EXPLORING CHILDHOOD

EXPLORING CHILDHOOD

We’ve all been thorough childhood. Some of us consider them the best days of our lives, others that they were the worst. I guess, in fact, that they were actually both. Every experience, good and bad, was fresh, sometimes completely new, and therefore indelibly powerful. It is fertile soil for the writer to discover fruit, flowers and sometimes weeds.

The first friend, the first quarrel, the best toy, the losing of that toy, the things that made you laugh or cry, an article of clothing you loved or loathed. Everything was just so new and so blooming intense. The end of the world could come several times a month, the start of a new life equally so.

A school lesson might go as fast as a car or as slowly as a whale dragging itself across desert sands. Holidays last for ever or pass in the blink of an eye.

The first time you laughed or cried. The first time you made someone else laugh or cry.

Here are some of my childhood memories:

Aged 0 to 4 months - I’ve seen a picture of me at Christmas where I’m gumming on a chicken leg. A four-month-old gourmet..

3 years old - I go into hospital for three weeks, only seeing my parents for an hour each evening. I remember singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star to some nurses who crooned with pleasure at me. I swapped a broken old toy truck with another boy’s new one and was forced to give it back. Don’t grown-ups know about the rules of swapping?

4 years - I go to school. I was sick down the headteacher’s back when I was told I wouldn’t be in my brother’s class. But then I fell in love with my teacher. I got a Rupert Bear Annual for Christmas from my eldest cousin.

5 years – On television at Easter I see a statue of Christ on the Cross which cries out, ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ I was terrified and fear pictures of the Crucifixion ever after.

I form a gang which I rule by a combination of fists and cunning. Neighbours call me the King of the Kids.

My dad built a wooden zoo for us for Christmas, full of toy animals he’d bought over the year. I put the penguins in with the lions and my brother refused to play with it again.

6 years - My parents took me out of my first school and sent me to prison school with Nurse Ratched for a teacher. I discovered the joys of school phobia.

7 years - Supercar starts on television. I love Mitch the Monkey, one of the stars of the show

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I see Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame; I’m horrified by the savagery of the mob. My brother terrorises me by stuffing cushions up his jersey and pretending to be Quasimodo. Better than this TV horror is the series Richard the Lionheart which I loved.

8 years - I indulge my school-phobia. I hid my bottle of milk and the whole school is kept waiting in the playground until the culprit owns up. I sealed my lips and because of this we missed the craft lesson, the one I loathed most.

9 years - I move 150 miles from London to the Midlands and 300 years back in time. I’d lost my London street gang but loved the adventure of living near the countryside. At school we were terrorised by the sadist, Mr Hardwick. More of him in later posts.

10 years - I meet Brian, who becomes my best friend and blood-brother. We’re friends to this day.

11 years - I go to Newbold Green Secondary Modern School. Mr Johnson is our teacher and I realise that I am good at English and enjoy writing. I like school after five years of loathing it. Meet another friend, Maisfield and we’re still friends. On Remembrance Sunday I write Scarred with Red, my first poem.

I started noting down these important milestones as an exercise for the writing group I run. Sitting back and reading it, I’m fascinated by what was important enough to come first to mind.

I detect common themes. The importance of family and friends, worries about losing them, the contrast between my confidence in the street and trepidation at school, the trauma and excitement at being uprooted and moving to a new town, how things I saw on television made a huge impact on me.

Incidentally, when I was in my twenties I noticed a familiar figure in a theatre bar. It was Dermot Walsh, the actor who played Richard the Lionheart. I told him how much I’d loved the show. He invited me to join him for a beer and a chat.

Here’s one of my stories about a seminal moment in my childhood.

THE LONGEST DAY

I was eight years old and about to go on the longest journey I had ever known; three hundred miles in distance, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years in time.

It started with the Pickford’s Removal Lorry arriving, with three men who entered our house and began to pack up everything. My biggest worry was my fish, Greenie, who was going to travel on the lorry. But my Dad had contrived some artful contrivance for her so I buried my fears.

I was a curious mixture. I was a sickly child, who missed great chunks of school in winter and found it hard to make friends there. I loathed and feared my teachers and under-achieved although the intelligence tests I was sent to take showed that at the age of eight I had the IQ of a twelve-year-old. I was, in truth, school-phobic and delighted to be leaving the monstrous prison school behind for ever.

