The First Seventy Years: 5 - A Mystery Explained
...Around this time my father began arranging homework for me in English and arithmetic. I was forbidden to go out to play until I had completed the work set by him. I recall some of the lads on the street, teasingly tapping on the front lounge window whilst I laboured away...
Not until he was much older did Eric Biddulph learn why his parents had confined him to the house and refused to let him visit the local cinema.
To read earlier chapters of Eric's autbiography please click on The First Seventy Years in the menu on this page.
At some point during the Second World War I found myself sleeping on a single bed in my parents' bedroom. At the same time I was banned from visiting the Saturday afternoon children's show just down the road at Berridge Road Cinema. Other children were able to pay their sixpence, two and a halfpence in today's money, enjoy their weekly session of Laurel and Hardy, The Three Stooges and one of the numerous short westerns that were part of a young boy's film diet at that time.
This exercise of parental control puzzled me and I was unable to rationalise the reason for it until much later in life. All the other lads in the area were sleeping in shared bedrooms, but at least they were separate from their parents.
Around this time my father began arranging homework for me in English and arithmetic. I was forbidden to go out to play until I had completed the work set by him. I recall some of the lads on the street, teasingly tapping on the front lounge window whilst I laboured away.
As a working class family there was no tradition of academic achievement. This made it all the more mysterious why my father had seemingly become engrossed in a mission to improve my educational standard.
I remember two words in particular which he had me reciting until I knew how to spell them without error; 'receive' and 'beautiful'. He conducted mental arithmetic exercises on a regular basis - addition, subtraction, multiplication, division. Such was the frequency that I became very proficient with numbers by the time I reached adulthood.
What, I hear you ask, was the reason for this bizarre agenda that had been mapped out for me. The only hint I ever had was a comment Aunt Sarah made some years later. "You were very poorly when you were little," she remarked.
My parents always behaved in a very secretive way most of the time, and I only discovered the truth through my cousin Jean when she told me many years later that I had gone down with meningitis.
It all began to make sense. The illness can affect the functioning of the brain. Those 'homework' sessions were a reflection of my parents' fear that my brain should not be allowed to deteriorate. Cinema attendance was out of bounds because I had experienced a few blackouts. This accounted for my sleeping in my parents' bedroom.
I must have shaken off the adverse effects of the illness, as I eventually moved into my own bedroom with its damp walls and ill-fitting window.
The legacy of my illness had a profound effect on my parents, much greater than I realised whilst still a child. Their expectations of me were strongly influenced by the desire to see me attain academic and social excellence. This would be a signal to all those around them that "our Eric is as good as the next man. He conquered his illness and we helped him do it."
I was never a member of a peer group or 'gang' as they were called in those days. The illness and my parents' protective shield around me did not allow much social contact outside my school experiences.
