There were only two times I remember there being sex education at our school. The first time was in biology class. My biology teacher looked like a cross between Magnus Pyke and Dr Snuggles. He was a decent man and a competent teacher. Normally we talked about animals or plants or we dissected frogs but this day was different.
For reasons I don’t quite understand, to this day, our biology teacher decided to forgo our usual lesson on things like photosynthesis and osmosis and decided to talk about how humans procreate, from start to finish with all the icky bits. Perhaps someone in charge of the cirriculum had decided we knew nothing about sex and needed teaching. We were eleven, so most of us knew something about sex in varying degrees. Maybe he decided to talk about this off his own bat. Was it improvised? Had he been up all night rehearsing? Was this the one lesson in the year he had been dreading for months, or looking forward to?
No. He hadn’t been looking forward to it at all. That fact showed in his whole demeanour. I’ve never seen a man get through a talk with such obvious awkwardness. During some moments, he looked like he was in physical pain.
The lesson stands out for two reasons, the strained seriousness and extreme effort of Pyke Snuggles to convey the basic biological processes of procreation and the doubled over please stop making us laugh, it really hurts now, no seriously, please stop sir, but he wouldn’t. We were not emotionally mature enough for this talk, not in a class setting. I like to think I was. For the first fifteen minutes, I sat there very composed and attentive and straight faced. After a while though, I was as bad ad the rest of them, who were practically rolling around on the floor clutching the stomachs.
It began with embarrassed sniggers but just got worse. Laughter and perhaps embarrassment is contagious. If he only knew, we were in pain too, trying to stifle our laughter but as with all these things, the more you try to stop doing something, the more you sometimes can’t stop doing it. Eventually, we gave in and let it all out. We drowned out his voice with our laughter. Perhaps that was deliberate.
I felt a combination of sympathy and distress for Pyke Snuggles. On one hand, I was sensitive to his extreme discomfort and frequent red face. On the other, I wanted him to continue, as this was the most fun I’d had in years. Even Fawlty Towers didn’t make me laugh this much. It was very conflicting. It was also painful to laugh so much.
At one point, he got cross with us and started shouting. This just made us laugh even more. It was at that point in mirth evolvement when everything he said and everything he did made us explode. We were far too over stimulated to back down now. It was like he was suddenly the best stand up comedian in the world and we’d paid good money to be entertained.
He gave up and we ended class early. As Pyke Snuggles exhausted stooped frame exited the classroom, I couldn’t help thinking he was going for a much earned lie down with a couple of Valium.
When I was sixteen, I went to a petting farm with my two best friends, Elaine and Renee. We enjoyed looking at the rabbits and the guinea pigs, horses, ponies, goats, lambs and sheep and eventually cows. The cows were in a shed. One cow. Actually, I can’t remember if it had horns, obviously if it had horns, it was a bull.
It was all on its own in the shed and there seemed to be a few waist high metal bars between us and the cow/bull, so it was a casual but significant separation. We gathered round as it chewed the cud, or grass. It was chewing furiously and while it chewed, it focused on me.
We were like fans round a pop star, admiring it while it chewed and stared. It continued to fix its gaze on me and gave me an evil look. Next minute, it opened its mouth and projectile vomited what it was chewing, straight at me, from about two metres away.
The copious vile smelling substance landed on my upper chest, with a splat. It had the consistency and smell of liquid poo, but it was worse than that. It wasn’t like any human diarrhoea that I’ve ever smelled. Did I happen to mention I was wearing a thick mohair jumper?
The smell was so foul my friends immediately sprang away from me, as if I was a leper. They thought it was hilariously funny. The faeces that had come from the cows/bulls mouth didn’t drip thankfully. Instead, it adhered to my jumper beautifully. Thank God for small mercies.
My friends acted as if I’d vomited onto my own jumper instead of being the victim of an oral assault from a psycho bovine stranger.
To be fair, I was ‘allowed’ back into my friends car. They couldn’t very well leave me at the petting farm, it was miles from anywhere but it wasn’t a pleasant journey home.
When I got home my mum was non too pleased about the stains from a sociopathic bull on my mohair but she put it in a hot wash all the same. I don’t even think it was the hot wash that ruined it, although I’m sure it didn’t help. The vomit and the heat had a debilitating effect on the delicate fibres. The projectile was like acid and seemed to dissolve the cloth. If the vomit didn’t kill my beautiful jumper then the hot wash certainly did. The jumper was never quite the same after that. It was rather bald and thin and exhausted where it should have been delightfully hairy. It was a traumatised mohair.
