31. The Rucksack

... being the final chapter (for now) in the sequence started by Chained to a Madman.

When you start systematically looking through your own poetry, maybe reviewing it with a view to publication, you can’t help but start to notice themes emerging. Recurrent patterns of thought, images and ideas reveal themselves. You start to read your own stuff like a reviewer or an academic might read the works of other more established poets. You start to realise that, unconsciously, you have set out something of your personality, your world view - yourself, in more detail than you had intended or imagined. You start to realise that maybe thats what all those other, more established poets had done in the past. Maybe they hadn’t planned any great arc of themes or atmospheric oeuvre at all. Maybe they just plodded on, one piece at a time, writing what occurred to them, and saw themselves emerge from the words, just as their subsequent reviewers did. Maybe some of them actually only discovered what they were writing about when some reviewer pointed it out to them. Who knows?

When Ian Parkes offered to publish a chapbook of my work in his Glasshead Press, and I looked through the stuff that I had written over the previous few years, I was surprised to see how much had been on the theme of fathers. My father, other peoples fathers, blokes who I had looked up to and admired when I was younger, teachers, rock stars, those who were inspiring and those who were less than inspiring. I eventually called the collection A Voyage Around my Father Figures (and other Male Role Models) The theme had been there all along, waiting for me in what I had already written, I didn’t start out with that title, or that idea. I discovered it in what I had created before.

Here - in these pages. In the first 30 of these 60 odd poems that I have presented so far, the father figures and role models are there in plain sight - some from the Glasshead pamphlet, and others, dating from both before and after that publication, that still qualify as a part of that theme.

if you care to take a look, you can find my dad in MCMLXXIII, and Planet of the Dead Dads, theres a teacher in Poetry Sets You Free, there are the rock stars, Jimi Hendrix, and Steve Peregrin Took, and there are terrible, terrible role models in Bad Men. Believe me - there’s plenty more assorted dads and dad substitutes where they came from.

And here we are, in chapter 31 and another theme has emerged. It seems to have something to do with a lack of sexual self control. It can be seen in Chained to a Madman, A Shameful Thing, and probably also in Any Port in a Storm.

I hadn’t noticed this as a theme until now. But now that I have noticed it, it is staring me in the face. Its something that I write about, without explicitly aiming to, time and again. That and father figures.

Which brings me neatly to The Rucksack, and to another recent discovery that I have made about my writing. I use poetry like some sort of therapy. Not all of my poetry, but a lot of it. Is that unusual? I haven’t a clue.

The Rucksack is set in 1974, just after MCMLXXIII and features the same version of me that can be found in that piece. A keen young boy, a little self important, who loved his dad, and whose dad indulged him in his quirks and interests, scientific things like astronomy and space, collecting fossils and rocks and minerals. My dad used to take me to lectures, ones that were mainly intended for adults. We went to a whole series on “the truth of the bible revealed by science”. My dad wasn’t even religious, but he took me with an open mind, and at the end of the course, we each received a King James Bible, with all the words spoken by the Saviour printed in red, and went home unconvinced. We also went to lectures by the Hull Astronomical Society, and The Hull Geological Society, and probably more that I have since forgotten.

It was at the Hull Geological Society that I met Percy Gravett. He was a member of the committee. He was well over sixty years old. I was twelve years old. My dad was forty-one. Gravett groomed us both, much more successfully than anyone from the bible course ever did.

He convinced both of us that I was a special sort of a child. That was just what we both wanted to hear. To have our beliefs confirmed by a senior member of an established scientific community was a powerful thing. He paid a visit to us at home, and talked to both of my parents. He offered to take both me and my dad on field visits to collect fossils to places such as the coast north of Whitby. My dad was a non-driver. It was ideal.

The odd trip turned into more regular ones, and if my dad was working, that was no problem, there was no reason that I should miss out. Gravett would look after me. He was an articulate, well mannered, white haired fellow, with an interest in my education. What possible harm would a trip out with him do?