But out of school, in my street, I was different entirely. I was leader of my gang, the best fighter of all, the instigator of all games and adventures. Some of the grown-ups referred to me as King of the Kids. With the family, I was the cause of adoration and exasperation in equal measure. I worshipped my big brother, Colin, followed his advice and railed against it, thought he was the wisest person in the world while simultaneously knowing that I was far cleverer.

That morning, I stood outside our front door, gazing at the pigeons and their children, the sparrows, the creatures with which I was most familiar. Then Colin materialised by my side and stood forlornly until my parents came out. We walked down the street, the only street I had ever lived in. My gang came out to see me off, all except my best friend and lieutenant, Keithy West. Inexplicably he stayed away. As we walked past his house, I sensed him watching me.

Then through the arches, still within my territory, and to Eileen’s shop. Eileen was my aunt and my second mother. I had seen her for at least six days out of seven all my life. Yet now there stretched an unimaginable gap of over a month before she would come and visit us. We said our goodbyes, I held back the tears. And then we were off to Holloway Tube and then on to Saint Pancras Train Station.

I had been on trains before and loved them. But when we settled in the compartment there was catastrophe. I had nothing to draw with. Dad leapt off the train and went in search of a WH Smiths. The minutes ticked by and still he didn’t return. I began to panic. What if the train went without him? What if we never saw him again? I cursed myself. All this because I’d forgotten my pencils. They were not the ones I really wanted but I didn’t care. I had my dad back.

The minutes ticked by and still he did not return. I checked my watch, a present for my seventh birthday and horror began to grip me. Dad would miss the train. We’d be sent north without him and it was all my fault. I leap to my feet and searched desperately for him to arrive, saw a guard march past with whistle in his mouth. I would never see Dad again.

But then he appeared, slightly breathless, sat beside my brother and passed me the coloured pencils. They were not the ones I really wanted but I didn’t care. I had my dad back.

I heard the whistle sound and then the train began to heave itself out of the station. I did not realise it but within minutes it passed close to where I had spent all of my life and then sped on, ever northward to our new home.

We were moving from central London to a town called Chesterfield. Mum had said it was halfway up a mountain and I drew pictures of a mountain with a solitary ledge with little houses clinging to it. I told my brother that we’d be able to hear Scottish pipers in the night although I knew this was not true.

Throughout the journey my face was glued to the window and I did not as much as look at the pencils Dad had risked his life to get. After three hours we arrived at my new town and I marvelled at its emblematic church. It was called the Crooked Spire for the spire had a bizarre twist, a grimace, part agonising, part hilarious.

We walked up a hill, not a mountain, and dropped our things at the Clifton Hotel, a guesthouse with pretentions to grandeur, where we would stay the night because it was too late to collect the keys to our house. Then we hurried to catch the bus for the final two-mile journey to look at our new home.

We were dropped outside a pub, The Crispin Inn, and trailed up a long road, Greenbank Drive, with houses so posh I was agog. We reached a half-built estate, my new neighbourhood. We traipsed over a building site and turned into our street, Brecon Close. Here was our house, shiny new, with its own front garden of heavy clay. Dad pointed out the window to my bedroom. We went round the back to our disappointingly small and barren rear garden. I was too small to see through the windows and my dad had to lift me on his shoulders for me to get my first look.

The next morning, we collected the keys from the Town Hall. I was in a state of ecstatic hysteria as we approached the house. I belted up the stairs, determined to be the first to use our inside toilet, thereby claiming lordship over the house. And then, with beating heart, I made my way to my bedroom.

It was tiny, dominated by a huge bulkhead with only just enough space for my bed. But the bulkhead would be a grand repository for my mountain of clutter. I fell in love with the room. My brother’s bedroom was four times larger but felt bleak and dreary, looking northwards to a hill with a solitary tree. I returned to my room. My window looked over the street where I saw my dad chatting to one of the neighbours, a work colleague.

I hurried down the stairs. The removal lorry had arrived. The men swiftly unloaded all our goods, including, joy of joys, my fish Greenie. I raced back to my bedroom and, overflowing with excitement, threw myself on my bed. It would soon serve multiple purposes as horse, spaceship, submarine, ship, racing car - an all-round Supercar.