Dib f***ing Dib

I'm on the fence with my experience in Scouting.  My view changes depending on the time of day.  On one hand it something that I was entirely unsuited for.  I hated change and trying new things.  It was a place of conformity, noise, shouting and emerging testosterone and machismo.  I got put, at one point, in a "patrol" that was full of school bullies.  I assume the scoutmasters thought that it would be character-building for me.  My first camp was filled with dread at the impending "camp christening" that never, in fact, came to pass.  I still think about my first experience on a climbing wall and being frozen, a few inches from the ground, and receiving no help from the venture scout holding the safety rope below.  I still remember sharing a tent with a bunch of kids who would discuss, when they thought I wasn't there, but was in fact hiding in the dark, how much they didn't like me.  I remember having another tent all on my own because I had ringworm.  I still, as you know, count the gang show being on my long list of early stage failures!

But on the other hand it was a place where I could be a different person to who I was at school.  I could, at last, let off some steam.  There was an old man in the stores at the back - the quartermaster - who'd sort you out with tent pegs and suchlike.  There was a kid called R who told me all I needed to know about jerking off.  I was put, on other occasions, in sixes and patrols that were slightly more suited to a kid of my sensitivities and was properly looked after.  I developed an early crush on a curly-haired kid called N.  He was crazy - seriously so.  I finally cracked canoing and still remember the surprise on the scoutmaster's face when I was the first back from the other side of the lake.  Camp fires and the occasional cooking triumphs.  Lightweight camp wins and bike rides across Belgium.  Running wild and wide games.  Being given a lift from Roald Dahl when we were lost.  Catching the gits out in rounders in high summer - three times.  The nice sisters from ventures who'd just been to the Queen, a Kind of Magic concert at Wembley.  Getting drunk at the scoutmasters house and dipping someone's tie in his coffee and going crazy in the minigym upstairs. 

If I had kids I'd probably send them to cubs and scouts.  I'd want them to have the good times and the things that it did, in fact, teach me.  I'd desparately try to protect them from the bad and be devastated if I failed to do so. 

I still have a dream now and then about returning to scouts because I missed my last "parade".  I feel nervous, again, about the prospect (which I want to avoid) of "going up" into Ventures.  I feel that it would be easier and more sensible if I wasn't there. 

And my shirt's way too small. 

Performance Angst

I guess I got my musical inclinations from my grandfather.  It was his piano I used to bash away on as a kid, swapping one book of music for another and making, no doubt, the same interminable racket, come what may!

The first piano arrived at around the age of six or seven and left a still-remaining gash in the garage to kitchen doorframe.  A great deal, up to a certain point where lack of real or meaningful talent really came into play, came easily to me (moreso than my brother as I've already mentioned).  And I, perhaps ahead of my time, was soon ready for public performance.

The first forrays were pretty disasterous - a piano solo that stopped twice in its tracks (even after back-to-back practice during the first half of the concert) and some accompaniment to the junior choir that barely got started.

This was all around the time of the dying-days of my time in Scouts which involved a crashingly awful performance from my "patrol" in the Christmas Gang Show that left me more-or-less weeping in the leaf-strewn car park, outside the scout hut, crying "why again?" to the moon!  What a drama queen.

I don't think I showed the "classic" signs of stress when it came to performance.  As ever, such things are internalised and hidden.    My Mum and Dad were baffled by my distress at what I saw as crushing failure - although they might have been trying to make a small deal of it for my (or even their own) sake!

But I got better - before too long (in the grand scheme of things) I was the repetiteur of choice and, towards the end of my sixth form, performed the first movement of the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 with some scraping from the school orchestra behind me (although D's oboe playing is still a pleasurable memory).

It was E's Mum who was the first to congratulate me that evening - my own parent's led with the "well - are you pleased?" line again - although they would be devastated, I'm sure, if they knew that I'd ever doubted their pride in that moment.

There is a large part of me that's tremendously pleased that I was encouraged to "keep it as a hobby" although I thought it was awfully defeatist at the time.  It gave me great pleasure and focus - although I resisted, at times, being stretched too far - and it gave me goals which I managed, in the majority to fulfil.  And at times it gave me a way to express myself where other forms of expression would have failed.

