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I felt it whenever someone looked at me. ‘You are special,’ their eyes proclaimed. ‘You are not like the others.’ Gradually I came to understand the detestable implications of my misfortune. The law itself decreed me different from the rest. I remember vividly how on one election day I stared through my window at ordinary citizens walking freely, to the polling stations from which I
would be for ever barred. I would be classed with the convicted criminals and certified lunatics, disenfranchised, marginalised. When the servant brought my tea to the nursery, in a cup of delicate bone china, I performed the one act of rebellion open to me. I poured it into a big plebeian china mug, and I sobbed. Yet within me desperation grew, and a fierce resolution. Whatever anyone
said, I would never grow up to be Lord Stansgate. I would be myself. I would be Tony Benn.
George Simmers
Gori, the Georgian town where I grew up, was a place of literally constant drunken brawls. I learned to fight before I could walk, though I wish I’d learned to run before either. My father, Beso Djugashvilli, was out all day trying to drink more money than he’d earned as an incompetent cobbler while Mother boiled meals of leftover shoe leather while bravely attempting to nurture my emotional and artistic sensitivities by insisting I possessed some. So little love did I experience that imaginary friends soon metamorphosed into imaginary enemies and I have been bravely battling them ever since. Age four, tired of his ceaseless beatings, I threatened Father with a knife; surprised we were wealthy enough to own one, he sold it for drink. Dreaming of escape, I spent my schooldays persuading Mother to buy me into a seminary, resolving to overthrow God, that other negligent father.
Adrian Fry
My father would mock me mercilessly in front of my companions, rejoicing when I suffered pain, guffawing at my humiliations. At his absurd second wedding he almost killed me, stumbling like the drunk he was from table to table. My halfwitted brother he held in higher esteem. You would suppose that I was safe from abuse under my mother’s wing, but Olympias was a woman who loved snakes, being one herself. Eager to sleep with a god she would bed me and boast to her watching associates. Frequently I would vomit in disgust, but she would smother me in obscene kisses and laugh that I was still a modest little lion. All the anger I suppressed in my miserable boyhood finds expression today: I must slice through problems; I must conquer. Should I be taunted now, my temper is such that I could kill my best friend.
Frank McDonald
Now in mid-winter, my days were dreary and my food monotonous. Roasted venison; stewed venison; salted venison; cold venison . . . pickled herrings on Fridays provided the only relief. I became a martyr to chronic constipation. Hour after hour I sat straining on the cold stone latrine beneath the leads, the icy up-draught numbing my naked posteriors; day after day I knelt in the dank chapel on my poor raw knees praying for release from my inner torment. Occasionally, I went to the palace where Pa referred to me contemptuously as that ‘bloody Mary’‚ while his new Queen smiled spitefully and stabbed pins into the backs of my thin hands. One terrible day kindly old Sir Thomas More was beheaded. He’d once given me a white mouse as a pet but Pa threw the little creature into the fire. Calais is written on my heart, but Mousie’s squeaks haunt my dreams.
J.C.H. Mounsey
Yes, I know that some people have had unhappy childhoods — look at my two, Cain and Abel, hardly a comedy double act — but have you ever thought how it must be for me, having had no childhood at all? I mean, when people ask you where you were born, what are you supposed to say? I wasn’t born, I was sort of created in this garden place? Who’ll believe that? They start muttering about Professor Richard Dawkins and sidle away. And you don’t get to go to any school’s Old Boy reunions, mainly because you never went to any school. But I suppose the worst bit is at the swimming pool, when everyone points and laughs and shouts: ‘Oi! You’ve left your belly button at home!’ Blame the parents, everyone says these days. I wish I could!
Michael Cregan
Memories of the murder of my father, Darnley, are shrouded in fog. I could never understand that my mother and her lover had blown him up, but I was inconsolable when my mother disappeared in the night. I would hide in the graveyard to escape the vicious beatings or unwanted sexual favours meted out by innumerable regents and tutors. The old gravedigger used to warn me, ‘Elizabeth’s got her; her head will come off!’ Gory pictures of her severed head haunted my nightmares. My tutors were replaced or murdered so quickly that I had no means of knowing whether a steamy session with a whip-bearing male or a sweaty interlude with a serving woman was the norm. There was one certainty: it was my destiny to be stabbed. I waddled around the court in huge padded doublets lined with Latin grammars, nursing my sore rump and inwardly screaming, ‘Why?’
Shirley Curran
Competition No. 2574: Anagrammatic
You are invited to take a poem, or the fragment of a poem (please specify), and anagrammatise it to make a new poem (16 lines maximum). Entries to ‘Competition 2574’‚ by 4 December or email lucy@spectator.co.uk.
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