.

And so I went gaily on until pulled up all-standing by illness in 1951 just as I needed to be my fighting fittest in starting the work I am now engaged in---Church and School---and in which I so greatly believe. A little reflection in hospital [for throat cancer] put the value of smoking at its true worth ; just another drug, making one less efficient and liable to produce serious illness. That is why for over five years now my pipes have been abandoned---and will remain so. I have chosen greater efficiency and, I believe, wisdom.

Now I wonder how I could have wasted so much hard-won money on smoke and ash. I fell, of course, through first-class advertising. Wishing to be the beau-ideal of manhood (a right and proper attitude), I saw pictures in Punch and similar papers of men from the “wide open spaces” on shikari [Urdu equivalent of Safari], building bridges, in club lounges, fishing, in university quadrangles, in cricket pavilion enclosures---sun-tanned gods to be worshipped by Young England. And all smoking beautiful pipes, imbibing inspiration from Three Nuns, or Parson’s Pleasure, or Dunhill’s No. 1 Mixture. I think, perhaps, Barrie’s “My Lady Nicotine” may have contributed, as, too, the fact that my father was a confirmed pipe smoker.

The appeal, you see, was that all real he-men smoked pipes (I never thought cigarettes stood for the same thing). I know better now. Far be it for me, a sinner, to chide others for the same fault ; all must decide for themselves. But I count it a duty to my boys, who should not have started smoking, to bust wide the fallacious idea that you must smoke to prove yourself a man. You needn’t. My idea of a first-class man is Jesus of Nazareth, and I have yet to learn of his being an addict to tobacco.

My advice to you to take or leave, boys, is not to start what may be as injurious as it certainly will be wasteful. Remember that, though you pull the damper out and push the damper in, the smoke will go up the chimney just the same.

Yours sincerely,

WILLIAM ERITH.

Beach Party

I mentioned in my last that my mother started to assert herself in Powys house to try and dispel the ghosts of E. (Blackett’s first wife) and the easy ways of an engineers’ messroom in the Merchant Navy. To this end she now persuaded Blackett (1) to buy a car and (2) to hire some help, so that she would not become an overworked skivvy in the business of running a proper guest house. As to the first, my illustration shows what he bought: a 1939 Flying Standard 9. As to the second, we welcomed Mr James Watling, a Royal Navy Warrant Officer (retired), late chef at an Aero Club on the mainland near Portsmouth. When he replied to our advert, Blackett must have thought he had the perfect CV, with such connections to both sea and air. He was seventy, or if younger his style of living had taken its toll: heavy features and build, bulbous nose, dyspeptic, cantankerous, heavy smoker. He got the job by sheer force of personality, and my mother was quite charmed. He let her call him Wattie. I see him now, smoking contemplatively at the kitchen table in his double-breasted chef’s jacket and baggy trousers, meditating on past glories and making a list of needed supplies: half a pig’s head, salt, saltpetre, bicarbonate of soda. The first three were for making brawn. The last was for cabbage, to keep it green despite half an hour’s boiling; and for his indigestion.

We shall hear more of Wattie. His presence allowed my mother to be the lady of the house while he ran it. Deprived of my friend Peter (See Peter and Johnny), who I now understood was too young, I had intriguing male company in the house. Our paying guests (polite term for lodgers) were three students from Birmingham University, on a sandwich course. This means that they interrupted their engineering studies for several months to get field experience at the prestigious aircraft company, Saunders-Roe, with a view to joining it permanently when they graduated. Wattie cooked their breakfasts and I served them in the guests’ dining room. To me they were heroes and we’d spend so much time chatting that I had to rush my own breakfast in order to catch the bus for school. They were witty, confident, knowledgeable about everything. And they liked me, treated me with respect. The various stepfathers and teachers I had known seemed by comparison ungenerous and harsh.

In the summer we had guests of our own: Margery and Pat. I have mentioned them already in this memoir. Pat was the half-Chinese girl who had taught me how babies were born. In disbelief I had challenged her to let us try it immediately. Being four and five respectively, we’d found it technically difficult, especially in a standing position. Margery was Pat’s mother and my mother’s school-friend, keeper of a secret she had promised never to reveal, though she told me on her deathbed thirty-five years later.

