There are many things I was told throughout my childhood that
turned out not to be true.
If you swallow chewing gum, it will wrap around your heart and YOU
WILL DIE! for one.
If you don’t go to sleep, the Bogey Man will come and get you
(subtext: AND YOU WILL DIE!).
If you don’t look right, look left and right again (I think that
was the order), as the road expert Tufty tells you, a bus will come along and
YOU WILL DIE!
Small wonder I didn’t die of a heart attack caused by fear, long
before I reached adulthood.
I am convinced that the reason I, and so many of my friends, never
experimented with drugs was because of a very effective poster campaign during
our teens. It was, basically: if you take drugs . . . yes, you guessed it . . .
YOU WILL DIE!
I was brought up with a fear of dying from a very early age, not
helped by a church background that instilled in me a fear of the afterlife –
heaven, if you were good; hell, if you were bad. Good meant have to take
eternal afternoon tea with all the old fuddy duddies from church, and hell was
just being very hot. I didn’t fancy either much.
Then, at Durham Road Junior School in Newport, on the last Friday
of every month there was a roll call at the end of assembly, listing the pupils
who had met a bad end for not adhering to Tufty’s road safety instructions.
“Steven XX, stepped out from behind a parked vehicle. Dead. Jane
XX, ran into oncoming traffic. Two broken legs.”
The headmaster saved up the broken limbs and fatalities as if they
were our reward for good behaviour: look what might have happened to YOU, had
you not listened to Tufty! Be grateful, give thanks, you are ALIVE!
My secondary school, Brynteg Comprehensive in Bridgend, did not
deal with death much better. Musical instruments were allotted to pupils for
just one year at a time, and I was in the clarinet queue.
One morning, the headmaster announced in assembly that the lead
clarinet player of the orchestra had been killed on his mo-ped on the way into
school. There was barely a beat of breath between that announcement and his
next sentence: “Would Jacqueline Stephen please go to the music room at break.”
The music teacher handed over the box containing the clarinet as
if it were the Crown Jewels. When I opened it, the reed was still damp,
evidence that the poor lad had been practising even before he took his fateful
journey. I didn’t want the instrument anymore, and every time I put it to my
mouth after that day, it was as if all I could taste was the dead boy’s spit.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death this week, as I have many
friends who have lost their parents in recent weeks, and I have had my fair
share of friends die recently, too. There is a sense that for every one who
goes, I am taking another step closer to that final gate, and it doesn’t feel
good.
I’ve also been thinking about it because on Monday, the next part
of the brilliant series Seven Up hits our screens. I was just a year younger
than the participants when this brilliant documentary series first aired in
1964 and I have followed their fortunes and disparate lives every seven years
since.
The original experiment was to bring together working class and
middle class children and see how they interacted; it was a social experiment –
nature versus nurture – and the results were often surprising, and sometimes
less so.
As the group moves towards their sixties in 56 Up, there is
something desperately poignant about those early years that saw them so full of
hope, excitement and joy, and something equally so desperately sad about
knowing that they, too, are next up to the gate: arriving, as Shakespeare’s
Seven Ages of Man speech in As You Like It says, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans
taste, sans everything”.
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