18

NEW TRADE: RENEWED PROTECTION

Poetry, Sick Bed and a New Home.

Though I was held up, by one of the senior Housemasters, to another boy, as an example of “Good behaviour; and respectful to staff”, my progress report of that particular year, of my fourteenth birthday, considered me a little differently. Ticking various listed categories, none much above “average”, the headmaster had summed up:

Eric can do better than this.

Tendency to fool about spoils his standard.

Even so, by the following months, and into the next year, I had quite forgotten this understanding of my behaviour and boldly requested a visit to the headmaster’s study: ‘I want to change my trade, sir,’ I told him, standing as a naked soul under his bespectacled staring eyes. I had seriously, quietly, thought about it during the previous weeks. And how could I manage the outside world? I feared it: it was strange – I knew nothing about it; there was an invisible wall that stopped me from moving into that society. Gary had put the thought of trade-changing into my head – as print being a better trade to take up than gardening. I considered this, and the fact that I would have the safety of the Home for several more years, till I was twenty-one.

‘The winter time makes gardening harder. I expect you will change your mind when summer arrives.’ The headmaster dismisses my request so casually, I am stunned.

‘You have good reports this year. You are doing well in horticulture.’ He looked through the folder before him on the table: ‘Read here.’ His thick finger pointed to the bottom of the sheet. I looked:

Eric has done very well here and is becoming a useful member of the school.

And as instantly I read above it:

“A” stream boy who has made very good progress.

I looked up: ‘Yes, sir.’ I was proud of myself and a shade of doubt entered my mind; I wavered in resolve: how can I leave gardening now? This disturbed me.

‘Go away and think about it.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I was disappointed. I hadn’t even thought of what summer, or winter, meant working in the gardens; both seasons had their atmosphere, had their different work needs. My feelings were hurt; as if winter was my excuse to get out of the gardening trade. I thought again of my original intent, and clung onto it. I now resolved that when summer came around, I would put in my request again.

‘You’ve done it!’ Gary smiled. He was my new trade buddy. Summer was here and the headmaster – seemingly preoccupied with more important issues in his leadership of the school – allowed me to move. Learning another trade – and always within a building, rather than outdoors – appeared a stronger choice. Botany lessons had really interested me, but with only one lesson, I had lost my loyalty to the horticulture department – and the talk of “genes”, when I mentioned this exciting knowledge, no one outside the instructor’s head had the faintest idea of what I was talking about – and on this I felt lost, and doubted even that I possessed such knowledge. The most I received in reply was: ‘You mean trousers, don’t you?’ I was stumped, and unhappy that my attempt to share my exciting new knowledge had ended here.

In the printing trade, I settled in to a new level of existence. As was usual, I attended general studies school one day a week, and trade practice the four other working days. This trade move led me into a different world: I was introduced to the school magazine, its editing and printing system. I contributed regularly by my seventeenth birthday, with articles on nature, and on photography, supplying my own photographs to illustrate my articles. A poem or two I also added to my contributions over the next few issues, one being:

Creation

The sun comes over the hill

and the earth is still.

Snow glistens white on the ground,

quiet, no sound.

A blackbird sweetly sings

of summer’s past things,

then more birds join in

and with joyfulness sing:

so mankind awakes,

destroys, or creates.

The scenes of thick snow crowning the stone arches of the main school entrance, and laden on the crowded trees in the grounds, each winter time awakened fresh in me wonderment and awe. And how it hung on the tree branches, bending them down; and all in silence and purity, such were the grounds at this time of the year in their glistening enchantment.

Going into the side entrance of the main school one afternoon I met up with the headmaster, as he was coming out (not often did we encounter him in our daily passage about the Home). He abruptly questioned me, standing as he was a few steps above me, ‘What is it you want to achieve when you leave the school?’ I quickly replied: ‘A clerk.’

‘What!’ he exclaimed (much to my surprise), ‘they are two a penny!’ He did not give me time to explain, for being a clerk I imagined I could write – my writing, for that activity was what I held secretly in my mind to do.

I continued my entry into the school hall, and he went on his way, obviously disappointed by my low ambition.

