Joining The Navy

A short humorous story about a bad day at school.

In 1984 I made the decision to join the Royal Navy. My academic career had been far from stellar and living as I did in the run down east end town of Wapping, I could see no way out other than to run away to sea. Well, that and the previous five years as a sea cadet had whet my appetite for a naval life and the week I spent at the Portsmouth naval base, Whale Island, aboard HMS Ramehead had sealed the deal. A life sitting on an old ship eating sweets and running the occasional assault course for fun seemed enticing. I telephoned the careers office and made an appointment to attend. It would at least improve my life as things had not gone well at school and something drastic needed to happen to make a positive change

 

   I came from quite a poor, some might say impoverished background and since money was scarce, school clothing was always difficult to provide. My mum had managed to procure for me a new pair of black trousers since I had outgrown the previous pair. The new pair were black just like the previous pair however the similarity ended there. The waist was several inches too small and even if I starved myself for a month I was never going to get into them. A quick visual inspection informed me they were obviously made from a very cheap material which gave the black, stretchy trousers a kind of green sheen and the teflon like feel meant that these trousers would never stick to the seat no matter how chewy the gum that was placed in it. In these trousers, I reasoned, I would be mercilessly torn to shreds by the other boys in their "Farah" trousers and "Kicker" shoes. Fortunately, the huge mop of ginger hair on my head, the innumerable  freckles on my body and the pale skin of the ginger kid would no doubt draw attention away from the trouser area.  My heart sank when I saw them, but needs must.....My mum informed me she would sew a triangular piece of material in the back of the waistband to lengthen the waist and that people would neither notice nor care.

 

That night, I went to sleep feeling insecure and worried about having to wear what appeared to be flared trousers made from an early, perhaps experimental version, of Lycra which gave off what I would describe as an unhealthy green glow. The feeling of unease I had when I went to sleep was as nothing compared to the horror I felt in the pit of my stomach when I awoke to find the trousers folded neatly at the end of my bed, complete with alterations that my mum confessed  she had spent all night working on. At first I found it difficult to believe her claim that she had spent all night working on them but after a cursory inspection of the finished product with their newly let out waist band, I decided the standard of workmanship and quality of finish were an obvious testament to the amount of work she had put in to give the trousers the exact look she had been aiming for. If only we had both been aiming at the same level. "You Better You Bet" by The Who was playing on the radio when my mum held up the trousers and turned them round for me to see where she had managed to "invisibly" insert the triangle. It would have  been more apt if Roger Daltrey had been singing "You Better Wear Them For A Bet". Alarm bells began to ring in my head and suddenly I could see perfectly well why my mum had been up all night working on these trousers. It would have been difficult to sew anything quickly with a hammer which is clearly what she had been doing whilst putting in a rudimentary quilting effect to make the triangle stand out so far from the rest of the trouser.

 

   Unfortunately for me, unlike the Rolling Stones, time was not on my side and I was forced to dress and leave for school. Heavy of heart and amazingly light of trouser I opened the door and left, confident that even though it was dark and I was dressed fully in black...well partially in black and partially in a kind of "so black it's green"....no car would hit me as the reflection off my trousers would immediately alert the driver to my presence. Anyhow, even if they did hit me, the teflon style coating would ensure no blood would stain these trousers. A few hours later, that theory would be tested to destruction. As I walked along the road, I checked out my reflection in the shop windows and looked to see how bad the rear view was. I felt quite fortunate that while I had my school blazer on, the triangle wasn't visible and so since this was march and summer was months away, I confidently told myself that I would be able to keep the alteration out of sight.

 

Three hours later I was staring out of the window, reflecting on the unseasonably hot sun now streaming through the huge panes of glass. As I sat  cursing the Victorians for making such massive windows, sweat streaming down my face and running down my back, I vaguely heard a voice in the background. It was my physics teacher, Dr Cioci.

 

Dr. Cioci was an italian who cut quite a diminutive figure and I would say from memory that he was no taller than 5 feet and perhaps one inch tall. Obviously suffering with "small man syndrome" Dr. Cioci made up for his lack of stature by being big in other areas, most notably, his voice. Dr. Cioci had the kind of voice that meant when he told you to do something, someone with a similar sounding name three doors along and two floors up did it too.

 

"Wouldn't you like to take your blazer off just now Mr Mcpherson?" He boomed across the classroom."God has given us such a lovely warm sun to bask in today, why not take off your jacket and enjoy it?"

 

"God?" I thought. "God? Why the bloody hell is a physics teacher telling me about God when he's bringing my attention to the Sun?" My forehead began to feel a kind of tightening that years later, "Laboritoire Garnier" would achieve artificially with "pro retinol A" or "hydroxyceramides" and sell to vain suckers for ludicrous sums of money.

 

I continued to stare at the top of the cabinet I was sitting in front of and shuffled uneasily in my seat. Actually, in my teflon trousers, I glided effortlessly across the surface of the high backed stool on which I was perched. If I could have had an out of the body experience right then I was convinced I would float up to the ceiling and look down to see Dr. Cioci and twenty nine other pupils staring and pointing at me while Dr. Cioci shouted at me to let everyone have a good look at my shiny black-green trousers with the big triangle sewn into the back of them.

 

"Mr. Mcpherson are you listening to me?" Shouted Dr. Cioci, this time sounding irritated that I had not answered him. If I'd had synaesthesia I'd have been able to feel my face and know what Puce felt like. As it was, I knew almost immediately what it felt like to have 60 eyes boring a hole through my blazer and peering at the triangular patch in my trousers. My head felt prickly and hot and I knew I was going to faint but felt powerless to fight the call of the cool floor. Had I known what was to happen next, I would have fought a lot harder.

