A Nice Bit Of Chaucer

Like most of my countrymen I have a long established love affair with swearing.

Despite Irish Navvies possibly protesting the claim, I believe that nobody on this planet swears quite like your average Englishman. Possibly at one time, your choice of cuss was influenced by class and proclaimed the same but these days a Peer of the Realm is just as likely to drop the C word as some habitual fly-tipping dole-ite on Benefits Street and your average tramp on the street sometimes has more breeding than your average bank manager.

When I was at Secondary school I swore every day. It was de rigueur. It was part of the atomic make-up of the rarefied atmosphere of “hormonal teen”. More than that. If teenagehood was a nightclub then swearing was the stamp they put on the back of your hand to prove you’d paid to get in. And that you were probably too immature to be there.

As I got older swearing, for me at least, was no longer about expressing anger but expressing humour. Peter Cook might have been swearing like a trooper in the 60s but for me it was the alternative comedy scene in the 80s that awoke the realization that a fuck placed strategically into a sentence could be the source of much mirth. Suddenly expletives – not denying their inherent shock value – became a tool of comedy and humour.

And that emotional response is pretty much where I have stayed. Which isn’t to say I don’t wince when I catch my eldest boy befouling the air with an age appropriate / environment inappropriate F bomb. Or sneer when I overhear some yob in the street linking every second word he utters with a mispronounced “fock”. This is quite possibly hypocrisy but, well, what can I say but fuck you? Swearing is open to everybody but as an art form few master it properly.

Swearing is on my mind today because I have just finished writing a new Kindle book. It’s a joke autobiography and is scurrilous, blatantly un-PC, cartoon pornographic and deeply puerile and will be published under an assumed name. I had enormous fun writing it and it made me laugh out loud. My wife has now read it and it has made her laugh too. She also complimented me with the remark that it is very well written but just like my (proper) novel, The Great Escapes Of Danny Houdini, I have peppered it (or even soaked it) with the kind of language that will probably drive away a good portion of the book buying public.

The ones that say “breadbin” instead of “bastard” or “bum” instead of “arse”. The nice ones who suffer bouts of apoplexy when someone let’s rip with a “the pope be damned!”

She’s not the first person to say that. A colleague who is currently reading Danny Houdini has also admitted to me that she found the frequent bad language shocking and hard to take. She’s enjoying the story so is “persevering” but she made it sound like she was having to wade through the sewers of Calcutta to reach a promised Eden. More, she couldn’t conceive how a polite, well-spoken individual like myself could produce dialogue of such excoriating depravity. My words not hers. Because I’m bigging myself up as I took it as a compliment.

But. It does niggle me a bit.

For me, swearing is a reality. It is all around us and, really, there are far more important things to be offended by than mere language and phonetics. In literature generally, but especially in the books that I write, I like the dialogue to be real. People swear. They say the wrong thing. They say silly things. They are offensive deliberately for a laugh. They lack the education to express themselves well so swear. Or they are well educated but like to swear for the effect it has. For some, swearing is its own subculture and, like teenage swearing, is evidence of their membership to it.

But I worry that perhaps I am deliberately sabotaging myself. The gist of my wife’s remarks to me this morning are that I come up with great stories and then render them inaccessible to 50% of the population. If that is true it’s hardly a winning marketing strategy.

You see, I suspect that just as half of me yearns for artistic success, the other half of me is scared of it.

Fucking scared?

Possibly.

Or maybe I’m just sticking to my comedy bollockycunty guns.

Real Boys

I was never a real boy at school.

I think I realized this most plainly when I encountered metalwork and woodwork for the first time.

While other boys took to the tools and the glues and the heat and the physicality of the work with gusto I felt my heart sink in my chest. Horrible, loud, dirty, brutish work. Urgh.

Which makes me sound like I was a fop. But I wasn’t. I was just a wimp. And like all wimps I was not at all confident with activities that required physical input.