After a particularly violent ding-dong with my mother I sat down to do some piano practice and chose only slow, mediative and, I thought, calming pieces.  I even played the fast pieces at a deliberately slow tempo, to maintain the mood that I thought I was creating.  When my Dad got home, he asked my Mum what she'd been doing that afternoon.

"Listening to your son play the piano for me".

A handful of pills

I think my parents were quietly worried about me - especially in these early days.  If I discovered that my son had (happily, blythely) spent the majority of a day trip to Bologne on his own I, too, would have been worried for a variety of reasons.  They called my form teacher with concerns (as ever, handled clumsily by all concerned) and expressed sentiments of confidence when they spotted me happily dancing with someone at a school event (let's be clear - it was pensioners day - at which my parents were on St John's duty - wrong on so many levels). I once, too, overheard them asking each other what they thought was wrong with me (I sneaked off after hearing this - I was indeed in quite a funk at the time - but it was because I'd been musing, generally, at the time, on the theme of death as well as on my, as I saw it, future inability to afford a house of my own on my current savings position, even including future interest!).

I guess, on reflection, they did have cause for concern.  I was clearly not over-run with friends and my run-ins with school bullies had been noted and documented.  Indeed, I'd suffered a black eye in return for fraternising with the "wrong" girl in the class, I'd been pushed over a variety of times and I clearly enjoyed (if that's the right word) the company of some girls a few years my senior who would hang out by the music block prior to band practice rather than kids my own age.  And even though, on the surface, I was handling it all with my usual aloof stoicism, I'd spent a number of evenings wanting it all to end, by whatever means necessary, and had even spent one particular evening sitting on the bathroom floor with a handful of pills in my hand  wondering whether taking them all was a solution of some shape or form.

I guess the advantage that I had was that I knew, deep down, that it does, indeed, get better.  Even though I would say that I was lost and that things would never be the same again, I guess I knew that things always change, you always end up finding your way and that optimism is always better than the alternative.

Deep down, I guess that's what I knew.

Girlfriends

My first (not, in fact, only) girlfriend was around the age of 13-14.  I'd had someone who I'd held hands with momentarily, prior to that (prompting a great deal of soul-searching with my brother as to whether I should tell our parents or not), but E was most definitely a girl friend and we are best described as "on and off" for a number of years.  Indeed, the first time that we were "off", I didn't realise in the slightest until a number of members of our year came up to me and told me that they'd heard that we'd broken up and that I'd treated her terribly.  Indeed, the Number One School Bully in our year (there were numbers 2-9, all of whom were accolytes of his, some of whom are in prison, hospital or working in timber yards now) took it upon himself to give me a good menacing on the subject (he's also memorable in that he "offered me out" once on the basis that he was the "hardest of the hards" and I was the "hard of the stiffs" in my view, or so he thought - more on that, perhaps, another day).


And I really did try!  Our first kiss (with E not Number One Bully)(and I'm starting to think that it was our only one) was by the side of a dual carriageway, walking back to her house with a couple of other friends, from the railway station.  My overriding memory is of an overly soft wetness that I couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

The ups and downs of my relationship with E, either as friends or as boy/girlfriends, was the catalyst, some times, to whether I had any friends at all.  Indeed, she held such sway over the small group of acquaintances that I had that people would, indeed, decide whether they would or could talk to me on the strength of her say-so.

It was with E that I sat in the back row of the cinema (Freddy Krueger movies during the daytime) furtively fumbling.  It was E who famously touched me up in the front row of the balcony of Les Miz.  It was E who gave me a very fruity pair of briefs with hearts all over them.  We're still friends today - we've not talked about our past for some time.

Chase Me!

So - it turns out that 1R wasn't, in fact, the bottom class - it was one of the two that were second from the top. The form teacher was a kindly woodwork teacher, close to retirement, with very exacting standards when it comes to the conduct that he expects in that first twenty minutes of the day. He kept someone behind once for answering "Oui" to the register, rather than "Yes".

