(more from The Autobiography)
Before we begin, let me just say that the photograph above, in case you were wondering, is Your Poet as a beautiful blondie perched outside an emporium which, I presume, was selling some of the confectionary produced by my Pa’s factory. But to business:
As mentioned previously, when I was a baby my Ma outsourced what should have been her motherly chores to a crone from the village, an old woman who may or may not have been head of the local coven. True to form, as I became older the crone was substituted, while Ma continued to ignore most of her responsibilities and put me in the hands (literally, at times) of a governess.
I have consulted with my agent and he has consulted with the lawyers to find out what I can and cannot say about my experiences during this period in relation to the behaviour of the governess(es), and I am more or less clear about the boundaries I cannot cross, and I have to say that this means I have to skirt around some of the juicier bits of those experiences, in case, apparently, any of the ladies involved are still alive and at all litigious. That they would be well into their 90s and beyond if they are still breathing seems to be beside the point as far as the legal people are concerned, while it strikes me that their fears are utterly groundless. It is not as if I will be using real names, and half the time people reading this think I am making it all up anyway. But I pay my advisors good money to advise, so I may as well take the advice for now, although I might test the limits of their boundaries, as it were, just for the fun of it, if I can be arsed.
So, having got all of that out of the way, let me introduce, entering from the wings in a rather fetching twin-set and pearls and a calf-length skirt and sensible shoes, all topped by a head with hair lacquered to the consistency of masonry and spectacles a female Buddy Holly would have been proud of . . . . . let us call her, since I cannot use her real name, Miss Governess from Hell #1. That rolls off the tongue quite nicely, I think.
Because my parents considered me too precious to attend the local kindergarten and mix with other mini-people (at least, I assume that was their reasoning) this she-demon had, as far as I can remember, the majority care of me from toddlerdom for about 3 or 4 years. It is obvious to me now that this dreadful woman resented my precociousness, and hated in particular my habit of correcting her grammar and pronunciation, and my refusing to waste my time with Janet and John and Spot the dog and Ladybird books when all I wanted to do was to get stuck into The Iliad and Robinson Crusoe, and she was adept at inflicting physical pain while leaving no visible evidence in the way of bruises or cuts or inadvertently leaving a severed limb laying around. Even my parents would have noticed a stray leg, probably. But before you quail at the mention of physical abuse and the like, please remember I have an awful habit of exaggerating things, so probably all that really happened was that she would not let me leave the table until I had eaten every Brussels sprout on my plate and would send me to bed three times a day, locking the nursery door so that escape was impossible. And as one can tell from this photograph she had very strange ideas regarding the cuisine suitable for a growing child; this was her idea of a
sandwich. (But was I not cute? SO cute!)
It is actually quite painful for me to go back in time and recall this woman, even though I cannot remember much and even what I can remember may not be true, so all I can usefully say more is Thank Goodness she was run over by a bus one afternoon while she had locked me in the nursery so she could go to the village hairdresser to have her hair re-concreted. I am SO glad she did not take me with her or Your Poet may not have survived to bless the world with so many great poems but instead have perished in the twisted steel and mangled remains of a 1950s-style infant’s perambulator. Great mercies! And of course it is sad that anyone should lose their lives in that way (boohoo etc.) but in this instance it is, from my childish point of view, not THAT sad.
I believe I was 6 or 7 years of age when the aforementioned demon was replaced by Miss Governess from Hell #2. This is where the legal people began to get the wind up, and the text I gave them to read had so much blacked out (“redacted” is, I believe, the current fashionable term) that there was virtually nothing left worth reading. As evidence, I give you the following example:
I think one has to admit that this is quite ridiculous. It may be all very well for the “modern” poet to be obscure and require the reader to try and work out what they are trying to say, but I very much doubt if my readers would put up with this sort of thing.
Anyway, what happened behind those blacked-out bits went on for some 3 or 4 years, and to say that this and similar behaviours were certainly an education, albeit not the sort of education that Ma and perhaps Pa had envisioned for their offspring, would be disingenuous, if that is the correct word. And mention of education leads me to introduce the other player in the story of my early years. I should probably have brought him in a little earlier, but this autobiography-writing business is a complicated affair, much more complicated than I had originally envisaged. Sometimes I feel like jacking the whole thing in, but I shall plod on, for now at least.
Mr. O’Flanagan, who insisted I call him “Sir”, was hired to be my private tutor – presumably on the grounds that one could not expect a mere governess to be capable of teaching a child complicated things like sums and reading, and I was still deemed too precious to sacrifice on the altar of a state education. That I had read Lucretius, Swift and all of Agatha Christie, and had a decent understanding of algebra and calculus by the time I was 8, while “Sir” could barely master the language of the Daily Mail and was quite hopeless at multiplication – well, I say no more.
But I think I will have a break now, and deal with him next time. Him and her, to be exact, because they turned out to be quite a pair when they put their heads (and other parts of their anatomy) together..
James Henderson
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