The History of the Michael
From the Earliest Times to the Present
I
shall start at the very beginning (which according to that singing nun is a very
good place to start).
My
name is Michael Marshall. Well actually my full name was, at birth, Michael Alan
Montgomery Marshall but I had the Montgomery removed as soon as I was old enough
(who?), and so I became just plain Michael Alan. Informally, I'm Alan, but
formally I'm Michael. So you
can call me Alan. We shall overlook the fact that this is an anagram of
Anal, and that in choosing my name my parents obviously had an arse-hole sense
of humour.
I
was born in my native England on Midsummer's Eve in 1954. Now all over Europe on
this night, witches and elves and goblins and fairies are supposed to come from
the earth and dance and sing and chant and play, and I guess it didn't help much
that I was also born with jet black hair (some of which
I still have), and a little hooked nose.
A
very early memory I have is of being in the presence of my grandma with my
brother and some cousins. In their turn each of them asked her, "Grandma,
where did I come from?" And in each case she
replied, "The stork brought you". But when my little turn came to ask,
she'd repeat what she'd always say, "Aah, you came sliding down a
moonbeam". And I'd always come away feeling really upset; you know how kids
are -- they always want to have what the other kids have and to be treated the
same. I mean, all the other kids get to come in the stork, in sheer pampered
luxury, while I have to come
sliding down this moonbeam by the seat of my pants. I could have fallen off and
broken my bl**dy neck.... but I
later realised, of course, that her answer was due to my Midsummer Eve’s
birth.
I
also had this really nervous aunt
who seemed to think there was something spooky about me. Six
foot Doll (Dorothy) was my dad’s sister and all the
time I was growing up there’d be occasions where I’d be out playing on my
bike, or standing around chatting with a group of friends, when out of the
corner of my eye I’d catch sight of Doll looking back over her shoulder at me
while disappearing around a corner. She’d seen me first. This phenomenon
worsened very considerably after that time I fell and hit my head, the resultant
gash above my eye requiring stitches, and the next day at school (and for a
considerable time thereafter) I could tell which sports house a kid was in just
by looking at him. Scared Doll to death. Her discovery that my mother was part
Romany gypsy didn’t help much either. Doll was also mortified by cats,
especially black ones. Actually I
don’t like cats much either -- but they like me. Even today, whenever I’m in
a room full of people and there’s a cat, it’s normally no time at all before
the cat is inexplicably climbing all over me, pretty much to the exclusion of
everyone else there, including its owner.
But
this picture is very much at odds with the contemporary image of my
mother's family. From the 1880s onwards they were soaked in Catholicism, and
that's the faith in which I was brought up (I developed a serious down on nuns
and monks – read on). My grandmother was so pious that she would walk around
the house constantly mumbling the rosary (took me ages to figure out what she
was always talking about to herself...so I crept up on her one day and caught
her in mid-mumble), and this piousness rubbed off on my mother to such an
extent that all through my childhood I was dragged off to mass every Sunday come
hell or high water.
I
was born into a working class family
in a little steel town called Stocksbridge in Yorkshire, England. This little
place had grown up alongside its steel works in the last 100 years or so and
occupied one hillside of a small Pennine valley. I was born in the hospital but
we lived at number 13, Pea Royd Lane, on the other hillside, which was, and
still is, mostly farmers fields. Decades later, only a hundred yards from there,
there have been many reported sightings of 18th
century ghosts dancing around beneath the electricity
pylons which 50 years ago were built across the fields there, and this has
earned the road the perhaps unenviable title of one of the most haunted places
in Britain. This little old house where I spent my first year was eventually
demolished in 1955.
This
is me giving my first little wave, offering three fingers to the world. This was
of course before I came to realize that it should’ve been only two.
I
also came into the world a poor relative of the richest family in Stocksbridge,
and of another family who were among the richest in Sheffield; my mother's
sister Mary married Cyril Firth, who owned a big timber yard in Stocksbridge,
and among her and my mother’s various cousins were the Walsh’s of Sheffield
who owned a large department store which they eventually sold to Harrod’s.
We
then moved over the other side of the valley to a council-owned house in the
mostly privately-owned Victoria Road, where I spent the rest of the 1950s and
the whole of the 60s. My very first memory comes from there. The house was
semi-detached and there was a path all the way around both homes. Next door
lived an old couple called Wiltshire ("Gypsy Jack", the guy was
nicknamed), and I'd go toddling round the path, singing "Ung an' ooo-tweeee",
the best I could do for "young and beautiful"; I still remember old
Jack standing there on his doorstep as I passed. I couldn't have been much more
than 2.
Next
door to Jack, on the other side from us, lived a 16
year old girl called Mavis. I loved Mavis. And it was
due to this that I had my very first adventure. In 1958 she moved away, and I
was gutted. For months I pestered my mother about her, asking where she had
gone, and could I go to her, but my mother would always snap back at me, or slap
me. And then, one day, I asked again, and she snapped back, "Oh she's gone
to America!" In actual fact, I
learned years later that she had only gone to Huddersfield, a town about 18
miles away.
Well I
didn't know where this America place was, but it did sound a very long way away
-- at least past the end of our street and I'd never been that far before. But
my mind was made up, and, realising that I might never see my mum and dad again,
I wrapped two little sandwiches in a piece of paper, and bravely I set off to
find America.
Well I'd
gone a very long way, (up the school hill somewhere), when I sat down on some
concrete in front of a shop, and started to have my sandwiches. Just then, this
big figure, all dressed in black with shiny buttons and a black helmet (!) came
bending all the way down from the sky right in front of me. Well I
worked up all the courage I could, and I asked, "Is this America, and is
Mavis in?". The next thing I remember I was being led hand in hand with him
down the right hand side
of the school hill, and back onto our street. And so, at the tender age of 4, I
had found myself Helping The Police
With Their Enquiries; something to do with chasing after a 16 year old girl. I
did kind of wonder, for a few years after that, why when I got home my uncle Jim
said, “Eeee I’m so proud of
you son!”. I guess it's a good thing I didn’t come toddling back through the
door with half moon eyes and a red rose clamped between my teeth.
I
never saw Mavis again.
The
following year however I rediscovered the place where I had looked for her. As I
was being dragged along backwards, on my very first day to school, with my mum
under one armpit and my elder sister under the other, my heels dragging in the
snow, (I must have started just after Christmas), I looked to one side and there
it was -- a shop on the end of Linden Crescent called Lindleys (later
Jackson's).
