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He thought himself all of 22 until he looked in the mirror. There he saw a kind of reality. His eyes were still sharp blue, the slightdullness at the edges from the one to many spliffs the night before fast disappearing. The face had enough creases to give it some character and deepen the mark of his lineage. Typically English - ahotch-potch of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Roma, and Jewish features that somehow fell agreeably once. He hoped that the closely clipped salt and pepper beard and greying temples offered a distinguished touch.He wasn't sure of that. His weight was good at the moment, at his lightest since twenty-two, but not as lithe. His handsome 22 was not before him and it was only now that he knew he was handsome then.
“Fuck. I'm fifty”, he admitted. Then, totally unconsciously as he turned from the honest mirror, withdrew the confession and reverted to thinking 22.
“Why am I up at 6.30? Oh, of course". Today is important. It's the start of his training as a London bus driver.
“How had I got here?” He wondered while getting dressed, and his
thoughts turned to the long-stowed cargoe of his story and a
neglected re-appraisal.
Seven years a soldier. From 15 to 22. A boy soldier in the RAMC
untill posted to the regulars at 18. What a con. He'd already done
three years as a boy soldier before the nine year contract kicked in.
His old-man must have known when he told him to sign without
reading. But being to big to hit anymore, his dad had to get him out
of the house somehow and lying by ommission comes easy. Not that
he was an angel. Far from it. The catalyst for the forced enlistment
had been an assault on a class-mate at school and, following his
expulsion, a little spree of shop smash 'n' grab - larceny in the
language of the court. The class-mate was hospitalised and he wasn't
the first or last to feel Blunt's temper. But he was sensitive boy for
all that. The macho stance hid his shyness and lack of confidence.
The last year at school had been awful. He had made the wrong
choice. It should have been art with his line, perspective, a pencil
and a brush. Instead he crumbled under the father's insistance on
science, despite the evidence of the termly reports. Maths was not
bad but chemistry, the periodic table. Yeah well. The only thing he
learnt about physics was that it was heavy and/or light relatively.
Cutting up dogfish in biology was very interesting, but the teacher's
casual violence - a knuckle to the top of the head - was not. A
years failing culminating in expulsion from a Grammar and appearance
in court. He had found Dylan by then. 'The Times They Are A
Changin' spoke directly to him, gave him justification to rebel. But
his rebellion was not constructive, not thought through, more
self-destructive.
Ridicule and pain are the bully's refrain. Ridiculed at five the first time
he opened one of his fathers books. A book without pictures only
words.
“You can't read. You're just a fool.”
“That's for nothing. Wait till you do something”, accompanied by a
clout round the ear and laughter, was the usual greeting when his
father came in from work.
The father probably thought he was being funny, but for Blunt it was
fifteen years of fear interspersed with times of terror. Beaten with
anything to hand - broom or belt - for some minor infraction of a new
rule invented to justify a loss of temper. The father's anger regulated
the family atmosphere.
Blunt's father came from a mining family. Treorchy, the Rhonnda
Valley. When four he lived the General Strike and then the aftermath
of the miners defeat. The grinding pinch of poverty. The dramatic
narrowing of horizons. The depression. His mother handed out the
beatings, the only way she understood of holding a seven member
family together in such circumstance. She learnt it from her father
who had been 'in service' with it's attendant poverty, and done the
same to her. Welsh, and his father sang well in an operatic tenor,
but could not stand on a stage. What dreams he had of conquering
stage fright were lost in the brutalities of WWII North Africa.
When he was thirty, Blunt's parents informed him that he had an
older brother. His mother had had a boy by an American GI just after
WWII. Kicked out of the family home for bearing a bastard, she had
initially found work as a Capstan Lathe Operator. That didn't last
long. Skilled craft needed for the war effort was no longer for
women. Not when the Boys came home victorious from war. She
could then only find night work and all her earnings went on rent and
childcare. She hardly ever saw him. After eighteen months she had to
give the boy away, isolated and shattered. A cousin had agreed to
take him on the condition that she never made contact but that he
would be told who his birth mother was when old enough. She never
made contact and the cousin never told the boy his heritage. In the
event it was obvious he was different. He did a search and renewed
contact thirty-one years later to her great joy.
