either by a single impregnation
or continual and stupid masculine advice,
also blighted mine. They told her
that teaching me early on (and badly) to swim
in the rough, cold North Atlantic
would harden me up,
that attending a school with a militarist training corps
(I joined the Scouts!), obsessed by rugby
and other mindlessly-competitive games
would knock the corners off. I was not,
however, so much a sissy, Mary-Jane or
(fatherless and brotherless) a 'spoiled' Mummy's Boy,
a craven softy, wimp (more deviant than consciousy defiant)
and 'butter-fingered' handless critter
as a Non-participant, a book-stealing outsider
whose outlook on life was (compared with
these pathetic, malignant and - yes - bitter
males) already much more reflective
(if at the age of eight somewhat inchoate)
more independent - and much wider.
2 comments:
Great self-analysis and perspicacious self-description, but I wonder if the subtext that runs through your narrative of who you were and how you were self-forming was also that you were one of the men who blighted your mother's life. I was not a sporty boy, was physically frail, sensitive, and had my feeling easily hurt. I was sometimes made fun of, but my mother never tried to take or seek anyone's advice about how to change me, to toughen me up, maybe because she despised her two rough and tumble to-hell-with-everyone else brothers, or if not exactly despised, she was terrified of them.
Oh yes, Marc, absolutely - I was a continual worry to my mother after the emotional rape which occurred when I was sent to a private ('preparatory') school. Her final shock was when I suddenly 'came out' as a same-sex-fancier at the age of 39! But she coped well with that, as with everything else including my 3 months in gaol in 1973.
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