Some Scenes from a Boyhood and a Bridge into Adulthood

He was up earlier than usual that morning. His feelings as he dressed a mixture of apprehension and excitement. Coming into the kitchen he saw his mother had already had breakfast and was busy at the sink. His ‘earlier than usual’ was later than her normal. “Good morning Mum”, he greeted her back. “Good morning James”, she said, turning to look at him briefly. “Your father will be down soon, he’s not too well today”. James reached the cornflakes down from the shelf in the pantry. “I’m cooking egg and bacon for your breakfast – this is a special day for you.” “Thanks Mum”, thinking, “I don’t really want egg and bacon.” He poured cornflakes into the bowl, added milk and a little sugar as the bacon began to sizzle under the grill. “Is your case packed? Your train leaves at 10.30 doesn’t it?” “Yes.” Hoping his reply would be taken to cover both questions.” His case was empty as yet and he knew that his mother would be irritated by that but Jim resented her controlling influence yet wasn’t strong enough to break free. In confrontations Jim would sometimes retreat into himself and remain silent. He actually really enjoyed the egg and bacon. “Thanks Mum that was nice. I think I’ll just finish off with a piece of toast and a cup of tea.”

Packing completed Jim was ready to leave. “Goodbye Dad, Mum.” Jim, as all his friends knew him, turned away from the front door on the side of the dorma-bungalow walking suitcase in hand down the path and through the garden gate. He turned to wave briefly to his father and slightly tearful mother and then headed in the direction of Spalding station, SPALDING TOWN the platform signs proudly declare. Spalding was then a small market town of about 17,000 people. Twenty minutes later Jim was seated in a window seat as the train pulled away from the station and slowly gathered speed, Jim’s immediate destination Doncaster and from there a second train to Leeds to embark on his university course. It was just over a year since he had arrived in Spalding with his mother. The family home in Nottingham had been sold, his father had stayed behind to tie up some loose ends, his twin brother George was staying on at the Grammar school for a third year in the sixth form to take Cambridge entrance exams so Jim and his mother had travelled to Spalding alone. Jim remembered that his mother had been anxious and somewhat depressed coming to a place she was not familiar with and where there was no-one she knew. Kind neighbours had invited them in for supper and played Beethoven’s 4^th Piano Concerto on their gramophone, one of Jim’s favourites, and he knew his mother loved it too though her choice would have been Mozart. Walking back to their house Jim tried to encourage her commenting, “They are really nice people aren’t they? Everything is going to be fine. ” Her muted response indicated that he had not succeeded.

The gently swaying carriage and the familiar clack-clack of train on track were relaxing. Jim was faintly amused by the station names disappearing backwards in turn, Pinchbeck, Twenty and Counter Drain. He had grown to love the flat arable landscapes of South Lincolnshire with their panoramic skies. There is nowhere to practice hill starts in that part of the world. The past twelve months had been a frustrating and somewhat unhelpful time. The original intention, before his father’s move to the Spalding branch of the National Provincial Bank, had been for him to spend a third year at the Grammar school in Nottingham, partly to improve his ‘A’ Level grades, partly because his headmaster thought that Jim needed to mature to get the maximum benefit from university. True, but not a boost to his confidence. Spalding Grammar school did not have a third year sixth so Jim was a bit of an oddball. He was repeating ‘A’ level Physics, Maths and Chemistry that he had already passed. He should have been aiming to improve his grades but was bored and in reality went backwards academically. He made a few friends but none as close as the friends he had had at school in Nottingham – he especially remembered Anthony; their country walks and conversations and their many games of tennis and chess which Anthony invariably won. In Spalding he did gain a place in the third pair of the school tennis team but he and his partner didn’t win any matches and neither did the team.

From the carriage window Jim could see in the distance Smedley’s canning factory where he had worked for several weeks during the summer after leaving school. He had found the job really tough at first but in the end had quite enjoyed the experience of being, for a short while, a factory worker – something completely outside his sheltered middleclass school experience. His job had been to carry sacks of carrots from the stack to the machines where the process of turning them into sliced carrots in tins began. The machines had a flat- bed at about waist height each side of which was a conveyer belt. The belts were manned mainly by Italian women. Jim had to upend his sack and tip the carrots onto the tray. The women topped and tailed the carrots before placing them on the belts to start their journey to be washed, sliced and canned. The women were on piece-work so interruptions in the supply of carrots produced an angry tirade spiced with Italian swearwords. Jim’s co-worker was adept at looking the other way when a bag was required so Jim did more than his fair share. By the lunch break on his first day Jim was physically incapable of lifting another bag. Walking to the canteen he had decided that he would have to swallow his pride and give up. He was following a young lad, one of the ‘permanent’ workers, 3 years younger and 4 inches shorter than Jim who decided, “If he can do it so can I.” So he lasted the course and by the time he left had gained the respect of his fellow workers who recognised that though he was well outside his comfort zone he had worked hard and to the best of his ability.

