Memories of England.

I recently heard from a blogger whose stuff I enjoy tremendously, who asked me to expand on comments I made in an earlier post where I talked about a few years my family spent living in England. I had to reread that "Memories" post to see what I'd said. I guess I left the impression in the post that those three years were a negative experience, but in retrospect I can't say it was all bad, or even mostly bad. But there was a lot of crap that went on there, partly due to the environment we found ourselves in and partly due to the stuff that was going on in the world at the time.

It was the late 1960s, the hey day of the counter culture. Vietnam was burning at a high pitch, and hundreds of years of lame British policies in Northern Ireland were coming to a head. There was an environment there where dad and other military people were told not to go out into London in their uniforms for fear that they might get into trouble, and there were even policeman posted for a time at the entrance and exit of our housing area.

We lived in a town called Carpenders Park, north of London on one of the tube lines. We lived in a clump of base housing set aside for Americans, surrounded by a high wall. We didn't have a gate, but it was sort of like the gated communities that a lot of people live in today. The housing area was dominated by a large open, paved playground and an unpaved area about the size of a football field. There were trees along the inside of the wall, and more in the central playground area, as well as swings and the like. It was excellent for hanging out, playing kick ball, riding your bike, or whatever.

The central area was surrounded by duplexes, with their back doors facing the field and play ground, their front doors facing the road. There was (and still is) a dairy farm on the uphill side, across the two lane highway from the complex. A road ran into the complex from that dairy side, in front of our duplex, around the neighborhood in a circle, and then out and down to the main town by the tube line where the Brits lived. There were duplexes inside the circle of the road, and more duplexes and a few single family houses on the outer side of the street, with their backs to the encircling wall where trees had been planted. There were no fences, so all the kids played in everyone's yard. You know the adults had to love that. My dad wasted a lot of time trying to get these kids to respect his "yard" to no avail. People would ask me "why's yer dad such a dick?' I'd say "I dunno."

Whether or not you lived in a house or a duplex depended on your fathers rank. I think generals families had houses, but the rest of the officers, enlisted and a few DOD civilians lived in these duplexes. It was basically an English public housing complex. I was young enough not to really care or notice the quality of the place, but my mom and sister did. I think that had something to do with the vibe that existed in the family while we were there. I loved the place, but they remember it being a run down hovel. We could have rented a house in a nicer suburb of London, but dad was too frugal to do it. We knew people who did that. They lived a lot better than we did, and their kids went to local public schools with English kids and got a lot better education. My sister and I rode busses in the morning to the base schools at Ruislip, and spent all our time with other service brats.

Dads early life in the depression taught him that if they are giving stuff away for free, you took it. My moms upbringing was a bit nicer, and she learned to differentiate between the kids who dressed well, even if they were poor, and the kids who were wild and ran around barefoot. My grandmother was a surgical nurse at the local hospital, and the primary bread winner in the family. She taught her three daughters to believe that those kids were barefoot because their parents were trash, and she shouldn't have anything to do with them. My dads folks always made sure he and his brothers had shoes, but I don't think there was the same sense of superiority. When my sister and I insisted on going barefoot in the summer, it used to drive our mom crazy. Made it even more fun to do it.

As the son of a sharecropper, hoeing and picking cotton until the war came along and gave him other career options, dad was taught to see things more basically. The result of all this is that my mom and sister were both pain-in-the-ass princesses, but my dad had no patience for that shit. He loved the fact that my mom was beautiful and kept the house with tremendous style and elegance, but to him, the day-to-day running of the house was her job. When he wasn't at work or playing golf with the guys from work, or doing whatever chores were required at home, he was sitting in front of our one black and white TV and didn't want to be fucked with. In many ways, I think that setting sums up the life that most baby boomers had back then. Our life was just on the other side of the ocean, in an island of Americans, set in the middle of a foreign country.

I think I was about five or six years old when we moved to Britain. It was the summer of 1966 and we had just completed tours of duty in Omaha, Nebraska, where my dad finished his BA in Political Science, Oklahoma City, and Wichita Falls, Texas, where I started kindergarten. We moved to three places in three years after a three year stint in Bermuda, where I was born. That was our life back then. You didn't live anywhere long enough to make friend's, and if you did, you lost em quick and had to make more in the next place. My older sister became a life guard in Wichita Falls at the pool on base and I took lessons and learned to swim. My sister was becoming a teenager by the time we moved to England and the generation gap was as wide as the friggin grand canyon.

