CH³CH²OH - Part 3

So. I'm 11 or 12, I guess, making the transition between 'junior' and 'senior' school: when I was a kid, you were in the 'infants' school from 5-7 (ish), juniors from 8-11, and senior school from 12-16 (or 18 if you stayed on and did A-levels); I grew up with the idea that people who 'stayed on' were a bit 'poncey' or 'up themselves'. Neither of those phrases existed in those days, of course - but it was clear to me that these stayers on were different from the kind of people that we were, even though my older brother had won a kind of scholarship to a school that was totally outside my family's experience - a boarding school; you can't imagine how exotic this was in the place where I grew up. I remember being very proud about it for reasons that aren't all that clear to me now - although I think that they were to do with pride in my brother's achievement (he was a role model for me, especially after we became a 'one parent family) and my sense that my family was somehow different from the rest of the people in our street. I suppose that there was some kind of snobbery at work here (for no reason), and perhaps an early sign of the intellectual arrogance that would afflict me in later years, but I guess the root was in my sense that I thought I knew better than most of the people I was around, even though I was shy and quiet and couldn't demonstrate my (felt, but unspoken, and almost unconscious) superiority.

So many of the other boys in my street/neighbourhood demonstrated their superiority through physical strength (John and 'Butchy' S) or through perceived toughness and intimidation (Stephen K). My persistent 'outside school' peer group was small, although I did explore friendships with different sorts of boys and girls: Helen W (doctors and nurses, and her brothers' plastic models on the shelves); Gillian H (who I remember promising to marry - we were 9); Atilla B, with his exotic French background and the dark flat where his mother wafted around even more darkly amid scents of rich perfumes - he wondered about whether our universe might just be inside "a giant's box"; Robert L; Tracey C, who lived in the same small blocks of flats as the previous two boys, and who I was in love with at age 10, even though the stairs up to her flat smelt of milk and dust, and echoed drearily under every footfall - even in later years, when I was delivering milk, or papers, or election leaflets to these flats, I remembered that weird sense of threat that I felt on those early visits, tied up, I think, with the time when, as a cub scout on 'bob a job' week, I accepted an old lady's bag of bottles, promising to take them to the off-licence and bring back the deposit money...of course I dropped the bag and broke some bottles, and the offie was shut when I got there, so I dumped the remnants in a bin outside the (equally closed) off-licence; Chris H, the epitome of the spoiled rich kid; Nicky H, my next-door neighbour, who I thought was spoiled, and who had all the toys that he wanted, of which I was massively jealous; Tracey W, who lived over the road at number 12 (another prepubescent platonic friendship); and Andrew M, who was my bestest friend for a long time, and in whose company I was happy to discover (I realise in retrospect) that it was OK to be interested in intellectual pursuits and in music - I think that his parents were both teachers, and their house had a piano and music stands as well as a lot of books, an apple tree that was was climbable, and a brick-walled cold-frame that you could get into, pull the cold-frame over, and treat as a bunker. They also had a jar half-filled with jam in their garden in the summer, and I remember being fascinated and appalled by the way that the wasps went straight past me (a relief) and descended on the jam, only to become stuck, and struggle, and eventually be killed with a dose of water; even then, I recall being uncomfortable about that aspect. Astonishingly, they had a private house - yes, a house that they themselves owned. I don't think we knew anyone else like that that (except Helen W's parents, perhaps - but I never registered that...only that they seemed 'posh'. I suppose that I should have twigged, even then, that the houses on our side of the road were all 'council', and the houses on the other side of the road weren't.