Rain Drops on the Window
By Leo Vine-Knight

The rain came down in gusts and sheets, raging against the steel-framed bow window like an omen…..
It was his first day at secondary school, and Kelvin trudged through the gate under the open scrutiny of his neighbours, who lined their windows like Angels of Death as he passed before them. He was resplendent in full kit, including gaberdine raincoat, dark green blazer, green and yellow striped tie, sticky white nylon shirt, grey short trousers and a large green school cap. He carried a brand new brown leather satchel, containing propelling pencils, a Parker cartridge pen, one 12” ruler, a protractor, three rubbers (not the barber’s sort), a compass and his Dad’s old slide rule. In his blazer, he had two Blue Ribbon wafers with twisted ends, a gigantic biro which had seven different colour options, and a large white handkerchief with one post-breakfast bogie already encrusting the centre. He was probably ready for anything, but he felt more like a self-conscious prat.
And he was.
He didn’t see anybody at all for the first sodden mile, and this gave him time to relive the nightmare of choosing his uniform. His mother had received a number of welfare vouchers which could be exchanged for the requisite clothes at recognised retailers and she intentionally chosen the swankiest shop in town to begin her search. The shop staff were absolutely askance when his mother flourished the vouchers in front of their toffee noses and they made her pay for her unprecedented audacity by encircling Kelvin as if he were an exhibit in a penny museum. His eggshell shyness did not respond well to this ordeal and he would always remember those twenty long minutes trying on different sized garments, while his chubby face went explosively crimson, his puppy fat bare legs trembled for release, and the rows of soulless eyes silently ridiculed him.
But the summer holiday as a whole had gone quite well, probably because he knew it was his last one before the ‘big’ school and he had to make the most of it. He’d regularly walked down to the foreshore, through the museum gardens with their meandering paths, duck ponds, Victorian drinking fountains and stone built Regency Halls, past the parked Ford Zodiac’s, Sunbeam Rapiers and 2 stroke Saab’s, to the clamorous world of amusement arcades, deck chairs and shell fish stalls. Indeed, over the six-week break he’d managed to accumulate £6. 10s. 6d. in pennies and three penny bits by skilfully playing the fruit machines and discovering their secrets.
He’d also managed to keep in sporadic contact with one or two friends from primary school, and they spent some quality time sailing model yachts on the local mere, rolling Corgi toys in the gutters, burying treasure on the beach, and digging pits for visitors to fall into. He kept one set of model cars in their original boxes, wrapped generously in tissue paper and buried deeply amongst his string vests in the chest of four drawers. They received a pious yearly inspection, and were then sold for a song in 1984 to fuel a transient interest in Yoga books.
For his birthday he received a ‘Binatone’ transistor radio which boasted three wavebands and over a hundred stations from all over the world. This was entirely true, but two or three stations invariably shared the same position on the tuner, so he always listened to the new Radio One on a background of German news broadcasts and distant classical music. It only added to the thrill, however, when he first heard ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ by the Rolling Stones; its throbbing base line cutting through the white noise and wavering foreign tones, like a fall of mortar shells.

Mad Dogs and Englishmen…
The town where Kelvin lived is said to enjoy one of the best views in Europe, as the bay sweeps around golden sands, fading Victoriana and a colourful harbour, towards the most magnificent, towering headland, and its Neapolitan reflection in the rock strewn sea beneath. There are many vantage points to the south, including dozens of oak benches dedicated by past visitors, and a variety of shelters with strange oriental embellishments.
But as the years passed by, Kelvin noticed how quickly people turned away from the wonderful view, and reverted to observing each other. They rested their backs on the cast iron railings or perched at right angles on the ends of seats, and watched ordinary human beings walking by. They watched and they watched, and they watched.
In fact, one day a middle-aged couple hauled a heavy steel bench completely around, so that they could ignore the annual regatta, and monitor the patrons of a nearby café.
People were unnaturally sociable, Kelvin thought.

