My mother always told me I wouldn't amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said 'Just wait'.
- Judy Tenuta
Yes, fate had decreed that I be placed once more under the watchful eyes of my grandparents, though to grasp what happened next, some scraps of family history have to be revealed. But first I must mount a defence against possible allegations of
prejudice against English people. It is to be emphasised then that I,
myself, am English. I was born in England England Italy
It is no longer easy to talk about class in our supposedly ‘classless’ society, in which class divisions are deliberately
blurred for political reasons. In that respect, I recall a statement made by
Tony Blair, a former British Prime Minister, who once declared, with a perfectly straight
face, “We’re all middle class now”.
Well, an article in the Telegraph of 12 January,
2015 divulged
that he possessed a fortune of some 60 million pounds. Yet he wishes to be seen as one with no more political clout than a caretaker.
While thousands of working class children do not have enough to eat, primarily because there is no work for their working class parents.
Thus, Blair is a first class liar.
While thousands of working class children do not have enough to eat, primarily because there is no work for their working class parents.
Thus, Blair is a first class liar.
Working class people, genuine working class
people, that is, people engaged in genuine labour do not as a rule lie, because
a lie could prove dangerous or even fatal. Those whose task is physical work
might be prejudiced or ignorant through lack of education, but they don’t generally
lie.
Of course, onerous physical labour has always
been the province of the man. As for the woman, it follows that - - - !
When I eventually returned to England as an adult
Why she had to voice such maternal hostility to
a son in these letters and, I now believe, in phone calls to several other
English women she knew in Winnipeg
She should never have been a mother, because her
suspicion of everyone she knew made her incapable of love. I have no memory of any
moment in my entire childhood when she betrayed any affection for anyone in the
world. Except maybe her father.
My conception of her essential lovelessness is
founded on a childhood memory of mine on the occasion of her second marriage. An aunt, one of the English women
alluded to earlier, arrived with my uncle to collect we three kids, who were
to lodge with them while our mother and new father departed somewhere for a
short honeymoon. Well, as I was heading for the door, my aunt said, “Colin, aren’t
you going to kiss your mother goodbye?”
I was astounded. I had no memory whatsoever of having
kissed my mother in my entire life, because she had never kissed me. I recall
that she, too, looked discomposed, but made an awkward movement toward me and planted
a peck on my cheek. To demand a show of affection where there is none: that is
English, but my mother lacked even the instinct to know when a show was necessary.
Not only did she show no motherly love for her
children, but the history of our family shows that she nurtured an especial vindictiveness
for her eldest son.
Why?
Because I was the most intelligent and
inquisitive of her three children. She just could not cope with intelligence
and inquisitiveness. There was no place for intelligence or its satisfactions
in the world of ‘ordinary folk’. All of that belonged to the world of the
‘mucky-mucks’, as she called wealthy people. Similarly, any curiosity about things had no
place there either.
“Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,”
was a common response to questions.
When, many years later, I conceived the idea of
attending a university, she said viciously:
“You’ll never see the gates of university!”
A response that showed some intelligence at
work, at least in its choice of words. Her retort probably betrayed a
frustration with her own lack of education, for she often told me she’d been close
to the top of her class when she had been compelled to leave school at 14 to begin
work as a servant in the house of a mucky-muck.
Intelligence and inquisitiveness are not so very
common in our society. The reason is that any sign of such aptitudes growing in
young children are systematically suppressed by a schooling that carefully
restricts their physical movement and squeezes the realm of their learning to
the size of a room in a school. In pretending to ‘educate’ children, we make
prisoners of them.
The children who do best in the suffocating atmosphere of these detention centres are the ones
who have been previously prepared for it, that is to say, the ones who have already been
made prisoners in their own homes, the ones who have already had their natural inclination
to learn and their virgin inquisitiveness suppressed – by their parents, who ensure that their offspring
digest as much as possible about the ‘right’ things, which generally means
things that are ‘useful’ or ‘profitable’ or that lead to ‘advancement’, and as
little as possible about the ‘wrong’ things, meaning the things that stir their
imagination and creativity.
The result of this regimen is that the creative kids, or those that show aptitude in that direction, are weeded out of the system, while those who know only to do what they are told take their place in the fulness of time amongst those who hold the reins of society in their hands. With what consequences? Just contemplate our leaders: examine their fantasies, listen to their lies!
