There are certain topics that British men, and indeed probably men across Europe and even further afield will not let anyone gainsay them on. Football is one of them. Immigration issues is another as is the treatment of convicted criminals. Do-it-yourself is another topic. These are things that the bulk of men will not be permitted to contradict them on, often even when there is clear evidence to the contrary. The last resort is 'that doesn't sound right', 'that can't be right', and 'you must have heard it wrong'. It is the equivalent of the 'does not compute' from a robot. A man's dignity is so dependent on him being right in these issues that he cannot mentally cope with any challenges to this perception. Perhaps the largest area for such a mindset is in terms of cars and driving.
The comedian Harry Enfield portrayed a character who would interrupt conversations in pubs with 'you don't want to do it like that' and would totally dismiss the individual's approach and lecture them on the correct way to do it. He could not accept that anyone could trump his view. Another set of characters in a similar vein were the Self-Righteous Brothers portrayed again by Enfield this time in collaboration with comedian Paul Whitehouse. They tended to take particular celebrities and praise their attributes before drawing a particular line over which they would not let them cross. These characters were played for comedy, but they are very well observed. As a blogger I get indignant and tell people what to think but the advantage of a blog is one click and you are away from it. I am not pestering you any longer than you wish. Unfortunately there are far too many people like this in Britain today who do it to your face and they make any troubles you face harder to deal with.
As I mentioned, the biggest focus for such intrusive souls is connected to cars. I have had a lot of bad luck with cars, two in a row completely died, though fortunately I had not paid much for them. In one case I was conned by people who appeared to be friends but clearly more wanted to offload a poor vehicle than they wanted to remain my friends. I tend not to publicise these problems as immediately it reduces my standing in the eyes of any British man I meet. They, of course, have perfect knowledge which means they are never conned and always get the best prices. For them it is simple to achieve this, so I must be a real idiot not to be able to do so.
My last car was 15-year old Mitsubishi people carrier which had done 200,000 Km (125,000 miles). It was still running but despite all the tweaking and services, it kept on losing revs at slow speeds, making it difficult to keep from stalling in the stop-start traffic that I now drive through. I thought it had had a good run so started looking for a replacement before it died completely. I lighted on a Kia people carrier, 8 years old and having done 115,000 Km (71,000 miles) for £3,500, about £1000 more than I could afford. However, it was in good condition and was large enough to accommodate stock for the business I sometimes help out. It has a diesel engine which these days means that it is less economical than it would have been about 15-20 years ago. It has a fuel tank which is 40% larger than the Mitsubishi but the distance per litre is about 15% less than the Mitsubishi. Apparently the advantage of diesel engines is only apparently if you cover more than 25,000 Km per year and I only do half that. Having run for two weeks without problem, it suddenly would not start.
Since leaving London in December for a better job, having struggled to find anyone who would rent me a room in a shared house in a city for less than £650 per month, I ended up renting part of a very large house which unfortunately is in rural West Midlands. Before you write in to say that you can rent cheaper rooms, try doing it when you are a man, over 30 and working in my industry, all of these things put off potential landlords/ladies. I have made another mistake about diesel cars. Yes, once I saw that I might buy a diesel car, I should have run off and read everything I could about them, but when you are at the dealership you do not have such time and with this tendency for all car dealers to treat you like an imbecile if you make one mistake about the car you are looking at, you do not ask questions. The woman accompanying me asked about the jack, something largely redundant in cars these days and it led to the dealer simply laughing out loud at here. They do not care and you have no choice, a private seller would be even harsher. It is all about them loving the boost to their insecure egos that such humiliation brings. The mistake I made is that diesel engines start poorly in cold weather. This seems ridiculous given that tractors, lorries and I imagine snowploughs use diesel engines. However, it is to do with the fact that it runs on compressing the fuel until it ignites, rather than a spark from a spark plug igniting it. I found I actually remembered quite a bit about diesel engines from my O Level Physics classes. Thus, living in a rural area, on top of a hill, with few houses around put me into not an ideal position to start the car.
The day came almost two weeks ago now when it would not start. I waited until the day warmed a little, then called Green Flag and still it would not start. The size of it meant a larger tow truck was needed and this dragged it to the nearest mechanics I could find who had a space, the sixth I had telephoned as all the others were busy, being the time of year. They had it for three days and could not work out what the problem was. There seemed to be a range of problems, the heater which warms the fuel before it enters the compression process had loose wires and the battery needed replacing. One problem with the car is almost everything in the engine is invisible, hidden below large metal boxes, a characteristic of a Kia, I have found I do not like. It also turned out that one of the tyres was below the legal limit despite the car apparently passing its MOT just a fortnight earlier. I had noticed this due to skidding on the road and was happy to have it replaced. The mechanics managed to get the car running long enough to get it back to where I am living, 6.5 Km away where it proceeded to die once more. I then discovered that the battery in the key fob was run down. Having walked back 9.5 Km to a branch of Asda which had sold out of just that sort of battery and a further 3 Km to a pound shop that had them at half the price of Asda and got a taxi at £10 back. I managed to start the car. It was apparent the low battery simply kept triggering the immobiliser. However, by now I was blocked in by the other lodger's car and satisfied that I had started it four times thought I would start again the next morning. Of course then it would not work. I have now had to wait seven days for the Kia specialists 25 Km away to fit me in and have to get it towed there once more.
In the meantime I have clearly been on to the people who sold me the car. Given that they have treated me so poorly I will do something I do not often do and tell you that they are BMC Autonation based in Bournemouth in Dorset. They are not huge but have a number of locations around the town. They seemed to be reliable and the car came with a 12-month warranty on parts - an important qualification. I telephoned them about the fact that they had sold me a car that had stopped working within two weeks of me buying it from them and that despite the MOT certificate had a tyre below the legal limit in terms of tread. They simply denied vigorously that it had anything to do with them. I had driven the car off the forecourt (though not very far given how little diesel there was in the tank) and as far as they were concerned that ended their responsibility for the car. I guess I should have realised from the lack of diesel that much more would need replenishing from the key fob battery to the car battery to the tyres. Basically the car was not fit to drive and I am sure thousands of men would shout at me for my inability to simply smell that these things were wrong with the car the moment I looked at it. That has been the attitude of many men and indeed a woman, since I bought it.
For £3500 I have been left with a car which cannot move after two weeks with problems that after 3 days, an experienced mechanic could not resolve. Being in a rural area with buses stopping in the village every 80 minutes during the rush hours, when they turn up, has meant great difficulty getting to work. It costs £3.30 to cover the first 6 Km and then £1.70 for the next 16 Km. The second stage is from town to town so is faster and far more regular. A return journey costs exactly £10 or £50 per week, 20% more than the diesel I was having to buy for the journey. If the bus does not come then it is £10 for the taxi over the first 6 Km, each way. So not only have I wasted thousands of pounds on a car I am now paying even more for the privilege of not having a car. If this goes on the choice is to move into the town and see my rent rise from £475 per month for a room to £650. Of course taxi drivers will swear that you can rent a 2-bedroomed flat for that much, but it actually turns out to be impossible to find any of these places they keep telling you that you are an idiot not to be renting.
I guess this takes me to the root of the problem. Men largely have an unshakeable perception of the world. They will not be challenged in that viewpoint. To be challenged somehow twists their brains so much that it is painful. Thus, they keep pumping out the same perceptions no matter how much someone contests them. Their own explanation for the difference between their world view and what the person is saying is that that person is an idiot, no matter how many admirable traits or how much knowledge they have demonstrated up to that point. Throughout this car saga I have had to put up with such lecturing, very difficult as a lot of it has come from my landlord and whilst I want him to stop banging on about this stuff I do not want to upset him so he feels that I am too much of a pain and chucks me out. Of course, when the car first broke down the landlord insisted that he got in and tried to start it, he did this repeatedly with no more success than I had had. The other male lodger similarly insisted that he must try and did exactly the same as myself and the landlord had done with exactly the same result. By now the engine was flooded and the battery run down anyway. However, there was nothing that could be done to stop them turning the engine over and over again. The landlady was determined to do the same and was only prevented by me taking the dying battery out of the spare key fob.
