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Cheating the Ferryman

Harold had served in the war. He had escaped from enemy custody more often in fact than in the fertile imagination of a Hollywood script writer. When he was a young lad, he passed the scholarship exam to a highly prestigious school, but never got there.

War broke him in the end. Returning to a grim northern town in England, he never knew ‘retirement.’

I suppose Harold’s life was a series of what-if’s?

What if he had been an American, and his exploits served as the basis for a film? What if his parents had not been poor, and they could have afforded to send him to Manchester Grammar after all? What if he had been given therapy, to purge the nightmares that guaranteed a life without proper sleep?

When his son Les asked him what drove him to keep escaping, putting his life at risk when it would have been easier to see out the war in a camp, his answer was ‘Doreen’ his beloved wife.

For years Les kept the letters his father he wrote to his mother. Then one day, long after both his parents were dead, for reasons he still can’t recall, he put the lot on the fire.

His son was fired by a rage against injustice. Injustice against the working class by the bosses, police and the state. Injustice against people who were different by virtue of their colour. Exploitation and bullying of any kind. His fight against ‘them’ defined who he was. The militant shop steward, the meticulous and conscientious fitter who would never give management an excuse to be sacked for his workmanship.

Les was bullied at school until he took up boxing and weight training. When he ‘failed’ his 11+ exam *, the whole street was told.

When Les and his mates had left primary school, and arrived at their secondary school, another life-affirming event was to befall them.

At the first school assembly, the rather large headmaster swept into the hall, contempt, arrogance and self-loathing seeping through his gown. He fixed the scruffy rag bag of new entrants stood at the front with a steely gaze.

‘You lot’, he bellowed, ‘Are here because you are all failures!’

This episode was clearly set in an era before praise and positive thinking had been introduced to the curriculum.

War was a fabulous breeding ground for baseless prejudice, bigotry, and racism. The ‘lot’ of Harold, Les, Doreen and the rest of their family and community, was just as limited and bleak as that of any Herman, Giuseppe, Eva and Sophia.

Harold’s take on it all was that he was fighting the Germans, but he reserved genuine hatred for the Italians. Just for good measure, he wasn’t keen on the Irish, who, in his mind should have been fighting the Nazis too.

Still, the more you hated the enemy, the more you would kill or maim, and the more times you would escape, should your officers drop you in it. In war, any sympathy for the enemy was irrational and could be life-threatening. And if you happened to [understandably] carry over any hatred after the war, so what?

Les was active against the domestic ‘Nazis’; the racist white-supremacist groups, the National Front and the British National Party. They were confronted and faced down at every opportunity.

Resisting the state, his and other employers gave Les more than his fair share of police beatings. Despite the pain, ignominy, deprivation and futility of fighting ‘them’ it gave Les’s life meaning.

His personal life was not without its challenges. On his wedding night [his first wife], his mother-in-law hid in the bedroom, muttering under her breath about how dirty sex was, and should be discouraged, if not banned completely.

His first wife, who he a long time later divorced, was a militant feminist.

One of his two sons had a terminal illness and died at 19.

Doreen didn’t like Les. Or at least that’s how he remembered her. As a kid, she would beat him for no reason, and let his sister get away with ‘murder.’ If his sister did do anything wrong, and it was apparent, Les would be blamed.

The last beating episode ended in farce. Les had more than enough of irrational beatings, and was a strong young man. Doreen had her favourite stick ready. She held it up, about to bring it down on the innocent Les.

Not this time. He grabbed it. Doreen was mortified, and for a few seconds, speechless. She could not wrestle the stick from her son’s grasp. In desperation, she called out to her husband:

‘Harold, he won’t let me ‘it ‘im.’

Survivor and escapee from brutal prisoner of war camps, front-line fighting and the horrors of war, Harold wasn’t interested in his wife’s pitiful nonsense with their son, and said nothing. Doreen never attempted to hit Les again.