She was going through completely different stuff than me, feeling that she should have been given more freedom and pissed off all the time. She's still mad at the folks because they didn't let her go to Hyde Park one weekend to see a free concert when she was thirteen or fourteen. She had friends who got to go to Creams farewell concert at the Albert Hall in about '68, but she couldn't go because she was on restriction that night. In other words, her normal teenage crap was elevated to a completely new level because she was in England, in the center of world pop culture in the late 1960s but not old enough to be able to fully take part in it. We found out later that she and her friends were doing all sorts of adult stuff on the sly, drinking and smoking and shit, being a typical rebellious kid. She's very lucky that ether she didn't get raped, addicted, or caught doing any of that shit by my mom or dad. I don't know which fate would have been worse. She claims other kids were doing even worse stuff and that she was always a good kid. Probably true. All I know is, she's been a huge gasping pain in my ass from day one, and she still is, bless her.

My life in those days was pretty much bounded by the walls of that housing area, and the cutthroat society that existed between the kids there. The few kids I hung out with were ok, but the kids that were a little older were constantly at one another's throats. The enlisted kids took great joy in pulling down an officers kid, and there were bullies roaming all the time, just looking for an easy mark like me. I was shy and retiring, so I was a favorite target. Fighting was constant, and I was always having to worry about getting jumped by some older kid. When fights began, all the other kids would form a circle and shout encouragement to the combatants. I'd never seen anything like that before, and it scared the shit out of me. Remember, I was six years old, which I don't think is quite old enough to have learned how to fight or defend yourself, much less be comfortable with the fact that you're gonna have to. I didn't grow up fighting with a brother like my dad, which might have given me the confidence and experience I needed before I was thrown to the wolves.

The result was I ended up spending a lot of time indoors, in my room or in front of the TV. I got overweight, which I've spent the rest of my life dealing with, and I learned to live inside my own mind, and basically shut out a lot of what was going on around me. I read my sisters set of encyclopedias for fun, listened to records on my little stereo and played with little medieval or Roman soldiers that my mom got for me (remember, it's England). I loved watching British TV shows like The Thuderbirds, Doctor Who, or Jackanory. I loved shows or movies about history, the Middle Ages and the Romans, and daydreamed constantly about being in those times and places. They had a cool show, sort of a soap opera, in which a British kid and a Roman kid became friends. All that stuff exploded in my imagination and I never really came down from it.

My first grade teacher, Mrs. Ireland, was a hag and a half (poor bitch). She had no clue what to do with me. I daydreamed constantly, and basically lived in my own world. Mom became convinced that there was something wrong with me, and took me to shrinks and had tests done, all of which gave me the mind fuck of the century. My sister remembers thinking "why doesn't he just do what he's supposed to do?" She'd been pressured to make good grades at my age and thought I was getting a pass. I remember one day when Mrs. Ireland gave out instructions for some project. I was in another world and hadn't heard what she'd said to do or not to do. She brought me back to reality; got right in my face and yelled at me in front of everyone when I did exactly what she'd just told us all not to do. That was my early school experience in a nut shell. Not much of a scholar then, or now, but you never know how things will work out. Today I make my living teaching school, college level History and Government. I wish Mrs. Ireland and the others could see me now.

When the time came to pass to the second grade, my folks came to me and asked if I'd mind repeating the first grade. I remember that moment very clearly. We were on the base, going into the officers club for lunch or something, which was a huge treat (the burgers and fries were to die for). They looked down at me and posed the question. I think my mom got down and looked me in the eye. What the fuck is a 6 year old gonna say? I didn't want to do it, but was made to do it anyway, and from the first day of school (I remember that day specifically too) when I walked into class, everyone else was sure that I'd flunked the first grade, and was obviously a looser. My new teacher never took me out in front of everyone and told them different, so I was labeled and set aside and spent the next few years having to live it down. The fact that I lived in the same neighborhood with these kids meant I had to take it to the playground out back as well.

The story the folks gave me was that they had screwed up and put me in school too early. I had to ether sit out a year or repeat the first grade so that all the other kids could ketch up to me in age. There may be somethin' to that because I was the same age as everyone else through the rest of my school years. Graduated high school at 18. My sister (the bitch) recently told me dad said at the time it was because I'd flunked. Who the fuck knows? All I know is being labeled as a looser at the age of 6 did nothing but add to the list of reasons I had to avoid other kids and stay in my room.

Don't get me wrong, it wasn't all hell. There were good times too. There were summer days when we played kick ball all day out on that field and had a blast. There were fabulous snowy winters when we got time off from school and spent all day playing and building snow forts. There were times when my mom and dad cooked traditional meals for us, like home made ice cream and fried chicken, passing on to us a little of their own family traditions. There were summer days on base when we went and spent all day at the pool and the BX and had burgers and fries. There were the summer days I spent in the trees by the wall playing Roman soldier with other kids. There were the days in those trees, hidden from others, where little boys and little girls showed one another stuff that would have horrified their parents to death, and even days at school when time seemed suspended and fun and discovery ruled the day. I loved living there on those days, and even look back fondly on much of the other stuff that turned out to be less traumatic in the end than this post may make it seem.