I
did not take at all well to school. It might surprise you therefore to learn
that I was the first person from Victoria Road, and from my extended family, to
go to university -- but more about that later. At the infant school myself and
Alan Suggitt hatched a cunning plan to go Over The Wall on the very first day,
and Alan Suggitt's dad was a teacher at the senior school which hardly inspired
in me any great confidence in the education system.
Strangely,
as my school career progressed I always felt brighter and quicker than most of
the other kids in the class, (which actually wasn’t all that surprising
because I had been chucked out of the ‘A’ class in the first year at the
Junior school for extremely disruptive behaviour and put in the ‘B’ class
which was quite frankly a joke), and my most abiding memory from this period was
the frustration, and the dejection, which I felt when I would turn my
performance right up, but the staff never, ever seemed to notice. I mean, I
wasn't exactly being overenthusiastic to the point of getting on the teacher’s
nerves; on the contrary -- everybody realised at a
fairly early stage what a shy and nervy kid I was. Now
kids are pretty sensitive sensory creatures, and if I didn't know better I
would have sworn that, for some reason, I "didn't count" … I wasn't
being allowed to take part. But again in
all fairness this may have been because I was a ‘dog house’ case due to my
initial notoriety but having said that, they must have been pretty unforgiving
and we might do well to consider what their underlying biases might have been
for that.
I
remember that I never got a word of praise from the form teacher, Mrs. Robinson,
after I would invariably get 24/24 for spelling, and on one occasion she even
threw my book at me and muttered something about Catholics. Again we
Catholics were treated differently, not being allowed to join the other kids in
morning assembly, and regarding my health, I was still having to lay down on the
floor after every break, with my continued breathing difficulties (in 1959 a bad
case of measles had left me with asthma, and I often had difficulty breathing).
The
bullying there was very bad for me too. I noticed that the bullies were always
the light-haired "Sassenachs", and the victims were invariably
dark-haired and shy Celts, like me. What was their subconscious telling them? However I
had my friends, too; people like Michael Peaker, Allan Tune, Robin Hobson, Derek
Tazzyman, Kevin Joyce and Susan Dimelow.
But even my asthma didn't seem to deter the bullies; on the contrary it just
seemed to make them worse. Looking back, they were quite like a bunch of
heartless Nazis whose brains were hard-wired for the survival of the fittest and
for the swift and instinctive detection of people who were somehow not of their
caste.
And so I
went through that school. I fitted into the mould in which I had been placed,
learned that somehow if I tried to find my natural place in the scheme of things
it would be denied
me, and became conditioned in this way to feel that somehow I didn't count.
Other people could collect their dues-- but not me.
And
at some point I
guess I just gave up. I began to idle, as I fitted into this mould of
ridiculously easy schoolwork that just wasn't worth bothering with, and when I
would decide to "turn it up" and give them a show, from time to time,
it was always, tragically, done in a tongue-in-cheek fashion on my part, as
though I had actually come to accept that a good academic display from me just
wouldn't count, and in my shyness I even began to fear, having seen so many
times the body-language of the adult staff, that it might even get me into some
kind of trouble. Worse, sinking back into the B-shaped mould they had prepared
for me, I guess I must have begun to look like
a B pupil too.
At
this point, I entered my Huckleberry Finn Period.
There
was great froggin' to be done at
Stocksbridge! And Sticklebackin',
too! Especially when the alternative was evening catechism classes at the
church, and I learned to quickly disappear just before my mother called me in to
get ready. At the upper end of Victoria Road there was a large white house with
very extensive gardens. A white-haired old lady called Mrs. Whittaker lived
there, and we kids all had these legends passing back and forth that she was
rather supernatural and spooky. Anyhow, in her garden she had two ponds bulging
with frogs, which every Huckleberry found naturally irresistible. There was the
"near" pond (further that is, from her house), and the top pond,
almost right under her kitchen window. Even under the cover of darkness, you
needed Guts of Steel to frog the top pond --which none of us possessed. But Eric
Wright, David Ranson and myself would catch some pretty
big frogs in her near pond, before we would suddenly
sight the old lady breezing our way with a long cane, whereupon we would leg it
like hell, being mindful of avoiding the roads, naturally, where my dad would be
driving up and down with the catechism woman looking for me.
The
"Lotties" were almost as good. These were the two
allotment water-head ponds at Garden Village, at the
western end of the town. There were sticklebacks there, too. We used to buy
butterfly nets from the shop at the end of our road,
and go walking off with one of these and a jam jar,
usually in small groups of two of three kids, for an evenings fishing at the
ponds, often stopping off enroute at a very large rope swing at a nearby
place called the Clough. In a sense these were happy times, but looking back,
they were happy not intrinsically or in the absolute sense, but by contrast with
the life back home, with bad parents and the strange feeling at school of
somehow not being welcome to take part.
At
eleven, in 1965, we did the 11-plus exam (1), which decided who should go to the
Grammar school, and who should not. I remember three times, in three tests,
running out of paper and being too scared to ask the Headmaster, Mr. Warrington,
seated there presiding right in front of me, for more. I also remember crying
for nights and nights after that, long before we got the results. They failed
me. I feel that I would have failed anyway. To pass would have been somehow
"wrong". It would have offended them. I felt moulded thus.
Next,
my parents decided that, in the name of Catholicism, I must again now say
goodbye to my friends, then my only source of happiness, and go to St.
Peter’s, a Catholic Secondary Modern school in Sheffield. Well I
turned up on the first day, along with Kathryn Whittlestone and Marian Lambert,
both Catholics from the A class at Stocksbridge, and to my surprise a teacher
let slip that there had been a letter about me from the old junior school.
The
letter said, that "....this pupil
is very highly capable... and should forthwith be put in the A-stream...". So they had noticed
me! But......why? I mean, why had they always been like that to me? To this day,
and all my life, I have asked this, and wondered. I guess I'll never know now.
Well I
went to that school for 5 years. I was always in the top three in the entire
year (2), and despite being the "baby" (born near the end of June I
was one of the youngest in the year) I was actually
top in the 3rd, 4th and 5th years, when they created
for us an "Upper" stream, above the A stream. At that point my parents
went to see Mr. C.P.Martin,
the headmaster of St. Peter’s, with a view to transferring me to grammar
school. However he
actually talked them out of it, saying that the pupils there would be ‘just as
good’ and perhaps I’d therefore be happier where I was. I fact, as he later
let slip, he wanted to keep his best kids in
order to boast good school exam results. Neither of my
parents had heard of 13+ and neither at the time had I, although I did advise
them that in going to see Martin they had perhaps gone to the wrong end?