The landlord then insisted that being a diesel engine it must need the glow bulbs replaced. These were the old method of warming diesel before it was compressed. He is still insisting on this even though I have told him at least ten times that the car has no glow bulbs but a more up-to-date, though possibly less reliable, heater system. Even when the car came back from the mechanics he has continued to say it simply needs the glow bulbs replaced. This shows the strength of his world view, that he believes even professional mechanics who had the car for three days would not have replaced the glow bulbs if that was all that was wrong. My refusal to accept that this reason is the correct one is now angering him. However, there is nothing I can do about it. Even if I get the Haines manual and show him the lack of glow bulbs it will simply stoke his anger, he would rather be angry and wrong than be corrected and so feel humiliated in this subject matter which clearly shapes a large chunk of his masculinity. The car has been sitting passive outside the house while awaiting the tow to the Kia dealers. I have tried to start it on the off chance but have simply ended up running the battery down again. Yet, even today the landlord suggested I try some more and went on about if I just got new glow bulbs it would be fine. His knowledge is clearly greater than that of the manufacturers.
Having proved myself very poor at buying cars, he has now insisted that if I get another one, which seems quite feasibly will have to be the case, he must accompany me. He apparently can sniff out faulty cars even when they work perfectly on the test drive (and as you can imagine given my past experience I tried absolutely everything in the car to see if it worked or not before I bought it). He along with a number of colleagues from my job have this ability and all want to come along next time, because clearly I am incapable of buying a car. I will need quite a large vehicle to fit them all in. Of course, they will spend the time correcting each other and pointing out how not only I am wrong, but their fellow 'advisors' are too.
Being lectured repeatedly as a man of 46 is hard. Being told that you are an idiot unsuited to drive, is humiliating. Having people insist that a part which does not exist is faulty, is hard to tackle politely. This is on top of the missed trips and visits to friends and the burden on my wallet to cope with. I feel once more as I did when living with my parents last year. All my achievements, the fact that I have survived all the bullying and losses without going mad are nothing simply because my car has broken down.
Showing posts with label humiliation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humiliation. Show all posts
Sunday, 24 November 2013
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Property In The UK 11: Squeezing Out A Little Bit More
The house I live in has been on the market since September 2010. Not a good time to be selling a house, but as regular readers know, I have never been lucky with property. If it were not for HM Revenue & Customs admitting to overcharging me £16,000 worth of tax in 2008 and refunding it (with no apology) then, by now the house would have been repossessed. I have been unemployed for 11 months, bar six weeks' of a few days of work (some weeks one day, some two days per week) and despite still having regular interviews I seem no closer to getting back into employment. Consequently, because of the woman who lives in my house running a business I am not entitled to any benefit to pay the mortgage. The mortgage lender, Nationwide Building Society, has repeatedly refused to discuss my inability to pay, saying that if I have enough to pay at least one month's mortgage payments, then it is too early to discuss me defaulting or going on to interest only payments. With unemployment rising and despite 27 interviews now, no sign of work, the only option is to sell the house. Of course, that is easier said than done.
I acknowledge that I am very bad at selecting companies to provide me a service. I always pick the worst company available (though on a number of occasions, recommended to me) for the particular job. Consequently I have been ripped off by letting agents, removal companies, electrical repair companies and now estate agents. Within a five-minute walk of my house there are at least five estate agents, though the best decided to morph instead into a financial advice company, much to my frustration and the company they recommended nearby only lets, not sells properties. Consequently I picked a large company close to my house that was tied into national networks so as to get the coverage. However, the staff turned out to be clueless, making no effort to learn about the neighbourhood (even though you can see their office from my house) or the potential buyers coming round and what they were looking for (buy-to-let, buy-for-family, buy-for-self; elderly, middle aged, young; with/out children; local, from London, etc.) and said nothing bar 'this is the living room'. They had the cheek to say they would no longer do accompanied viewings because I simply took over the sales role. I said that was insulting as I had only taken that role because their staff made no effort to address the viewers or sell the property. Anyway, we got one buyer from them, but it took him three months and he had not even sent round a surveyor. We abandoned both him and the estate agent.
The next company we went for, is tiny, but works incredibly hard and within a week of transferring to them we have another buyer, offering £2000 more than the first. I live in a town with still high demand for property, very close to a good range of shops and good primary schools. Despite paying £240,000 for the house in 2007 it is now worth £230,000; to be expected with the downturn in the market. Offers have come in starting at £205,000, not leaving enough to clear the debts on the house and have enough to put down a deposit on a rented property. We have managed to get offers now up to £217,000 helped by the move from Winter to Spring, but still in line for a heavy loss. Given the location and the benefits of the property, once the economy recovers, the value is likely to rise fast, especially with the revival of buy-to-let mortgages reported this week. Thus, the person is getting a good deal on the property, £13,000 less than the valuation given even now by the estate agents.
These days, it is apparent, that a good deal is not enough for house buyers, they constantly want to squeeze out more from the seller. I have experienced this even back in 2007 selling my flat in London, a time when the housing market was much healthier. Due to being bullied by the landlord's representative, I effectively sold a two-bedroomed flat for the price of a one-bedroomed flat in the area of Newham. It was clean and modern and I had replaced the bathroom and the windows and made other improvements in the six years I had owned it, primarily for my own benefit when living there, but clearly improving it over some of the neighbouring flats. In my hurry, the buyer got a very good bargain. However, this was not enough. Living in rented accommodation I had no desire to move the furniture and white goods from it. This was initially not an issue, but then suddenly the buyer wanted them gone at my expense. Then he wanted the flat to be cleaned, by him even before he owned it, at a cost of £500 (€565; US$805). The flat was not unclean and it took £40 to employ a woman to clean it thoroughly. However, it was clear the buyer was using it as an excuse to squeeze more money for me, even though he was paying about £30,000 (€33,900; US$48,300) less than an equivalent flat in the same area would have cost him. Once the front door lock had been destroyed by the estate agents' carelessness on the day before the contract exchange occurred, I took the opportunity while it was being replaced to ensure that the buyer would receive a welcoming gift of rotten milk, a mouldy fridge and faeces when he arrived. Any waste paper and other rubbish I could find, was distributed over the flat so he could really see what an untidied flat looked like. As you can understand, I was angered, by the attempt to squeeze more and more from me, even when I was selling the place at a bargain price.
A very similar thing occurred with the current house. The second buyer we accepted first sent around three inspectors. The surveyor spent three hours at the property and people came to check the central heating and electricity too. This dragged out over a couple of weeks. The buyer did not take efforts to conceal her contempt for us and I overheard her ridiculing myself and the woman who lives in our house as stupid. Clearly she, like the buyer of my flat, believed that we were so desperate that she could humiliate us and we would have to swallow it. I have no idea why humiliation is now seen to be a necessary part of buying a house. Certainly getting an extra £500 from the buyer now seems to be part of a fashion. In this case she did not demand cleaning, she asked instead that we paid £500 towards the £1000 it would cost to build an additional wall around the kitchen; a wall that we would gain no benefit from. We naturally refused. The estate agent felt the demand was ridiculous, which suggests that it may not be as common behaviour as I have experienced, but he did offer to take £500 off his commission instead. The woman, disgruntled with our refusal to comply with us immediately withdrew her offer, over two months since she had made it, and like the first buyer, during that time, had effectively blocked other potential buyers.