I learned to distrust cows and young bulls after that. The only other time, I was attacked by an animal in such a way was when I was at Southport Zoo many years later, passing by the chimpanzee quarters with my mum and my husband. The chimps threw their excrement at us, among indulging in other recreational activities. It still wasn’t anywhere as bad as having liquid poo spat at me, exorcist style, at a petting farm. We managed to dodge the chimp poo very successfully. They didn’t have the element of surprise on their side like the young bull.
Now, where’s the joy in this you might say, well, it’s all in the anecdote. I realised I haven’t thought about it in almost forty years, not once, until just now and it made me smile and I suppose it might be funny to an outsider, in a schadenfreud kind of way.
When I started senior school at the age of eleven, I was so excited. I loved first year. Of course now it’s all different, the school years are counted differently but in my day, the first year of ‘big school’, a rough comprehensive, in an economically depressed area of Merseyside, was senior school and we were called first years. One of the teachers I had in my form and year was a religious education teacher. He was handsome in a classical way. He had black hair and wild brown eyes with unfathomable depths in a pale waxy face. He wore white, beige, silver or brown suits, tight as anything, narrow tie, sharp crease lines down the trousers. It was 1981 after all. He was bang in fashion. He was like a showroom dummy who had come to life all of a sudden, but in a really good way.
Mr. Hanson’s lessons went by in a second. They were as light as a feather. They energised me and made me happy. He was the sun, the moon and the stars in the lessons but they weren’t lessons, they were intangible things, feelings and experiences. it wasn’t school and I wasn’t in a lesson. I was a child of the sky. He didn’t give me mind altering drugs but what he did do was allow me to be part of an experience that I will never forget.
He may have begun this particular lesson very normally, probably talking about the bible, scripture. Students always misbehaved in Religious Education. They didn’t take it seriously at all, not even half as much as any other lesson and they didn’t take those seriously either.
To them, R.E was a permit to mess around in class and especially in the comprehensive school I went to. Mr. Hanson was a lovely man but his patience had limits. He was already on the outskirts of sanity, so cracking up was an easy thing to do and that day he would crack up but in such a sweet and spectacular and entertaining way.
I think Mr. Hanson was so exasperated with the behaviour of the children in his class that he hatched a plan. Although, to be fair to him, he didn’t seem the type of person to hatch anything. The strange light behind his twinkling brown eyes always seemed to be in improvisation mode. In this lesson, I think his creative energies were on fire, or else I think he just didn’t give a toss. It was like he’d joined this thing, this teacher thing, in a working class comprehensive, teaching rebellious, out of control feral teenagers and thought, ‘Oh no, what have I got myself into? Okay, well, I’ll have move the goal posts. I’ll have to move them to survive.’
Mr. Hanson had weighed up his options, had drawn up a plan of battle tactics and came up with several modes of attack, whether he was aware of it or not:
The element of surprise
Distraction
Unpredictability
Confusion of the enemy through unprecendented behaviour, unbecoming for a teacher
He was talking about evolution versus creationism and the class were being particularly disruptive. Class harmony was compounded by the fact that his class didn’t have tables that four or five people could gather around. Instead, he had two person desks, widely spaced, all in single file in three rows. I quite liked the set up but groups of children couldn’t hang out together and fan the flames of rebellious adolescence, like naughty knights around a round table. It would impede them on many levels. It caused consternation, indignation and frustration, all the ‘tions’ that would lead to trouble for poor Mr. Hanson.
The cacophony of sound rising in the classroom drowned out the sound of the chalk squeaking along the board. Everytime his back was turned, they would all whoop and holler and throw screwed up pieces of paper at him. He would turn to us, everything would be quiet but the minute he turned to write, chaos would erupt again. Eventually, he stopped writing and turned to talk to us. This wasn’t going to work either. No-one was listening to him. There wasn’t one attentive face. Most kids were talking amongst themselves very loudly. The rest were in varying degrees of commotion and locomotion, the dreaded ‘tions’ again.
At that moment, that almost surreal moment of disorder and anarchy, Mr. hanson did somthing memorable.
He became Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ape.
He calmly threw away the chalk and his tranformation began. He hunkered down. He swung his arms down and out so that they hung lower than his knees. He started to move from side to side. He started making grunting noises, mimicking chimpanzee sounds. The class stopped talking and stared transfixed. His ape impersonation got more ape. He got louder and started screeching and whooping. We looked at him like he was crazy.