Encouraged by both mothers, I took Pat for a walk in the wilder parts of East Cowes and discovered unaccustomed feelings, hard to describe. I wished to possess her, but no image of how to do so presented itself. For matchmaking purposes I knew she was beyond my reach. This did not stop me becoming infatuated with her three years later. She eventually became a professional dancer. But now we played together like children. In the woods we found a fifteen-foot pipe: one at each end, we used it as a telephone, and giggled. “Do you remember when we tried to make babies?” I eventually called through the echoing pipe. Her face clouded---that incident was taboo.

Margery and my mother had kept in touch by letter all through the war. But they were so different! Margery was teasing, fun-loving, outrageous, extravagant, sensitive, kind. She almost bullied my mother into being more jolly, to make this a real holiday, for all of us together.

Plans were therefore made for each day, for example a series of picnics on different beaches. On one I nearly drowned as I swam out and got caught by the current. The weather was hot and humid. Each morning the sun was obscured by thick fog which took most of the morning to dissipate. Then it blazed all afternoon till thunderstorms tore the sky several evenings in a row. Wattie made us packed lunch and Margery contributed some additional luxuries. Cider was the main drink or at any rate the one I was allowed to imbibe. The best picnic was on the Sunday, when our student lodgers came too. We had two cars between us: I’d never travelled in convoy before with such possibilities of “which car shall I go in?” and constant joking and waving to the other car and trying to overtake them. Why had I never had fun like this before? Why were my parents so grim?

On that Sunday, we went to Woodside Beach, next to the nudist “colony” of the Rev W. E. Critchard (see my “Woodside” post), the sacred spot where my mother and Blackett had met. There are better beaches. At low tide it’s mud and shale with rotted wooden posts sticking through odorous seaweed. Only at high tide you can swim, but fortunately the Solent has “double high water”, so you don’t have to wait too long. The beach offered a panorama of the Solent’s parade of ships---all sizes up to the greatest liners---and sailing yachts and the Fawley Oil Refinery with its constant flame at the top of a chimney. Between the woods and the mud was a strip of shingle and this was enough for us. We played ball and quoits (the frisbee not yet invented), gathered firewood and ate and drank and waited for the tide. I’d spent my childhood nagging for fun, insistently demanding when I felt opportunities were being missed. On that beach I had it all. Margery was a self-appointed godmother reluctantly keeping a secret (the identity of my father) and wanting to make up for it with attention and kindness. Her visit brought joy but left frustration in its wake. Life seemed drab afterwards.

When the sun went down, we lit the driftwood fire and the tide lapped close: time for skinny-dipping! Were the “boys” bold enough to honour the traditions of Woodside Beach? I’m not sure. I see a man towelling himself by firelight under a starry sky. He exclaims “I feel a new man!” and his companion responds “You mean a nude man”. Since they were my heroes I might have remembered gazing at their naked bodies with special curiosity, but I don’t. Though it wouldn’t have been the first time, I would have been too bashful to strip in front of Pat, so I know she can’t have been there. And now I recall why.

Margery had met her husband Sin Sitt in Singapore. He was a cultured man who suffered from the racism of those days. In their East London suburb he worked as a rent collector for the Council. If you had patience---this was one thing my mother could do---you could bring him out, but he had withdrawn into a gentle Confucianism. Margery and Pat had driven to the Isle of Wight in their car but Sin Sitt followed a week later by train, not being able to take the entire two weeks off from work. On that Sunday there wasn’t enough room in two cars for the drive to the beach. He’d arrived the day before and stayed behind at Norfolk House with his devoted daughter Pat in attendance. Poor man! Exiled, overshadowed, forced to take refuge in Chinese inscrutability.

Our destiny is inevitably affected by how we look, though we claim in our spiritual moments that it doesn’t matter. We rebel against the inequalities of wealth, health, learning opportunities---and looks. I was handicapped by my odd-looking face as a child---how very odd is apparent to me now, looking at the case full of old school photos that my headmaster’s daughter gave me. My favourite charity is called “The Smile Train”. It mends cleft palates and lips of young children in poor countries. The reason why it first appealed to me will be revealed in a later instalment.

The Wings of Fate

I’m still not ready to take you through the gates of my new grammar school and show you round that extraordinary world. But it waits patiently, and when we start, the topic will span five years. In contrast, I was only at Powys House a year.