These may be isolated incidents, but to me there does seem to be a trend that, as a buyer you see what you can squeeze out of the sellers. Getting a good price is not enough. There has to be some specific demand imposed on the sellers to make it clear to them that you hold the power. To me this does not seem to be a healthy way to do business. Either you want the property or you do not. Either you can afford to buy the property or you cannot. There is obviously room for discussion over the price and we have engaged with that, all the buyers (we are now on to the third, who rather worryingly has requested a third viewing of the house as I have been writing this) have got a price well below the asking price. When seeing Niall Ferguson talking about the success of Western capitalism and how now it is not thriving so well as it is in China, he noted the fact that honesty in business is one trait highly valued in Chinese commerce. This element seems to have gone from buying and selling in the UK and slows down exchange and discourages commerce. This applies to selling on eBay in the UK as it does to selling houses. Sometime in the previous decade, perhaps prompted by television programmes, buyers have been encouraged to move from simply getting a good deal, to squeezing unnecessary extras. After all, on a £217,000 sale, the commission to the estate agent is usually £4880 and unless the buyer if a first-time buyer the Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) is £2,170, so what is the fuss over £500? It seems to be a principle that Ferguson missed that is damaging to capitalism in the UK today. It is not enough simply to make a profitable deal, now you have to 'win a victory' too and rub the face of your 'opponent' in the mud by asserting how much more economically powerful you are than them. This is one thing which harms sales and business in the UK and seems to be increasing as the recession widens the gap between people who previously would have been on the same economic level. Selling your house should not require you to kow-tow to someone who explicitly holds you in contempt.
P.P. 28/05/2011
This aspect of the house sale has taken on an additional unpleasant twist. It is clear that I have a sign on my forehead that I cannot see but which instructs everyone else: 'patronise and exploit this man as much as you can'. Last week I was fortunate enough to get work. This means there is no longer a need to sell the house, though we will struggle with paying the mortgage until my first salary arrives at the end of July. However, given that the house is worth tens of thousands of pounds less than when we bought it and we own 1/300th of it more, every month of the mortgage we pay, if we can hold on to it until prices have at least returned to their 2007 level, then we will at least be a little better off.
Once the job had been confirmed, I telephoned the estate agent to tell him we were taking the house off the market. I said I expected an invoice for services rendered in the four months they had been selling our house for us. I assumed he would inform all the relevant parties. Today, however, I received a very snotty letter from the solicitors' office, asking why they had not been informed as well. It was clear they had found out in two days of me telling the estate agent anyway, but that I did not crawl round to them and kiss their feet and apologise for not continuing with the sale, was clearly sufficient to leave them indignant. They were not our choice of solicitors anyway, we only took them as they are the ones the estate agent uses. All our communications, bar one visit, have been through the estate agent. Given their attitude now, I am actually glad I did not call them.
It gets worse. When our second buyer decided that because we were unwilling to pay her £500 and have a wall built to no benefit of us, she would break off the sale, we were left with the solicitor's charge for the work they had done already, a sum of £300 [€318; US$483]. We contacted the buyer to see if she would reimburse us this money. She did not say no, she simply refused to respond to any attempts to contact her. We accepted that with no written contract we could not get the money out of her. Now, however, this time we have broken the sale and now this latest buyer is trying to get his solicitor's fees back out of us. Despite being employed by us, our solicitor seems always to be working on behalf of other people. In the first case she did nothing to help us recoup the money from the buyer who broke off. In this second case, however, she has forwarded a bill from the buyer's solicitor, at a cost of £8 to us, and written to tell us it is 'only fair' that we reimburse the buyer. Why is it 'fair' that we have to pay the fees for everyone? The solicitor seems to have no interest in aiding us, despite being paid by us, at fees £66 higher than those levied by the latest buyer's solicitor.
Part of the problem seems to be that we are too honest and treat people politely. In contrast the two buyers have behaved in a 'chav-plus' manner. They behave as if thuggish, self-centred people from a housing estate, terse and rude in their manners, expecting always to get that bit extra, and yet, they have the money to speculate in property. I could be terse and aggressive in my business dealings, put on the accent and behaviour I learnt in Mile End and it is apparent in not doing so I somehow signal that I am open to being exploited by all and sundry. My advice is: the only way to go into buying or selling a house in the UK in 2011 is to behave as if you are some small-time gangster who has retired from the Ocean Estate in Stepney to Chigwell. In addition, avoid Aldridge Brownlee solicitors.
I acknowledge that I am very bad at selecting companies to provide me a service. I always pick the worst company available (though on a number of occasions, recommended to me) for the particular job. Consequently I have been ripped off by letting agents, removal companies, electrical repair companies and now estate agents. Within a five-minute walk of my house there are at least five estate agents, though the best decided to morph instead into a financial advice company, much to my frustration and the company they recommended nearby only lets, not sells properties. Consequently I picked a large company close to my house that was tied into national networks so as to get the coverage. However, the staff turned out to be clueless, making no effort to learn about the neighbourhood (even though you can see their office from my house) or the potential buyers coming round and what they were looking for (buy-to-let, buy-for-family, buy-for-self; elderly, middle aged, young; with/out children; local, from London, etc.) and said nothing bar 'this is the living room'. They had the cheek to say they would no longer do accompanied viewings because I simply took over the sales role. I said that was insulting as I had only taken that role because their staff made no effort to address the viewers or sell the property. Anyway, we got one buyer from them, but it took him three months and he had not even sent round a surveyor. We abandoned both him and the estate agent.
The next company we went for, is tiny, but works incredibly hard and within a week of transferring to them we have another buyer, offering £2000 more than the first. I live in a town with still high demand for property, very close to a good range of shops and good primary schools. Despite paying £240,000 for the house in 2007 it is now worth £230,000; to be expected with the downturn in the market. Offers have come in starting at £205,000, not leaving enough to clear the debts on the house and have enough to put down a deposit on a rented property. We have managed to get offers now up to £217,000 helped by the move from Winter to Spring, but still in line for a heavy loss. Given the location and the benefits of the property, once the economy recovers, the value is likely to rise fast, especially with the revival of buy-to-let mortgages reported this week. Thus, the person is getting a good deal on the property, £13,000 less than the valuation given even now by the estate agents.
These days, it is apparent, that a good deal is not enough for house buyers, they constantly want to squeeze out more from the seller. I have experienced this even back in 2007 selling my flat in London, a time when the housing market was much healthier. Due to being bullied by the landlord's representative, I effectively sold a two-bedroomed flat for the price of a one-bedroomed flat in the area of Newham. It was clean and modern and I had replaced the bathroom and the windows and made other improvements in the six years I had owned it, primarily for my own benefit when living there, but clearly improving it over some of the neighbouring flats. In my hurry, the buyer got a very good bargain. However, this was not enough. Living in rented accommodation I had no desire to move the furniture and white goods from it. This was initially not an issue, but then suddenly the buyer wanted them gone at my expense. Then he wanted the flat to be cleaned, by him even before he owned it, at a cost of £500 (€565; US$805). The flat was not unclean and it took £40 to employ a woman to clean it thoroughly. However, it was clear the buyer was using it as an excuse to squeeze more money for me, even though he was paying about £30,000 (€33,900; US$48,300) less than an equivalent flat in the same area would have cost him. Once the front door lock had been destroyed by the estate agents' carelessness on the day before the contract exchange occurred, I took the opportunity while it was being replaced to ensure that the buyer would receive a welcoming gift of rotten milk, a mouldy fridge and faeces when he arrived. Any waste paper and other rubbish I could find, was distributed over the flat so he could really see what an untidied flat looked like. As you can understand, I was angered, by the attempt to squeeze more and more from me, even when I was selling the place at a bargain price.
