A Certain Kind of Mistake

By G. M. Hutchison

He is shocked and can’t believe what’s happened! 
In his love life, he has made a complete fool of himself. 
At work, his promising career is in tatters. 
It is only when he connects these mistakes to a memory which has haunted him since childhood, that he realises he has been making the same mistake over and over again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jul 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781800469839

G. M. Hutchison

G. M. Hutchison lived next to a smouldering bombsite, having started school in Scotland just as the first bombs were being dropped in the Second World War. He has worked at quite a few different jobs and likes to meaningfully compare the conflicts these have involved him in with some of the more significant life issues of today which includes the despair, determination, ineptitude and romance contained in the storylines.”

Book preview

contents

chapter one

chapter two

chapter three

chapter four

chapter five

chapter six

chapter seven

chapter eight

chapter nine

chapter ten

chapter eleven

chapter twelve

chapter thirteen

chapter fourteen

chapter fifteen

chapter sixteen

chapter seventeen

chapter eighteen

chapter nineteen

chapter twenty

chapter twenty-one

chapter twenty-two

chapter twenty-three

chapter twenty-four

chapter twenty-five

chapter twenty-six

chapter twenty-seven

chapter twenty-eight

chapter twenty-nine

chapter thirty

chapter thirty-one

chapter thirty-two

chapter one

Although you don’t always know the reason for their animosity, you can usually tell when people have something against you. They deny you a proper place in the conversation and seem suspicious of what you are saying. In certain circumstances they will ignore you altogether. My new colleagues, for obvious reasons, couldn’t go as far as that but, in effect, their grudging acceptance of me was sufficient to make me think back, as I so often did, to a very worrying time in the days of my boyhood when something similar had seemed to be happening, something which had not only caused me great pain at the time but which has had a marked effect on me ever since. My suffering had been a kind of trauma, I suppose, as I look back on it through adult eyes and remember the feelings the events aroused in me and how they were made much more intense than perhaps they should have been because of my very young age at the time and my total inexperience in dealing with people outside my familiar boyhood environment. The culprit had been a boy who had recently joined my class at school, about a year after the rest of us, whose apparent loneliness was something that bothered me and which I felt I had to do something about. In spite of the fact that I could see he was acting the part just a little, to get my attention, I invited Aston, as he was called, to join my little group of friends all of whom, like me, had to stay in school for lunch because their homes were too far away to reach in such a short time. He accepted, enthusiastically, and very gratefully too, I had felt at the time.

That little group of boys consisted of Graham who was the smallest and Alan who was the tallest and sometimes Tom, and usually Alex and Alistair, and of course myself who was the leader because I talked in the loudest voice and had the most to say at the start of a conversation, although only at the start, because several of my companions, Graham and Alan especially, were clever boys who always sat in the back row in class and had the ability to easily contradict me and hold their own with me as the conversation developed. Having the sense to realise this I managed to keep their respect and friendship by toning down my arguments before they could do any serious harm. And I think Graham and Alan were doing the same so that the little group remained intact for a very long time and I could look back on its members with affection as being the natural friends of my boyhood.

It looked for a while that Aston was going to become one of us. He joined in our conversations quite well, seemed to have one or two interesting things to contribute and seemed anxious, like the rest of us, not to let disagreements turn into serious arguments.

But the expected close relationship didn’t come to pass at that time because, a few weeks later, Aston left the school to go abroad with his family. He didn’t even say goodbye and we only learned of his actual departure from an aggrieved fellow pupil who had asked a teacher about him because he had recently lent Aston a ruler which hadn’t been returned.

I missed Aston and puzzled over him. He had fitted into my little group so well. Although the others had accepted him, too, they didn’t seem to feel so strongly about him as I did. In fact I had the distinct feeling that it was only because of my approval of Aston that the others hadn’t in a certain way resented his presence amongst us because Aston stayed near the school and wasn’t, like the rest of us, forced to take his lunch away from home. In this connection there had been an occasion on which he had left us for a few minutes during our lunch time stroll to actually go up to the door of his house, a dingy old terraced villa, and speak to someone who had peered out at him from behind the less than half-opened front door. Our parents would surely have invited us all in on an occasion such as this, or at least exchanged a few words of greeting with us from the doorway, I had thought at the time.

