My name is "Mobi"; I'm an alcoholic

A Lustful Gent, Part Three –’Toby’, Chapter VIII

11 Apr 2012 2 Comments

by mobidark in Uncategorized

Mobi-Babble

My daughter and her partner returned from Bangkok on Monday afternoon and they will be with us until next Monday when they return to the UK.

Yesterday, one of Noo’s friends came over from Pattaya with her two children and we all had a little pool party. Noo cooked up a storm of seafood on her little Thai-style Barbecue and  the highlight of the whole affair was a load of fried red ants which they acquired from a nearby ants nest.  I have it on great authority that they were delicious and enjoyed by one an’all – except yours truly – Mobi.

In fact they were so delicious that today, Noo and her son went foraging for more red ants and they are going to repeat this culinary delight, which is eaten with sliced mangos, from our own trees. How can I complain – the entire feast cost me nothing!!

(But spare a thought for the poor ants – they may have been reincarnated people who were paying penance for doing evil in their former lives…)

Sorry, folks but I’m a bit tied up today with family affairs, so I will post a few pics and the next chapter of my novel, which I have been holding in reserve for just an occasion.

The New Mobi-Mitsu

But before we get into my story, here’s a few pics of the new Mobi-Mitsu, which I am extremely pleased with. You will note that I am trying to attract a few more readers, so if you recognise my vehicle on the streets of Pattaya, give me three short honks on your horn.

And now, a few more regular pics…

And finally, here we go with a return to ‘A Lustful Gent…..’

A Lustful Gentleman

 

PART THREE –TOBY

CHAPTER VIII

Almost from the first day, things didn’t go too well for Toby at Ilford Grammar school. Although the school wouldn’t formally ‘stream’ the pupils until their second year, after the teachers had been able to properly assess the new pupils’ abilities, there was, nevertheless, an ‘informal’ streaming in year one, though it was supposed to be a closely guarded secret to all except the teachers concerned. But somehow every year, everyone knew the ‘unofficial’ first year streaming within days of the commencement of the new term; and although Toby was in class ’1A’ – the letter ‘A’ stood for ‘Appleby’ the the first letter of the  name of his class teacher, and he soon realised that he had been placed in the somewhat ignominious ‘D’ stream.

This decision was inexplicable to Toby, as he had been top of his class in his end of junior school examinations, and now he had to suffer the shame and indignity of seeing pupils who he had beaten in those exams placed in class ’1H’. ‘H’ was for Mr. Hall, the teacher who had the dubious honour of being class teacher to the brightest boys of the 1958 intake – the boys most likely to succeed; some of whom, one day, may even  add to the school’s proud record of the few who succeeded in  attaining entry to Oxford and Cambridge.

Toby never did discover exactly why he had been placed in the ‘D’ stream, as his academic record clearly showed he should have been in the ‘A’ or at worst the ‘B’ stream. In later life he simply assumed that the junior school’s streaming recommendations – for that was how it worked –  the teachers made recommendations on each of their pupils to the grammar schools – had been made long before the year end results had been known.

Whatever the reason, it was a huge blow to Toby when he realised he had been overlooked, and it was made even worse when he found that a majority of his classmates in ‘1A’ were from a rough, very poor, working class area of East Essex, and that they had no interest in academic achievement. Most of them just went through the motions, misbehaving whenever they could get away with it and waiting for the day when they could leave school and join their parents on the factory floor and earn some beer and ‘fag’ money.

These kids were obviously quite bright, as they had successfully passed the dreaded 11-plus examination, but their academic aspirations were virtually non-existent, especially as they had little or no encouragement from their parents. Once he got to know a few of them, Toby realised  that there was no way their parents were going to allow them to stay at school after they had sat the ‘ordinary’ level GCE examinations which were taken in their sixteenth year – their fifth year at grammar school. Their parents needed an extra source of income, and it was out of question that they would support their sons through two extra years of grammar school, let alone through three or more years of University.

The double blow of being unjustly placed in the ‘D’ stream and having to put up with rough, uncaring, often violent classmates had the effect of demoralising Toby almost from the very first day at Ilford Grammar. In spite of this, during the early months of his new school, he did show some interest in a few subjects – notably English and mathematics – and the teachers in those subjects quickly identified him as a bright student, but even that didn’t last long. The ethos that existed within ’1A’ meant that it was not good to show any enthusiasm in class, and anyone who completed their homework on time or attained high marks in class tests, was looked down upon as some kind of a ‘traitor’.

Toby soon slipped into the habit of behaving as badly as the other students, and although he continued to perform reasonably well in mathematics and English, he kept it as low profile as he was able, as he had no desire to ‘stand out’ and be pilloried for being a ‘teacher’s favourite’. He actually found mathematics – arithmetic, algebra and geometry –  easy to understand and always scored very high marks. He deflected any move by classmates to deride him for his high marks in maths by giving a helping hand to many of them who found the intricacies of  ‘x+y = z’ and ‘Pythagoras’s  theorem on isosceles triangles’ totally beyond them. And he adored English literature; there was nothing he liked more than to spend his spare time composing his own essays.

But Maths and English were his all too few ‘high points’. In almost every other subject – including the sciences and humanities, he showed absolutely no interest or aptitude; and as for visual and practical artistic pursuits, such as painting and woodwork – both of which were compulsory, he soon grasped the unpalatable fact that there wasn’t a creative juice in his body. He couldn’t paint worth a damn and was completely useless with his hands. In those days, every subject was compulsory, and his course work, together with the results of end of term examinations on each and every subject would determine his final position in class.

