Empathy is not a Colour. Chapter 3

He thought himself all of 22 until he looked in the mirror. There he

saw a kind of reality. His eyes were still sharp blue, the slight

dullness at the edges from the one to many spliffs the night before

fast disappearing. The face had enough creases to give it some

character and deepen the mark of his lineage. Typically English - a

hotch-potch of Anglo-Saxon, Celt, Roma, and Jewish features that

somehow fell agreeably once. He hoped that the closely clipped salt

and pepper beard and greying temples offered a distinguished touch.

He wasn't sure of that. His weight was good at the moment, at his

lightest since twenty-two, but not as lithe. His handsome 22 was not

before him and it was only now that he knew he was handsome then.



“Fuck. I'm fifty”, he admitted. Then, totally unconsciously as he

turned from the honest mirror, withdrew the confession and

reverted to thinking 22.



“Why am I up at 6.30? Oh, of course". Today is important. It's the

start of his training as a London bus driver.



“How had I got here?” He wondered while getting dressed, and his

thoughts turned to the long-stowed cargoe of his story and a

neglected re-appraisal.



Seven years a soldier. From 15 to 22. A boy soldier in the RAMC

untill posted to the regulars at 18. What a con. He'd already done

three years as a boy soldier before the nine year contract kicked in.

His old-man must have known when he told him to sign without

reading. But being to big to hit anymore, his dad had to get him out

of the house somehow and lying by ommission comes easy. Not that

he was an angel. Far from it. The catalyst for the forced enlistment

had been an assault on a class-mate at school and, following his

expulsion, a little spree of shop smash 'n' grab - larceny in the

language of the court. The class-mate was hospitalised and he wasn't

the first or last to feel Blunt's temper. But he was sensitive boy for

all that. The macho stance hid his shyness and lack of confidence.



The last year at school had been awful. He had made the wrong

choice. It should have been art with his line, perspective, a pencil

and a brush. Instead he crumbled under the father's insistance on

science, despite the evidence of the termly reports. Maths was not

bad but chemistry, the periodic table. Yeah well. The only thing he

learnt about physics was that it was heavy and/or light relatively.

Cutting up dogfish in biology was very interesting, but the teacher's

casual violence - a knuckle to the top of the head - was not. A

years failing culminating in expulsion from a Grammar and appearance

in court. He had found Dylan by then. 'The Times They Are A

Changin' spoke directly to him, gave him justification to rebel. But

his rebellion was not constructive, not thought through, more

self-destructive.



Ridicule and pain are the bully's refrain. Ridiculed at five the first time

he opened one of his fathers books. A book without pictures only

words.



“You can't read. You're just a fool.”



“That's for nothing. Wait till you do something”, accompanied by a

clout round the ear and laughter, was the usual greeting when his

father came in from work.



The father probably thought he was being funny, but for Blunt it was

fifteen years of fear interspersed with times of terror. Beaten with

anything to hand - broom or belt - for some minor infraction of a new

rule invented to justify a loss of temper. The father's anger regulated

the family atmosphere.



Blunt's father came from a mining family. Treorchy, the Rhonnda

Valley. When four he lived the General Strike and then the aftermath

of the miners defeat. The grinding pinch of poverty. The dramatic

narrowing of horizons. The depression. His mother handed out the

beatings, the only way she understood of holding a seven member

family together in such circumstance. She learnt it from her father

who had been 'in service' with it's attendant poverty, and done the

same to her. Welsh, and his father sang well in an operatic tenor,

but could not stand on a stage. What dreams he had of conquering

stage fright were lost in the brutalities of WWII North Africa.



When he was thirty, Blunt's parents informed him that he had an

older brother. His mother had had a boy by an American GI just after

WWII. Kicked out of the family home for bearing a bastard, she had

initially found work as a Capstan Lathe Operator. That didn't last

long. Skilled craft needed for the war effort was no longer for

women. Not when the Boys came home victorious from war. She

could then only find night work and all her earnings went on rent and

childcare. She hardly ever saw him. After eighteen months she had to

give the boy away, isolated and shattered. A cousin had agreed to

take him on the condition that she never made contact but that he

would be told who his birth mother was when old enough. She never

made contact and the cousin never told the boy his heritage. In the

event it was obvious he was different. He did a search and renewed

contact thirty-one years later to her great joy.