But I hadn’t seen the last of Aston. Far from it. It was from a boy who stayed near me, a boy who attended another school, that is the local school, that I learned that Aston was back and had enquired after me. Now a pupil at that same local school and apparently living in my area Aston had learned that I stayed nearby. This was probably because he had told the other boy that he had once attended the school at which I was still a pupil. As I remember it, I was the only boy in that area who wore a school uniform, which would have made me conspicuous enough to be identified as Aston’s former classmate.

At that time I lived in a district that was separated from The River Clyde by various factories and shipyards, many of them world famous. The actual street I stayed in ran parallel to the main road, along which ran the tram cars, and which separated the respectable upper working class part of the neighbourhood, in which I stayed, from the more affluent area on the other side.

The fact that Aston and I were the only boys for miles around who attended a fee-paying school didn’t seem particularly significant. After all the school was run by the Council and the fees weren’t as exorbitant as those of a private school, although the ethos was very similar, with rugby instead of football and absolutely no woodwork or anything of a practical nature on the curriculum. It was just that we attended the same school, not the same fee-paying school, where wearing a uniform was compulsory, and which, in my street, made me seem a bit posh. But I was only considered to be a ‘bit’ posh and, as I remember how it affected my relationship with the other boys in the neighbourhood, being posh was almost a good thing rather than a bad thing. It meant that I was very slightly looked up to, which might not always have been the case.

In this connection, I am not absolutely sure why I was never bullied. I like to think it was because of my face or my general appearance. Although I was skinny and only of average height did I nevertheless have that quality that made boys who didn’t know me too well slightly wary of me so that even those who took exception to my wearing a school uniform always treated me with a measure of respect, at least at first? After that, if any potential boyhood enemy decided to make a more aggressive approach towards me I cannot remember many occasions on which some other more friendly neighbourhood boy hadn’t stepped in to help me. Even when I was on my own and encountered a ‘war party’ from outside my immediate neighbourhood an invisible hand always seemed to keep me safe, and no damaging blows ever struck me. Called a few names because I looked posh was as bad is it ever got, and since I seldom wore my uniform after school hours, occasions such as this were few and far between.

That I was stubborn and would never run away from trouble, that I was a pretty good climber of trees and fences, and very difficult to wrestle to the ground in playful boyhood tussles meant that I had an inner self-confidence, quite a high opinion of myself.

When you add to all this the fact that my father was a popular member of staff at the local motor works, and my mother a likeable neighbour who had several sisters and sisters-in-law all well-known in the district, my boyhood position was a happy and secure one. I suppose the word was out – my father knows his father or my mother knows his mother kind of thing.

The trappings of a happy boyhood were mine. I belonged, in spite of going to a posh school.

Not long after I had learned that Aston was back and was living quite near, although I didn’t know exactly where, I was playing one evening in the local park with my neighbourhood friends when someone shouted my name from the street outside. A figure came running towards me and threw his arms around me, a practice which was a bit unusual but wasn’t looked at askance in these days and, energetically returning the hug, I clung to Aston as if he was a long-lost brother.

Where have you been all this time? I asked. We all miss you at the school.

I’m coming back, he told me, smiling affectionately.

When?

Next week.

Where on earth have you been?

Oh, all over. But we’re back for good now.

Back where?

On the other side of the main road, 25 Beechwood Avenue.

And so a very close friendship was born. Aston seemed to have missed me as much as I had missed him. His membership of the little lunch-time group was something he wanted to renew as quickly as possible. And not just because he had missed us but also because, like the rest of us, he now stayed too far away from the school to travel home for lunch.

Gradually over the next few weeks Aston and I began to travel home together, meeting later to roam the district, sometimes in the company of my neighbourhood friends but often just the two of us. We always had things to talk about since we not only shared the same school now but also the same district.

I, of course, knew the district much better than he did and probably for that reason, in addition to our friendship, Aston treated me with great respect always expressing his gratitude for the fact that I was taking the time to show him all the important places. The great field containing trees, bushes, shrubs and long grass, ideal for playing games of cowboys and Indians, and the picture house which opened for children on Saturday mornings, were two of these places both of which eventually figured prominently in our friendship.