I had, on reflection, quite a schizophrenic first couple of years. I was incredibly studious in class and, in the break times, I went to the strangest lengths to blow off steam. I'd taunt kids who were significantly older than me (some of whom were contemporaries of my brother - which can't have helped his case at all) and, for want of a better phrase, get them to "chase me". There's an irony here in that it made me a friend in TB - someone who wouldn't have been seen dead sitting next to me in class but who would approach me in break times and ask if I wanted to "get a chase".

I was top of the class in everything. Apart from PE and Home Economics/Technical Studies (we were the first year where boys and girls both had to do both - the boys would burn their scrambled egg on toast and the girls would get their fathers to produce intricate drawings of ballpoint pens). Further down the line it transpired that there was some debate about whether to move me into the top class in the year but the idea was ruled out in that I was "making friends" in 1R.... Kids don't exactly warm to other kids who are top of the class in everything. Indeed, the crazy Czech chemistry teacher ("are we having a smashing time?") berated the class mercilessly for groaning at the announcement of another high-scoring test result - "why you GROAN! you should RESPECT!".

I took my school report home once and showed it to my Mum who was having her hair cut in a neighbour's kitchen (the neighbour had the same name as my Mum and a similar taste in swirly carpets - their similarities ended when it came to smoking and divorce). "Look at all those Ones" my Mum said (referring to my position in the class). The hairdressing neighbour just rolled her eyes and groaned.

CB was a girl who I fought endlessly for my top slot with. She left, unfortunately, after the first year. My father was quite keen on her - I remember him laughing when she referred to me as her "number one rival".

I also remember a game of Kiss Chase (did we really play that at that age?) at Hatfield House where I was chasing her - a caught her and lived up to the name of the game - something that ellicited the response from CB - "blimey - I didn't think you had it in you!".

First Day in the Rain

The Americans attach so much significance to one's passage through High School. People who've attending private schools in the UK appear to do the same. But we don't tend to give similar weight to "senior school" if you're in the comprehensive system. Now that we're getting older and a tendency for nostalgia and reminisence has started to kick in, a "favourite memory from your school days" trend is starting to emerge - perhaps aided, uniquely, by facebook. Perhaps it wouldn't have emerged without facebook and school days nostalgia would be confined to the small niche who've taken the time to join a old boys/girls society. Who knows in this facebook-dominated world.

Anyhow - my first day at senior school. It was raining.

My mum was insistent that I would walk to school - start as you mean to go on. However, S's mother had other plans - especially as it was p**sing it down. She had a green Triumph Acclaim - as did we (it was inherited after my grandfather died and was our first car with electric windows - a real sign that we had finally arrived - I was later to put a rather large dent in the back passenger door as well as burn the seat upholstery with a carelessly-discarded cigarette).

I was already "different" from the other kids in that my school blazer was from the original school outfitters in North London rather than being from the new one in the local department store - the identifying feature being a "properly" embroidered badge rather than an iron-on one.

And we walked, S and I, into school and headed straight for an undercover walkway, of which there were many linking the various school buildings together. This particular area was packed full of children waiting, in the dry, for the day to begin. And the first person that I bump into is my brother. My brother and a couple of his friends.

They were laughing at me.

I ignored them and took a left into the school building and the assembly hall.

I have little memory of the headmaster's welcoming address. All I can remember is hoping upon hope that when the class allocations were read out that I wouldn't be in 1R. We had already received word, via S's sister, that 1R would be the bottom stream - the thickos. I was a little nervous in this respect because I didn't feel that the entry exam had gone particularly well for me - it was on the same day, incidentally, as the one and only time that our home football team made it to the FA cup final . We lost. The maths had been terribly easy. The "english" exam was a fill in the gaps affair. S felt that it had gone well (and this was later proved through his being selected for the Top Class (from which he was later demoted)). The fact that for one of his answers, he'd said "Washington" where I'd said the answer was "marvelous" gave me particular cause for concern. Given the fact that I was a certified "swot", the impending sense of forthcoming injustice was becoming too much to bear.

And which class was I summoned to join?

1R.