Autobiography (5 page)

Barry Ryan sings
Eloise
and rises to number 3 with a song that is five-and-a-half-minutes long – an eternity in radio space. It is an overly dramatic epic of clash and plea, a 48-piece orchestra wrapped in cliff-bound sirens, racing to an
out-of-my-mind
screaming vocal. It is an unusual disc, and Barry Ryan is from Leeds, the adopted city of Alan Clarke and Billy Bremner. None of the family had passed the 11-Plus exam, and henceforth cannot be saved, our futures doomed by an undotted i. We transmute from the gothic horror of St Wilfrid’s to the next phase in a familiar theme, and unto an even darker place go. If, like Oliver Twist, I had known, I would have screamed all the more louder, and not even
Something h
ere in my heart
by the Paper Dolls could save me now.

St Mary’s Secondary Modern School on Renton Road in Stretford may indeed be secondary, but it is not modern. An unattractive slim slab of glass, St Mary’s is life’s second bolt of frightening lightning, and it hits the target with five confined years that will answer no purpose – a school of notoriously mean disciplinarians whom one hopefully
survives despite everything. Now comes the hour to choose between being acceptable to others or being acceptable to one’s own self, for we must kill our true selves off in order to survive. I had no idea that life could get worse, or that schoolteachers could be more
contempt
uous than those of wilting St Wilfrid’s, but the snarling stupidity at St Mary’s is deathless, and its wearisome echo of negativity exhausts me to a permanent state of circumstantial sadness. Vincent Morgan is the Headmaster whose voice is a sigh, whose carriage is militantly empirical, and although a spectacle of suffering, he is mysteriously tuned in to God. Well past middle-age, he is rigorous in grey suit and gleaming black shoes, the sag of cruelty in his face a clue to the torrential capacity for violence. Sealed up like an envelope, he is unable to act with kindness or humanity, for he has neither, and there is evidently nothing to humanize him. For five years I witness the monumental loneliness of Vincent Morgan as he busies himself day after day with the beatings of small boys. And it goes on, and on, and on, and on – leading nowhere, achieving nothing. By 9:40 each morning, we shall all have witnessed several humiliating beatings at St Mary’s, and this is how we begin our day of knowledge. As Vincent Morgan concludes his morning prayer in assembly – in which he gives thanks – he will then point to up to twelve boys seemingly at random, who must step aside and prepare to be lashed, such being the heart of a man of Christian forgiveness. In its motive and conclusion, it is pathetic. Yet it never subsides. Inevitably, I am sooner or later marked out as one of the turkey
twelve, drawn to Vincent Morgan’s attention for reasons that he shall never be called upon to explain. Standing in line, my rage is for the smaller boys alongside me who, after one of six swinging whacks with a thick leather strap, have trouble standing, and whose small hands crack under the powerful military might of Morgan’s excited slam. Undersized and freshly plucked from junior school, these boys are still children and are no match for the satanic attack launched by this heaving and burning artilleryman. What could it possibly all be for? Only once do I ever see a boy square up to Vincent Morgan with the measured advice that he should
‘Fuck off’
, and it is that moment once again when the gunshot is so unexpected that it baffles the bully. My only possession is a brave front, since I have never known how to fight, and even as Vincent Morgan whacks and whacks and swings that leather belt with the full and mighty force of his entire body, something in his face tells me that he alone pays for all of this misery. Marooned, Vincent Morgan walks to and from school every single day by himself, an umbrella neatly propped on an arm that crosses the front of his body with marksman preparation. He has no friendship with the other teachers, and is only ever visible as the one of perpetual flogging. The fruitlessness of such overactive repulsion, in modern times, would of course suggest the starkest sexual overtures
...
for what else? What
job
did he think he was doing? And
...
for whom? And if there is no reason to show interest in these boys for any other cause (as there clearly isn’t), then why be so concerned about administering their punishment? Why isn’t their punishment ignored along with their hopes and dreams?