No doubt, being the highly intelligent and resourceful man he was, Harold looked back on his life of struggle, the insanity of war, the pain and permanent physical and emotional legacy of imprisonment, weighed against his love for his wife and family, and decided to let go, and check out before ‘three score years and ten.’

Or possibly God wanted him to spring a key historical figure from jail.

The pointlessness and barbarism of war left his son with a burning compassion for humanity, and contempt for those he regarded as the perpetrators of misery and oppression. The favouritism shown by his mother towards his sister, and the relative lovelessness of his childhood, let inevitably towards a liaison with a feminist.

The feminist whose mother despised men.

The working class father born into poverty which denied him a place at the top grammar school. Which may have led to him becoming an officer, away from the front-line, and maybe even away from the grim industrial town. And Les may not have had a deprived or [parentally] bullied childhood, might have been inspired by his father to use his own [considerable] intelligence and horror-of-horrors, even join ‘them’.

When Les was made redundant, towards the end of his working life, not only did he lose his job, but his position in the trade union. In one fell swoop, he lost his identity. He took it hard.

With help from his second wife, friends and many opportunities to examine his whole life in detail, he began to realise much of his perspective of what had happened to him could be changed. And he did, and it was.

He became skilled in alternative therapies, and an incredible practitioner of Tai Chi. The beauty of Tai Chi enabled him to both express and release his inner sorrow, rage regret and love about his son’s early death, war, the violent days of the 60’s and life in general.

But the daily diet of media doom and gloom, his lessening exposure to alternative mind-sets, and bouts of perceived serious, but invariably trivial illness often cast him back to the days of reaction.

Doreen wanted to toughen Les up, and didn’t want his sister to end up down the despairing path followed by so many working-class women of her own generation. She knew she had over done it with the stick.

She also knew he had forgiven her.

Harold had cheated the Ferryman so often, death had no hold on him.

“Well, I’m ‘up here’ with Doreen, my grandson, other family members, ‘lost’ comrades and too many others to mention.

My son, Les is a credit to us. He has helped so many people realise what’s actually going on ‘in the world’ and his heart is so big it has lit up his community at times. Like everyone, he often loses his way. Most of his life has been spent reacting against things, but now he has Tai Chi, he spends his time creating beautiful movement.

He, and no doubt thousands of others, wonders if he should turn his energies back into ‘the fight.’ We have a number of fights running at present. The bogus and manufactured fear device of fighting against terror, the ‘war against drugs’ when those apparently fighting it are the drug ‘barons,’ and the seemingly softer stick of global warming.

Yes, if they don’t scare or terrorise you into submission, they will shame you into it.

I wonder where my son got his dislike of ‘them’?

It takes a fair amount of unlearning and de-programming to realise what’s going on. The world is upside down. Most of what’s happening is based on the doctrine that God is like a big, bad vengeful bouncer, chafing at the bit to pitch us all into hell if we step out of line.

As Einstein once said, the key question is ‘Is the universe a friendly place?’ or to put it another way, is God loving, forgiving and benign?

The ‘us’ and ‘them’ mind-set is part of the problem. ‘They’ are getting bigger numerically, and soon [like 1984] half the population will be watching the other half.

As long as enough people believe God is either irrelevant or vengeful, we’re stuck.

My first big wake-up call was when I was running from the Italian camp guards during World War II. I ended up hanging under a railway truck before they caught me.

I looked up, dreaming of the truck pulling away before the dogs sniffed me out, and finding myself back in England, with my Doreen once again.

Instead it didn’t move, but the plate above my head bolted to the truck read:

‘Vulcan Engineering, Earlestown, England.’

Yes times did get very grim indeed in my home town of Earlestown, before during and after the war. Les still wants to go back.

Les has many choices to make, and he has much longer on the earth plane than he imagines. He has to realise how much is up to him…

JS, 25/3/08.

* the 11+ was a formal examination which [pass/fail] decided whether kids at age 11 would go to grammar schools [the best] or secondary schools [second best]. It was a very significant class barrier in England and Wales up to the 1980’s