Chapter Three
So my implied reader, are you still with me? Should we make this point a beachhead -- our base camp? Shall I put up a flag? I feel we are walking in the foothills, and I can feel the slope of the book under my feet, and an egress into something else. The book may be slowly becoming a pilgrimage
‘The past is not dead, it’s not even past’ as Faulkner says. Everything lives through us, and I am a long story. I am the link to a past that is not petrified. I’m Perched on the windowsill of the present looking back. I see all the people I’ve have been through the eyes of the person I am now. I know now that the timing of this journey is correct.
But what is it from my past that calls to the present? Something that wouldn’t lay still? My reveries have awakened a small living creature, which clings to me for warmth – but it is not warm to my touch – it is cold, and it is a porcupine, with spines as sharp as needles and daggers. But you must touch the past to capture it and it bristles with many stabbing questions. It is a ball-grasping recall that brings tears to the eyes.
And as for the writing I have discovered there is a great difference between remembering something, and writing about it. When I’m writing about my dodgy childhood I have to get into the right psychological state. This state is really beyond my powers of description. It is like being lost somewhere between angels and beasts. They say Jack Kerouac used to get down on his knees and pray before he could start to write. Praying to his ‘lamy Jesus.’ I would rather wing it. I’m just trying to put all the stuff in -- the good the bad and the ugly. I’m not aware of what I’m doing -- I’m not so analytical – and wouldn’t want to be. To remember and tell it – to tell it for and through me – tell it to clear it – to move it – tell it because it must be told -- to tell what’s never been told. When I write something down it really seems to make it concrete. I relive it. I have to deal with being back there – still unable to effect any thing – no ju ju for it – no mojo working to disarm it. My childhood seems to scowl at me like an enemy with a drawn dagger, as if seeking revenge.
As I once more enter the slum’s savage and jagged edges I’m swallowed up into its jaws – its hunger is not satiated -- it lives again and must eat to live
I hope the reader doesn’t think I’m playing the martyr – shouting ‘woe is me!’ Though my childhood was hell my life has been far from a vale of tears.
The stuff we call memory comes from wherever it resides – laid still as dust somewhere until we blow it up into a morphemic cloud -- super charged swarming images which form into the resemblance of the original impressions. As if on a strange blue wind they flow around me – flapping my thoughts like wet washing, impelling me to look into the smoked-glass mystery of myself. They come in eerie eddies in the inner eye, cubist jumps, cat quick shifting planes of faces, names and events colliding in my head. I roam the rooms of my memory, while with my words I’m trying to remake that world -- to turn words into the flesh and blood of time. I am beginning to realise that ‘the truth’ is actually the search for truth. So maybe it’s a search for the writer who is searching. Maybe watching this struggle will be interesting for the reader.
*****
Old Tolstoy the Wise proclaimed: ‘All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ And many, are want to say: every kid needs a father. But, I don’t think that is strictly true. I think it depends on many things – the father and kid to name but two. Some kids are real heroes -- quite able to accept that their fathers are not of the living, or simply not there. While others might be a bit more curious -- might wonder what it would be like to have a father like all the other kids. And being without such a thing might make him or her sad, or might not. But what is far, far harder for a kid is getting a horse’s arse for a stepfather.
So, now you have it! I was that kid. I’m sure not having my real father around made little difference to me. But getting a horse’s arse really did: but more of that later.
While growing up I always considered that I hadn’t been born for that slumscape of Hull under the stone. I felt I had been slung there -- dragged there by fate at one year old, along with my older brother, Peter, and my mother.
Apileius thought bad luck was contagious. Maybe he was right, for there seems little justice in providence. And with us it did seem as if the usual host of gods and fates, if you will, had become hostile to good fortune. It was as if we had been fixed there like nailed wood by a tragic occurrence of events: a contrivance of my vanished father, and a bigoted society. Would that feeling of being fixed later be responsible for my wanderlust, which seemed to have come from my very essence, like the urge that runs the birds south every winter?
