‘I can show you nothing you do not know, I can show you nothing you have not seen.’
– Brion Gysin, ‘Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success’
Jimmy Savile was my scout leader, Gary Glitter a teacher at school. You may think this is in bad taste but it was nothing compared to my education back then or the way that the archbishop pardoned each and every bastard who ever touched kids up or took pictures of them to sell. One art teacher was excused because of mental health issues but we just thought he was mental, the way he swore at us and slapped desks with the metal swords we had made for a heraldry project. His head of department resigned when found with an under age boy modelling for him nude, but no-one cared as long as we could still ogle our young maths teacher fresh out of college, clothed in fresh ideas, optimism and a mini-skirt that rode up when she bent down to retrieve the pencils we ‘accidentally’ dropped.
Savile once came to the hospital where I worked, I saw him striding to the radio station studio, didn’t think anything of it. We had food fights in the tunnels and cheap beer in the staff social club but porters were beneath the nurses we desired as well as the doctors we ran errands for. Only by sticking together could we have fun and a say in how things were run. Too many others were up themselves, never bothering to think or act independently, reliant on others to keep things ticking over while they earnt even more money on their days off, doing private work.
Abuse and sexism everywhere. Psychiatry was hip, nurses there were young dudes who didn’t care, quite happy to restrain patients and instigate courses of shock therapy, new experimental drugs, whilst mothers delivered babies as instructed, not as planned, in Maternity, just along a glass corridor. We mostly got on with the cleaners and technicians, kept ourselves to ourselves but knew the place’s underside, what went on in the animal research centre next door, had experienced how hard it was to put someone you knew, who’d gone off shift only moments before, into the mortuary, label on his big toe, possessions in a plastic bag.
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© Rupert M Loydell
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