Stripped of her first child by a cruel father, Blunt's mother could be

social again and three months later she married his father. A year

after losing one boy she gave birth to another. She received

occassional reports from her sisters about the boy, his progress and

health, and the news would always help raise her spirits. Make her

grin. Lift her head from the drudge. She was always loving, but it

was at these times Blunt adored his mother and he didn't understand

why. The boy, David, was academically successful at school. Has

become a Professor and Barrister/Partner in the Inns of Court.



At thirty Blunt understood his mother more. A husband who, with

mental and physical bullying dominated her environment. Left her

marooned. Without the deep tactile affection she craved and lonely

with her grief at loss, made for a psychological cleft. She was

distraught, left home when he was 4 and 5. Walked out on her

husband and son and daughter. Her emotional needs and undoubted

intellect stymied by circumstance and men, and desperate for a way

out. The children were introduced to fostering. Each time she

returned after a few weeks having no where else she could be. Finally

falling into the addiction of 'mothers little helpers' . Her twenties a

haze. It took hospital admissions to get her clean and fostering for

her children again and again. 'Mothers little helpers', a misnomer for

a straight jacket. Prescription drugs issued by lazy GP's in their

billions, that confined millions of emotionally and intellectualy

frustrated young mothers in a chemical cosh. 'Man works and woman

looks after the home and family', was the mantra of the times. If

women found it hard to restrict themselves to the role then there is

something wrong with them.



“You are not real women.

You are ill.

Take the drugs.

Be quiet.

Accept your lot".



The revolution of the contraceptive pill came to late for his mother.



Being clean didn't last long. Her thwarted dreams no less painful, an

alcoholic in her thirties. She finally succeeded in getting dry in her

fifties and became a nationally respected councillor to junkies and

alcoholics. A former 'Valley of the Dolls' wife gaining satisfaction

from using her intellect at last. Her becoming had taken a long time.

He has been proud of his mum these last twenty years.



To his father, David was a parallel child for Blunt to be judged by. A

competition he didn't know he was in. Tests he didn't know he was

taking and with no chance of passing. He may have been his father's

first child, but he was the second of his mother's. Anger instilled by

his own mother and jealousy of an American GI fuelled the father's

violence, made vicious when co-inciding with good news about David.

The frustrated tenor's songs echoingly corrupted to the wailing,

screaching agonies of his son.



Through families and down generations, violence has a habit of

replicating itself. Blunt lived in fear until 10 and his puberty. Anger

and violence reared their heads amongst the hormones. His sister

was the first to get it. He tried to fuck her. The nearest and

weakest to him being passed the baton. Protheroe terrified his sister,

fucked up her life and the abuse only stopped when they were given

their own bedrooms three months after it started. Guilt has been his

constant companion since. His father has only recently found out

about the 'incestuous' son. The final failure. Has banned him from

ever “stepping foot in his house". Barring Blunt from his mother. His

father still does not get it. His own culpability never questioned. As

dogmatic in his self-righteousness as the Stalinism he learnt in The

Valleys.




They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

This Be The Verse Philip Larkin




Blunt's mother had insisted on the Royal Army Medical Corp not the

infantry and the killing. Up in court the day of his enlistment. In front

of the beak at 10.30am, on the train by 11.30am. The Magistrate was

the wife of the Headmaster who had expelled Protheroe a month

before. Doing her civic duty, she sentenced him to a conditional

discharge for the smash 'n' grab'. Odd the ways of educators and

justice.



The army was an escape of sorts. From one bully to Ranks of them,

but, in a contradiction to the army's rationale, with less violence.



He indulged his passion for rugby. Rugby, the premier contact sport.

Short - 5' 6”, and stocky - 11st 7lb, upper body strength, a low

centre of gravity and short, fast-twitch muscle fibres make for a good

scrum-half. But still three inches to short and two stone to light for

an excellent scrum-half. His talent was in his balance and explosive

speed over the first ten yards. Practise and play brought skill.

