Before
I suppose I was about eleven years old, I know that it was a Friday night. It was a Friday night because that was the night we were scouts.
I think that the idea was that we were always scouts, it just never felt like that. Unless we were camping, or playing wide games, or doing something that required us to don the dark green-shirts and the neckerchief and woggle, we belonged to some other group: our class, our school, our team, the kids we played with in our street…
For the most part we were only scouts on Friday night.
In that day-and-age you were either a scout or a BB—a member of the boy’s brigade. I suspect that it was more or less the same experience, except they had drill and we played wide games; a form of glorified night-time hide-and-seek. I’ve always loved hide-and-seek and hated drill—so I was a scout.
A major part of being a scout were the badges. There were badges for everything and there was a lot of kudos about having the stupid things. The odd thing was that you didn’t need to do much more then attend a process to get them—an actual knowledge/skill wasn’t required. I had a sewing [haberdashiary?] badge that my granny sewed onto the sleeve of my uniform because I couldn’t. Anyway, it was badge-hunting that first got me inside the door.
This, or that, Friday we were going to achieve the yellow-triangle that was a level two science badge. This involved us in watching people mess up a few experiments. It was the first time I ever went inside my school.
I knew that the school was there—I went to a primary school round the corner but it had never featured largely in my then life-map. My visit didn’t alter that life-map; it was only much later, when I was inspecting my memories, that I understood what had happened to me.
I vaguely remember the stupid chemistry demonstration that I’ve since seen messed up too-too many times. I have two clear recollections of import—pulling on the door that needs to be pushed and the line of jannies.
The pull/push conundrum is caused by a borked metaphor—you are meant to push but you are presented by the most beautiful handle that screams, "Pull!". Thirty-odd years I’ve been going in and out of that door, I still get it wrong sometimes.
The line of jannies contained my future boss and was a something that I was a future to part of, and a something that when I aquired the power I ended.