Adolescence is, I'm told, many things some quite technical. But whatever my serotonin levels, adolescence was sex. Especially the bad side of sex. Was there a good side? I whimpered, hopelessly.
Physical lust arrived surprisingly early, before I doffed short pants. But it was undifferentiated, like belly-ache from over-eating. As predictable as Meccano.
Eventually lust became something softer and wider. In literary terms Stanley Kowalski morphed into Pierre Bezukhov. I can date this transformation exactly even if I didn't recognise its significance until decades later. Only old age has brought understanding.
I was thirteen sitting in the school hall for an evening showing of a docu-feature movie, San Demetrio London. I remember I was uncharacteristically happy: my brothers and I would soon move to Heaton, another Bradford suburb, to live with my mother, now detached from my father.
On the row behind me were classmates who coincidentally lived in Heaton. Surprisingly, given the times, they had brought a guest, P., a schoolgirl of the same age. P. kicked my chair. I turned round and she giggled. When I turned away she kicked it again. Giggled in a nice way.
Living in Heaton I got to know P. distantly, imagined I was love with her. She was friendly but my timidity ensured nothing happened. The chair-kicking remained vivid but uninterpreted. Now I realise an attractive intelligent girl was prepared to take the initiative with pustule-studded, peeled-shrimp, unconfident me.
A perfect specific for adolescence, but alas beyond my comprehension.
"Pustule-studded, peeled-shrimp." Right. Well, at least you had the stud thing going on....
ReplyDeleteThough you never got the local Heaton heat on...
Just know that the rest of your readers were each and every one ridiculously beautiful, astoundingly self-assured, amazingly confident, positively precocious, and just plain old Killing It sexually at that age!
Not to mention their wondrous absence of zits...
XD,
Marly
p. s. The worldwide grapevine says that those other guys with fewer torments were just really, really good at burying the abysmal scourings, voice-breaking humiliations, and hair-raising terrors of adolescence.
p. p. s. But we like you better for not hiding them!
Marly: Eloquently put, although you make me realise I am deficient in modern-day argot. Re. "had the stud thing going on..." and "...local Heaton heat on.", I understand both but lack the confidence to use them. With slang, confidence is everything.
ReplyDeleteAs to the gravamen of your comment all I can say is "many a true word spoken in jest". This was exactly how it seemed: I was repulsive while all other male youths of my age were gilded. And in novels I read male youths were "having it off" (Yesterday's slang, I fear) at younger and younger ages.
While I, in my timidity, didn't want anything so extreme as "having it off" - just an informed conversation about Hemingway's good and bad points. Finishing with touched finger tips.
You are kind with your PPS but it strains my credulity.
As I was a-tub with For Whom the Bell Tolls last night I wonder: Hemingway's bad points? I've read it several times over the years, and find that I can open it to any page and be absorbed within a sentence or two.
ReplyDeleteMikeM: You don't want me to rain on your parade. Stay with the early ones and - especially - the short stories. Oh, and Death In Afternoon (n/f), and The Moveable Feast which is outside the publishing chronology. Avoid Across The River And Into The Trees (One reviewer: Across The Carpet And Into The Sheets) and Islands In The Stream (Perfect title for a book going nowhere). But what do I know? The latter came out in 1970 and I read it then, skipping more and more brutally. That's fifty years ago. Who was I then?
ReplyDeleteThe danger lies in his greatest invention - his dialogue. It's only one step away from self-parody and sometimes in the later stuff you wonder. Also he's not all that hot on names and that can irritate.
You must have been extremely shy, and very hard on yourself.
ReplyDeleteThe harshest teller is always oneself...
ReplyDeleteColette/Marly: It's fair to say shyness, a broken family and lack of academic endeavour ruined my youth. But the great thing about youth is we outgrow it eventually. Journalism forced me into being assertive, taught me to apply my one true skill (curiosity) and encouraged me to put one word after another coherently. National Service exposed me to science and becoming an editor revealed the delights of bending others to my will.
ReplyDeleteAs a result (and it's evident from some of my posts and my comments) I now go too far. I am occasionally thought rough-handed and insensitive, and find myself having to apologise. Nature - that undefined yet powerful force - has a way of balancing things out. Luckily or perhaps inevitably my social life is non-existent. A long and fruitful marriage allows me not to worry too much about these solecisms.
Both of you have made kind responses in the past and now. It would be painfully insufficient if I merely said I appreciated these. They arrive from sources I admire and whose blogs I read closely; worlds quite different from mine. Both articulate and witty. As the French would say: "Chapeau!"
Well, that was sweet!
ReplyDeletePerhaps if you didn't come to believe as a teen that you were alone, that no one understood, that you were "different," and that you disliked much about yourself, you would not have been ready for "a long and fruitful marriage" or to go out in the world as a curious soul eager to understand others and other things and write about them. Perhaps that's the sort of thing that the horrors of teen years and earlier childhood do for us, if we can become healthy-minded in adulthood.
Likewise, readers are often drawn by stories in which a terrible thing occurs--a thing that eventually reveals itself as not just an end but generative of change, that even the worst can lead toward some sort of strange blessing.
Marly: I am sure you're right. Adolescence forced me to depend on myself and possibly I developed abilities which I simply regarded as unremarkable. At the time I was only aware of the void.
ReplyDelete