He wasn’t done yet, not by a long chalk, unlike the one he’d just thrown away. He jumped up on one of the front desks, in one deft mocement, still deep in character as King Kong. There was a collective intake of breath. Right now, he definately had the element of surprise on his side. He made his way down the desks, expertly jumping from one to the other like a practiced orangutang.
He went all the way down the desks, hooting and howling, pouncing atheletically from each one, right down to the back of the class. The girls at the back began to scream as he jumped on their desks. It didn’t help that he got off the desks for a while and ran around the entire room as an ape. As his drama tutor may have said, he really used the space. He then returned to the desks, gambolling up another row, picking up pencils with puzzlement and chewing on their tips. He nibbled an eraser, looked bewilderedly at a ruler and then hit himself with it. He took off his shoe, smelled the inside of it curiously and then tried to wear it as a hat.
As an ape, Mr. Hanson frightened the girls and rendered the boys speechless. When he jumped on my desk, I moved out of the way just in time. I suppose you could say it was scary but fun. I can’t remember how it all ended. I don’t suppose it really matters when you start so strong.
This is a slim, delicate looking guy in a sharp silver suit, with a face like a porcelain doll, doing a quality method acting performance of a primate. Uncanny valley doesn’t even begin to describe. It was the most exhilarating moment of my life. I’m sure for Mr. Hanson though, there must have been easier ways of making a living.
‘Let every man be quick to listen,slow to speak and slow to anger.’
– James 1:19
But why is it so difficult to be slow to offend?
What open wounds
Exposed to hot knives
Have taken me there?
The bitter taste
of resentment
Still on my tongue
If pushing my buttons were a sport
I would lose every time.
Each imagined slight
Or real live betrayal
Has no sliver of light between them
They merge
And become one
And all the lines blur
It’s all very well
To advise
But when
that button is
so vunerable…
When it feels like everyone finds it
temptingly delicious to push…
I need to take responsibilty
For how I feel.
‘Human anger does not produce the righteousness
that God desires.’ – James 1:20
I need to understand why it feels how it feels.
It feels nasty, disconnected, like I’m outside myself.
Like I’m not there anymore.
‘Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in the mirror and after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like.’
-James 1:23 -24
That’s exactly what it feels like!
Feelings of hurt and anger sometimes makes us feel disconnected.
They alienate us from our our basic selves. But wait a minute, I need hope that I can be slow to offend. Can you give me that?
‘Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.’ – James 1:4
I get it. Now there is understanding and hope for change.
But where is the unconditional love, where is the hug that I so desperately need?
‘If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.’
-James 1:5
And suddenly all the heat of the anger melts away and in its place is the warmth of the hug.
My dad said you should always wear a red cloak to stop people seeing the blood.
I really bought into this idea of his of wearing a red cloak and thereby not allowing people to see blood from emotional wounds. These days I’m not so sure if it’s a good idea. In social situations, in this modern world, the red cloak was meant to stop people taking advantage, to protect us from predators and users. No harm in that. But do we overdo it?
Roman soldiers would wear red cloaks when they marched into battle, believing it would protect them from harm. If the enemy didn’t see the stain of blood on the red cloak, they couldn’t see that you were injured and that may give them the advantage in a battle situation.
Yet the colour red isn’t just about being wounded. It’s also the colour of power and leadership and connected with wealth and luxury.
When Little Red Riding hood wore a red cloak, it was all about innocence, purity, danger and passion.
In Christianity, the red cloak represents the Blood of Christ and the sacrifice He made on the cross.
In terms of the red cloak as self defence, lately I’m seeing a tendency in some people to always be smiling or laughing and acting like nothing can hurt them. Not only does that deplete their mental and physical and emotional energy to breaking point, it makes other people think they are absolutely fine and that they don’t need help from anyone. Some people think they aren’t hurting and can take the knocks and they might even feel free to deal them out. After all, smilers can take it right? After all, the chances are you’re gonna come up smiling, like you always do.
Now that I’m seeing it in others, I can see it in me. When I was young one of my nicknames was ‘Smiler’ but now I’m thinking far from it being an expression of a happy soul, it may have been a trauma response, or as I like to say ‘The Red Cloak Response’, a desperate need not to show the blood for fear of further attacks. After all, I’m pretty sure the wounded gazelle in the savannah does not want the lion to know they are wounded and that makes perfect survival sense to me.