In these days of frank and open discussion around such matters, it seems obvious. In those days I don’t think it was. He was very convincing, he didn’t look like a leering pervert, he came across as a man who wanted to help.

At the height of it all I was visiting his house one evening a week, and eventually spent about five days alone with him in a caravan in Scotland.

The abuse wasn’t violent, not penetrative, or anything approaching that level of interaction. He just masturbated me a number of times, not even to completion. I was too young to manage that, and before I got much older, he ditched me. Leaving me, and probably my Dad, confused and conflicted about the whole thing.

I never told my parents. If they asked, I was non committal, and they didn’t probe. I felt that I had to protect them from the facts of the matter. I hardly spoke to anyone at all about it until after they had died over forty years later. Perhaps I should have told them. That is what we would encourage any young kid to do now. But it was complicated. I felt that maybe I was as much at fault as he was. I felt ashamed, and I felt cheated. He hadn’t seen that I was special after all. He didn’t love me like he had said he did. He was a bad man. The first bad man that I had ever seen, apart from the crooks on Z Cars on the telly and their ilk.

However mild the abuse, he damaged me. He proper fucked me up. I was so young. I hadn’t really though about sexual matters much at all before his intervention. Afterwards I didn’t know whether I was homosexual or straight. I didn’t know that sexual interaction could be right as well as wrong. I just knew that people were vulnerable, and could be manipulated, and I knew that I never wanted to manipulate anyone, not like that. And that coloured my relationships with others for a long, long time.

And it colours things still. I still sometimes wonder how I might have turned out if it had never happened. A better version of myself? Or a worse one? Or just a different version of myself. Maybe less compassionate, less caring, less creative, more practical, more interested in science, better with people? Its not worth thinking about really. But I do. Particularly when things aren’t going my way, and I find myself slipping into depression, and thinking that, on the one hand, blaming all my failings on a a few fumbled wanks back in the early 1970s is a cop out, but on the other hand, seeing a thread of difficulties and awkwardnesses leading all the way back there.

I now have a lovely wife, lovely grown up kids, a lovely extended family and friends. I have also had some fantastic counselling sessions over the years and have written some great poetry (even though I say so myself) and all of this has helped me to get through the difficult times. People have had worse experiences than mine, but I know enough to know that even small experiences are not easily shrugged off, particularly childhood experiences.

Still, I can’t help but see the ridiculousness alongside the darkness. I have always seen a ridiculousness in male sexuality. He should have been ashamed of himself. Maybe he was. He should have been locked up. He never was.

Anyway the story of how he made his first move is related surprisingly accurately in the poem below.

Next week, I shall write something lighter and more uplifting. I promise.

The Rucksack

You’re unique for a lad of just twelve, boy
You’re not like most lads of your age 
You’ve an interest in things
Beyond pop stars and sport
You seem somehow refined
Full of things of import
You are growing and learning,
Expanding your mind.
I could help you with that
If you were so inclined

I can see you becoming a scientist, boy
With your budding, enquiring, brain
Observing and noting
Out in the field
I can see you collecting
What nature can yield
With a rucksack of course.
I could help you select
One that’s just right for you
One that would be correct

There’s a science to choosing a rucksack, boy
You need to be measured for one
You need to take care
You can damage your spine
With an ill-fitting sack
Of a shoddy design
You really should not 
Overburden your back
Spread the weight evenly
Don’t leave straps slack

It is best to be nude for the fitting, boy
Under an experienced eye 
One such as mine
On the set of your bone
Complementary
To your muscular tone
So, take off your clothes 
So that I can see
There’s no need to worry
It will fit perfectly

You’re a fine specimen of a growing boy
I was right about you all along
I’m a very good judge
If I say so myself
You stand out from the crowd
You’re a picture of health
God has made you like that
You ought to be proud
Now let me examine
If I am allowed…

There’s no need for any embarrassment boy
A touch is a touch between friends
Jesus told us to love
God made us to enjoy 
So it cannot be bad
But please be warned, boy,
It’s a beautiful thing 
Yet it makes some folk mad
They just don’t understand
So best not tell your dad