These days few boys have meaningful relationships with male mentors and father figures, men who can teach and inspire growing boys. Many boys grow up without having been taught by a male teacher or are taught by teachers who have no life or work experience outside of a classroom. In Britain, 85 per cent of school teachers are women. The boys in many a modern British home may have several ‘fathers’ over time. How times have changed.

As a youngster, I used to call around to see my friends. ‘He’s out, he is helping his dad.’  My friend’s father might be a builder or car mechanic, a craftsman in any of a score of trade callings. The youngster was being moulded in masculine ways. Often heard; ‘My dad’s helping me with the Meccano set,’ or ‘I’m going fishing with my dad.’ My dad, self-taught in Gaelic, he had fought in four conflicts by the time he reached his fortieth birthday. His passion was writing and he patiently taught me the art of written communication. Today I practice what he preached.

It is said that when you educate a man you educate an individual; educate a woman you educate a family. No one is going to argue with that but when you educate a man you educate boys and youths. At school, I recall only one good and inspiring female teacher; Miss Illingsworth; an absolute angel of a woman. Miss Smith and Miss Taylor, spinsters were as useless as a bull with tits.

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The rest were men and they were no angels. Many had military service backgrounds. From them, we learned discipline and respect; respect for women, your elders and your peers. They were lions teaching cubs how to get things right and stop fooling about. My stepfather taught my brother and me how to live off the land by fair means or foul. From him, we learned, often the hard way, that necessity is the mother of invention and self-sufficiency a virtue. What we ate we grew in the garden, caught and killed. Our cooking was done by woodfire.

My friends were members of boxing or ju-jitsu clubs; many played football or any one of a score of manly sports. Several were members of the Church Lads Brigade, Sea, Air or Army Cadets; the Boy’s Brigade. They were taught manly things and manly ways by real men.

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Then for me, it was sea training school then a sea-going career. There it was a different kind of male mentoring; you learned that the price of indiscipline was more than a thick ear. Those men practised what they preached. They were preparing us youngsters for life in which getting it right and wrong was the difference between life and death. It is hard to imagine anyone better able to guide young men.

Not to be forgotten the men who had gone before us and left their lessons behind; the adventurers, the soldiers and the poets and the writers who had carved a path for us youngsters to follow. I am not here to judge. I just do wonder at times if we have made a rod to beat our own backs with when young men were abandoned by real men and women, not men became their mentors.