Take nothing for granted

“What are you thankful for?” asked a blogger friend, seasonably. What shall I do with the days that remain, if not give thanks? For the birds that sing in my backyard. For everything.

I always go to meet my wife at her office in the hospital, at the end of her working day. It’s a twenty-minute walk each way. On Thursday I muttered some words into my voice recorder on the outward journey. In America it was Thanksgiving; here it was just another day. This is an edited transcript.

“…to capture the very essence sometimes of what is going on in this world at this moment. I’m sure that what we see is a reflection of where we are at. I see cheerfulness, despite the debris and desperation. There’s always reasons for those. This morning in the playground—my shortcut into town—a man was sitting on a low wall, hunched, head sunk on his chest, motionless. It looked like despair, but it might have been a meditative ecstasy. The beer can in his hand and the dishevelled clothes admittedly cast doubt on this hypothesis, suggesting instead that he was not looking after himself well.

“I see things in such fine detail and precision: sensations, thoughts and emotions; three different realms, though they are not easily separable in ordinary life. The senses too are separate realms whilst usually all active at once. Here in the twilight I note a hedge bordering a front garden, rigorously pruned but apparently covered in pink blossom, flourishing in November; but I can only guess its colour as the sky darkens, and I don’t slacken my pace. I’m a creature totally alert: for this I give thanks. I observe with all my senses and think too, trying to classify this botanical phenomenon taking into account the time of day, the time of year, possible optical illusion, my memories of similar phenomena; whilst the cold wind and the faint combination of scents that it carries all form part of what I observe.

“I’m thankful for the sky. It’s still above, always putting on a display, whether it be fantastic cloud-shapes, fathomless blue, dazzling sun or impenetrable night. In these well-lit enclaves I seldom see the full pageant of stars, as one would see in the desert, or I once saw when bivouacked on the Isle of Wight Downs. We sat round a circle of dying embers and ash, gazing in wonder at a hundred shooting stars.

“I pass down a street with houses either side. A smell of stewed beef hangs in the air. A Chinese man emerges from his house for a smoke, followed by two little dogs, who look Chinese too. I don’t mean they look like the man: more like mongrel versions of Chinese dog breeds (Pekinese, Chow). In the privacy of my thoughts I wonder if these are the dogs which are bred for cooking purposes in China. The man glances at me as if reading my thoughts. That’s the thing: it is all right to observe the world of Nature as if one were an outsider, like Hesse’s Steppenwolf. But I must remember that people are more “psychic” than common reason acknowledges. Perhaps I must not even think “racist” thoughts. Now I hear a yapping behind me. Did the dogs read my thoughts too? A young black man walks towards me, so tall, striding so powerfully. There is more than rhythm in his stride: there is music and dance too, I don’t mean literally, for he carries no iPod, only music pulsating in his veins. Life is so interesting! If it were really the case that I could have an influence on the world, to give something back, I would gladly respond to a vocation of sharing this immediacy of experience: not to entertain others but encourage them to find it for themselves. This immensity, without any drugs!

“Now I’m behind two little children who stepped out of a car in absurd school uniforms—blue blazers too large, skipping along in front of their mother. The girl is smaller, wears thick red stockings and her footwork fascinates, for it’s uncontrived, not intended for any audience. Maybe she goes to ballet class, maybe not.”

Does everyone experience such things? I may not presume one way or the other, but give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m pretty sure the Piraha tribe of the Amazon live in a similar world:

“Piraha problems with reading, writing, and arithmetic stemmed not from slow-wittedness but from a cultural conviction about how to converse, Everett proposes. From the villagers’ perspective, talking should concern only knowledge based on one’s personal, immediate experience. No Piraha refers to abstract concepts or to distant places and times.
. . .
“Moreover, the Piraha tell no creation myths and don’t make up stories or draw pictures. They believe in spirits that they directly encounter at times, ‘but there’s no great god who created all the spirits, in the Piraha view’ Everett says.

“Cultural mandates to express only one’s immediate experience and to shun outsiders’ knowledge have kept the Piraha population, which now amounts to around 200 people, from learning other languages despite more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and various Amazonian groups, he adds.” (From an article on the work of linguist Daniel Everett.)

I also give thanks for the blessings of counting and reading and writing.

