Intimations of Mortality - 2
Being a series of random but loosely connected musings on my life, the world I have lived in and what the future - what's left of it - may hold.
It is good to have a dream. One dream. Or many dreams. But one dream, one big, beautiful dream, is best. When it comes to dreams, go all in. There will be other nights, other tables, other decks.
My dream was escape. To leave behind the grey and the grime, the tedious steel-toed shuffle into nothingness. I didn't want my mother's life of drudgery punctuated by a couple of port-and-lemons and a Saturday night fuck. My father was a tool-maker (where have I heard that recently?). He spent his life making a tool of himself.
They weren't happy, not with their lives, not with one another. If the duty of parents is to engender ambition in their children, their misery proved mine a success. I was determined not to be anything like them.
My elder sister - 19 months older, though I usually call it two years for brevity - took one of the more established routes out. Worked hard at school, stayed on until she was 18, avoided teenage pregnancy by "saving herself". She studied for two years at a secretarial college - in those days, men who thought nothing of flying a jet fighter aircraft would faint away at the prospect of using a typewriter keyboard.
She qualified, got a job with a local firm. Within another two years, she became Personal Assistant to one of the directors. She personally assisted him out of his marriage and, via the Registry Office, into her bed. A year later, gave birth to their first child. "Saving herself" clearly didn't do any harm.
For some reason that, even now, sixty years later, I cannot fathom out, I took a different route. I was, to put it mildly - my parents stopped putting it mildly after about six months - a difficult child. Disrespectful, disruptive, disobedient. I could claim that I was fiercely independent. In truth, I was a total brat. I wasn't going to work to escape. I was going to blow the bloody doors off.
I followed my sister to the local Primary school, literally as well as figuratively. She hated me following her. I followed more closely. And then to the Secondary Modern, which was very secondary and not very modern. No Grammar or Comprehensive School for us. We were the lowest of the low. Cannon fodder for a country that no longer had any cannons.
I know this now. Back then, all I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I had that strange affliction visited on some children that I had been born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents. This wasn't my life.
It is good to have a dream. One dream. Or many dreams. But one dream, one big, beautiful dream, is best. When it comes to dreams, go all in. There will be other nights, other tables, other decks.
My dream was escape. To leave behind the grey and the grime, the tedious steel-toed shuffle into nothingness. I didn't want my mother's life of drudgery punctuated by a couple of port-and-lemons and a Saturday night fuck. My father was a tool-maker (where have I heard that recently?). He spent his life making a tool of himself.
They weren't happy, not with their lives, not with one another. If the duty of parents is to engender ambition in their children, their misery proved mine a success. I was determined not to be anything like them.
My elder sister - 19 months older, though I usually call it two years for brevity - took one of the more established routes out. Worked hard at school, stayed on until she was 18, avoided teenage pregnancy by "saving herself". She studied for two years at a secretarial college - in those days, men who thought nothing of flying a jet fighter aircraft would faint away at the prospect of using a typewriter keyboard.
She qualified, got a job with a local firm. Within another two years, she became Personal Assistant to one of the directors. She personally assisted him out of his marriage and, via the Registry Office, into her bed. A year later, gave birth to their first child. "Saving herself" clearly didn't do any harm.
For some reason that, even now, sixty years later, I cannot fathom out, I took a different route. I was, to put it mildly - my parents stopped putting it mildly after about six months - a difficult child. Disrespectful, disruptive, disobedient. I could claim that I was fiercely independent. In truth, I was a total brat. I wasn't going to work to escape. I was going to blow the bloody doors off.
I followed my sister to the local Primary school, literally as well as figuratively. She hated me following her. I followed more closely. And then to the Secondary Modern, which was very secondary and not very modern. No Grammar or Comprehensive School for us. We were the lowest of the low. Cannon fodder for a country that no longer had any cannons.
I know this now. Back then, all I knew was that I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I had that strange affliction visited on some children that I had been born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents. This wasn't my life.
61-69, F
