I had come prepared. Bulging the bottom of my bag was a roll of tape bought yesterday from a Chinese one euro shop round the corner from our club. It stocks an interesting range of fridge magnets, along with other essentials for eco-friendly existence, including a battery-operated defecating old man whose bald pate rocks gently from side to side as he strains at his stool, a fat plastic baby that tinkles “I love you” amid intermittent giggles, and vast glass screens painted with jungles and mountains that tastefully portray perpetuum mobile waterfalls au naturel when connected to 220 volts.
So, as I approached the seafront Harley Davidson rockers’ bar, perhaps the most popular daytime venue in town, to affix my poster to the lamp-post opposite, I was confident, as I manoeuvred past the mobility buggies parked outside, that my mission would start well. Then, having positioned my bill, cut my tape, made my loops to ensure nothing protruded untidily beyond the edge and finally prepared to attach, I found that, as far as the marble plinth on my lamp-post was concerned, my adhesive tape - guaranteed to stick anything to anything, said the packet - was about as sticky as a melted ice cube.
So I had to walk back into town as far as the Morocco Bazaar to find a slab of Blu-tac. It was fortuitous, I reconciled, for on arriving there I realised I had put off the purchase of a new bag of turmeric, that essential ingredient of the home-cooked curry, the powder whose spills paint the kitchen permanent yellow. The problem with Benidorm, of course, is that all the Indians just throw tinned sauces at microwaved chicken bits, so the determined seeker of the traditional British curry has to make his own.
I bought my blue sticky stuff, and my yellow spicy stuff, and proceeded back to the Harley rockers bar to mount my message. I had, of course, been thoroughly eco and refused the plastic bags offered for my bizarre bazaar purchases, electing to drop them loose into my clearly adequate carrier bag, re-used from last week’s supermarket visit. And yes, the wrong side of the bed came back to haunt again as, in retrieving said poster from my bag, I found it and all the others streaked beautifully yellow with the newly-liberated turmeric powder, its cheap, Third World packaging incapable of withstanding a forty centimetre drop onto the edge of a masking tape roll. I must contact destructive testing agencies with the information. Having also already opened the pack of Blu-tac to check its ability to hold my posters, I found it too mixed with yellow spice to imitate concrete mix, its professed ability not to stain any surface now somewhat undermined by a thick coating of bright yellow permanence.
Admitting defeat, I ditched the lot, posters, flyers, Blu-tac, sticky tape, turmeric and bag into the nearest bin and squelched home in my soggy new shoes. It was only after I had got back to the van and had settled to my coffee that I remembered the perfectly good pair of scissors I had also put in the bag that morning. When Suzie came in an hour later she reminded me of the side of the bed maxim. She insisted I get back in bed and get up again, which I did, and the day has progressed without incident ever since.
Eighteen
It was the phrase B and E... - Don listens to the radio and reflects upon the nature of Britishness by going back to school again. He draws a map of the world and colours in the pink bits. He proposes a pyramid of creation and reflects upon status.
It was the phrase B and E that caught my attention. It featured in a radio interview from Britain, a daily opinion-forming and news-creating broadcast I still listen to whenever I can. As a work-a-day electrician in Kiddington Colliery, of course, I only ever heard radio or watched television in snatches. I used to hear bits of the early morning broadcasts as I got ready for work when I was on afternoons. If I was on mornings or nights I would be doing other things when it went out. It’s only since retirement that the regular ritual of morning news has begun, and it only continues courtesy of broadband internet. Since I am often blogging at the same time as listening, it seems natural to record items of topical interest in my journal.
The phrase B and E figured in a report on institutional racism in the police. The presenters usually insist that interviewees spell out acronyms in full, but this morning’s first mention of the phrase went unchallenged and unqualified, and I was left pondering its meaning. B and E immediately conjured up a medal, the British Empire Medal, or BEM. It was awarded to military types, but only the NCOs and below, not the nobs, and to civil servants. The BEM went to a rating who did something special, whereas the nobs received higher ranking awards merely for doing their jobs. Now that was a comment in itself on the rest of us, wasn’t it?
I immediately recalled being in my seat in Mrs Cartwheel’s class in Kiddington Junior and listening to a radio programme about a driver from Jest who had been awarded the medal for his role in the Normandy Landings. Mrs Cartwheel put a picture of the medal on the board and we all had to copy it into our books and colour it in. I used to be pretty good at such things, having been tutored so effectively in the art of colouring-in by my baby-sitter, Jack. But Geoff Watson, as ever sitting to my left, used to struggle with anything that involved drawing. His attempt at the seated Britannia on the front of the medal’s disc looked more like a circus elephant at tricks. I can remember Mrs Cartwheel holding his book up to the class, provoking all of us to laugh long and loud. Poor Geoff went beetroot red and cried all through playtime. I told him not to be such a sissy and thumped him in the gut to make him shut up.
