A boy to be watched
I had not made any connection between the
final line in my last blog and the fact that I do really like being
watched. The eight year old I was at the
time liked being at the centre of things and maybe that’s what I was doing by
scratching the swastika. It’s difficult to say as it was so long ago and 'the
past is a foreign country' (L.P. Hartley, The Go-between, 1953).
However it wasn’t the first time I’d been
in trouble, but it was the first time it had become public. I remember angering my father at home on many
occasions to the extent that he would hit me.
I think he was hit as a child and didn’t know any differently. Maybe he should have done as he was a
teacher, and a good one, who rose to become a respected and loved headteacher
in the salubrious confines of Highgate Village, not far from Southgate. But Richard did hit the three of us quite
regularly and as children we were a bit frightened of him. I’ve mentioned we were encouraged to call them
Pat and Richard. I think it’s a potty
idea and I wouldn’t recommend it. It made the distance between us even more
pronounced. Richard was a teacher at the
school. At the time of the swastika
incident he was on the staff of the school.
The difficulties that made in the staffroom can only be imagined and it
wasn’t long after that he took another job elsewhere.
What makes a boy who is brought up
religiously and with love and care become the rebel I grew into over the following
three or four years? Richard would have
blamed ‘bad influences’. It surely couldn’t have been original sin. I think he
believed that my friend Geoffrey Monk lead me in the wrong direction. I don’t
think Geoffrey was to blame, even though he was a strong figure in those last
two years of my life at Walker Primary.
Next week’s story tells of another incident which stands out in my memory.
It involved Geoffrey directly and I think was the final contribution to the
moves made by Pat and Richard to distance me from such influences and look for
a school that would, in their eyes, give me a better education than was
available locally and would give me a chance to make a new start. They weren’t to know that Christ’s Hospital
would, far from making a new start, confirm my outsider
status for once and all. But I’m hopping
ahead to the story after next. Next
week, it’s Geoffrey Monk and the Policeman.
Back in the damp twenty-first century
present, Cat’s Paw Theatre goes from strength to strength. The welsh language team has just finished the
second week of touring with ‘I think I can wait’. Despite some inevitable
first week teething troubles, I watched it yesterday and I was enormously
pleased. They’ve made it their own. The welsh culture is very different from the english. It’s not just a language difference, there’s
an entirely different approach to all aspects of life, and this is nowhere more
apparent than in a welsh-speaking school.
The welsh team understand that of course and have developed the piece we
originated for our culture fully into theirs and the results are there in the
evaluation and feedback we are receiving from the teachers and more importantly
from the young people themselves.
Back in the English culture (although I
admit still geographically in Wales), Andrea presented a one woman show which I
directed for Stepping Stones (www.steppingstonesnorthwales.btck.co.uk),
the organisation that offer counselling for adult survivors of childhood sexual
abuse. This wonderful third sector
organisation has been operating on a shoestring in Wrexham for thirty years and
the afternoon was a celebration of that fact.
We were honoured to be asked to develop a one-off piece of theatre for
the occasion and presented to VIPs and well wishers. Andrea’s performance as a survivor was
memorable. Touching, moving, in parts
funny and entirely appropriate for the occasion. I was immensely proud of the result, and
proud to have directed this piece of invisible theatre. Invisible because the audience is never told
it is theatre. So for many of them it’s
real. An interesting thought which I will
leave in the air until another time.
All the best from a road near you,
Mr Alexander
PS The music project is now fully funded
thanks to many of you who have contributed.
If you haven’t done so but would still like to there is still time,
until the end of November, to make a contribution. Check it out on
Any extra over the target will add more
musicians to the band.
Mr Alexander’s Ragtime Band, of course, it
had to be.