NO MORE NARRATIVES PLEASE!

Tell us the truth!

I seldom write personal opinion pieces without references to research but here goes.

I was four years old when I realised that adults tell a lot of lies.
It was very disappointing.
I had been learning to read with my father & he encouraged me to read out the headlines of his daily newspaper.
”Wicked” I would say, but my father would laugh and call me “cute”.

There came a day when my natural blurted truth caused a huge upheaval in my family.

I was sitting on the battered steps of our Islington, London home. It was 1956. The building I lived in was crammed with small flatlets, no bathrooms, one shared toilet & surrounded by craters left by WW2 bombs. I loved to play in the bomb sites. They were treasure troves full of broken bricks and bric-a-brac.
I was often filthy & hungry.
One day the man who lived with his wife in the flatlet above us stopped to sit beside me on the front steps.
”Wanna see some pictures?” he asked.
I was bored & polite enough not to refuse.
He pulled a pack of cards from his pocket & began to hand them to me one by one.
My mother called from within the house & I went running, thanking my neighbour as I scampered away.
”What have you been up to?” my mum asked as usual.
”Mr Pickering showed me some pictures of naked ladies” I said innocently.

Suddenly my mother’s face froze, the customary smile had disappeared. She washed my dirty hands & face, settled me down with my evening meal and fell into an unusual silence.

My father came home from work around 6pm & I heard my mother relating my words to him. He leapt up from his seat, pounded up the stairs and, as I watched from the landing, he battered Mr Pickering down the stairs, all the way to the front door. They spilled out of view and onto the street.
Meanwhile my mother was forcefully preventing Mrs Pickering from defending her husband. Mrs Pickering’s glasses fell, smashed at my feet.

I was in shock. I had no idea what Mr Pickering had done and I had never seen my parents violent before.
All the neighbours and family were informed about this event and I never saw the Pickerings again. The police arrested my parents and, eventually, they went to court. Both of them were bound over to keep the peace for 2 years….. all because I told the truth.

The impact upon my consciousness was immense, but not as my parents might have expected. I never told them the truth again.

I did not dare.
The truth caused mayhem.
The truth made people behave like lunatics.

From that day on I began to notice that adults lied all the time.
”How do I look?” my Auntie would ask her boyfriend “Alright!” he would say automatically while fidgeting with impatience over her lengthy preparations in front of a mirror.
”Where did you get this, Grandad?” I would ask when given a new toy or trinket. “It fell off the back of a lorry!” would be the winked response.
”Father Christmas comes down the chimney if you are a good girl!” I was deeply concerned for him risking burning himself & choking in a thousand London chimneys all pumping out toxic coal smoke.

“Why did you colour the letters of the alphabet, Johnnie?” asked the teacher of my first class in school. “To make them look pretty!” said Johnnie. The teacher whacked his knuckles with her ruler.

Again I was in shock.
I muttered “Wicked!”, immediately picked up my coat and walked home. My mother came home from work many hours later to find me waiting on the doorstep, adamant that I would not be going back to that school. Of course I was in the wrong. I was a bad girl for leaving the school like that. Nothing was said about the violent teacher or poor Johnnie’s hand.

My world became a nightmare of speedy thinking or total silence.
If asked about school I would never tell the truth.
I would invent something unremarkable to say like “We did drawing” or “We had peas pudding for lunch” but I never told the truth, that caused too much trouble.

-0-

Nowadays the lies are so thick and fast that I do not watch tell-lie-vision, read lame-stream media or pay any heed to politicians.
Do they really think we believe them?

This continuous atmosphere of deception has depressed me since I was 4 years old.

I am now 70 so I do not envisage living to see the end of it.