My Life Story.

The one I told my therapist about (Part I).

Well doctor……

I was conceived at the climax of a “group session” during a hedonistic music festival in the 1960s. My subsequent birth had been both a painful and stressful experience for my mother. After a protracted labour and despite her best efforts to squeeze me out of her flue naturally, I became tightly wedged in the birth canal and eventually had to be delivered by C-Section, much against her earth mother principles. As the surgeon levered me out of her, those present were shocked to see that I was wearing a tiny mask, snorkel and flippers.

In the course of a particularly trippy, yurt-based conversation with other free spirits, my mother had apparently touted the idea of using a birthing pool to bring her child into the world, as it would be “really wild, man.” Some wag must have run with this, and casually slipped the mini scuba gear “up there” as a prank, while she wasn’t looking. She claimed that she didn’t hold my unnatural entry into the world against me but I remain unconvinced to this day.

This photograph was taken at the now infamous Open Ovaries festival held on Leicester’s Western Park at the height of the swinging 60s. Eager suitors, later to be honoured with the misleading nomenclature “uncles”, vie for my earth mother’s favours, whilst she suggestively readies herself for what would turn out to be my conception.

My hippy-swinger begetters then opted somewhat spitefully to identify their progeny as non-ternary and bestowed the “it” pronoun on me, long before the concept was remotely fashionable. They further rubbed salt into the wound by bringing me up as biodegradable, which would deprive me of the carefree, non-recycling childhood enjoyed by my peers.

I was subsequently raised in what was at the time commonly described as a Marxist collective but these days would most probably would be called a cult. It consisted of a gaggle of some fifty or so colourful, unkempt but very earnest souls and a few progressively insightful goats, who lived in a jumble of gaily decorated buses and caravans on a small plot of wasteland, just off the slip road to the Toddington Services on the M1.

Home for me was a decommissioned double decker number 21 London Transport bus, which had been tastefully converted into a bijou countercultural residence by my parents. We shared it with their androgynous familiar, a mysterious beturbaned figure called Auntie Bubbles, and my pet gerbil, Mike. Quite the dandy, Mike, who was of a highly nervous disposition, frequently wore his fur in a stylishly gelled back look. He must also have had some form of respiratory condition as he always smelt strongly of Vicks Vaporub.

The commune was a real melting pot thanks to this country’s then membership of the EEC. I acquired a love for the French language listening to the wit and wisdom of the man who was the commune’s head. He was a charismatic, moustachioed Frenchman and former Légionnaire turned street performer called Eugène. He was an abrasive alpha male who, when he was with the drink, would recount ribald anecdotes of his time as confidant and official fluffer to “Monsieur Le Président de la République”, often through the medium of mime.

My passion for German on the other hand evolved through a youthful crush I had developed on a charmingly hirsute woman called Bettina, who had ties, I have since discovered, to the Rote Armee Faktion, aka the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang. She was charged with giving me my political education, in exchange for her not being handed over to the Feds.

While she and I went about the day’s chores, Bettina would sing extracts from Marx’s Das Kapital in the original German to the tune of the chart hits of the time, pausing to let me translate the text and sing it back to her in English.

My favourite number was taken from: “Commodities and Money – The Commodity – 1.3 Form of Value – 1.3C General Form of Value, which we sang to the tune of Spanish pop duo Baccara’s 1977 chart hit, “Yes Sir, I can boogie”.

,,Ja, mein Herr, ich kann Boogie tanzen, aber die entfaltete Wertform kommt zuerst tatsächlich vor, sobald ein Arbeitsprodukt, Vieh z.B., nicht mehr ausnahmsweise, sonder schon qewohnheitsmäßig mit verschiedenen anderen Waren ausgetauscht wird.”

“Yes, Sir, I can boogie but the expanded form of value comes into actual existence for the first time when a particular product of labour, such as cattle, is no longer exceptionally, but habitually, exchanged for various other commodities.”

Unfortunately. these light-hearted moments were rare. In the early days, hippy attitudes and values tended to prevail, but under Eugène’s stewardship, Marxist dogma increasingly influenced our lifestyle. I became accustomed to living in a stiflingly austere and oppressive atmosphere.