That tall stone mansion had been built in the expectation that Queen Victoria’s retreat at Osborne House just up the road would make East Cowes fashionable. Instead, fifty years after the Queen’s death it was air travel which brought newcomers to this little town. I don’t mean they came by air---they would have crossed the Solent by ferry. They came to build Saunders-Roe aeroplanes. You can scarcely imagine how proud Blackett was of his Princess: not my mother but the SARO Princess G-ALUN: click the link for a Wikipedia article. I first met him when this airliner-flying boat was the company’s great hope and his too: on that occasion he proudly showed off a small model he’d carved in clear Perspex of this sexily-curved plane. It was scrapped after only 100 hours flying time and I think he mourned for the rest of his life, not least because he was made redundant in consequence. This in turn helped shape the direction of my life, but we’ll reach there all in good time.

I’ve hardly mentioned my mother in the recent narrative. Perhaps in Powys House she felt a ghostly presence of his first wife E. (he would often speak of her but never using her name Edith). E. had fled with their children and the lodger two years previously and as I described in my last, the vacuum had been filled by a fraternity of engineers, casual in their habits. Some indeed were engineering students on sandwich courses, ready to rough it a little in return for adult freedom. Together, they had been languishing like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys before Wendy showed up. My mother was no Wendy but responded to the challenge in her own way.

We moved up to some rooms at the top of the house. Here they established a private sitting-room where in the evenings they played romantic music on the radiogram, as daylight slowly faded. Last night I listened again to Puccini’s La Bohème. I don’t know of anything from rock, classical or “World Roots”, which bursts into life with more exciting energy than the opening of this opera: “Questo mar rosso Mi ammollisce e assidera . . .” The orchestra is so impatient to take us there, straight to the middle of things. So it is with this narrative.

The music in its creative passion united three souls, whose faces became indistinct as twilight advanced in that upstairs room. where my parents (mother and stepfather) clung to their honeymoon feelings. To prolong those emotions, they played La Bohème night after night. Was it the music or the joy in discovering a family at last, that kept me spellbound in that room?

Amongst the treasures of the basement, I had found a pile of comics: The Eagle. It was a complete set from the very first edition in 1950: at least a hundred issues. With Puccini coming through my ears and Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, absorbed through my eyes, I concentrated with hungry intensity and got through the pile of comics very fast, reading for hours at a time in the gloom. They didn’t want to spoil the atmosphere by turning on the light. My mother, who had specialist treatment for her own eyes as a child, and poor sight as an adult, was always exhorting “don’t spoil your eyes”, as if eyesight ran on batteries that could never be replaced.

This was as near as she got to maternal concern. Blackett gave me a bicycle around this time, a battered old thing with springs sticking through the saddle and brakes that fell off when applied. When I fixed it up as best I could, my mother endlessly repeated her story of poor cousin Jack, her playmate who at ten years old had fallen off a bicycle, landed on his head and died. For this reason I must not ride a bike: it made her worry. I was not prepared to make that sacrifice. Instead I used to sneak off without her knowledge, staying out as long as I dared. Once down a winding country lane I was nearly killed. A man driving the other way stopped and told me so, quite upset. My mother never got to hear of it, fortunately.

Back to the comics, though. A boy in my class, David Best, asked to borrow them and in the spirit of friendship I lent him the lot: never to see them again. Ah well. Things of worldly value have always slipped through my fingers.

Machines and Words

My most vivid memories are not of the first days at my new day-school, as you might think, but of coming back home each afternoon. I’d been five years at boarding-school and could not imagine a greater luxury. Let out at 3.45, I’d arrive home from a country-bus ride, ravenous. My mother let me cut “doorsteps” of fresh white bread, butter and golden syrup: perfect.

Then I’d settle to do my homework at the most convenient table. This was a Singer sewing-machine in the bay-window of a large room next to the kitchen. It was the guests’ lounge of our lodging house. They had their dining room and their bedrooms, some of them sharing. We ate in the kitchen. This lounge was a comfortable makeshift, a kind of men’s common room. It wasn’t as extreme as the mess-room that my stepfather Blackett recalled from his sea-voyages. There they had a huge teapot, emptied only at the end of a voyage, if he is to believed. You would keep adding spoonfuls of tea, then boiling water direct from the ship’s steam-pipes. There was a communal teaspoon suspended from the ceiling by elastic.

I liked the Singer table. The machine itself could be swung out of sight leaving a flat surface; and a restless child could work the treadle to a fine speed whilst reading his textbook, for the belt hung disengaged and no one could tell you off for it. It was delicious to manage my own time and not be supervised for my parents were busy enough with their new marriage and the house and adjusting and looking after the boarders. I felt this freedom anew yesterday morning, the first working day since 5th February that I didn’t go to MaxiRam and try to guess what they wanted of me.