My mother’s family had rejected her after she had met my father, got pregnant with my brother, and left the family home. For my super straight grumpy grandfather there would never be any going back. He refused to have anything more to do with her. So my mother was forced into another paradigm.
After they had they were married they lived here and there, moving around as my father went from job to job. My mother suddenly found she was pregnant again, with yours truly. And then my father just took off – legged it. While growing up I was always aware that my father had left before I was born – just three weeks before in fact – the swine! I was aware of it because my stepfather constantly threw the fact in my mother’s face, and later Peter’s and mine.
My desperate mother, now left alone with two small children, unable to work or find child care took a live-in-house-keeping job for a widowed fish-filleter, John Benson, who lived in that tumble up, tumble down house in that dammed street, and to whom she would later marry. He had two children of his own: Tommy and Jane -- ten and eight years old, who had been running wild for a couple of years since his wife died.
But the full details of just how we came to be in that street is a little tale of horror -- a tale that would tear the bottom out of your pants, which I think I’ll save for another place. It’s enough to say here, that we three naives, dupes of that cruel mocking fate, following no dam star, found ourselves were we did not belong -- like birds hatched in a viper’s nest.
At a certain age -- I don’t know how old -- it must have just slowly crept up on me with great stealth, like one of those wind-feigning tarantulas, but whenever it was, I began to feel that this world was not all that it seemed – not quite right -- a sort of mock-up – a fabrication -- a rubber show which everyone seemed to be going along with unconsciously. It was this phoniness -- this duplicity of the people, which really put the finishing touches to the ugliness in the life of the street. Everything seemed at odds with everything else. I didn’t trust the ground I walked on. What was this pretending? Was it the people or the whole thing? Was it the meaning that was at odds with itself – the poetry failing – being killed by the ugliness imposing itself?
But, as a squib, I didn’t have the foggiest. I hadn’t really mastered joined up thinking, so it was nothing I could really figure out or speak of. I remember strange kinds of thoughts coming over me in those moments we call daydreaming – then I would weird-out into some kind of alpha state -- a peculiar kind of testing of the quality of the moment. I would catch myself observing myself observing. Weird kid eh!
I’m sure any lay psychologist will now be saying: ‘there it is a kid without a proper father -- the first speck -- the embryo that begot the first cell of suspicion’. But who can really say? I’m not just yet rady to thank my absconded father for having heightened my consciousness to all the dammed phonus-bolonus around me. But I see those states of mind as an early communing with the self – a little awaking, my inner voices playing counterpoint in my kiddie-brain – I was just trying to put the ducks in a row.
Over these last months, I’ve spent a lot of time struggling to trace the sauce of that initial mistrust -- to place its origin in the boy’s mind -- reversing from one seemingly relevant event to the next. I find here and there a clue -- an incident -- a piece of information I feel is may be of importance. But in the end the root always fades into the fog and fuddle of the never areas of the primordial mind under that small kid’s cranium.
At five years old there was school. O my liquid eyes -- wounds bleed into wounds – a phenomenon -- a cultural deprivation tank – an absurd singularity insultingly referred to as education. It was no more than an ink smudge on an already empty social page. I do believe our first feelings of insecurity begin very early – at the latest in the infant school, where our very first lessons are graded with gold, silver, red, blue, and yellow stars, stuck on our tests papers as carrots – large and small carrots, which slowly become combined with small and then larger sticks.
My mother moved me and Peter from our first school, Scarborough Street, after a few months, to a new school when the school’s parsimony had reached its very obvious bottom: our crayon drawings we brought home were suddenly no longer on white paper, but on newspaper. This was a stab in the heart for my mother: her coming from a middle-class family in which education had meant so much. She herself had been studying medicine until she got pregnant. So hoping it would be an improvement, we Rigly kids were sent to West Dock Avenue Infants School (Kipper College) five dangerous streets away. And there, by Sod’s luck, waiting to pounce on me was the infamous Miss Trot! Who had been there as long as anyone could remember. A carthorse of a woman with big flat flapping feet, who always wore a large flowered bell shaped gown, which made her look like a giant lampshade. I can still see her hell-spitting eyes, the peevish frown, and her grey mop tossing from side to side like Tarzan’s discarded vines, as she toweringly strode down the aisles between our tiny desks like a conquering Roman Emperor. And I can still hear her animal voice booming and thundering, as if she was speaking in tongue, and scaring the hell out of us kids! We soon found out she was completely mad to the middle. If anyone put one of their little feet wrong she would lose her gear and go into remote chaos. Like a raging storm she would rush down on us, pull us over the desks like sacks and pour blows down on our backs, so hard that we would be left gasping for breath through our uncontrollable sobs -- our little hearts broken. We would howl like banshees for our mothers, and beg to go home.