Yes, Aston and I had a lot in common – same school, same district, same active imagination in re-enacting scenes from the latest films, and in playing games of cowboys and Indians, and maybe also in the fact that we were both just a little bit posh, even if I did stay on the slightly less affluent side of the main road.

If attending a fee-paying school had made me a little more class conscious than I might otherwise have been it had, up until then, no really harmful effect on my everyday life. I wasn’t snobbish and I felt I belonged where I lived surrounded by friends and relatives and the difference between how the people at my end of the street dressed and spoke compared with those at the poorer end was just a fact of life. We were better in some way than they were. It was normal to look down on their scruffy looks and their broad city accents in which ‘give me’ was rendered as ‘gees’, ‘come on’ as ‘moan’ and ‘I did’ was almost always, and not just occasionally, as might happen with those who should know better, rendered as ‘I done’.

My friendship with Aston prospered for a long time. We travelled to and from the school together, we prowled and debated our way through the lunch hour, we went to the Saturday morning cinema club and, with increasing frequency, to the field to play at cowboys and Indians.

I was sometimes invited into his home where I said ‘hello’ to his older sister. I was also introduced to his big brother, a very friendly-looking young man who smiled a lot but didn’t say much to me, because he had a speech impediment of some kind, according to Aston.

Very soon Aston and I became almost inseparable. He was a very important part of my life although as I look back on it I have to admit that, as is the case in many adult relationships, I liked him partly for reasons that I wouldn’t have owned up to or at least consciously understood at the time. For instance I liked the big house he stayed in and was glad I was the friend of someone who stayed in it. It had seven rooms, quite big rooms, and a garage at the back, in which often nestled a shiny black motor car. The car, never mind the house, signified that Aston was hugely better off than I was. In these days no one in my street owned a private car and those in possession of even a motor bike, or a van from their place of work, were considered to be a cut above everyone else.

As I remembered the shabby looking house near the school, in which Aston had first lived, and the fact that he had gone abroad shortly afterwards, and that he could now live in a respectable looking big house and own a motor car, I wondered about these things. But feeling puzzled about something connected with Aston happened quite a lot and, on most of these occasions, I was usually left in the dark. I somehow sensed, however, even at that early age, that his father hadn’t won the football pools and that there must have been some other reason for their improved circumstances. Whatever it was all that it really meant to me deep down was that Aston’s family was better off than mine and that for some reason I preferred that comparison to its being the other way round.

As time passed, Aston gradually became more important to me than ever and, naturally, I was very sensitive to any change that might take place in our day to day relationship.

That he gradually stopped coming with me to the Saturday morning cinema club took me by surprise. I felt slightly annoyed at first but it was only when he stopped coming at all, giving what I thought at the time was a very feeble excuse, did I feel really put out. It was the first backward step that had been taken in our friendship – and even at that very early stage I sensed there were more to come.

Our friendship at school went on as before for quite some time, however, and we continued to make the journey to and from the school together. The route we took certainly wasn’t the quickest one but it ran through a nicer district than did the alternative one where you had to leave the tramcar and walk for a bit through a very busy and rougher part of the city in order to reach the school.

How then could Aston have decided to take this route from now on instead of the original one? I had asked myself, when he had told me of his intention.

It’s a bit quicker, and there’s too much nonsense when we go the other way, he had told me, which had at first sounded a quite reasonable explanation. Pupils from our school had even changed the destination indicator at the front of the tram car on one occasion causing letters of complaint to be sent to the school by passengers taken down the wrong road. There had been some rowdiness too and more letters of complaint to follow.

Aston was definitely right about this. At least right from his point of view for I found the unruly behaviour interesting and exciting not something I felt I had to avoid. But of course I could easily see how Aston, or would it be his parents, could disapprove of such bad behaviour, and not want their son to go anywhere near it, or even, like I did, to become occasionally involved in it by continuing to push and shout after having been told to keep quiet by the conductor and the other passengers.

But travelling to and from school with Aston was something I didn’t want to give up. I was already missing him at the cinema club. The other boys on the tram weren’t really friends, just fellow pupils. They weren’t anything like Aston, in whose company I felt I really belonged and with whom I could talk without ever having a serious disagreement.

