All at Sea

Seventeen.
I was seventeen and suddenly I was aware,aware that I knew nothing, that I was ignorant. It came to me in a flash like waking from a dream or surfacing from a deep dark pool. In all my life I had never travelled further than Cleethorpes on the east coast. I didn’t even know where I was on the map .I knew I was in the East Midlands because it said so on the side of the local bus. My relationship with my father had been deteriorating for quite some time ,as I grew older he seemed to go out of his way to alienate me. I suppose it was all part of growing up, in those days nobody explained puberty, it was a taboo subject, we had to find out for ourselves. The young men coming home from the war filled our heads with all kinds of outlandish yarns and being young and gullible we believed most of it. From my early days at school I had been an avid reader, my mother found it quite amusing that I would sit with my head in a book chuckling to myself over some comical chapter,but father could only say “What’s that rubbish you’re reading now?”  When I sat with my head pressed against the wireless listening to a special programme he would switch the set off with the usual words, “You don’t want to be listening to that rubbish”.  The council house I lived in with my brothers and sisters was quite modern with hot and cold running water and the outside toilet joined on to the house, it also had a bath and a coal fired boiler in the kitchen. On washdays this was a restricted area and took on the appearance of a Dickensian workhouse laundry. Although the house was wired ,for reasons of economy my bedroom didn’t have a light bulb and so each night when the sky was clear I placed my book on the windowsill and read by moonlight. Within those pages was another world, Tarka the Otter, King Solomon’s mines, The Just so stories. Just William seemed to mimic the life of myself and my little rag arsed band of friends. The writings of Dickens seemed to ring a bell, I accepted poverty as the norm. Came the day of my life changing event, I had worked a double shift at the local glass factory and presented mother with the grand sum of £4 .16 shillings of which I received half a crown pocket money, It was called tipping up. The average wage for a labourer at that time was about £5 .5 shillings and I made the mistake of pointing out to my father that I was earning almost as much as him. That night he came home from his usual visit to the pub and immediately began to slap me around the face, not hard, not violent just gently on each cheek. And so slap you think slap that you slap are better than me slap. I was furious and for a brief moment contemplated punching him hard on the nose but seeing the horror on my mothers face I went upstairs to bed with tears streaming down my face.
Enough was enough, the next day I cut an ad out of the newspaper and posted it off. JOIN THE NAVY AND SEE THE WORLD screamed the headline,why not I thought, it has got to be an improvement on this life.