A very similar thing occurred with the current house. The second buyer we accepted first sent around three inspectors. The surveyor spent three hours at the property and people came to check the central heating and electricity too. This dragged out over a couple of weeks. The buyer did not take efforts to conceal her contempt for us and I overheard her ridiculing myself and the woman who lives in our house as stupid. Clearly she, like the buyer of my flat, believed that we were so desperate that she could humiliate us and we would have to swallow it. I have no idea why humiliation is now seen to be a necessary part of buying a house. Certainly getting an extra £500 from the buyer now seems to be part of a fashion. In this case she did not demand cleaning, she asked instead that we paid £500 towards the £1000 it would cost to build an additional wall around the kitchen; a wall that we would gain no benefit from. We naturally refused. The estate agent felt the demand was ridiculous, which suggests that it may not be as common behaviour as I have experienced, but he did offer to take £500 off his commission instead. The woman, disgruntled with our refusal to comply with us immediately withdrew her offer, over two months since she had made it, and like the first buyer, during that time, had effectively blocked other potential buyers.
These may be isolated incidents, but to me there does seem to be a trend that, as a buyer you see what you can squeeze out of the sellers. Getting a good price is not enough. There has to be some specific demand imposed on the sellers to make it clear to them that you hold the power. To me this does not seem to be a healthy way to do business. Either you want the property or you do not. Either you can afford to buy the property or you cannot. There is obviously room for discussion over the price and we have engaged with that, all the buyers (we are now on to the third, who rather worryingly has requested a third viewing of the house as I have been writing this) have got a price well below the asking price. When seeing Niall Ferguson talking about the success of Western capitalism and how now it is not thriving so well as it is in China, he noted the fact that honesty in business is one trait highly valued in Chinese commerce. This element seems to have gone from buying and selling in the UK and slows down exchange and discourages commerce. This applies to selling on eBay in the UK as it does to selling houses. Sometime in the previous decade, perhaps prompted by television programmes, buyers have been encouraged to move from simply getting a good deal, to squeezing unnecessary extras. After all, on a £217,000 sale, the commission to the estate agent is usually £4880 and unless the buyer if a first-time buyer the Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT) is £2,170, so what is the fuss over £500? It seems to be a principle that Ferguson missed that is damaging to capitalism in the UK today. It is not enough simply to make a profitable deal, now you have to 'win a victory' too and rub the face of your 'opponent' in the mud by asserting how much more economically powerful you are than them. This is one thing which harms sales and business in the UK and seems to be increasing as the recession widens the gap between people who previously would have been on the same economic level. Selling your house should not require you to kow-tow to someone who explicitly holds you in contempt.
P.P. 28/05/2011
This aspect of the house sale has taken on an additional unpleasant twist. It is clear that I have a sign on my forehead that I cannot see but which instructs everyone else: 'patronise and exploit this man as much as you can'. Last week I was fortunate enough to get work. This means there is no longer a need to sell the house, though we will struggle with paying the mortgage until my first salary arrives at the end of July. However, given that the house is worth tens of thousands of pounds less than when we bought it and we own 1/300th of it more, every month of the mortgage we pay, if we can hold on to it until prices have at least returned to their 2007 level, then we will at least be a little better off.
Once the job had been confirmed, I telephoned the estate agent to tell him we were taking the house off the market. I said I expected an invoice for services rendered in the four months they had been selling our house for us. I assumed he would inform all the relevant parties. Today, however, I received a very snotty letter from the solicitors' office, asking why they had not been informed as well. It was clear they had found out in two days of me telling the estate agent anyway, but that I did not crawl round to them and kiss their feet and apologise for not continuing with the sale, was clearly sufficient to leave them indignant. They were not our choice of solicitors anyway, we only took them as they are the ones the estate agent uses. All our communications, bar one visit, have been through the estate agent. Given their attitude now, I am actually glad I did not call them.
It gets worse. When our second buyer decided that because we were unwilling to pay her £500 and have a wall built to no benefit of us, she would break off the sale, we were left with the solicitor's charge for the work they had done already, a sum of £300 [€318; US$483]. We contacted the buyer to see if she would reimburse us this money. She did not say no, she simply refused to respond to any attempts to contact her. We accepted that with no written contract we could not get the money out of her. Now, however, this time we have broken the sale and now this latest buyer is trying to get his solicitor's fees back out of us. Despite being employed by us, our solicitor seems always to be working on behalf of other people. In the first case she did nothing to help us recoup the money from the buyer who broke off. In this second case, however, she has forwarded a bill from the buyer's solicitor, at a cost of £8 to us, and written to tell us it is 'only fair' that we reimburse the buyer. Why is it 'fair' that we have to pay the fees for everyone? The solicitor seems to have no interest in aiding us, despite being paid by us, at fees £66 higher than those levied by the latest buyer's solicitor.
Part of the problem seems to be that we are too honest and treat people politely. In contrast the two buyers have behaved in a 'chav-plus' manner. They behave as if thuggish, self-centred people from a housing estate, terse and rude in their manners, expecting always to get that bit extra, and yet, they have the money to speculate in property. I could be terse and aggressive in my business dealings, put on the accent and behaviour I learnt in Mile End and it is apparent in not doing so I somehow signal that I am open to being exploited by all and sundry. My advice is: the only way to go into buying or selling a house in the UK in 2011 is to behave as if you are some small-time gangster who has retired from the Ocean Estate in Stepney to Chigwell. In addition, avoid Aldridge Brownlee solicitors.
Monday, 25 February 2008
Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 2: Teachers
While I was ill last week I was haunted by memories of those teachers who humiliated me in my youth. I am sure everyone has teachers who made their young lives a misery. I realised that this blog was the ideal environment to purge myself of those ghosts that for more than thirty years have angered me for what they inflicted on me in my youth. I know what they did will probably seem very minor to many people, especially those who suffered harsh abuse, but I think it is important for me to get them out there and away from my psyche.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
I thought about whether I should use my former teachers' real names. I do not know the first names of any of them anyway. I realised that so much time has passed that the bulk will have retired; some I know, are dead. Those still at work will be in high positions, close to the ends of their careers, so more than strong enough to weather the negative comments of one small boy they taught in the 1980s. If they continued behaving in the way they behaved to me, I am sure they will feature in the curses of a thousand adults. I now detail those teachers I can neither forget or forgive, in rough chronological order of when I encountered them:
Mrs. Simmons - art teacher
Now, in the UK, most primary school teachers stick with a single class of pupils each year and have to teach them all the subjects. This can be pretty challenging for them, though to some extent it is leavened by the fact that handling pre-11 year olds (in my county we stayed in primary school until 12, out of step with the rest of the UK) they do not have to go into a great depth on any subject. Some, however, do not seem to even work at the level of reading the text book a couple of pages ahead of the children. I met a German researcher at a party in Oxford once and she was investigating how many British primary school teachers believed dinosaurs and humans had co-existed. She had been stunned at how many had held this view, despite the fact that even basic books on dinosaurs make the 64 million year gap between them apparent.
Anyway, that is the contextualisation on the type of primary school teachers of which Mrs. Simmons was one. She taught a class I remember very well about British kings and queens and got most of those of the 20th century in the wrong order. She might be excused as she was employed by the school to teach art to different classes as well as holding down her own class, so it may have stretched her abilities far further than she anticipated. To lessen the burden on herself she forbid us from using certain English grammar in our writing, such as direct speech, we were only allowed to use reported speech which she found easier to mark and correct. (Thinking back on such deficiencies I remember clearly a trainee teacher we had had the year before, while our main teacher was off ill, and when doing addition she would 'carry' the number as you are supposed to do and then 'give it back', so making, for example, the units column have one extra than it should have. She had to be corrected in her ways when our teacher returned, but how this trainee could function in everyday life, let alone as a teacher working with such a fundamental error in her mathematics, I have no idea).
