Non Fiction - A thread, a flap and a beloved head
In which I fondly remember my first headmaster, and what it was like to stupidly ruin a pair of perfectly good keks.
A rendering of me just before the events mentioned here, created by AI. I can only hope the trousers mentioned here were actually this boss.
This is another piece inspired by a prompt from Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass in which he suggests to write about the most embarrassing moment of your life …
For me, writing comes in waves. Those waves, just like the ones you see on the beach, are difficult to predict and have taken a lot of time and effort for me to be able to ride. I can ride them now, after years and years of practice. So many years of falling off into the ever clinging tide of my own entropy, years of fears building up to point of creative suffocation, years of having to put the critics in my head aside, years of disregarding the still waters between, to find the waves that take one to where it’s finally worth the ride.
For me, the waves start with a tingling feeling, akin to an itch. Often, I’m minding my own business, doing something uncreative, often almost the opposite to creative, you know, in that I’m listening to music, or watching TV or reading a book, when the tingle pings and I know the wave is coming. I know, if I choose not to act, it will drown me in an intense neediness, indeed, there appears to be very little choice in this, and so, I act.
I start by trying to find what it is that’s on its way. This often feels like I’m in the bathroom on a dark night, still half asleep and at my most vulnerable, and I’m grasping for the string that triggers the light, the hand waving in the general direction of where the string should be, grasping for what I know is there, yet is difficult to find, and when I get my hand to clasp around it, there it is, and then I pull, and there is light.
Often it’s an image, a vague impression that feels akin to a scene from a forgotten dream, yet this is one that stars someone else, someone who never existed. Someone who wants to speak to me and tell me their tale. I find them, as the words hint their way into the front of my mind, and there, and then, it all floods in and I listen to this never-been soul, this hint of a person, this impression. I listen to them as they tell me where they are, and what they’re doing and what they need …
All of that preamble is designed for me really to avoid the crux of this exercise. All of that is designed for me to try to avoid, by use of metaphor that is true to try to avoid telling you how, when I was about 7 years old, curiosity got the better of me, and led me to shuffle home crying, with my trousers all split. This was more than 40 years ago and, to be clear it’s really not the worst moment of my life, in fact it’s not even close, and yet, the shame still stings.
I’ll begin by telling you about my early years school and why, for a brief time I adored school and I felt school adored me.
Let me tell you about Mr Perry and how I think he was the first homosexual I ever knew, though I wouldn’t have been able to tell you that way back then. Gay was a concept that was ill defined for me as a very young boy, back there in the early 80’s. Gay was an insult, something one would rather not be, something one avoided like the proverbial plague. Of course I now know, love and spend plenty of time with folk who identify as gay, and they have been a vital and helpful and beautiful part of my life for many years, which I see as a vivid measure of the changes that necessarily occur as one grows, and a solid example of how time works its way through you.
Ah, look at me again, where was I? That’s right, Mr Perry. I seem to remember he wore a thick dark grey toupee, and I seem to remember he was ever so tall, and I seem to remember he wore three piece suits, yet I’m certain that he had a thick, sliver bracelet that would jangle upon his desk as he wrote, with what I remember as a fountain pen, though I wonder if that’s true, though I certainly now remember I loved him very, very much. That has come as a shock to me. I had forgotten that.
I mean, I still had a father then. It’s just that I never saw him that often, as his days were mostly spent at sea, which left a hole in me that needed to be filled and, as I think back, I recall Mr Perry very much appreciated the role he played in the lives of all of the children under his care. He took his role as Headmaster seriously when he had to and lightly when he felt was it was right to. He loved me very very much, I have no doubt about that.
You see, I was a precocious child of prodigious intelligence, with a deep thirst for learning and a polite manner which had been rigidly installed by my father, and I think all of that is what led me to be treated by the school in the way that I was. It seemed to me that I was upheld as being precious. I noticed this from the moment my Infant years teacher took me aside at the age of 3 (maybe 4) and held open a huge book of words, for her to point at and inquire if I knew them, joking as she did at the funny tails on the end of the g’s (that word was egg, I remember that). Many of the words I knew just fine, at that young age, though I remember being foxed by choir. I’m reminded now of how bothered I was that I didn’t know that, the folly of youth clouding the truth that we all still have so much to learn.