Stripped of her first child by a cruel father, Blunt's mother could be
social again and three months later she married his father. A year
after losing one boy she gave birth to another. She received
occassional reports from her sisters about the boy, his progress and
health, and the news would always help raise her spirits. Make her
grin. Lift her head from the drudge. She was always loving, but it
was at these times Blunt adored his mother and he didn't understand
why. The boy, David, was academically successful at school. Has
become a Professor and Barrister/Partner in the Inns of Court.
At thirty Blunt understood his mother more. A husband who, with
mental and physical bullying dominated her environment. Left her
marooned. Without the deep tactile affection she craved and lonely
with her grief at loss, made for a psychological cleft. She was
distraught, left home when he was 4 and 5. Walked out on her
husband and son and daughter. Her emotional needs and undoubted
intellect stymied by circumstance and men, and desperate for a way
out. The children were introduced to fostering. Each time she
returned after a few weeks having no where else she could be. Finally
falling into the addiction of 'mothers little helpers' . Her twenties a
haze. It took hospital admissions to get her clean and fostering for
her children again and again. 'Mothers little helpers', a misnomer for
a straight jacket. Prescription drugs issued by lazy GP's in their
billions, that confined millions of emotionally and intellectualy
frustrated young mothers in a chemical cosh. 'Man works and woman
looks after the home and family', was the mantra of the times. If
women found it hard to restrict themselves to the role then there is
something wrong with them.
“You are not real women.
You are ill.
Take the drugs.
Be quiet.
Accept your lot".
The revolution of the contraceptive pill came to late for his mother.
Being clean didn't last long. Her thwarted dreams no less painful, an
alcoholic in her thirties. She finally succeeded in getting dry in her
fifties and became a nationally respected councillor to junkies and
alcoholics. A former 'Valley of the Dolls' wife gaining satisfaction
from using her intellect at last. Her becoming had taken a long time.
He has been proud of his mum these last twenty years.
To his father, David was a parallel child for Blunt to be judged by. A
competition he didn't know he was in. Tests he didn't know he was
taking and with no chance of passing. He may have been his father's
first child, but he was the second of his mother's. Anger instilled by
his own mother and jealousy of an American GI fuelled the father's
violence, made vicious when co-inciding with good news about David.
The frustrated tenor's songs echoingly corrupted to the wailing,
screaching agonies of his son.
Through families and down generations, violence has a habit of
replicating itself. Blunt lived in fear until 10 and his puberty. Anger
and violence reared their heads amongst the hormones. His sister
was the first to get it. He tried to fuck her. The nearest and
weakest to him being passed the baton. Protheroe terrified his sister,
fucked up her life and the abuse only stopped when they were given
their own bedrooms three months after it started. Guilt has been his
constant companion since. His father has only recently found out
about the 'incestuous' son. The final failure. Has banned him from
ever “stepping foot in his house". Barring Blunt from his mother. His
father still does not get it. His own culpability never questioned. As
dogmatic in his self-righteousness as the Stalinism he learnt in The
Valleys.
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.
This Be The Verse Philip Larkin
Blunt's mother had insisted on the Royal Army Medical Corp not the
infantry and the killing. Up in court the day of his enlistment. In front
of the beak at 10.30am, on the train by 11.30am. The Magistrate was
the wife of the Headmaster who had expelled Protheroe a month
before. Doing her civic duty, she sentenced him to a conditional
discharge for the smash 'n' grab'. Odd the ways of educators and
justice.
The army was an escape of sorts. From one bully to Ranks of them,
but, in a contradiction to the army's rationale, with less violence.
He indulged his passion for rugby. Rugby, the premier contact sport.
Short - 5' 6”, and stocky - 11st 7lb, upper body strength, a low
centre of gravity and short, fast-twitch muscle fibres make for a good
scrum-half. But still three inches to short and two stone to light for
an excellent scrum-half. His talent was in his balance and explosive
speed over the first ten yards. Practise and play brought skill.
