DRAFTS
Introduction
I have already written quite a lot about my childhood, the war, boarding schools etc. Some of that was for a thesis on 'Learning from experience' and/or 'Mutual education' and much of what I described might feel familiar to many people of my gender, age and class – male, 75 and upper(?)middle.
So this time I've started at the point where I left school, with a few months in hand before what was then another obligatory stint for most people: National Service. In my case, for reasons I'll explain, this became International Service, a rather different way of learning from experience.
The trouble is, the longer I live, the less of it I remember. Memory gets erratic with age, and the longer you live, the more of what happens seems more or less familiar, well-known enough to be taken for granted rather than remembered. It's basic to our mental economy that we save our consciousness, and conscious memory, for the new and unexpected, until that too becomes routine, our responses suitably automated, so we can save the screen for...something new and unexpected.
I'll be writing in a hurry, and it will show, because I want to get it done. What follows will be not so much a finished work as a set of drafts in more or less chronological order. When things seem to relate across time and space, or just for fun, I'll jump to match. One feeling I have about time is that in some way it's all here anyway, with now no more real than then, my life no more substantial than anyone else's, born or unborn. This is easier for us to grasp in space, where we don't for a moment assume that a stretch of the road that is out of sight to us does not exist...
I thought of heading this bit of work just 'Drafts' but then came the pop-up puns, familiar as fleas, in waking life as in dreams. From drafts, to draughts, to draft-dodging – since I was to refuse military service – to draught-dodging, more suitable to a man of my age, with fingers that lose their circulation when my hands get cold... I always had a bad circulation, but when I joined Reuters and spent much of my time on a mechanical typewriter I stopped getting chilblains. I cant remember now whether they came back when I left Reuters for other sorts of work.
I think I had already set my mind on journalism before I left school, except that nothing about me then was really set, and certainly not by me. It might have been different if there had been anything I could do about it, but first there was the two-year stint of national, or international, service. If I had been more academically inclined, I might have deferred my military service and eventually escaped it that way. As it was, and unlike most other boys, I had been presented with another option. My mother was a Quaker and I went to a Quaker school, so I knew that there was such a thing as 'conscientious objection.'
That was one way in which I was different, but then everyone is different in many more ways than one. More importantly, I had, and have, more in common with others, with everyone including you, than there is to set us apart. If that were not so, if this story was just about me, it wouldn't be worth me writing. The value of what I'm doing, if any, lies in the fact that our lives and worlds run into and through each other. My experience is not just mine, possibly not mine at all, just part of the world that composes it.
Social world, material world. I say 'material world,' not to make it mechanical or unmysterious, but because I don't feel comfortable with mental apartheid. I dont know much, but what little I know, or imagine, cannot be cut up into separate compartments, 'material,' 'spiritual' etc.
Just as, in the physical sciences, matter and energy cannot be properly distinguished. Life is at once more mysterious, and messier, than the classes and distinctions we put on it. I feel as Huck Finn did when he was taken to live with the kindly Widow. (I once talked to a 'freedom-fighter' – 'terrorist'? – who said that his goal was a nicely-set table and a clean white cloth.) For Huck Finn, being taught manners in a fine white house, it was this sort of thing that put him off. What he longed for was the confusion of his old hogshead home: 'In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better'
I've just googled those words to check, and find that in my memory I'd included non-food things like candle-wax. I cant remember whether I first read that passage for myself, or if my mother read Huck FInn to us - my brother Martin and me - as children. (I was the eldest. Richard and Susan, nos 3 and 4, would still have been too young.)
I have already written quite a lot about my childhood, the war, boarding schools etc. Some of that was for a thesis on 'Learning from experience' and/or 'Mutual education' and much of what I described might feel familiar to many people of my gender, age and class – male, 75 and upper(?)middle.
So this time I've started at the point where I left school, with a few months in hand before what was then another obligatory stint for most people: National Service. In my case, for reasons I'll explain, this became International Service, a rather different way of learning from experience.
The trouble is, the longer I live, the less of it I remember. Memory gets erratic with age, and the longer you live, the more of what happens seems more or less familiar, well-known enough to be taken for granted rather than remembered. It's basic to our mental economy that we save our consciousness, and conscious memory, for the new and unexpected, until that too becomes routine, our responses suitably automated, so we can save the screen for...something new and unexpected.
I'll be writing in a hurry, and it will show, because I want to get it done. What follows will be not so much a finished work as a set of drafts in more or less chronological order. When things seem to relate across time and space, or just for fun, I'll jump to match. One feeling I have about time is that in some way it's all here anyway, with now no more real than then, my life no more substantial than anyone else's, born or unborn. This is easier for us to grasp in space, where we don't for a moment assume that a stretch of the road that is out of sight to us does not exist...
I thought of heading this bit of work just 'Drafts' but then came the pop-up puns, familiar as fleas, in waking life as in dreams. From drafts, to draughts, to draft-dodging – since I was to refuse military service – to draught-dodging, more suitable to a man of my age, with fingers that lose their circulation when my hands get cold... I always had a bad circulation, but when I joined Reuters and spent much of my time on a mechanical typewriter I stopped getting chilblains. I cant remember now whether they came back when I left Reuters for other sorts of work.
I think I had already set my mind on journalism before I left school, except that nothing about me then was really set, and certainly not by me. It might have been different if there had been anything I could do about it, but first there was the two-year stint of national, or international, service. If I had been more academically inclined, I might have deferred my military service and eventually escaped it that way. As it was, and unlike most other boys, I had been presented with another option. My mother was a Quaker and I went to a Quaker school, so I knew that there was such a thing as 'conscientious objection.'
That was one way in which I was different, but then everyone is different in many more ways than one. More importantly, I had, and have, more in common with others, with everyone including you, than there is to set us apart. If that were not so, if this story was just about me, it wouldn't be worth me writing. The value of what I'm doing, if any, lies in the fact that our lives and worlds run into and through each other. My experience is not just mine, possibly not mine at all, just part of the world that composes it.
Social world, material world. I say 'material world,' not to make it mechanical or unmysterious, but because I don't feel comfortable with mental apartheid. I dont know much, but what little I know, or imagine, cannot be cut up into separate compartments, 'material,' 'spiritual' etc.
Just as, in the physical sciences, matter and energy cannot be properly distinguished. Life is at once more mysterious, and messier, than the classes and distinctions we put on it. I feel as Huck Finn did when he was taken to live with the kindly Widow. (I once talked to a 'freedom-fighter' – 'terrorist'? – who said that his goal was a nicely-set table and a clean white cloth.) For Huck Finn, being taught manners in a fine white house, it was this sort of thing that put him off. What he longed for was the confusion of his old hogshead home: 'In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better'
I've just googled those words to check, and find that in my memory I'd included non-food things like candle-wax. I cant remember whether I first read that passage for myself, or if my mother read Huck FInn to us - my brother Martin and me - as children. (I was the eldest. Richard and Susan, nos 3 and 4, would still have been too young.)
posted by Greg Wilkinson at 5:46 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home