It was a surprise and delight for me to find Duncan posting to this Board.
Our relationship goes back further than either of us would care to admit, right back to the days that were.
We both attended one of the most respected schools in our English town. A school which produced reams of achievers like a combine-harvester of the soul. It sowed the embryonic seeds of a major UK politician, world class musicians, in the classics and out, and a particularly amusing mimic who went on to write comedy scripts for some of the UK’s most popular shows.
I was not a JW at the time. Just a quiet and pensive young man who was already world-weary by the time I was seventeen and who spent most of his semesters in a drunken haze, or even worse. The wildcat who resisted civilized training, I would cunningly disrupt classes by encouraging the more innocent students into out-of-character behavior, and bought chaos to the rigid establishment of the English school order by wearing what I wanted, saying what I wanted and doing what I wanted, all at the wrong times. Frequently caned, I wore my stripes with a comfort that the apostle Paul may have written about with a sense of pride, were he a serial-killer rather than a Saint.
One breathless and blistering summers day, as LSD was allowing me the telescopic ability to count the number of hairs protruding from our English Masters nose right from the back of the classroom ( my usual haunt ) , he broke his usual examination on the vagaries of John Keats poetry, a poet that incidentally he frequently referred to as ‘a right little pansy’, to announce that something quite extraordinary was about to happen in the life of a student named Duncan. It was obvious even in my slow-motion world that he was mightily upset and for the first time in around eighteen months I sat up and listened.
I admired this teacher and his opinions. It was he who had intervened on more than one occasion as I was about to be expelled from the school, by pleading that mine was the case of a developing Ezra Pound and that one day the school would be proud of me. Mind you he did suggest that I bugger off to France for a while for private tuition after I freshened up the Common Room by turning the fire hose onto a least sixty bleary-eyed students one Monday morning.
Now Duncan was several years younger than myself, a slightly built, intense and interesting young man with a thatch of curly blond hair, azure blue eyes and a remarkable gift for words. As my own vocabulary at the time contained about ten words and three phrases; words like ‘Jazz’, ‘that’s not 'e' major ya daft sod’, and ‘Mum, I’m in Amsterdam so I wont need feeding this evening’, I was impressed. Little did I know at the time, that our Duncan’s prodigious talents for word-grabbing were a product of many years of student talks in a Kingdom Hall coupled with a natural talent. Lord how he could talk, and witty with it.
The English Master, referring to Duncan by name and extolling his virtues as an exceptional student, then went on to mystify us all with the news that Duncan was leaving school to become a window washer and to work full time for his ‘Jehovah’ religion. He was barely fifteen. A few students tittered, one particularly dim-witted lad cried out ‘What’s a Jehovah?’, but most of us fell silent. Duncan has committed a crime against education and was not even going to get caned for it. He was parodied by Mr. Lxxx as an example not to be respected, something that might happen to us if we were not just an average failure, but a complete evolutionary mistake. Even years later after I became a JW, he would lament the fate of Duncan as he poured more stout down his gullet than was good for him.
I saw Duncan just once in the weeks that followed. It was a grey and dismal aching November afternoon, I was returning from a sketching hike with cherry-red ears and a few cherry-red blisters in boot, and I spotted Duncan in the newly built housing estate that was begging to savage more meadows than was healthy, with a young lady walking from door-to-door, swinging a maroon leather briefcase in a most nonchalant manner. He seemed to be, judging from his body language, trying to woo her, and though I had no doubts that given his silver tongue he could easily accomplish this, she did not seem to be very impressed.
Part two will follow in a few days, unless of course I hear from Duncan’s lawyers.
HS
Hey! Now you are an outie, you can dance too!