Side-steps off either foot, a dummy out of either hand. A flat spin
pass to left or right or reverse. A knock down hit in the tackle.
Good times. And respect amongst the men. His violence hadn't left
him but was being constrained, channelled.
Still a virgin at 18 (the attempted fucking of sister didn't really count
in his reckoning). What humiliation. Still untested by love. Still not a
man really. Then came Christine from Llantrisant, with love and the
minting of a man. From her he learnt to give, engage his finer
emotions and his fumblings started a journey toward refinement.
Six months of blissful pride as he danced around beauty and her smile.
Snatching sex in hidden corners at a rush. She taught him sex was
good. All moist and synchronised, pushing, wrapping, gripping,
sweating, tasting. But rare the chance to sleep the night and find that
point where time slows, extends, stretches. All six months. The
army posted his nurse, tenderer to love, to hot and humid Singapore.
He was left alone amongst dull amd monosyllabic men in the
oppressive drizzle of a Woolwich winter. They wrote for a while.
Eventually word came back that she had found another to love her.
Never to meet again sharing smiles. Never skin to skin again.
Routine and rugby filled the vacumn. After a while he found himself
again looking for love. One-night stands had made for passing fun and
a gradual easing of grief, but not love.
Not long after losing Christine from Llantrisant and at 24hrs notice he
made aquaintance with Kenya. Emergency medical cover for the
Coldstream Guards on a two month jungle and bush exercise. Their
Medical Sergeant had broken his leg skiing, poor sod. Lucky Blunt.
The equatorial sun was fierce. Sharp pulsing daggers of light flaying
any tender white skin exposed in their path. One Guardsman, thicker
than most, didn't listen about the need for gradual exposer to the
Kenyan sun - shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow for only ten
minutes on the first full day, twenty minutes the next day and so on.
Thirty minutes after taking off his shirt on the first full day in
Nanyuki, the Guardsman's back was one big blister. Blunt drained it
with the biggest syringe in the kit, strapped the injury then put the
Guardsman on a charge of 'self-inflicted injury'. What a pratt. The
nick-name, 'Blister', stuck.
One night while he was sleeping in the medical tent, the tent was
stolen from above him. He woke to the so-so-high African skies.
Bliss. Then his brain worked and he cursed, “Bastards". He spent all
morning trying to get a replacement, but to late. A dust-devil, a
miniature tornado, a whirllygig tore through the medical centre and
scattered all the dressings, drugs, equipment and notes across the
arid plains of Samburu. The vast Kenyan bush. Hours to reclaim or
bin. Did he get a bollocking and did the squaddies laugh! He found
out a few weeks later that the Blister had done it. Got his own back
for all the kitchen pans he had had to scrub as punishment for his
self-inflicted injury. Not so thick.
The so-so-high African skies and open, generous people humbled him.
He adored Kenya and the ochre of its earth but was appalled by the
poverty and embarrassed at the stupidity inherent in the soldiers
racism. The soldiers were rich by comparison and young women
would prostitute themselves to it, desperate to fed families. Most
Guardsmen who took some pleasure there didn't see this. They were
just “jungle-bunnies to fuck and cheaper than the whores around
Chelsea Barracks".
Blunt will admit he took some comfort there. The 7 day course of
sulphadimidine he took after cured the soft sore.
Away from Nanyuki in the bush at Smalls Farm, an elderly Kikuyu
woman was brought to the medical tent with a badly gashed leg. A
machette had sliced to the bone and left a six inch long wound on her
left calf that needed a lot of detailed and deep muscle stitching. The
injury was at least three days old. She had walked for two days to
get there. A tough Kikuyu matriarch.
A Sandhurst trained bum-fluffed 2nd Lieutenant ordered him not to
treat her. It took a lot of persuading, but finally he managed to get
the use of a landrover to transport her to the regional hospital near
Nanyuki. It saved her another days walk. She never uttered a word
throughout, but the reproach in her tearless eyes at the callousness
of the Sandhurst trained bum-fluffed 2nd Lieutenant remembered
Mau-Mau and spoke thunder.