Some kids, myself included, would sit in our little chairs and piss ourselves, too hazed even to raise our little hands to ask to leave the room. Oh we had so much to learn eh!
But I can also remember a Miss Brown, who was very kind. She made a little nature table with leaves, acorns and chestnuts, and such, which at that age and living on treeless Hessle Road really impressed me, not having yet had the pleasure of actually seeing those things grow.
But, for some reason, and much to all the kid’s regret, Miss Brown left and the table lay bare. Maybe we should have put toenails and fingernails, hair, and stuff like that on it, these being the only organic things growing in the area.
Sometimes on my way home from school, I used to go to an unused factory at the bank-end of my street. It had a two metre high rough wooden fence around it -- which I would easily climb. I discovered it was the only place in the whole area where grass grew, although been nothing more than a narrow strip hidden behind some large sheds, like a secret garden. You must imagine these eighty year old, stark streets -- everything concrete, brick, and the colour of slow rot. The nearest park was two miles away. The only open areas were large gaps, like missing teeth, between some of the houses, where bombs had landed during the Second World War. But no grass could ever grow there through so much rubble, glass, and grey dust. Thinking back, by planting a bit of grass, and a few bushes and trees in those places it would have been so easy, and inexpensive for the local Council of Pain to have introduced a bit of bottled moonshine, and brought a flash of colour and joy to an otherwise dismal place.
After nipping over that fence like Billy The Cat, I would sneak around the sheds making sure not to be seen. There I would crouch, and do nothing more than pull up handfuls of the lush green grass by the roots, just to see what insects were lurking under there. There were beetles, earwigs and such scurrying away, fat slimy slugs and worms sucking themselves back down their tunnels, and the damp smell of the exposed earth still hangs in my mind, as strong now as it was then. It must have been a childish subconscious urge in me to get to nature, to bury my fingers in that black rich earth, to find out how things worked under there, or maybe it was just to have the smallest access to another world – my own secret world. It made me wonder what lay under the street. Under the broken flagstones, the patches of tarmac, and rubble was a clean, black, living earth -- the Promised Land trampled, buried beneath the feet of a ignorant lost tribe -- imagine that!
After two years of the mad Miss Trot worse was to come. It was up into the junior school. Which was an all-boy’s school (where girls were now only in our imaginations). Boys will be boys, and without the civilising influence of the fairer sex (Miss Trot being the exception) boys (teachers included and thus responsible as the upholders of that institute) became beasts -- dirty, smutty, uncouth, bulling devils. It was a dehumanising experience from top to bottom.
The so-called teachers were borderline psychopaths who performed a much higher system of torture that made Miss Trot look like Little Bo-Peep. Almost to a man these mountebanks, churls, dastards, and valets had hatched, concocted, and adapted from somewhere in their perverse brains, weapons of all descriptions for the beating of children.
Every morning we would be gathered together singing hymns and praising God, the Prince Of Peace, and Love, and within minutes we would be getting hard and jolly hell with sticks and things. So, it can’t be said they were laying down heavenly foundations. Violence had become a mechanical itch – and boy did they scratch it. They had perfected it to a sport. From the headmaster, Mr Sykes, with his Chinese-cane, sinisterly named ‘The Bee-Sting’ to Mr Lee’s dreaded ‘Black Jack’ – a twelve inch long, by five inch wide, by a half inch thick strip of black rubber, applied in three swift energetic strokes to each hand, which would leave them red and throbbing for the whole day. A beaten boy with liquid eyes, fighting back the tears, was for the teachers a symbol to be seen by all, to show the boy had learnt something…. he had learnt to ’take it like a man!’ It seemed to be the reverse of the saying: ‘he who has a mind to beat his dog will find a stick.’ Their feelings for kids had atrophied. Their souls must have escaped their bodies and fled. Mr Lee and his Black Jack bruised my very being.