Toby soon realised that his complete lack of ability in the visual artistic subjects would always drag down his overall results, and this, along with many other demoralising factors, had the effect of increasing his general apathy and inhibited any lingering desire to do well. For the main part, he was happy to exist, day by day, and do just enough to maintain his position in the mid-class. This wasn’t too hard to achieve, given that there were so many boys who cared far less than even Toby did and who made no effort whatsoever to achieve anything at all.

Even at such a tender age, Toby and some of his more clued-in classmates, quickly understood that the school too were just ‘going through the motions’. Many of Toby’s teachers were from a bygone age, when the students at grammar school had been  largely from well to do families, plus a very few exceptionally bright children who had been lucky enough to win rare scholarships. Most of the older teachers had little or no interest in encouraging these working-class no-hopers of average intelligence, all of whom would leave school as soon as they were legally able to do so. There was little or no likelihood that any of the students in the ‘C’, ‘D’ and ‘E’ streams would win a place to even the most lowly of Universities.

The school was ruled with an iron rod by an ambitious, selfish, uncaring headmaster, who was only interested in how many of the boys in his school he could place in university each year, and his driving motivation was to out achieve all the other grammar schools in the area. So a majority of students – these ‘also runs’ – were of little significance to him or the school governors, for this was in the days before school ‘league tables’ were invented, and the only criteria to judge a Grammar school’s success, was the number of students who made it to university. The number of kids who passed their GCE’s, or how many subjects they were successful in, was of little or no interest to anyone, except, just maybe, the kids themselves.

***

It was lunch time, and Toby was sitting at his desk in class ‘2D’, munching on a packet of crisps and frantically trying to complete his homework which was due to be handed in at the first lesson after the lunch break. He never did any homework at home and hardly ever revised properly for his end of term tests. Life at home was simply not conducive to serious work or study, so for the most part he existed on his wits – rushing through his homework during break times, and cramming for tests whenever he was able to, by sitting at the back of class, away from the eyes of his mainly disinterested teachers.

He was one of about a dozen boys who had not gone home or was not having lunch in the school canteen. Most of them were ‘rough-housing’ around the classroom as there was no supervision during the lunch break, but Toby was oblivious of the pandemonium around him as he tried to get his physics homework completed. Suddenly, to everyone’s astonishment, the door opened and  none other than the Headmaster himself, Mr Glenwood, entered the room in all his illustrious glory. He had never seen the Headmaster so close up before, and he certainly had never had the pleasure of such an exalted visit to his classroom before. ‘Were his classmates making too much noise? Had someone complained? Were they all for the ‘high jump?’ he wondered to himself.

The distinguished looking headmaster, replete with his flowing, black Cambridge University gown, and elegant, greying hair, seemed to have an expression which bordered between superciliousness and disgust on his face. He took in the sight of the hooligans of class ’2D’, up to their usual tricks, clad in their dirty, dishevelled school uniforms and scuffed shoes and stared at the assembled ruffians in silence for a few seconds. It had the effect of freezing them all in their tracks. Then he closed his eyes. It was almost as if he was wishing them all to vanish – to disappear from his beloved, Victorian seat of learning which had such a proud academic record. What manner of government had allowed such ‘animals’ to desecrate these hallowed walls?

His eyes still closed, he finally spoke to the terrified students.

‘Stark, Toby Stark. Are you here?’ he asked.

Toby almost jumped out of his skin, as he jumped to his feet and put his hand up. ‘Sir!’

Mr Glenwood opened his eyes and looked at the boy and said: ‘Follow me Stark.’

It was only a short walk from Toby’s classroom to the headmaster’s office at the end of the corridor, which probably explained why, being lunchtime, the Headmaster had come personally to find the boy.

But as he turned the corner at the end of the passage and entered the central office area, Toby’s heart sunk like a stone. There, waiting for him was his brother Danny, looking scared out of his mind, and next to him was the intimidating figure of his father, looking as angry as he had ever seen him.

‘Here you are Mr Stark, here is your younger son, now, will you please take them both home and deal with whatever ‘domestic’ matter necessitated your visit today.’

At the sight of Toby, his father rose from his chair. ‘Toby! Danny!’ follow me’, the big man said, and abruptly marched off towards the school entrance with the two boys following,  almost running to keep up with their father’s long, hurried strides.

*

Home, since the summer of the previous year, had been a large, three bedroomed  apartment, which was located in a low rise council block, barely ten minutes’ walk from Ilford Grammar School. Toby had only been there a year, and while he initially revelled in the luxury of  having hot water in his home, it wasn’t long before he came to the conclusion that he had probably been happier where he had lived before, in the old Victorian terraced shop-house, some three miles away. At least when he lived there, he could hide away in his bedroom at the top of the house, or go and play in the garden or the alley beyond. Here, in this wretched council flat, in the middle of a public estate, there was literally ‘no hiding place’ from the brooding presence of his father, who was rarely more than a few yards away.

But he had barely had time to ruminate on this and other matters when the two boys arrived fearfully at their home. Toby’s father slammed the front door shut, and led the them into the family living room, where, on the dining table in front of them, were two packets of cigarettes. Toby took one look and nearly jumped out of his skin.

‘Who do these cigarettes belong to?’ his father demanded.

Neither boy answered.