Part of his job was to regularly check the refuse dump and ensure it
was not a health hazard. It was just a bloody big hole in the ground
where all the kitchen refuse was dumped. It would be covered with
earth when they left. The MO accompanied him on his tour one day.
Fuck. They found a Kikuyu elder in the pit loading up with food. With
the usual profligacy of the army, whole fresh loafs had been discarded
that morning after breakfast. The poverty of pasturalism make people
take where they can find. The MO though was having none of it and
started yelling at the Kikuyu elder ordering him out of the pit and
away from bread. The look in the eye of that affronted, disrespected
Kikuyu elder remembered Mau-Mau and spoke thunder. The MO was
as one with the Sandhurst trained 2nd Lieutenant and expats. Where
his Hippocratic Oath and his attention to the whole man.
She was petite with wide-set ice-blue eyes. Auburn freckles where
her hair had flecked her face, a constant smile and always in demand.
A Womens Royal Army Corp ambulance driver for the A&E where he
worked when with 12 Coy back in Woolwich. Effervescent Fitz. A
Tyke Dyke who came to him thinking he was the man who could make
her straight and kill the guilt welded to her soul. He married her out
of some twisted macho logic. Three tempetuous months and it was
over.
Blunt had finished a Casualty night shift and returned to the flat to
find another just leaving. A lesbian lover/friend who had stayed the
night by the state of the bed. Thwack. He hit Fitz. That was the end.
Still emotionally immature, caught in the cleft of being a John Wayne
man and sensitivity, he had failed her. Little did he know then that it
would be another four years till confident enough to kiss again and
that a pattern to his relationships had started. Difficult women would
be his attraction, short term the pattern but never to hit a woman
again.
She changed him, his psych and dress. He started wearing Levis. Still
not divorced and Fitz still in the closet. Odd the ways of love and
sexuality.
It seemed every time he lost a love he won a posting.
The UN and medical cover to the Royal Irish Rangers on Aphrodite's
stunning Cyprus. The failed lover on the island of love. Cyprus
where the Irish taught him how many ways there are to drink and that
Orangemen were wrong. Cyprus, an island divided in itself and
policed by soldiers from another. Cyprus slowly-slowly awaiting a
Turkish invasion and a new twist to the antique relationship between
Greeks and Turks.
The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland permiated the Rangers. Made
them fractious. Understandable when considering the composition of
the regiment. The other ranks were raised from both north and
south, with the catholic south having a slight majority. The
Regimental Police, those that run the 'Glass House' and regimental
discipline, were Protestants from the North. Except the senior Glass
House Sergeant who was from Cork. A Catholic, and very proud that
his father had volunteered as a fascist Blue Shirt serving Franco in his
war against Spanish democracy. The Officers were Anglo/Irish of
course.
The Battalion HQ at Limassol was build by Kitchener. With the
imagination of military intelligence it was called Kitchener Barracks
and the architect had built the POW camp in The Great Escape. All
wood on a concrete plinth. Cold and uncomfortable. The church was
multi-denominational and also built of wood. One sectarian
Regimental Policeman decided that he didn't like Taigs worshipping in
the same place as Prots, so burnt it down. Fucking nuts. Court
Martialled to six months imprisonment in Colchester's Military
Correction Training Centre and soldier on. The worst of all
outcomes for him - he was hoping to get kicked out of the army.
For once military intelligence got it right. It was preferrable to keep
him soldiering than let loose on the streets of Belfast.
The latrines were 8ft deep thunder boxes. Emptied once a week by a
local Cypriot farmer with his sludge gulper. The stench within a
hundred yards of him was acrid. Destroyed the sense of smell for the
day. He was paid to collect it and fed this Irish shit to his Cypriot
fields, turning Guiness into wine. A fucking genius.