The tough and tearless boy who had advised Vincent Morgan to
‘fuck off’
was Michael Foley, and as star witness I slung my glass into the sea. At last, an individual! Handsomely G.I.-faced Foley is the only boy of wit and glamor in the entire school, and luckily for me he is in my class and easy to befriend. He cannot, though, turn zest and spark to anything at all other than girls’ knickers, and a friend for life fades in time. He works on the bread vans each Saturday morning, and entices me to give it a go, rising as I must at 6
AM
to be poetically active by 6:30 – an experience so frightening as to not be tackled twice. In my short conversations with Vincent Morgan I am struck by his game of persuasion, trying to convince me that whatever I say to him by way of reply has no value. I am dented by his technique of always making the cross-examined feel ‘less’, as I am also pierced by his bullying trick of speaking only in intimidating questions:
‘and what’s all this, then?’,
‘and who told you that you could do that?’
,
‘and who do you think you are, exactly?’
– and irrespective of however you explained yourself he would always come back with a question-reply so that he maintains ground as the inquisitor, keeping you answerable, yet failing to account for your actions. The words are a trick to make the victim passive. Without question, the boys lined up before Vincent Morgan, ready to be corrected by his floggings, were England’s dregs, and they could only be taught failure
by
failures, illumination by violence.

Whether at St Mary’s or St Wilfrid’s, I am spared the indignity of ever staying for school dinners, although I cannot escape the daily waft of dead pig and foul fish sandblasting both buildings and clinging to the senses for a lifetime. Once the dinner vans arrive, the school corridors are polluted by floating venomous toxins, unbearable to inhale so surely deadly to consume, and by late afternoon the leftovers will splodge and stink and spill and surge from huge bins awaiting collection. We are decades away from food awareness or any consideration of animal compassion, and stories circulate throughout St Mary’s of small stones in mashed potatoes and of mince that moves. Yet it is uncivilized to complain, and a Mr Bumble always hovers somewhere, and although you pay for your dinner you are not invited to shape the menu. The condition of England at the time was such that supported the predicament of taking whatever is dished out, whether this be food or violence. In order for there to be winners there needed to be losers, and the winners were already seated at fully heated Stretford Grammar. Somebody, it had been ordained, must be available to bang nails into wood for a living, and here we were.

By their unlucky presence, the teachers surely felt a similar way about themselves. Not for them some first-class establishment where laughter and success intermingled – they, too, have been thought to be not much cop, their dreams undone by the emphatic grainy-blackness of St Mary’s, unexpurgated and without serenade. Injuries of time marked the school as tired and tatty, yet trying to be technical. Exactly why I am here, and what it is I am meant to do, is beyond me. Each day is an array of invectives, thrown at the boys who are united in their understanding that they have been dumped, and are being dumped upon. Each day is Kafka-esque
in its nightmare, and the school offers nothing at all except a lifelong awareness of hate as a general truth. Encouragement is not on any curriculum, its place filled by the shit-without-wit repartee of such as Mr Kijowski, physical education instructor ostensibly, yet whose constant stream of hate suggests that if he is not frightening someone then he is nothing. Young and unmarried, he is obsessed with homosexuality – that it should be traced and uncovered, named and shamed. This tirade goes on and on for more years than could be thought possible, and I am not surprised that I am regularly the butt of his bombast, and yet the most obvious homosexual behavior reveals itself in Mr Kijowski himself, as each PE lesson closes and the obligatory communal showering is enforced. This is always the time when Mr Kijowski will conduct any sub-plot to demand that all showering boys
‘freeze’
and remain still until a fantasized misdemeanor of some kind is admitted to, with the familiar threat that
‘No boy will move until the culprit owns up,’
as Mr Kijowski pushes his way through this cramped room of naked boys.
Mr Sweeney is also a physical education teacher, and unmarried, but is less obsessively homosexualist, although it is commonly noted how he stands and stares and stands and stares at showering boys when neither standing nor staring is necessary. One day during five-a-side, I flip forwards and crash down on my right hand. This stirs a blip of compassion from Mr Sweeney, who then takes me into his private office, whereupon he proceeds to massage my wrist with anti-inflammatory cream. At 14, I understand the meaning of the unnecessarily slow and sensual strokes, with eyes fixed to mine, and I look away, and the moment passes. Shortly thereafter, drying myself off after a shower, Mr Sweeney leans into my mid-region to ask,
‘What’s that scar down your stomach, Steven?’
– but his eyes are lower, and these are the moments that cause you to check certain words in dictionaries, and for the first time you are forced to consider yourself to be the prize, or the quarry.