Decisions on matters relating to daily life were made by an elected committee and involved lots of contentious debate before being put to a vote, which then had to be ratified by Eugène. I frequently felt frustrated and trapped by the relentless tedium and lack of fun. This feeling of alienation increased as I entered my teens.

Matters were made worse because I didn’t feel especially wanted by my parents either. They seemed to spend most of their time with Auntie Bubbles and for some reason my pet gerbil, Mike. They could also be quite cruel to me at times. As a very self-conscious teen, I clearly remember having to wander around in my undies for days on end, because they would regularly get out of helping with bi-annual run to a laundromat in Luton. And I still carry the emotional scars after my parents publicly denounced and then mocked me on the commune noticeboard and in the local free press for my bourgeois suggestion that we should make our own pesto.

Imagine my surprise when Rachel Riley revealed the childhood nickname bestowed on me by my parents as a conundrum answer on the Countdown letters board!

By the late 1980s, Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev had decided that Communism wasn’t doing it for him and with that, the people of Eastern Europe began to throw off the shackles of oppression.

Within the commune rumblings of discontent were also starting to be heard. Things literally exploded on one occasion after some of the adults pulled a rowdy all-nighter, quaffing quantities of a particularly robust batch of home-brew. The flatulence they produced sparked angry exchanges between drinkers and non-drinkers over the commune’s carbon footprint. Things took a further tragic turn when several elders and two goats failed to recover from their night of binge-drinking and sadly shat themselves to death.

Things were never the same after that and the commune finally broke up on 9th November 1990, ironically the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

However, by the time I had turned eighteen I had already made good my escape. I stowed away in the trailer of an articulated lorry parked in the services area, and headed for Calais. I earned a pretty lucrative living over there selling tickets for a popular dinghy day-trip to England run by a two charming Albanian brothers, Elvis and Zog.

One balmy summer’s evening, I had just packed my last customer into the dinghy and pushed it out into La Manche (English Channel) and was having a cheeky Dubonnet or two down by the quayside before retiring to bed. Out of the shadows, two small, bewildered orphans approached me and asked in faltering French:

«Pardon, monsieur, où est la port, s’il vous plaît?»

I stared into their sad, imploring eyes before replying:

«Quoi? Je ne vous comprends pas. Répétez la question.»

«What? I don’t understand you. Repeat the question.”

«Pardon, monsieur, où est la port, s’il vous plaît?»

«C’est LE port, masculin, pas LA port, féminin». I admonished them. «Répétez la question.»

“It’s LE port, masculine, not LA port, feminine. Repeat the question.“

I insisted they asked the question again, this time correctly.

«Pardon, monsieur, où est LE port, s’il vous plaît?» , said the orphans.

Once they had rectified their glaring grammatical faux pas, I answered their query.

«Alors, vous allez tout droit et puis vous tournez à gauche. Vous avez le fric, non? Demandez monsieur Zog.»

“So, you go straight ahead and then turn left. You’ve got the cash, haven’t you? Ask for Mr Zog.”, I explained.

As they wandered off, tiny hand clasped in tiny hand towards the dinghy departure area on the south side of the refugee camp, I suddenly burst into tears. I sobbed uncontrollably for a good ten minutes. I had just had an epiphany; after years of living without any real purpose, I had finally found my calling in life. I had just helped two disadvantaged children navigate the grammatical complexities of the French language. It all made sense! God wanted me to be a languages teacher. Who was I to argue?

With a new found zest, I soon returned to England and enrolled on a languages degree course at a highly reputable East Midlands university. I sailed through it with flying colours and moved onto do a PGCE and became a teacher. And that’s where I think things started to go awry, doctor.

Postscript.

Following the break-up of the commune, Mike was found wandering in a daze along the M1 northbound hard shoulder. He was rescued by an RSPCA patrol and put into a short-term care facility, where he received intensive therapy after he revealed that he had been coerced into performing unspeakable acts inside Eugène and several other commune members.

Having received intensive therapy from the RSPCA, Mike is now able to live his best life. He runs a non-profit drop-in centre and on-line support network for victims of menthol topical ointment abuse amongst the rodent community. We still text each other every now and then.