I loved sucking my thumb as a toddler, and had a fabulous yellow wool comfort blanket with satin trim which I would push under my nose while I sucked. To this day I still have an indentation permanently embossed into my skin where the thumb rested on my incisor. I suppose my parents realised this was going too far when I started waving goodbye to my friends with four fingers while the thumb remained resolutely in my mouth. It was clearly time to wean me off the thumb.
My mum first decided to get rid of my blanket, and took the short-sharp-shock approach: I was simply told I was too old for it now and it had been thrown away. I was utterly devastated and declared myself unable to sleep at night without it. Since no blanket was returned to me I was forced to take matters into my own hands, and I waited until my mum's back was turned and crept into the kitchen drawer to steal some scissors, retiring to my bedroom and cut a blankie-sized piece of terry towelling out of the undersheet on my bed.
I'm not sure how I thought my crime would go undetected. I suppose my infant mind imagined that the beds made themselves and that my mother never had call to go near them. Anyway, the destruction was quickly discovered and I was severely punished. As this was the 1970s, when one didn't go throwing things out simply because they'd been slashed by an infant with scissors, my mum sewed my new blankie back into the undersheet and there it remained until way into my late teens, an uncomfortable ridge under my heel when the 16-year-old me was trying to sleep.
Once I had finally grown used to the absence of the blanket, my mum exposed me to the horror that is Die Geschichte vom Daumenlutscher, the terrible tale from Shockheaded Peter in which a young boy is told not to suck his thumb while his mother goes to the shops. I recall identifying with the boy in the story very well, and even feeling slightly cheered to see him finally submitting to his addiction and sucking his thumb, so it struck me with an extraordinary level of horror when a skinny old man with a giant pair of scissors broke into the house and snipped off both thumbs as a punishment (for some reason, my brain believes this story was told on Rainbow, but that seems unlikely).
I went to bed that night utterly horrified, convinced against all reason that a man would break into my room and cut my thumbs off with scissors. My dad came back from work late that evening and went to kiss me goodnight, surprised to find me still awake, and I pleaded with him to leave the lights on in case the scissor man came in and tried to amputate my thumbs.
I remeber quite clearly the confused look on his face, and my mum's shrug as she stood at the bedroom door trying not to look sheepish. I don't think I heard any more Shockheaded Peter stories after that.
[Time: 1980]
Thursday 8 October 2009
PEOPLE: Stuart Colefaks
In the third year of Middle School, when I would be around 10, a school trip to Wales was announced. Our math teacher Mr Nicholson was to work out the sleeping arrangements and asked us to write down the name of the person we most wanted to share with, and the name of the person we least wanted to share with. An optimal solution could thus be calculated.
It took me no time at all to work out who to put as my friend, Alistair Howtown. It was also no trouble working out who I least wanted to share with: the poisonous dwarf Stuart Colefaks. I had known Stuart since primary school and he had always been a vile and filthy creature (for those unacquainted with him, you need only think of Golem from the Peter Jackson movies). He also had a huge patch of scabby baldness on one side of his head, where some horrible accident had burned off his hair - the unpleasant, violent and essentially stupid nature of his personality meant this was not a cause hatred, not pity.
Anyway, long story short Mr Nicholson got the names on my piece of paper muddled up, and so while Alistair Howtown and everyone else got to sleep in dorms with their friends, I was the only one out of sixty kids who appeared to have put Stuart at the top of my list and so we ended sharing a set of bunk beds in a tiny room together. I still wonder to this day if Mr Nicholson was being purposefully vindictive.
A cautious friendship was formed with Stuart during those four days, in which I learned to almost trust him. It seemed Stuart put on a facade of obnoxiousness in order to disguise his insecurities, and once he realised I wouldn't judge him for that he began to act more like a human. Things were going really well until one night when he wet the bed, a fact which Mr Nicholson swore me to secrecy and which I have faithfully kept a secret until this very day (to be fair, Mr Nicholson said "Don't tell your friends", not "Don't publish this in your blog in 23 years time").
For some reason, Stuart was convinced I would betray him and entertain my friends with tales of his noctural emissions (nothing was further from my mind. It wasn't entertaining, it was disgusting. I'd been in the bunk below). Stuart decided the best way to deflect the entirely absent accusations against him was by launching allegations against me, claiming I had wet my bed. This was an extraordinary way to behave and only drew attention to the truth, and I told him in no uncertain terms that if he kept talking like that I'd tell everyone he'd pissed on the mattress. This silenced him for the remainder of the holiday.
Back at school, we had an uneasy acquaintance and I don't recall much of significance passing between us. I have a vague memory of playing a game with him in sewing class, where there was a huge set of tiny drawers each with a different type of thread in them. The game he came up with was to select two drawers at random and see if the colours matched. Given the drawers existed solely to separate the different colours out I could see this was a futile game, but he was an extraordinarily stupid child who was regularly driven to violence and so it was just pleasing to find something peaceful to occupy him.
One day we had to bring in photographs of ourselves when we were younger for some sort of memory project. I had a typical photo of an apple-cheeked child happy at play, and was naturally fascinated to see what sort of beastly infant Stuart had mutated out of. To my great surprise the photo he presented was of Stuart with clean blond hair and an undamaged scalp, engaged in a scene of beatific joy building a sandcastle on the beach. I looked at the collection of urine-soaked bones holding out this photo for my inspection and saw for the first time that he had trouble at home: Stuart was not this way because this is what he chose to be, but because this was the best he could manage in horrible circumstances. The photo was the last remnant of a happier childhood he could only vaguely remember.