During
these years I was very highly respected by all my classmates, and, it must be
said, by the staff too; I was regarded as serious, sharp and
analytical and was top in most subjects. I had some good friends, notably Peter
"Noggin" Mogan and David Martin, and a great many compatriots,
particularly Andrew Udall, Brendan Langan, Mick Hawker, David ("Stan")
Staniforth and Sylvana Lawlor, but I was not really disposed to jokes or
lightheartedness, and many commented -- correctly-- that I didn't really have a
personality. Along with others I was subjected to some horrendous bullying, from
2 individuals in particular. But
not only did I never smile, I also
had something of a personal hygiene problem. Red-haired Kathryn Whittlestone
would point this out to me quite bluntly, but only after I
had replaced her at the top of the year-- never
before. Strangely, nobody ever put two and two together and realised just
how depressed I always was.
Here is the only class photo I have from that period.
Class 5 Upper, 1969-70. Top row L-R: Andrew Udall, Kevin Bartram, Michael Portman, Brendan Langan, Nigel Paluch, Me, Paul Tonner. Middle Row L-R: Michael Frain, David Martin, Josephine Keen, Catherine McSweeney, Anna di Nicoli, Peter "Noggin" Mogan, Selwyn Spranklen, Paul Fleming. Bottom Row L-R: Kathryn Whittlestone, Sharon Naughton, Christine Brown, Marie Murphy, Mr. Silcock, Josephine O'Neill, Lynn Cottingham, Marian Lambert, Silvana Lawlor.
I
wasn't too depressed not to fancy the girls, though. Lynn Cottingham was very
cute, and although Marian Gillespie was the class belle whom everybody wanted to
go out with, I suffered in silence for 3 years over her mate Lynn Boyes who I
thought was absolutely bewitching. For her, I secretly invented "drop dead
gorgeous" 20 years before the rest of the world. But she had a funny,
menacing laugh which worried me a bit (like, “oo-oo-oo-ah-ah-ahh”)…and
in any case I kept my sufferings to myself for fear of the taunts of my mates.
It's hard when you're that age!
We
got up to some pretty diabolical tricks
too, such as building bombs in metalwork class. Noggin actually
set one off just outside the metalwork shop door, which
made Jim McNerny the history teacher, in his room directly above, think that a
cooker had detonated next door in domestic science. We also got a student
teacher in metalwork to actually help us
build a rocket. We-e-l-l-l…..he was only a naďve
student teacher. This was rather small, but it eventually became one of the
strap-on boosters of something rather bigger a couple of years later at Wortley
-- which blew up and set half the woods on fire, much to the chagrin of my new
friend the Earl of Wharncliffe, whose woods they were and who actually
lit the fuse.
These
rockets had a curious habit of blowing my eyebrows off while leaving the rest of
me completely intact. Now at school we had this really
sadistic games master and when I first showed up with
no eyebrows he demanded, “Marshall! Where’s your eyebrows?!”. “Er, arghh”,
I rejoindered, “I forgot them sir”. “Well bring them tomorrow Marshall,
I don’t want to find you without them next time!” Then he’d go walking
away with this muffled, wheezy laugh. Next day….same again.
“Marshall! Where are they?!”. Cruel sod. Anyway I
lost 3 sets in all, which made me very sensitive on the subject, to such a point
that years later, when I was working in a steelworks as a student (to earn some
money for university), I was working in a team high up on the girders in a
melting shop, 100 feet over an electric arc furnace. We had to sweep the dust
off the gangplank and, being students, we amused ourselves by sweeping the dust
into piles then pushing the piles off into space. Unfortunately, just as we did this they
swung the lid off the furnace below (imagine looking down into a bubbling
volcano) – and the huge pile of dust fell straight into it. Boom! It was like
standing over Dante’s Hell and we stood there, on a 3
foot wide gangplank, empty space either side of us –
and as the searing heat came up everybody defensively put their hands between
their legs, except yours truly here who instinctively slapped his hands over his
eyebrows.
During
this period I
also met John Pollard. He was 2 years younger than me and had just moved in
across the road from us. We became great friends. Together we were into
everything...maths, physics, chemmy, astronomy.... particularly the
"practical applications" of those subjects, which normally entailed
the making of rockets and bombs, in which we used sodium chlorate and
sugar, or home- made gunpowder made from anhydrous potassium nitrate, sulphur
and charcoal, and I seem to have left such an impression on people during that
period, that both then and long afterwards if anything blew up it was always
Blame Alan.
For
years my brother and I had not been allowed to have a bicycle. In all fairness
this was not due to meanness on the part of my parents; my mother was a very
frightened creature by nature and
she'd had plenty of opportunity to be shocked by the hair-raising bicycle antics
of young David Ward across the road, Victoria Road's Evel Knievel. But John had
one, and eventually, at the age of 13 in 1967 I persuaded them to buy myself
and my brother a bike each too. I felt liberated, and for the next 3 years I was
seen up and down as the slightly scruffy, anoraked, bike riding delinquent, who
was yet surprisingly knowledgeable and gave fascinating conversation, but was
instinctively looked upon very dubiously indeed by those who didn't really know
me -- and that was just about everyone.
John
had pretty much the same image, despite
the fact that he went to the grammar school and didn't
live in a council house. One of his enemies, Heather Hull from further up the
road, seemed to have a definite down on him, and knowing the two of them I would
be the first to admit that it was entirely his fault. Heather wasn't to be
messed with. She was, in fact, the most no-nonsense, pragmatic, down to earth
example of self- reliance and true Yorkshire Grit that I ever clapped eyes on.
John messed with her. There was this one time, when he threw something at her,
(Alan here, astride bike, slowly closed his eyes as his hand drew up over them)
and she chased him all the way down Victoria Road, all the way down Victoria
Street, and all round the old coal yard at the bottom. It was like the keystone
cops; he wasn't getting away and she wasn't catching him. Eventually, she took
off her shoe and threw it at him. I had a lot of respect for Heather. I think we
all did.
She
had a younger sister called Sharon. She was the only sister I actually
met and knew (Heather I knew by sight only). Sharon
took a shine to the rabbits we had, and so I turned my charms on her to try to
sell her one. It didn't work; her mother said she couldn't have one. Consequently I
didn't get far enough for her to detect the bit about the 2 bob for the
rabbit--- but I think she might have detected the charms.
