As the swinging sixties swung to the furthest extent of their pendulum Gerry became aware of many changes. The once fab-four, about to implode over bitter personal and business issues, had earned the disapproval of Gerry’s father in a marijuana-fuelled, mantra-chanting display of decadence from which there would be no pardon. Whilst John, Paul, George and Ringo were suddenly banished from the play list of the weekly pirate tape-recordings they were not alone in obtaining Bill Hood’s disfavour. Mick Jagger’s drug bust was grist to the mill of Gerry’s father’s disillusionment with long-haired, ‘pot-smoking’ disciples of indiscipline and the house reverberated to his imprecations to “bring back national service!” - something which paradoxically he had himself hated, notwithstanding the fact it had been whilst on his own stint in the RAF that he had met the boys’ mother. He was also incensed by the abolition of capital and corporal punishment and would intersperse his appeals for their restoration with bitter complaints about the incumbent Labour Government “ruining this bloody country!”.
Such exhortations were nevertheless not reflected in his own world which had recently seen the appearance of a ‘rent-a-set’ colour television in the family’s front-room and a relatively new white Jaguar Mark II 3.4 automatic car on the newly asphalted driveway. The car, his pride and joy, was a high-octane gas-guzzler which attracted the attention of all, including the local police, and Bill was soon bemoaning a collection of speeding endorsements, acquired in moments of excitement and irritation by the police’s latest tactic of what he bitterly referred to as ‘speed-traps’. One such endorsement had been the indirect result of Gerry and Glenn’s fascination with this new speed-machine. Whilst their father was working on his latest building-site project the boys had ignored his very specific instruction not only to “stay out of my car!”.
Everything their father owned would be prefaced by the personal pronoun ‘my’ to the extent that Gerry would for many years actually believe that his father possessed an utterly divine right to illumination due to his insistence, whenever the boys would gather to watch him perform some skilled task or other, to “stay out of my light!”. Their father, a pragmatist at heart, had carefully added the further caution that should the boys ignore his warning and enter his car “whatever you do, do not touch the intermediate speed-hold!” which became a mysterious quest to find once they had entered the red-leather, walnut dash boarded world of opulence they had been forbidden from. Glenn, as elder brother, of course occupied the driver’s seat whilst Gerry investigated the contents of his fathers glove-compartment and fiddled, to his brother’s annoyance, with the gear-selecter. The Connolly hide seats, which when combined with the somewhat overpowered and under-stabilised ride of the vehicle would produce car-sickness in children with even the strongest constitutions. In next to no time at all Glenn had his hand on the plastic-topped paddle to the right of the steering wheel and as his no doubt frenzied fantasy excursion reached its imaginary climax on some hill crest of his young mind it clicked ominously as he enquired aloud “I wonder what that does?”.
What it did was to prove less significant than what it caused his father to do, which was to be caught in another speed-trap.
“I had to drive the bugger at eighty-five miles an hour to get the sodding thing out of intermediate speed-hold!” he ruminated in his deepest, and therefore most dangerous baritone rumble. He was not best pleased, either by the fine of £40 or the latest embellishment to his driving licence which would curtail his boy-racer instincts to the sedate cruising of an old-age pensioner, in order to avoid further endorsements which would result in a total driving ban. The Jaguar was not a car best suited to such a purpose and lasted only as long as it took to be rid of the accumulated endorsements whereupon it was replaced by less exotic and tempting substitutes, the boys having effectively “ruined” his pleasure by this one simple act of “defiant disobedience!”.
Jimmy Hendrix somehow escaped their father’s censorship and both Purple Haze and All Along the Watchtower would reverberate from the Grundig TK14’s speakers before its motors whirred their last. Deeply impressed by the monorail that his cousin had powered on his own parents’ TK12, Gerry set to work constructing his own system. This he intended to transport a motley collection of soft toys and Action Man figures in various battledress and frog suit ensembles (Neil Armstrong had yet to make his giant leap and therefore Gerry would have to wait patiently before becoming the proud possessor of the astronaut kit, though he never was able to persuade his parents to ‘spring’ for the Gemini capsule) from one end of the washing line to the other and back again. Simple in its conception it would rely on the motor power of the family’s once most prized possession, now fallen into quiet neglect since the arrival of the colour television, which also heralded the end of 405 lines broadcast with the new and much improved 625. On this Gerry’s father would watch the relentless forehand of Rod Laver grind all comers into submission during successive Wimbledon championships, eating ham salads from tea-trays served by his long-suffering mother who would emerge from thankless encounters with her thus pre-occupied spouse with a look of disgust on her face as she spat the words “bloody tennis - it’s all he thinks about!”