Side-steps off either foot, a dummy out of either hand. A flat spin

pass to left or right or reverse. A knock down hit in the tackle.

Good times. And respect amongst the men. His violence hadn't left

him but was being constrained, channelled.



Still a virgin at 18 (the attempted fucking of sister didn't really count

in his reckoning). What humiliation. Still untested by love. Still not a

man really. Then came Christine from Llantrisant, with love and the

minting of a man. From her he learnt to give, engage his finer

emotions and his fumblings started a journey toward refinement.



Six months of blissful pride as he danced around beauty and her smile.

Snatching sex in hidden corners at a rush. She taught him sex was

good. All moist and synchronised, pushing, wrapping, gripping,

sweating, tasting. But rare the chance to sleep the night and find that

point where time slows, extends, stretches. All six months. The

army posted his nurse, tenderer to love, to hot and humid Singapore.

He was left alone amongst dull amd monosyllabic men in the

oppressive drizzle of a Woolwich winter. They wrote for a while.

Eventually word came back that she had found another to love her.

Never to meet again sharing smiles. Never skin to skin again.



Routine and rugby filled the vacumn. After a while he found himself

again looking for love. One-night stands had made for passing fun and

a gradual easing of grief, but not love.



Not long after losing Christine from Llantrisant and at 24hrs notice he

made aquaintance with Kenya. Emergency medical cover for the

Coldstream Guards on a two month jungle and bush exercise. Their

Medical Sergeant had broken his leg skiing, poor sod. Lucky Blunt.



The equatorial sun was fierce. Sharp pulsing daggers of light flaying

any tender white skin exposed in their path. One Guardsman, thicker

than most, didn't listen about the need for gradual exposer to the

Kenyan sun - shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow for only ten

minutes on the first full day, twenty minutes the next day and so on.

Thirty minutes after taking off his shirt on the first full day in

Nanyuki, the Guardsman's back was one big blister. Blunt drained it

with the biggest syringe in the kit, strapped the injury then put the

Guardsman on a charge of 'self-inflicted injury'. What a pratt. The

nick-name, 'Blister', stuck.



One night while he was sleeping in the medical tent, the tent was

stolen from above him. He woke to the so-so-high African skies.

Bliss. Then his brain worked and he cursed, “Bastards". He spent all

morning trying to get a replacement, but to late. A dust-devil, a

miniature tornado, a whirllygig tore through the medical centre and

scattered all the dressings, drugs, equipment and notes across the

arid plains of Samburu. The vast Kenyan bush. Hours to reclaim or

bin. Did he get a bollocking and did the squaddies laugh! He found

out a few weeks later that the Blister had done it. Got his own back

for all the kitchen pans he had had to scrub as punishment for his

self-inflicted injury. Not so thick.



The so-so-high African skies and open, generous people humbled him.

He adored Kenya and the ochre of its earth but was appalled by the

poverty and embarrassed at the stupidity inherent in the soldiers

racism. The soldiers were rich by comparison and young women

would prostitute themselves to it, desperate to fed families. Most

Guardsmen who took some pleasure there didn't see this. They were

just “jungle-bunnies to fuck and cheaper than the whores around

Chelsea Barracks".



Blunt will admit he took some comfort there. The 7 day course of

sulphadimidine he took after cured the soft sore.



Away from Nanyuki in the bush at Smalls Farm, an elderly Kikuyu

woman was brought to the medical tent with a badly gashed leg. A

machette had sliced to the bone and left a six inch long wound on her

left calf that needed a lot of detailed and deep muscle stitching. The

injury was at least three days old. She had walked for two days to

get there. A tough Kikuyu matriarch.



A Sandhurst trained bum-fluffed 2nd Lieutenant ordered him not to

treat her. It took a lot of persuading, but finally he managed to get

the use of a landrover to transport her to the regional hospital near

Nanyuki. It saved her another days walk. She never uttered a word

throughout, but the reproach in her tearless eyes at the callousness

of the Sandhurst trained bum-fluffed 2nd Lieutenant remembered

Mau-Mau and spoke thunder.