‘If you don’t tell me right now who these cigarettes belong to, I warn you both, you will live to regret it.’

The two boys looked at each other in fear. The truth was that they both had cigarettes secreted away, but they had no idea whose stash it was that their father had discovered.

Before their father became any angrier, Toby decided that he better take the plunge. ‘Th…they’re mine, Dad..’

‘Yours! Toby! You’ve been smoking?’ Toby’s father shouted.

‘Yes, I…I’m sorry…’

‘Sorry! Yes you WILL be sorry! Now, tell me, where did you get the money from to buy cigarettes?’

‘I…I…saved up…’

‘You’re lying. You don’t get enough money from your paper round to buy cigarettes. I ask you again! WHERE DID YOU GET THE MONEY FROM TO BUY THESE CIGARETTES?’

The boys remained silent.

Danny! Do you smoke as well?’

‘No Dad – Never!’

Then where did your brother get the money from?’

‘I – I don’t know’

‘Well I know! You stole it from me!’ he shouted at his younger son.

‘What? No! Never, Dad!’ riposted a terrified Toby.

‘Don’t lie to me! Last night I left ten shillings in coins in that glass jar, on the mantelshelf, and this morning five shillings was gone. Someone has stolen five shillings from me!’

‘It wasn’t me,’ Toby answered, ‘’I swear!’

Not you! Not You! You’re lying! I found these packets of cigarettes in your cupboard. Now, turn out your pockets.’

Toby did was he was told and revealed a half a crown coin in his jacket pocket.’

There! Half a crown! I told you, you fucking little liar!’ You stole it from me!’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t’

‘If you didn’t steal it where did you get the money from? And don’t tell me you saved it up because I know you spent all your paper-round money on your bloody scout camp. Your mother told me.’

Toby looked at his father and realised that he had better come clean and tell him the truth. Anything was better than letting his father think he stole from him.

‘I…I used my school dinner money.’

‘Dinner money? What do you mean? Dinner money?

‘The money you give me to buy school dinners, I didn’t pay it to the school – I kept it…’

‘You bought cigarettes with your school dinner money?’

‘Yes’.

‘So what have you been eating?’

‘Nothing…well… some…crisps…and sweets…that’s all.’

‘So you use my hard earned money to buy cigarettes, crisps and sweets! Is that it?’

‘Yes, Dad.’

So if you used the dinner money to buy cigarettes, who the hell stole my money? YOU?  DANNY??’

‘No Dad, Never! I would never steal from you.’

‘So it’s another fucking mystery is it? A ‘mystery man’ stole my money did he?’ he screamed at the two of them.

They remained silent, afraid of what their father was going to do next.

‘Danny, go back to school this minute or you’ll be late for class.’

Without any further bidding, Danny made good his departure before his volatile father changed his mind. Toby feared what was to come.

‘As for you, you are in deep trouble!’ his father screamed, as he approached the Toby and dragged him by his shirt collar to the sofa where he sat down and pulled the skinny, malnourished youth across his lap.

‘I’ll teach you evil little bugger to steal my dinner money….’

As violent as it was, during the course of his father’s prolonged and vicious beating, Toby hardly felt a thing. He was too consumed by his own sense of injustice. Surely it wasn’t really stealing? If he chose not to eat, it was his business. But much more than this, was the realisation that yet again, he was obliged to suffer for his brother’s misdeeds.

He knew for a fact that Danny had stolen the money from his father; he had told him so this morning, claiming his father would never notice. If Danny hadn’t stolen the money, none of this would ever have happened, and now he his brother got off Scott free – yet again, and Toby was paying the price. God knows what further punishments his father would inflict on him before this was all over. He didn’t really feel any resentment towards his brother; after all Danny was Danny and he would always do things like this. But it wasn’t fair, it just wasn’t bloody fair, that he – Toby – should always take the blame.

INTERMISSION

CHAPTER VIII (Continued)

 

The months following the ‘stolen dinner money affair’, were a testing and miserable time for Toby. He had received a severe beating, and a host of other punishments from his furious father, so as a result, he kept his head down during school lessons for the remainder of that school year. Although he still couldn’t bring himself  to do any of his homework assignments at home, he became more careful to ensure it was submitted on time, as he had suffered about as much retribution from his father as his flesh and blood could stand, and he didn’t need any more.

Toby  increasingly withdrew within himself; he made few friends, none of whom he could class as close friends, like the other kids in his class tended to make. But his inability to form close friendships and participate in extracurricular activities, had the unexpected effect of producing a marked improvement in his school work. Even so, nobody was more surprised than Toby when, despite the terrible results in his detested subjects of art and woodwork, his overall results were still sufficiently good for him to be promoted to the ‘C’ stream for his third year at Grammar school. It was not unlike the situation that had occurred back  in primary school, when over two years, he had progressed from the ‘C’ to the ‘A’ stream.

But unlike primary school, the ‘C’ stream was as far as Toby managed to travel down the road from his starting point as an ‘academic no-hoper’, to a ‘grammar school achiever’.  Certainly, the students in the ‘C’ stream class were taken somewhat more seriously by the school than the mainly working class ‘louts’ who occupied the ‘D’ and ‘E’ streams. But very few of even these kids would win places at university, so the principal aim of some of the more conscientious teachers was to ensure that as many of their charges as possible ended their school careers with at least  at least five subjects was the minimum entrance requirement for a vast majority of trades and professions and apprenticeships.

