Erotica Artist Ch. 01: Inferior Initiation

As it happens, one of my earliest memories involves solitary confinement and the birth of an obsession. This in a secluded corner of an elementary school playground in the shadow of St. Mathew's Anglican Church. A self-imposed isolation really, for, sensitive flower that I am, I choose not to join in the rough-housing of my schoolmates. But it's a very real solitude all the same.

I'm peering through the railings, the bars, in fact, that are embedded in a waist-high brick wall, across the road and south for two hundred yards to the local railway station, where an arc of track gleams between bleak row houses on the left and a mountain of coal slag on the right, and where each morning a passenger train full of adults with the freedom to venture on a weekday to exotic locales at seventy miles an hour shoots west to the city and the sea.

Okay, maybe not so exotic a locale: Liverpool. Lime Street station to be exact, and the River Mersey. But beyond that the Irish Sea, the Atlantic, and North America.

It would take another decade to win that freedom myself, to escape over that wall and through those bars and to leave all British schoolyards and this provincial backwater and this class-ridden country for good, not aboard an express train maybe but with the same destination: lovely Liverpool by the sea, a town I had visited only once or twice before on pre-Christmas shopping trips with my parents. A pre-Beatles town still, in 1962, though they were there somewhere in its dreary back streets. At Merseyside the cream-colored liner waiting, ready to slip downriver to the Irish Sea, the Atlantic, the New World!

For the time being though it was just yearning glimpses at an outside world full of promise and excitement that was represented by that roaring steam train. Symbolism already in my young life, though I had yet to learn the term. Church steeples casting shadows and express trains soaring west.

And I wondered later if it wasn't this elementary fascination that allowed me to waste countless hours as an older schoolboy trainspotting on railway platforms or on country embankments, the sweet green meadows of Beech Hill maybe, underlining in blue or red ink the numbers and names of those potent old machines just a year or so before their relegation to the scrapheap. And here too, I now realize, was a species of early deprivation. Young as I was, I could never leave the confines of the London-Midland Region, the northwest UK. Never to visit the Eastern Region, the Southern, never to go spotting at Euston, Kings Cross, Victoria or Waterloo! Still, to be on the London-Glasgow route and at the crossroads for Liverpool and Yorkshire, that was something, wasn't it?

The exoticism of those identification plates bolted alongside the steam boilers: an education in itself. British colonies and regiments and battleships and battle sites, admirals and military figures renowned and obscure, heroes of old from the rich and glorious past of a Britain already well into decline, demoted to the sidelines of the world it so recently dominated, just as the steam locomotives themselves were soon to be shunted into the wrecking yard.

The names that resonated most for me in later years were never of war heroes or admirals, always of writers. I had no idea who or what were Tyrwhitt or Wemyss, but I knew of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, Dickens and Kipling and Hardy. And I would come to know much more.

The power, the speed, the freedom of those old trains: how I longed to be aboard one! How I yearned for liberation!

But there were bars along the top of that brick wall and I was maybe five or six years old. I was already seeking out the quiet, lonely corners, as far from the rough-and-tumble as I could get and as close to the escape route: gleaming rail lines heading west.

* * *

This sense of limitation, of deprivation, of imprisonment, came not just from school, where shyness isolated me, but from home too, from the dreary brick house at the end of the dismal back street. Queen Street it was called. No indoor toilet and no bathtub, in fact no bathroom at all, and no heating beyond a pathetic coal-burning fireplace. No effective heating in a climate as wet and frigid as the northwest of England in the early fifties! It was just a step or two from living in a cave!

I never knew cold like that again, not even in the wilds of coastal British Columbia: a damp, steel cold that bore through you and made getting out of bed in the morning an agonizing act of will.

And that toilet: across the street, quite literally, part of the tiny brick out-building that housed the garbage cans, a white-washed, wooden doored cubicle where as you sat to do your business you heard the talk and the footsteps of passers-by on the cobble-stones, before you pulled the chain of a cistern whose pipes froze solid every winter. In later years I sometimes tried to recall what it was like to drop my pants and perch on that wooden seat in the depths of December or January, and I found I couldn't do it: the memory, the nightmare, had been erased. Maybe during the winter months the entire family used the chamber pot under the bed for all calls of nature. I could never remember. I had blotted it all out.

