Image: Meteors in the British sky by time-lapse camera 12/13 August 2022
It is 6am and I am opening all the windows and doors to let the cool dawn air clear the vestiges of sleep from my home and my skin. I listen to the birds and worry, for the thousandth time, about their decline in numbers and species. I refill the dry bird bath and stare sadly at the stunted yellow grass. My onion flowers are doing well. Tall and strong stemmed. They took up all the fluid they needed when the rains fell all through May and June.
I finish my first coffee and answer a couple of comments on Substack.
The first thing I am considering is a question raised by Arthur Brogard:
I quickly type a comment but immediately realise how reductionist it is….. Our intelligence, or the lack of it, as a species cannot possibly be the result of only one change agent. There must be thousands of interacting effects chipping away at our collective potential.
Nevertheless I let the comment sit there, waiting for someone to observe its limitations….
—0—
When I was 9 years old I was creating a book. It was very basic, with one page of writing or poetry opposite an illustration in a school exercise book. I had been working on it every day for quite a while and looking forward to beginning a new volume shortly. Everything I loved and feared, hoped for and dreamed of, was in this book. It wasn’t a journal or a diary. It was my personal record in an artform and I loved it. I would spend hours daydreaming of what I would write and draw next. Nobody else saw this book. It was far too private for that.
One Sunday morning I reached under my mattress and could not find it. My heart leaped into my mouth as I lifted the mattress higher. I felt strangled. I ran downstairs and asked my mum if she had seen it. She beamed proudly at me and declared that she had found it while changing my sheets. She then dropped the biggest clanger onto my head.
“I took it to Mr Ball, your headmaster!” She declared. She went into a state of shock when I exploded in an hysterical rage. She stuttered something about it being “genius” and “so proud” but I was utterly bereft and inconsolable. I felt betrayed.
I saw that book only once again.
I never made another one.
A few miserable weeks passed by. Suddenly, after school lunch one day my mother appeared to collect me. “You are going to see a special doctor!” she announced as she grabbed my coat and pushed my arms into it. She rushed me to the bus-stop and we headed into town.
The brass plate next to the door said “Psychiatrist” and the betrayal was like a knife in my guts. She thinks I am crazy, was all I could guess. I said nothing, but I resolved to answer all questions as if I were my best friend, Mandy. The doctor was a thousand years old, his office was dark and smelly, stacked with books and junk. Its only saving grace was a gorgeous lit painting of white horses running through a gentle rolling sea and my personal book lying on his desk.
This beady eyed man asked me a lot of questions. He gave me endless puzzles to do and asked me to say one word in response to his prompts. At the end of the session he had noticed that my eyes were constantly flicking to the horses in the painting.
“Do you like horses?” he asked me and I replied “Yes, of course!” “Well” he said, “Maybe your mother will buy you one, if you are a good girl!”
That was when I realised that this man was as thick as a brick and totally patronising. I had to stifle a sarcastic nine-year-old laugh. ‘Blimey!’ I was thinking, ‘observational skills of a gnat!’ Didn’t he see my worn out shoes? Didn’t he notice how haggard and tired my mother was? Could he not recognise poverty when it was right under his nose? Buy me a horse, indeed. She had trouble buying me FOOD!
On the way home my mum was babbling. She knew that I was furious because, unusual for me, I was in total silence. I wanted my book but the psychiatrist had placed it in his folder. My mum assured me that the book would be returned to me eventually. It never was…..
A flurry of events followed on from this. I was taken to sit an entrance examination for a good girls’ school and when the result arrived it caused a huge argument between my parents. My father could not see the point in the government providing expensive education for poor girls. My mother steamed with fury “Educate a girl and you educate her children!” she yelled. I slid out of the back door and skated off down the street.
‘They are thick as bricks too.’ I grumbled.
My contempt for adults at that time of my life was of epic proportions. Hardly anyone impressed me. I buried myself in books, but I did not attempt to write another one myself.
No. I did not trust the world with the contents of my head.
The world would probably betray me.
So angry at your mother; more angry at the schoolmaster. She should not have touched your book, and certainly not him either. NO, not ever and not still. I was reminded of a few things in my childhood that were also unfair, and of how those things affected me. One, when my Mom decided that the best way to fit all my NEW crayons into the tin I used to keep them in was to BREAK ALL THE NEW CRAYONS IN HALF to do it, and throw them on top of the old used up crayons. It was totally improper crayon care and respect, and I let her know it was mean. They were BRAND NEW CRAYONS and she broke them all in half. I was horrified when I opened the tin, to see this. I would not use them and there they sat, unused forever. I never colored anything again in protest. I think she was secretly jealous, because (due to her difficult and tiring job) our family had much more than she did growing up. The other trangression was when my the wood block toys I used were suddenly gone, my elder brother gave them to the science teacher to use in a physics experiment. I was also assured they would come back, but never did. Private lives of kids, fragile and broken by clueless adults. Unfettered creativity is such a gift, and one that the world of men seeks to rule over, to take, to own. For no good reason, other than this ownership, which inevitably destroys the gift it cannot truly perceive. The Cabal Covidians are doing the same with nature and our bodies, our perfect gifts, which they seek to own and in doing so destroy. All the gold and silver cannot touch its perfection and never will. Best Frances
Powerful indictment, but you not only survived but thrived. I believe seeing adults as stupid is a necessary step in growing up, and I had similar experiences with so called 'professionals' and my mother myself. Stupidity itself is a relative concept...there's absolute stupid and a kind of blindness. With the public health people, we got both...