Our
bike riding expeditions during this period were memorable. We would frequently
ride to Penistone, a town a few miles away, and beyond. We also discovered a
method of making free telephone calls to anywhere in the world from the old
payphones they had in those days; you just tapped the top of the phone as
uniformly as possible, n times to dial digit n, and dialled the zero in the
usual manner. We called all over.... New York, L.A... just by guessing area
codes and numbers, and with a little help from the telephone directories in the
Sheffield City Library. We also built up a database of all the phone boxes in
the area. Very few people were on the phone at home in those days. We grew
bolder and bolder. Traveling on the train from Penistone to Dunford, we noticed
that the ticket inspector didn't bother chasing you up if you went to the toilet
when he came round. We also noticed that at Sheffield station you only needed a
platform ticket to get onto the station. And so, putting 2 and 2 together, we
planned a day out in London. But at that point the bottle failed.
The Brameld brothers
were also great friends. Descendants and heirs of the famous Rockingham Pottery Bramelds (who
went broke in the 1800s) they lived just around the corner on Sheldon Road.
With them came another memorable occasion upon the evening of April 10, 1967 when
we all decided, just off the cuff, to jump on the bus to Hillsborough and see
Sheffield Wednesday play Manchester United. These were United's (and for that
matter Wednesday's) great days; Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and Pat Crerand all
played that night. Very balmy Monday evening. 2 apiece. Unforgettable.
A
few years later my father sold my bike, and because he thought it was still his,
he kept the money. More on that later…
Other
people I remember from Victoria Road include Stephen Cook, imaginatively
nicknamed "Cookie". We were in the same class at school in the very
early days but after that we didn't really interact much. For some reason he
seemed heavily into sport. Fancying himself as a goalkeeper, he would also walk
up and down the street practicing his cricketer's bowling swing and for years
afterwards I heard on and off that he still faithfully tramped up to the tennis
club on Linden Crescent with his tennis racquet. I don't know how good he was,
but I played soccer against him on the playing fields a few times and his
goalkeeping was really
not bad. I played on the forward line in the school soccer team and had a talent
for speed and for thunderous shots at goal. I noticed that Cookie’s record for
stopping these was actually better than
our school goalkeeper’s.
I
will never forget the night of Saturday November 2, 1968. That was the night
everybody's bonfires disappeared overnight. In England we celebrate Guy Fawkes
Night on the 5th and we all light fires. So there
they all were, these wooden pyres, standing in people's gardens waiting to
be lit on the 5th, until me and John Pollard both got up at midnight, crept
downstairs, sent flashlight signals across the road to each other, then crept
out and, over the next few hours, basically nicked the lot. Needless to say John's
bonfire that year (we always had it at his place) was the biggest and most
spectacular of our annual series of Victoria Road bonfires. But although I
couldn't know it at the time, it was also to be my last.
In
1969, after 15 years at Victoria Road, we finally left Stocksbridge and moved to
a nearby village called Wortley. There I soon met two people who were to become
my sincerest friends: Carlton and Aline, the Earl and Countess of Wharncliffe.
We were distantly related, and I hit it off with them from the word
"go". Again though
I say it myself I had been a very knowledgeable delinquent at Stocksbridge, and
they were fascinated by the conversations we would have on a variety of
subjects, ranging from whether the monarchy should be abolished, or whether
there are such things as souls, to whether we are alone in the universe or
if there's a Loch Ness Monster.
Soon
I began to babysit at Wharncliffe House and to stay over. Aline, quite the night
owl, would often come home at 2am from social functions, and after our midnight
cooking sessions, over hurriedly-made scrambled
eggs (with too much salt!) we would chat for hours. I guess my Huckleberry and
delinquent periods had long been dying; again I
was very knowledgeable, and in any case any real lout would have easily seen
through me. I guess it always was a strange kind of yobbo who knew every star
constellation, galaxy and
nebula in the northern hemisphere sky by the time he was 12. I was, in effect --
and again though I say this myself -- a higher IQ person brought up in the
conditions of lower castes – in complete contrast with those of the middle
class whose IQs fall within more normalised parameters, making them the exact
opposite. During that period I
will always remember Aline with a fondness and a gratitude for the heartfelt
encouragement which she always gave me in facing the life I had at home, and
which was soon to become so very much worse.
We
were not allowed to do O-level qualifications at St. Peter's, that was the
privilege of my old friends at the senior school at Stocksbridge whose school,
like the old grammar school, was now under the new Comprehensive system. Instead we
had to do CSE, (Certificate of Secondary Education). I got 6 grade 1's, each the
equivalent of a pass at O-level. Then, in 1970, aged 16, I transferred to where
I should have been all along -- De La Salle, a very high standard, semi
private Catholic Grammar school for boys.
Well,
I had always been a good all-rounder, especially in history and English, and it
would have been nice to have done Advanced Levels in English, history, maths and
physics. But that was not possible in those days; we had to stick traditionally
to either the Arts or the Sciences, and so despite being a good all-rounder I
chose the latter and began A-levels in mathematics, physics and
chemistry. I wanted to read Physics with Astronomy at degree level, and so the
headmaster, Brother Wilfrid, a monk of the Christian Order, also asked me to
pick up an O-level in geology, to assist in planetary studies when I reached
university.
I
had come to hate religion. Not only for what it was, and was not, but also
because, rightly or wrongly, I came to blame it for the way in which I had been
treated in my young days at school, and for the inferior education I had
received for the past 5 years. If my religion-soaked mother had not taken the
decision to send me to St. Peters, then I would have gone to the new
comprehensive at Stocksbridge and the 11+ debacle wouldn’t really have
mattered.
I
also took issue with the fact that there we all were, just children sat in a
classroom, looking forward to being educated and bettering ourselves, when into
this place of learning comes this person dressed in weird clothes who then
starts to instill into us (probably with no teaching certificate), that
there’s this big hairy bloke floating about up there who made the cosmos and
everything in it, including ourselves, and we have to live in fear of him or
we’ll all burn in Hell. Imagine it was you sitting there and
this weirdly dressed bogey man came walking in the door, peddling his ardent
belief in Hubert the Flying Giraffe, and threatening you that you’ll all burn
in Hell if you don’t cringe in fear in front of Hubert – and then he starts
backing himself up by pushing his fist into childrens’ faces.
You might conclude – correctly – that you’re in some pretty dangerous
company, you’re not safe, and he should be sectioned under the Mental Health
Act, and the only singular reason he is not, is because he just happens to have
succeeded in spreading the word about Hubert to a very large audience around the
world for a very long time and ingrained it into every social tier – but
that’s no rational reason, and certainly no credit to his organization for
carrying it off.
During
religious lessons both at St Peter's and at De La Salle therefore I used to derive
great pleasure from asking really awkward and
compromising questions to the monk or nun who would be ‘teaching’ us,
despite the fact that they would always answer in that same characteristically
violent manner.