Unfortunately, life has decreed that so very
many of the ‘wrong’ things are so much more interesting or pleasurable than the
‘right’ things. Thus, as a child, I was lured by the siren songs of
unrighteousness and, as a consequence, earned the enmity of my mother, (among
others) who (I suspect) increasingly saw my behaviour as being ‘out of
control’, especially when my father fell ill with the cancer that eventually
led to his death, so that, from that time on, she had to cope alone with her wayward son.
So, what did I get up to in my time of minority that so drove
her to distraction and fuelled her contempt? Nothing very wicked, I would venture
to suggest. I cannot remember all of what incurred the maternal wrath, so that
a few examples must serve.
Fire fascinated me at the time,
and I recall several occasions when I abstracted some matches from the house and
lit a little blaze. The most stupid thing I did in that respect was to light a fire under
the ‘back shed’, an extension of the house on stanchions, used for the storage
of winter coal. We kids habitually crawled underneath it for the purpose of
hiding while engaged in games.
Hiding my fire was my motive that day. I admit it was a remarkably stupid thing to do, because the shed and the whole house were made of wood. However, my fire was a pitifully tiny one, fuelled with just a few scraps of paper, so that the flames failed to rise anywhere near the rafters supporting the floor, roughly three feet from the ground, and lasted only a moment or two. In any case, I don't recall being caught and punished for that specific misdemeanour.
Hiding my fire was my motive that day. I admit it was a remarkably stupid thing to do, because the shed and the whole house were made of wood. However, my fire was a pitifully tiny one, fuelled with just a few scraps of paper, so that the flames failed to rise anywhere near the rafters supporting the floor, roughly three feet from the ground, and lasted only a moment or two. In any case, I don't recall being caught and punished for that specific misdemeanour.
At another time I satisfied my fascination with fire by lighting a little blaze on the front boulevard. This was a strip of wild grass and weeds several feet wide that constituted the division between the sidewalk and the road. It was only meant to be a tiny fire, but I was astonished at how quickly these weeds took flame. They must have been very dry. However, having ignited the blaze, I discovered I couldn’t put it out. It was put out, of course, but I can’t remember how, possibly by the involvement of neighbours, for one of them must have called the police, because I recall an officer, enormous and bulky in his winter buffalo coat, standing next to my mother and looking down at me from a great height.
“If you ever do anything like that again,” he
said, “I’ll take you away from your mother and feed you on bread and water.”
I imagine it was that particular episode, more
than any other, that convinced my mother that I was headed for delinquency,
because, although no actual damage had been done as a result of the blaze, I had
damaged her fantasy of herself as a superior sort of being come from abroad who could teach these yokels a thing or two about gracious behaviour and the
art of raising children.
At another time I ignited a bit of kindling in
the back lane, a narrow road, unpaved in those days, which ran between the
backs of the houses and served for access to the back yards where people kept a vegetable garden and parked
their car if they had one. My brother was crouching down opposite, and I think I was just
about to light my small assembly of paper and twigs when he looked up, got to
his feet and began to back away, looking across the top of my head. I turned to
see what he was looking at, but it was too late. I felt a thump on my backside,
for my mother had just kicked me in the ass.
Hardly Marquis of Queensbury rules.
Hardly Marquis of Queensbury rules.
Redwood Bridge, Winnipeg
I suppose most kids are captivated by running
water. The nearest running water to our house was the Red River , a murky waterway that drifted
through the city and glided past our part of the town about a mile and a half away. As a
mile and a half is a long distance to a child, I was not tempted to visit it, and anyway
my mother threatened terrible retribution if she ever caught us there.
However, there came a day when I fell under the spell
of one Ed Homes, son of a neighbour, who one day persuaded me and (under my
influence) my brother to accompany him down to the river, where he said he
would rent a boat with money earned from his paper route. Well, who could refuse?
Thus, the three of us trudged down to the river where Ed rented a boat and he
and I paddled out onto the murky surface, leaving my brother on the bank
because he was terrified of what our mother might do if she discovered where we
had been and what we had been doing.
The scene of this escapade in my memory now changes. My brother
and I are back at home, our mother is livid with rage, as she has got wind of
our trip to the river. How had she found out? She drags me into the bathroom,
ordering my brother to follow. She grasps her thick wooden hairbrush from off
the top of the toilet tank where she kept it, turns it upside down, seats
herself on the toilet seat, spreads me prone across her knee and beats my backside
in a frenzy with the back of the brush until she can beat no more. Then she releases
me and makes a lame reach for my brother, who makes his escape - who is allowed to make his escape - out the
door.