There is another common issue which I realised as I began writing this posting, that applies to teachers working at all levels and that is how self-righteous so many of them are. It is a trait I kept on encountering during my school life. On reflection, I guess you have to believe in your views on things and feel that you have to impart them to others to have the motivation to actually be a teacher, but many of the worse go far too far. I remember one religious education teacher we had who promised to show us so many horrific videos that she felt every girl in the class would never consider having an abortion. It was her first post and I was glad calmer heads stepped in and stopped her distorting things so greatly. Such an attitude also inflicted Mrs. Simmons. Foolishly she told all the parents coming to the parents evening that she saw one of the greatest problems of (her 10-year old) pupils was their immorality around sexual issues and felt that this had to be stamped out. We were oblivious to this crusade of hers but it was going to cause problems. Superficially she appeared the 'cool', trendy teacher but had an approach to schooling more suited to an old fashioned 'school ma'am'.
In the UK you are supposed to receive your first sex education at the age of 8. It is basic stuff which is mainly about what all the sexual bits of your body do. This is built upon when you do biology at 12. However, I was at school during a period of great industrial unrest so the teachers were often on strike and so somehow we had reached 10-11 years old before anyone realised we had not had our sex education. It became apparent as my year (of three classes) were clearly less well informed about such matters (and the associated emotional issues) than the years below us, let alone children of our age from other schools. Mrs. Simmons, of course, was not happy to have to do this, but she bit her lip and did so, but in such a desultory way that my class was now out-of-step with the other two classes in my year.
Another theme, aside from self-righteousness, that I will return to in this posting as a failing of teachers, is their use of humiliation. I will do anything to avoid humiliation and will intervene or leave a room rather than watch others humiliated. I accept that that is a phobia of mine, but using humiliation on children as so many teachers do, is a terrible tool that can cause problems for years to come. Following the sex education lessons, two girls in my class, one rainy break time, sat and wrote a fake letter (something girls often did, usually on a romantic theme) and in fact an activity Mrs. Simmons encouraged. This time, however, they used their newly found knowledge and wrote as if it was to a boyfriend they had had and saying that they had got pregnant as a result. Now, this may seem a bit mature for girls of 11, but given that now in the UK some are getting pregnant at 14 or younger, probably not too early to discuss the issue. Did Mrs. Simmons use this in a positive learning way when she uncovered this letter? No, of course not. It gave her the opportunity to lay down her strong views on sexuality and not only humiliate the two girls in front of the whole class, but also made us all feel that what was discussed was evil. I discussed this incident a couple of decades later and the two women who had written the letter as girls remembered it vividly. I blame Mrs. Simmons handling of the issue for making it very hard for my class to get on with the opposite sex. This was something which became very apparent when we all moved up to the secondary school and mixed with children who had not had such warped teachers or delay in the education they needed to mature at a proper pace. Given that the UK outstrips every other country in Europe in terms of the number of teenage pregnancies, people like Mrs. Simmons need to be kept out of the teaching profession.
Mrs. Webb - music teacher
There must be something about music and language teachers as they fill up the bulk of this posting. In those days, long before the National Curriculum, all pupils had to do music. Those who were talented took proper lessons with an instrument, but the rest of us has to do an hour of music per week. We generally listened to classical pieces and heard about the history of composers and played a few percussion instruments. Mrs. Webb resembled Rosa Klebb in the movie 'From Russia With Love' the kind of woman to terrify any eleven year old (the age I was when I last met her). I lack any musical ability and, in particular, rhythm which makes it had to play percussion instruments. Consequently I was in line for attack from her. In those days teachers could insult you in a way they would not be permitted these days. She felt I was constantly playing out of tune deliberately and would level invective against being 'an individual'. Of course, flushing with embarrassment I was even worse at playing again, triggering the vicious cycle. I was also clumsy and being terrified in her room would knock over things (we had to balance the wooden chairs upright on the tables at the end of class again something else that would be banned these days and I always struggled to achieve it). I do not think I was alone in her attacks as one day when the school hall was being re-decorated we had to eat our packed lunches in classrooms and I was assigned to her room with about 30 other pupils. I hid in the corner and stared at a poster about wind instruments. The room was silent as everyone ate; clearly everyone was in terror of her picking on one of us. She found this strange and told us we had permission to speak, but no-one said anything still and I wondered if she realised how much she terrified us.
Mr. Atherton - language teacher
The language teachers at my school, despite all being British, eerily seemed to match the stereotypes for their respective countries. The French teachers were often relaxed, urbane, with young wives and stylish clothes, the German teachers were very austere almost rude at times and the Spanish teachers, unsurprisingly had similarities with the French but dressed more casually and could be really flirtatious or, if female, looking like the matriarch of an extended Spanish family.
Mr. Atherton fitted his language with casual, bright clothes and a moustache that would have suited Errol Flynn. He came from northern England and I made the mistake of encountering him in his early days in southern England when he seemed to be on some crusade to hammer southern English children as soft and deserving of harsh treatment. He was very tricky and I fell into one of his traps about when you could and could not speak and got a detention, the only detention I ever received in my whole school career, something I was so ashamed of that I never mentioned it to my family. He was one of those teachers who pretend to be your friend but in reality hold you in contempt. Thinking about his smug attitude really riles me even now. Fortunately his career was brought to an end a few years later when I had left the school as, despite having a young wife, he was caught having an affair with a sixth form girl (sixth formers were 17-19 years old, so it was legal, but obviously disapproved of).
Mr. Marks - language teacher
Mr. Marks was upfront nasty. He would give you small scraps of paper to put your answers to tests on and when you found it difficult to fit the answers on one line you would lose marks as he would say the answer, though correct, was written wrongly. Such behaviour is soul destroying, because you think: what is the point of even trying to get it right? So many of these teachers do not realise how by such behaviour they turn you away from their subjects, let alone making it hard to truly know how you are progressing. He seemed to want to humiliate me all the time (I doubt I was alone in being picked on, but, of course, I can only talk from my personal experience). At the time of a general election he made me stand up and outline my political views so that he could spend the rest of the lesson explaining why I was so wrong: he was a grown man, I was thirteen, but, of course, he thought it was impertinent that I felt that I had political views at that age.
The worse case was the following year when I was sent to his class by mistake due to an administrative error and he ordered me out of the classroom (blaming me for the error). I had to wander the school trying to find someone to tell me where I was supposed to be. He had very dodgy Social Darwinist ideas and would question children waiting to buy crisps and drinks at break time about what ability level of class they were in, assuming less intelligent children would eat more.
Mr. Shoveller - deputy head
My school had loads of deputy heads for different functions. The worst was Mr. Shoveller who looked like a textile mill owner from the 1840s. His attitudes to any physical interaction between boys and girls was much the same and he would prowl around the school disco moving the hands of miscreants dancing during the slow dances (the hands were not permitted to rest on anyone's buttocks) and on school trips arms were not permitted to be put around anyone in photos taken.
For some reason he treated me reasonably well, but I do not forgive him as I witnessed his real side. Every day at the school one pupil was taken out of class to serve as an errand boy/girl to the secretary of the school. This meant that you were positioned for the day in the administrative heart of the school and hence near Mr. Shoveller's office as he was the most junior of the deputy heads. That afternoon, a sunny one when all the windows were open, a boy was brought to him who had been trying to spend a £10 note (worth a lot more in the early 1980s than now) in snack shop.
The boy, (I knew him reasonably well but we were not friends) was questioned at length about where he got the money from. Shoveller did not believe his explanation that his mother had given it to him to get drinks and snacks for a party (I knew this to be the truth as he had earlier spoken about the party). His mother worked and could not be raised during the day (this was the age before mobile phones and at a time when employers often did not permit outside contact during working hours, again a sharp contrast to today). So, having heard the evidence as he could gather it at the time, Shoveller acted as judge and jury and beat the boy for theft (in those days corporal punishment was still permitted in schools by senior staff). The number of beats seemed excessive to me and the boy was howling for all to hear, no doubt the pain worsened by the fact that actually he had done nothing wrong. I was sat outside the window and realised how arrogant and callous Shoveller was, self-righteous too in that he felt he could beat the wrongdoing out of the boy. It still sickens me to think of how terrorised children were in those days by bullying teachers.