After rain

thanks flickr amandabhslater

It was a Sunday morning in March and I was just 16. I’d been writing an essay on a stanza from a poem by William Wordsworth: “A violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye / Fair as a star when only one / is shining in the sky”. I’d been sitting by the warm kitchen hearth in the country cottage where I was boarding with Mr & Mrs Jenkins. My parents had moved from the Isle of Wight after my stepfather was made redundant from the aircraft factory. He couldn’t find another job on the Island. They knew Mrs Jenkins from the Spiritualist Church. It wasn’t a good time for me to change schools, so this makeshift arrangement made sure I could continue with my Sixth Form studies. Mr Jenkins used to wheeze and rattle with every breath, after inhaling poison gas during the Great War. They were a kindly couple and I appreciated the independence from my parents.

When I saw that the heavy rain had stopped, I took my chance to step out from the stuffy cottage to clear my head. Rivulets had formed on either side of the steep lane, sparkling in the sun, making v-shaped waves as they flowed; then went milky as they washed away mud, leaving grains of sand caught in the rough road surface; then went clear again so that the waves made a lens for the sunlight, with highlights and shadows dappling the rivulet bed; then carried little twigs and leaves as they flooded in wide pools and narrowed to swift rapids. Birds sang in the budding hedgerows. I never thought I might write about it fifty years later, but we tend to remember turning-points in our lives. Till then I had not been tuned to Nature in that particular way, as a boy might not be tuned to a girl glancing at him with a particular look. Nature took my heart before any girl did, and I’ve just described the moment.

Telling you about this incident serves the function of unblocking the flow of my memoirs, which got dammed up in February at this point, but that’s coincidence (which as I proposed in my last post is the very fabric of existence). I just happened to recall it today, on this Sunday morning, on a mundane errand under an umbrella. Early snow had turned to sleet and then heavy rain; finally the sky lightened and the road shone like a mirror made of dark metal. It made me think of that Spring morning in 1958.

I actually intended to write about a book by Bill Plotkin, but all in good time. Let me be honest: I find writing hard and it keeps getting harder. Plotkin has his agenda, which I try and understand, and whilst I agree with his plot, and feel closely kin to his ideas, (& paid no bill, having borrowed it from the library---whoops, can’t resist playing on the syllables of his name), I have my agenda too, which his book helps me see. I write for the lonely soul. I’m not a writer by vocation, just an amateur craftsman, not even with much loyalty to my craft. Mostly now I prefer to work with my hands: building a door from scratch for an old man’s shed, cooking a lemon meringue pie (having recently learned the secrets of this magical dish), renovating traditional country chairs made of elm and ash; taking walks in all weathers to quell thought and connect with the elemental universe.

I could write a book if only my ideas stood still long enough, but they don’t, and I can only see here and now, not what happens round the next corner. My writing is about the moment, and has to take place in the moment.

Plotkin is an academic and mystic. The two mix together like oil and water, i.e. not easily; but he does a tolerable job of it. I like to suck up his mystical bubbles as through a straw, and disregard the rest. His more illumined sentences rise up from a sea of verbiage, like this one:

“Soul-initiated adults serve both nature and culture by serving their own souls.”

Or perhaps I just like to mine the nuggets of stuff I already agree with. Is there any use in reading a book for that purpose? Oh yes, we all like to read things we agree with. And then I change sides and argue with them, for I don’t seem to learn anything except by arguing against. Plotkin’s title is Nature and the Human Soul: perfect. Even the subtitle is good: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World. He wants us to recognize the stages of maturity that each person ought to pass through, and has lovely names for them:

1. the innocent in the nest
2. the explorer in the garden
3. the thespian at the oasis
4. the wanderer in the cocoon
5. the apprentice at the wellspring
6. the artisan in the wild orchard
7. the master in the grove of elders
8. the sage in the mountain cave.

And where am I? Stage 2, by the sound of it, corresponding to Middle Childhood. Hm, I ought to get moving.

Hilltop reverie

I went up the hill, the one that faces my study window. I’ve been there a lot lately.

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my strength.
My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.

It’s a plateau really, you can only see the initial slope in the photo. The second photo is taken from near the lamp-post at bottom left, pointing back across the valley towards my house. My study window is bottom right in that second photo, above the white-painted ground-floor wall.