It’s not the homework I remember but the restless distractions I allowed myself. I started by inspecting the little drawers on either side. In addition to the usual sewing-machine attachments, little engineering marvels like the grisly surgical instruments I’d seen in a glass case at the hospital years before, there were loose senna pods, pill-bottles, tarnished coins; not interesting in themselves but conveying a history, this room’s past. Who was the hypochondriac who left these things in the drawers? Perhaps Satterthwaite, the man who’d run off with Blackett’s first wife. The best thing I discovered was a cache of Astounding: American science fiction magazines. One story was “the Man who hated Tuesday”. Another was about a subway train which disappears along with its passengers because its engineers have inadvertently constructed the tunnels like a Möbius strip. Both of these stories (I see from the Web) have been made into movies: worthy homage to a potency which has kept them lodged in my memory for fifty-three years.

The SF magazines weren’t Blackett’s. His favourite reading was Popular Mechanics, also from the States, which got me interested in crystal sets: radios which required no electricity or loudspeakers. He gave me a crystal and a piece of phosphor-bronze wire to make a “cat’s whisker”. I also cut a whisker from our cat, to test if the real thing might give better reproduction. I’m glad to report that when I acquired a Spanish guitar, with nylon strings, I didn’t eviscerate the poor animal to see if a more authentic sound could be obtained from real catgut. Blackett took me to a friend of his who had a maze of connected sheds in his backyard with a great collection of coils, condensers, valves and other components mostly stripped from aircraft, so that I could get the bits I needed. Ah! Children have endless hours to waste on developing specialised skills. Some kick balls around, some do clever things on bikes and skateboards, a few become prodigies on the piano. And I? From the boarding-school, from my grandfather, I had learned nothing of how things are made, and probably looked down on such learning. I’m grateful to Blackett for the new world I entered. His passion for engineering came from a frustrated career, already declining when I met him, having never amounted to much. He saw himself as an inventor with an encyclopedic mind, but ended up little more than a document controller in an aircraft factory, an unqualified autodidact. Through his influence I devoured the truly encyclopedic Amateur Mechanic in four volumes by Bernard E. Jones. You could build your own house, make your own paints and varnishes, cure and mould rubber stamps, make pumps, dig wells, turn metal on lathes---all with the help of Mr Jones’ detailed narrative and figures. I was a sponge to whatever reading-matter came to hand. Since then, I have believed it possible to make anything, mend anything: and proved it too.

And now I remember a magnificent gift from Blackett: the chronology escapes me but I flew it in Granny’s large garden. How could he have brought it there? It was a scale model with 4-foot wingspan of a Russian MIG-9 fighter in balsa-wood and doped tissue-paper, built by a friend of his. Its hollow fuselage was quite a novelty: a jet’s air intake at the nose, nozzle at the rear. There was space for a little diesel engine and propeller to be concealed inside and keep the illusion that it was a jet. But I flew it as a glider and mended it every time it crashed.

Involving me in mechanics had a hidden agenda for Blackett. Not only was he a failure at work: he had taken huge blows as a husband and father when his whole family ran off to Australia with Satterthwaite. For her part, my mother hardly made any attempt to conceal her superior social class. Who else could Blackett be superior to, but me and the cat? So he belittled my advanced literacy. “The future lies in electronics” he pronounced: and was not wrong. Over the years, we became sullen rivals. He would admonish me to respect his tools and obey my mother. I would silently judge his inadequacies. My mother always craved male attention and had no idea how to be maternal. The best I got from her was to be accepted as her young male companion, a friend when no others were to hand: someone to amuse her and be her source of pride. How could the males in her house eye one another without jealousy?

