Capitulation And Chalk Dust - Part 1

Navigating a world of dreams and reality

This journey into memory is part one of two.

It’s about the most powerful relationships we all experience and the forces that shape them. About the decisions we make and the decisions that are made for us. And agency and power and how much or how little we all have. And, about the delicate and precious fleeting moments we don’t even notice until they pass us by.

The second part will come out next Friday. Both parts work together so be sure to catch next week’s conclusion.

(Also, I’m so sorry about the delay in posting this piece. I’ll make it up to you over the holiday period, dear reader)

Photo by Mario Gogh on Unsplash

1.

John McEnroe's nervous intensity and turbulent eruptions were exactly the kind of behaviour I was used to in my profoundly unpredictable world.

I wanted to be like Björn Borg. I wanted an aura of gun-slinger cool and a zen-like demeanour. But it was McEnroe’s lit-fuse explosiveness that most mirrored the instability of my family life. Borg was an enigma. McEnroe was familiar. So it was McEnroe that caught my eye.

The social norms and traditional forms that orchestrated English society were gorgeously irrelevant to this swashbuckling tennis player from New York. It was tantalising to have the benchmarks, touchstones and yardsticks of Englishness blown to smithereens live on the BBC. Especially because we too, behind our closed doors, were also burning bridges and setting fire to our lives like seemingly insane ego maniacs.

I dreamt of becoming a tennis player so I learned tennis from a book. I played local kids on broken concrete courts and entered tennis tournaments advertised in magazines. Rich kids would turn up in cars with coaches and bags full of rackets and thrash me over and over and over again. I never once bellowed “you cannot be serious” . I never once screamed “It’s so goddamn unfair”.

As doors were being slammed in my face, McEnroe was kicking his down. How far was he willing to go? What about me? What was I willing to tear apart and destroy?

What I did know, what these bamboozled English umpires couldn’t fathom through the two-week tennis festival of flying doors and smashed norms, was just how lonely and frustrated John McEnroe really was. They were deceived by his performance and blinded by his behaviour. I knew it though, because I came from the same place, a place of anguish and yearning, injustice and rage.

Britain in the 80’s was a harsh place getting harsher. There was a vicious undercurrent in the pompous and extravagant efforts taken to create and maintain the colonial self-image. A world of carved stone lions draped in union jack bunting, meat and sauces on Sunday tables and casual xenophobia and violence pouring in and out of every living room. Britain was a country stumbling and snarling like a ravenous drunk searching for another bottle, strenuously attempting to keep up the appearance of sobriety, stability and civility.

There were nightly broadcasts of soldiers fighting in the Falklands, and more nightly broadcasts of police fighting on the picket lines. And there were politicians in pastel evening wear claiming there was no alternative, the good times were coming whether we liked it or not. And following the men with rifles and batons came a continual chorus line of men in suits leaping from Porsche’s and bursting through revolving doors into newly built skyscrapers celebrating their insatiability, their pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony and wrath. Only sloth was singled out as the remaining sin, held back to merrily beat the poor.

Very quickly after we washed back onto the shores of the mother country, those rose-tinted memories that’d whispered like sirens to my mother were exposed as a dangerous reef on the voyage of life. Penniless, but rich in nostalgia, she was laden with ambitions and aspirations nurtured in a bygone era. Her dreams of being an actress or a writer and wafting about with admirers falling over themselves like ducklings, would likely have been shattered at the best of times, driven as they were, not by a love of the acting or writing, but by an unquenchable need to be loved and admired.

But in the cauldron of wealth fetishism that was the 80’s, her dreams were well past their sell-by-date. Those privileged enough to dream in 80’s Britain dreamt of naked wealth and brutal power and screwing everyone else. Literally, metaphorically, and tragically. Our family’s triumphant return was greeted with cold indifference and scorn. In a country obsessed with class, wealth and power a now single mother with questionable class, no wealth and no power had better dream the dreams she was allocated or be crushed under the wheels of the good times rolling right over her. So she was duly crushed. And we were all crushed alongside her.

By the time McEnroe appeared on British screens our family was well and truly pummeled into the ground. There were no dreams. There was only survival. As the Super-Brat threw his public tantrums and cursed out the world, my mother threw her private tantrums and cursed out our world. McEnroe’s triumphant victory coincided perfectly with our family’s tremendous crestfallen loss. Read the term family loosely, for we were more of an amorphous mass of blaming, angry, depressed, co-dependent and atomised relationships that traveled together through time and space in the form of a 1980’s, recently immigrated, highly precarious, newly British family on the verge of breakdown, watching John McEnroe tear up the world on TV.

2.

In 80’s Britain shame was a political whip. While McEnroe vented his spleen on decisions that went against him, the British Establishment turned an entire nation against each other and fanned the flames of contempt and anger so vigorously that the fire is still burning to this very day. It was they, and not a petulant young McEnroe, that were really burning convention and exploding tradition. But their Union Jack bunting blinded the broken population and stirred up a manic cult of so-called Enterprise.

The scene was set and a British Tragedy was about to unfold where the structural creation of poverty was buried deep in the national psyche and an entire country began to experience cognitive dissonance. Out of this strange discordant atmosphere blossomed a culture of accusation aimed directly at individual poor people. A darkness spread across the land where the recently unthinkable became common currency as an entire nation began punching downwards.

Our family were the flotsam on a cruel wave of opinion and legislation. Battered about and exposed to this social weathering, a torrent of shame rained upon us and all we had left to belittle and blame was each other. My mother, crippled as she was by the vast gulf between her dreams and her reality, was broken by her anguish, her unfulfilled yearning, her sense of injustice and an incredible rage that set the tone for the remainder of the time we managed to cling together in what, from the outside, looked like a family.

We began to take centre stage on Britain’s nightly broadcasts. “The poor”, “the feckless” and the “culture of dependency” were destroying the country and newsreaders, newspaper editors and politicians made lengthy pronouncements that we should expect the same treatment as the miners and the “Argies”. Capitulate or be wiped out. Except they couldn't wipe us out because “the poor” are the soil in which the rich plant their roots, nurture themselves and grow. So instead of being wiped out we were subject to a storm of abuse and whittled away as human beings under this perpetual heart breaking onslaught.

Was it any wonder that when we were at our most vulnerable, and the world took hold of us in its mighty hands and twisted and mangled us until we were unrecognisable and broken, was it any wonder that we too became heart breakers in that cauldron of bubbling contempt? We became a family of mini McEnroe’s in a world of chalk dust and fury and there was nobody willing to teach us to stop or show us how to forgive one another. And then we blamed ourselves for being that way and went on breaking each other’s hearts until it was too late.

To Be Continued…