Later, I understood that he had probably read, or heard of, my school magazine contributions in The Goldonian, and was curious at my future intentions.

In my seventeenth year I came down with the flu – half the school had it. I struggled on, not aware I had “the flu” – except that one day, I knew something was wrong with me, and I told myself to go to the sick bay, a bungalow by itself near the main school. In a daze of half-awareness I tapped on the reception outer window: ‘I don’t feel well,’ I told the sister. She looked at me with a stern face then placed a thermometer in my mouth as I stood weakly at the opened window. She looked at the thermometer result and asked me, ‘Why didn’t you come here sooner?’ She was cross – I didn’t mind that, as I liked this particular sister; she was kind, though she looked rather like a benign witch with a big pimple on her nose. Immediately I was taken to one of the senior dormitories, they being used as sick bays due to the number of ill boys, the sick bay itself full up. I dreamily changed into pyjamas and climbed into the neatly made bed. I placed my head on the crisp white pillow. I lay there happy, in a peculiar sense of being cared for. I closed my eyes – and from that moment I do not recall anything else – but must have slept, flat out, for many hours; and several days later, recovered my usual health.

During a holiday period an apprentice who had relatives on the Isle of Sheppey took me there. Ian and I enjoyed the freedom of playing on the crumbling clay cliffs along the coast. He watched as I jumped down from high up, bouncing with my feet from each huge clump of clay, downwards, dancing and posing in mid-air as in some musical, before landing further below, at great speed, to the shoreline. This play was joyful, and gave me a sense of losing the constraints of the physicality of my body. (Yet, in contrast, back at the school one lunchtime, while eating our sandwiches by the cricket field, I told another apprentice: ‘I would like to be an insect, really small, hidden in the grass’; here, I guess, was another imaginative attempt of getting away, even getting out, of my existence.)

By now, general subjects and school attendance had been completed. I was a full-time apprentice having signed my print indentures papers – along with the headmaster and the master printer of the teaching staff. Till twenty-one years of age I would now have the security of the Home’s environment, and I blossomed out a little more, contented in that knowledge.

‘Would you like to join the Print Union?’ the local secretary asked me.

‘I well may,’ I told him, unsure about being trapped into anything like a formal-sounding organisation.

‘Let me know when you decide.’

I did decide, after thinking about it: I did not like the idea of my individuality being taken away, as into a group, to decide things for me. However, I reasoned the value of being united and so to be strong as a group, and I had a vague sense that it would be right, the working people against some outside force that owned them, or at least, paid for their existence. Gary and the other apprentices appeared to be in the union, though I did not specifically ask them if this was so. So I saw the union representative and told him I would join, which I did. I felt proud to be a member of a trade union.

Like the sports master’s request for me to enter the boxing competition, and at another time to play in a game of team football, without my particular desire to do so, I entered the cast of the Christmas pantomime. During rehearsals we had a recording machine; on it I heard my voice. The sound of it was a shock to me. My voice was deep and rough, least to my ears, and not being of the sensitive person I knew myself to be. This put me in a daze, wondering what had happened to me. But I had to accept this change of sound, especially as no one else took any notice. I now had a new image of myself; I was harder in nature than before. This is how I need to be, to grow up, I thought, and reluctantly had to let a refinement of my personality go; or, in reality, be repressed. I was Widow Twanky, of “Mother Goose”. The part of the young (and rather feminine) boy was originally offered to me, but I rejected it (sensing it to be too much in the nature of who I was, and playing this type of boy in public would reveal my inner self). This role of Widow Twanky was a great success, being mentioned in the next day’s morning assembly by the headmaster: ‘We were all much surprised by the Widow Twanky. We did not know Eric Holden had such talent hidden in him.’ (This comment was followed by assembly laughter.) I felt a little proud – and enjoyed the moment’s attention. I sensed I had it in me, prior to the performance; yet to perform with such gusto was a surprise, even to me – but very releasing. I was encouraged by the producer of the pantomime, Mr Newton, also the sports master, to go into the local town’s amateur dramatic society. I was reluctant, and shied away. I would need more support than that, just to come out of myself, let alone to enter such a venturesome course of social interaction. My imagination did not open up to any possibilities there. So that potential avenue of freedom for self-growth was not pursued, or opened up for me.

