marnanel | Entries tagged with me.history

CW non-sexual child abuse, ableism

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When I was about five, I drew a plan of our house, and then named all the rooms as though it was a town plan:

Moon Drive
Guitar Road
Dancer Street
Jumper Park

Somehow, forty years on, my family still use those names for the rooms.

I have continued the system. For example, in the house we just moved out of:

Lamb Street
Treacle Road
Orion Way
Drawing Close

And in the new flat, two tiny rooms (or large cupboards):

Sonnet Road
Ocelot Street

This is the street names system. It's surprisingly useful if you make sure the names don't fit any pattern.

This is me when I was eighteen months old, and cute.

Twenty-five years later, at work, I arrived early for the weekly all-staff planning meeting. I turned over my copy of the agenda, and to my horror, naked baby me was smiling back.

Nobody else had arrived, so I quickly checked the other face-down papers around the table. All of them had the photo. I went back to my seat and waited, with trepidation.

The others arrived.

“Just before we start the meeting,” said the CFO, “here’s a bit of fun. You all have a photo of one of the people here, as a baby. I found it when I googled their name last night. Can you guess who it is?”

I LEFT THE COMPANY SHORTLY AFTERWARDS

(Not just because of the baby photo. My desk was near an external door; one day a process server came in and handed me a writ about an unpaid debt. So I took it to the CFO, who said “just put it on the pile with the others.”)

During the time of my GCSEs and A-levels (this would be 1989 to 1992-ish, I suppose) a charity called Education 2000 was trying to increase the usage of computers in schools; they'd picked on our area to experiment in. The practical upshot of this was buying each school a hundred or so rather crappy PCs. But then, suddenly... oh glory... then, there was Ebby.

Ebby. Two VAXen in Letchworth Town Hall, named EBENEZER and HOWARD after the founder of the town, a high-capacity network between there and all the secondary schools in Letchworth, Baldock and (for a while) Hitchin and Royston too... four or five terminals for each school (two for the library, one in the staffroom, one in the sixth-form area as a special privilege, one in a quiet room somewhere else)... a conferencing system running on them called Caucus... two dialup lines for students who were lucky enough to have machines with 2400 or even 9600 baud modems at home... all these were Ebby.

Yet Ebby was more. It was the people who used it...

...it was the bizarre screen names, that the admin eventually clamped down with a few weeks' grace period until they barred the change-name command... the announcements of this in school assemblies (who needs MOTDs?)... the people, such as the ever-vivacious Helen Priestley, who never got around to changing and so were stuck with names like "THE HASH SMASH POT!!!!!" all the rest of their Ebby lives...

...it was a few thousand teachers and students learning how to exist in cyberspace for the first time, the "Ebbyverse" as we called it, the disembodiment of minds...

...it was the culture of emailing your friends who you'd see next period anyway...

...it was remembering people by their Ebby logins...

...it was the conferences, discussion boards with grand purposes and strong names... SCHOLAR2 the quiet hive of no activity... CHRISTIAN the atheist-versus-Christian flamewar where both sides were as indignant and insensitive as sixth-formers can get... PRATCHETT (was it?) where we discussed the writings of the great one, and someone worked out an address, fertile with percentage signs, which would send email out of Ebby onto another network that would forward to some sort of Internet gateway that would somehow get mail to Terry Pratchett's Demon account... APHYSHELP, AMATHSHELP, ACHEMHELP, the forums where staff and students were supposed to discuss A-level difficulties and find solutions, and which were supposed to justify Ebby's existence, but in practice were so empty that your nervous exploring footsteps echoed around you when you ventured in from the bustling world outside...

...it was the PHONE command, instant messaging in real time, which was banned and unbanned as regularly as clockwork...

...it was INTRO files, descriptions of a user, which usually ran to several tens of kilobytes and had pictures and pages of blank lines, every so often dropping in another random nugget of information...

...it was meeting up with people you knew from the same area and talking about Ebby even when you were offline...

...it was meeting people who wanted to know how to hack around with the registers of an EGA card to get the colour addressing properly which led to the assembler animation routines in Avalot working at all-- specifically, meeting one Cameron Grant from another school in the computer forums, who was a mentor to me in writing games, and collaborated with me on mailshotting US bulletin boards and magazines with the programs we'd written...

...it was sharing our poetry...

...it was laughing together at every joke in The Mary Whitehouse Experience...

