Open Journal #53
Open Journal #53
full collection link in my signature below
Things I Wasn’t Meant to Know, But Did Anyway
Two completely unrelated incidents, but not.
My family unit was a mother and a father, and three younger sisters.
Nothing had ever suggested otherwise.
I was going away to boarding school, and the organising took weeks. A uniform to buy. All the usual boyhood paraphernalia: socks, underpants, trousers, shirts — each with a name label carefully sewn in.
Books and pens, a wash bag, a dressing gown, favourite paperbacks, toothpaste. “Don’t forget this,” “Remember that.”
A big old suitcase in the days before wheels, the kind you had to lift with both hands. Closed only by sitting on it.
I was reading the checklist of things sent by the school and realised I needed my birth certificate and a letter from my parents to grant permission for the school to make medical decisions on my behalf in their absence.
I went to the bureau to find the large metal firebox where such things were kept safe and unlocked it. Passports and various papers and there was a bundle of birth certificates. I found mine, and the next one in the pile was my parents’ marriage certificate. 1962. Two years after I was born. Odd.
Oh, they must have lost the original, and this must be a copy. I told myself immediately. Not once did I think ‘hang on a minute, what the hell is going on here?’ Or ‘don’t be daft, if they got a copy, it wouldn’t be dated when they got the copy; it would still show the original date of marriage’. I just told myself a perfectly nonsensical explanation and just accepted it.
I never questioned it, or anyone. I put it out of my mind and never thought of it again. Did I at some unconscious level know that it spelt trouble and it was best avoided? Was I already so deft at applying denial to anything I didn’t want to think about that, I just believed anything I told myself?
Roll forward six months or so and I am at school. My friend and I are running across a huge hallway on the first floor between dorms. Two crimes are being committed: we are running indoors, which is unacceptable, and we were also doing that running over an expensive ancient Persian carpet that we were very much forbidden to step on. Boys will go around the edge, stepping on the wooden floor.
The headmasters wife fixed us with a terrifying glare and froze us on the spot. Chastised and reprimanded, we slunk to the edges of the corridor and looked suitably humbly guilty. In the process of telling us what horrific examples of young gentlemen we were, she fixed me with a haughty sneer and remarked, ‘Heaven only knows how your stepmother deals with a young hooligan such as you.’
Time froze. My confusion must have shown on my face, and there was a beat. As she recovered and mumbled how she was mixing me up with someone else, we were released and told under no circumstances to let her catch us doing something like this again.
There was a moment, a few years later. I am told this is not my mother. Mine died not long after I was born. We met, we got married. The rest is history. Now you know.
I had seen in comics how people had an idea or realised something, and a light bulb lit up over their head. Oh, I see. Ahhh, that explains it. It wasn’t a copy; it was the actual, original. She hadn’t made a mistake. Inadvertently slipping out a truth in the heat of the telling-off that wasn’t supposed to be said out loud.
Like Lois Lane missing the bleeding obvious because a man puts on spectacles, I had missed it. Or ignored it. Or told myself not to think about it. One of those things I wasn’t supposed to know but did anyway.
svf
full collection link in my signature below
Things I Wasn’t Meant to Know, But Did Anyway
Two completely unrelated incidents, but not.
My family unit was a mother and a father, and three younger sisters.
Nothing had ever suggested otherwise.
I was going away to boarding school, and the organising took weeks. A uniform to buy. All the usual boyhood paraphernalia: socks, underpants, trousers, shirts — each with a name label carefully sewn in.
Books and pens, a wash bag, a dressing gown, favourite paperbacks, toothpaste. “Don’t forget this,” “Remember that.”
A big old suitcase in the days before wheels, the kind you had to lift with both hands. Closed only by sitting on it.
I was reading the checklist of things sent by the school and realised I needed my birth certificate and a letter from my parents to grant permission for the school to make medical decisions on my behalf in their absence.
I went to the bureau to find the large metal firebox where such things were kept safe and unlocked it. Passports and various papers and there was a bundle of birth certificates. I found mine, and the next one in the pile was my parents’ marriage certificate. 1962. Two years after I was born. Odd.
Oh, they must have lost the original, and this must be a copy. I told myself immediately. Not once did I think ‘hang on a minute, what the hell is going on here?’ Or ‘don’t be daft, if they got a copy, it wouldn’t be dated when they got the copy; it would still show the original date of marriage’. I just told myself a perfectly nonsensical explanation and just accepted it.
I never questioned it, or anyone. I put it out of my mind and never thought of it again. Did I at some unconscious level know that it spelt trouble and it was best avoided? Was I already so deft at applying denial to anything I didn’t want to think about that, I just believed anything I told myself?
Roll forward six months or so and I am at school. My friend and I are running across a huge hallway on the first floor between dorms. Two crimes are being committed: we are running indoors, which is unacceptable, and we were also doing that running over an expensive ancient Persian carpet that we were very much forbidden to step on. Boys will go around the edge, stepping on the wooden floor.
The headmasters wife fixed us with a terrifying glare and froze us on the spot. Chastised and reprimanded, we slunk to the edges of the corridor and looked suitably humbly guilty. In the process of telling us what horrific examples of young gentlemen we were, she fixed me with a haughty sneer and remarked, ‘Heaven only knows how your stepmother deals with a young hooligan such as you.’
Time froze. My confusion must have shown on my face, and there was a beat. As she recovered and mumbled how she was mixing me up with someone else, we were released and told under no circumstances to let her catch us doing something like this again.
There was a moment, a few years later. I am told this is not my mother. Mine died not long after I was born. We met, we got married. The rest is history. Now you know.
I had seen in comics how people had an idea or realised something, and a light bulb lit up over their head. Oh, I see. Ahhh, that explains it. It wasn’t a copy; it was the actual, original. She hadn’t made a mistake. Inadvertently slipping out a truth in the heat of the telling-off that wasn’t supposed to be said out loud.
Like Lois Lane missing the bleeding obvious because a man puts on spectacles, I had missed it. Or ignored it. Or told myself not to think about it. One of those things I wasn’t supposed to know but did anyway.
svf