Who Are You?
Entry by: Nicholas Gill
5th December 2014
Who are you?
By Nicholas Gill
“For God’s sake, Gill, stop trying to be someone you are not.†I remember these searing words from Peter Powell, a wiry-haired, bookish boy of around 15 in my class at school. It was an all-boys uniform-wearing establishment in the home counties in the late ‘70s. I had been trying to amuse the Cool Set, probably without success.
“Well, how do I know who I am?†was my not unreasonable reply.
The teenage experience, we are often told, is about trying on different identities in order to develop some sense of Self. But I think now that evolving a sense of self-acceptance is just as important if some kind of securely grounded psyche is to emerge. Looking back, it is hard to see how all but a few Alpha Males could have developed secure self-worth at my school. And what monsters did those ones become?
There were distinct groups in my class and I flitted uncertainly between them. There were those that went train-spotting, long before the activity had become stigmatised as a Loser Activity. Boys had dog-eared log books with thousands of lines of numbers crossed out in biro representing spotted engines. They would arrange weekend spotting binges at distant train stations. Quite a few of the teachers engaged in the same activity. Possibly these boys had already made up their minds to become office workers or civil servants and didn’t need to rebel or experiment in order to find themselves. Whether the spotting of trains helped the development of a strong, assured sense of Self I don’t know. Perhaps they were just treading water while the trauma of sexual awakening raged in an abandoned part of the psyche. Train spotters didn’t get girls as far as I could see.
A few of the boys in the Cool Set did get girls and affected a cruel apathy about their short-lived loves. At lunch-time they would sit in a semi-circle by the radiators kicking their heels and joking about their girl-friends’ defective bodies and social deficiencies. Beneath this, I now see, lay an intransigent insecurity about being one half of a gender-split psychic universe. If you could talk of the High School girls as being a bunch of stale vaginas, jelly-bums or crochet-knitters you could temporarily feel safer in the knowledge that it wouldn’t matter if they finished with you and sent you back to the uncertain margins of the tribe, where the isolated male roams in search of himself.
Aboriginal boys, I had read, were sent out on Walkabout for a year and hailed as men when they returned. Jewish kids had a Bar Mitzvah to tell them they were now adult members of their community. Roman Catholics wore white and did something or other in a church as a rite of passage.
I had a Roman Catholic girl-friend at that time, an Italian who went to the Convent School. It was a misty-morning school uniform romance, the girl dressed in blazer and blue calico skirt disappearing up the hill while I drifted on with satchel to the secular male compound, looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her, as the song went. For a year we walked around the tree-lined circular path of a local park after school, watching the leaves change through all four seasons without so much as holding hands. I think I talked self-consciously and charmingly as I still have a tendency to do now when with a female. We exchanged long letters which I buried when the final rejection came.
I didn’t know what to do with a girl, because I had been on no Walkabout or Bar Mitzvah and no Wise Man of the Tribe had instructed me on the ways of women. My father, to his credit, summoned me to his study once and asked me nervously if I liked girls. When I tentatively answered Probably, he suggested I read a chapter on sex from the “Little Red Book†which he presented to me before rapidly changing the subject.
And so I lusted sterile through dry and rickety school days, becoming ever more insecure when the Cool Set joked and fearing that ultimately their contempt would turn on me. And so it did, when my assurance slipped, like a death ray seeking to scald the identity that dared show itself to belong outside the group’s perimeter fence.
At school they played rugby, during which times I would linger by a corner flag with a couple of “fatties†talking about Doctor Who while a raw wind lashed our bare legs. I suppose we comprised a group of some sort, but so low in status as to only retard any growth of The Self. I would gaze from a safe distance at the scrummaging contortions on the other side of the field and make non-committal gestures towards the horde when it advanced towards my posts. And throughout life, I have stood at a safe distance and wondered what the hordes were doing and what it is like to belong to one.
There was a Literary Set as well, which was probably my natural home, but at the time I didn’t realise it. They were destined for Cambridge and made charming excursions to second hand book shops with tea and cake afterwards. I picked up an edition of H.G.Wells’ Complete Short Stories on one such trip to the Penn Bookshop situated by the village pond and tea rooms. We were 15 going on 78. I remember walking with my Italian girl, looking at a sunset and talking to her about the Mystery of Life and the Quest for the Enlightened Soul. She told me I sounded like an Old Man. Perhaps Peter Powell was right, and this was the Identity I should have put on at the Personality Outfitters Shop.
But something inside me wouldn’t accept that the easy life of the academic could lead me to the sense of self-acceptance that I still crave today even as middle age begins to swallow me.