...it was being part of it all.

I'm blessed to have been a part of Ebby. May its memory be ever cherished.

-- THURMANTS3

In a box of old papers, I found this leaflet from Puffin Books. “Thomas” is me. In mid-1978, I would have been three and a half.( scans )

I've always dressed androgynously and worn my hair long since childhood, because of being nonbinary, but this was the first time I'd got this treatment. I think it gets more common after puberty?

When I was about fifteen, I participated in a thirty-mile walk to raise money for charity. The final checkpoint was a pub, and of course everyone went into the beer garden and lay down on the grass.

Now you know how when you've been exerting yourself, you can walk fine until you stop, whereupon your muscles seize up. Well, after lying on the ground for a few minutes I got up because I needed to go into the pub and find the toilet, and of course I could hardly walk. So I hobbled towards the pub door.

A middle-aged man walked up and held my elbow, saying, "Let me help you, my dear."

First thought: wtf?! Why has this creep grabbed my arm without asking?

Second thought: Oh! In these baggy walking clothes, he thinks I'm a girl.

Third thought: Wait a moment. That means that girls get this sort of treatment all the time and I'VE NEVER NOTICED.

It was seriously a life-altering moment.

How was/is your school organised? Mine wasn’t, very.

My school (state comprehensive) had houses called Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria, and Wessex. Northumbria was red, Anglia was yellow, Mercia was blue, and Wessex was green. I was in Wessex.

There was a system called “tutor groups” that applied to everyone except the sixth form, where you had to report to a particular teacher (in whatever room they taught in) at the beginning and the end of each day. The teachers were organised into houses and you were in the same house as your tutor. Despite the name your tutor wasn’t responsible for teaching you anything.

The school had 1200 kids and had outgrown the rather small hall, so assemblies alternated between Mercia+Anglia and Northumbria+Wessex. If you weren’t in assembly you just sat around in your tutor group doing homework (i.e. playing Top Trumps).

The school secretary was really really keen on coding everything. Each of the teachers, each of the rooms, and each subject had a three-letter code, and you were expected to memorise all the ones which applied to you. You wrote your tutor’s three-letter code after your name on everything– my tutor was Mr Crowther who taught chemistry, so my name was “Thomas Thurman CWR”. His room, where we went every morning and evening, was L05 (laboratory zero-five).

We had house points in the first two years, but they weren’t tallied up per house and they only applied to you. (This made no bloody sense even at the time.) You were given a card where the teachers initialled squares.

You got a badge if you made 100 or 200 house points. I finally reached 200 at the end of the last term of my second year. I’ve still got the badge somewhere. [edit: found it!]

This is the first of our rose plants to flower.
The plant's name is Sheila.

I've been growing roses all my life.
I wear a necklace of rosewood.
In many ways, I am a rose.

Roses aren't naturally climbing plants, like bindweed or grapevines. They must be cared for, and bound to a structure. And I've learned that I need to give myself a structure, or I can't naturally climb.

I am a rose.

Roses need work. They must be pruned. The pruning is painful, but without it they won't flower.

I am a rose.

Nobody cares about dog-roses, nobody notices them, but they grow wild wherever they please. The popular roses that everyone admires are sterile and can't spread: they survive because they're grafted onto a dog-rose root. The roses nobody cares about are the roses that keep the others alive.

I am a rose.

I grew up near one of the biggest rose nurseries in the country, so everywhere there was me, there were roses too. I fell into many a rosebush while I was learning to ride a bike. I carefully grew one up the side of the house, a yellow rose with a mind of its own: soon I had to leave it to its own devices because it had grown taller than my arms could reach.

I am a rose.

When I was about six I had a dream of a concentration camp. I had been imprisoned, along with many other humans, by gaseous aliens who lived on methane. The armed guards would float around our cabins and the parade ground, terrifying us as much as they intimidated us.

Of course when you're sent to the camps, they take everything away from you: all your property as well as your dreams and your name. But I'd smuggled in one memento: a small twig of rosewood. I kept it in the pocket of my grey uniform and squeezed it tight whenever I was homesick.

One day I realised that roses have thorns. And that was the day I used the rosewood to burst and kill the guards at the gate, and run free into the outside world. One small piece of reality had torn a hole in the nightmare.

I am a rose.

In the second year of my BSc, one of the lecturers asked us to build a Unix shell. In those days, Unix on PCs was a novelty, and most people used accounts on a minicomputer called altair. (Now I feel old.)

