A Better Tomorrow?

“Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Malcolm X

To have a better tomorrow, we must educate our children.   It’s all too easy to leave it to chance so that children work it out for themselves without guidance.  Without guidance we run the risk of things getting worse, not better. Children don’t have to work it out for themselves.

-o0o-

The thing I remember most about David Senior was his shoes – his shoes were ripped apart by his feet.  They were cheap shoes, I expect, and David’s family was doubtless much like the rest of us: stony broke so that once the shoes were torn, there’d be no money for new ones until the following September, at the start of the school year.  For the whole year then, David had the indignity of walking about with his feet exposed to all the elements.  There might, conceivably, have been another pair if his feet had grown length-wise or a pair of plimsolls but beyond that he would have no choice but to wear what had been bought for him.

Not that David Senior could walk very well, he was too large.  I now know that he had Prader-Willi syndrome – a rare genetic condition with a range of problems including the constant desire to eat.  David’s sister often spat out at us, “he doesn’t eat any more than the rest of us”  when people were taunting him but everyone in the entire world knew it was untrue. David did eat more than the rest of us.  He was always eating. He never stopped.  And that was because he was constantly starving.  I now understand that a child with Prader-Willi can eat three to six times more than children of a similar age and still be hungry but we just thought he was overweight and indulged.

Considering how big David was, people didn’t pick on him too much even though our neighbourhood was  a hunting ground for bullies and hard-cases roaming around looking for trouble.  I think it was because David was a bit sad, and not clever enough to fight back and it was obvious that something wasn’t quite right.  If it’s a dog eat dog world perhaps you do kick those who are already down just to big yourself up a bit, and we were all guilty of that, I’m sure. David would blink through his thick rimmed glasses and then finish off eating whatever he had on the go.  It was as if he hadn’t noticed what people said, or didn’t care.  Taunts were not his priority – food was.

No one was surprised when he died young.  It was a wonder that he lasted as long as he did.

-o0o-

We didn’t really take any prisoners as children though, setting out our stall by getting our kick in first.   That’s what it was like with flame-haired Audrey who lived on Queensgate Street.  In fairness to us she was always trying to lord it over us because she had the trace of a Scottish accent and was a foot taller.  She was one of those girls who grew to their full size at 11 (with bosom) and then all of us spent the next five years catching up with.

Audrey made a rookie error.  She told us one of her inner most secrets.

Unlike the rest of us, she had actually been to a funeral.  It was her granddad’s.  And because she was an only child she went because there was no one to look after her.  As her grandfather was carried from the church in his coffin, they had sung Amazing Grace.  Audrey told us that every time she heard this, she found herself crying.

In our defence, KM (my sister) and myself were probably pretty needy sorts, the sorts who liked to have some kind of minor victories in what were often challenging days. Our mother could be difficult, and occasionally very difficult.

SO, whenever Flame-haired Audrey made an appearance, we would start to hum building to a crescendo as she got closer and closer. Sometimes we’d even sing,

“Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me

I once was lost, but now I’m found

Twas blind, but now I see…”

The same thing happened every single time.  Audrey cried (even now I’m not convinced they were real tears, just a part of the exchange we’d created between us) and then she ran away.  This went on for months until she moved and our fun (and hers) was over. We would not have a laugh and Audrey would not get to cry again for us. We’d all liked the drama of exchange…

I do feel bad every time that I hear that song though and think of Audrey and her grandpa…

-o0o-

The school assembly was hushed.  It was normally very raucous.  When we sang Glory, Glory Hallelujah, for example, I can recall the waves of ‘the teacher hit me with the ruler’ emanating from the back rows as the headteacher smiled benignly on.  I was in my first year in junior school then and we all knew, even the youngest of us, that no one could put us all in detention if we sang the wrong words.  There was something joyous about the hymn singing.

Not this day though – the room was completely sombre.  Row upon row of children with their heads bowed as the headteacher told us all about the Gaul.   It was 1974 and it had sunk with all 36 hands lost.  On every row a child was related to one of the dead. I remember one boy – as we bowed our heads to pray – refusing to do so and the tears streaming down his face.  He was in my sister’s class.

The weather had been particularly bad as the Gaul made its way across the seas but the crew had sent word that they had battened down the hatches to ride out the storm.  The trawler sank suddenly with no chance to send out an emergency signal, and no chance to attempt a rescue.  Suddenly, then. Many thought it suspicious.  The Hull Daily Mail ran the headline, “Another Marie Celeste?”

There has, in more recent years, been talk of submarines and spy missions, and the trawler taking an under water hit so that it suffered a catastrophic hole in it bow,  that meant it sank like a stone.  Many in Hull believed that this was very possible – a recognition that all trawlers sailing from the city at that time had a dual role as intelligence gatherers.  This has never been confirmed, but the rumour persists.  Some blamed the Russians, others said that trawlers were used as cover for our own submarines operating covert missions, the trawler providing a visible presence on sonar.   There has never been any official word on what happened to those men – only that they were lost.  Gone.

And in the end it did not matter to that boy in the assembly that day, now a fully grown man, I suppose.  Because his father had died, and he would never come back.  His tears continued as we sang,

“Eternal father strong to save,

Whose arm doth bind the restless wave,

Who biddst the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep,

Oh hear us when we cry to Thee,

for those in peril on the sea.”

A hymn that speaks of Hull And I watched that boy fold in on himself whilst those around us left the assembly and just carried on.

-o0o-

Incidentally, and in an aside, yesterday was the 43rd anniversary of this.