Was it any wonder I developed feelings of inferiority from these earliest days? My life was inferior. Any more inferior and you were living in a frigid cave with ice water dripping down the walls.

And the parents that brought me into this hellhole weren't exactly bursting with confidence either, were they? Not exactly the couple to break out of this relentless grind of poverty and deprivation? My mother toted up less than four years of school because of a sickly childhood, and though in later life a voracious reader, she suffered always from an acute sense of not having much to offer the world.

For me she was everything: warm, even-tempered, forgiving. I can remember only one occasion from early childhood when she scared me out of my wits, and I deserved it. After I'd thrown a fit over not getting something I coveted at the grocery store, she somehow locked me in my room, or pretended to, and told me she was leaving me alone in the house while she finished shopping.

Abandoned! By the most beloved woman in my life! The experience shook me greatly, and I could not recall acting out in such a manner ever again, though all she was doing was correcting obnoxious and hysterical behavior as well as she knew how.

In the real world she was shy and self-effacing to a point where she barely existed. And yet whatever strength, whatever backbone existed in the family was hers. For my father was a cipher.

Away from his one or two boyhood cronies, he was even more tongue-tied and socially inept than his wife. Next to his boisterous, brazen older sister Dolly, he was practically mute. Out of school at fourteen and glad of it, he was apprenticed as a bricklayer. Not an insensitive soul himself, he was nonetheless all his life proud of the fact that he never read books. He didn't see the point.

Imagine that: to be proud of your lack of desire to know anything about the world around you! How could anyone live in such smug ignorance? And this stubbornness and lack of vision were his strongest characteristics. If there was anything more potent in him it was his impatience, his irritability, and his immense negativity.

And though he tried to be affectionate in his way, he was never able to offer a single word of encouragement to me or my sister in our formative years or thereafter. He could neither say the words or make the gestures. And if he did have anything to say, it was always a word of admonition, a negative, a warning. Every infraction, no matter how minor, could end in the direst consequences. There were never any positive outcomes to anything, only ruinous probabilities. And whatever happened, it was always your own fault.

When still very small, I one winter evening squatted, freezing, before the rarely lit parlor fireplace while both parents were busy in the tiny kitchen. Hands spread out above the flames, I daydream over the red-hot grottoes formed by the coals in the grate. Till I lose my balance and tip forward, hands first, into the fire. I'm suddenly in agony, but for as long as I can, for many minutes, I suffer with my scorched hands in silence, refusing to tell my parents, knowing what would ensue. It wasn't that they were lacking sympathy, but that the price for the care, at least from my father, was so high: upbraiding and rebuke. Retribution.

"Stupid lad! What were you thinkin'?" or some such.

Much later, on an all-too-rare summer holiday week in Blackpool, the cheesy but exciting working class vacation spot by the sea, I one day sprint eagerly back to the boarding house from the beach for something I've forgotten, a pail, a kite, something, and a sports car zooms out from a lane and across the sidewalk. I'm unhurt but end up draped over the front fender. I could easily have been injured or killed. But instead of raging at the idiot driver, I quickly run on, feeling guilty: I shouldn't have been running so carelessly across the alley etc. etc.

I have learned from my never-forgiving father that you are always in the wrong. You are always guilty. This is father's major bequest to his only son. There really wasn't much else. He wasn't Kafka's dad, certainly, but in the neighborhood.

When he passed away a few years back at the age of eighty five and my mother and sister and I had to sit down with a funeral director and come up with some items to flesh out his biography, the record of his time on this earth, there was an embarrassing silence around the table. We could barely come up with a thing. Had he been a doting father? No. A doting grandfather? No. A faithful husband? Okay, yes, he was that. We think. Likes? Dislikes? Hobbies? Passions?

He followed the local soccer team when young and for years afterwards religiously filled out his football pools, but other than that, there was nothing. A decent husband who didn't drink or smoke. That's about it. Oh yes, and he liked to watch sports on TV.

* * *

There was another characteristic, besides a bottomless guilt, that I acquired from old dad: his profound reserve. From my mother I gained a lifelong love of books and the written word, but I was never, like my father, much of a talker. And as for speaking in public ...