There was a song at that time. Some of the tough boys from the lower streams had bought parker coats and Lambretta scooters. They were trying on Zoot Suits from the Gentleman’s Identity Fitters. They bought records by The Who, not realising that by this time this band had become more Rock than Mod. They let me go to the pub with them on Saturday nights and one of the chaps loaned me a record.
“I woke up in a Soho doorway
A policeman knew my name
He said ‘You can go sleep at home tonight
If you can get up and walk away’
I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew back my hair
I remember throwin' punches around
And preachin' from my chair
Tell me Who are You?â€
I liked this record, though even then my 78 rpm ears could discern that Pete Townsend’s melodic invention was quite stunted and the lyrics not up to Keats’ standard. It started with a harsh, percussive synthesiser riffing over drum claps and splurges from the electric guitar. And then Keith Moon’s crashing yet strangely musical drum rolls introducing a teasing refrain:
“Who are you…who, who…who, who…who are you…â€
And I remember getting drunk during an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in punk London around ‘79, and staggering through the underground with that refrain looping around my head. Part of me wanted to be rough. Something inside was sabotaging my easy progress towards the warm dusty corridors and soft Chesterfield sofas of academia. I needed a crisis. I was a deaf, dumb and blind boy, the Pin-ball Wizard. I wanted to be Roger Daltry butterfly-stroking through an azure Mediterranean sea singing “I’m free…I’m free…â€
And since then I’ve been down to the Gentleman’s Identity Fitters quite a few times. I’ve been a Quest Knight, a Poet (both visionary and romantic), a died-again Buddhist, a Pagan Man of Nature, a Vintage Jazz Piano Player with a liking for cravats and studded dress shirts mounting firmly to the chin, and a regular guest at The Lunatic Asylum or Nut-house for Crazy Folk.
So I’m sorry, Peter. You, at the advanced age of 15 could see that I was trying to be something I was not. I respect your incredible teenage maturity and wonder how you came to have it. Presumably you checked into Cambridge and are now enjoying a gentle collegiate collapse somewhere within the safe sand-stone walls of the Intellect, sure in the knowledge of who you are and always have been. For myself, I am still quite capable of getting it wrong in a variety of colourful and damaging ways. I can regress to any realm that should have been left behind, such is the clamour of sub-personalities within me. I may even go back to Rock for a moment and hear that taunting refrain,
“Who are you…who, who…who, who…who are you…?â€
* * * * *
By Nicholas Gill
“For God’s sake, Gill, stop trying to be someone you are not.†I remember these searing words from Peter Powell, a wiry-haired, bookish boy of around 15 in my class at school. It was an all-boys uniform-wearing establishment in the home counties in the late ‘70s. I had been trying to amuse the Cool Set, probably without success.
“Well, how do I know who I am?†was my not unreasonable reply.
The teenage experience, we are often told, is about trying on different identities in order to develop some sense of Self. But I think now that evolving a sense of self-acceptance is just as important if some kind of securely grounded psyche is to emerge. Looking back, it is hard to see how all but a few Alpha Males could have developed secure self-worth at my school. And what monsters did those ones become?
There were distinct groups in my class and I flitted uncertainly between them. There were those that went train-spotting, long before the activity had become stigmatised as a Loser Activity. Boys had dog-eared log books with thousands of lines of numbers crossed out in biro representing spotted engines. They would arrange weekend spotting binges at distant train stations. Quite a few of the teachers engaged in the same activity. Possibly these boys had already made up their minds to become office workers or civil servants and didn’t need to rebel or experiment in order to find themselves. Whether the spotting of trains helped the development of a strong, assured sense of Self I don’t know. Perhaps they were just treading water while the trauma of sexual awakening raged in an abandoned part of the psyche. Train spotters didn’t get girls as far as I could see.
A few of the boys in the Cool Set did get girls and affected a cruel apathy about their short-lived loves. At lunch-time they would sit in a semi-circle by the radiators kicking their heels and joking about their girl-friends’ defective bodies and social deficiencies. Beneath this, I now see, lay an intransigent insecurity about being one half of a gender-split psychic universe. If you could talk of the High School girls as being a bunch of stale vaginas, jelly-bums or crochet-knitters you could temporarily feel safer in the knowledge that it wouldn’t matter if they finished with you and sent you back to the uncertain margins of the tribe, where the isolated male roams in search of himself.
Aboriginal boys, I had read, were sent out on Walkabout for a year and hailed as men when they returned. Jewish kids had a Bar Mitzvah to tell them they were now adult members of their community. Roman Catholics wore white and did something or other in a church as a rite of passage.
