Granddad’s Fire & Brimstone
Confessions are always difficult. Especially when asking Granddad for forgiveness.
I was asked not long ago, and I am unsure what prompted the reader to ask if I was ever scared of anything. I apologize for misleading the reader if she was inspired to ask this question after reading my work.
Like most writers, I exaggerate, invent, and make myself braver than I am. If the question were phrased differently, would I run away from a bully? I could categorically tell that reader, no, I would not.
There are many things in life I would not dream of taking on or confronting, but bullies, no matter what shape or form they appear, I will engage in hopes of persuading to back off, but failing to do so, I’ll not back away until one of us is down.
Lately, down is a position to which I’m growing accustomed. There would be many more ‘downs’ if Jenny didn’t see the hairs on my neck start to prickle and move my ass out of there. Trust me, I’ve been told a million times that interfering doesn’t make me a hero but a damn fool.
Some have read the “About Me” story, but much information has been omitted. It talks of tragedy and triumph, but the ugly, not so much. The older I become the more I think about youth. This is the same for most of us, but it doesn’t paint a nice picture of my reality.
I’ve talked about the orphanage a hundred times on Medium, and my wonderful, adopted parents, but little about what kind of heartache I brought them, one time enough to send me back to the orphanage.
Almost.
I was bullied at school. I’d never been to a school where girls and boys were educated at the same school and only had two years of learning anything at the education establishment used by Barnardo's. Only boys were present.
After adoption, several months, my new parents didn’t want to send me off for a whole day of schooling before I had settled in. I went to school during the afternoon. I wish I could say bullying didn’t start immediately. It did.
I could have read better, spelt phonetically, and talked with a different accent. I was nine years old. To say I hated going to school would be an understatement; I loathed it to the point I set it on fire. I was a thinking boy, innovative when it came to being wicked. I lit the school up on November 5th, Guy Fawkes Night, when it was customary to light bonfires in the garden and set off fireworks.
I brought immense shame on my parents, who were not young and had never been parents. Dad wanted to know why I had come home smelling of Paraffin! Less than an hour later, the headmaster, who had thwarted my effort — only the door to the classroom had to be replaced — came to our door, returning the Paraffin can.
I recall many people coming to see me at home, asking questions like: was I happy at school? Even at nine years old, I got to answer it in my own head. Of course, I’m not fucking happy at school; I tried to burn it down, didn’t I?
I have hardly mentioned this in my stories about my youth; it is still shameful. I was nine years old and wanted the same power as the bullies. Burning down the school would give me credibility. To say I’ve never been scared of anything, am I kidding myself. I was scared shitless of what people would do to me, and I thought I was going back to the orphanage for sure.
I was home-schooled for the next two years and never celebrated Guy Fawkes the same.
Though he was amusing and exciting, I was always slightly terrified of Granddad. He told me if I didn’t eat creamed asparagus with my boiled codfish, a lightning bolt would come down and strike me into charcoal.
I remember Mum chastising him for mentioning anything related to fire as if it were yesterday.
I never did eat asparagus, so I still wonder, at 75 years old, when the lightning comes, and the thunder of my heart starts to beat, if some blue-white flash will sneak up on me and cut me down for all the asparagus I never ate.
Granddad loved me; I know this for sure: the way he would pull me into him, making the contours of my body fit his. He had only one arm, the other being severed by a mad Russian whale woman with a flensing knife. That’s what he told me. Dad told me he lost it in a fishing boat accident. I preferred to believe a mind haunted by old age, and with each story following, they became more fantastic.
The scariest, the most unbelievable story, he told me in the year I turned twelve years old. It was the author, Jack London. Something about the crackle of a bonfire made the way Granddad told the story so real. Mum told Dad that Granddad was training me to be a pyromaniac. The reason this was too funny is that Granddad, as well as being a fisherman, was the island’s vicar. He taught Sunday school.
Along with other kids, I attended Sunday School before the leading service began. Sunday mornings, listening to Granddad telling us about sins and other intriguing possibilities. Some of his stories scared the living crud out of me. Nailing someone to a cross was far worse than lighting the school up.
I sat in the church wondering if Granddad knew anything about what the other boys had told me, things like Susan Rafferty never wearing a bra under her blouse. We were only thirteen, and Susan was a year older. Such silly indiscretions were then, and probably still today, the mindless occupation of a boy’s thought. Certainly mine.
I grew up not necessarily erect. I bent sometimes to the will of other boys, wanting to know what they knew and always believing what they told me. Imagine Dad opening the door to be confronted by a father complaining that I had tried to grab his daughter’s breasts.
I scrubbed barnacles from fishing boat hulls for two weeks regardless of weather conditions.
I have talked a lot about people in my early life, exaggerated their warmth occasionally but never their love for me.
Granddad has figured little in my stories but played a large part in my reality. I never dared ask Granddad about all the praying we did.
Granddad told us a scary story about a Father who gave up His Son to the world. He said the story ended with the Son being nailed to a cross. I didn’t cry, though the way Granddad held his hands up, asking us to imagine nails being banged through them, forced tears to the brim and then fell on my cheek.
Susan Rafferty was in Sunday School, sitting across from me, with the flickering flames of a candle, and I didn’t want her to see me as weak.
So, in response to a sincere question about being afraid, the answer is yes, but fear makes me stronger and occasionally wiser.
Being nailed to a cross, that’s something I’d run away from, the school bully — Nah, I’d burn them in hell before giving in.
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