“Oi! Look at this! It’s Andy Capp!” commented some eloquent intellectual behind him, breaking into his reverie.
“Bloody hell! He looks more like Andy Pandy with that haircut.”
The rain ran down the gutters and pricked his bare knees.
It was Kelvin’s first contact with the older boys at the school, and for a further ten minutes he gritted his teeth as the pithy insults followed him down the road towards the winding school drive, and his stomach churned. By then, other victims had come into view and he was able to hide gratefully amongst them as they all slid down the hill like an unstoppable green anaconda on its way to the jungle. He spotted a few familiar faces in the windswept yard which helped to calm his nerves, but his fried bread breakfast came back to haunt him with a vengeance when the bell went, and his leaden legs turned involuntarily towards the big, arched door, with its huge guarding puddle.
They filed up the worn concrete steps for the first time and the new boys sat cross-legged on the ancient parquetry floor of the assembly hall, while endless hordes gathered behind them and the teachers mounted the dais in front, exhibiting their weird side show variations. An aggressive man who looked like a cross between Benito Mussolini and Groucho Marx then silenced the whispering mass with one rabid look, and Kelvin’s first day at secondary school had begun.
The premises had originally been used as the Boy’s Grammar School, but a 1960’s modernist glasshouse now had that privilege, leaving Kelvin and his fellow morons to take over the stage. It was really a bigger version of the primary school, with Victorian redbrick solidity, soaring Gothic arches, flag poles, sash windows, green slimy outside toilets and a mysterious frieze running along the front of the building which served to trap wayward tennis balls. The population included most of the local council estate boys, and a number of notorious miscreants from the nearby care hostel for ‘difficult children’, who hung about in non-regulation bright striped blazers like felons in a rock breaking yard. There were three vicious fights on the first day of term (old grudges by the look of it), and Kelvin noted how quickly the other boys packed around the combatants ten deep to ensure cowards could not escape. The routine noise and brutality was appalling.
After the assembly, Kelvin clumped up to his appointed classroom, occupied one of the tiered wooden desks, and inspected its contents while he waited for the master to arrive. There was a multifarious collection of grimy reading books, old rulers with bits chewed off, broken pencils and sweet wrappers. This particular desk had a remarkable green and yellow collage plastered under the desk lid which rather mystified him, until the boy who shared the double desk told him that his brother used to empty his nose onto it every morning for four years.
“Jacklin”
“Yes sir”
“Jessop”
“Yes sir”
“J-----”
“Yes sir” Kelvin replied,
There were to be about 750 calls of the morning register during his stay at the school, and that was as near as any of them got to a conversation in lesson time. There were no sophisticated seminars or tutorials in those days, only direct teaching followed by questions and answers to assess retention, but then they all shared the ridiculously old-fashioned view that the teacher would probably know more about his specialist subject than the witless pupil. Their form master was both good-natured and able, only bridling when they corrupted his name (Aubrey) to ‘Strawberry’.
In order to minimise his exposure to the cut-throat playtime society, Kelvin enrolled at the library, signed up for the chess group and assessed the lower playground for quieter areas. ‘Strawberry’ appreciated his perspective straight away and encouraged his scholarly pretensions throughout the fours years he spent at the school; kindly calling him a “slow developer” when he failed the ’12 plus’. Beyond school, his semi-detached relationships continued as before, and for a while his studious nature was almost threatened by associations with a few anarchic elements. One ‘bad’ lad was banned from calling for him at home, so they arranged a bizarre alternative whereby the friend would stand at the end of Kelvin’s street and give three long blasts on his dad’s bugle. He knew, of course, that he wouldn’t have to pay the ultimate price for his growing delinquency because the death penalty had been abolished in 1965 (and anyway he was now the school chess captain).
His sex education continued unabated, and on one occasion his nefarious friend asked him if he “ever got a bone in it”, before they resumed their karate chopping of some discarded tiles in the undergrowth. He later showed Kelvin some nude women in a dog-eared, stained magazine, and explained that their completely smooth nether regions ‘were filled with wax’ to outwit Mary Whitehouse and the censors. By 1968 Kelvin’s plodding studiousness finally prevailed and he was given a second class passport to do his ‘O’ levels at the local ‘Tech’.
But by then more important things were happening at home.
For a while, his mother’s frightening monthly rages continued, and he could clearly recall being locked in the shed at the back of the house, while the young seedlings he’d been cultivating indoors were being flung into the rockery. She habitually regaled people with extravagant stories about his idleness (he didn’t do enough gardening she said), the disgusting state of his underpants, and his disloyal nature. Even the man who collected their monthly insurance premium was not spared the full, unexpurgated account - his fixed professional grin slowly cracking around the edges as he sidled towards the bolted door.
Then in the mid 1960’s his mother tried to rebuild her social life with weekly visits to an upmarket nightclub, and regular outings with a variety of eligible men. He quite enjoyed the idea of having a father at last and sometimes sat on the staircase listening to their conversations and wondering what was happening during the lengthy silences. But after a while it became clear that none of the men were “trustworthy” enough and his mother was “too frightened” to enter into another relationship. He contented himself with looking at old car magazines, and working out how long it would take him to save up for an ‘E’ type Jag if he got a part-time job after school.
His irrational cravings began to reach out of the house like the hand of a drowning man.
By 1966, at about the time of England’s World Cup victory and his first paper round, the situation suddenly worsened and Kelvin found the monthly blips becoming permanent problems. His mother began to spend longer and longer periods in bed, complaining of vague female problems, while projecting blame consistently in his direction for her alarming physical deterioration.
“You’ve worn me out” she whispered.
