Biography, Autobiography, Old Steve of Scarborough, North Yorkshire, United Kingdom

1. My father had taken up breeding Budgerigars and playing Table Tennis and both hobbies took him out at night and weekends, providing, I suspect, much valuable drinking time which I swear my mother never latched on to, or if she did, she was so naive and adamant that her husband didn't drink, like the rest of his rotten family, that she shut off from it, while it certainly gave us kids some breathing space. Also he would spend long hours, when at home, in his 'aviary' and I would be sent miles to buy birdseed and what ever else he wanted. How he didn't choke the poor little buggers to death with that pipe of his I will never know. They say that passive smoking is bad for lung cancer, well if that were strictly true then I, along with many others, should have been dead a long time ago. He also, according to my mother, spent many hours teaching me how to build models. That was not true. He spent many hours building model airplanes and I was allowed to watch. Shortly after that he and my mother took up Ballroom Dancing and that left me and my sister to baby-sit the youngest, who turned up when I was ten, and spend long hours alone at home, doing homework and taking ourselves off to bed at the specified time, while they would come home at goodness knows what times. There was nothing particularly new in that as we had always been left but it intensified when I was a teenager and became, according to them, more responsible. Anyhow it did have one thing going for it; at least we could start having people in, if only secretly and for short periods.

2. About this time I had managed to survive and get over the 'boil' stage, which, at the time, seemed to go on forever and was very painful and distressing. Many of my peers suffered from acne, ranging from mild to severe and many had shown no outward signs of anything, but I was one of the few who developed boils and in my case quite severely. I still have scars at the back of my neck where they were lanced and I had them in my hair, on my face, on my back and backside, in my nose and between my legs and often two or three at a time and all were very painful and you can imagine the problems they created at school. To start with my mother would not allow me time off. Secondly they were often not adequately covered over because proper dressings cost money and so lint and tape had to be sufficient. That and two other generous concessions; I was fed Sulphur Tablets, as an old wives remedy and you can imagine my popularity when the gas they generated escaped and secondly I was subject to untold agony as my mother would crudely try and draw them by placing a heated bottle over them, so that as it cooled, hopefully, it sucked the boil into the bottle neck. It rarely worked. One teacher, an art teacher who's name escapes me, threw me out of his class because I was making a stink and had a boil that had burst and was running down my neck and had to be dabbed continuously with my handkerchief and his parting words were that I should get something decent to eat then I would not rot away is his classes. But on a much happier note my healthy interest in girls continued to develop and some of the girls my sister brought home were very attractive and as long as my parents didn't realise I was interested in them then my father would refrain from taking the 'mickey' and my mother would not do everything within her power to break it up.

3. I was rapidly reaching the end of my school career and couldn't wait to break free and had all the summer holidays to look forward to, or so I thought. Not according to my father who didn't care what I did as long as I did something and it all happened and came about, after that, by accident. I don't know how or why but something must have come up during a conversation or discussion with one of my teachers, Chucky, the woodwork and metalwork teacher, and a few days later he gave me the name and address of a friend of his who, he said, was looking for an apprentice. Now I knew little about trades but in those days it was considered essential that the middle working class should be tradesmen with a good sound apprenticeship behind them and seeing as my attempts to get into the upper working class, as a draughtsman, had failed, I took it up and, as has always been the case throughout my life, I set off, alone, to find this guy.

4. I confess that I still cried a lot in those days as I looked about me and saw how everyone else seemed to belong and to have untold backing for everything they attempted or wanted to do, while I felt so alone and seemed to have no one. I have gone throughout my life feeling lonely despite the fact that I know that I am now surrounded by people who genuinely care for me and I still get twinges of loneliness when things are not going quite right. That was another reason why later I set out to discover how this sort of thing happens and where these emotions come from and how they can be corrected and put right and how it is possible to create a tranquil, self sufficient, calm, peaceful and self-confident person, which I certainly am today and which later, the secrets of which, I will be only too pleased to share with you.

5. As confessions seem to be the order of the day I think I should tell of an incident that happened during my school and early teenage days. Whenever I got the chance I would go out during the evenings and meet up with my pals. We had little to do, living in a village and with little money, so we would go and play on the moors, with the girls if we could persuade them, but if not we would go and pinch apples, among other things. There was a particularly good orchard bordering onto the moors and each evening the guy, who lived alone in the cottage, would come out and stand in front of his door for a few minutes before going down the garden and into the outside loo. That was our time to strike, as he could not see us from the cottage, as he would do normally, or from the loo with the door shut, so in we went before making our escape with as much as we could carry. We did this faily regularly when the fruit was on the trees but he must have either wised up or heard us for one night he dived out of the loo and caught one of my mates. Having relieved him or his plunder he then cuffed him rather savagely around the head and shouted what he would do to us all if we came back. We would certainly be back. He had hurt one of us and taken back apples that were rightfully ours, or so we bravely declared among ourselves when out of harms way. A few nights later we crept back and decided that we would make our way round, under cover of the humps and hollows and long moor land grass, to a point where we could wait until he went into the loo and then throw stones onto the roof and make our escape across the open moor land. We crept up to the actual back wall of the loo but instead of throwing stones listened; fascinated as he broke wind and dropped whatever he was trying to get rid of. Sad, isn't it? But not as sad as it was to get. We decided to withdraw and return the following evening that little bit sooner, and open the wooden door very slightly in order not only to hear more but also to perhaps see something. We did both and to cut a long story short the next time we went back we not only opened the door but once he was inside one of my mates ran to an outhouse, close by, against which a long brush was standing, and returned with it. We looked at each other and at a nod rove the small door open, shoved the brush in the soft stuff and scrubbed his bare backside with it. We legged it like bats out of hell and never went back just in case he had set traps for us.

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