I went up in the early morning drizzle, wandering through the suburban maze, while most were driving off to work. Past the crowded houses you see in the photo, it thins out, and many of the residences stand detached in their own grounds. Along one such road, I heard from a distance workmen’s emphatic voices and as I got nearer expected the normal banter of a gang happy in their work, peppered with expletives, on any subject under the sun. But as I passed without slackening my pace I heard this through a hedge: “What allegiance do I have to my brother, and my father, and my father’s brother? Only one thing. To work. And there ain’t any work around at the moment.” Then there was a gap in the hedge and I saw that the speaker was a young man pacing back and forth on a scaffold platform, beside a half-built brick wall on a building site; waving his arms in agitation. Two or three men on other parts of the site paused from their work and stared perplexed. Were they the brother, father and uncle in question? It was a Hamlet moment, or even a Jacob and Esau moment: but it wasn’t enacted for eavesdroppers. This one snippet was enough for the theme of a whole play, a topical drama showing the effect of the world credit crisis on a family.

Up to that moment, I’d been mentally composing something, wrestling to understand my own current family dilemma. In an odd way my thoughts echoed what I just heard, for they went like this: “My late mother and her sister, my own self, my four children, my three grandchildren: we are linked in a certain way, as if we carry a ‘rebel gene’. We flout the conventions: I admit this in sorrow, not pride. For I am the patriarch now and I don’t like what is happening. (There’s a particular thing I’ve been brooding on for days). This family waywardness has put us through unnecessary travail. And now it’s affecting the grandchildren, not by accident, but through deliberate ideology. And I desperately want to fight it.”

I don’t regret any of what I’ve been through in my own life, despite everything. But I don’t want to see my grandchildren handicapped so needlessly, so senselessly. Oh, I’d be glad if I could see it differently. But my dander is up and I want to fight, even though I’m no longer the troop’s alpha male. I want to stand on a scaffold platform too, and rant like that young man: “What allegiance do I have to you? Only one thing: to give your children what they need—a grandfather.” Perhaps I’m King Lear, victim of his own foolishness. I have a film version on DVD, with Paul Scofield in the title role. I saw his famous performance in the same role at Stratford-on-Avon in 1962; but I’m finding it too harrowing these days. I’ve been reading Huckleberry Finn, which makes me laugh out loud, but it gets heavy too, and I wonder if I am like Huck’s Pap, wanting to force my ideas on my eldest son; ideas exactly opposite to those of that disgraceful drunk, as it happens, but does that excuse me?

“Don’t read too much into coincidences, Vincent! Lear; Huck Finn’s father; the man’s speech on the building site; they’re not about you!” Well, excuse me. What is life at all, if not coincidences? It’s the fabric into which we are born. Naturally we pick and choose which ones we find of interest when we tell a story, and leave the rest of the fabric on the cutting-room floor, denying it any significance.

I’m wishing I had what it takes to be tactful, persuasive, influential: the honeyed tongue of a politician, I suppose. As it is, my influence lies out of out of my control. They copy the things I’ve renounced, and ignore what I say. All I want to tell them is this: “You pay a big price for swimming against the current: more than you imagine.” “You’ll just have to trust me,” said my son.

Oh, the hills!

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

[Quotations from Psalm 121.]

Valley reverie

“Place does affect the way I write, maybe the tone and always has an influence. Does place matter in your work?” Poet Scot Young asked the question in his blog and I said yes. When I go walking, thoughts come to me, and they seem to resonate with the sky and the trees and the roadside litter, and the sounds, and everything. I said it would take a series of essays to amplify my “yes”.

Time comes into it too. My best is the early morning and ideally I’d be abroad on highways and byways as the sky lightened, ready to greet every dawn. But there's so much to squeeze into one's best time! Last Friday I did manage to get out by 8, with camera and voice recorder---the joy is doubled in trying to recapture it afterwards. So this is the tale I bring back, not verbatim but trying to convey the essence.

There’s a fresh breeze and it’s damp rather than cold. A weak newborn sun lights the hurrying pedestrians on their way to work. I pretend the cars are not there and I’m in the nineteenth century. It works pretty well except when I have to cross a road, when self-preservation takes priority.