Anyway, a fundamental part of building a shell is the sequence of fork() then exec(). It's unique to Unix-like systems, and most students were unfamiliar with it-- hence the exercise.

Now, if you miss out the exec(), you'll have a continuous loop of fork()s, otherwise known as a fork bomb. This could bring down the system, especially in those days. So imagine several dozen CS2 students logging in to the same computer, building a fork bomb by accident, and setting it off.

The funniest part was how angry he was with *us* in the next lecture. "The sysadmins are saying I told you to put fork() in a loop! I *never* told you to put fork() in a loop!"

When we were teenagers, my brothers and sisters and I played a game called Starlight; we’d made it up and it evolved over time. There was a deck of 64 cards. Here are some of my favourites, drawn by teenage me.

STARLIGHT. Top card in the deck.

ALCHEMIST. Part of the game was that everyone could choose a card that represented themselves. This was my card.

PHARAOH. This card was the most powerful/valuable. He gained a microphone in this edition because we’d just finished a school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

POET. He’s writing something about himself and weeping.

OREAD. An oread is the spirit of a hill, just as a dryad is the spirit of a tree.

DRYAD. This was my brother Andrew’s card– he wore glasses at the time. This edition has his eyes drawn heavily blue, because Andrew has noticably blue eyes.

NAIAD. The spirit of a stream.

The full set is here: https://thurman.org.uk/starlight/ . Apologises for the card called MADMAN: I know better now.

And through thick woods one finds a stream astray
So secret that the very sky seems small...
– G K Chesterton

In 2009 I was working in a dull grey cubicle, in a dull grey office, in a dull grey office park. And I was very bored.

After a few months, on my lunch break, I was walking along the grass verge beside the car park. The verge was neatly mown, but beyond its edge there was unkempt woodland.

So I began to wonder about the woodland. As far as I could tell, it had grown up by itself because nobody was looking after the land. I determined to explore, next lunchbreak.

I had to fight my way through the overgrowth at first. My path was blocked by brambles and plenty of poison ivy; fortunately, I’m immune. But after only a minute or so, I couldn’t see the office park any more. There was nothing but me, the trees, and the sky.

I came back every day to explore. Soon I discovered an almost dry streambed, which led me to a stream. I don’t know whether it has a name, but I named it Teg. (That means “beautiful” in Welsh.)

Every lunchbreak from then on, I’d come down and sit by the stream to eat my lunch. It was the most peaceful place I knew, and it almost made that job worthwhile. I never saw another human there. Sometimes, when I was sure nobody else came down to the stream, I used to bathe in it.

A few months later, when I was offered a better job, I left with no regrets– except for my river. About half a mile downstream, there’s a road bridge that crosses the stream for a moment, though you’d never notice it unless you knew to look. As I crossed the bridge on my last journey home, and said goodbye to the Teg for the last time, a bright white egret stood drinking from the stream. He saw me, and flew away.

CW misogyny, sex, death, patriarchy...

Once upon a time, I was president of CUHaGS, which has quite a large crossover with the Monarchist League. CUHaGS has a tradition that the annual dinner is held at the college of the president, so in my year it was held at Sidney.

People often get up and walk around outside between courses, so that they're sitting next to someone else for the next course. (I don't know whether that's just a Sidney thing.) And I began to overhear Monarchists saying things to one another like "I've just been for a leap", or "I fancy a leap. Want to come?"

Some background here. Despite being 400 years old, Sidney has produced approximately two famous people: Carol Voderman and Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell, as you probably know, killed King Charles I. At the restoration of the monarchy, Charles II had Cromwell's body dug up and hanged, and his head put on a spike. Then someone stole the head.

Centuries later, that person's descendant decided it was a bit creepy having a head around, and gave it to Sidney. The head was buried in the chapel, but its exact location remains a secret known only to the Master and a few Fellows. Otherwise there was a risk that monarchists would dig it up again and use it as a football.

Anyway, I investigated what the people going for a "leap" were up to. Of course the Monarchists hate Cromwell, because he killed a king. It turned out that they often hold dinners at Sidney, get drunk, and go to the chapel, and jump up and down on random parts of the floor in the hope that they're showing disrespect to Oliver Cromwell's head.