Gazing out of the window Jim observed that the countryside was gradually changing. Small hills and woodland were replacing the flat arable landscape of South Lincolnshire. It now had some similarity with the Nottinghamshire countryside, the county in which most of his boyhood had been spent. He and his twin brother George had been born in Bristol in June 1939. Just over a year later Bristol was being heavily bombed and before Jim and George were 18 months old their father was in the army and soon to go abroad. His mother left Bristol with her two young sons to live in her parent’s home in Nottingham. Sherwood Grange, a name that rather flattered it, was a detached Georgian house with a moderately large high walled garden. One wall had a green wooden gate set in it which concealed the world outside and at the same time was the entrance into it, a world to him at that time, largely unknown. The romance of this high wall and gate would remain with him throughout his life. None of his mother’s four siblings still lived at home so the peace of her elderly parent’s home was suddenly disturbed by their daughter and two toddling infants. Their grandmother was delighted by the intrusion, she had seen very little of the two curly haired twin boys having visited them in Bristol only once. The boys’ grandfather, initially pleased and proud of his grandsons, soon became irritated to find them under his feet and impinging on his privacy and freedom to do what he liked when he liked.

Jim’s grandfather, a ginger haired, moustached, pipe smoking Scotsman with a fairly short fuse was a man of strong character, enterprising and with many practical skills. In 1870 he and a friend had joined the Australian gold rush. They had found gold but before they could stake their claim it was ‘jumped’ by some ruthless individuals. Thomas, Jim’s grandfather gave up on the gold, bought a horse and cart and began selling bread to the prospectors. This was going well until the day the cart overturned and his arm was broken. Thomas returned to England. He invented a mechanised process for making clay pipes and set up a factory. Sadly before long the uninsured factory burned down. Arson was suspected because handmade clay pipe workers were losing their jobs. In the 1930s Thomas had established a business selling wireless sets. Earlier in his life he had made violins for himself and his five children. (After his mother’s death Jim inherited her violin and it was played at his son’s wedding.)

Jim and George, already unsettled by their father’s sudden, and to them inexplicable, disappearance from their lives became quite disturbed by their grandfather’s unpredictable outbursts of anger. Their mother decided to take her twins to live with their father’s mother in Sheffield. The boys’ widowed grandmother lived in the semi-detached house with her aged mother, “Gagga”. Jim’s memories of that time were Lupins in the garden, the stately Poplars just beyond the end of the back garden, donkey rides in Millhouses Park, seeing his great grandmother lying dead in her bed and being given a flag to wave on VE day but not understanding what the excitement was about.

“Have you got a match, lad?” asked a middle aged man in the seat opposite breaking into Jim’s memories and enjoyment of the changing countryside. They were alone in the carriage. “No, sorry I don’t smoke”, Jim replied. “Very sensible”, the man commented. “It costs me a packet.” He laughed at his own joke. Jim forced a smile. Sensing that the man wanted to start a conversation Jim looked out of the window with studied concentration. He didn’t want to talk, partly out of shyness and partly because he preferred his own thoughts. He noticed a flock of Lapwings in a passing field. Jim had become interested in birds when he was 10 years old and could recognise most, certainly the common ones. A pair of Blackbirds had nested on a fence ledge close to the dining room window. Sadly a late snowfall had caused the birds to abandon the nest and four eggs. Jim had kept the nest in the garage for a while. The house in Nottingham was semi-detached, 3 bedrooms, 31 Bedale Road, Sherwood. The front garden was small with a holly bush each side of the front door. Jim had once found a £5 note in one of them – a princely sum for him at the time. The back garden, the central feature a Silver birch tree, was about 5 feet below the level of the back of the house with steps down to it which George once (accidently) rode his tricycle down. Jim was six when the family moved from Sheffield to Nottingham. His father after being de-mobbed had got a job in the National Provincial Bank in the centre of Nottingham.