K has lent me a pedometer which she got on loan for a week from her employers, the National Health Service, that symbol of socialistic kindness which blesses her Majesty’s subjects with its concern for their wellbeing. 10,000 steps per day is recommended. Let’s see what I do on this walk along the Wye Valley to Loudwater. (It came to 24,000.)

The ground is covered with fresh-fallen leaves. For a moment, I wonder why they appear so poignant, like fresh-fallen snow. I imagine a small child seeing them for the first time; and then a man in the autumn of his life remembering all the autumns he has known---including the first time he noticed the fallen leaves stuck damply to the ground; or dry ones blown into heaps that he shuffled his way through. And who is that man? Everyman; also me.

After the first mile, I leave those streets with their streams of workers, and go diagonally through the park, reaching the trail of public footpaths which penetrate every obstacle: woods, meadows, housing developments, factories. There used to be several papermills along this valley, powered by waterwheels, one of which has been reconstructed out of a respect for history. On special occasions they use it to grind a few sackfuls of wheat, but mostly it lies silent, desolate, the millrace diverted by sluice-gates.

I move to another branch of the river which has squirrels dashing along the path to take the bread and seed which people had scattered to feed the ducks and swans. I encounter a rat near the place where the river disappears into a culvert. It regards me coolly with whiskers a-twitch before going about its business, in no particular hurry. Being classified as “vermin” and unworthy of humane treatment hasn’t made it hate or fear me. Its forebears spread bubonic plague throughout old Europe. Could it be blamed for that? White sailors spread syphilis wherever they went; white missionaries spread the idea of sin and redemption to savages who were fine without it. And now, there are those who may consider white man vermin. I don’t want to blame them either.

I pass through meadows, paths, the alleys between the backyards of suburban houses, and reach the embankment of a disused railway line. Nearby there’s a wastewater treatment plant which collects from a big pipe and pumps effluent into the river. It’s good to see the infrastructure of this town, and I pass all kinds on this walk: red Royal Mail vans, postmen on foot, electricity transformer substations, gas distribution, water, and now sewerage, which I feel moved to photograph. It works for us invisibly, we depend on it, so it's a kind of God, really.

The idea – the ideal, the slogan – of Freedom comes into my head. I suppose in the recent Presidential election it was a word of mystical power. I can understand how it would still be so---to a slave. Why is Freedom so important to those who see themselves as already free? Because, I suppose, they feel burdened with the duty to defend it. It makes more sense to generalize and say that everyone acts to protect what’s sacred in their society. Attack that and there will be a fierce response. One society values sexual freedom. Another society would prefer to be free from AIDS.

For some reason I have always found it easy to identify with the downtrodden, and have had little sympathy with the powerful. I don’t mean to attack freedom, or any other concept of the sacred: just to scrutinize it. I think of a peasant as freer than an ambitious office-worker, but that’s just my bias. I’m in a meadow, closely following the meandering river. On the other side are newish apartment blocks, with balconies and neat communal gardens. They need no fence because the water makes a natural boundary.

I think about Americans, in a week momentous in their history. They seem like an Old Testament people. We only hear the Israelite side of the story. The Philistines and followers of Ba’al would have had their story too: their own myths, their own heroes and tales of inspiration, but we don’t know them, only the biased winners’ history, that has somehow been forged into the scriptures of two separate religions.

The things that matter to a tribe are often encoded within a religious belief-structure, that may seem like superstition or prejudice. It is not surprising that in a progressive society, the urge is to let rationality sweep those things away, ignorant of the precious secret: that the sacred is hidden, wrapped up in the mumbo-jumbo. What is the sacred? It’s something revered because it is necessary for the healthy existence---and coexistence---of mankind.

[Later, I recall an illustrative example: the astonishing findings of the anthropologist Steve Lansing in Bali. The irrigation system for the terraced paddy-fields was controlled by a network of Hindu priests each in his own temple according to a complex balancing of various factors. The Indonesian Government swept it away and spent money on concrete dams and consultant engineers, nearly wrecking an age-old method which was subsequently realized to have been highly optimized.]

