Psychovertical. Andy Kirkpatrick

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СКАЧАТЬ course, the trick to swimming in the docks was not to swallow any water, or get entangled on anything below the surface, or bump into a dead dog or worse. I would often imagine the zombied bodies of dead tramps or murdered prostitutes crawling along on the bottom, trying to catch my feet—perhaps more of an indication of my video choices than of a vivid imagination.

      Every summer, kids would drown, and the headmaster would give a stern warning in assembly about not going near the docks. The worst thing that ever happened to me, and the last time I jumped in the docks, was when I landed on something very sharp and cut my feet so badly I couldn’t walk, and had to be pushed home on someone’s bike, blood dripping out of my Dunlop trainers all the way. Up until then, whatever the dangers, these things never stopped me. After all, it was an early lesson in life, that games without risk are just that—games. Anyway, the local swimming baths had been bulldozed to make way for a new bypass. For us it was the docks or nothing.

      Someone once told me that a wilderness was an area of several thousand miles with no infrastructure or human impact. They were wrong. Looking back I think the docks, Little Switzerland, and the bombed-out buildings gave me something immeasurably valuable as a child, something that I would hang onto for the rest of my life. These industrial wastelands of cut stone and dank water were a wilderness as precious to us as any tundra. They were where we explored both without and within ourselves.

      The early years of my life in Hull seemed to be one long hot summer: the roads were always quiet, and weekends and holidays never seemed to end. We were poor, but so was everyone else, so this never seemed much of a problem. Mine was probably the last urban generation to have an old-fashioned childhood fairly free of consumerism save for the odd Star Wars figure. It was consumerism that later created real poverty and, worse still, the realisation of how poor people were. Back then, everyone on the estate was hard up, so we were all equals. Having a TV that was rented, and required you to feed it 50p coins to make it work, was normal, as were free school dinners and clothing grants. Nowadays I reflect on the fact that I still get free clothes—only now they are from outdoor companies and I get paid to wear them.

      Unlike the mothers of most of my friends, my mum would always try and save enough money to take us to the seaside for the day at least once a month on the train, our family British Rail railcard making it possible. I used to wonder how we could be a family, without our dad, but obviously BR was pragmatic on such sticking points. We would arrive in Scarborough on the earliest train possible, and disembark carrying everything we needed for the day. ‘Now,’ my mum would say as we walked towards the beach, ‘we have £5 to spend, and when it’s spent that’s it.’ It was amazing how far that money could go.

      She once said that we were never poor, but that she was poor, and it’s true that she kept many of her hardships secret, well apart from the need to make ‘hen’s meat’. Nevertheless, growing up I was aware that life for her was a juggling act between paying bills and having money for trips to the seaside, toys or little luxuries that made the flat a home for us. Her life was full of small disasters, unexpected bills, lost or damaged clothes she had to replace, and I would often see her despair, only to rally later and fight back. One of her most common sayings was, ‘If that isn’t the story of my life!’, used whenever something went wrong. She seemed to have so much bad luck, with life constantly making her tough life even tougher. It was only later that I understood that poor people tread such a fine line that even the slightest thing can push them over the edge, yet each time she climbed back and carried on. ‘Never mind, it’s the story of my life’ became so common that it seemed like an automatic defense, an acceptance of what life threw at us. One such occasion was when, on our way to Scarborough, the train began sounding its horn, then slammed on its brakes, eventually coming to a sudden stop, depositing the passengers on the floor. ‘I’m very sorry,’ said the guard as he walked through the carriages. ‘We seem to have hit a cow on the line.’ Our nice day out ruined, Mum just looked at us. ‘Well, if that’s not the bloody story of my life.’

      If my early memories of Hull seem to be captured in rays of summer sun, then the years that followed are cast in autumnal gloom, beginning when I moved up into senior school. This was an all-boys’ school, the classes packed tight, the atmosphere tense. Its hallways and balconies were like a prison wing. It seemed as if I had been taken from a small, hard-working and positive school, where children felt special and valuable, and then poured into the grinder of a factory for the disillusioned and bewildered. A school system should attempt to bring to life that special gift each of us is given at birth, to blow on that ember of skill and help you to realise something you perhaps could be. This school, and many like it, simply tipped the lot of us into a bucket and stirred for five years.

      Overnight I went from being a happy child who had a few problems with writing and reading, to a ‘REM’. I was stuck in remedial classes where teaching was simply about containment. Kids ran wild. They pushed teachers out of their classrooms, they set fire to desks, threw their books out of windows. The threat of physical violence hung in the air. All you could do was hide behind bluff and show, or slink to the furthest corners at break time. No one could show any interest in learning for fear of being labelled a swot and ostracised by the pack. We were all going to hell.

      At the end of our time there, it was decided that our failing school would be amalgamated with another failing school, thus doubling the problem and halving the resources to deal with it. Many teachers were just seeing their time out, ineffectual, exhausted and plodding. You felt they hated teaching us just as much as we hated being taught by them. What was lacking was passion of any sort, but then, with three-and-a-half-million unemployed, they knew they were serving out a sentence just like us and thought they weren’t paid enough for passion. They went on strike for more pay, and soon the kids joined them, the local radio station coming down to interview them standing at the gates, not realising the strike had in reality already been going on for years on both sides. With so many unemployed, there was an air of pointlessness about the whole thing. Why weren’t we learning? No one gave a fuck.

      Worst of all, I suddenly seemed to be bad at every subject, swamped and drifting along. I became aware that my mind didn’t seem to be working as well as everyone else’s. In the first maths exam, I spent the fifty minutes trying to work out what number June was in the date-of-birth box at the top of the paper, more afraid of looking like a fool at getting that wrong than of failing the paper itself; trying to write out the months of the year on a scrap of paper, unable to remember all twelve, or the order they came in. The harder I tried to think, the deeper the answer sank from view.

      I had always loved school, and my young mind had gobbled up knowledge. I was a ‘mine of useless information’ as my mum would say. Now I hated school, and felt sick each morning knowing I had another day of bedlam ahead. I wanted a teacher who could look into me and see my potential and help me draw it out, but no one had the time. There seemed to be no future for any of us apart from youth training schemes, dead end jobs, going on the dole or crime.

      I didn’t want to sign on. Deep inside me I held the ember of self-belief that I was better than that. I didn’t want an ordinary life like the parents of my friends, signing on, doing cash-in-hand jobs, living off the proceeds of goods that ‘fell off the backs of lorries’, having kids, trying to pay off the catalogue man for their Christmas presents. I wanted to be free of it all. But how?

      I went to the careers adviser and told him I’d like to work outdoors, but the only thing he had in his file was working in forestry. I saw a poster for a careers day about being an officer in the army, but was told by the adviser I couldn’t go as I probably wouldn’t be able to get enough O-levels to qualify for a place. This felt like a slap in the face. I was angry. I wanted to prove him wrong, but knew he was right. I wasn’t clever enough.

      I began to think about joining the Marines, probably because it was the only option that offered some way out, and maybe because it also offered some way back into the comfort of military institutionalisation that I had felt so attracted to as a child. СКАЧАТЬ