We say about people when they unravel, when they are undone, or are having difficulties that it is a ‘cry for help’, but at the same time, they may also be trying to hide. There is definately some merit in hiding at certain times but when you hide too well and too much, people think you’re okay and that you don’t need help. They may even think you’re thick skinned at best, inauthentic, false or fake at worst. I’ve seen how ‘appearing strong’, i.e laughing things off when you want to cry and smiling when you’re far from it, can backfire. When I was younger, someone once said to me, ‘Everything’s a joke to you isn’t it?’ but it couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was the red cloak speaking. So while we don’t want to appear too vulnerable for very many reasons, some show of vulnerability, at the right time, in the right place, with people you can trust, is actually essential for survival. But this is the crux of the matter isn’t it? How do we know who to trust? It’s not always cut and dried and we don’t want to trust too quickly.
Some of us grew up in environments where we walked on eggshells and it was essential to constipate our feelings in order to placate one or both parents or other family members, or just someone in authority, like a teacher. It could even have been another child who was bullying us. It wasn’t cost effective to show our feelings at the time. So, as a feint, appearing happy or jolly or like we don’t care was preferable to being kicked while we were down.
Far from the red cloak being a defence, it can be a liabilty, if it’s not tempered with assertiveness. Assertiveness is the real red cloak. The red cloak on its own is not enough. It’s all very well to act like we’re invincible, laughing off the insults of others, smiling all the time and generally acting like nothing is wrong but when we don’t show our disapproval at the way we’re being treated, nothing will change, red cloak or not. If we don’t make that change, by either letting someone know they are overstepping boundaries and/or taking advantage or using and manipulating us in some way, the red cloak is really just a costume change. It means nothing. So, there has to come a time when you say I’m not putting up with this or that or a certain unfair situation.
Wear the red cloak by all means, the red cloak has some purpose but it has to be accompanied by expressing yourself when you are feeling used or abused, or simply when you need help, when a situation isn’t right, whether that’s at work, or a friend is taking advantage, or maybe there’s an imbalance in a relationship that needs more balance. Sometimes, just voting with our feet will work, that’s a very powerful message.
So, we have to speak up, whether that’s with our body language, or our tongues or with our silence, or walking away. The red cloak is not going to protect us from anything, although it might may us feel good temporarily. It’s time to let our feelings show and not hide them. Our feelings, rather than being detrimental, give us validity. When we tell people what we’re thinking, or at least show what we’re feeling on some level, people then have to take notice. They then can’t say ‘Well, I didn’t know you felt that way. You never told me,’ or they at least have to acknowledge it on some level. When we hide or wear a red cloak, they may feel they can legitimately turn a blind eye. We always thought red cloak helped but it never has. Time to take responsibilty and give ourselves permission to show our feelings.
A couple of years later, when I was about eight or nine, I was still following my older brother around like a puppy (see Joy of the Tomboy) and he seemed to have got into some altercation with some boys I didn’t recognize and they didn’t seem to be local. There was also something very serious and grown up about them. They seemed much older than us. They were after my brother for some reason and were not happy. I’m not sure what he’d done, or if he’d done anything or why they were so angry. When I looked around, my brother was gone from my side, he’d disappeared and I was left with five menacing boys, who, after being unable to find my brother, set their sights on me instead and were glowering darkly at me as one force. One of them said ‘That’s his sister.’ Another ordered, in a sinister whisper, while never taking his eyes from mine, ‘Get her.’ My intuitive and instinctive senses told me I was in danger. I don’t think I even waited for them to start running, I was already off down the hill and had passed the park by the time they started coming after me. The thing that sticks in my mind the most is the speed I seemed to be running. I was running like the wind but I could hear them so close behind me, I could hear their feet pounding on the concrete flags, their flailing arms and hands flicking and brushing against mine as they ran. I could feel their breath on my neck. The blood was pounding in my head. My heart was thumping as if it would burst. I knew I could not let them get me. The entrance to the park was about two hundred yards from my home. I didn’t have that far to go, so I suppose it was a quick spurt kind of thing. I don’t think I’ve ever ran like that before or since. I sped up the path to my house, got to the front door and when I looked back, the boys had done a U-turn and were gone. I’d outran all five boys. I’d reached a place where they couldn’t follow. I’d reached sanctuary. I felt such relief. The joy of escape I’ll never forget. Whatever they were going to do, I don’t want to know and I’m glad I didn’t find out because I ran for my life. I’d been in survival mode. It’s not often we escape by the skin of our teeth. It seems that is one of those things you only see in movies and there were so many times before then and after then when I didn’t escape, or couldn’t escape and that seems to be most people’s reality. But this was one time, just this one wonderful time, I did escape and because of that it really sticks in my memory. And we need to remember those times when we did escape and celebrate them. Needless to say, that was the moment I stopped following my big brother around.
Things In My Head 