Mr Pask

My Hero I like going to the mall. It’s the place where I can stay in touch with what’s really happening in the world. Go where the people are and you’ll have no need to study polls or surveys. To really understand what ordinary people are thinking, what interests them, and what they care about, just go shopping. Listen to the ladies gossiping at the checkouts. Eavesdrop on their husbands declaiming at the barbers, and read the empurpled messages on teenagers’ T-shirts.

One glaring fact that I’ve learned from all my mall monitoring is that this is neither the Day of the Environment, the Atomic Age, the Time of the Computer, nor the Communications Century; lamentably this is the Era of Hero Worship. Typical examples; the recent death of a crocodile hunter who was mourned by billions worldwide; capital cities closed to traffic so that thousands can worship a dozen or so millionaire heroes who kick a ball better than other millionaires; and bad singers becoming instant “Idol” stars to sell inarticulate CD’s. Not that hero worship is all new; perhaps it’s just louder. Even when I was a small boy some eighty years ago, my playmates all wanted to be Walter Hammond, Alex James, Lionel Van

Praag or Sir Malcolm Campbell. Perversely I cared nothing for these sportsmen and speedsters. When, in a portent of future attitudes I used to ridicule my friends’ idols they’d call me stuck up, jealous. They couldn’t understand why I didn’t share their worship. Perhaps it was the influence of my parents. As a small boy my dad had lived with the gypsies. He loudly proclaimed, and passed on to us, his Didikai contempt for any and every thing that could be linked to the values and venerations of the Gorjia (non-gypsy) world. As for my mum, there was no star in the firmament but Jesus. One other source of my disenchantment might have been Aunt Annie. In those mid twenties and thirties many working class

people still revered the blue bloods at the summit of the social heap. My aunt would have sent them all to the tumbrils. Yet eventually I, too, succumbed and acquired a hero to worship. Contrariwise, and to the disgust of my mates, my hero was a schoolteacher. Arthur Cyril Sydney Pask came to the Staples Road boys’ school when I was twelve. He was the first and only teacher at the school to have a university degree. He was a Bachelor of Science. He was also the only teacher to drive a car, a Morris Oxford. I erroneously connected the name of his car to the source of his degree. Mr. Pask’s first lesson provided me with frissons of both fear and wonder. He told us the story of evolution. In one hour he

unknowingly relegated my mum’s decade of creation stories to the dustbin. Throughout the years of indoctrination with Old Testament myths of Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, Jonah and the Whale, I had silently wondered and doubted. Even to a pre-teen boy it was all so absurd, nonsensical, and preposterous. I had thousands of unvoiced questions. Where did Cain’s wife come from? How did the dinosaurs fit with a world created at 9AM, October 23, 4004 BC ? How, what, why? If my mum had known what Mr. Pask was telling us she might have gathered a lynch mob of believers and burned him on a pyre fuelled by his evolution books. She didn’t know. Even more to be kept quiet was the fact that I’d done the unforgivable in her eyes and the

eyes of my schoolmates, I’d asked “Pasky” if I could borrow one of the evolution books to read on my own. He would have been unaware of the explosive, anti-fundamentalist message I saw in the books he lent me. To him I would have been that rarity a council-school boy who wanted to do extra study. So, most afternoons when everyone else had gone, and he sat marking exercise books, I sat at my desk, absorbed the theory of evolution, and peppered him with questions. He always had the answers. I rapidly became a proselyte to Darwinism and hero worship. Once again my Aunt Annie may have played a part in my adulation of A.C.S. Pask. When he arrived in the village, one of his first acts had been to

join the local branch of the Labour Party. My aunt was one of its leading lights. She brought to Socialism the same unquestioning zeal and fervency my mother brought to fundamentalist gospel indubitability. My aunt had none of the gentleness generally favoured by English Fabians; her socialism was the knockdowndragout, crimson, Marxist variety. In Mr. Pask she found a likeminded protagonist. I don’t know how I became the subject of their conversation, but somehow they got to talking about the unusual boy who stayed behind after class to study. They were both surprised and delighted to discover that this paragon was Annie’s nephew. Perhaps they saw me as the foundation member of an English version of the Young Pioneers who