Air from 1947 hangs in the school stockrooms where outmoded textbooks stockpile against unwanted plaques anointing proud achievements of boys long-since gone, like a roll-call of the war dead. The slowness of days drills the brain, especially around 2:30 in the afternoon, when time never seems to move, and the 3:40 bell hangs lifelessly until the last drop of nausea has been wrung from the brow. Chalk and stale sweat catch whatever air escapes into these barren vaults, and a yellowing world map is all that the eye can rest upon, with not one continent available to you or meant for you. It is impossible to imagine a time when we shall feel free of all of this dissonance, and it is impossible to meet the situation halfway. Sadly, it is also impossible to simply just get on with it. My eyes lock permanently on the view from the windows, as I long to the point of tears to be released from this prison maze, or this maze prison, where I am ridiculed simply for just turning up. Mr Pink is reading aloud a story entitled
Boris the W
ig-maker.
He stops suddenly and burns in my direction as my eyes watch the black rain banging against feeble windows.

‘Steven, who exactly was Boris?’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not interested,’
I quickly reply, but very softly.

‘Right!! Stand up!!’
Warhorse Mr Pink charges to a cupboard to grapple for his treasured leather strap, and I am ordered to stand and take four whacks of the belt across my hands. I am then ordered to sit down, and, his turbulent rush fed, he continues to read to the class. I return my gaze to the rain. It is all so utterly stupid. I am at this point struck by the understanding that this freakish use of the leather strap is the answer for all teachers who find themselves in a situation that they simply cannot deal with, or answer. It is
their
weakness, not ours. Simply because I quite honestly admitted to having no interest in
Boris the W
ig-maker
, how does a violent charge with a leather strap provide an answer?

Occasionally we suffer the disdainful presence of a local priest, young and patronizing, with a name never to be recalled. Oddly, he seems to fix his curiosity upon me, possibly because I sit aloof, possibly because I do not contribute to polite laughter, possibly because of the newly tended weave in my hair.

‘And what do YOU like in life?’
he asks me, ready to play the patronizing game at my expense in order to raise a giggle from the rest of the class, thus rendering him popular for a few perverse minutes.

‘Mott the Hoople,’
I answer truthfully.

‘Oh, I see,’
he smirks, greater and grander than us all,
‘most boys like girls – he likes Mott the Hoople.’

The Catholic priest looks to the rest of the class having given them their cue for courteous laughter. But no laughter comes, and the priest looks back at me with his face of hate – as if to warn me that there will come another time when he shall score.

The topsy-turvydom of 1972 had brought an explosion of music and art and newness into my life and I was now in full self-development mode and desperate to be free of censure. There was no one with whom to discuss these understandings, and certainly any interest in art and self-expression through music was something to keep hidden throughout the cracked corridors of St Mary’s. I had bought the
Starman
single by David Bowie, which had climbed to number 42 in the chart, and I catch this epoch of self-realization for the first time on television as the exotic and shapely Ayshea Brough celebrates newly distributed color television with her show
Lift Off with Ayshe
a
. As David Bowie appears, the child dies. The vision is profound – a sanity heralding the coming of consciousness from someone who – at last! – transcends our gloomy coal-fire existence. David Bowie is detached from everything, yet open to everything; stripped of the notion that both art and life are impossible. He is quite real, impossibly glamorous, fearless, and quite British. How could this possibly be?