FRIENDS

They will stand beside you
When all things are good.
And in the times when things are bad
Beside you they have stood.
They always tell the truth to you
As every good friend must
And they are reliable:
Friends you always trust.
They never will say nasty things
About the clothes you wear
They'll stand up for you against others
When you're not there.
You can always trust your friends
To hold your place in queues.
They'll always tell you "You played well",
Even if you lose.
Always keeping by your side:
Friendship never ends.
Yet, after all, we're only human:
Who has friends?

It occurred to me that I've never told the story of the toilets at my secondary school.

The sewer that ran under the boys' toilets was cracked and leaking. But they didn't find that out for years. So they assumed the terrible smell was our fault.

To begin with, they told us to aim properly at the urinal. But the stench continued.

Then, one morning at assembly, they sent the girls out early. The boys remained, with some trepidation. The headmaster went up to the lectern and told us that perhaps we didn't know how to use a urinal, because it's not something your parents teach you in toilet training, so he was going to explain it to us. It was the most horrendous assembly I can remember. I can't tell you much about the explanation: I tuned out after "Because of the shape of your penis..."

The stench continued.

At another assembly, we were told of the latest hypothesis: we must have been standing to urinate in the stalls, rather than at the uriñal. This practice was banned forthwith.

The stench continued.

They decided we weren't paying attention to the new ban. So they stuck signs saying "THINK!!" on the cisterns-- these were the old-fashioned kind, so the cistern was about at head height. Someone public-spirited added "FUCK" in marker pen to all the signs. This caused another assembly.

Somewhere around this point, people began using toilet paper in protest-- flushing entire rolls and so on. The result was a ban on toilet paper. For the next few years, if you were planning to do anything that might involve toilet paper, you were supposed to go to the school office and ask for some, then carry the roll through three corridors to the toilets, and take it back afterwards. It was a kind of public humiliation. It was easy to forget beforehand, and at least once I had to use graph paper from a previous maths lesson.

None of this seemed odd at the time. I take it not all schools were like mine?

One summer, when I was a small child, I found a book on astronomy. I read it eagerly, and talked about the stars to everyone I met. But it was summer, and so my bedtime was before dusk, and stargazing was impossible.

So my father offered to let me stay up one night to see the stars. He took me to the tall window on the stairs, and drew back the curtain, and I saw the stars scattered across the dark blue of the sky, and the Milky Way shining.

And it was terrifying. It seemed I was looking not just into unimaginable distances, but at something that should not be seen, something almost indecent for human eyes to see-- like seeing the sky goddess all naked for one moment before looking upon her beauty strikes you dead.

I fled, screaming.

When I was at school, the county would often send psychologists to ask me things. Once, when I was about thirteen, I had to fill in a sort of questionnaire. It had statements with tickyboxes, like

I would like to be an astronaut ☐
I would like to be stronger ☐

The paper said at the top that it was the version of the test for boys, and the last question of all said:

I would like to be a girl ☐

And I had a panicky moment considering that if I told the truth there it would involve a lot more psychologists and probably further humiliation in front of my classmates, so with some level of guilt for lying I left the box unticked.

A few years ago, someone said to me that they thought life was a bit like playing chess-- you know the rules, and you have to think a few moves ahead. I replied that I'd often thought life was rather more like Mao. In case you don't know Mao, it's a card game where nobody's allowed to explain the rules, so the first few times you play you'll lose spectacularly; after you begin to work out the rules, you may discover that there's a standard way for people to create new rules, but because of the prohibition on explaining the rules, the other players will have not only to notice that a new rule has been introduced, but also to work out what it is by induction. This somewhat parallels my experience of life-- everyone seems to have seen the rulebook except me.

Well, the other night I had a dream. I was at a party where everyone else was playing a game a bit like Mao, but instead of using playing cards, everything was on index cards: when you introduced a new rule, you had to create new cards to go along with it. And I was confused and disorientated and disheartened, just as in my metaphor for life.

But then a card turned up in my hand which had clearly been circulating for a while. It was in a familiar handwriting, and after a moment I recognised it as the stumbling form of my own handwriting I'd used when I was about eight or nine.

And this was the most encouraging dream I've had in a long while. I used to know how to play this game. I knew once. I can learn again.

I can't sleep. But I was just remembering being six years old and made to sit in the hallway outside my classroom, the desk being put there specially so that everyone who passed by would see it and remark on it, and being told to write out "I am a baby" a hundred times. And I am remembering defiantly writing "I am not a baby" and being made to do it all again.