Mr. Salmon - science teacher
This man retired while I was at school meaning he would in his late eighties by now, though he told us he would be dead three years after retirement anyway. With him there was no single incident to point to, just how harsh he was in every lesson. I used to leave with a stomach ache caused by his snide, acid comments about people and their failures. You were terrified of doing anything wrong in his lesson but knew that you could not avoid it. Again he was one of these who liked to be tricksy with his challenges. He always said he only bet on certainties but would cajole us to take the losing side just so that he could subsequently ridicule us. Even for a school that seemed to employ misfits he seemed to have stepped from the 1950s or even 1930s in his behaviour and attitudes. He was very proud that he did not own a television without being aware of how out-of-step that made him with all of us.
I am beginning to see common themes arising here as, like many of the others, he was self-righteous and clearly loved the extent of his own knowledge and parading it before us, portraying us as poor specimens (in a district where all the most intelligent went to private school, maybe that was his true perception of us state school children). He believed that radioactivity did no harm to the human body which seems a very dangerous belief for a science teacher.
Humiliation and stress began to impact on me medically while at secondary school. There was another teacher who when he realised how I was suffering stopped slapping me around the head (I was not alone in experiencing that, he did it to many of the boys) and ridiculing me, realising that he had probably gone too far. He spoke to me one-to-one about the issue, and it is that realisation on his part that lifts him out of my condemnation today. Mr. Salmon, who literally made me ill with worry, (I can so clearly remember the stomach aches after his lessons) had no iota of an idea of how much discomfort he inflicted, it probably would not have penetrated his thinking even if he had been told directly.
Mrs. Williams - music teacher
You can understand how pleased I was when I reached the age of 14 and music stopped being a compulsory subject. This woman was rather odd and there were many rumours about why that was, maybe it was simply she was a musician. She had performed in alternative music groups in the 1960s, at one stage just making peculiar sounds with her voice. It was said she had had a miscarriage after having been struck by lightning but that sounds like the kind of story that schoolboys make up. She certainly stuck out in what she wore, predominantly leather clothes - jackets, skirts, trousers, tops, boots in a whole variety of shades, of course black but also maroon, olive, red, various shades of brown. I know it was the 1980s and leather clothes were popular but did seem rather outre for a teacher at work. She fostered a clique of admiring pupils around her. Obviously, many of the keen musicians were in this clique, though not all, and pupils with other interests were permitted to enter her ranks of acolytes as long as they did nothing to displease her on the basis of one of her cryptic rules. This 'in' and 'out' division with her obviously caused tension in an average class where he clique members would be favoured over the rest of us.
The key problem, though, was her general set of quirky rules that you learned through error. She would not accept the word 'hey' to be said in her class and if anyone used it they had to undergo a humiliating ritual. Humiliating rituals were favoured by her for many errors against her rules. For boys she would have you stand on your chair and rotate like a ballerina whilst she played tinkly jewellery box music. In contrast to Mrs. Webb, Mrs. Williams seemed to accept that I had no musical ability in me and left me pretty much alone. However, humiliation to one's friends and classmates can be painful to yourself too and I cringe as I remember pupils being treated that way. She had no realisation that to use such methods signals to children that humiliation is a permissible tool and they need discouragement on that basis, rather than a green light.
Miss. Brook - English teacher
I have now reached the aged of 16 in my school career. This woman I know retired a few years later, probably something like 22 years ago now, so again, she is probably at least 82 if not 87. I know that if she was in education today she would have been charged with some some. Again, like Salmon, she belonged in a previous age. Like Marks she was self-centred and arrogant and like Shoveller, Williams and the rest, self-righteous. The fact that she had less physical and mental impact on me probably reflects that have experienced 6-7 years under all these nasty people I had developed a much harder shell and could see her for the sickening individual she was. She was not even very good at her subject with views that dated back thirty years and she made no attempt to catch up with current thinking.
In common with many of these teachers she liked to exercise an acid humour on pupils (maybe that is all that a career in teaching leaves you with). However, she also exhibited her prejudices very actively in class. She questioned us about our religion and seemed to particularly dislike Roman Catholics (who made up a sixth of our class) and seemed it incomprehensible that any of us were not Christians (she felt you had to know the Bible intimately to be able to study English literature). Such things are private, not to be dragged out into the open in class.
Brook had nothing good to say about contemporary culture as if all us teenagers should listen to nothing bar Beethoven at the most modern. She openly criticised how we dressed as if out of school we would dress the way she did as a 60+ year old woman. She also felt that the concerns of no-one else in the school were marginally as important as her concerns (for example if you had to go on a history trip). The fact that the English teachers had their own separate staff room, I think simply illustrated the difficulties they caused for the rest of the school. Her greatest problem was how lowly she perceived her pupils. Owing to the fact that none of us subscribed to the culture she liked and because we often espoused new ideas she was convinced that we were going to fail, especially if we were Catholic or Scottish or thought about going to university. She gave the lowest predicted grades of anyone I have encountered and clearly signalled that we were an embarrassment to her and the best we could hope for was to train as a manager for a supermarket. Again I think much of this stemmed from the area where we lived with its high level of private schools, though at 16+ many of the private school children had come back into the state sector, something she did not seem to comprehend despite her regular cross-examining of us in class.
A teacher has to have faith in his/her pupils, especially when they become teenagers, otherwise they are going to abandon all hope. Maybe that was what she wanted so that we achieved nothing more than she did. Clearly she felt we were contemptible and deserved nothing better, a bad attitude for a teacher who is supposed to raise, rather than douse expectations.
Recent reports say that there are 17,000 incompetent teachers working in the UK at present teaching 100,000 pupils at some time or another during every school week. I do not know whether the teachers I discussed above were incompetent but they were bad teachers in other ways. Teachers should not be self-righteous, they should not bully and especially not humiliate pupils. They should give constructive criticism not patronise people. They should expect the best of all pupils not dismiss them and push them away from opportunities. They should not make arbitrary decisions but base choices on sufficient evidence. They should also be aware of how much they screw up people's lives for decades to come, when they behave in nasty ways. They are in a position of immense power and should use it responsibility or should be kicked out of the profession as soon as possible.
Now, I estimate around 100 teachers taught me in 14 years I spent at school and college and only a fraction of them remain in my memory for what they inflicted on me. No-one pretends teaching is an easy job, but it is clear that no-one who enters the profession should be allowed to treat pupils in a way which causes mental and emotional difficulties as all of the teachers highlighted here, did for me. Some of them may be dead and gone but their impact lives on in the way my life turned out and I am sure there must be thousands of people they have screwed up in similar or worse ways. I remember the nasty teachers not the good ones and I imagine I will continue to condemn them for as long as I remain alive.
P.P. Andrew White - university tutor
Recently I saw an old Volvo car and it brought back to mind a tutor I had at university who caused me so much problem by his incompetence that it was clear that I had blotted him from my memory. The man is Andrew White and I imagine that he is now about 45/46 so probably in a similar sort of position as to when I met him. I see he has gone from where I encountered him, though one of his colleagues who was not much better, is not only still there, but has been promoted. I never met such a patronising woman who seemed to hold her students in contempt and loved playing mind games with us. However, she did not have as direct input into the problems I experienced as White did.
White was simply incompetent, completely out of his depth and we students suffered as a consequence. I failed the course that I had saved thousands of pounds for. He had given minimal feedback and then turned up at last stage, at my house with a feedback form jammed with criticisms that he insisted I sign. It said if the university authorities wanted more information of how poor I was at my course they should contact him. This damning document was only produced in the final month of the course. If I had truly been that bad the suggestions should have come much sooner. I did not roll over in the way he and his colleagues expected. I scrawled over his feedback form saying I totally disagreed with it (never be compelled to sign anything and if they insist make sure you spoil their document with your comments written over it, very visibly) and took his improper behaviour to a formal university complaint. I never found the outcome but I trust that they booted him out of the university.