It didn’t help that the two teachers for these classes were stereotypical old school brigadiers. Both had bristling moustaches and the haunted eyes of those who’d seen action in WWII. They had no time for wimpy boys. What they were forging and carving were not shoehorns and mug-trees but boys into men.

My woodwork teacher rendered himself unapproachable during the very first lesson by announcing that his name was Mr Pritchard and woe betide any boy who thought it amusing to remove the “c” and replace the “t” with a “k”. He gave at least half of us in that room an unasked for complex that bordered on Tourettes whenever we had to speak to him. In the end we just called him sir. But Mr Prikhard stuck mentally.

I can’t remember the name of my metalwork teacher. I only recalling him holding up a big metal file in our first lesson and announcing in a voice that sounded like it had been blasted by superhot metal filings that it was a “flat bastard”. This did not augur well for future learning under his hands.

For two years I persevered – until it came time to choose my options and I could drop both subjects. In those two years I produced a shoehorn (which I still have), a towel holder, a wooden tea tray that would best serve a teddy bear’s picnic and various misshapen off-cuts of wood and metal.

If nothing else it taught me that the factories of industry were not meant for me. I couldn’t drill a hole straight to save my life and could only saw wavy lines. If I’d been in the A Team I would have been the one making tea while everyone else built a tank out of a dustcart and an old fridge freezer.

I didn’t, in truth, like getting my hands dirty. And I still don’t. Oil, grease, grime, grit. They do nothing for me. Lord help me I even turned my nose up at glue. I think I built a total of 3 Airfix kits as a child and they, all of them, resembled something that had been cocooned by a giant funnel-web.

I just didn’t have the finesse or the dexterity. Or, just maybe, the will.

I don’t even know if they offer woodwork and metalwork at school any more. When my eldest boy starts secondary school in September it will be interesting to find out. I suspect his opinion of such things will be the same as mine but these things are not set in stone. I do know that precious few chose woodwork or metalwork as a study subject when the time came. Only those that saw them as an easy option. The same lads did “gardening” too though I daresay such pursuits would be termed Agricultural Studies now.

Do we choose our social class or is it foisted upon us?

I do a white collar job now. Never done blue. I would never have survived in a factory. Not back then.

And yet, I get an inkling every once in a while... a desire and a wish to learn a craft. Crafts are good. Maybe I have enough confidence in my own abilities now to actually make a decent job of that tea tray?

And as for the shoehorn... well, what can I say? It still works. Maybe more than Mr Pritchard’s name stuck over the years?

Maybe that bastard did something good for me after all?

Class

The way it was always told to me, not long after Chamberlain had declared war on Germany, my grandfather – barely 19 years of age – had hotfooted it around to the RAF recruiting office to sign up. He no doubt fancied himself kitted out with one of those stiffened scarves and leather goggles and chewing on a choice cigar from the comfort of his cockpit as he strafed a few Heinkels with a careless flick of his thumb on the joystick.

And who wouldn’t? The RAF, even before the Battle of Britain, had an air of the glams about it. I mean, dash it all, but those chaps were just plain dashing. Why yomp across France when you can sit at the controls of possibly the best plane ever built and let a Rolls-Royce Merlin carry you all the way to the theatre of battle in style?

But the RAF didn’t want my grandfather. They told him in no uncertain terms that he didn’t have the brains to be a spitfire pilot or any other kind of pilot. He wasn’t made of the right stuff, see. He wasn’t educated properly. He’d made it through a decent enough school but he was indelibly working class. As far as the RAF were concerned he was a yomper if ever there was one. They no doubt looked at him through their steely monocles and muttered under their breaths, “Not one of us.”

And so despite, the urgent country-wide call to arms, the RAF declined my grandfather’s enthusiastic offer and the legend of The Leamington Baron was shot down before it even got off the runway.

If my grandfather was ever embittered by this show of classism he never showed it. He was resilient and perhaps just plain pragmatic enough to depart the RAF recruiting office with a cheery wave and an “Okay gov’nor” and hop over the threshold of the recruiting office immediately next door and find himself signed up by the Royal Navy. They snatched his hand off and had him rated as able-bodied before you could say “hard to starboard”.