A few of the brighter ‘C’ stream boys would be encouraged to stay on at school for a further two years, until their eighteenth birthday, and study for ‘A ‘ level GCE’s, which would be even of even more benefit to them when seeking a job. And maybe one or two of the really bright ‘C’ stream students might just be encouraged to seek places at university, as these were largely the prerogative of students in the ‘A’ and ‘B’ streams.

For while, in fact until almost  until the summer of Toby’s fifth year, he was one of the select few who had been encouraged, and indeed had been accepted to stay on at school and study mathematics and English, the two subjects that he excelled at. He particularly loved English literature and English grammar and it was one of his greatest delights in an otherwise miserable school existence, to write very long, rambling stories, whenever possible as part of his English homework assignments. In his fourth year, his English Literature teacher would take great delight in reading out to the class his long, fanciful and exciting stories – week after week, month after month. The teacher loved them and so, it would appear, did the rest of Toby’s class.

But although his academic achievements had taken a slight turn for the better, on a personal front, the adolescent Toby had become ever more withdrawn, introverted and shy. His father had beaten every spark of natural exuberance out of him, as not only did the overbearing bully lose his temper at the slightest perceived infraction of his rules, but he totally dominated Toby’s every thought, everything he did and everything that he wished to do. Toby couldn’t even embark on a short journey on his rusty old bicycle – to go toshopping or somewhere else nearby – without his father telling him exactly what route to take. He was now an intelligent youth in his mid-teens but there was no escape or hiding place from the domineering influence of his father. He was stuck in a flat, where his father was an all pervading presence; for the man rarely went out, given that for most of the time, he was unemployed.

Since Toby had been eleven years old, his mother had been back at work full time, to help pay for the family’s keep. She worked in the City as a telephone operator and had to leave home very early to take the hour long journey by underground train to the city centre,and didn’t  return to quite late in the evening. Her salary, together with the paltry amounts Toby’s father obtained from the government unemployment office, were all that held the family of five together. Toby had to find his own pocket money by delivering newspapers every day at the crack of dawn and this, together with his involvement with the Scouts was his only joy and relief from his father’s control over his life.

Without the Scouts and in particular the regular camps during the summer months, Toby had no idea how he would have survived those years. He literally suspended all thoughts of life and reality from one camp to the next, and sometimes, even from one scout meeting to the next. It was the only place where he had been able to make good friends and it was the only place that he was able to be himself and be respected. Outside of the scouting environment, he was a very lonely, very unhappy, extremely shy young man, who very rarely spoke to a member of the opposite sex, let alone have any kind of serious relationship with one.

As spring turned to summer during his fifth year at school and after he had already signed up to stay at school for another two years, something happened, which improved Toby’s state of mind, but which presaged a major change in his future life. For once, his father had been able to hold down a regular job. It wasn’t a regular ’9-5′ job, as he didn’t go to work every day and sometimes he would come home at odd times – often in the middle of the afternoon, but for the most part, during the weekdays, Toby’s father was not home, not even when Toby arrived back from school in the late afternoons and had to prepare the daily dinner for the whole family.

So for a few magical months, Toby often had the flat completely to himself from early morning to evening time when everyone would arrive back home to have their evening meal. He only lived a five-minute bicycle ride from the school, and it wasn’t long before he realised that he could easily nip home during the day, when his class had a so-called ‘study period’ – a period when, for one reason or another, the teacher would be absent from class and the boys had the lesson-time to themselves.

It wasn’t long before it dawned on Toby that once the school had admitted all its students in the morning and closed its gates, there was no proper check on who came and went during the day. There seemed to be a regular procession of students and others in and out of the school all day long for one reason or another, and nobody bothered to check properly to ensure there was good reason for the students leaving the school.

So it was only a small step from popping home during study periods and other school breaks, to popping home whenever there was a lesson that he didn’t wish to attend – like art, or woodwork, or chemistry, or physics. Remarkably, nobody seemed to know or care. The teachers always called the attendance register at the start of each lesson, but Toby realised that no one ever  collated these attendance records for the individual lessons. As long as he was marked as ‘present’ first thing in the morning, the official school records showed that he was at school for the entire day.

During the early weeks of Toby’s sixteenth summer, he spent more time alone at home – reading books and watching television. The sport that Toby loved above all others was cricket, and it so happened that England was playing Australia at cricket that summer. So Toby would bunk off school during the afternoons and watch the games on television for hours on end, day after day, week after week. He was almost happy for the first time for many years, dreaming that he was a famous cricketer and dreaming that his batting prowess had saved the day for England and that he had become an instant national hero.

***

It was a clear case of déjà vu. Toby was at his desk during the lunch break, swatting up for his forthcoming GCE examinations. Unlike the other kids, he hadn’t been studying for months on end to permanently instil the dreary details of chemical formulas, the rules of physics, notable historic dates and other such pointless trivia into his memory cells. No, he was content to wait until the very last moment, and then to cram every conceivable fact into his brain in one fell swoop, in the fervent hope that a enough of it would stick there for at least forty eight hours, or until he had completed his examination. To a large extent he had been reasonably successful in these efforts.

He was near the end of his round of examinations, and he only had history and English literature remaining. English literature required no cramming at all, as he knew his set pieces – Hardy’s Trumpet Major and Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night inside out and could easily quote almost any passage of either work to demonstrate any point the examiner chose to challenge his knowledge and understanding of these classics pieces. History was pretty easy too, provided that you could recall all the important dates, and he was in the process of stuffing the key years into his brain, when – lo and behold – the door opened and who should enter the classroom, but his headmaster, the one and only Mr Glenwood himself.

