^_WRITING

                              BEYOND OTHER WORLDS
                                                           : the memoirs of Paul Korda
                                                                            by Paul Korda
                                                                     © 2010 Paul Korda Music
                                                      (Not to be reproduced without authors permission)

Chapter 3

                                                                    Navigating Uncharted Territories

It was fortunate that the Christmas holidays only lasted about three weeks, and the time spent over Christmas in the remand home meant I only spent a few more days with my father, as my mum had to return to France. I was soon on my way to Gatwick Airport, to catch my flight back to Victoria College, so this return to school was a joy for me.
My father had dropped me off at the airport and I was waiting to board the aircraft when we were told that due to storms in the English Channel, the flight had been postponed to the following morning. Being thirteen years old, I had been placed in custody of the airline, and the airline was making a hotel available for the passengers, within a short distance from the airport.
The only other youngster, who also had been dropped off by her parents, was a girl of similar years. Although I forget her name, I remember us looking at each other with wide eyes, and while we were chatting, we both were giggling about spending the night together! Of course we never expected to be in the same hotel room, until we arrived in it, and the airline steward said goodnight. I think we were so overwhelmed by the adult nature of being with the opposite sex in a hotel room together without our parents that we jumped up and down on the thick springy mattress while the TV played loud. Neither my mother or my father had ever talked about sex to me, and at that time the closest to sex I’d ever experienced was when my foreskin rubbed against a bed sheet, and that didn’t relate to girls. I had kissed a girl, but not even that crossed my mind, as we both fell asleep.

The next morning, an hour and a half after later, I was back on the island of Jersey. I was apprehensive about not having a microphone, but at that age nothing is unmanageable.

It turned out that the Intruders’ members, all being college boys, were at an age to start taking their education more seriously, at least Mark and Craig who were older day boys living at home with their parents, probably had to, so we didn’t do any shows that term, in fact anymore, while I was at the school.

So I concentrated on my interest in Latin, for it gave me the roots of the original meaning of many words, and allowed me to be more penetrating with my understanding of vocabulary and communication in general. I also liked Roman history, for all their technical achievements with roads, and baths etc.

Scripture classes with the school chaplain always started with pandemonium, when often the chaplain, who rode a BMW 1000 motor bike would arrive to several skirmishes, and his lack of authority, often couldn’t bring the class under control. He was actually a very nice person, but you couldn’t afford to be that way with some of the bullying types.

One of those types, who lived at the College House was my first introduction to an American, called Rice, who was just plain greedy!

Looking back now in 2010, he was probably the product of the new USA consumer generation of the 1950s, where the value of an individual was no longer the fact they were human beings first, but their reason for being was more justifiable if they consumed and owned plenty.

He was a boarder, who was a large imposing boy, who enjoyed taking the ‘tuck’ (snack food) that we received by post from our parents, and terrorizing us until he got the food, or more often than not, would just grab it before we managed to eat it ourselves. Several of us were growing rather tired of his behaviour, so we plotted to pretend to have received some snacks that we had drenched with red hot pepper. Sure enough Rice grabbed two large handfuls, shoving one then the other into his open mouth. His face suddenly glowed bright red, and he went howling down the corridor to the shower room, to try to wash out his mouth. He never did his food grabbing again, but after lights out that night, he came to my bed with a glass of water and drenched me and my bed clothes. A little later, I filled a water jug to the brim and when he was sleeping, I tipped the whole jug of water on him. There was quite a commotion, but the prefect came in to our dormitory, turned the light on, and having witnessed a completely drenched Rice, appeared to deny what he was seeing could actually be real, and just said alright, goodnight.

It was a period of my growth that appeared to display conflict scenarios, or maybe this happens to many thirteen year old when they reach puberty. Up to this time I had asserted my self in my inner nature by being creative and staying close to my sense of personal reality, often introverted and in a dream. Now I was being faced with bullying pubescent boys who appeared to be a great deal more frustrated than me, and enjoyed angry provocations. I didn’t enjoy being dragged into their psychological imbalance, for I’d taken care of my inner life, for it was my true place of residence. The more I’d try to avoid their confrontations, the more extreme they would get to get me to return their negative attention seeking. It was becoming a chore that distracted me from my creativity, so I knew it was time to act and alert my inner border guard to take action.

The one thing I had learned in the remand home, when one of the wardens had put me against a huge gang member in a wrestling match, was the power of belief. As I looked at the massive muscular delinquent, I slammed my right fist into my left palm and gave him the fiercest expression I could muster. He looked visibly shocked, and as wrestling was about the only sport I knew that used a simple science of twisting a limb against its natural inclinations, I grabbed his arm and managed to twist it, and it startled him, allowing me to do some more twisting, before he pushed me away, rabbit punched me in the head and I fell over, blacking out for a second.

So being faced with bullies, I realized it was necessary to make a psychological move and physical statement that the bullies would talk about and fear that I had the power to retaliate.

One morning while walking down to the College from the boarding house, one medium sized buddy of the bullies tried to interrupt my journey, tapping me on the shoulder, to which I swung round and punched him. I really didn’t like doing it, and had no idea that when I did, my fist would land squarely on his jaw, and knock him down. The action seemed to have the desired effect, as violence against me calmed down quite a bit.