I expressed my suspicions to my mum, who had worked as a dinner lady at the primary school while we were there and had gathered enough gossip to fill three Memory Projects. She told Stuart's background as the story of a happy family torn apart by child abuse, violence, extreme poverty and all-pervading neglect. He was the Baby P of his generation. He was a bed wetter for a reason.
If I felt a pang of pity for Stuart then, this quickly evaporated in secondary school where he formed a gang with a number of other miscreants and set about abusing everyone and everything. He even tried bullying me, something I tended to ignore as I was a quiet teen, but I recall eventually snapping. One day outside the science block I was so pissed off with his petty slander that I grabbed him by the shoulders and bellowed a stream of abuse at him. I was five feet ten with a solid build, and he was the same tiny, dirty little shit he had always been. He ran away and never bothered me again.
Ultimately, while I was at university, Stuart was jailed for his involvement in drugs, and in around 2001 a rumour started circulating that he had killed himself in prison. The people I discussed this with seemed almost pleased that such a poisonous creature had removed itself from the world, but alas it turned out to be nothing more than a rumour.
That said, if you run his (non-obfuscated) name through the internet, there is no record of his existence.
It took me no time at all to work out who to put as my friend, Alistair Howtown. It was also no trouble working out who I least wanted to share with: the poisonous dwarf Stuart Colefaks. I had known Stuart since primary school and he had always been a vile and filthy creature (for those unacquainted with him, you need only think of Golem from the Peter Jackson movies). He also had a huge patch of scabby baldness on one side of his head, where some horrible accident had burned off his hair - the unpleasant, violent and essentially stupid nature of his personality meant this was not a cause hatred, not pity.
Anyway, long story short Mr Nicholson got the names on my piece of paper muddled up, and so while Alistair Howtown and everyone else got to sleep in dorms with their friends, I was the only one out of sixty kids who appeared to have put Stuart at the top of my list and so we ended sharing a set of bunk beds in a tiny room together. I still wonder to this day if Mr Nicholson was being purposefully vindictive.
A cautious friendship was formed with Stuart during those four days, in which I learned to almost trust him. It seemed Stuart put on a facade of obnoxiousness in order to disguise his insecurities, and once he realised I wouldn't judge him for that he began to act more like a human. Things were going really well until one night when he wet the bed, a fact which Mr Nicholson swore me to secrecy and which I have faithfully kept a secret until this very day (to be fair, Mr Nicholson said "Don't tell your friends", not "Don't publish this in your blog in 23 years time").
For some reason, Stuart was convinced I would betray him and entertain my friends with tales of his noctural emissions (nothing was further from my mind. It wasn't entertaining, it was disgusting. I'd been in the bunk below). Stuart decided the best way to deflect the entirely absent accusations against him was by launching allegations against me, claiming I had wet my bed. This was an extraordinary way to behave and only drew attention to the truth, and I told him in no uncertain terms that if he kept talking like that I'd tell everyone he'd pissed on the mattress. This silenced him for the remainder of the holiday.
Back at school, we had an uneasy acquaintance and I don't recall much of significance passing between us. I have a vague memory of playing a game with him in sewing class, where there was a huge set of tiny drawers each with a different type of thread in them. The game he came up with was to select two drawers at random and see if the colours matched. Given the drawers existed solely to separate the different colours out I could see this was a futile game, but he was an extraordinarily stupid child who was regularly driven to violence and so it was just pleasing to find something peaceful to occupy him.
One day we had to bring in photographs of ourselves when we were younger for some sort of memory project. I had a typical photo of an apple-cheeked child happy at play, and was naturally fascinated to see what sort of beastly infant Stuart had mutated out of. To my great surprise the photo he presented was of Stuart with clean blond hair and an undamaged scalp, engaged in a scene of beatific joy building a sandcastle on the beach. I looked at the collection of urine-soaked bones holding out this photo for my inspection and saw for the first time that he had trouble at home: Stuart was not this way because this is what he chose to be, but because this was the best he could manage in horrible circumstances. The photo was the last remnant of a happier childhood he could only vaguely remember.
I expressed my suspicions to my mum, who had worked as a dinner lady at the primary school while we were there and had gathered enough gossip to fill three Memory Projects. She told Stuart's background as the story of a happy family torn apart by child abuse, violence, extreme poverty and all-pervading neglect. He was the Baby P of his generation. He was a bed wetter for a reason.
If I felt a pang of pity for Stuart then, this quickly evaporated in secondary school where he formed a gang with a number of other miscreants and set about abusing everyone and everything. He even tried bullying me, something I tended to ignore as I was a quiet teen, but I recall eventually snapping. One day outside the science block I was so pissed off with his petty slander that I grabbed him by the shoulders and bellowed a stream of abuse at him. I was five feet ten with a solid build, and he was the same tiny, dirty little shit he had always been. He ran away and never bothered me again.
Ultimately, while I was at university, Stuart was jailed for his involvement in drugs, and in around 2001 a rumour started circulating that he had killed himself in prison. The people I discussed this with seemed almost pleased that such a poisonous creature had removed itself from the world, but alas it turned out to be nothing more than a rumour.
That said, if you run his (non-obfuscated) name through the internet, there is no record of his existence.
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