An early memory of abject terror was standing before an audience of parents, as the narrator in some school pageant. Again there was the feeling of entrapment, and of being coerced into doing something I absolutely loathed. I would have given anything not to have had to stand in front of that audience and mumble through that awful narration. But I had nothing to give. Nothing to trade.

All I had was imagination, and that seemed to cause me nothing but trouble. Barely into my education career I was stood in front of the class - another audience - for daydreaming. A dried-up hag named Miss Hoople, frustrated at my lack of concentration and inability to calculate some elementary math problem, forced me to count off the number of laughing children she sent in and out of the classroom door.

"Six were here, four go out the door, now how many are left?" or some such thing. All that was missing was the epithet "moron!"

What a humiliating place it was, that primary parochial school, Five years of the drudgery of catechism in an educational system that had a set of exams waiting for the unsuspecting eleven-year-old that tested speed and accuracy in math and English and spatial intelligence: the fearful, fateful Eleven-plus that determined if you were fit for grammar school and later perhaps university, or were to be shunted into technical school, or alternatively, a career selling shoes or delivering coal.

Not feeling up to par on the day of the exam? Too bad, you may not score high enough and end up out on the street at age sixteen. Forget about grammar school and university. Not feeling well, nervous, or having just spent five or six years at St. Mathew's droning the Anglican catechism? Same thing. Your future decided forever at age eleven.

Such a limited life already, a life of physical deprivation and intellectual imprisonment and already the high-security facility of working-class mediocrity waiting for the teenage years, the only chance of escape a one-day set of exams I had not a hope of passing. An entire future set at age eleven in three hours of nervous tension.

* * *

Outside of school there were glimmers of hope. The shyness was paralyzing only when I was the center of attention in some artificial school situation. One on one with neighborhood friends just as deprived as I was, I could relax There were endless summer days in the weed-choked garden beyond the out-houses or in the farther flung hayfields with my devoted friend, the slow-witted, ever-cheerful Raymond. And if guilt ever rose to the surface, it was rarely.

One day I grew so outraged over something Raymond and a visiting school friend of his had done or said or not done or not said - maybe they'd excluded me from something: I can no longer remember - that I crept around the brick out-buildings, and while they were innocently sweeping up, of all things, in front of Raymond's house, I lobbed a sharp hunk of slate in their direction.

It sailed between them, missing their heads by inches, and shattered a windowpane. Raymond blamed his friend for putting out the glass with his broom handle. Neither saw the missile, or me. But what terrified me at once was the wanton lunacy of my act of vengeance. An inch or two either way and Raymond or his friend could have been killed or blinded or at least had a jaw broken and teeth smashed. Both their lives, and mine, could have been changed forever.

I slunk away into the afternoon full of self-loathing, deep shame and yes, guilt. Echoes of these feelings would reverberate in my life for years. But for the time being at least I was not to be incarcerated literally for nearly decapitating Raymond. Instead, over a five year period, a series of minor miracles occurs.

Miracle number one: my family moves away from the hellish hovel of Queen Street to a paradise on the western outskirts of town. And what has brought about this wondrous migration, as unexpected as it is exhilarating? Not some sudden burst of enterprise from my stick-in-the-mud father, surely? No indeed, the source of this minor miracle is dad's flighty, superficial, self-absorbed sister Dolly, with no small encouragement from her eldest son, nineteen- year- old Jamie.

An odd collaboration, this, for she really doesn't seem to care much for the charming, handsome, affable teenager. Maybe she cooperates just to shut Jamie up. No brainier than her brother but with enough confidence and sheer bravado for the both of them, she has somehow secured sponsorship from old friends for emigration to British Columbia.

Her husband Joe, warm, pliable, doomed Joe, will leave within weeks for the job that awaits him in the Beaver Falls Hotel. Dolly, Jamie, and younger son Eddie, will soon follow. Their house, their dream house as far as I'm concerned, needs to be sold fast, and so is offered to my parents at a very reasonable price.

