A Grumpy Old Man’s Tale 41 Bearthwaite Politics, Law, Lore and Reality
One of the pupils at Whiteport Academy was Fergus McCann. To others fourteen year old Fergus was the ultimate alpha male. A big strong and physically unstoppable boy who was the star of all the physical sport games he played for his school. It was a surprise to most when they discovered he was more interested in the creative stories he wrote for his English teacher than he was in his endeavours on the fields of sport. The boys thought he was a bit odd because he admitted to enjoying reading, and even writing, poetry, drawing and painting, but none made anything of it because Fergus was not someone whose ire they wished to court. Without doubt Fergus was a masculine male, and he had never considered being, nor had he ever wanted to be anything else. But his day dreams would have been considered by most of his peers to be in a word, pink, if that is any other than himself had been aware of them. He had absolutely no desire to be in any way feminine and like other typical males of his age from time to time he had sexual fantasies concerning his friend’s mothers and sisters, but naytheless he had a very different view as to what constituted masculinity from that of the males of his acquaintanceship and especially his father, Davy, who he did not get on with. His father would have liked him better if he’d been a male chauvinist bully, and better still if he’d been a chauvinist thug like himself, but his mother, Eunice, was delighted that Fergus was naturally polite, helpful and considerate, especially to girls, but his father unremittingly reviled him for being a sissy. The only reason it had not come to blows between them was that his father was like a lot of bullies a coward and was deep down afraid of Fergus who had for a number of years been bigger and stronger than his father.