I loved my time there. More than most other establishments I had ever been in, through, under or within as they afforded me freedom. A freedom that I felt was based on merit. I was allowed to roam free through the school, able to partake in whichever classes took my fancy. Although, I spent most of my time in the library, which was placed perfectly at the top of the school. I still remember the glorious feeling of hearing the rain thrash down upon the metal roof, while I sat happily reading some tale or other, Mrs Gibbons in the corner doing the same, both of us warm and happy in our respective worlds.
But of course, all of this colour doesn’t help you get to the meat of what we’re here to chew on. What indeed did I do to embarrass myself? Well, I guess it’s time to finally explain …
Mr Perry loved assemblies. On special occasions, you know, Harvest Festival and the like, these would take up the entire morning and, as a child I’m sure you felt the same, those ones, no matter the subject matter, those ones were painfully boring. I remember sitting and smelling the sweat encrusted as it was into very walls of the main hall, looking idly at the apparatus that we used for PE tucked away as it was against the wall, remembering as I looked at the athletics horse, the time that I walked up a wooden beam, slick with polish, in my socks and fell and banged my head, that same head soon after finding itself buried in Miss Gibbon’s ample, sweet smelling busom as she jokingly said “OOOH GREAT BIG HOLES IN DE CARPET” in a German muppet voice that made me laugh enough to forget the pain, if only for a moment.
I don’t recall at all what this assembly was about, but I do recall it was very very boring, and I do recall there was also a thread, this time a real one, one at the bottom of my new grey school trousers. I do recall what it felt like to pull on this, that ever so satisfying series of little snaps felt as I tugged away, with no idea of what I was causing by doing this. I tugged and pulled and enjoyed myself greatly until, I saw my trouser leg flap apart and then … then I knew what I had done.
I don’t remember if a friend, and there will have been one, perhaps even two next to me. I don’t recall if they actually called me a divvy once they noticed what I had done, but I feel they must have, and if they didn’t, they certainly should have. But I do recall standing gracelessly up, the trouser flapping about my right leg, and running straight out of the hall, tears thickly spilling from my eyes in huge racking sobs as I ran disjointedly home.
Home wasn’t far away, perhaps 7 or 8 of my little legged minutes, but that run home, it felt like forever. No one I knew saw me, but that didn’t matter. Some folks did see me and that was enough. At that moment, I was the stupid boy with the flapping pants.
I arrived home and Mum was there, shocked and yet pleased to see me and, I’m glad to say to you, she was lucid and decent and kind and helpful. Perhaps one day I’ll tell you why this was a shock to me. Perhaps one day I’ll even tell you why I no longer call her “Mum” or “Mummy” or “Mother” at all. But that’s not what we’re here for now.
I remember that she kissed me and held me and helped me out of those pants and into some others. I think I remember they were red pants and they were pants I liked very much. Then she held my hand as she walked me back to school and told me stories of strong men who got past their embarrassment and how this made them stronger. At least, that’s what I think I remember.
I got back to school and followed Mum’s instruction and apologised to Mr Perry, with pants intact, in front of the whole school. With shame still clouding over me as I did so, and yet, of course, he kindly accepted, and asked me to rejoin the assembly, which I did, back next to my friend or two, and they were happy that I had returned, that I was no longer crying and there was no more to worry about or spoil the day. We just had to survive the rest of the assembly and then it was lunch, and all kids love lunchtime. That was always the best part of the day.
It’s funny isn’t it, to wrap this all up, how I had to find the thread to pull on to then remember the thread I pulled on and how that ended up embarrassing me so. And yet, here I am all proud of the words that I have put here, but oh, how the mind flaps about when you get to the age that I am now, close to reaching half a century here on Earth, how the mind flaps about, exposing the flesh of the remnants of the life beneath, one almost and sometimes remembered and full of moments just like this.