And the other lessons? Well they were as bland as knitting patterns -- flat as road kills, an unflagging, unbeatable boorish verbal soup of names, places, battles, etc. nailed into you like Luther’s partition. We kids were blank spaces, and waited only what would be branded into our minds. If the school had had a motto it could not have been more fitting than: ‘JUST GET USED TO IT!’
As a child you are unable to disagree. Beyond the shallow mindlessness of conformity, the 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 – a Mr Fairweather -- mon ami! -- who never possessed one of those 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 I was charmed.
Unfortunately, it was Fairweather for only one year, if you’ll excuse the pun. 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 placed in my mind. 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 their rules would be without that rare commodity called dignity. And any sign of potential would become a prisoner in the restricting mucus of routine. They’re 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 were already becoming 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 as 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 the sweets of childhood..
When I think of all the canings, clips, smacks, jabs, kicks, etc., and the general ache of poverty, while all the while sucking in the nonsense along with the pollution and the 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 was being 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-colour 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 had leaked in. He would be set off whenever he picked up a book. Yet home was a one book house -- an encyclopaedia 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 -- more 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 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. But he couldn’t relate to any of it in his own life -- he accepted it as it was 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 taking 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 boring lives.
But my little kid fibs were believed on all hands, it seems – or at least a group of kids wanted to go along with me, which in turn inspired and pushed me further. And as I got older my stories became more complex -- more sophisticated.
I’d start with just one or two kids in the schoolyard during the break -- spin a yarn about something which was interesting me at that moment – horses for instance. I had a real thing 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 fleapit, the Langham. After watching Hop-A-Long Cassidy flicks at those Saturday morning matinees everybody was galloping home on horses!
So with my theme of horses chosen, I remember I kicked off one Monday morning by casually mentioning my wonderful weekend in the country visiting my uncle Jim. Who just happens to have some horses we ride about on. And how old Chestnut (named for his colour) is my favourite – and is the only one I ride, even though I love them all, Snowball, Jet, Sandy, etc. After a few sessions of this improvisation, my audience of one or two had now grown to three, four, or five. Then I would really get down to business -- research my subject -- take a book from the library and read up a bit, and weave some facts into my soap opera.
Now my wheeze had expanded to another uncle – Uncle Alan in America -- who has a ranch in Wyoming, where I’ll be off to work just as soon as I was fifteen. As cocky as a metronome I 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 – how he knows every one of those black dots on old Spot -- a real equestrian! 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 me looking like a full array of those Russian dolls, I could have packed them all up -- the smallest into the largest, tucked them under my arm, and simply strolled home with them, for they were mine!
After a few more days of this, I would begin to lose interest, and so, shift the subject. I sometimes had to wonder just how smoothly this could go -- as if on wheels. In one sentence I went smoothly from horses to the Sahara Desert via: just how my grandfather, while in a cavalry unit during the war, had taken the wavy dagger, which hangs on his wall, from an Arab, just before he had sunk it into to his heart. And then I‘d be off again -- blowing my 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,that it would turn him into a Snark-hunter. Ever since he was an egg, it seems he wanted to say so much. 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 were truer than their phoniness.
****
Another night falls, and the whole world turns over, and tick-tocks like the strain of 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 a 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 tugboat’s 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 weathervanes. The crumbling houses in the crippled street stare death-like across the streets and the terraces – leaning and sinking into each other like sculls decaying in a mass grave – future dust.
The boy lies 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.
(Link to other chapters:)
http://www.abctales.com/set/chris-whitley/adventures-in-a-difficult-worl...