The last time he had been graced with this ‘presence on high’ was some three years ago, when his father had dragged him from the school and had subsequently made his life misery for months on end. ‘What now?’ he thought to himself, ‘surely not my dad again – surely not…’

Mr Glenwood looked around the classroom before settling his gaze on Toby, seated near the back of the room. He showed no sign of recognition but nevertheless continued to stare at him as he spoke his name.

‘Stark – Toby Stark.’

‘Yes sir!’ said Toby, almost jumping out of seat in alarm.

‘Follow me, Stark,’ said the Headmaster sternly as he walked briskly to the door.

‘Oh my God! what have I done now?’ Toby asked himself.

He breathed a sigh of relief when, turning at the end of the corridor towards the Headmaster’s office, the dreaded figure of his father was conspicuous by its absence.

‘Into my office, Stark.’

Mr Glenwood walked around his large, leather lined desk top and sank himself into his high-backed chair and bid Toby to sit in one of three empty chairs facing him.

‘Stark, Mr Fletcher came to see me this morning about you.’

Toby’s heart missed a beat. Mr Fletcher was his chemistry master.

‘You know Mr Fletcher, do you, Stark?

‘Yes, s…sir, he’s my chemistry master.

‘Oh? Really? Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir, I’m sure.’

‘Well that’s a relief, as I thought you may have forgotten who your teacher was. Apparently you haven’t been to his lessons for weeks.’

‘Weeks?’ responded Toby, a little indignantly, that’s not true sir.

‘Well, how long then Stark?’

‘I…I haven’t been this week sir…’

‘And today’s Thursday, so that’s one week. And last week?’

‘Erm… I’m not sure sir; I think I went last Monday…’

‘Not according to Mr Fletcher’s attendance records. So, not last week and not this week. One and one makes two doesn’t it Stark? Or have you been missing your maths lessons as well.

Yes sir… I mean .. no Sir. I mean Yes, one and one are two and no, I haven’t missed any maths lessons.

‘I know that Stark. And so does Mr Fletcher. Do you want to know how Mr Fletcher knows you haven’t missed any maths lessons, Stark?’

Toby sat in silence.

He knows, Stark, because he happened to be talking to Mr Blackwood, your maths teacher. Mr Fletcher was worried about you. Just fancy that Stark… Mr Fletcher was WORRIED about you, because you hadn’t been to any lessons recently and the chemistry GCE examination is nearly due. You’re not very good at chemistry, are you Stark?’

‘No Sir.’

‘No Sir’, Mr Glenwood mimicked. ‘But you’re quite a dab hand at maths aren’t you Stark?’

‘Yes sir’.

‘Yes sir. So Mr Fletcher – the teacher who was so worried about you, – decided to ask your maths teacher what he thought about you being absent so close to the examinations, and wondered if you might be sick. And do you know what your maths teacher told him?

‘No sir… at least… I can guess what he probably told him..’

‘Oh, now what would that be, may I ask.’

‘He probably told Mr Fletcher that I was at all his lessons.’

‘You must be a genius Stark, for that is exactly what he told him.’

The headmaster sat and stared at his pupil without saying a word, almost as if in trance, before finally looking at his desk and picking up a large sheet of paper. After perusing it closely, he turned his attention back to Toby.

‘This morning, Stark, my secretary, Miss Evans, spent about two hours going through your class attendance records for the past few months. She has come up with some quite extraordinary attendance patterns. You seem to like some lessons more than others, don’t you Stark?

‘Yes sir’, Toby answered, in a barely audible whisper. Toby was starting to sweat, for whatever trouble he may be in with Mr Glenwood, it would pale into insignificance compared to the trouble he was going to be in with his father, once he had been informed of what Toby had been up to.

‘Here’s what I’m going to do Stark. I’m going to forget all about this disgracefully deceitful behaviour of yours, upon two conditions. The first is that once you have completed your GCE examinations, you leave and never come back to this school. Most of the fifth year will be drifting away in the course of the next few weeks, before the official end of term, but for you, it is to be immediate. I do not want to see you back in this school, once you have completed your examinations. Is that clear?

‘Yes sir, but what about next term? I’m supposed to come back in September to start my ‘A’; levels.

‘There will be no next year for you Stark. Your school days are over – finished. We don’t we want any lying, dishonest pupils like you lowering the ethical standards of our sixth form. Do you understand?

‘Yes, sir; but what about my father?’

‘What about him?

‘Will you write to him and tell him what has happened?’

‘Write to him? No, of course not! I don’t have time to deal with disruptive, difficult people like your father. What you tell your father is your business; as far as the school is concerned, your time here will finish next week, when your exams are over. We, at Ilford Grammar, have the sole right to choose which pupils we want in our sixth form, and we don’t choose you!  Now GO! I have wasted more than enough time on a nasty little boy, who clearly has no concept of right or wrong.’

The headmaster rose from his desk, walked to the door and opened it, beckoning Toby to leave. He exited the office and the door was closed with bang behind him. That was the last he ever saw of a man he had never once had any liking or respect for, so different from his beloved ‘Kempo’ from his final year at junior school.

Barely a week later, when he had finished his GCE’s , he walked out of Ilford Grammar for the very last time – never to enter its hallowed walls of learning again and never to see his classmates, or even his few school friends for the rest of his life.

