As a child at school back in the
sixties I remember being taken into a room, physically examined by an
elderly medic and hearing him apply to me a big word I didn't
understand, but whose tone and context told me was important, and
possibly shameful, so I memorised it. It was before I knew how to use
a dictionary. At the time the chief clues to word meanings were hung
on the classroom walls. I remember the picture of an axe and being
mystified by the spelling of the accompanying word – why the E at
the end?
The presence of an E at the end of AXE
remained a mystery but the meaning of my big word didn't. After a
while I learned that “underdeveloped” was every bit as shameful
as I'd suspected.
It's odd to think that I remember a
particular word being said when memories of my early school days are
normally so hazy, but then the handling of ones genitals without
invitation by a towering stranger lends itself to recall. It's also
odd to think that this manipulation was considered normal practice. Maybe
it still is. Or perhaps nowadays the examiner uses some sort of
electronic soup ladle (or teaspoon in cases like mine).
I have long had a mental picture of my
father being present at this institutional groping, I can see him
slumping in resignation upon learning that his son was never going to
be a caber tosser and was destined instead to lead a life of
unalloyed milksoppery. I now suspect I added my dad to the scenario
at a later date just to confirm the ritual humiliation of it all. The
real interlocutor was probably a secretary with a clipboard, fountain
pen poised to mark me down for life, stockinged legs scissored,
strained lab coat threatening to catapult buttons-
Anyway, sometime during the following
years my genitals must have put on a metaphorical spurt as I remember
engaging, as a cocky nineteen year old, in frenetic and seemingly
concatenate bouts of copulation for months on end with an obliging
girlfriend. I couldn't believe my luck and was far too hyperactive to worry about underdevelopment, that was until she referred to
me as being “immature” a term that had uncomfortable echos of the
U word. It came as a tremendous relief when she patiently spelt out
to me, in what turned out to be our final conversation, that she was
referring to my morbid jealousy, snide comments and
all-round superficiality.
