Back To England

-
I have never been sure why this happened, but when I was about 8 it was decided that my mother, sister, brother and I would return to Britain, Russ staying on behind to sell his practice and the plan was to join us later.

At the time I didn't really think about it much, merely accepted it, as kids seem to do, but much later I came to the conclusion that actually my mother was leaving Russ as she hated Australia so much, and simply had to get the hell away from the place, no matter what the cost to her marriage.

So off we went, yet another huge ocean liner, across the equator again (but thanks to my well guarded certificate with no problems for me) and back to England, where we settled in a small house in Chalk Farm in London and I was sent to a totally insane school just up the road which was a bad copy of Summer Hill School. In this school kids only had to go to lessons they wanted to, and teachers seemed free to teach anything they felt moved to teach, so the only thing I learned there was the entire history of the Boers in South Africa and the horrors of the British wars against them, and the various Zulu wars and treks of the Boers..... Also bullying was rife there as there was absolutely no control of the kids by the teachers.. A horrible place to be stuck. And on top of that I had a thick Australian accent which was reason enough for many of the older kids to beat me up at every opportunity... I lost that accent as fast as I could, believe you me!

We remained in England for about a year as far as I can remember, and apart from that school, I have no real memories of how that was. Actually the only thing I remember about life there was discovering the dangers for small boys from pedophiles in London. Luckily for me I had been well informed by my mother about such men, so I was not at any real risk.. I knew what to do when hassled or followed by such sad and unpleasant people... But it was sort of scary to be honest.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Which I Venture Into Luanda - Beggars, Guns, Filth and Smiles

-
Image
Before we arrived in Angola we had been told all manner of horror stories about Luanda as I mentioned in my last post about Angola.   About how it was the most expensive city in the world, how dangerous it was to venture alone onto its crime ridden streets and how chaotic it was. The result of this was that the first time we went into the city (safely tucked up in our school bus, with uniformed guard) we were all terrified to set foot out of the bus. It duly arrived at the "South African Super Market", which we were being shown, as a good place to shop, This is a smallish supermarket, surrounded by a high cement wall with armed guards at the entrance to the parking lot, as well as at the entrance to the supermarket itself.  By the way, these armed guards were armed with AK47s, which I later discovered was totally normal in Angola at that time.  Every shop had its uniformed and AK47 toting guard sitting outside it.  Taking all our courage in our hands, we c...
Read more

Oh Calcutta and Pork - On stage obscentity and I meet Andy Warhol

-
Image
Whilst I was at the Roundhouse, several productions occurred that were all about sex in one way or another, the chief ones being Oh Calcutta and Pork . Oh Calcutta Oh Calcutta was a very dreary show, more or less entirely at the mental level of a smutty 14 year old schoolboy's sense of humour.  There were as far as I was concerned only two good things about it.  The first of these was a ballet sequence in it performed by two naked dancers, a man and a woman, which was incredibly beautiful to watch, and the second was that everyone and his uncle wanted to see the show, so we who worked at the Roundhouse did a roaring trade in smuggling people into the theatre to see the show.  We stuffed people into the lighting booth, all around the auditorium and absolutely anywhere we could think of that would allow them to see the stage... And charged much fine money for this obviously.. Basically it consisted of a load of shortish sketches, all dealing with sex in one w...
Read more

Groupies, Hot dog wars and random thoughts on Royalty

-
Image
Life at the Roundhouse was never dull, as we experienced at first hand the hassles of Rock and Roll concerts and  how to cope with the rather strange world of British Royalty. As I have written, at the Roundhouse we had rock concerts each Sunday.  These were quite large events, which ran from about midday to midnight, and typically had audiences of around 2000 people (we removed all the seats from the auditorium for these concerts) and of course attracted not only the main audience, but all the peripheral hangers on of the world of Rock and Roll - drug dealers, groupies, fans, fast food sellers, ticket touts and so on.  Some of these were a problem for us, others not.  I have already talked about how we dealt with the drug dealers but I thought you might be amused to read about how we dealt with some of the other groups of people who such concerts attracted. Groupies: As is well known, Rock and Roll attracts groupies, what might be less well known is that ...
Read more