***

BUTT…BUTT…BUTT… I Don’t give a hoot!…

A Lustful Gent, Part Three – Toby, Chapter VII

04 Apr 2012 Comments Off

by mobidark in Uncategorized

1 Year, 3 months – Still sober

Mobi – Babble

On Monday afternoon, Noo and I picked up my eldest daughter and her husband from the airport and yesterday we spent most of  the day doing some of the sights of down-town Pattaya. After that, we checked out places such as  tailor’s shops, opticians, and of course ‘Tuk Com’ – the phone and computer department store, where all visitors to Pattaya go to find the bargains that are unavailable back in their home countries. It  was a very full day of activity and I crashed relatively early, because….

….Today, Wednesday, I was up at 4.30 am for my latest trip to Rajavithi hospital in Bangkok, as it was the dreaded assessment by the Rajavithi cardiac team; or, as they termed it, a ‘Surgical Conference’ – an event I have not had the pleasure of experiencing before. I was shown into a large room which was jam- packed with student doctors, and where the resident consultant held court. It looked like something out of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’.

My chest X ray and other heart pictures were put up on a big screen and I was told to lie down so that about a dozen students could examine me – including one gorgeous looking female doctor who held my hand ever so gently…

The boss went through my medical ailments with the assembled masses and informed them that it was absolutely necessary that my aortic valve was replaced.

So I am now booked in for two night stay in three weeks’ time, when they will perform an angiogram and other tests to establish whether I will also need a bi-pass at the same time. I was first diagnosed with coronary stenosis (narrowing of my arteries) more than a decade ago so it wouldn’t surprise me if the additional procedure will also be necessary.

I will go under the knife for real about two months after that, when they will perform the valve replacement surgery, and also possibly do a bi-pass. ‘Post op’, I will stay in hospital for about 2 weeks and then a few weeks more convalescence back home – all being well.

Today, I will publish the next chapter of my novel, and if I’m still otherwise occupied on Sunday I will publish another chapter then.

 

So here we go with a return to ‘A Lustful Gent…..’

A Lustful Gentleman

 

 

PART THREE –TOBY

CHAPTER VII

 

 

Toby lay on his bed, his mind in a whirl, wishing that somehow the room would swallow him up and spit out his body in a different universe – a universe where people like his father didn’t exist. He felt so wretched, so worthless, so humiliated, and devoid of any will to fight back. He didn’t think he could take much more of his father’s bullying and volatile behaviour, yet there was seemingly no way out; no end in sight to the endless tempers and rows and abuse that had so dominated the first sixteen years of his life. What could he do to get away from it all? Nothing! It was impossible and the more he thought about it, the more depressed and exasperated he felt. He was no longer physically scared of his father – these days his parent  rarely laid a hand on him and even when he did, Toby had long since become inured to the pain. But that hadn’t stopped the mental torments, occasioned by the big man’s incessant haranguing, complaints and criticisms at every possible turn. Never a single day went by when he could escape his father’s vile moods and tantrums.

Never, that is, unless he went away on one of his beloved weekends camps with the ‘Scouts’. Scouting, and especially camping, was Toby’s only relief from the miserable existence that he was otherwise forced to live at his parents’ home. Toby had been a scout since he was eleven years old and he soon discovered that provided he could come up with the money, his father was only too pleased to see the back of him for a few days, whenever his scouting friends organised one of their frequent camps. He had been earning pocket money working as a newspaper delivery boy since he was ten years old, and this meagre income provided him with pocket money and covered the small fees he had to pay to attend the camps.

Scouting and camping has been a Godsend to him, and without those breaks from his father, Toby honestly believed that he would never had been able to survive his terrible existence at home without going completely mad. As it was, he felt that he was not a million miles from some kind of mental breakdown as he lay on his bed and his eyes welled up in the sheer frustration and injustice of it all.

He had returned from a four day scout camp that afternoon – happy but very tired. At sixteen years old, he had risen to senior position in the Scouts and it had been Toby who had organised and run the four day camp for two patrols of a dozen younger boys, for whom he had been responsible. A great time had been had by one and all, but my God it was hard work, and by the time he had arrived home a couple hours ago, he was extremely hungry and very tired, not having slept for more than a few hours a night since he had been away. At first, his father had seemed to be in a good mood and welcomed him home with a half-smile and Toby breathed a sigh of relief. But it hadn’t lasted long.  Soon after they had sat down to eat, his father had suddenly erupted in a rage when Toby had attempted to cut a piece of cheese with the sharp knife and the knife had unexpectedly snapped in his hand. His father went berserk and accused his son of being a ‘stupid fucking half-brain’ who couldn’t even cut his food without breaking things.

‘Is that what you learn at your fucking scouts? That’s it! No more camps for you. You go away for three days and the minute you get back you start breaking up the home! You’re grounded! – Permanently!’

Tony was overwhelmed by the unfairness of his father’s accusations and the punishment he had just meted out. ‘But Dad…it wasn’t my fault… I was just cutting the cheese the same way as I always do…. It’s got nothing to do with the Scouts… please Dad, please don’t do this …’

Toby’s mother joined in: ‘Take it easy David, you can’t blame the poor lad for breaking the knife, it could have happened to anyone.’

The big man erupted in still greater fury. ‘Listen, you bitch! I will blame who I like, when I like, and how I like! This is my home and under my roof, I will do as I fucking well please, and not you – or your stupid fucking son is going to stop me.’