He loved his time in the Navy. He loved the travel. He loved the camaraderie. Not that he was blinded by his love – he didn’t like the torpedoes, or the magnetic mines or the time his ship had its stern completely blown off and they had to rely on luck and the skill of their captain to limp them miraculously to the dicey safety of a Maltase port – but I can see from his war photos that the Navy changed him. It broadened his outlook. It completed his education in a way that a stint with the RAF would never have done. So he was never a member of a gentleman’s club or got a nickname like “Squiffy” or “Ack-Ack”... but he got to see India, North and South Africa, Malta, Iceland, even a few Russian ports.

He saw parts of the world that a boy from the working class slums of Leamington Spa would not ordinarily have got to see. And though the officers on board ship were just as high born as those of the RAF there was a closeness and equality (of sorts) born of spending months and months together in the equivalent of a tin can with no other company than the burly chaps around you. The respect that was engendered went both ways. In that respect war is a great leveller.

If it wasn’t for my Nan’s reluctance to travel I have no doubt my grandfather would have left these shores far behind him after the war and I’d be writing to you from South Africa. My grandfather loved his shore leave there and often spoke fondly of it in the years before his death in 2009. Not that he particularly regretted staying put in Blighty – he and my Nan gadded about quite a bit during their retirement years and saw as much of the world as they could – but I’m sure he occasionally dreamed of what could have been; if things had been different.

For all that though my grandfather did well for himself after the war. Yes, he did manual work but he was well paid for it. He aspired to be comfortable and he achieved it. He ended up owning his own house and car and was as far removed from those childhood slums as it was realistic to expect to be.

At the end he could have looked those RAF officers in the eye and got a polite nod in return. He’d earnt his wings.

The first casualty of war might be innocence but one of the last was class.

Suicidal Tendencies

No, don’t worry. I’m not thinking about attaching a hoover pipe to the car exhaust and gassing myself. Or indeed casting myself into the River Leam with my clothes left by the roadside accompanied by a note reading “goodbye cruel world”. (Given the Leam I’d be more likely to die by poisoning than drowning anyway).

I’m talking about that urge that most of us get at one time or another to stick your head above the parapet. To go “over the top” in World War I parlance. To deliberately step into the gun sights of assassins that you know are just waiting for an opportunity to take a pop at you.

For years, man and boy, I’ve been one of the shrinking violets. One of those conscientious people that, if alive 200 years ago, would have doffed their hat to Dorcas Lane and spoke in hushed tones of the quality toffs that lived in Candleford. I’d like to blame my working class upbringing. I know my place and all that crap. But actually that’s rubbish. When I was a kid being working class was already about cocking a snook at the middle and upper classes and speaking of them scathingly in the snug of the local pub.

But nevertheless I was brought up to respect those in authority over me. Not just to respect but also not to question. That’s quite a telling distinction.

I’ve never been able to rid myself of that whole thought process – that mind trap – until recently.

I don’t know what’s happened over the last few years – well, I do: I’ve had kids, finally got my University degree, had experience of running my own fledgling business – but suddenly that invidious bit of mind programming has been broken. The algorithms no longer work for me.

And the inherited fear that was part and parcel of that mindset has also dissipated.

I’m suddenly thinking so what? I’m suddenly questioning not just why but also why should I? Why me and nobody else?

And best of all: isn’t there something better? Why not do what I want to do?

It’s a heady brew all this jumping around with a big target painted on my chest. Years ago my natural sense of self preservation would have had me diving into the nearest Anderson Shelter. Now I want to just shit down the air-hole of everybody else’s.

I’m starting to realize that in some [bad] situations you actually have very little to lose if it all goes tits up. So why worry? Why care? Why take it?

Dangerous thinking.

But don’t worry. I might be mooning at the enemy troops out here in No Man’s Land but I have no intention of putting a pistol to my own head either.

I’m just saying that the smile on my face is a knowing one. Not an insane one.

Laters.