Part of his job was to regularly check the refuse dump and ensure it

was not a health hazard. It was just a bloody big hole in the ground

where all the kitchen refuse was dumped. It would be covered with

earth when they left. The MO accompanied him on his tour one day.

Fuck. They found a Kikuyu elder in the pit loading up with food. With

the usual profligacy of the army, whole fresh loafs had been discarded

that morning after breakfast. The poverty of pasturalism make people

take where they can find. The MO though was having none of it and

started yelling at the Kikuyu elder ordering him out of the pit and

away from bread. The look in the eye of that affronted, disrespected

Kikuyu elder remembered Mau-Mau and spoke thunder. The MO was

as one with the Sandhurst trained 2nd Lieutenant and expats. Where

his Hippocratic Oath and his attention to the whole man.



She was petite with wide-set ice-blue eyes. Auburn freckles where

her hair had flecked her face, a constant smile and always in demand.

A Womens Royal Army Corp ambulance driver for the A&E where he

worked when with 12 Coy back in Woolwich. Effervescent Fitz. A

Tyke Dyke who came to him thinking he was the man who could make

her straight and kill the guilt welded to her soul. He married her out

of some twisted macho logic. Three tempetuous months and it was

over.



Blunt had finished a Casualty night shift and returned to the flat to

find another just leaving. A lesbian lover/friend who had stayed the

night by the state of the bed. Thwack. He hit Fitz. That was the end.

Still emotionally immature, caught in the cleft of being a John Wayne

man and sensitivity, he had failed her. Little did he know then that it

would be another four years till confident enough to kiss again and

that a pattern to his relationships had started. Difficult women would

be his attraction, short term the pattern but never to hit a woman

again.



She changed him, his psych and dress. He started wearing Levis. Still

not divorced and Fitz still in the closet. Odd the ways of love and

sexuality.



It seemed every time he lost a love he won a posting.



The UN and medical cover to the Royal Irish Rangers on Aphrodite's

stunning Cyprus. The failed lover on the island of love. Cyprus

where the Irish taught him how many ways there are to drink and that

Orangemen were wrong. Cyprus, an island divided in itself and

policed by soldiers from another. Cyprus slowly-slowly awaiting a

Turkish invasion and a new twist to the antique relationship between

Greeks and Turks.



The 'Troubles' in Northern Ireland permiated the Rangers. Made

them fractious. Understandable when considering the composition of

the regiment. The other ranks were raised from both north and

south, with the catholic south having a slight majority. The

Regimental Police, those that run the 'Glass House' and regimental

discipline, were Protestants from the North. Except the senior Glass

House Sergeant who was from Cork. A Catholic, and very proud that

his father had volunteered as a fascist Blue Shirt serving Franco in his

war against Spanish democracy. The Officers were Anglo/Irish of

course.



The Battalion HQ at Limassol was build by Kitchener. With the

imagination of military intelligence it was called Kitchener Barracks

and the architect had built the POW camp in The Great Escape. All

wood on a concrete plinth. Cold and uncomfortable. The church was

multi-denominational and also built of wood. One sectarian

Regimental Policeman decided that he didn't like Taigs worshipping in

the same place as Prots, so burnt it down. Fucking nuts. Court

Martialled to six months imprisonment in Colchester's Military

Correction Training Centre and soldier on. The worst of all

outcomes for him - he was hoping to get kicked out of the army.

For once military intelligence got it right. It was preferrable to keep

him soldiering than let loose on the streets of Belfast.



The latrines were 8ft deep thunder boxes. Emptied once a week by a

local Cypriot farmer with his sludge gulper. The stench within a

hundred yards of him was acrid. Destroyed the sense of smell for the

day. He was paid to collect it and fed this Irish shit to his Cypriot

fields, turning Guiness into wine. A fucking genius.



