Free Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes Page B

schools that I attended, before I packed that nonsense in three years ago, who actually made me realise two things, of which number one is, that what you learnt had some actual value to you personally, and wasn’t justdropped on you like a punishment, and number two, that everything you learnt, you hadn’t learnt until you’d really dug it: i.e. made it part of your own experience. He’d tell us things – for example, like that Valparaiso was a big city in Chile, or that x+y equals something or other, or who all the Henrys were, or Georges, and he’d make us feel this crazy stuff really concerned us kids, was something to do with us, and had a value. Also, he made me kinky about books: he managed to teach me – to this day, I don’t know how – that books were not just a thing like that – I mean, just books – but somebody else’s mind opened up for me to look into, and he taught me the habit, later on, of actually buying them! Yes – I mean real books, like the serious paperbacks, which must have been unknown among the kids up in the Harrow Road those days, who thought a book’s an SF or a Western, if they thought it’s anything.
    Since we’re on the subject, and I can’t cause any more red faces than I already have, I’d also like to mention that the second great influence of my life was something even more embarrassing, and this is that, believe it or not, I actually was, for two whole years a wolf cub ! Yes – me! Well … this is the fable. I got swung into that thing when, like all kids do, I was called up for the Sabbath school, and I soon told that Sunday lot it could please take a walk, but somehow got latched on to this wolf cub kick, because it started to fascinate me, for the following reasons. The first week I attended, dragged there by Dad, the old cub master, who I now realise was a terrible old poof, said that he wanted my attendance to be voluntary,not forced, and if after a full month I found they made it so attractive I’d want to come of my own free will, then would that show? I said, sure, yes it would, thinking, naturally, the month would soon pass by, and they began to teach me a lot of crap I found, even at that age, absolutely useless and ridiculous, like lighting fires with two matches when matches are about the cheapest thing there are to buy, and putting tourniquets on kids’ legs for snake-bites when there aren’t any snakes in London, and anyway, what if they bit kids on the head or other sensitive parts? Yet gradually, all the same, to everyone’s astonishment, I did actually begin to be a raver for those weekly meetings in the Baptist corrugated iron temple, because I really felt – don’t laugh – that for the first time, here was a family: at any rate, a lot, a mob, a click I could belong to. And though that dreadful old cub master with his awful shorts, and his floppy khaki hat, was queer as a coot and even queerer, he didn’t interfere with any of us kids in any way, and actually succeeded in teaching us morals – can you believe it? Well – he did! He really did. I can honestly say the only ideas on morals I know anything of, were those that bent old cub master made me believe in, chiefly, I think, because he made us feel that he liked us, all us grubby-kneed little monsters, and cared what happened to us, and didn’t want anything from us, except that we look after ourselves decently in the great big world hereafter. He was the first adult I’d ever met – even including Dad – who didn’t come the adult at us – didn’t use his strength, and won us over by persuasion.
    That brings me to today, and to the third item in my education, my university, you might say, and that’s the jazz clubs. Now, you can think what you like about the art of jazz – quite frankly, I don’t really care what you think, because jazz is a thing so wonderful that if anybody doesn’t rave about it, all you can feel for them is pity: not that I’m making out I really