White drove around in an old Volvo in which the seatbelts did not work and I wished that I had shopped him to the police. I saw the car again a couple of years later outside a restaurant in London and it was only because I was with a girlfriend that I did not attack it or storm into the restaurant and seek to humiliate him for what his incompetence did to my life and his arrogance in seeking to cover-up his blunders. If I ever see him again when I am alone I will probably end up in prison for assault. My hatred runs that deep.
Friday, 8 February 2008
Not Forgetting and Not Forgiving 1: My Parents
The British poet Philip Larkin (1922-85) wrote the following poem (beloved of bloggers it seems) in 1974:
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
The reason why I thought of this poem was that my father turns 70 next month. In his middle-aged years he always said he wanted to take a pill on his 70th birthday and to simply fall asleep and die so that he was no longer a burden on society. I think this partly stems from the burdens elderly relatives in his and my mother's family inflicted on him in his 40s and 50s. As the date approaches, statements he has made seem to indicate that he may follow this prescription. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that it is one of my beliefs that we should do nothing to stop someone who wants to take their own life. It would be hypocritical for me to intervene and anyway there may be nothing I can do, especially if he is determined. What I did realise was that I had no emotional regrets about his imminent departure from the world. I have selfish regrets that a source of income and of woodworking and electrical skills will be cut off, but beyond that I simply feel numb about the occurrence.
Throughout my teenage years, probably in common with many people, between bursts of thinking about killing myself, I plotted how I would kill my father. Before I go any further I should emphasise that I was never sexually abused or physically abused. However, I do blame him very directly for screwing up a large chunk of my life. I am certainly not as forgiving as Larkin is. I believe part of his actions were getting back at his own father who always favoured his younger brother in terms of support financially and otherwise. My father was rarely violent towards me though he kicked me right across a room when I was about twelve and he threatened to cut off my ears off with a kitchen knife when I was sixteen and we were wrestling over it. (even now he is physically stronger than me), but I think that incident stemmed very much from his misreading the situation and thinking me threatening to take my own life was aimed at threatening to kill him to somehow win my mother from him. It was only later that my plans against him crystalised and they were only ever for my own sense of revenge and had nothing to do with my mother.
The ways in which my parents, especially my father, earned an undying hatred (and I call it so accurately because even 20 years on it is as strong as it was at the time and I envisage it never burning out) is because of how they undermined my life leaving it distorted probably for ever more. It was really not until I turned 34 and a woman proved willing to sacrifice her happiness on my behalf that I really came of age. I had been kept back from maturing properly into an adult by the psychological burdens my father put on me.
The first element is not going to seem shocking, but it was the way I was free labour for my father. He owned one third of an acre (about 0.13 ha) on which he grew vegetables and I cannot remember a weekend when I was not forced to weed or water 'the land' as he called it. There were bushes to clear and lawns to mow and fruit to clear up, jobs for every month of the year in the cold, the hot, the rain, whatever. He grew a vast range of vegetables and every kind of temperate climate fruit available at the time. Each Summer and Autumn there were things to be harvested. Once we had exhausted the crop from this source it was out into the woodlands to pick buckets of blackberries and rosehips. Then it was backbreaking work picking up innumerable sweet chestnuts from the floors of other woods. I know self-sufficiency was popular at the time, but I simply felt like a serf. I received my board and lodging and some pocket money, but was never paid for this incessant year round work. Refusing to work or treading in the wrong place on 'the land' or dropping or spilling something all resulted in bed without dinner or a smack (still legal in the 1970s). When friends were out on their bicycles or at the park or playing board games or listening to cassettes, I was out there serving one man's empire. I have an intense loathing of any gardening to this day and will go nowhere near it.
The second thing that I despise my father for distorting my life with was mock examinations. I lived in a county that had scrapped the so-called 11-plus examination (taken at 10, which chose which school children went to at the age of 11, it is still used in Kent and Buckinghamshire) even before I started school. However, this did not stop my parents sitting me down in examination room conditions to incessantly do mock 11-plus papers from at least the age of 9 onwards. I found them difficult (they had IQ test questions as well as the usual short essays and mathematics you expect on entrance papers), especially the logic problems and the mathematics, both skills I quite lack. However, the fact that I might find them impossible was never taken into consideration. In my parents' view I only did badly on them because I was lazy and did not apply myself. This treatment was worse than the gardening as the room I had to do the tests in looked out on the road and I could see my friends cycling by to the park while I was stuck indoors. There was absolutely no point doing these mock examinations. I went to the local state secondary school at 11 anyway and you had to do no examinations to get in there. I did reasonably well and see no benefit from doing hour-upon-hour of these tests. I blame it on some high expectations of my parents. I know I said disappointment is the highest form of flattery, but I wish they had simply taken a more realistic view of my abilities and not inflicted these useless tests on me, that gained nothing except making me loathe them even further.
You may note that I have shifted from 'him' to 'them'. My father was the clear instigator of all the activities I mention here, but my mother was a clear accomplice. It maybe she was frightened or she believed in what my father insisted upon. However, if he had adopted a more humane line towards me I am sure she would have gone along with that too.
The element of their behaviour which caused me greatest difficulty was the humiliation. Now, I know that all parents embarrass their children at some time or another, but it does not usually form the basis of sustained action. I had always felt to be an outsider in my school. Everyone in the area was well off, but we lived in the 'wrong part of town', we lacked the consumer items most people had, I had a strange name and had never been baptised. All of these things were aspects pupils ridiculed me on, but I could resist those jibes. What totally undermined me was the humiliation from home which began around the age of twelve and led to stress-related illnesses and made it almost impossible for me to operate in the adult world until many years later. For some reason my father decided that the way I spoke sounded like 'the hooting of an idiot child' and that the way I walked was like that of an 'imbecile' or someone who was mentally handicapped (as the term was in the 1970s). I was constantly reminded of these deficiencies in public as well as criticised incessantly about them at home as if they were something I could alter and was refusing to do so. Attempts to walk and stand differently to avoid such criticism simply led my mother demonstrating that I walked like a woman trying to defend herself from being raped! You can imagine what that felt like to a boy in his teenage years. Most people lack self-confidence as a teenager and are self-conscious of their appearance. I am not an attractive man and am clumsy, so to be constantly told by your parents that you look like someone who has such difficulties makes you feel there is no point. At school I would simply hide in the school library all the time so as to avoid going into the playground. Seeing a victim (and my parents blamed me for making myself that victim when I was beaten up in a public library) I became the butt of jokes and the 'Laurel and Hardy' theme would be whistled whenever I passed. Ironically, it was only my ability to overcome the stress-related illnesses that I began to suffer that won me any standing at school (though of course not at home where I was clearly blamed for these illnesses).
Once I left home, I had no confidence that anyone could find me anything more than a replica of the elephant man and I simply threw myself into work and hanging out in libraries until they closed, as a refuge. I tried to eat myself to death by bingeing on cakes and then I tried alcohol, drinking until I could stomach no more every night of the week. These things dulled the pain but did not kill me. To some degree it was planning my revenge on my father that carried me through and slowly I was able to develop my own identity as something worth people's time, but it took years. How I wish we had had blogging and chatrooms back then, it would have been less isolating. The only real escape was into cakes, beer and the fantasy fiction I wrote.
My life has been many times better than that of people who have suffered sexual and physical abuse and I believe they are the real courageous ones in our society. I have thought with time that I would find forgiveness of my father, but a quarter of a century has passed and I feel the anger no less strongly than when I left home. I do not think I have the capacity to forgive him for how difficult he made my life, especially personal relationships. If you entirely strip away every iota of someone's faith in themselves they have absolutely no basis that they can interact with other people on more than a superficial level. My memory is failing as I have commented before, and as I cannot offer my father forgiveness, he may get forgetting out of me, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the incidents are still very raw in my mind and whilst many other things have faded from it, these stay there very clearly. I have no idea what motivated him to behave the way he did, I never really cared. I would have preferred an absent or oblivious father to the one I got and I will not mourn his passing.