Jim could remember watching with George from the front bedroom window of his grandmother’s house in Sheffield as they waited for their father to come walking up the road. It was exciting but strange to have him home after such a long absence with only very brief visits on leave. His mother told Jim later he had been more unsettled and seemed to miss his father more than George. She thought that this was because his father usually gave him his bottle while she fed his brother. Even now, Jim reflected, although he loved his father he had never got really close to him. His father was a man of few words who did not often display his emotions. He rarely spoke of his experiences in the war and Jim surmised that these had accentuated his introvert personality. Jim remembered the evening his father had come home after having to have the family dog put to sleep. Rusty, a Cocker Spaniel, was mainly Jim’s dog. He had pestered his parents for a dog and they had finally reluctantly agreed. Jim was sitting at the table working on a balsa wood model aeroplane he was making. He had tried to involve his father in what he was doing, wanting to communicate, “Dad it’s OK I know you had to do it”, but his mother had cut in saying, “James, don’t trouble your father, he’s very tired.” Jim’s father might have bonded better with his son if not hindered by ill health. When Jim and George were learning to ride their bicycles their dad had tried to do what fathers traditionally do – running behind holding the saddle but his asthma didn’t allow him to continue. In the end Jim applied the logic of ‘other people do it so if I peddle confidently I won’t fall off’ to launch out on his own and went back into the house to proudly announce his success to his parents.

Jim’s thoughts were interrupted by the train coming to a rather jerky halt. Lincoln Central announced the station sign. Carriage doors swung open, some people left the train, others were boarding. A pretty young woman not much older than Jim got into his carriage and sat down on the same side as the matchless man but some distance from him. She adjusted her short skirt, glanced briefly at her two fellow travellers, took a book from her bag and began to read. Both Jim and the man studied her with interest using sideways eyes, hoping she would not notice. She looked up, gave them both in turn a disdainful glare and returned to her book. Jim, embarrassed, stared fixedly out of the window again. Carriage doors were slammed shut, the train pulled away, gathering speed.

Jim had had few encounters with girls until the family came to Nottingham when he was six. He remembered walking up the road to post a letter for his mother. “What’s the difference between an elephant and a post box?” she had asked. “Don’t know”, the inevitable reply. “I’m not going to let you post my letters then”, her laughing response. “Hello, you’re new here aren’t you?” The speaker a girl of about his own age smiled a welcoming smile. Jennifer introduced him to John and Pauline who were in the front garden of their house next door to hers. At that age girls seemed no different to boys and friendship was easy and natural. It wasn’t until Jim was in his mid-teens that girls started to become desirable, mysterious and therefore unnerving. The more attractive the girl the more insecure Jim felt. Jennifer (never Jen or Jenny), John and Pauline, Patricia and Alison, Jim and George became close friends. Jennifer was the unelected but undisputed leader of the seven friends. The five years leading up to 2^nd year Grammar school when Jennifer’s family moved away from Nottingham contained many of the happiest memories of Jim’s boyhood. Winter always brought many days of snow with snowball fights and sledging down Ennerdale Road, relatively safe in those days of few cars. Cricket was played in the road with a lamppost wicket and a tennis ball. There was only an occasional cry of “Car, car, C A R”, interrupting the game. Jim smiled ruefully, remembering leaning too far over a neighbour’s garden wall to retrieve the ball and tumbling face first into nettles.

Looking up he realised that the train was pulling into Doncaster station. Following his two companions Jim stepped down onto the platform. The girl and the man headed for the exit but Jim had to catch his connection to Leeds. He had forty minutes to wait for that train and discovered that the last four carriages were destined for Bradford while the rest of the train would go to Leeds. Concern that he might miss the train prevented him from doing the sensible thing and going to buy a cup of tea. He sat alone, but not lonely, on a station trolley reflecting on his years at the Grammar school in Nottingham which had provided the foundation that enabled him to gain a university place. He saw those years as a series of random snapshots.

First snapshot. The only try Jim scored in three years of rugby was after relegation from the 3rd year house rugby team to the ‘remnants’. Jim ran and jinked half the length of the field without a hand being laid on him. His pride at the achievement suppressed the fact that the opposition was pretty rubbish. Jim was always relieved when rugby ended for the year to be replaced by three weeks of cross country running at which Jim was above average and, perhaps for that reason, enjoyed. In the fourth year Jim was able to switch from rugby to hockey which suited him much better.

Second snapshot. With limited numbers able to swim Jim made it into the House first years swimming team. He had never dived in prior to the race, dived deep and surfaced to see everyone else well ahead. He never made the team after that.

Third snapshot. A spectacular reaction catch when fielding at silly mid-on in a house cricket match. Jim was never given a turn at bowling and batted low down the order so rarely got an innings. His highest score was eight. He and George loved the scratch games played with a few friends on the local ‘rec’. They both had lots of chances to bat and bowl. George’s hero was Len Hutton, Jim’s Dennis Compton.