I was feeling more serious with life – and myself; getting older, the other boys appearing childish in their attitudes. The song “Dark Moon” stuck in my mind around this time; it repeated, and repeated the lines, in my head:

Dark moon, away up high up in the sky

Oh, tell me why, oh, tell me why you’ve lost your splendour.

Dark moon, what is the cause, your light withdraws

Is it because, is it because I’ve lost my love?

Becoming a stranger to my surroundings, I ached to leave this large house. I was a senior boy at the Home now. More than that, I was free of the confines and routines – and daily authority – of the Home staff. I could use the Prefects’ Common Room – full of cigarette smoke, manly sex talk and the smack and clash of coloured balls on the large snooker table. It was one day here that Walker, an active, sportsman type of senior, bossed his way to use the table, out of his turn, shoving away another boy. I interceded, arguing that it was unfair of him to behave like that. Walker threatened me: ‘Do you want to fight over it then?’

I thought about it – and my mind referred to the time at Barrows Green when, on a similar incident of bullying, by a senior boy toward a junior boy. Though I reasoned with myself how I could overpower him, with the help of some wood lying about the cellar room, I reckoned it would be too dangerous in bodily damage. This senior went to the local grammar school and so I was surprised and unhappy that he did not show fairness in his dealings with the junior, and much smaller, boy. On complaining to him about his unfairness the senior boy threatened me if I interfered further; his conscience not pricking him at all, however wrong he was; and like this present occasion, I, reluctantly, tense with frustration, backed down. Physical fighting was not an activity I willingly engaged in, even as I was unhappy at these situations.

It was not many weeks later that Walker came up to me in the print shop: ‘Hey Eric, make one of your headmaster signatures for me. I need this pass signing.’ It was known that I could imitate the headmaster’s signature in an accurate copy – as well as the chaplain’s signature, and the signature of the teacher with the BA after his name.

‘No,’ I replied.

‘Come, you’re joking. You can do.’

‘No,’ I repeated. Walker saw that I was serious. In my mind I would do a signature for fun, but not as an act of deceit.

‘Stuff you, then,’ Walker shouted at me, inches from my face.

I stood there, not moving away. He then walked off, still cursing me.

It had turned out that he could offer to fight me, as in the snooker room, but he could not beat me at my own kind of strength.

I liked him though, and it stirred in me that I wanted some kind of sex with him but I did not have the wherewithal to step out from my introverted existence and into his male-strong life. Such as in the dungeon-like outdoor printer’s toilet I entered to pee. Yet I rarely used it, as the power of the males around deterred me. There was Walker, alongside, peeing. I tensed up and attempted to pee; I could not manage it, and waited there. He finished and did up his trouser belt, which aroused me: on his habit of unbelting his jeans to get his dick out. A small shock came when he zipped up: I did not have a zip as I did not wear jeans, only trousers, and with fly buttons. The sound of the zip movement I found provocative. His sexual energy stirred mine but I could do nothing about it, not daring to transgress his male boundary.

Within this environment, of being a senior boy and having an apprenticeship (and thereby a wage), I was becoming a “young man”. Learning the print trade would give me a space to reach out for a meaning in my life – a philosophy by which I could live. Soon after signing my indentures I was transferred to the hostel, the Verney, in the nearby village of Waterford.

I was safe: I would be within the school arena till my apprenticeship completed, at aged twenty-one years. From this secure base, my new life was focused away from the Home – except that I, as the other apprentices, travelled to the print shop within the Home’s grounds each work day. Even this attachment, to the main Home, went, as I became involved – or rather, edged into – the society of the local town and into the adult-style routine of the hostel of twelve teenagers, and the Warden’s family; the Home and its daily activities was a thing apart now. And this coming period of apprenticeship years would give me an inner stability – which would consolidate, eventually, from halfway house hostel, into lodgings, at age eighteen; and a life with new people, attempting to make my own way into an exciting but strange, new territory.