As for the rest of us, as usual, I return to the kind of sentiments Larkin outlined at the start and I am thinking of making my motto:
'Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.'
Wise words.
This Be The Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
The reason why I thought of this poem was that my father turns 70 next month. In his middle-aged years he always said he wanted to take a pill on his 70th birthday and to simply fall asleep and die so that he was no longer a burden on society. I think this partly stems from the burdens elderly relatives in his and my mother's family inflicted on him in his 40s and 50s. As the date approaches, statements he has made seem to indicate that he may follow this prescription. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that it is one of my beliefs that we should do nothing to stop someone who wants to take their own life. It would be hypocritical for me to intervene and anyway there may be nothing I can do, especially if he is determined. What I did realise was that I had no emotional regrets about his imminent departure from the world. I have selfish regrets that a source of income and of woodworking and electrical skills will be cut off, but beyond that I simply feel numb about the occurrence.
Throughout my teenage years, probably in common with many people, between bursts of thinking about killing myself, I plotted how I would kill my father. Before I go any further I should emphasise that I was never sexually abused or physically abused. However, I do blame him very directly for screwing up a large chunk of my life. I am certainly not as forgiving as Larkin is. I believe part of his actions were getting back at his own father who always favoured his younger brother in terms of support financially and otherwise. My father was rarely violent towards me though he kicked me right across a room when I was about twelve and he threatened to cut off my ears off with a kitchen knife when I was sixteen and we were wrestling over it. (even now he is physically stronger than me), but I think that incident stemmed very much from his misreading the situation and thinking me threatening to take my own life was aimed at threatening to kill him to somehow win my mother from him. It was only later that my plans against him crystalised and they were only ever for my own sense of revenge and had nothing to do with my mother.
The ways in which my parents, especially my father, earned an undying hatred (and I call it so accurately because even 20 years on it is as strong as it was at the time and I envisage it never burning out) is because of how they undermined my life leaving it distorted probably for ever more. It was really not until I turned 34 and a woman proved willing to sacrifice her happiness on my behalf that I really came of age. I had been kept back from maturing properly into an adult by the psychological burdens my father put on me.
The first element is not going to seem shocking, but it was the way I was free labour for my father. He owned one third of an acre (about 0.13 ha) on which he grew vegetables and I cannot remember a weekend when I was not forced to weed or water 'the land' as he called it. There were bushes to clear and lawns to mow and fruit to clear up, jobs for every month of the year in the cold, the hot, the rain, whatever. He grew a vast range of vegetables and every kind of temperate climate fruit available at the time. Each Summer and Autumn there were things to be harvested. Once we had exhausted the crop from this source it was out into the woodlands to pick buckets of blackberries and rosehips. Then it was backbreaking work picking up innumerable sweet chestnuts from the floors of other woods. I know self-sufficiency was popular at the time, but I simply felt like a serf. I received my board and lodging and some pocket money, but was never paid for this incessant year round work. Refusing to work or treading in the wrong place on 'the land' or dropping or spilling something all resulted in bed without dinner or a smack (still legal in the 1970s). When friends were out on their bicycles or at the park or playing board games or listening to cassettes, I was out there serving one man's empire. I have an intense loathing of any gardening to this day and will go nowhere near it.
The second thing that I despise my father for distorting my life with was mock examinations. I lived in a county that had scrapped the so-called 11-plus examination (taken at 10, which chose which school children went to at the age of 11, it is still used in Kent and Buckinghamshire) even before I started school. However, this did not stop my parents sitting me down in examination room conditions to incessantly do mock 11-plus papers from at least the age of 9 onwards. I found them difficult (they had IQ test questions as well as the usual short essays and mathematics you expect on entrance papers), especially the logic problems and the mathematics, both skills I quite lack. However, the fact that I might find them impossible was never taken into consideration. In my parents' view I only did badly on them because I was lazy and did not apply myself. This treatment was worse than the gardening as the room I had to do the tests in looked out on the road and I could see my friends cycling by to the park while I was stuck indoors. There was absolutely no point doing these mock examinations. I went to the local state secondary school at 11 anyway and you had to do no examinations to get in there. I did reasonably well and see no benefit from doing hour-upon-hour of these tests. I blame it on some high expectations of my parents. I know I said disappointment is the highest form of flattery, but I wish they had simply taken a more realistic view of my abilities and not inflicted these useless tests on me, that gained nothing except making me loathe them even further.
You may note that I have shifted from 'him' to 'them'. My father was the clear instigator of all the activities I mention here, but my mother was a clear accomplice. It maybe she was frightened or she believed in what my father insisted upon. However, if he had adopted a more humane line towards me I am sure she would have gone along with that too.
The element of their behaviour which caused me greatest difficulty was the humiliation. Now, I know that all parents embarrass their children at some time or another, but it does not usually form the basis of sustained action. I had always felt to be an outsider in my school. Everyone in the area was well off, but we lived in the 'wrong part of town', we lacked the consumer items most people had, I had a strange name and had never been baptised. All of these things were aspects pupils ridiculed me on, but I could resist those jibes. What totally undermined me was the humiliation from home which began around the age of twelve and led to stress-related illnesses and made it almost impossible for me to operate in the adult world until many years later. For some reason my father decided that the way I spoke sounded like 'the hooting of an idiot child' and that the way I walked was like that of an 'imbecile' or someone who was mentally handicapped (as the term was in the 1970s). I was constantly reminded of these deficiencies in public as well as criticised incessantly about them at home as if they were something I could alter and was refusing to do so. Attempts to walk and stand differently to avoid such criticism simply led my mother demonstrating that I walked like a woman trying to defend herself from being raped! You can imagine what that felt like to a boy in his teenage years. Most people lack self-confidence as a teenager and are self-conscious of their appearance. I am not an attractive man and am clumsy, so to be constantly told by your parents that you look like someone who has such difficulties makes you feel there is no point. At school I would simply hide in the school library all the time so as to avoid going into the playground. Seeing a victim (and my parents blamed me for making myself that victim when I was beaten up in a public library) I became the butt of jokes and the 'Laurel and Hardy' theme would be whistled whenever I passed. Ironically, it was only my ability to overcome the stress-related illnesses that I began to suffer that won me any standing at school (though of course not at home where I was clearly blamed for these illnesses).
Once I left home, I had no confidence that anyone could find me anything more than a replica of the elephant man and I simply threw myself into work and hanging out in libraries until they closed, as a refuge. I tried to eat myself to death by bingeing on cakes and then I tried alcohol, drinking until I could stomach no more every night of the week. These things dulled the pain but did not kill me. To some degree it was planning my revenge on my father that carried me through and slowly I was able to develop my own identity as something worth people's time, but it took years. How I wish we had had blogging and chatrooms back then, it would have been less isolating. The only real escape was into cakes, beer and the fantasy fiction I wrote.
My life has been many times better than that of people who have suffered sexual and physical abuse and I believe they are the real courageous ones in our society. I have thought with time that I would find forgiveness of my father, but a quarter of a century has passed and I feel the anger no less strongly than when I left home. I do not think I have the capacity to forgive him for how difficult he made my life, especially personal relationships. If you entirely strip away every iota of someone's faith in themselves they have absolutely no basis that they can interact with other people on more than a superficial level. My memory is failing as I have commented before, and as I cannot offer my father forgiveness, he may get forgetting out of me, but surprisingly (or maybe not) the incidents are still very raw in my mind and whilst many other things have faded from it, these stay there very clearly. I have no idea what motivated him to behave the way he did, I never really cared. I would have preferred an absent or oblivious father to the one I got and I will not mourn his passing.
As for the rest of us, as usual, I return to the kind of sentiments Larkin outlined at the start and I am thinking of making my motto:
'Get out as early as you can/And don't have any kids yourself.'
Wise words.
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