I
remember one time, when we had this very strict nun for religion classes, I
asked her, “Sister, we are told that Adam and Eve were the first people in the
world (world population 2), and then they begat 2 sons, Cain and
Abel (world population up to 4). Then Cain killed Abel (back down to 3)… and
then he went out and got married. Who to?”. Whereupon she rejoindered, “Er….well by
then other people must have been created, and one of these other families must
have supplied Cain with a wife. Yes, that must be it.” But the mistake I made
at that point was in not letting go, like some predator with the smell of blood
in its nostrils. “Well in that case”, I continued, (not realising how weak
the physical connection between my head and my shoulders was potentially
becoming), “these other people would not be descended from Adam and therefore
not responsible for the Original Sin”. Have you ever
been duffed up by a 6 foot penguin?
I have. You shudda seen
the feet on it. Mind you, it didn’t help matters much when I expressed how
sorry I was, that she should have to stand there through the frigid Antarctic
winters balancing a large egg on her flippers. Let’s face it: I was at war,
with the religion which had separated me from my childhood friends, and which I
had not been born in natural harmony with in the first place (3). Embittered by
the strappings I would receive by some of the monks and nuns, I developed a
vigorous ‘down’ on them and resolved not to have anything to do with them
for the rest of my life.
There
was another time when a Brother Claude
came visiting at school, he impressed upon us that Christ died for our sins,
whereupon again I rejoindered, “Oh blow it out your arse Claude he was next in
line to the old Maccabean throne of occupied Judea and he died trying to boot
the Romans out. You know it, I know it, everybody upstairs in the Vatican knows
it; the only people who don’t know it are the schleps in their countless
millions who go to mass every Sunday and place their hard-earned coin in the
collection box, thereby subscribing to the organization which preaches that it
is better to give than to receive, only to then receive more than it ever gave,
to the extent of becoming the richest organization on earth. Claude, what do you
think that the insurrection was all about, the one at the end of every gospel?
And what happened immediately after that Claude? Yes, they strung the bugger up
didn’t they Claude.”
Open
rebellion! The dogs of war! Again, a perhaps uncomfortable truth might be that
even apart from my childhood ordeals I never underlyingly felt that I had come
into this world a real Christian in the first place. The graft just never took.
But
now at least, at De La Salle I was at a school in which at least in terms of calibre I
felt at home. And despite my feelings towards religion I
was among my own religious denomination, and therefore insulated, I guess, from
many of the prejudices which had been applied to me in my younger days. But I
did not find the relative contentment that I thought would at last be there. I
discovered, to my horror, that I was an entire year behind the rest. I realised
that I was going to have to leap from CSE to A-level, in subjects like
mathematics, and get university-selection grades too. And it was in all fairness
explained to me by the Brother Wilfrid
and Brother Serenus, not yet knowing what I was capable of, that in such an
undertaking if you haven't got the IQ, the sheer power under the bonnet, then
you will assuredly go under. It was like a 100
yard race, with the beginning of the 6th form at the
starting line, and university, where in those days only the best would reach, at
the finish. And I would have to start 50 yards back and finish with the fastest
of them. I knew I had a decent IQ, but how decent I didn’t then know, only
that I’d need it all.
Meanwhile
at home, at precisely this time, my mother had decided that she resented my not
leaving school and getting a job, and she set out upon an intense and deliberate
programme of making my life as thoroughly miserable as possible. Looking back I
would say that, more because of the situation at home than at school, this
was the most horrendous period of my life.
My
parents were very loud people who genuinely believed that they owned their
children and were determined that they should never have human any rights or
liberties. It wasn't really possible to
do any homework because of the sheer noise in the house -- usually violent, top
of the voice rows between my neurotic mother and my violent father. Worse for
me, every time they saw me trying to keep my head down doing some homework,
they'd say, "That looks hard...you're too bloody good for us you, aren't
you!", and hit me across the back of the head. It wasn't necessary for me
to say or do anything; it was only necessary to be there.
My
dear friends Carlton and Aline, the Earl and Countess of Wharncliffe, suggested
that I go to their house to do my work, and stay over which I often did. At
least that way I got a bit done.
By
nature, it has to be
honestly said, my parents were absolutely tyrannical. They claimed powers which
no parent ever had. My mother was a narrow, shallow, volatile, nasty, unstable,
neurotic, childish and immature Irish catholic (and the truly horrific thing
here is that I’m not exaggerating one bit (4)); my father a rough, violent man
who, if his mastery of any trade or profession had ever matched his command of
the streetwise ways of Yobbos' Corner in the school yard, would have done very
well indeed. At Victoria Road they were the only couple whose raised voices
could frequently be heard at the other end of the street, and on a
number of occasions the police had to attend to break
up fights between them. I noticed very
early on, that this never happened elsewhere on the
street, and some of my earliest memories are of standing petrified under the
kitchen table, the shock making me feel like I weighed only a few ounces, and
grasping and pulling at my hair while these two giants were knocking seven bells
out of each other. I must have been very little. This hair pulling, called
trichotillomania, is something which shows up in photos of me as young as three.
I still find myself doing it today. It’s a reaction to stress, rather akin to,
but more noticeable and less socially acceptable than biting one’s nails.
They
had no respect for our age, dignity or
independence, and they nastily and violently resisted every effort by their
children to grow up. My mother was a mental nurse (which is exactly what she
was) at the Middlewood Mental Hospital in Sheffield, (the loonies were all
scared to death of her because they thought she was a right head case). Respect,
which they demanded without earning, meant fear, the Mafioso interpretation of
the word. Years before, my sister had left school with no qualifications at all
and had gone out to work. She worked full time, but when she would get home on
payday with her hard earned money they
would take it all from her, including her Christmas bonuses and her holiday pay.
That was far more than they needed just for her board. She felt like the slave
that she was, and she couldn’t even save up to get away from them. When she
eventually escaped (by marriage, but not before my father had once made her
boyfriend take her engagement ring back; she was 20) her room was kept
unchanged, like a kind of shrine, by my mother, and I was not allowed to move
into it despite the fact that my brother and I, who shared a room, were getting
older and bigger. All they could think of was money. I remember that ever since
I first started school, the main meal of the day for me was the school meal.