I had a Roman Catholic girl-friend at that time, an Italian who went to the Convent School. It was a misty-morning school uniform romance, the girl dressed in blazer and blue calico skirt disappearing up the hill while I drifted on with satchel to the secular male compound, looking back to see if she was looking back to see if I was looking back at her, as the song went. For a year we walked around the tree-lined circular path of a local park after school, watching the leaves change through all four seasons without so much as holding hands. I think I talked self-consciously and charmingly as I still have a tendency to do now when with a female. We exchanged long letters which I buried when the final rejection came.
I didn’t know what to do with a girl, because I had been on no Walkabout or Bar Mitzvah and no Wise Man of the Tribe had instructed me on the ways of women. My father, to his credit, summoned me to his study once and asked me nervously if I liked girls. When I tentatively answered Probably, he suggested I read a chapter on sex from the “Little Red Book†which he presented to me before rapidly changing the subject.
And so I lusted sterile through dry and rickety school days, becoming ever more insecure when the Cool Set joked and fearing that ultimately their contempt would turn on me. And so it did, when my assurance slipped, like a death ray seeking to scald the identity that dared show itself to belong outside the group’s perimeter fence.
At school they played rugby, during which times I would linger by a corner flag with a couple of “fatties†talking about Doctor Who while a raw wind lashed our bare legs. I suppose we comprised a group of some sort, but so low in status as to only retard any growth of The Self. I would gaze from a safe distance at the scrummaging contortions on the other side of the field and make non-committal gestures towards the horde when it advanced towards my posts. And throughout life, I have stood at a safe distance and wondered what the hordes were doing and what it is like to belong to one.
There was a Literary Set as well, which was probably my natural home, but at the time I didn’t realise it. They were destined for Cambridge and made charming excursions to second hand book shops with tea and cake afterwards. I picked up an edition of H.G.Wells’ Complete Short Stories on one such trip to the Penn Bookshop situated by the village pond and tea rooms. We were 15 going on 78. I remember walking with my Italian girl, looking at a sunset and talking to her about the Mystery of Life and the Quest for the Enlightened Soul. She told me I sounded like an Old Man. Perhaps Peter Powell was right, and this was the Identity I should have put on at the Personality Outfitters Shop.
But something inside me wouldn’t accept that the easy life of the academic could lead me to the sense of self-acceptance that I still crave today even as middle age begins to swallow me.
There was a song at that time. Some of the tough boys from the lower streams had bought parker coats and Lambretta scooters. They were trying on Zoot Suits from the Gentleman’s Identity Fitters. They bought records by The Who, not realising that by this time this band had become more Rock than Mod. They let me go to the pub with them on Saturday nights and one of the chaps loaned me a record.
“I woke up in a Soho doorway
A policeman knew my name
He said ‘You can go sleep at home tonight
If you can get up and walk away’
I staggered back to the underground
And the breeze blew back my hair
I remember throwin' punches around
And preachin' from my chair
Tell me Who are You?â€
I liked this record, though even then my 78 rpm ears could discern that Pete Townsend’s melodic invention was quite stunted and the lyrics not up to Keats’ standard. It started with a harsh, percussive synthesiser riffing over drum claps and splurges from the electric guitar. And then Keith Moon’s crashing yet strangely musical drum rolls introducing a teasing refrain:
“Who are you…who, who…who, who…who are you…â€
And I remember getting drunk during an Anti-Nazi League demonstration in punk London around ‘79, and staggering through the underground with that refrain looping around my head. Part of me wanted to be rough. Something inside was sabotaging my easy progress towards the warm dusty corridors and soft Chesterfield sofas of academia. I needed a crisis. I was a deaf, dumb and blind boy, the Pin-ball Wizard. I wanted to be Roger Daltry butterfly-stroking through an azure Mediterranean sea singing “I’m free…I’m free…â€
And since then I’ve been down to the Gentleman’s Identity Fitters quite a few times. I’ve been a Quest Knight, a Poet (both visionary and romantic), a died-again Buddhist, a Pagan Man of Nature, a Vintage Jazz Piano Player with a liking for cravats and studded dress shirts mounting firmly to the chin, and a regular guest at The Lunatic Asylum or Nut-house for Crazy Folk.
So I’m sorry, Peter. You, at the advanced age of 15 could see that I was trying to be something I was not. I respect your incredible teenage maturity and wonder how you came to have it. Presumably you checked into Cambridge and are now enjoying a gentle collegiate collapse somewhere within the safe sand-stone walls of the Intellect, sure in the knowledge of who you are and always have been. For myself, I am still quite capable of getting it wrong in a variety of colourful and damaging ways. I can regress to any realm that should have been left behind, such is the clamour of sub-personalities within me. I may even go back to Rock for a moment and hear that taunting refrain,
“Who are you…who, who…who, who…who are you…?â€
* * * * *
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