Harkness – MacGillivray Stories

Earlier, we touched on the topic of social classes and how my mother often warned me against playing with the ‘dirty’ working class boys, despite her own background. Of course, there were lads with whom I enjoyed playing with. They were good and smart. However, there were also lads like Kenny Osborne who made it much more difficult to disagree with my mother. He was the boy who nearly got electrocuted.

I would say that Kenny was the worst of those boys who populated the working class streets behind our house. He was 11 years old and lived not far away in Hampton Avenue at that time. He became infamous for his bad behaviour, but the most memorable event had him end up on the front page of the local newspaper.  That day the headline read: “BOY NEARLY ELECTROCUTED BY 40,000 VOLTS SAVED BY WELLIES.” Kenny, like the little monkeys all boys are, loved climbing up anything that could be climbed up. The typical lad would just be happy climbing up trees; but Kenny was not a typical lad. He was way more ‘advanced’ and preferred climbing up electric poles. 

According to the newspaper, Kenny had been lucky that day. The electric shock had knocked him to the ground, but he was saved by the rubber wellington boots that he was wearing. The newspaper had interviewed his father afterwards who said ironically, “I’ve told him a hundred times not to wear those wellies with big holes in them!” 

After that incident, it was probably harder for parents to maintain authority over their children. How could they even challenge the idea that Kenny’s stubbornness saved his life? Although, if I had been a parent at that time, I would have countered that had he not been stubborn and just climbed trees, he wouldn’t have needed saving at all. Looking back, I see Kenny as the antithesis of Bertha, the good little girl who was eaten by the wolf, because the wolf had heard her medals clinking together¹⁰¹.

In retrospect, where did I get this story from? Well it was obviously from my mother. So, although she wanted to distance herself from her working class roots, she saw something ‘daring’ and ‘heroic’ in Kenny’s behaviour. Let’s face it, the son of a doctor or a lawyer would be well-behaved and always clinging to his mother’s skirt. It was these kinds of boys we despised as kids – that is, ‘mummy’s boys’. In other words, my mother’s character was some kind of contradiction of opposites, she ‘despised’ her peasant and working class roots, but also romanticized them.  

101  “The Storyteller” by Saki. https://www.classicshorts.com/stories/Storyteller.html Accessed 9 September 2021.