How had she found out about our trip to the
river? It takes no Sherlock Homes to unravel that mystery.
That was not the first time she had beaten me,
but her terrifying rage that day (as well as the flaming pain I left in my backside)
burned the memory of it into my brain. It was the last time she beat me,
because she remarried not long following that performance. A new husband proved useful for many things,
not least for the beating of children. He was in fact an uncle, my father’s
brother, a brother, I may say, whom my real father had had no respect for. But
he was quickly initiated into the family practice of scapegoating the older boy
when he was requested to continue the work on my backside in response to some other
grudge of my mother’s.
I don't recall what I had done to warrant that particular thrashing, but I do remember being led into the back shed, where my new father began with an attempt to justify the particular whipping he was about to give me. He told me that my mother had said this, and that, and the other, but I can't recall just what he said she’d said. As a man of inadequate schooling, who had grown up on a farm, he had never possessed many words. His new wife, by contrast, had numberless ones, which she doubtlessly deployed to convince him that I needed to be subjected to an ordeal that, I have every reason to believe, he had never had to suffer himself. He was just discharging this 'duty' in the misguided idea of currying favour with his new wife.
He didn’t ask me why I had done whatever it was
I was supposed to have done because I think he feared losing any discussion that might follow
about reasons. He just chose a stout stick from a stack of scrap wood, told
me to lean across a stool and then calmly set about thrashing my backside.
I suppose that my mother had been able to
derive a certain satisfaction from brandishing her hairbrush, but I know that
the same could not be said of my stepfather wielding his stick, for he never attempted
to impose on me that method of discipline again. But that may well have been
because I was simply getting too big to be manhandled like a dummy. From that
time onward his attempts to discipline me were limited to Ramboesque threats
declaring that I was not too big to be beaten again, an ultimatum that grew
increasingly ridiculous every time he repeated it, for in the end he was
compelled to look up at me while mouthing the words. It was mere braggadocio, a performance offered for
the benefit of his wife, still thirsting after demonstrations of
humiliation.
My poor misguided uncle! When all three children had left
home, their mother turned her venom on him, and when he finally realised
the truth about her, it was too late. In the end, finding that he could no longer
share a house with her, he persuaded my brother and sister to acquire separate
accommodation for them in two side-by-side flats in an apartment block.
A few short years later, he died in a Winnipeg
"I didn't know he was going to die,
did I?" she declared to me afterwards in one of our occasional telephone
conversations. It was the most revolting justification of callousness I had
ever heard.
Four years after that, I received the news that
she’d fallen in her flat and had to be taken to hospital in a coma. A couple of
days later it was reported that she had woken from her coma with the
words, “You can’t keep an Englishman down”, before becoming comatose again.
A day or two later she died.
The news saddened me, for my mother had been by
no means an especially nasty specimen of humanity. I remember that after my
brother and I had left home (in my case, to live in a rented house, in his, to
join me there), the family continued to get together every Christmas Eve to share
several drinks and a meal and just to chat about old times. In these instances
it was plain to all who had eyes to see and ears to hear that my mother’s many
years in Canada
Her taste for consuming sizeable quantities of Canadian beer at one sitting alone testified to the truth of that contention. In the ‘season to be jolly’, she got jolly enough on my stepfather’s favourite tipple. On those Christmas Eve evenings she loved to repeat tails about the old days and invariably recapitulated her favourite family story, the one about the time we arrived atGrand Beach
Her taste for consuming sizeable quantities of Canadian beer at one sitting alone testified to the truth of that contention. In the ‘season to be jolly’, she got jolly enough on my stepfather’s favourite tipple. On those Christmas Eve evenings she loved to repeat tails about the old days and invariably recapitulated her favourite family story, the one about the time we arrived at
Grand Beach, Manitoba
She told the story in exactly the same way every
Christmas Eve. Her accent had always sounded English to me, but when I returned
from my first trip to England, I realised just how un-English her pronunciation
had become.
Her conception of England England England England
But it is notable that in all her talk about
memories of England
As you can see from the photograph below, taken at about the time of my fascination with fire, the grass and weeds of both boulevards are quite lush. The picture is of my brother and me.
As you can see from the photograph below, taken at about the time of my fascination with fire, the grass and weeds of both boulevards are quite lush. The picture is of my brother and me.
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