A little ‘additional’ history

I was thinking that somewhere a long the line I should write some things that link up bits of my history. Mostly things come to me in random chunks and because they have been recalled due to a conversation, hearing something or seeing something…or indeed being somewhere.

Post the festival season, or at least the main part of it, there is a lot of admin to catch up on. This can involve a lot of sums as I do all the admin on the merchandising for all the bands I am in. This involves a lot of note taking as well as feeling like a money launderer from time to time because I come home with wads of cash that have to be attributed to the right bands, paid into the relevant accounts or handed over to individuals.

I commented on facebook recently that as a child I want from the top of the class in maths to the bottom and back again fairly regularly and that later in life I had worked out that this often had to do with whether I understood the point of the maths I was doing or not. When I do understand I actually quite like the magic of sums and enjoyed the statistics module I did as part of my degree and much later the Excel spread sheet course…love the formulas!

But all that took me back into a time in primary school. We were living in Halesowen in a  council Maisonette. Basically these were houses on top of houses as we had stairs and upstairs bedrooms but we had to go upstairs to get to our front door. We had a little balcony, black tiled floor with underfloor heating and a multi-storey opposite that people used to jump off from time to time when they’d had enough. Sadly I’m not joking. I don’t remember liking or loathing the place. I know we had no carpets on the stairs and there were a few  significant events that cemented the flat into my mind.

Although the flat was not cold because of the under floor heating and the fact we were on top of another maisonette we had a little three bar electric fire build into a fire place that someone had put together for mum, in the front room. Behind the bars was a chrome backing that stuck out at the top and bottom as it was curved. One day I managed to drop a playing card and it went down behind the Chrome at the top. My logical little brain said, ‘if you stick you hand under the bottom curve it should have dropped down and you should be able to fish it out’. The fire wasn’t on so this small person went ahead and stuck her hands down the bottom. BANG. I was flung from one end of the room to the other as, whilst the fire wasn’t on, the fire was switched on at the wall so the wires down the bottom were all live. I took the skin off all my knuckles and have a little scar on the end of one of my fingers that would make me instantly recognisable were I ever finger printed without having to compare the details of the curvy lines! I was terribly shocked of course and howled and that was not helped by my mother, obviously terrified that I could have killed myself, shouting at me. She did cuddle me relatively immediately afterwards once she’d checked out I was OK.

The reason the carpetless stairs stay in my mind is that when mum came and got us from our foster parents, a few years before, we went to live with her and her boyfriend, a guy who was an ex sailor. We’ll call him Bill. Unfortunately Bill had a sadistic nature which not only involved him slapping mum from time to time but also hitting us – with a big black ruler – and forcing us to stay seated at a table to eat stuff neither of us liked. With my sister one of those things was tinned peaches, she still hates them to this day, and with me it was boiled fish…yep, really boiled stinky fish. Quality cooking had not entered my life at that stage. Anyway mum wouldn’t have afforded to have us live with her without being with him but it became obvious that this couldn’t last and my mother still can’t talk about him and what it was like because it’s too painful. She is not always good at facing her demons. We had a spell of living with my grandmother, we moved to Cheltenham for one year and then we were living in this maisonette in Halesowen and Bill decided to visit. Not living anywhere near us at the time and being quite a while after they’d split up, this was quite a thing. I can’t remember if my sister was there or not but I know I refused to come downstairs and just sat on them, at the top, until he had gone. I don’t think I was punished for doing that as mum understood why even though it must have been hard trying to talk her way through that with a potentially violent ‘Bill’ in the front room.

I also remember poor mum being totally stressed out because my sister became very poorly while we were there. We were on a very tight budget but my sister and I knew things were pretty serious when mum bought Fi some Lucosade…not something we could have afforded. I just remember thinking that wasn’t fair but that she must have been ‘really ill’ and not truly understanding what was going on. It turned out she had some weird virus eating the bones near her brain and the medics were at a loss in terms of how to stop it. It did stop and my sister went on to become a forensic scientist..so no damage there!….

I remember quite liking my primary school but there were a couple of mathematics related instances that popped into my mind. I mentioned on facebook that I had Psychosomatic temperatures and sore throats. We obviously didn’t know they were psychosomatic initially but we had this lovely German doctor..Dr Schubert who said to mum…go and talk to the school. I don’t think she’s really ill but she’s upset about something and school may be the key. She was right. It could have been maths or the fact that my desk was near the back and I wasn’t doing well mostly because no-one had worked out my eye sight wan’t brilliant and I often couldn’t read things on the board. (We’re not even going to go into dyslexia and spelling tests here). But one thing that happened stayed with me all my life.

One day we were all in class waiting for the teacher to come in. We were typical energetic small people and being quite rowdy and to be quite frank we didn’t even really stop once she came in. Eventually she looked really cross and shouted at us. Then when we were really silent she said, ‘Ok then is there any body in here who doesn’t want to do maths?’…….and my hand shot up. Oooooooops. She really shouted at me and sent me from the room and I had to stay out until the end of the lesson when she would ‘deal’ with me.

I cried all the time I was waiting and by the time she got to me I was completely inconsolable. Bearing in mind I wasn’t very old, I’m guessing about 6 or 7, I had a fairly simplistic way of looking at the world. Mum had drummed into us that lying was really bad and I had taken that completely to heart…..so, when asked directly , ‘is there anyone here who doesn’t want to do maths?’ I stuck my hand up. I was, in my mind ,following unbreakable rules i.e. you don’t lie and I wasn’t being cheeky or trying to be funny but had given an instantaneous knee jerk reaction to the question. I took it literally. If you add into that the fact that in not lying  I had brought down a storm upon my head…I could not understand why and hence was inconsolable. So much so that I remember the teacher cuddling me later and trying to comfort me but she must have barely heard my explanation of why I’d put my hand up through all the sobs..”my mum”…..sob .sob sniff, sniff, sniff..hic… “do do don’t” …wah was wha…”do don’t lie”….etc etc ….things got that bad that the teacher became very upset and mum was called and had to come to school to explain why I was so upset and take me home.

Fortunately I was too young to feel embarrassed by the whole incident but tucked away inside me there is still an adverse reaction if anyone hints at saying they think I’ve told a lie…even a little white porky pie. That and anything like public humiliation ..the two here are obviously linked I guess…are the things that can upset me greatly. Beyond reason and rational.

Funny the things that stay with you.