Most people here in the USA have never heard of the British singer, Ian Dury. I initially became aware of Ian when a friend who was studying at Oxford sent me a mix tape of popular British music in the late 1970s. Ians father was a bus driver and former boxer and his mother was a nurse who made home visits. His father was mostly absent during his childhood. He contracted polio at the age of 7 and spent 6 weeks in a full-body plaster cast as part of his medical treatment. As you already know, people never fully recover from polio and pain is a lifelong companion for the victims of that terrible disease. Ian was sent to a school for disabled children where it was believed that tough love was better for disabled children than coddling. That school focused on preparing kids for more manual trades, but Ians mother thought he was smart enough to handle a more academically challenging curriculum, so she had him enrolled in a more traditional grammar school where punishment for Ians occasional rules violations was learning difficult and long pages of poetry until he cried. For example, He was forced to sit inside a school storage room where he was required to learn 80 lines of Ode to Autumn by Keats. Ian said, If I got a word wrong I had to go back, they added that to the end of the sentence and after five nights of this my head had definitely gone. In spite of it all, Ian was determined to succeed in life, exploiting all of the talent and other gifts that he had left after crawling from the wreckage of his early life. Ian, crippled for life by polio, did not want people to feel sorry for him and he despised patronizing politicians and special events that he felt were more of a disservice than a benefit to people who face the kind of challenges that he faced. Ian conquered the challenge of living with polio, but this father of two succumbed to metastatic colorectal cancer at age 57 in March of 2000.
Posted on: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 20:28:12 +0000
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