I’m on a narrow footpath now, beside a bit of river straight like a canal. I was here before. I never got to write about that walk, though for weeks I wanted to. It was a hot day after rain, and the wet undergrowth was steaming with aromatic exhalations given a special flavour no doubt by the luxuriant Himalayan balsam, a species which has escaped into the wild. Today the vegetation is declining. The day is warm enough but the native species know they should save their strength for spring.

The footpath debouches into a retail park. I come face-to-face with “Kentucky Fried Cruelty”, as Scot's daughter calls it.

Where was I? The sacred. Locked up like a seed within the pod of superstitions, posturing and corruption, there is something lively and noble in every culture. You can’t talk about any axis of evil. Here, in this morning, in this valley, it seems totally clear to me that the only sensible thing to do with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban is talk to them. Then we’ll discover that we are exactly like them. We have our ideas of the sacred, which we feel is threatened by the enemy, and so do they. This is what “enemy” means! Instead of fighting, we need to respect one another’s sacred things.

And if it is true, as someone told me, that Obama has “political ties with convicted and accused terrorists ... does in fact have ties with Muslim and more specifically Palestinian sympathizers (including radicals)” then this makes him the safest possible President for our age.

Enemies should approach one another bearing gifts, ready to listen and be magnanimous. The conflicts would evaporate. And that is exactly how the derided “savages” used to do business.

[Later: I don’t see this happening even within America’s own borders yet, even amongst its own people. Get unity at home if you want to work for world peace.]

Where is “freedom” on the Maslow hierarchy of needs? [Later: I’ve just checked. It’s nowhere.] Of what value is freedom if you are hungry, or fleeing for your life?

The footpath takes a zig-zag route through meadows; a recreation-ground where dogs taking their owners for walks lift their legs against goalposts; an overgrown alley between backyards and warehouses; then debouches into a suburban development of modest houses. In the UK it seems you can’t build over a public footpath, even though you’ve bought the land, so these ways have longevity; humble but strong. There’s one called the Ridgway Path which dates back several thousand years. I recall the same thought I had last time I was here: only a terrible calamity would erase these footpaths. The cars would go first. Then the complex infrastructure: mail, electricity, gas, piped water, sewerage. The supermarkets, presently bursting with food like Christmas every day, would empty and become derelict. Only if the fertile land were blasted or buried in toxic floods, or some very unbritish power took over the government, would the footpaths disappear; and I expect them to be here long after me. One day I’ll be struggling to take my final breaths, and my memory, if it survives, might allow me to wander these neglected paths one last time, bidding them farewell, recalling a few reveries like this one.

While I ponder thus, a couple of elderly ladies approach from the opposite direction. There’s something incongruous about their greeting, as if this is a moment for great joy, and all three of us have been let into a secret, here in the narrow lane between backyards. I’m caught unawares, tongue-tied. What can one say in a few moments of greeting? I smile and say something conventional. What can I share with strangers?

Nearly a week later, I try to share it with you.

Remembrance Sunday

[Click any photo to enlarge.]
I went to a church service today, the first time for many years. It was Remembrance Sunday, commemorating war dead, a civic occasion, as my photos illustrate, with attendance by the Mayor, Member of Parliament, police chief, local Air Force chief and so on; with a band (sea cadets), a saluting platform, wreaths placed at the War Memorial in the churchyard, prayers outside with the assembled crowd and finally a service in the ancient Parish Church, in the middle of the town centre. The procession of worthies went in by the West door, while we the ordinary people went in by the South Door.

Civic services are not just non-denominational: they don’t assume the worshippers are all Christians, or even believers in God. The Mayor is sometimes a Muslim or atheist, but---I get the fact from my own biography of a former mayor---is expected to attend about a dozen civic services in the Parish Church during his year of ceremonial office. (He or she is a temporary monarch of the town, attending public events and so on.)

We liked our experimental church attendance so much that we plan to do it often; though on the non-civic occasions I suppose they will be rather more Christian in tone. In his sermon the preacher asked us to think what are the qualities of a leader, before offering his own suggestion: the leader should be humble. One of the uses of God (I paraphrase his words) is to be someone higher than all the politicians and persons of power, reminding them to be humble. I liked that.

What I liked most was to feel embraced within the community. The Church of England represents centuries of peaceful tradition in this country. Its head is the reigning monarch who (in principle) appoints the Archbishop of Canterbury. In practice it’s a very tolerant church, wanting to bring everyone together in unity.

