I exchanged my shoes and took the bus into Whincliffe to go to the army surplus shop in Cartbeck. I got to Whincliffe OK but suddenly found I couldn’t remember in which direction the shop was. Result: I trailed around the rain-swept streets for an hour feeling foolish.
This evening I watched a good play on television, Keep on Running by Andrew Armitage. It was set in July 1967 and the protagonist was a sixth former named Alan whose rebellious ways get him into trouble, but he finds a ‘friend’ in the headmaster, who is disillusioned with teaching and with growing old. The night of a school disco, Alan blunders into the headmaster’s study with a girl and is shocked to find the headmaster still sat at his desk. To cut a long story short, the headmaster tells Alan about all the people he sees who “end-up” and never do anything with themselves, and impresses upon him the need to “be outrageous, to show your arse,” to “write a novel or something, but do.”
Alan gets angry at the headmaster presuming he has anything to impart; the usual misunderstanding between generations etc., and storms off back to the disco. He stands at the door and, as he sees the smooching couples and the stifling mediocrity of everything, realises that the headmaster was right. So he rushes to the turntable, takes off the schmaltzy chart hit, and instead plays “Purple Haze,” shouting that “This is the music, this is it!”
He receives the slow hand-clap from the unimpressed couples so runs out with the record, back to the headmaster’s study, where he finds that the headmaster has hanged himself from the chandelier, a ‘Teach Yourself Italian’ record intoning away mindlessly in the background . . . “What-must-I-do?”, . . . “What-have-I-done?”
I thought it was quite impressive, and I think Mum did too, but Dad just frowned and looked bewildered.
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