But I also hated it. I learned to avoid bullies there, rather than to defend myself. I learned to live inside my own mind there, and my socialization was stunted for years after. I learned to love books, TV, Movies and to love history there, and would never trade those times I spent quietly in my room for anything. I make a pretty good living teaching history now, and get to try to help people understand things that I've loved for 40 years. All the other stuff is ashes.

England was a singular experience in my life, but the peace and quiet of the woods in Missouri was a paradise compared to it (see earlier post). Basically, my hiding place got a lot bigger and more interesting. My life got a lot more normal in Missouri, but I never learned to be much of a team player, or much of a student, or even really how to defend myself from bullies (it took a long time to get over that). I've been a loner ever since. I learned a long, long time ago that if you stay to yourself, no one has the chance to fuck with you, and you can do pretty much what ever you want.

Thing is, there's a point in your life when you have to own who and what you are. Wining about your childhood at my age is grounds for a severe beating. I'm who I am now, good and bad, because of all the experiences of my life, both good and bad, and that makes me the same as everyone else in the world. Lots of people had it a lot worse than I did. I was lucky. I still am lucky. My family is all still alive and still gets together regularly in the summer and consumes massive quantities of homemade peach ice cream and fried chicken. Plan to do it again this coming Lador Day weekend. I tell folks my mom's got the best restaurant in town. She knows her shit. We're goin' to Austin to eat Mexican food tomorrow.

She has the house set up like no one else, classy as hell, with all the paintings, brass rubbings and clocks and stuff they brought back from England, laid out all over the place. Don't get me wrong. She can still be a huge pill from time to time. My dad is 84 now. He's been retired since about 1975, and has outlived most of his friends and all but one of his brothers. He spends a lot of time watching crappy daytime TV and sitting in the swing in their back yard with the cats, thinking about old times. When he asks me from time to time to come over on the weekend and take him to the driving range or the golf course, I have to bite my lip to keep from saying something like "hey, where the hell were you 40 years ago when I needed you?" But you know, I love that old bastard to death, and there's a statute of limitations on that old shit. It's water under the bridge. They made up for whatever they did or didn't do back then with things they've done in later years.

So I go over there every weekend, and I take him to eat Chinese food, and to hit balls when I can, and I remind myself that his father died when he was my age, back when we were living in England, and there was nothing he could do. He and his father were the best of buds, but because of his career he couldn't spend time with him. He didn't have the chances I have now. When I was in my room, his father was dying of a heart attack and his mother was in a nursing home with alzheimer's, unable to recognize ether him or his brothers. That realization makes me think the life he had back then was a lot sadder than mine? I wish I'd known.

So, we're all a lot older now, and if you pay attention during your life, you learn to see things from other points of view. You learn that some of the things that seemed earth shaking in your childhood turned out not to matter much at all, and that your parents are just people. They dealt with the shit that was thrown at them as they lived their life, and as you lived their life along with them. In stead of a large extended family to help her, my mom had so-called experts writing books, telling her how to raise her kids. And it didn't help that the world we were growing up in might as well have been on another planet from the one my folks had known. Like I said, it's all water under the bridge.

In August of 1999 I went to England to visit with some good friends who had moved over there, and during the visit I made a point to find Carpenders Park and ride the tube up to see it. The circle of housing is still there, but they had torn down the old housing and replaced it with nice new buildings the year before. In every other way though it was still the same place. The trees and the playground are still there in the center of the place, and the Dairy farm across the highway looks like a snap shot from my memory. Couldn't believe it. It was almost a triumphal feeling to stand there looking out over it and tell myself, "see, you've made it. Here it is. This place is still here, but you're a big, strong man now and you've made it back. You're not that little kid any more." I guess that's a nice end to the tale.

Well, I've got to go to the store and get some shit to eat. I'm gonna try to make that shrimp fried rice Mushy talked about a while back. So go hug yer kids and don't be such an asshole. One of these days you're gonna be old as hell and they're gonna be taking care of you. You're gonna want them to like you then, and bring their kids around for you to spoil. My folks don't have any grandkids. That's the price they pay. Consider yourself warned. Later, FHB.

Postscript: Having reread this a few times, it occurrs to me that the little boy who was very scared so many years ago is still very much inside me. In going back to Carpenders Park in '99 it was like I was fulfilling a duty to myself. The stronger, grown up and basically happy guy I am now was taking that unhappy kid back so he could see the place and put it behind him. It was sort of like taking a scared little kid into a dark room and turning the light on so he can see there are really no monsters. I think I'll always feel a need to protect that kid. He didn't have much of anyone to protect him for a long time. In a fundamental way, he's still who I am.

Oh, and the rice turned out good. Check out the fixens at "Mushy's Cookings" over in the links. Ok, now I'm realy done. Enough is enough. Shtum.