That defines poverty these days. Tea would be sandwiches, and supper milk and
biscuits, of little or no nutritional value. All through my childhood,
therefore, I received just 2 cooked meals a week from my parents, one on
Saturday and one on Sunday. I twice ended up in Thornbury Annexe, a convalescence
wing of the Sheffield Childrens' Hospital, with lung congestion, the first stage
of pneumonia, basically an indication of not being properly looked after. That
would be a Social/ Family Services matter these days. My brother and I were always
contemptuously called "Them", and it was made clear to us in no
uncertain terms that we were just burdens. My father once bragged that I would
be treated like a dog until I learned to fear and cringe in front of him.
Meanwhile, in the garage, there was over these years a succession of brand
new cars, each paid for in cash. And, doing the math,
it was my sister’s slavery that had bought them the cars (5).
But
now, in the sixth form, with no hope on their part that they were going to do to
me as they had done to my sister, all hell broke loose. How on this earth I ever
got through those years, I will never know. My parents had this mentality,
whereby they thought could abuse the parent-child relationship as much as they
wanted --and yet it would never break, I would never disown them, and however
bad things became I would always dutifully go back for more. Like the dog that,
no matter how hard it gets kicked, will always come out from under the table
with its tail wagging when expected. They really did believe that, and they
certainly lived the part.
I
always wondered just how such people would ever have allowed me to stay on at
school in the first place. Then one night, as I lay awake in bed listening to
yet another blazing row, I overheard the answer: it was, of all things, to
compete with other branches of the family. You see, my cousin had gone to
grammar school and yet despite entering the sixth form not having come from
behind, she didn't go to university, nor apparently would she have done so
because her chemistry wasn't up to scratch. If I would reach university
therefore, coming so obviously from behind, then that would demonstrate that my
IQ would be greater than hers. Pathetic competition!
Well
yes, so it would, at least if reasoned logic is anything to go by. She ran the
100 yards and didn't go to university. I started 50 yards behind and did go. Ten
out of ten for reasoning. But----why on earth would my parents want to be like
that in the first place? Personally I
don’t give a fig about how bright others are or are not, but apparently the
need to compete arose from the fact that my mother was spoken ill of in the
family for marrying beneath herself. She had 4 siblings, 2 boys and 2 girls. One
of the boys was head of the extended family while the other became a police
detective, while the eldest girl married a businessman and
the other girl married a guy who did not long survive the war but might have
become an airline pilot. Which left my mother who, despite interest by the local
doctor and 2 local businessmen, married a loud, base, nasty man with nothing
about him who hailed from the roughest part of town, and the criticism which
came back to her from time to time had obviously had an effect. I never believed
in that rubbish myself. I always thought that we should each stand on our own
merits and talents, and a nation which can’t utilise its best talent and
develop same irrespective of their origins, will never compete with those
nations which can. Besides, there were enough coal miners among the various
grandparents and great grandparents on the family tree to make a joke out of the
entire rivalry thing.
Well,
I did my A-levels, in maths, physics and chemistry, and then I got a
"holiday" job at the local steelworks while I awaited my results. One
morning they came. Because of the horrendous climate in which I had lived, I had
frankly expected to fail all three. After all, it was only a 2-year course, very
advanced, and I had started 1 year behind, and to make matters worse I was the
baby of the class. I opened the envelope. Physics, pass, good grade, university
pleased. Mind you I was so good at physics that I was 2nd in
class after just 6 months despite coming from so far behind. Chemistry,
..pass..good grade..university pleased.
Math...oh no! down a single grade on university offer! University says repeat
and up the grade!
My
"show" was roughly the same as my cousin’s had been, except that her
weak spot was chemistry and mine was math. Unlike her, though, in all fairness I
had come from a year behind.
And
in all fairness to my parents, (although one does wonder if they were still
doing that silly competing thing) they did get their heads together and let me
repeat the year. And wow-- what an easy year it was! I was soon top in math, and
thankfully I was only weeks older than some of the others because I was an
end-of-June baby and
the academic year ends in August. And when the time came, I never thought I
would actually enjoy an
A-level math exam! I was still 18 when I did this last A-level. (I had been
still only 17 the first time around).
Well
again the summer holidays-- and the waiting time--came. But this time the result
wasn't in doubt. Eventually it came. ...maths...2 grades higher than
needed. The anoraked delinquent from Victoria Road had become the first from
there -- and the first of his extended family -- to reach university.
You
know, there are some things I just can't watch on television. One of those
things is when tennis player Jana Novotna lost the Wimbledon final and cried on
the shoulder of the Duchess of Kent. It will forever remind me of when my first
maths result was insufficient, and I did the very same on Aline Wharncliffe's
shoulder. Another is when Jana finally won her Wimbledon title in 1998. Although
I didn't exactly fall to my knees and burst into tears like she did (I'm not that melodramatic!
--I think I was sat on the sofa when I read my maths result), for some strange
reason, probably some kind of memory association with the first event I went
through the year before, that footage of her winning her title will forever
remind me of just how I felt at the moment I read that result and saw that
I had made it to university, and how I looked back at the way I had been
treated, and thought of on the street, and written off, over so very long, and
seemingly since I was so very little, -- and then to become the first, not
only from where I grew up but also in my extended family, to achieve this. I
have a sports video laying around somewhere. I still can't watch the Jana bit.
Having
read this far, you may think that I wanted a lot to be able to go to university.
But strangely, that's not actually true. I really wanted two things: I
wanted to get even with the past, and I wanted to get away from
"home".
Well,
I arrived at my Hall of Residence room in Newcastle upon Tyne, and there waiting
for me, greatly to my surprise, was a letter from one of the staff at the old
junior school. He congratulated me on my achievement, and just seemed so
completely, almost cheerfully impervious to the way I had been treated
there. And I looked at it, and I stared out the window, and I just went back in
my mind... and I stood there for what seemed like a very long time, and I
thought and thought, and I just didn't know what to do with the letter.
Eventually,
I pinned it on my wall.
And
so, I entered my University Period. For the first time in my life, I would have
what others in education had always taken for granted – to be on a course
which naturally followed on from what I'd just done. Confidently, casually even,
I looked forward to getting an honours degree in particle physics with
astronomy. But behold the twists and turns of fate! Other, and in some ways
greater, things were to befall me.
To
make a short story long, which regrettably for some people I’m rather good at,
I came 12th out of 56 in the exams at the end of
the first year, and that was in the Honours group (in those days there were 2
groups, Honours and Ordinary)….
before leaving university after succumbing to the temptation of a well
paid job. This of course is always a mistake of the
first order, especially in those days where although British universities were
very hard to get into, a revolution was plainly visible just around the corner
where just about anyone would go, degrees would be ten a penny, and I wouldn’t
have one! However I
was by then badly in debt, what with clothes and especially books being so
expensive, there were no student loans or top-ups in those days, and my bank
manager, whose son I had gone to school with and was not as capable as I, was
bellowing at me to get a job. He had refused to extend my overdraft and there
were no student loans or top-ups in those days, only a fixed basic grant. And
when I then asked my parents to honour their signed declaration on my grant
application form, to provide their parental contribution to my grant, well
perhaps you can imagine by now the response of two people who had enslaved their
daughter for seven years and robbed her of every penny.