Toby hated it when his father started a fight with his long suffering mother and for the first time in his life he decided he would stand up for her. ‘Why do you always have to shout at Mum? It’s not her fault – she hasn’t done anything! You can shout at me all night for all I care, but leave Mum out of it!’

His father stared at his son, speechless for a few seconds and Toby took the opportunity to make himself scarce. He rose from the table and ran out of the room and into his bedroom, slamming the door shut before collapsing on his bed. He was still famished, but there was no way he could stay in that room with his father another moment. Ten minutes later, as the full reality of what he had just done began to sink in, he started to feel very nervous. He had never shouted at his father like that before; what would happen now? What would he do to him?

His worst fears were realised when seconds later his father stormed into his bedroom. ‘What are you doing here? Come back right now and have your tea!’ his father yelled at him.

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Not Hungry! NOT FUCKING HUNGRY! What’s the matter with you?

‘Nothing, nothing – just leave me alone,’ he begged. It was all too much for the distressed teenager as he burst into loud sobs, completely unable to keep his emotions in check for another second.’

David Stark looked at his son, curled up, sobbing with his eyes shut tight.

‘Look at you! You snivelling little coward! Since when does a sixteen year old boy cry like a baby? You’ve got no guts, Toby – you’re a miserable little child. When are you going to grow up and act like a man?’ he screamed as he walked out of the room and slammed the door.

Toby remained in his foetal-like position, gently crying to himself. He was tired, hungry and a mentally exhausted. What a wretched end to a happy holiday – and how many times had it always ended like this?  At least his school days were now behind him and he would soon be starting his first job. Maybe things would get better once he started working. It surely couldn’t be any worse than the life he had had to endure for the past five, miserable years of grammar school.

 

***

 

When, at the age of eleven, Toby had arrived home from junior school on his last day of term, proudly holding his school report in his right hand, Toby’s uncle Ted was sitting across the kitchen table from his father.  Both men looked very grim. They were talking about the house and the trouble that Toby’s father was in with the landlord. Toby stood there, listening to their conversation, waiting for an opportunity to hand over his school report to his parent.

‘So you think the court may go against you, then David?’ Uncle Ted asked Toby’s father.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know, Ted. They have a good solicitor and I can’t even afford to hire one. I have to defend myself and anyway the judges nearly always rule in favour of the bloody ‘ruling classes! It’s not fair, it’s not fucking fair!’

Uncle Ted remained silent for a long while, before finally, he tentatively asked: ‘So when was the last time you paid the rent then David?’

‘I haven’t paid for over six months, ever since that hole appeared in the sitting room ceiling and the bastards refused to repair it.’

‘Six months – that’s a long time. If you paid up would they drop the case?’

‘I doubt it, Ted, it has gone too far and they just want us out. Anyway, I haven’t got any money. I can only hope that the judge is sympathetic with our plight and reads the rent agreement properly.’

There was another pause in the conversation and Toby moved towards his father, holding the report out for him to take.

‘What’s that?’ his father snapped at him.

‘It’s my school report Daddy.’

‘School report! School report! With all the problems I have to deal with, you want me to read your fucking school report! Get out of here – go play in your bedroom before I give you what for!’

Toby put the envelope back in his pocket and slowly walked out of the kitchen, while Uncle Ted looked on, feeling sorry for the lad but knowing there was nothing he or anyone could do.

 

*

 

Several days later, Toby had given up all hope of persuading his father to look at his school report and was reading a book quietly in his bedroom when he heard the kitchen door slam followed by the dreaded sound of his feared parent climbing up the stairs up to his bedroom. A ripple of fear ran through him as the door opened.

‘Toby! Go downstairs to the garden and bring some of those empty tea chests upstairs. I want you and your brother to start packing all your things and put them in the chests. When you have done that, come back downstairs and help your mother and me with the rest of the packing!’

‘Why, Daddy, where are we going?’

‘Where are we going? I have no bloody idea son, but we have one week to pack up and move out of this house. The court case went against us. The fucking judge wouldn’t even listen to me. We have to get out!’

With that, the big man stormed back downstairs, muttering and cursing under his breath.

The next seven days were a living nightmare for the young, emotionally vulnerable Toby. Every day and for much of each night, the family toiled to pack all their worldly possessions; belongings that had been accumulated over the past eleven years, into old, battered suitcases, cardboard boxes and tea chests. Then they carried and dragged them out of the house, along the alley that ran at the back of their house, to a neighbour’s garage at the far end of the alley.

When the county court judgement had gone against him, Toby’s father had sent his daughter, Jeanette, to ask a neighbour if they would let them store the family’s belongings in their garage. The neighbours hated the fearsome bully who lived along the road, but had great sympathy for his family, especially Jeanette. They had no daughter of their own, and the childless couple treated her much as they would have treated their own daughter. So in spite of their antipathy for Jeanette’s father, they readily agreed to put their garage at the family’s disposal.

At the end of the week, the three children were mentally and physically exhausted. The packing and moving was nearly finished and there were just a few bits and pieces remaining to be packed and moved to the neighbour’s garage. His father was rummaging through the discarded rubbish making sure that nothing of value was being left behind, when there was a ring at the front door.

‘Toby! Go and see who that is!’

He ran downstairs and opened the door. A tall, well built, man in a suit was standing in front of him.

‘Hello young lad,’ he said kindly, ‘and how are you today?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘That’s good to hear. I take it you live here?’

