I WATCHED IT HAPPEN!

Until I moved from Long Island to Virginia, I really had no idea of the deeply entrenched and malevolent racist motivation that lay behind the Civil War's factions of Unionist and Confederacy.

Though in actual fact at the time of that conflict, there probably wasn't the political divide that historical record tends to suggest, at least not in the minds of the general soldiery who were probably pretty similar in opinion about people of colour even if the Northerners really believed that slavery was an evil.

Broadly speaking the Northerners owed their livelihood more to their own access to resources, such as industrialisation that the South did not possess in abundance, whereas the South owed its prosperity to its largely agrarian economy which relied upon slavery to make it profitable.

To grossly oversimplify then, the South produced the raw materials that the North processed into fabrics and from which familiarity with mechanical processes their industrial supremacy was born.
Which is not to deny the technical achievements of the Southern based mechanics and engineers which were considerable, but to avoid nit picking over details of who achieved what, especially during the war, when considerable ingenuity was equally evident.

No, I just wanted to establish a canvas onto which I want to paint with broad strokes lest it become a narrative at the mercy of this that or the other criticism which isn't really important to my main theme.

In actual fact I realise that I have already gone down a blind alley because none of the preceding, except the first sentence, has any real bearing on my main theme but I had to sketch out my viewpoint or the following might lack conviction.

So, my first impression on moving down to Virginia to take up a teaching position in a middle school, was how similar in both appearance and 'feel' the Eastern Shore was to my childhood holiday haunt of Suffolk, England. It was there, as a teenage boy that I met my first American adults both black and white from the nearby airbase who were very friendly, generous and much more open minded or so I thought than my own parents, particularly my mother.

So I had already been favourably impressed by American culture and had no idea that they were really any different than us as regards their general attitude towards strangers. Besides we had an American family as next door neighbours, their son was too old to show any interest in me but his father was a skilled aviation mechanic who cherished old Triumph cars and who was more than happy to let me 'help' him and teach me how to work on engines.

I also had an American boy my age as a school friend, Dave Hendel who I have often wished I had stayed in touch with as I'd bet he ended up at JPL or NASA given his pyrotechnic proclivities!

So given that an older boy who was a friend and neighbour nicknamed me 'All American Mike' it should hardly be surprising that I eventually ended up Stateside, having been lured there by the love of a girl I met when she was on vacation in Edinburgh.

We set up home in Valley Stream, Long Island and I went to work as a motorcycle mechanic which certainly gave me a crash course in American society, since white and blue collar men are equally at home with riding Harley Davidson's despite their different education and income levels.

No class system here, I thought, at least not the more ostentatious version that still held sway in 60's Britain, where the wrong accent can act as a deterrent to some though the Beatles were already helping abolish that stuffy BBC English standard.


Oops! I digress (again) oh well, to continue with the story, yours truly arrived in the USA circa 1975 and after a rocky few years adjustment including a change of wife and career plus a detour into further education to get a B.Ed Honours degree to become a teacher of Craft, Design and Technology, I then was glad to be offered a position on Virginia's Eastern Shore which I fell in love with almost immediately.

One of the first things I noticed about Virginia, compared to New York, was the general level of politeness such as referring to men and women on first acquaintance as 'Sir' or 'Madam'. To this day my New York wife still finds my manners amusing but they were drilled into me from an early age and I can't help but use 'Please' and 'Thank you' and 'Excuse me' etc. I just think it helps to smooth the way, so to speak and I really like it when my natural politeness is reciprocated.


(....and this is where the story really starts! But you'll have to wait as my bum is sore and I can't write any more till I've had a rest. Thanks chaps)