Whirligig of Time (eBook)

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The suggestion for the story had stemmed from our Soviet friend. I admit that created suspicion in my mind, but there are many ways to recite a tale. He proposed I should condense the story and achieve a succinct conclusion, but we were imprisoned here for the evening and we each enjoyed the Club’s spiritous fare. Besides, what kind of raconteur abridges a good narrative? Since Homer, all storytellers have emphasized one maxim, and I saw no obvious alternative: I would start at the beginning.

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Harold Ambrose (let me call him ‘Harry,’ since I know he prefers that sobriquet) remembered his early childhood in British Malaya with mixed feelings. The influence of parents upon their children is an accepted indicator of the mammalian world, and Harry was no exception. The symptoms parents vaccinate us with can last a lifetime, but they can’t always supply the elixir of affection. His father owned a palm plantation about twenty miles west of Ipoh, the royal capital, home of the Sultan of Perak, in the District of Kuala Kangsar. A vibrant tropical rainforest and equatorial climate permeated the boy’s upbringing; hot and humid, with predictable afternoon rain showers. You know, the tropical kind; drenching without refreshing. A mix of servants, tutors, and gardeners raised Harry in an ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse extended family. He lived a life of childhood recreation, guided by his Malay nanny, Aisha, and learned English (without an accent) as his first language. He spoke the local Malay dialect well and cultivated an understanding of Mandarin. Beside the plantation spread an idyllic landscape full of monkeys, hornbills, flowerpeckers, and sunbirds. Within hiking distance, he could encounter bats, flying squirrels, lemurs, antelope, Asian elephants, macaques, gibbons, and more. The jungle lay beyond the open grassland. It was primitive and off-limits, where few trod alone in the darkness. In the distance were eruptive masses which formed the background hills and mountain ranges, like shadows on a fair, sunlit landscape. British Malaya, in the 1920s, was a picturesque place to endure a classic colonial upbringing with English-born parents.

But young Harry lacked an all-embracing relationship with those parents. His father was a man who believed in the Empire and grew pessimistic about its decline. The palm oil business occupied his time, often requiring travel to Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore. At home, he had limited occasions for any emotional relationship with his wife or son. Harry could recall only a handful of meaningful conversations over the years. Neither did he understand his mother’s strange moods, because he hardly imagined the insidious damage of excessive alcohol. He endured comfortably, without understanding, in a dysfunctional family. The phrase was unknown in the twenties, and so his instinctive inclination towards hugs, kindness, and love existed only in Aisha and the family’s pet dog. His parent’s acknowledgement of him as a golden only-child had, initially, been comforting, then meaningless. Finally, it came at an enormous cost to young Harry.

The ability to love and empathize is innate to everyone, but it must be maintained. Aisha, as splendidly affectionate as she was, could not fill the void. Economically, though, their only child lived a better life than they had endured a generation before, as his father proved a competent entrepreneur. As both heroes and villains, the improved fiscal life made a convincing argument that his stiff, awkward parents had fulfilled their basic commitment to their child. Perhaps they had, but Harry, as he developed, would return nothing virtuous to the world. In their small way, they had contributed naught to the larger society they occupied because they lacked that basic component of parenthood; affection.

In later life, he could recite the reasons they abandoned him with emotional scars and pain. He recognized the inherited trauma of his junior years lingered in the room when he thought of them. In reflective moments, Harry considered the possibilities of love, family, and children. They flickered through his mind like water quenching a flame, a fork in the road to a better life he never took. There were times he craved the opportunity and environment to pursue a bold, new route, but it never came. A traumatic brain may discover self-reflection and self-improvement, a chance to learn how to care for others. But it required the cage door of pain be flung wide and a new world beckon him to venture outside. Harry knew this could never happen; the door had been locked closed somewhere along his journey.

After the early years of home-schooling, at the tender age of ten, in 1931, his expatriate parents—against all his immature, shrieking doggedness—shipped him across the world to the torment of the English public school system. His life of privileged circumstance over, his future turned to a kind of beastliness as he joined the five percent of the population who attended this love-barren system. Harry had rarely seen his parents during the intervening school years. His only familial sustenance being an eccentric grandmother called Betty in Maidenhead whom he visited on school holidays.

The Haberdashers’ Aske’s’ School educated boys only, aged five to eighteen. It nestled in the bucolic countryside of Hampstead, northwest London, an area known for intellectuals, artists and nascent political activism. Upon his arrival at prep school, the dearth of biodiversity had astonished him; the trees forsaken as they dropped their leaves in autumn. The local wildlife suffered a limited variety; badgers, hedgehogs, house mice and manic gray squirrels, while God had constrained the woodlands to poplars, oaks and sycamores. Winter had been a momentous shock.

For a child, the school dimensions appeared vast, the ceilings towering, the surfaces hard stone, dead timber and iron. He memorialized the smell of old English wood, starched linen and pipe smoke for the rest of his life. Disoriented, he yearned for his tropical existence. Affected by the English allergies of spring, he experienced victimization from those who misunderstood his maladies, but he grew to love the English summer with a feral passion. All the while he abhorred the system his parents had thrown him into, along with the prison-style isolation from the world outside.

In the United Kingdom, ‘public’ schools are one of the splendid ironies of society, because they exclude the general population. They charge fees, are governed by an elected board of governors and avoid many of the regulations applying to their state-funded cousins. For centuries, the public schools and their alumni have maintained a class war against the lesser peoples. Eton College, their most distinguished exemplar, and its famous compatriots—Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Radley, Westminster—were formed for altruistic reasons long ago. But then they transformed into endowment-hungry institutions and opened to selected students only. They became private and elite. To confuse anyone paying attention, they retained the moniker of ‘public.’

As young Harry learned, these schools created a class culture unknown to most nations. Haberdashers, a boarding school, separated young children from their parents to, expectantly, shape them into members of an elite. A cripplingly shy Harry, with a slight stutter, like others, endured the loss of his family with emotional austerity; distancing himself from any feelings of love or empathy. He wet his bed, blubbered through the night, and suffered the consequences. But one of the school’s primary functions was the tempering of young boys. No one had sympathized with his crying, and as he grew older, Harry felt no need to support others when he witnessed them howling in despair. Survival required a hardening of his regular human softness, a severe disconnect from emotions and sensitivity. He endured the tired and lifeless food, and a bizarre veneration of old pupils who had died in the nineteenth century, fallen like dead leaves on the highway of battle. The school discouraged friendship between boys out of a grotesque fear of forbidden homosexuality. So many boys, isolated and unable to connect with humans, were encouraged instead to invest their loyalty in the school, and the system itself; a charmless cartoon of self-repression.

Bullying was not just endemic, but structural in the thirties, and newly distressing after the tender years in Malaya. Harry and the other young boys acted as servants for the older ones, fulfilling menial tasks like making beds and brewing cups of tea, and enduring whatever punishments their teen overlords contemplated. Their reward was knowing they could exact the same themselves in the future. They promised they wouldn’t, but they all did. The system was called ‘fagging,’ and dated back centuries. The fag-master became the benefactor of his fags and responsible for their happiness and moral conduct, while they fawned like dumb, neglected lap dogs embracing the emotional manipulation.

In his fourth year, at the sensitive age of fourteen, Harry—a good looking pubescent boy with an almost feminine complexion—encountered the classic child grooming strategies of the pedophile, including the invading of personal boundaries, which led to incremental touching. The abuser was a music teacher named Webb, who openly discussed the relative merits of boys as vehicles for adult pleasure. The boys, ignorant of sexual abuse notions, were taught to trust and respect. The confusion aided Webb in ogling the cold baths like a home supporter at...