Skinnier even than I was and a bit shorter, Aston certainly didn’t look physically imposing. But although he didn’t look strong, he certainly didn’t look frail either so his headaches surprised me at first and, as he would stand in the doorway of his house, telling me how splitting they were, and how he couldn’t venture out because of them, I felt unhappy going off somewhere without him, usually to the field, and hoped he would soon get better, partly for my own sake, because the local boys who sometimes took his place seldom had it in them to re-enact scenes from the latest films with the same finesse as Aston, or myself, for that matter.

Of course there had been other ‘warning signs’ as I feel I can now call these events, perhaps the greatest of which had been the occasion on which he had told me that his parents had wanted him to play nearer his home. I can’t remember if he said it was because it was safer there, or if I just assumed that they did. After all his home was across the main road from mine and was surrounded by the bigger and nicer houses whereas mine, although respectable enough, was adjacent to the rougher and poorer area, even if not actually rough and poor itself.

I hadn’t made a conscious decision about how I would deal with Aston’s change of route but I knew I would have to do something. The matter was very important to me, and was becoming even more important since I was seeing less of him after school, too.

Going out through the main gate one day, at the same time as him, instead of turning right, as I usually did, I found myself turning left with Aston and almost at the same time deciding to accompany him on his new route home, which after all would be a bit quicker for me too.

That it was plain from the look on his face that Aston didn’t want this, didn’t want me to accompany him, didn’t take me altogether by surprise. Somehow I had sensed that the change of route had something to do with me, as well as the rowdy boys who went the other way.

My anxious thoughts almost took me a stage further. The other boys had really nothing to do with it, it was me and me alone that he wanted to avoid. But I couldn’t accept this. Why would he want to avoid me?

At that age, as I look back on it, I had not yet learned to distinguish between thought and feeling, far less to decide which of the two I should respond to. When I thought of his absence from the cinema club and of the headaches that kept him from coming out to play with me I could see that the two were connected but I had not been able to feel that they were. Aston was too important to allow me to face up to this and I had been encouraged to avoid it by the fact that he still joined us in the school at lunch time, and there at least nothing seemed to have changed.

But as I began to walk with him on the new route the feeling that I wasn’t wanted soon became the predominant one.

Aston had hardly spoken to me but he kept looking at me as if he was about to say something, which he couldn’t bring himself to say. I spoke to him in my usual way, about the usual things, about one of our mutual friends, about something one of the teachers had said in class, but Aston wasn’t interested, or sufficiently so, to take me up on any of these topics, At best he nodded his head and at worst he didn’t respond at all. But he continued to look at me from time to time as if he was about to say something, although he never did.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that what he had left unsaid was what I had already suspected. He definitely no longer wanted me to be his very best friend, a terrible suspicion which was soon confirmed when he began to take the new route in the morning, too, and had already left for school when I called for him the next day.

But of course what he had also left unsaid was ‘why?’

The lunchtime group was affected too. Aston looked guilty and I felt resentful when he began to find other things to do in the lunch hour. The others, only mildly interested in his absence, soon tried to persuade me that Aston wasn’t as important as I had thought him to be and that he was in fact a bit of an ‘odd ball’. His parents were funny too, one of the group had pointed out. No one quite knew what to make of them, according to this boy’s parents, who had some fleeting knowledge of them. And there was some truth in this, I had thought at the time, as I remembered one particular incident that had occurred on the very day of my birthday and on a school holiday, when passing his father in the hallway of his house. The look on his face had been anything but friendly and had been in sharp contrast to the looks on the faces of my family on that occasion when they had, earlier in the day, called at my house to offer me their congratulations and give me presents. I hadn’t, of course, expected his father to do the same. He probably wouldn’t even have known of the great event but the look on his face had been like some kind of weapon he was using against me, as if to keep me at a distance, and the icy chill that came over me lingered for quite some time after he had gone past.

Although I could get by without Aston the feelings our boyhood friendship had aroused in me never really went away.

Just as I had looked down on these poorer people at the end of the street so had Aston, or at least his parents, looked down on me for staying on the wrong side of the main road. I suppose no one hates being looked down on more than someone who is looking down, even a little, on someone else, and that someone had been me. In this respect Aston’s behaviour had touched a nerve. I had liked being a little bit ‘posh’, although I evidently hadn’t been posh enough. His behaviour, however, had affected me in some other way, too, for I had never been able to forget what had happened.

chapter two

Being treated in such an unfriendly way by my new colleagues didn’t, in itself, bother me too much. I could almost understand it. With Aston it had been different. Too young at that time to look seriously into the causes of why people were so class-conscious it was the emotional impact of being cast aside by someone so important to me, of being rejected, through no fault of my own, that had done the damage.