Blunt lost a man in Limassol. A heart attack. A twenty-two years

service man on his last posting before retirement and a pension. 42

and his heart goes. Despite the pumping and mouth to mouth for an

hour, he lost him. The autopsy revealed a massive myocardial

infarction and no matter what he did, he would have lost him. It

didn't assuage his guilt much. What did was another soldier saying

with pride,



“No matter where we go around the world, no matter how long we

stay, the Royal Irish Rangers always leave someone.”



He felt drawn into part of a tradition and the guilt slowly dissipated.



His violence surfaced again. Two bottles of cheap Cypriot brandy and

Blunt could kill the world. Not the world but a fellow medic was the

recipient of his fists. A supercillious, arrogant pratt of a

lance-corporal. No excuse though and 28 days in the Guard House cells

under the authority of the Catholic fascist from Cork.



At the end of the six month tour the Rangers were relieved by one of

the Parachute Regiments. This was a few months after Bloody Sunday

and the massacre of unarmed demonstrators on the streets of Derry

by the Paras. The advance guard who came to secure stores and sign

the hand over, had a torrid time. Three of them were 'captured' one

night and thrown down the deep trench latrine. The Farmer hadn't

been for six days and they weren't found till morning when the sludge

gulper turned up. One of them was very ill and rushed to hospital but

made a recovery. They were subsequently charged for being late on

parade. The stench hung on them for a while, creating an invisible

bubble that no one dared penetrate. They had only themselves as

company. Blunt had to monitor them for a while, ensuring they

recovered and were disease free. Everybody else had refused to

enter the nasal exclusion zone.



From Nicosia a sojourn to Israel and Jerusalem. He hobbled around

Jerusalem with his leg in plaster. He'd broken his foot playing rugby

for the Rangers against the army hospital in Dhekelia. Typical. He's

playing for the Irish against old team-mates from Woolwich and

breaks his foot in Cyprus. But three weeks later he's in Jerusalem.



It was the first time he had seen the ancient Medina in a Middle

Eastern city, and he was stunned. No word he'd read, no film or

picture he'd watched or seen, no sound he'd heard had prepared him

for this. In the narrow lanes the cacophony, the babel of voices near

overwhelmed him. The animated cadences of barter; the running

giggle of children weaving in and out, in and out the throng; the

ubiquitous laughter and the occassional shrill arguement when all

combined, put in the mix, contained an antique rhythm that gave the

city its vibrant beat. Lock-up shop after lock-up shop lined the lanes

in ranks. Keffiyahed and jalaba'd Palestinians, smiling stall holders,

were looking to deal, to commerce. Shafts of light like shards of

mirrored glass danced across their wares. His excited eyes darted

here and there unable and unwilling to settle. They leapt to a glint of

lapis lazuli caressed by a beam, snapped at a flash of bronze fish,

sprung to a swirl of gold thread blazing through a bolt of turquoise

cloth. Exotic aromas from every known spice and herb had him

salivating in unconditioned reflex. Barrels of thyme and mint, ginger

and cardoman and chilli, cumin and coriander. His tongue has never

been the same since. The soft sensuality of camel leather crafted into

bags, saddles and belts seduced his fingers into constant strokes.

'This city belongs to all humanity and their every sense', he thought

enthralled by its vitality.



But this is a land at war. The negotiation for space is conducted with

the tank, the bullet and the bomb, the Bible, the Torah and the

Qur'an. Animosity and assume-the-worst is the atmosphere between

Jew and Muslim and Christian. Gaza and the West Bank under illegal

occupation is patrolled by fundamentalist settlers with machine guns.

Like Scripture - Dangerous.



Any residual religiosity died here. Here in the Holy Land. A land and

a city where three words collide. Bible, Torah, Qur'an.

Human-made words cynically exploited by theocratic fascists to justify

the imposition of an absolutist world view and the murder of 'other'.

Paper tectonic plates throwing up great volcanoes, that spew out

intolerance as a shroud of toxic words choking progress around the

world. Intellectually vaquous ravings. Mumbo-jumbo.



I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A Chapel was built in the midst,
where I used to play on the green,

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And 'Thou shalt not' writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

Garden of Love William Blake