Fourth snapshot. Being one of five shortlisted for the fifth form essay prize but failing to win it because of poor spelling. However Stanley Middleton, later a prolific novelist and winner of the Man Booker prize in 1974 for his novel ‘Holiday’, told Jim’s parents that he would have awarded the prize to him.

Fifth snapshot. The comment of his physics teacher on a parent’s evening, “Jim has a Physicist’s brain.”

Sixth snapshot. Losing to ‘Fools mate’ in his first match playing for his House chess team. His opponent had arrived with a book which he read between moves deceiving Jim into thinking that he wasn’t really interested. Everyone gathered round to view a match that had ended so quickly. Jim retrieved some pride by drawing his second match and winning his third.

“What a mixture of insecurities and unjustifiable pride”, Jim mused, smiling wryly to himself. He remembered how on the one hand nothing was quite good enough for his mother, on the other hand she wanted to boost him up and be proud of him, perhaps to achieve through him some of the things that circumstances had denied her. I suppose I am lacking in confidence he thought. Both he and George were quite timid and thought of as ‘weedy’ by many of the other boys at school. He remembered a time when a friend had talked about walking through a tunnel on a disused railway line. “Of course you wouldn’t dare, Jim”, said John. “Yes, I would. I’d go through it during the night”, responded Jim anxious not to appear a coward. So the challenge was set. Jim and John agreed to meet that night at 1.00 o’clock outside the Metropole cinema near the tunnel. Jim crept from his house at twenty to one, only George was awake. By just before one Jim was outside the cinema but after 15 minutes, what a surprise, there was no sign of John. Jim set off for home along the Mansfield Road. A police car passing him going in the opposite direction did a U turn. Jim quickened his pace and made to head off down a side street. One of the policemen quickly apprehended him. What was a twelve year old boy doing out alone in the early hours of the morning? Meeting a friend but he didn’t show up. A likely story. Where do you live? We’re taking you home. This was the gist of the one sided conversation. Wakened from sleep his parents were shocked to discover their son at the door with two policemen but were able to convince the officers that their son was telling the truth though they did not have an inkling of his plan. In the future they would relate the story to friends with pride. On the way to school next morning Jim was met by John who asked, “Where were you last night?”, although he himself had not gone. Once Jim had convinced John that he had gone the response was, “You’re a stupid idiot!”

“You will be a stupid idiot if you miss the train”, Jim said under his breath, suddenly realising that it was about to leave. Avoid the last four carriages, he reminded himself. Sitting in the crowded carriage Jim pondered his future, wondering what the next few years would bring. The sense of apprehension and excitement of earlier in the day returned.

This last year had been a confusing and unsettling one for Jim. It was the first time in his life that he had spent a significant amount of time apart from his twin brother. He often got into disagreements with his parents, “Jim, why do you argue about everything?” One heated argument had followed Jim’s immature conversion to pacifism after reading ‘Cry Havoc’ by Beverley Nichols. Jim had defiantly informed his parents that he would refuse to do National Service. “You’ll end up in prison”, from his angry and agitated mother. In the event Jim’s National Service was postponed till after University and had been abolished by the time he left. In his heart Jim knew that he would have not had the courage to refuse and, in any case his views had changed by that time. Then there was the whole girls and sex thing. Jim would often take his confusion to the solitude of the banks of the Coronation Channel half a mile from home. There he gained a temporary measure of peace but the reasons for his confusion and emotional turmoil was something that he only slowly realised years later. His conflicts with his mother he came to understand were mainly because they were similar to each other in many ways. He had the same introspective and depressive nature, was prone to the same occasional outbursts of frustrated anger and cutting remarks directed at those he most loved. He regretted the distance that had come between them especially when he remembered what a good mum she really was and began to understand how difficult the years of his father’s absence were for her. It had been hard for his parents to rebuild their marriage relationship when he returned and Jim thought that they had never properly achieved this. Jim’s mother loved the teaching of Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount. She believed that this was the way one ought to live but was unable to discover how this could be made to work in practice. Someone has written that Tolstoy understood only law whereas Dostoevsky understood both law and grace. Tolstoy’s heroine Anna Karenina, after finding love but unable to escape from a loveless marriage and the condemnation of society, committed suicide whereas Dostoevsky’s hero Raskolnikov after committing a horrific murder found redemption through the love of a good woman. The amazing grace of God is the key that unlocks the Sermon on the Mount but Jim did not know that then.

Alighting from the train Jim followed the Way Out signs which led him over the bridge in the direction of the exit. Metaphorically it was a bridge from immature youth leading eventually into adulthood. In the next four years he would gain a 3^rd class degree (“not much better than a fail”, his mother’s disappointed comment), fall in love for the first time and come to know God through faith in Jesus Christ.