So you can understand my double-take when, a few seconds later, the radio presenter prodded the question “B and E?” to prompt clarification and received the words “Black and Ethnic” from the subject of the interview. From British and Empire to Black and Ethnic in a generation and a half, I thought. I mentioned it to Suzie, but she just shrugged her shoulders and said, “Same thing, isn’t it?”
“I’m not ethnic,” I said, “I’m British,” indignation bristling my tone.
But in a way she was right, at least in the sense that British and Empire always did mean Black and Ethnic. You couldn’t have one without the other, except in Ireland, of course, which always was a special case and therefore doesn’t count.
The memories again took me back to Mrs Cartwheel’s class. I can also remember having to copy all the pink parts of a world map from the board. After years of training and practice she could do a near perfect outline of the continents on the blackboard in less than five minutes. When she did one, it stayed there for the day, and we did all our lessons around it. She had us all practise the skill until we could also do it perfectly. All, that is, except Geoff Watson who, as I mentioned earlier, was hopeless at drawing and used to shake with fear whenever he saw those first confident squiggles appear on the blackboard because he knew he would have to try unsuccessfully to copy them.
I got South America, Africa and Australia off to a tee quite quickly. South America is just a big triangle. Africa is the same, except there’s an oval on top. They never did build that east-west canal from Congo to Kenya that would have caused the bottom bit to come loose and drift down to the South Pole. Australia was just a box with a few bits sticking out. Perhaps it still is. North America came easily once you realised after a few curves that you could leave all the top part as negotiable. Europe took some mastering, since Scandinavia always came out much too big, looking like a limp plonker, an appendage with which we, the people, were becoming collectively obsessed at the time. Asia was always a swine, however, because there were in bits and out bits, big bits and little bits, and lots of islands that tended to wander off usually misshapen into the Pacific. At least we all got India in the right place, despite the fact that - as we perceived it - it only ever existed in our collective imagination.
But Mrs Cartwheel persevered. We had already been told that she always did the same thing for the first month with every one of her classes. She did nothing else until everyone could copy an outline world map and then she used the skill at least once each week throughout the year. So we practiced drawing it until everyone, except Geoff, of course, could produce
one whenever her frequent geography classes required one. It wasn’t long before Geoff started bunking off. On days when he did come to school, he would sometimes cry and shake with fear in the playground before we lined up. He couldn’t cope with the sense of isolation that came every time he was asked to do something he couldn’t manage. Like all of us, he thought his problems were unique, the first time in history that they had been manifest. And, also like all of us, he possessed no mechanism for coping with personal individual failure.
It was towards the end of that first month that we completed the task that all the practice was leading up to, the Britain and Her Empire lesson, B and E to be precise. It was a lesson that everyone in the school did at some point. It was a lesson whose confident message was designed to instil pride and patriotism, love of the Royal Family and, like the British Empire, everything else that was dependably permanent.
We each got a special piece of paper for the task. It was thick, textured, plain paper that suggested fray at the edges, cut from what looked like bed sheets of the stuff with a giant guillotine. Mrs Cartwheel warned us about not touching the guillotine, that only she was allowed near it and that anyone who disobeyed would have their fingers ceremonially removed by its blade, in imitation of the Godless French who had used the machine during their bloody terror, we were told. We all complied, knowing it wouldn’t happen but afraid it could. We all giggled, however, because she had used what now I would call a non-e word.
We all got new pencils, HB, that were sharpened to lances before we used them to spike one another on the shy below the level of the desk. The lesson was such a hoot, completely silent after Mrs Cartwheel’s instruction to draw, silent, that is, until you heard the whirring of the table-mounted sharpener being used to re-point a weapon and then, a few seconds after the sounds of a regained seat subsided, a stifled “Ouch” pierced the stillness as the point stabbed home into someone’s short-trousered thigh. Everyone would giggle, Mrs Cartwheel would theatrically clear her throat and we’d all be still and apparently concentrating again until the whole process started again, to be repeated every few minutes through the hour.
So on that large sheet of paper, specially distributed for the task, and with our newly sharpened pencils we were instructed to draw our practiced continental outlines. Geoff Watson was hopeless, so I did his as well as my own and got a ticking off when as a result I fell behind the rest of the class. Geoff’s paper looked like he had kept it in the coal cellar, the parts that should have stayed white having been pencilled and erased so often they were solid grey, the outline I added on top barely visible. One section of Central Africa looked like it had been mined so intensively that the desk showed through.
Mrs Cartwheel had a prize possession that she used to display occasionally. It was a map, but not just a little paper thing that was stuck to the wall. It was printed on fabric and glistened. It rolled up onto a pair of giant wooden curtain rails before being stored in a black cylinder with an end that went pop when it came off. The fabric made flopping sounds as it unfurled and threads detached from its edge every time she used it. She would pull them off with a yank that made a ripping sound like someone running a thumb along a comb. “Another thread closer to the end,” she would mumble as she rolled the twine into a ball before placing it carefully, accurately into the West Riding standard issue waste bin that lived next to the door. Even in those days they were green.