I was astonished at one of the hymns we sang for this Remembrance Sunday. Here it is in full:

God of the nations, God of all who live,
How many gave us all they had to give!
Now, in remembrance of our nation’s dead,
In honesty and pride let prayers be said.

Some died sustained by promises of success
Some in defeat’s despair and bitterness;
Some died the victims of incompetence:
Through years of peril they were our defence.

‘When you remember us,’ we hear them cry,
‘Take greater care how you let others die;
Whatever god you worship, or if none,
Pray that the nations learn to live as one.’

We lay our wreaths, perform the simple rite,
Anxious that we may see in clearer light,
As those for whom a nation’s blood was shed,
How best to serve the living and the dead.
(words by Fred Pratt Green)

I never thought to sing a hymn which included the word “incompetence”. Today’s experience healed a sore that’s festered in me since I was fifteen, rebelling against the rituals of school. My headmaster was passionate for the Church and the Armed Forces in equal measure. I reacted with equal and opposite passion and remained a vague agnostic and pacifist ever since.

Now I see the point. The lost sheep is returning to the fold.

Political colours

One day the colour won’t matter but yesterday it mattered so much that the black-over-white victory eclipsed the blue-over-red; at least over here, where no one much cared that the Democrats had trounced the Republicans, except in the sense that Bush’s party had lost, which everyone applauded. Colour mattered so much because it marks the end of an era in which colour mattered so much. Let us not be coy. It marked the end of world-wide dominance by the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant tribe.

I’d better declare my own self. I’m white, my wife is black, my politics are blue: not aligned to the American Democrats, but the British Conservatives. I’m technically a WASP myself, a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant: not religious personally but descended from an Archbishop of Canterbury on the mother’s side. Of the father’s side I know less: illegitimacy and distance have got in the way. I look in the mirror and see white, but there’s enough oddity in my features to have inspired a genealogy wherein I had for great-grandparents a renegade Catholic priest and an abducted underage Aboriginal girl. “Where did that come from?” you ask. From pure imagination, but that doesn’t prove it false.

My wife is an Afro-Caribbean, as they say over here. There is no such expression as “Afro-Briton” to correspond to Afro-American. The race-police who monitor these things are more interested in “ethnic origins” than fostering patriotism. You never hear “West Indian” these days, except amongst the elderly who can’t keep up with fashion in political correctness. Away from the public arena wherein language is mangled on the altar of guilt to appease pressure-groups, I like the word negress: beautiful, descriptive and all the better for being taboo.

We listened to the speech of the President-elect live on radio, then switched to the TV. Tears flowed. We felt---she felt, I felt---the electric moment, the long-awaited signal to the black men and women of the world, that they may be prouder than before. This is not for the whites to fear, unless the ending of top-dog status justifies fear. I suppose white racial dominance started with the Greek Alexander, but now its long reign has come to an end. There are still weapons, fraud, cruelty, greed. There is a huge mess to clear up. But one barrier to a united world has gone.

At the end of one short speech yesterday, I heard President Bush say, “America is the greatest country in the world.” I thought “Why, George W, why? What is going on in your addled brain at this moment? Is that what you think this is about? It’s foolishness like that which sends bombers with hate to you and your country. Stop competing, for God’s sake. We need healing and unity in this world, not a top-dog mentality.”

I said my politics are blue, which over here stands for Conservative. It depends what you want to conserve. “Guns and religion” would not be on my list. My deepest instincts are against everything progressive: cities, social engineering, psychiatrists, electronic gadgets, neologisms, fast cars and planes. Poetically as opposed to rationally, I prefer Cuba’s political system to the USA’s. At the deepest level, I’m an anarchist. You can keep your “freedom”---that excuse for so many wars. I passionately embrace what Kropotkin says:

It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind. It is the conscience---be it only at the stage of instinct---of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every man’s happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed.