Incredibly, there's some hesitation from dad the dynamo, but his wife will not allow such an opportunity to slip away. It takes every last penny they have and then some, and it means several years of real financial hardship, but one summer afternoon I sit with the furniture in the back of a borrowed truck with only half a rear door, and watch 54 Queen Street fade into my past.

Raymond and the horrific brick hovel on the wrong side of town are abandoned in favor of a home with an indoor toilet and a real bathroom, though still no central heating, a house facing westward over a swath of hayfield and woodland.

The parochial school is left behind for a secular establishment geared to churning out grammar school candidates. In my tenth year, just in time, I am placed under the tutelage of the formidable Mr. Hart - Mr. All-heart to those who know and love him - a dynamic teacher renowned for successfully pushing a huge percentage of students through the grueling Eleven-plus exam.

A year of catch-up follows, ten or eleven months of unmitigated horror, chock full of ridicule and bullying, in which the class seating plan goes from right to left in descending order of scholastic merit, and where I find myself on the far left, and in the back row, which means not only am I among the slowest and dumbest kids in the room, I am the slowest and dumbest kid in the room and never for one second of the day am I allowed to forget it.

Among the over-achievers sitting on the far right of the classroom are the brilliant but vicious and borderline psychotic Kendrick twins, whose pleasure it is at recess to lead a marauding pack of thugs to root out misfits like myself from the more secluded corners of the playground and toss them in the air one, twice, three times or more and then leave them nauseous and squirming on the concrete. Many poor wretches are hauled kicking and screaming into this mayhem by the powerful vigilantes but I remain in mute submission, even when my innards are churning.

After the torture I retire to my corner to continue my daydreams of freedom. I have no trains to watch anymore, but my imagination is still vibrant, much to the chagrin of Mr. All-heart, who one day catches me gazing off into space at the start of a strictly timed preparatory quiz.

"That imagination of yours will cause you grief sometime, young Mason," he warns. "There's no place for it here."

He was right in the present instance, of course. If I was ever to get through the exam of a lifetime I had to concentrate. But such a gift, such a treasure, this ability to imagine. And yes, Mr. All-heart, the source of grief and turmoil also. Did it lead me through labyrinths of pain over the years or was it in fact my only real source of joy and enlightenment, of freedom, repeatedly saving my sorry ass?

A year of pure hell with Mr. All-heart follows, lightened only by his lame jokes: "Fairhurst, be quiet or I shall drive you into the ground like a tent-peg!" Or: "Look at Standish, he hasn't laughed so hard since his grandmother fell down the stairs!" Then in spite of the schoolyard brutalization and the incessant humiliation in the classroom, I almost pass the Eleven-plus. I'm given another year to prepare for a second shot at it, and free now of the Kendricks, who have moved on, I'm promoted to somewhere in the top third of the class and at the end of this, minor miracle number two, I pass the monumental exam and along with pretty Susan Tomlinson and two others I go on to the grammar school full of boys and girls in crisp white shirts and ties and blazers, where courses of French are offered, and Latin, and in later years German, a school with a real library, and a gymnasium, from whence students have been known to go on to university and splendid careers.

It's not quite paradise. In warm weather you have to play cricket, one of the stupidest games ever invented, not to mention one of the most dangerous, since it involves teenage boys throwing or smashing a granite ball at your face at eighty miles an hour. And when the fields are frozen solid: rugby! In cotton shirt and shorts! With tackling! Who are the sadists who think this stuff up?

* * *

But there are other consolations in the move westward. A wider circle of neighborhood friends. No girls, but a group of six or eight boys who are decent and welcoming. And with them I explore the farmlands and woods and during my first few months I even have an adventure or two.

One clear evening with my new friends I'm climbing on the exposed roof beams of an unfinished house in a nearby development when a policeman on a bicycle, a regular English Bobby no less, spies us and gives chase. We all scatter and never would have been caught had not one insufferable prig, an older boy from my new school, out to take the evening air with a friend and a pair of older girls, rugby-tackles me and brings me down in a show of perverse bravado for the benefit of the young ladies. This total ass is about to divulge the names of the scattered boys when his own companion gives him the sign to shut up. But I am apprehended and marched home through my new neighborhood by the uniformed constable to my parents' living room, where I have to listen to a lecture on the dangers of trespassing on local building sites etc. etc.