Not able to fully understand all these years later why my new colleagues didn’t seem too keen on me either, I could at least hazard a few guesses. I suppose the fact that I had been promoted from within the company to join them on the management team would make them feel uneasy. I hadn’t, like most of them, been imported from elsewhere on the strength of my glowing references probably, in their case, I thought resentfully, exaggerated by previous bosses who had wanted parting with their services to be a sweet sorrow. Nor would I be in possession of formidable-sounding, written qualifications, which they would guess someone who came from such lowly origins as I did, wouldn’t have. Having leapfrogged into their team in this way would suggest either that I was ridiculously capable, too clever for my own good they would probably hope, eventually, or that I had a friend or friends in high places, both of which possibilities they would most likely see as a threat of some kind. I might make them look stupid or, if they didn’t think that such a thing was possible, I might inform on them if they uttered a ‘careless’ word.

The immediate result of all this wasn’t that they didn’t talk to me in a reasonably courteous way it was the fact they didn’t confide in me. They didn’t seem to have any problems. They never, as colleagues and workmates are inclined to do, talked to me about their work and the injustices that had been inflicted on them by the higher-ups.

For a long time, therefore, I was on my own in my new job with only a few things to keep my spirits up. I no longer had to clock in. I didn’t have to wear overalls. And in addition to these, I was itching for an opportunity to exercise my managerial skills. Fortunately, one soon presented itself.

It concerned one of the shop floor supervisors called Willy McNish. Not actually on the staff, but expected nevertheless to boss people around on behalf of the management, he was a small bald man with a huge barrel chest and brawny forearms. He never smiled. He had very small eyes with which he would squint at you, seldom looking you straight in the face, and when he was annoyed about something his choice of language was inclined to deteriorate. His reasonable knowledge of his job, that is what was covertly expected of him, was paradoxically accompanied by an unreasonable knowledge of the people working under him whose laziness and ineptitude he seemed to think had reached epidemic proportions which called for his personal intervention. With an unpleasant manner even when nothing was going wrong, when it did he would become spiteful and vindictive towards the people he thought were responsible. He was often described by the workers as ‘a mean, fat, slant-eyed little bully’, not always in this order, and sometimes with the last word changed to an even worse one, all of which I thought from personal experience just about summed him up.

Not so long ago, in my days as an ordinary worker, I had sometimes been on the receiving end of Willy McNish’s unfriendly attitude but my change of status had at once, and completely, removed this danger. More than this, it had actually placed him in my power. I was on the staff, and he wasn’t. He wore overalls, and I didn’t. Vengeance most certainly could have been mine.

But I soon dispensed with this idea since it wasn’t only my status which had changed, his whole attitude towards me had changed too. He made it obvious that he was now there to help me, to make it easier for me to control the workforce. His bullying was now conducted on my behalf and latecomers, shirkers and incompetents quickly became people I didn’t have to bother about too much. Willy McNish would do the dirty work for me. There was no need for me to get side-tracked into these relatively unimportant and unpleasant activities.

If I didn’t have it in me to make a success of my new position, a possibility that I was painfully aware of, I at least felt I had sufficient resources within me to put up a good fight one of which, in particular, would surely stand me in good stead. I felt I had an in-depth knowledge of what it was like to be an ordinary worker. Hadn’t I actually been one in the not too distant past? so recently in fact that I was still finding it difficult to adopt the prevailing ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude held by my colleagues, some of whom I suspected, at this early stage in my new career, still saw me as a ‘them’.

Where I felt my strength lay specifically, that is where I felt it would compensate for my total inexperience as a manager, was in a very narrow and difficult to define area. I thought I knew how much effort constituted a good day’s work and didn’t confuse this with what an accountant or production manager felt it was. What they felt it was, was usually just the same thing as what they wanted it to be, or what they felt it had to be, whereas I had on not a few occasions actually done a good day’s work myself, and actually knew what it consisted of.

Of course this undoubted ability was only a strength if I knew how to use it. Without this I would be no better than Beethoven would have been if everyone within