I won’t say machines have shaped my life but they’ve sat there as dumb witnesses while I have gained more skills with words than physical materials. That room with its Singer treadle machine and pile of Astounding and Popular Mechanics was an echo of another room from an earlier phase of my life: the one in which my grandmother taught me from Reading Without Tears. It had been built as a bedroom but other floors had been let out to tenants so my grandmother converted it. She divided it with folding screens: one-third kitchen, two-thirds dining-sitting room. She had a sink put in with a little high window above. Post-war austerity dictated everything. She had a haybox to minimise use of gas. When your pan of potatoes boiled, you fitted it snugly into a space in this chest and closed the lid. They were cooked soft within the hour. In the other part of the room were the sofa, the dining-table, a china cabinet with a nodding Mandarin and other treasures, a bookshelf with her brother Llewellyn’s school prizes bound in calf. One was William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience into which I dipped when still too young. But when I sat still learning to read (without tears) she would get out her Frister and Rossman:
a beautiful little machine you had to turn with one hand whilst guiding the material with the other. She was always bottling fruit and knitting and telling me what fungi and berries were not good to eat and other lore. In fact my grandmother and Blackett had a lot in common. His metal and Perspex, her food and clothing. Instead of a Merchant Navy teapot, she maintained a perpetual stockpot; at any rate the room reeked of old mutton-fat. She taught me to knit, before I found out it was not a skill for a boy to be proud of. Making and fixing are manly skills which still serve me today.

Leaving MaxiRam

Every relationship carries its own end, as the seed lurks in the overblown flower, biding its time. One dies, the other is born. For the last few weeks, my computer password has been “freedom”, as if escape from MaxiRam would be unmingled joy. But it was oddly stressful to disentangle myself and finally hand in my pass to Security.

For seven months I was the mother of a helpless infant, feeding it, washing its clothes, defending it against bullies, writing notes to its teachers, making it behave properly. The infant has not yet attained adult independence but I have had to hand it over to a stepmother. I’m referring to a database. I should not be so attached to it but they paid me to nurture and nurturing breeds attachment. Its new mother Frances is competent but I spent the night, awake and in dreams, composing anguished notes to send her about its future welfare.

My first days seven months ago were just as stressful. Its previous mother (I’ve called him Kevin in this blog) had a week to hand the baby on to me, just as I’ve had a week to hand it on to Frances. He used to come down from the ninth floor quite often after that, to make sure it was all right, till he got over the maternal feeling.

MaxiRam itself means nothing to me: an abstraction. The reality was a shifting team of people and the messy project which stuck us together for a while. No one wants to be on that project. Everyone dreams of escape. Some say goodbye but the project reaches out its powerful tentacles and they return sheepishly two months later. I won’t be one of those. When they presented me with a card yesterday, I confessed to “survivor’s guilt”: I could walk out intact from the catastrophe leaving the less fortunate behind. A joke of course: I have mixed feelings but not about that.

Apart from LiveC, who now infests this blog as a reader, the two who had most impact on my time at MaxiRam were “enemies”. I mentioned them in February and I’ve just gone back to those posts and added their newly-coined nicknames: Beethoven and Al Pacino. I fell out with each of them in my first days. Beethoven has big hair and a brooding intensity, a kind of anger. Pacino is a skinny bundle of energy with hawk-like features. He likes to lead a rat-pack of junior managers & be their hero as the funniest and boldest, a man who shoots trouble. I challenged their overbearing rudeness from the start, in sheer self-defence. I admit my methods were crude but I hadn’t worked in an office for ten years and started with the attitude that I didn’t really need this one, and wouldn’t let it damage my health. Pacino and Beethoven are each key players, and each tried his best to crush me. They tried every trick to bypass the database, even hiring others to write different databases. But where would they get the data to feed them with? The various hired hands failed to deliver and melted away or stormed out in fury. Pacino (in the part of Napoleon Bonaparte) spent the month of June hunched over battle-plans (spreadsheets) whilst I had nothing to do and wondered what was being said against me in the crisis meetings I wasn’t invited to attend. Beethoven slept under his grand piano and woke in the small hours to pen new sonatas and email them to a dozen mystified recipients. He competed in the European championships of a sport so rarified I could only mention it at the risk of identifying him. Came back with a bronze medal and on crutches.It's fortunate that I knew my job well for Al and Ludwig were alert to every small slip I made. I could see things which would derail the project which they should have seen, but telling management their job can be a sacking offence when you’re a marked man already. The urge to be a hero has waned with age. My precious database was not in the best of health having swallowed some wrong data. As Murphy’s Law states, “A spoonful of sewage in a barrel of wine is sewage”. Ludwig and Al were fond of sending me instructions via their acolytes and not directly, but at the end, mutual respect prevailed.

The world is full of compromises and imperfections. One of them is called “work”. I shall miss it---until the next time.
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Photo at top: I used to work in the Gallery overlooking the "engine room" of MaxiRam where they have shelves of servers doing their mysterious things.
Bottom photo: We moved to the third floor and I would spend hours gazing out of the window watching a new housing estate being constructed.