 

As Dr Cioci called me to turn around and answer him I lolled backwards in my seat, stopped from falling off, only by the high backrest which was somehow pushed up between my blazer and my back like a vertical spine board. Having been stopped from a backward slump by the backrest of the chair, my unconscious body, now a dead weight, began to slump to the floor and this was where my luck was out. The teflon coating on my trousers acted like a lubricant, or wax on the skis of a bobsleigh and I shot downwards like Franz Klammer at deadmans curve.

 

Almost as soon as I started my downward motion, my body was checked by my blazer which was now firmly snagged on the backrest of the chair. Unfortunately for me, my weight was pulling far harder than any resistance my arms could possibly offer and like an escapology dummy I shot down and out of my blazer in a move that Houdini himself would have envied, my arms raising up in surrender as I fell down and out of the chair.

 

 

 

I was woken from my temporary state of unconsciousness by the pain of my face smashing into the door lock of the cabinet I had been sitting in front of. My nose started to bleed and for me this was the defining moment for my trousers as the blood plainly failed to soak in, running straight off onto the floor......A floor I was now slumped on in a kind of crumpled up, face down foetal position that wouldn't have looked out of place at a mosque. Allah was most definitely not going to save me here though.

 

In the short amount of time between hanging off the chair, held by my blazer and falling to the floor, the stitching in the "V" at the back of my trousers had decided that the enormous strain now being placed on it was not in the original job specification and, without informing me, pulled out of the deal. Now as I lay on the floor, thick headed and bloody nosed but conscious, I decided the best thing to do would be to get up and as I attempted to do so, I was  helped up by a clearly shocked classmate.

 

However, my classmate's shocked expression was  incomparable to the expression of shock I witnessed across every face in the room as I stood up unsteadily and faced the class. At that moment, in a feat of unrivalled comic timing that Morecambe and Wise could not have bettered, my trousers....now devoid of an effective triangle in the back...... fell to my knees in a kind of half mast hoisting for the death of my dignity. In my minds eye I could see my "street cred" jumping into a taxi outside, giving instructions to the driver to make for the airport. How I wished, all of a sudden, that I was not wearing my "Chips" underpants......Officer Poncherello staring out at everyone with a cheesy grin, never mind what Officer Jon Baker was doing behind me. If it was possible to get a deeper crimson than puce, then my face was giving it a good go.

 

Looking at the class as I attempted to bend down and pull up my trousers, I wished my maths teacher had been present, for witnessing the short amount of time between shocked expression to hysterical laughter kicking in, I felt I finally understood what a nano-second was. Mr Philpott would have been so pleased.

 

Now, as I stood outside Holborn underground station, I was quite content that school was, for today at least, the last place I wanted to be. Wearing the well fitting jeans that my sister had given to me the day before...well this was the eighties after all........I stepped across the road  towards the Royal Navy recruiting office.

 

In the office, a large framed sailor walked slowly up to me and enquired if he could help me. I understood that I was in a  military recruitment office and subsequently, I was the target in his sights. He stared at me like a hawk watching its’ prey and feeling slightly pressured, I gave him a weak smile and said yes.

Author's Note

Would love some feedback about the humour, grammar and general layout and structure of the story as well as any comment about the writing style used.

Reviews

[JayG]

You didn’t ask for comment, but since you are posting a fair number of stories, and all of it has an issue that the author won’t see, I thought you might want to know:

You’re transcribing youself telling the story to an audience. But verbal storytelling is a PERFORMANCE art. How you present the story matters as much as what you say, because pretty much all the emotional content of the story comes via that performance. But…

Can the reader hear the emotion in your voice? Can they know where you pause to take a breath, for dramatic effect? Will they know where you change expressions, and the gestures you visually punctuate with? Can they know the body language you literally feel as you edit?

Hell no. So in reality, what you've given the reader is a storyteller’s script, minus the performance notes and time to rehearse.

In short: We can’t use the techniques of one medium in another. The thing we miss is that the only kind of writing we’re given in school is nonfiction. Remember all the reports and essays you were assigned? They made you pretty good at writing what employers need: Reports, papers, and letters, all of which have informing the reader as a goal. And all have a fact-based and author-centric methodology. But it's useless for giction because the goal is different.

As E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And how much time did your teachers spend on that? None, right?

So it’s not your fault, and it’s not about your talent or how well you write. It’s that we leave our school days exactly as prepared to write fiction as to pilot a 747 airliner…but don’t know that. And THAT’s what you need to address. Personally? I’d suggest Dwight Swain’s, Techniques of the Selling Writer, which recently came out of copyright protection. It's the best I've found to date at imparting and clarifying the "nuts-and-bolts" issues of creating a scene that will sing to the reader. The address of an archive site where you can read or download it free is just below. Copy/paste the address into the URL window of any Internet page and hit Return to get there.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

Not what you were hoping to hear, I know. But as I said, since it’s something the author will never notice, I thought you might want to know.

Hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein
https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/

[matelot]

Thank you for taking the time to read and review my writing. Your advice is greatly appreciated and I will endeavour to look up this work you mentioned and try to apply the techniques you advised in my writing and see if I can make an improvement, :)

[JayG]

I suspect that before the end of chapter 2 you'll have said, "My Lord, how could I have not seen this," at least 4 times. I certainly did.