Decades later I eventually got a first in physics, by way of a modular course in
America where I lived for some years among my US relatives. In the meantime and
since, I’ve been variously a consultant in a staff bureau, a qualified
ceramicist (potter), a math tutor, an explorer and, all my life, a prolific
inventor, prolific though I say so myself, with patents on a diverse range of
innovations ranging from musical note transposition devices to electric rockets,
from a device for lifting cars up at home so high that you can stand underneath
to fix them, to a device for catching lobsters and another for making scuba
divers’ air last 3 times longer. I’m presently
working on an artificial human eye (for implantation) which gets around the
connection errors in reconnecting the optic nerve in blind people. It’s
related to the technology used in cameras where the circuitry knows when the
picture is in focus and is not broken up. Then it scans thousands of random
connection possibilities until the patient sees a clear, crisp and
unbroken image.
I’m
also a confirmed feminist (my three daughters had not grown very old before they
were coming home crying, “the boys” said this and, “the boys” have done
that, or, “the boys are being bossy”), and out of this came my anti-rape
invention, a tube which a woman wears inside her vagina and whose internal
surface is full of upward-facing barbs which hinge out of the way when a penis
enters, but penetrate the penis on withdrawal so that the rapist is effectively
impaled on the device, which the woman then releases from herself. It has
to be removed surgically, and basically wrecks the
penis head. I thought of this 13 years before
the next inventor had the same idea, but I never presented it to industry for
manufacture because malicious women who scream rape and might use the invention
as a weapon are numerous enough to make any marketer think twice, and of course
its always possible for the female half of a perfectly happy and sincere couple
to forget it’s there.
More
famously I solved the famous Kidd-Palmer treasure maps that were once in the
British Museum, for which I hit the headlines in 1980, revealing an island which
we explored thoroughly, only to suffer the horror of the BBC and the local
Sheffield newspaper decrying me as a charlatan, despite the volumes of research
material I had accumulated over years, together with the active participation of
the foreign government involved, right up to the top, and much paperwork and
correspondence from them (6).
These
days I’m retired, I live alone, have a small cottage in the sun (anything
bigger would only add to my loneliness), my lump sum and all the time in the
world to devote to my writing and inventing. I’ll be the first to admit that
I’m a terrible recluse, and that this is almost certainly due to the
circumstances of my early life. Shy to begin with (would you believe), as the
natural non-Christian in the Christian land, the catholic boy in the protestant
country, the Celtic boy in the Saxon land, the country boy in the city school,
the council house kid on the private street, the ‘A’ kid in the ‘B’
class, the grammar school boy in the secondary modern school, the poor branch of
a family which owned timber yards, driving schools and department stores, the
victim of the bullies, the charlatan with the impeccably genuine project, from
an immediate family that couldn’t even love themselves let alone each other --
I never belonged, and perhaps with justification I have become wary of people,
never really having been at ease in the company of anyone who wasn’t a
time-honoured friend (7).
Although
I have a ‘first’ in physics I could always string a sentence together and
I’m now a freelance investigative journalist with many literary pieces to my
credit, including all you may read on this site, and I like to keep the subjects
of my investigations varied and diverse. I occasionally get reporters coming to
my door asking about my past work, but my answer is always the same: wasted trip
baby, get lost, go and
get your own material don’t come here dipping your bread into mine. A few
wretched ones have even tried to lay it on me that ‘they’ve come a long
way’; tough -- they should know better than that, having called all the shots
on that one without consulting me.
These
days I still explore, in pursuance of my various historical projects and in this
I travel widely, from South Africa to the frozen wastes of northern Canada, from
the leafy glades of Sherwood Forest to the castles of Bonnie Scotland, tracing
and tracking down some of the real-life figures behind some of our more famous
novels and legends, and some of our lesser ones. My uncle had been a Detective
Sergeant in the Leeds CID and there does run in my family a natural talent for
tracing things in general and people in particular. Read some of my stuff on
this site!
In
2021 I was diagnosed with colon cancer, stage 3, and a month later I had surgery
to remove this. I then made the mistake of my life, agreeing to a short
precautionary course of chemotherapy, which overdosed and poisoned my entire
colon, of which I lost all but 8 inches, with surgeons fighting for 2 hours to
keep me alive from multiple organ failure due to septic shock. I woke up in
intensive care with a colostomy bag, whereupon I lost no time in lobbying my
life-saving surgeon, bless her cotton socks, to remove the blasted thing and
reconnect me, which she did 7 months later. Never
before or since have I walked unaided into an operating
theatre with my mask hiding such a beaming grin.
That
was 2 years ago and
frequent tests and scans still can’t find a trace of anything untoward. Naturally
however I’m still wary, who wouldn’t be, despite the original surgeon
telling me that the cancer had never travelled very far, then my colon had been
poisoned, and then my colon had died, and then the dead colon had been
removed…. and all in all if
it can get out of that one we’ll call it Houdini. I’ve just been told to get
lost and come back in 3 years.
And so, my travels continue, and hopefully with a little luck, and a lot of holy water, I guess it won’t come to pass quite yet what they always come to say in Ireland -- that we have known the days.
Me
in 2022: My passage through school might have been
smoother had I not mixed my sense of humour with
my underlying hatred of the regime, and my childhood
might have been a bit easier with anybody else for
parents.
Notes.
1).
Another thing I remember about the tests put in front of me is that they were
not psychologically-based intelligence
tests. Instead there
were pages and pages of computation work. There shouldn't have been. There
were no shapes to be turned around in the mind, no codes to solve, no word
anagrams, no memory tests, no logic tests, no reasoning tests. My personal
abilities were such that I would have passed such a test and enjoyed it. The
only problem was that they didn't give me one to do. If properly designed, these
tests should have been equally accurate if applied to anyone who could simply
read and write. Instead they
depended heavily on factual knowledge. They shouldn't have. Further, they were
printed on local school paper and seemingly hadn't come from outside. I always
genuinely wondered if the B-stream's papers were even marked. My age-corrected
IQ was finally measured by an organisation called Mensa in the 1990s. It is 140
-- top 1%. (2 sittings: 138+/-2 and 140 +/-4, overall average 140).