She would hang the map over the blackboard and wander from side to side with a long stick that she pointed at various places, occasionally, rarely, tapping the surface to emphasise a word, so that we could “Learn something about places outside of our little Kiddington world”, as she put it, “to gain a glimpse of a life outside the cultural confines and anti-intellectual restrictions of a working class pit village.”
I remember her words exactly, despite the fact that at the time I couldn’t understand them. I find it fascinating now to realise that she still saw herself as an outsider. At the time my thoughts were of simpler things. I always used to think that the ripples that flowed across the map’s surface when she tapped it with her stick might be waves on the sea. It made me think of paddling in the sea on the vast sands on the coast north of Jest.
This, clearly her favourite lesson, was her real starting point for each year. “When you have finished your outline of the continents,” she said, “I want you to copy the outlines of all the pink parts of the map, labelling the names of the countries and their cities. You can come up to the board with your slates to copy the place names and then transfer them to your maps back at your desks. When you have finished, you can take it home to put on your bedroom wall, so that you can use it when I set Geography homework.” Even when she spoke the asserted eternity of disciplines demanded capital letters.
The title was important. It had to be printed in block capitals across the landscape sheet in the permanence of pen and ink, and double underlined. BRITAIN AND HER EMPIRE is what we had to write. B AND HER E. Not the United Kingdom, you will note, or England, but Britain, and only Britain, without the Great. It was an era when the British would have felt that the prefix might constitute unbecoming over-statement, especially when terminated by Empire, and over-statement, like any other form of potential indulgence, should be avoided, we consistently learned, at all costs.
I loved the names. There was Bechuanaland and Basutoland. There were Trucial States, crucial for our future wealth, Mrs Cartwheel told us. There were places called George and Victoria all over the world. There were even Charlestowns and Charlesvilles here and there. I never understood why the Edwards and Williams seemed to have failed to register as profusely. It was a world that seemed something like the size of our backyard, with Kiddington, itself, dwarfing the rest, offering an example of the honesty, hard work, thrift, respectability, industriousness and cultural superiority that both created and justified empire.
“And the pink parts are all ours,” said Mrs Cartwheel, “including Australia, Canada, South Africa and India, countries that we have launched on the ocean of independence, having built them in our own image.” I remember her writing the words on the board so that we could all copy as she prescribed along the lower edge of our individual maps, like some footnote to an otherwise ignored Antarctica.
There was another of her lessons that year that I still remember. She called it something like ‘The Order Of Things In Creation’. Again it involved drawing and, again, we used special paper cut to size on the class guillotine. The Order Of Things was a pyramid, represented in section as a triangle. At its apex was God. God was a male, whose lined face and flowing beard were far too much for the graphical skills of Geoff Watson, who sat and cried throughout the exercise. Just below God was The Queen. This was the old Queen, Mrs Cartwheel told us, and not the new one. But it didn´t matter, since it was the office that was important, not the individual who held it. So we didn’t need to draw her, a crown being sufficient to represent her presence. Beneath The Queen were the ministers and officials of the state, and just below them the upper classes. The middle classes came next, and within them, presumably all Rugby Union clubs. Their umbrellas, walking sticks, briefcases and other baggage of class identity sufficed as representative icons. The labouring classes were on the next floor down, shown by their shovels, trowels, scissors and picks. Beneath them were the planet’s non-Europeans, stick men in black or yellow, positioned just above the layer of apes and monkeys. Other mammals came next, represented by cows, dogs and cats. Birds, reptiles, insects and fish occupied the next four descending levels, all atop a seemingly amorphous final layer labelled ‘Lower Orders Of Life’. I nudged Geoff and told him that’s where he came from, but he didn’t respond. As usual he was too busy crying.
But we have our place. Mrs Cartwheel made sure we knew it. Though ‘Children’ did not appear in her pecking order of creation, we learned to respect our elders and our betters in amounts proportional to their status, measured i
n how many floors above us they lived. But we were also taught our duties to the inferiors below us, hence be kind to animals. By virtue of our birthright at the centre of the pink world, however, we also carried a special responsibility towards the rest of the human race, a responsibility endowed by our superiority. We, the British, had invented everything on earth that was worth having, had brought civilised government to the planet and order to nations that previously had lived in the dark ages of chaos, superstition, pestilence, sacrifice, famine, totalitarian autocracy and daytime temperatures that resulted inevitably in languor, and even the culpability of midday sleep under the nearest tree. It made us all feel proud, especially when we watched the next Highway Patrol or Gun Smoke, because we were probably responsible for inventing them as well, by virtue of their being American, and Americans were really British in the end because they spoke English. Even Geoff Watson, as the snot and tears that were his response to his inabilities dribbled down his chin, even he mustered a proud smile. At least he could still lord it over the reptiles and insects, not to mention the rest of humanity, including all the B and Es, while he learned to doff his cap at those who played Rugby Union.
Nineteen
Frankly, I was surprised at my emotion... - Donald leaves Kiddington emotionally and recalls his life in the mines. He reflects on fellowship and community. He revisits 1984, discusses socialism, recalls his own radicalism and then, via contemporary analysis of strike action, describes his own compromise.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 19
