A BOY’S CLUB

A look at the influence of childhood experiences on adult political decisions

When I was knee-high to a grasshopper (and it’s a lie, I never actually was) I used to read books by the imaginative Enid Blyton about children in various clubs. When I was closer to the grasshopper-size it was the Secret Seven and as I grew a tad taller it was the Famous Five. And believe it or not, before then, when I was little more than a speck in the world of crickets, I enjoyed the antics of Noddy, his awesome mate Bigears and all the folks in Toyland.

In short, I was a reader and I saw myself as member of a variety of clubs, all of which morphed, with the printed word, into reach other.

Then I became double-figured, ten or so, had read all of the Famous Five books and progressed in a kind of natural way onto Biggles, the world war one air ace in his Sopwith Camel. He had mates too, Ginger and Algy I seem to recall, and they formed a sort of club as well.

The thing is, it was as natural as walking or weeing to see myself as one of a kind even though as I grew the kind slowly changed from one into another. And those club memberships informed a great deal of what I still am. Not that I want you to think I’m still manning that cunning machine-gun that actually fired between the blades of my Camel’s propeller without actually hitting it because I’m not and I find the Germans I’ve met to be nothing like the cruel foes in my sights but decent people, not unlike myself. But the idea of being one of a gang of decent kids who included a dog in their number is quite appealing even though I’m no longer a kid and it would have to be a gang of geriatrics with zimmer frames and a very inactive pooch that I accompany into wild adventures in the park at my advanced age.

And the point is it’s the same for all of us. We have been trained by our early experiences to want to belong to a club. It might not have been the books we read because believe it or not there are a few children who rarely read anything more than the basic readers they had foisted on them at infants school. Yet school itself was a club. Our class withn the school was another club (my teacher’s better than your teacher) and the whole school was yet another (now then children, there’s a footie match against Saint Upyerpipe’s tonight and I want us all there cheering our lads on). All those growing years and all those clubs!

And then, suddenly, we’re grown up. But our brains have been hard-wired into being in a series of wonderful or not-so-wonderful clubs and we can’t truly manage without them.

With Enid Blyton’s heroines and heroes it was perfectly all right to want to be an extra member and number amongst them because (and this would have shocked me back then) they’re not real and never were. Neither were their adventures (shock, horror) - but their comradeship was. True, they were figures painted in words in a long series of adventure stories, but they were also comrades. Why, I can still remember their names which is more than I can say of the names of the real children who accompanied me down the early years of my life!

The thing is, it meant a lot and it meant nothing to be with my fictional heroes.

Now I’m facing some of the adult clubs and as I’ve never been particularly sporty, never raved over this or that football team, the clubs I see around me, beckoning me to join, are mostly political, especially at a time like this when there’s a general election not so far off. But which one of them do I belong to?

In truth, none of them. I haven’t ever been a member of any political party even though I know where my leanings naturally go. The kids Enid Blyton wrote about were middle class and spoke with nice clipped accents (though back when I read the books it didn’t strike me that they were any different from me and my real-life mates) and I guess I’ve always been a kind of middle-of-the-road guy.

I couldn’t be in the Conservative Party (for that read Republican if you’re American) because their values are so different from my own. You see, those parties are clubs and if you happen to qualify for membership you must be, in some way, typical of the rest of their membership. So the Conservative party is for those with more than their fair share of wealth. They need to preserve (conserve) it at all costs, so when they’re in power they establish rules and systems to enable them to do just that. It doesn’t matter one jot to the millionaire that there are far too many people wondering where their next penny is going to come from: he’s got more than he needs and it’s going to stay that way.

I’m not in the other major political party either, the Labour party (Americans read Democrat) even though they’re diametrically opposite the Conservatives. True, a great deal that they publish is little more than wonderfully crafted common sense and quite right (in my world), but there’s a teasing little thought in my silly old head that suggests they’re a bit too different from the Famous Five. I went to a public meeting a week or two ago and what was said was pure immaculate me, but was wrecked by the intrusion of something I couldn’t quite go along with. Yes, I like the idea of a much fairer distribution of wealth, I hate the idea of war, particularly nuclear war which will see us all off if it happens, I believe that words are better than guns, I reckon it’s plain daft to oppose the nationalisation of important services. But no, there are a few little irritants I can’t go along with. It’s not quite the right club for an adventurer like me.

Now, those in the first club, the Conservatives, include newspaper proprietors, quite a lot of news gatherers and disseminaters and this means that they preach what is of importance to them. They want to keep their millions (these days it’s often billions) and so their public organs like the major red-top newspapers drip-feed us with anti-labour party nonsense, and too many people, of course, are of the mind to believe everything they read in print. So the leader of the Labour Party has been scurrilously treated in a long campaign designed to make us titter at him as he walks by whilst the present Prime Minister, the leader of the Conservative Party, is treating the campaigning for re-election as a sort of joke, carting her hand-picked supporters from place to place and pretending they’re a crowd. I particularly dislike her tactics because they make a mockery of everything I find acceptable in a world in which precious little is.

But my biggest problem is with the club I ought to be in. I ought to be in one of the central clubs and because I’ve a mind that our environment is fairly important it ought to be the Green party. But it can’t be because (forgetting UKIP for a moment as it’s becoming increasingly irrelevant) there’s one club on the right and a plethora on the centre and left of the political world, which means, the left being divided, the right will win again even though a majority will vote against them. They’re bound to.

You see, lies got the present American president into the Oval Office and it’s lies that will get the leader of the Conservative party back into Downing Street, and to hell with which club is best because when in power those that will win will be doing the best to serve their own club to which the majority who vote for it will actually have no rights as members because, not being ultra-wealthy, they’ll be robbed in the long run by the outcome. But they’ll vote that way anyway, because they will believe the lies. You see, they don’t really belong there even though they’re told, superciliously, that they do. And we see that we live in a post-truth age when the fictions of politicians have more power than reality ever did. A bit like the Famous Five to a nine year-old, really.

© Peter Rogerson 13.05.17

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