‘Yes, sir, I do, but we are about to move out.’

‘I know that, son. Can I ask your name?

‘Toby Sir.’

 Toby, does your family have anywhere to go?’

‘No sir, I don’t think so.’

The man looked at Toby, and seeing that the exhausted, skinny boy was close to tears, put his arm around his shoulders.

‘I know sonny, I know. This is not a happy day for you and your family is it?’

Toby remained silent, trying to hold back his tears.

‘Toby, is your father home?

‘Yes sir.’

‘Would you go and get him for me. Tell him that the bailiff is here.’

Toby was about to run back upstairs when he saw his father walking towards them.

‘Dad, this is the…’

‘Yes, Toby I know who it is,’ his father interrupted. ‘Good afternoon!’ he said to the bailiff. Then amazingly, he shook the bailiff’s hand, and spoke in a  loud, but unusually controlled voice, ‘I know you have a job to do, so let’s get on with it.’

‘Good afternoon, Mr Stark.  I’m afraid I have to ask you to hand over the keys to the house and vacate the premises within one hour.’

‘Toby, run upstairs and tell everyone to quickly finish the packing. Tell them to hurry – we just have one hour left to get out of this fucking dump of a place.’

As they carried the final boxes out of the garden into the alley beyond, Toby started to feel the familiar hunger pangs; he hadn’t eaten all day. He put in hand in his pocket to see if, by chance, there might be a sweet or broken biscuit which would give him a bit of sustenance. No, there was nothing there – nothing except the envelope containing his now, very rumpled school report, which had been totally ignored and forgotten by his father. ‘What a wonderful father’, he thought bitterly to himself; ‘a father who had now succeeded in making his family homeless – with literally no roof over their head and with no food in their hungry tummies.’

An overwhelming feeling of despair suddenly overcame him, and although he realised that there was a possibility that he might one day live to regret it, he held his precious school report between his hands, and carefully and methodically, tore it into little pieces, and watched as the occasional gust of wind, blew the bits of paper away, to the far corners of the alley.

 

*

 

Toby had spent the remainder of his summer holiday with his brother Danny, at his Uncle Ted’s house, in Cliftonville, on the Kent coast, near to the popular holiday resort of Margate. Uncle Ted owned a large, sprawling bungalow, set in an acre of ground which also contained a self-contained chalet surrounded by an apple orchard. Uncle Ted would rent out the chalet during the summer months to holiday makers, but this year, for the entire month of August, Ted had generously foregone the income he would normally have earned from renting out the chalet, in order to provide a temporary home for his two homeless nephews.

The two boys had been told nothing about their father’s plans to farm them out to his brother-in-law until the evening they had been made homeless. They had been obliged to spend the night in a loft over the garage where their household effects were stored, and the following morning, their father had handed over a few coins which would pay for their train fare to Cliftonville. Their parents had moved into a nearby ‘Bed and Breakfast’ room and Jeanette, their older sister, was lodged at the neighbour’s house.

Toby would never forget that summer holiday, which had started off so traumatically and had then had transformed itself into what was as close to heaven that he was likely to experience for many a year. His Uncle Ted was a serving officer in the RAF and was away during the week, but at weekends he was always found time to play with the boys. Ted was a kind, gentle man and he had taken a particular liking to Toby and was always on hand with a smile, a joke and words of encouragement.

During the week, the two boys were mainly left to their own devices and they spent most of the time either playing in the large garden or trekking down to the beach to play and swim with other local kids who were also enjoying their school holidays. Uncle Ted had a wonderfully affectionate mongrel dog, ‘Mick’, and Toby spent much time playing with Mick and taking him for daily walks. He dreamed of the day when he could have a dog of his own – but he knew that it was just a wild dream that was never likely to materialise.

Then there was the magic of television. Despite the fact that by 1957, most of the country had at least one TV in their home, Toby’s father had never shown any inclination or the wherewithal to acquire such a luxury. Toby had always felt an outsider whenever the subject of television programmes came up amongst his friends, as he had never had the pleasure of seeing the programmes they would  chatter about endlessly. But Uncle Ted had a large black and white TV in his living room and the kids, together with Uncle Ted and his wife would spend the evenings and weekends glued to the ‘goggle box’ watching the scintillating delights of Wagon Train, Bonanza, Rawhide and many other wonderful TV programmes of the late 50’s.

But all good things must come to an end, and just when Toby was starting to wonder if he would be going back to east London in time to start his new school, word came through that his father had been successful in finding a place for them to live and that they should make arrangements for their train journey back to London. Toby’s mind was a whirl of emotions when Uncle Ted drove him and Danny to Cliftonville station. He had enjoyed himself more than at any other period in his life.

For four wonderful weeks he had been free of his father’s incessant bullying and temper tantrums. He had had such a great time; swimming in the sea, playing with his Uncle and Mick, and watching television. So he was feeling very sad that it was all coming to an end; but he was also excited. Excited to be starting his new school and excited about the prospects of living in a new home – about which he knew absolutely nothing, but which he held in eager anticipation.

In his mind, nothing could possibly be worse than living in a dilapidated, cold, Victorian monstrosity of a house, such as the one that was home for the first eleven years of his life.  So however bad his new home may turn out to be, it surely had to be an improvement. Thoughts of home and his new school occupied his mind as he and Danny sat in an uncomfortable, third class compartment of one of the very last steam trains to ply its trade from the south coast of England to the depths of East London.

***