Abject poverty -being frozen out
1Imagine the chess club is a good 50 minute walk away, more when the weather is bleak. Imagine it is the winter of 91, England. The snow has been on the ground for weeks, the evenings long, cold and dark. You have no money for transport, no money to buy winter clothes and have to walk in something worse than this.
I had to use an elastic band to hold it together, I mean the trainer on my right foot, but often it snapped and the sole just flapped as I trudged through the snow on the pavement and slipped on the ice crossing roads. Always I had to stop somewhere and sit on a low garden wall where the stone was bare and snow left untouched. It made my bottom wet as I bent down to dislodge the snow in my trainer with my index finger. To make matters worse, I only had rechargeable batteries in my walkman and they died in no time at all.2
When I arrived at the chess club, I had to defrost my foot. Usually my sock would have a big hole in it. I always went to the bathroom to attend to that: best case scenario was I had to spend the entire evening playing chess with a wet bottom, a wet sock on, and with my level of concentration affected. On the walk back home, the only solace came when I would tell myself it wasn’t important that I lost again, ‘I have been been beaten by so many -one more loss doesn’t matter. Even if I had the money to buy new trainers, it won’t make any difference’, I said to soften the blow, that helped abate hunger also, myself too poor to buy chips on the way home. Then, at the end of the evening, I would just lie on my bed and look through the window at the starry sky above, succumb to solitude, feel nothing about how my play went, slide into some reverie about the summer slowly, and sleep. A month or more passed, each week the same… .
- Picture taken Kuwait 2008, yes thats moi. ↩︎
- That winter the main band I listened to was Queensryche. I should explain further that I was studying at a college and had no money all year long. ↩︎
M J M
McCreadyandChess 