An August haze 1962

The wooden black board rubber that hit me on the head that day
was large
school issue.

The teacher said: “You’ll never get a job as long as you got a hole in your arse!”

He is not here today for me to tell him he was wrong. However, another teacher told me, I was so hopeless, I’d “End up sweeping the roads,”

He was right about that, I did!

Education by fear,
a belt round the ear,
gallows hopelessness,
and a Jamboree bag….

When we left school that day for the last time, I looked at the vast harvest fields, we were shadow figures on a Suffolk landscape then, we were lower than flesh and bone, doom was our home, killed by miscellaneous love, loved for what and by whom? So many cried under that august moon, where the love of God seemed dying.

The rooks no longer roost in the yellow barn down Frogs hall lane and my hopeless friends I will never see again, those who sang illiteracy’s tune under the august moon.

We paid a great price for just living in that august haze of 1962.

Now our history is trodden under foot by millions who betrayed us with a fountain pen, and the chimes of Big Ben and echoes from cathedral lowlands grown for those in that august haze that robbed us of days.

Somewhere in God’s memory we wait, and in-between life and death we hate, while the perpetrators of that superhuman inhumanity seek middle class absolution.

1 thought on “An August haze 1962”

  1. ;o)
    I was ‘slippered’, caned, hit with a board ruler and normal ruler, had chalk thrown at me and had my ear painfully twisted……and I was a good student!!!
    I was once sent for caning for yelling out in class….as was the lad that had jabbed the compass point into my rear end.
    When Rosie was young, being Rosie, she threw a milk bottle at her teacher because the teacher did not like her German accent.
    Happy days!

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