He suggested the doctor, but she emotionally refused, sending him instead to the chemist for strange parcels which were handed over with querulous looks, but no comment.
It then became an exercise in wish fulfilment, as every evening he walked home from school hoping that she would have got up during the day, and that the windows would not be dark as he rounded the corner with a queasy feeling rising in his gut. But more and more she remained in bed and the breakfast pots would stare at him through the half-light, as he drew the curtains and walked upstairs past the picture of the weeping urchin, and into the shadows of his mother’s bedroom. A sickly sweet smell would often meet him and like travelling on a macabre roulette wheel, he would wait to see if rage, muteness or tears greeted his inadequate hello. Then it would be down to the kitchen to select some tins for their tea, put on the telly and hope that ‘Blue Peter’ would nullify his thoughts with its cheerful faces, cardboard castles and licking pups. But the situation was becoming acute, and he couldn’t help his fourteen-year-old mind contorting and twisting into a revulsion which he knew was morally wrong, but seemed unavoidable. It was as if a probing blackness was surrounding him as he squatted in front of the smoking fire every night, looked through the 40-watt smog at the tatty remnants of their 1950’s heyday, and sensed the building blocks of his mind being inexorably rearranged.
The skies seemed full of rain.
By 1967, Kelvin’s mother was almost totally bedfast and still refusing to see the doctor. She had told some story or other to the neighbours, and they contented themselves with occasional civilised enquiries at the door, and probably intense speculation at home. One neighbour had even been duped into shifting a single bed downstairs so that his mother (who was then only 45) could sleep permanently in the living room, without this apparently raising further alarm. Kelvin just drifted along with a combination of childish naivety, the conditioned fear of defying his mother’s wishes, and the even greater terror of hearing the worst if professionals were brought in.
It was an impossible position and his mother moved from white-faced stoicism and secrecy, to appalling candour as she began describing her problems in stark revolting detail. She was “haemorrhaging badly”, “bleeding both ways”, and was having to use a bucket as a toilet downstairs. She was scared of what the doctor might tell her and she was getting through a pack of large external sanitary towels every day (thus Kelvin’s trips to the chemist). It reached crisis point during the Christmas of 1967, when they spent the holiday in a daze of alternating anger and despair, and she gathered him into her arms to finally admit:
“I think I’ve got cancer”
A neighbour sent for their old doctor and immediately tests were arranged, revealing within a short space of time that his mother had a non-cancerous growth in her womb. They had apparently been sharing the agonies of the last two years for no good reason, and a hysterectomy would set things right. They both breathed a sigh of relief and Kelvin reflected on how terribly callused he‘d become to suffering. Little did he know, that the problems were in many ways just beginning.
The time his mother spent in hospital was like a morbid religious holiday, as he hung warily between feelings of loneliness, and newly discovered independence. After a short recuperation, his mother came home and for a while there was honeymoon period of mutual sensitivity, but it wasn’t long before he noticed some strange changes occurring in her personality. She was deeply immersed in the whole experience of illness, and didn’t really seem to expect full physical recovery, or the resumption of a normal life. She was extremely negative about her general prospects, saying she was totally “worn out”, and seemed to take little interest in anything but her ordeal.
“I’ll soon be dead” she commented in the morning.
“I’m finished” she said at bedtime.
As the months went by, she spent most of her time sat in the fireside chair, with eyes closed and arms crossed. She avoided doing any household chores and the house became untidy, cluttered and dirty. She firmly believed that her problems were a combination of physical incapacity, congenital ‘nerves’ or acts of unchangeable fate, and any implications that she was experiencing psychological problems would be greeted with massive temper loss, embarrassing scenes, threats and tears. She finally trained other people to leave the idea well alone.
The rain beat against the windows.
“I’ve given up” she said. “I’m jiggered.”
Kelvin was at this time old enough to be rather looking forward to a more self-sufficient, freedom loving lifestyle than was possible in the family home – bringing him into inevitable conflict with his mother. Some of their exchanges would never be forgotten as she went scarlet with rage, called him every name in the book and attempted to bombard him with blows as he scrambled out of the house. She waylaid every neighbour, friend and acquaintance to update them on his perfidy, and harangued his stunned friends on the doorstep if they were ill-advised (or curious) enough to call for him. He retained indelible images of his mother with her feet up on the chipped, 1930’s tiled mantle piece, surrounded by unopened mail order catalogue parcels and mountains of magazines, picking the dead skin off her shins and asking him to turn the telly off for her, because she’d “had enough of that tripe”. She seemed to love the miserable silence and razor tension that ensued, while to him it was like a swirling black hole which was slowly swallowing him up.
“I haven’t the strength to go on” she said one day. “I’m……..”
“Finished” he unwisely interjected.
“Smack!” came the response, as she leapt across the room like a kangaroo and landed a smart right-handed slap to his temple.

Mad as Hell
One rainy day Kelvin had done something to offend his mother, and she charged after him like a rhino through to the kitchen, her eyes wild with fury, screaming abuse, raining slaps around his defensive arms, mad as Hell. His first impulse was to escape into the garden and just hang around outside until she’d cooled down, but for some reason the door was locked. As he wrestled with the handle and fiddled with the key, he could feel further blows stinging the back of his head and neck. Multiplying and getting harder. Much harder.
Like a cornered animal, he turned around and fought, pushing her hard against the old washing machine. He heard her gasp as he made for cover upstairs, and as he passed her astonished face, he instinctively knew that something had changed. The sitting duck was no longer sitting, and temper had found its place, like all things. The physical attacks were finished.
He had grown up.

The boy is the father of the man.

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 18.09.2009

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