I was invited to take the main Mensa test but the lowest IQ they accept is 136
and I didn’t want to be one of the thickest people in Mensa.
2).
Now here's an interesting thing: at St.Peter's there
were just 3 of us, Kathryn Whittlestone, Marian Lambert and myself, who came
from Stocksbridge, in the top class of 32 pupils, and every year, all through
school, we 3 occupied the top 3 positions in the entire year with a rather large
gap (in the yearly exam results) between 3rd and 4th places. The statistical
probability of this happening by accident, of the top 3 just happening to be the
three Stocksbridge people, is just 1 in 826, which is the number of random ways
that 3 can be selected from 32 with the 3 in any order. This, then, is also the
probability that there was no anti-catholic bias
going on at 11+ at the old junior school (think it out!). In other words, the
three of us should have been at grammar school all along.
3)
My favorite movie throughout this period, and still one of my favorites today,
was The Singer Not the Song, with Dirk Bogarde and John
Mills. It was about an educated renegade who had a down on the Catholic church.
I forgave the film’s homosexual undertones because of its main theme: the
struggle of minds and wills between the renegade and the priest he admired and
with whom he could have intelligent conversation. However the
renegade did not allow this to distract him from his goal – to expunge the
priest at any cost. The singer is the priest; the
song his religion. Had it not been for the camp undertones, the renegade in the
movie, Anacleto Komachi, could easily have been me, especially in the last scene
where his animosity towards his adversary shows undertones to the contrary
which, at the last, might have surprised even he.
The
Singer Not the Song (Dirk Bogarde) (1961) - YouTube
(4)
She was also incredibly unknowledgeable. She would scrub stains on surface tops
and leave permanent scratches instead of soaking them and coming back later to
just wipe them off, do the same with stains inside drinking mugs, using pan
shiners and leaving scratches where bacteria could breed, instead of just
pouring a weak bleach solution into them and coming back 20 minutes later, boil
the crap out of rice instead of soaking it first and then just heating it up,
mix gravy powder with boiling water instead of cool and then constantly and
vigorously stir to try get the resultant lumps out, every plate of food she
cooked had a puddle of water in the bottom, and when a friend of mine once
showed her an old honeycomb from a bees nest she asked, “And what does that
do?” Into her mid-fifties she thought that an egg came out a hen’s bottom,
and when I put it to her that an egg was effectively an unborn chicken and perhaps she
might think about that again, she pondered, then melted down and broke a plate
over my head. More seriously, she always rather nastily blamed me for always
crying as a baby – only to be caught 25 years later vigorously rubbing a
pacifier against my baby daughter’s gums to force her to accept it. My little
daughter cried for days after that – by which time she’d done it again.
My father always used to say, “Your mother knows best!”. Hence her nickname
– Knowsbest.
On a visit to their house once, I had given my daughter her prescribed
medication – and my mother insisted I give it to her again because she had not
overseen me doing it the first time -- thereby threatening to overdose her. When
I refused she
violently melted down, because what she perceived as her absolute authority had
just been challenged and she was very obviously putting this before my child’s
life.
When my eldest child was 6 months old, we cut them both off for 15 years as a
dangerous influence. During that time we
heard that they’d been drunk in charge of my sister’s little kids, and
during one of their rows my mother had fired a 12-bore shotgun inside the home.
5) However in all fairness it should not pass unobserved that my sister also had her failings. She was immensely selfish. She was 10 years older than I, and in that sense was never a real sister. We never once played out together, never once skinned our knees together, and never even had any of those brother-sisterly arguments which are so frequently looked back upon with nostalgia. To me she would come and go like some sort of visiting aunt. I was thrilled as a kid when she'd take me out to the local coffee bar and local public pool...only to realise years later what I should have known then... that she had used me as an excuse to socialise with her friends at these places, something which my parents had forbidden. I did wonder why she kept wandering off and leaving me entirely alone in the pool when I was very young and couldn't swim. We seemed to get closer when my kids came along... but there again the grim truth manifested itself when I got divorced and me and the kids no longer lived in the same house --- she would absolutely always go to visit them there...at never me at my home. Not once--- ever. Even when returning from trips to Scotland they'd drive past my home to get to my kids’ home. In fact, over the 63 years I lived on this earth prior to her death, her record for coming to visit me, where I lived, not being a place where my kids also lived, had been a Perfect Zero. Another upsetting example of the kind of person we had here, was in the fact that despite all of the above, as soon as I first went out into the world and made some good money, I paid for her to have an au-pair (a Spanish girl called Christina) for a period of time. At that time, she only had 2 kids and her husband was in a well paid job. Years later, however, when my wife and I had 4 kids, and no job, and were desperately struggling...she never offered. She had been an only child until she was 10, and the selfishness which can develop in such situations had never left her.
6).
I eventually received an apology from one of
the individuals involved. I had refused to allow these detractors to see my
research files but later, in a change of heart, I sent copies to Patricia A.
Coldwell who ran a consumer affairs programme on the BBC and had covered my
work. A few days later my phone rang. She expressed her sorrow at how she had
misunderstood both myself and my work and said that if only I had shown her this
material beforehand, her programme would never have gone out or at least she
would have refused to take part in it. I think she had originally pictured me as
a complete conman who’d just sat there in a room and made the whole thing up
with a glint in his eye and a pen in his hand; it must have come as a shock to
discover not only its genuineness but also the calibre of some of the people
involved in it.
One wonders how much flak her department might have received from elsewhere.
7)
The misfit nature of my medical history is just as odd, except that there’s
the good news and the bad news here. First the good news; dentally I’m a
caries-free adult, meaning there’s something in my saliva stopping my teeth
from going bad (1% of the population), I have a CCR6 (double delta 32) gene
which means I can’t get smallpox, HIV or the bubonic plague (1% of the
population), my formally measured IQ is 140 (1% of the population), and at
school aged 14 I was the 100 yards sprinting champion and also ran a mile in 4m
34s – with feet as flat as a pair of flippers but which have never given me
any trouble at all. Now for the bad news: my blood group is A negative (6 % of
the population), when in the 1990s I was treated over an 18-month period for
successive bouts of acute pain, which turned out to be my appendix repeatedly
bursting then sealing itself up in fatty material, they diagnosed and treated me
for renal cholic because the pain was in my kidneys,
my colon cancer came from a polyp which turned malignant but each polyp has only
1 chance in 20 of doing this and I only had one, and when I went for the chemo
that nearly killed me I expressly told them beforehand
to watch out because my body doesn’t read the bl**dy script!