Blunt lost a man in Limassol. A heart attack. A twenty-two years
service man on his last posting before retirement and a pension. 42
and his heart goes. Despite the pumping and mouth to mouth for an
hour, he lost him. The autopsy revealed a massive myocardial
infarction and no matter what he did, he would have lost him. It
didn't assuage his guilt much. What did was another soldier saying
with pride,
“No matter where we go around the world, no matter how long we
stay, the Royal Irish Rangers always leave someone.”
He felt drawn into part of a tradition and the guilt slowly dissipated.
His violence surfaced again. Two bottles of cheap Cypriot brandy and
Blunt could kill the world. Not the world but a fellow medic was the
recipient of his fists. A supercillious, arrogant pratt of a
lance-corporal. No excuse though and 28 days in the Guard House cells
under the authority of the Catholic fascist from Cork.
At the end of the six month tour the Rangers were relieved by one of
the Parachute Regiments. This was a few months after Bloody Sunday
and the massacre of unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Derry
by the Paras. The advance guard who came to secure stores and sign
the hand over, had a torrid time. Three of them were 'captured' one
night and thrown down the deep trench latrine. The Farmer hadn't
been for six days and they weren't found till morning when the sludge
gulper turned up. One of them was very ill and rushed to hospital but
made a recovery. They were subsequently charged for being late on
parade. The stench hung on them for a while, creating an invisible
bubble that no one dared penetrate. They had only themselves as
company. Blunt had to monitor them for a while, ensuring they
recovered and were disease free. Everybody else had refused to
enter the nasal exclusion zone.
From Nicosia a sojourn to Israel and Jerusalem. He hobbled around
Jerusalem with his leg in plaster. He'd broken his foot playing rugby
for the Rangers against the army hospital in Dhekelia. Typical. He's
playing for the Irish against old team-mates from Woolwich and
breaks his foot in Cyprus. But three weeks later he's in Jerusalem.
It was the first time he had seen the ancient Medina in a Middle
Eastern city, and he was stunned. No word he'd read, no film or
picture he'd watched or seen, no sound he'd heard had prepared him
for this. In the narrow lanes the cacophony, the babel of voices near
overwhelmed him. The animated cadences of barter; the running
giggle of children weaving in and out, in and out the throng; the
ubiquitous laughter and the occassional shrill arguement when all
combined, put in the mix, contained an antique rhythm that gave the
city its vibrant beat. Lock-up shop after lock-up shop lined the lanes
in ranks. Keffiyahed and jalaba'd Palestinians, smiling stall holders,
were looking to deal, to commerce. Shafts of light like shards of
mirrored glass danced across their wares. His excited eyes darted
here and there unable and unwilling to settle. They leapt to a glint of
lapis lazuli caressed by a beam, snapped at a flash of bronze fish,
sprung to a swirl of gold thread blazing through a bolt of turquoise
cloth. Exotic aromas from every known spice and herb had him
salivating in unconditioned reflex. Barrels of thyme and mint, ginger
and cardoman and chilli, cumin and coriander. His tongue has never
been the same since. The soft sensuality of camel leather crafted into
bags, saddles and belts seduced his fingers into constant strokes.
'This city belongs to all humanity and their every sense', he thought
enthralled by its vitality.
But this is a land at war. The negotiation for space is conducted with
the tank, the bullet and the bomb, the Bible, the Torah and the
Qur'an. Animosity and assume-the-worst is the atmosphere between
Jew and Muslim and Christian. Gaza and the West Bank under illegal
occupation is patrolled by fundamentalist settlers with machine guns.
Like Scripture - Dangerous.
Any residual religiosity died here. Here in the Holy Land. A land and
a city where three words collide. Bible, Torah, Qur'an.
Human-made words cynically exploited by theocratic fascists to justify
the imposition of an absolutist world view and the murder of 'other'.
Paper tectonic plates throwing up great volcanoes, that spew out
intolerance as a shroud of toxic words choking progress around the
world. Intellectually vaquous ravings. Mumbo-jumbo.
I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
where I used to play on the green,
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.
And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.
Garden of Love William Blake
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