Finding A Voice
How The Writer Gets Their Style
Style is the answer to everything. Charles Bukowski
This site, this ‘Only Fans for Readers’, offers much writing, of course, but offers too, I have noticed, after a happy month splashing about in these pleasantly warm waters, plenty of writing about writing. Some find uroboric self-absorption of this kind no less unappealingly self-indulgent than others of our vices that start with ‘self-’. I shall risk their wrinkled-nosed distaste as I look back on the long journey that began in a distant world now long vanished …
A drone shot looking down on my prep school in 1964. An Eden, you might think. A charming mock castle,1 battlements and all. A lake, ponies, green fields, woods and wonderful Gloucestershire countryside in which to ramble and build dens, hides and treehouses. I was seven years old, not such an unusual age to be boarding 200 miles away from home in those days.
I was unhappy. It was not homesickness that brought about my distress but incompetence. Finding myself for the first time thrust into a whole crowd of other boys forced comparisons. Did I match up? Did I belong? Was I an insider or a doomed peculiarity always destined to lurk on the fringes of those merry, confident gangs, groups, tribes, cliques and clans into which others appeared so easily and naturally to coalesce?
The Red Trunks of Shame
I immediately saw that the most important attribute a boy could have was some form of athletic ability. I was doomed, therefore, for I was the kind of unfortunate who, when thrown a ball, tried to catch it with a wild clapping motion, the wretched semi-dyspraxic who could barely run in a straight line without charging into a tree or tripping over his own shadow. Scared of the very sound of a football booted towards me or bouncing with a thud on the mud; scared of just about anything that approached with speed, and might require a reflex physical response.
Back at home with just my brother and sister around to watch me disporting myself, I had never had an opportunity to realise that I was so unusually hopeless a specimen. It came as a severe shock, therefore, to discover that every attempt I made to engage my body in an activity that furthered the interests of a sporting contest activated in my schoolfellows the wildest howls of hooting mockery. The gym, the games fields and the playground were all scenes of smarting shame. I couldn’t climb a rope, I couldn’t dance or wave my hands like a tree for those strange ‘Music and Movement’ classes that were a thing back then. Damn it, when we all had to sit around in a circle, I couldn’t even manage to do so tailor-fashion, let alone in an elegant lotus position like everyone else. My knees would be up by my ears. For my first term or two, the kindest word that pursued me everywhere was “Unco”: in school slang, this was short for ‘uncoordinated’. The school had an outdoor swimming pool. Boys who couldn’t yet swim had to wear water wings and trunks of scarlet, unlike the swimmers’ trunks of royal blue. To this day, the sight of anyone in a red bathing costume fills me with pity and sorrow.
I paddled miserably in the shallow end of the pool and more miserably in the shallow end of the school population. One of the pathetic outsiders, destined for loneliness and contempt.
The strings have plunged into tragic minor-key depths now; the oboes are wailing and somewhere, a bassoon sobs. You are probably choking back hot tears in sympathy. No need. I appreciate your fellow feeling, but it does get better soon.