At this period I was in the CCF, which was the army cadets, even though I hated doing it, I had been the youngest boy to win the seniors cup for marksmanship in an indoor range and the CCF wanted me to train with the larger caliber 303 rifles in the open range, to send me to the National Bisley championships in the UK.
Every Saturday afternoon, the team, dressed in our wool khaki uniforms, would board a coach to take us to the northern end of the island, to a range that overlooked the Channel Sea. One of us had to stand watch to raise a red flag if a boat was nearing, as the bullets whizzed over the sea. We would have to sit in a large rusty metal remnant of WW2 that had a high metal flagpole. This particular Saturday heralded a fierce thunderstorm, and guess who’d been made lookout! Well I was relieved that instead of my having to lie out in the rain trying to hit a target 300 yards away. I could hang out of the rain, in the hut. Well I thought so until I saw the lightening strikes hitting the open sea and moving toward where I was. I decided to stand in the rain and I was getting sopping wet, when there was a loud bang, a spark hit the top of the pole, travelled down to the hut, and there was a bright flash, inside the hut. Not realizing at the time how important my premonition was, I returned back to College House damp but unelectrified.

The Cadet force was to play an important role in my return to England when I was 14, for both my parents had expressed that they wanted the other to pay for my return airfare, and probably because they weren’t working enough. So I had heard that the first two weeks of the summer holidays was a Cadet force field trip to an army camp at Blandford, near the Salisbury Plain in south-west England, and the excursion would cost fifteen pounds for the return boat fare and the camp. So I enlisted, in the hope that one of my parents would pick me up from the army barracks. Little did I know how macho this trip was going to be, or that most of the bullies at school had been to camp on previous summers.

We all arrived at the camp in a coach and were assigned an army barrack where we would sleep. This army camp had regular soldiers stationed there, and having witnessed one having sex with a local prostitute in a water tank housing, we were ordered to sleep, as we had an army exercise on the Salibury Plain, at 5 am the next day. I’d overheard one of the college boys talking about ‘black balling’ the newcomers to camp, after lights out. Black Balling was the term for initiating the new comers testicles with black boot polish, and that was something I wasn’t going to allow to happen to me. 
 

The rain was coming down that night by the bucket loads, each drop percussively striking the wooden hut, as I saw Benest, one of the homies from school whisper “OK Kunstler, it’s your turn” as he leaped out of his bunk toward me, being followed by several other large boys. I jumped out of bed and up onto a window sill, undoing the window latch and leapt out into the soggy mud in the downpour, dressed in my pajamas. I think that the other boys didn’t want to follow us into the mud, so I was just dealing with Benest, and having the advantage of the moment I leapt toward him with both fists blazing. He was no match for my public relations stunt and I climbed back in the window, as a bedraggled Benest came in through the front door. That was the end of my initiating, and on my last night at the camp, after a week of war-game I heard that while we were in town, one of the regular army privates, who was drunk, had broken a bottle and thrust it in the eyes of a military policeman. What an experience for young kids.

Well I was staying with my father again, and I did as much as I could to stay out of his way.

It was at one of these away phases that I met a eighteen year old called Brian, who had just bought an old Triumph Mayflower, which was a black car with a boxy old fashioned style that one might imagine a VIP travelling in the back. Brian said he didn’t like it being black, and had bought some white paint, and asked me if I’d like to help him paint it white. In return he said I could drive with him to a seaside town that night. It all seemed exciting to me, so I spent the morning painting with him, and another young kid he had befriended. Well it turned out that he had gloss house paint and it really didn’t cover the un-sanded black paint too well, and the car looked like a zebra with melted stripes. Still, we didn’t mind, as we set off toward the coast.
The painting had left me quite tired as he told us that he didn’t have enough petrol to get us there and back, and that he knew where there was an abandoned car that probably had some left in its tank. He found the old car in an alley, and pulled a can and some rubber tubing out of the boot. He was sucking the tube, to get the gas out of the tank and pouring it into our motley vehicle. When he had finished he said he was going to take the bumpers from the other car and for some reason the license plates too. After the siphoning, and back on the road, I had fallen asleep, and was suddenly awoken to the cry of someone Brian had just knocked off his bicycle. We were at the coast, as the cyclist hobbled back on his bike to Brian’s apologies.

I must have been exhausted, because I never saw the coast, as I fell asleep again. This time I am awoken to Brian saying “It’s a police road block!”. We had reached the hill that approached where I lived, and there was a few police cars and the officers hailed us to stop. They asked Brian where he was going and why was there a bumper with a number plate attached, on the back seat. He said he just wanted the bumper, and wasn’t interested in the plate. Then he had to open the trunk and they discover the can and a rubber hose as well as a single license plate with no bumper attached. As the officers suspicions arose, the captain of the officers came over to the car and leans on it while talking to his men. When he stands up, the rear of his black uniform is a motley white colour not dissimilar to our cars custom mix paint job. We all look at each other, trying not to betray our need to laugh, as we look at the expression on his officer’s faces that seem to relate to a sense of comedic horror. Suddenly one of them says its time for us to be getting home, and the car wouldn’t start. Amazingly they push the car in a semicircle so that we could jumpstart it on the hill. I never saw Brian again, and good that I didn't.   

Chapter 4

“Us” was Them

           

                                   

                                                                      © 2010 Paul Korda Music