Such preoccupation allowed Gerry the pause to trial his scheme, albeit on a much smaller scale in the tranquillity of his shared bedroom, his brother (now at secondary school having become preoccupied himself with equations, algebra and books about the internal combustion engine) ignoring the strange machinations and complexities of wool and whirring. Gerry waited for a window of opportunity when alone in the house he could put his grand plan into full operation whereupon he carefully placed his improvised pulleys and by turning the machine to ‘play’ his wonderful whirligig burst into life. Perhaps had he not decided to reverse the process by turning the handle to ‘fast-rewind’ all would have been well, but with the over-confidence of an inventor high on his own genius he ignored yet another of his father’s warnings not to do so without first stopping the precision-built German tape-deck and with a bright blue flash, immediately followed by a foul acrid stench, the Grundig began to belch forth blue-black smoke and as his invention ground to a halt, died.
Like the intermediate speed-hold before it Gerry could easily anticipate his father’s words which would begin with an imploring “I told you not to…” and end with bitter recrimination, so he decided to replace it where it now resided, largely unused and neglected and let fate take its course. The ultimate discovery of its demise, and resultant condemnation was directed squarely at both boys but his elder brother never once intimated that his share of the blame was unjustly directed, though Gerry paid for it many times over in an ongoing war of attrition between them which would rumble on like the war in Vietnam and his father’s remonstrations with their ‘interfering with things they have no business touching”.
Bill’s “best boxwood rule” was to prove another example of this in their cannon of destruction. They had been forbidden, time and again, to even touch this hallowed measuring device, with which Bill would ‘measure-up’ jobs for which his building firm would be tasked to provide a price quotation. On one occasion the two boys had been corralled into accompanying him, in the Jaguar, to a site in a rather unprepossessing rural village. Whilst the boys were commanded to remain in the car on a searingly hot day with the well known euphemism “I won’t be more than ten minutes” from their dad they knew full well that an hour at least of stultifying boredom would ensue. For some unknown reason the boys’ father had left his boxwood rule, his best boxwood rule, on the little shelf that sat just below the radiomobile radio set. Gerry, who received a narrowed-eyes look of caution from Glenn unfolded the two arms of the instrument before opening the legs into first a long ‘V’ and then as its brass rotating hinge widened its growing arc, straightened it completely across the width of both front seats until its entire four foot length bestrode both Gerry and his now irritated brothers positions.
“Put it away quickly, dad’s coming!” exclaimed the suddenly anxious elder brother.
The panic that descended upon Gerry in that uncertain moment caused the now flapping hinges of the extended rule to mutiny as his inexpert fumbling failed to return the instrument to its folded form, and in one dreadful moment of irretrievable haste Gerry felt one of the legs snap and fall splintered and broken into his lap. In the time it took his brother to get out of his father’s seat, Gerry replaced the broken piece upon its hinge and turning the entire affair scar-side down replaced it upon the shelf.
“Pass me my boxwood rule please” were the very last words either of the boys wanted to hear but which his father’s request now demanded that Gerry do. Without demur Gerry carefully placed both the intact and severed components of the rule in his father’s outstretched hand and watched gratefully as he walked back toward whatever it was he now intended to measure. He had gone perhaps ten paces towards his destination when, unconsciously unfolding the instrument in readiness for his task the broken end fell to the earth at his feet.
“You little buggers!” were the only words that resonated across the quiet village green next to where he stood frozen by the realisation that once again one of his boys at least had been interfering with things they had no business touching.
Retribution, when it came, was both swift and brutal, consisting of a heavy clout around the head but, to the accompaniment of Gerry’s anguished cries which rang out across the formerly tranquil hamlet was immediately followed-up with the terrifying threat of “wait until I get you home” from his exasperated father. Gerry had tried his father’s patience - which from Gerry’s perspective had already demonstrated profound limitations - to the limit this time and was about to become a hostage to his wrath for the entire summer, a summer which hitherto had stretched out before him like a silken road of luxuriantly seductive possibilities. What Gerry’s father had in mind was more akin to a Texan chain-gang, breaking rocks in the hot sun, and he learned to resent his father’s ambiguous relationship with discipline that summer like never before.
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