The prince’s old clothes

In my last, I claimed that my long-standing writer’s block was over, and promised to continue my memoirs from where they left off last February at the age of fourteen. There has been plenty of scribbling since then but nothing fit to print. I wanted by some means to indicate “the story so far” so as to fulfil the aim that each post on this blog be self-sufficient and meaningful to the reader who stumbles on it for the first time. But the tone was invariably wrong, and the writing just wouldn’t go where I wanted it to. In the end, I grasped that an inner voice wanted to be heard, even though it wasn’t saying what I wanted to hear. It kept on going on about clothes. Around fourteen or fifteen I started to care how I looked. So here are some extracts retrieved from recent drafts otherwise consigned to oblivion. The year is 1956/7.

Extract no. 1
The bitterest row was over my greatcoat. Every Thursday, we had a cadet parade at school in the afternoon, with periods of instruction in the military arts. Instead of school uniform, cadets would spend the whole day in “battledress”. The night before, boots had to be spit-and-polished. If you had new boots, the bumps on the toecaps had to be burned flat with a hot spoon. The gaiters and belts had to be Blanco’d, brass buckles had to be Brasso’d. Trousers and tunic had to be ironed to produce razor-sharp creases in exactly the right places, using special methods such as shaving the serge threadbare on the inside and rubbing it with dry soap. To get the trousers to hang neatly over the gaiters, weights were used, for example lumps of lead on a circle of string. Many of these operations were officially forbidden, but this didn't stop me and other obsessives from spending hours on them every Wednesday evening. We wanted to achieve a certain look, as in the photo alongside, which is not of me, but a cadet sergeant who actually did go on to a distinguished career in the real Army. My mother remarked upon an odd contrast. I worshipped my army uniform with unseemly idolatry, whilst leaving my ordinary school uniform crumpled each night on the bedroom floor. I treated her observation with the complacency of one who knows better than his elders how things should be arranged.

What I did mind, and what caused shouting and even tears, was my mother ordering me to wear my greatcoat to school, on days when no other boy turned up in this heavy garment. I explained that she was not my superior officer, merely my mother. I was prepared to come to school looking like a Cossack in a Russian winter only when there was thick snow on the ground. Any other weather condition, including frost, rain, hail or high wind, did not justify the greatcoat. Confronted with this dilemma, a less principled and more diplomatic boy would have donned the disputed garment as he walked out the door, bidding his mother an affectionate farewell and offering his cheek for a light kiss. Then he would have stuffed it in a hedge round the next corner. And if it were to have disappeared when he returned to collect it in the evening? He wouldn’t mind: he’d have helped keep some tramp warm.

Extract no. 2
In addition to being (unwisely) trusted to study unsupervised during many slots within the week’s timetable, a Sixth-Former was awarded the privileges, responsibilities and accoutrements of being a Prefect. We wore white shirts like adults, instead of grey. Our blazers were edged with a slightly more colourful piping instead of the usual black and white. Our caps had a tassel which swung uncontrollably into our eyes but conveyed great authority. I remember buying a couple of white shirts at Whitcher’s, the school outfitters in town. I put one on straight away and as I walked out of the shop, I felt an altogether new status, which I was sure would be apparent to every passer-by. “This is no boy, but a young gentleman!” they would be saying. I was fifteen.

Extract no. 3
My preoccupation with clothes must have sprung from an awareness of our relative poverty. My pockets always seemed to have holes in them, through which pencils and coins frequently fell. At some point in the late fifties, drainpipe trousers became the fashion. I had no problem with the coarse grey flannel of our school uniform, and if it looked like prison garb so much the better, to emphasize the lack of choice; but I desperately wanted something more stylish for leisurewear. No funds were available but my stepfather offered me his demob suit. This was issued to ex-servicemen on their demobilisation to “civvy street”. It was thick brown worsted with chalk stripe, made to last a lifetime or beyond. I got my mother to sew up the legs to achieve the drainpipe appearance. Unfortunately her skills were insufficient to reduce the size above the crotch; so that the seat, fly and waistband remained a few sizes too big, giving a somewhat ludicrous appearance. I wore them anyway. It was the lesser of two evils.

I publish the above extracts with some embarrassment, but the addiction to writing gets the better of me. I prefer it when I can be the mouthpiece of some edifying spiritual discourse, but that doesn’t happen too often. I need to write something, and, because I like to view sentences and paragraphs as pieces of precision engineering, I’d happily work as someone’s hired editor, or even in volunteer mode if it were a good cause. What would be a good cause? Anything that felt like one.