marched across the pages of my aunt’s monthly copies of Soviet Life. Whatever the cause the result was that my aunt was forever telling me how lucky I was that Mr. Pask saw me as a prodigy worthy of after-school help. And at her urging that help increased. I became Pasky’s pet, and History was added to the Evolution I read after school. But this was a different history. Instead of mind-numbing dates, Kings, Queens and battles, Mr. Pask’s stories introduced me to new champions, Watt Tyler, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Tom Paine, Robert Owen and other “labour” heroes. “Pasky” presented me with new worlds of both belief and heresy. He could have been in big trouble if the school or my mum had known about these subversive

extra curricular studies. He would have been in even bigger difficulty if “the authorities” had known all the facts about some of his other outside activities. That year saw the start of the Spanish Civil War, the clash between Progressive and Fascist forces now seen as a rehearsal for the world war that followed three years later. Internationally there was an agreement on a policy of nonintervention in Spain. But in fact, Italy and Germany supplied the Nationalists (fascists) with troops, planes and arms. The Russians provided similar support for the Government (democratic) forces. The Socialist believers of the world provided the crusading International Brigade. During the three-year war over sixty thousand young men and

women from fifty-five countries enlisted to fight against the Spanish fascists. Ten thousand of those volunteers died. Some of them came from our village, and Mr. Pask had recruited many of them. In his passionate call to arms, his urging young men to risk their lives, he had risked the wrath of our school board. In our socialist eyes he was a hero. I left school in 1938 but I still had regular news of him from my aunt. She knew how I looked up to him. She and I thought of him as one of those legendary teachers who a pupil remembers for the rest of his life – a council-school Mr. Chips. And then, just six months after the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War Two broke out. Everybody knew it was coming. Everybody dreaded it. But

everybody recognised it had to be fought. Everybody. The first air-raid siren sounded fifteen minutes after the declaration of war. No bombers came but the minatory wail ignited people’s emotions. A tidal wave of patriotism swept across England. Things and people changed overnight. Disarmament campaigner Aunt Annie morphed into an air-raid warden complete with tin helmet, gas mask, whistle and rattle. My recusant dad signed up to spend his nights patrolling roof tops with sand and stirrup pump ready to extinguish German incendiary bombs. Even my mum added Onward Christian Soldiers and Fight the Good Fight to her incessant hymn singing. I joined the Air Cadets, the only semi-military body that accepted fifteen-year-olds. Older males, of

fighting age, lined up at ‘Drafting Centres’ to be medically examined and assigned to an appropriate branch of the Services. Mr. Pask, was the right age, and with his education and past links to the International Brigade I imagined he would soon be wearing officer’s uniform. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Indeed, it soon became plain I couldn’t have been more mistaken about Mr. Pask, period. In the civil and civilized society that was England there has always been provision for the oddity, the eccentric. This ideal applies even in war. If someone can prove he has a conscientious objection to fighting he can be excused from serving as a combatant. The person pleading a conscientious conviction appears

before a panel and declares his case. The reason given is usually based on religious grounds. The person is known as a “Conscientious Objector”, but in popular parlance he’s called a “Conchie”. To almost everyone it equates with coward; but sometimes a Conchie is anything but. Many men who professed a conscientious objection also volunteered to serve as medical aides in the most dangerous areas of fighting. Mr. Pask manifestly had no conscientious objection to fighting when it involved recruiting other young men to go kill and be killed with the International Brigade. And I knew as a fact that he had no religious beliefs. Yet within days of the outbreak of war the word was out, “Pasky is a conchie”.

It was incontestable, in Pasky’s case Conchie corresponded with Coward. There was no saving grace of volunteering for any form of humanitarian service. Pasky just wanted to save his skin. In those jingoistic times his crime was worse than cowardice. It was treason. He was a traitor, a betrayer, a Judas, not only to us but to all those young men he’d incited to The International Brigade My hero hadn’t exploded; he simply vaporized. My case of Hero Worship was cured. Almost forty years were to elapse before I again became infected.