Character Forming.
All of my childhood memories are bad. All the memories that filter through are painful, barbed.
Probably the first thing I can properly remember, is sitting in the garden, next to the forsythia on the broken step, and repeatedly trying and failing to tie my shoe-laces. I'd been told I needed to know how to tie them before I started school, but I couldn't master the complicated mathematics involved in the looping and knotting. I failed school even before I got there.
On my first day at school, a boy called Gary Lloyd kicked me up the arse, and I fell into a tray of plastic camels. A girl named Jane Moran was crying on a rocking horse nearby. I remember nothing about Gary Lloyd after this, apart from his gormless wet lipped face, and remain puzzled as to why a primary school would have an entire tray full of plastic camels. It was labelled "camels" in neat, jumbo marker, teacher's handwriting. I couldn't tie a shoelace, but I could read before I went to school.
My dad tried to teach me to swim, but I was so terrified of the water I clung to him like a screaming spider monkey. He gave up in despair. At that this distance, I'm not entirely certain he knew how to swim himself but, knowing my dad, he would have sat down with a pen and paper beforehand and worked out how swimming was achieved.
I liked the Adam West Batman TV show and, one Saturday, the FILM version of the TV show was on Southern, our local ITV variant. I closed all the curtains to stop a rhombus of all the colours of the spectrum appearing on the screen and waited for the familiar Neal Hefti theme. My mum swept into the room, demanded to know why the curtains were closed in the middle of the day, opened them, pronounced the weather "glorious", and demanded I go outside. I pleaded with her. This was Batman, the Batman film. But she didn't care about the sophisticated differences between the Batman TV series and the film, and I was sent out into the garden. Within a minute, a single minute, I had been stung on the lip by a bee. My tears, my banging on the backdoor demanding to be let back in, fell on deaf ears, as she assumed I just wanted to watch TV. So I sat on the step in the garden, my face slowly swelling, tears describing the bulging parabola. By the time dinner was called, I looked like Rocky Dennis. She merely asked me, "What have you done to yourself?" Somehow, this too was my fault. The bee, the outside, didn't come into it.
My dad tried to teach me ride a bike in the Victoria Play Park in Portslade. There were three bollards, and he advised me to ride between the bollards. I, unerringly, hit the bollards every time. If I tried to avoid one, I'd veer directly into another. It must have looked as if I were doing it on purpose, though why I would want to do it on purpose, I don't know. Once again, he gave up in despair. I did eventually learn to ride a bike. And to swim too, in fact.
I had a pair of "bumper boots", classic canvas baseball boots. Exactly like Converse, but probably not branded Converse. I have no idea how I came to own them, as they were not at all the sort of thing we would have. Nothing was the sort of thing we would have. Children's possessions were not something my parents were bothered about, as they were too busy trying keep the whole ship afloat. Four kids, six years between them, one salary. Ouch. I may well have inherited the bumper boots from my London cousins. We got a lot of their cast offs, and we were always extremely grateful. I got a Stretch Armstrong, the weird, orange cladding of his arms already marbling and becoming brittle, years after the doll was properly popular, and I couldn't believe my luck.
Anyway, I loved my bumper boots. And one day, at the beach, my brother threw one of them into the sea and that was the end of my bumper boots. I walked home with one wet sock and two wet cheeks. Again.
I had a poster of The Incredible Hulk from the seventies TV series. It was the transforming Hulk: Bill Bixby at one one end in his standard, boring, dad shirt, and Lou Ferrigno, in full body paint and wig, snarling at the other. In the middle were two other guys pretending to be variations on each of them: a slightly more muscular man than Bill in a raggedy shirt, with the green contacts in, and next to him, a slightly less muscular bloke than Lou, still with black hair, but with greenish skin. I think it was a pull-out from the TV Times. I had it on my wall. It was my pride and joy.
I came home from school one day and it was ripped to pieces on my bed. You can have nothing.
Everyone was going on about Grease. It's the word, it's got groove, it's got meaning. Everyone was seeing that film. I'd missed out on the last big hit, Star Wars, from the previous year, and was going to do everything in my, admittedly limited, power to get to see this new word-of-mouth-must-see-movie. I was in luck. It was somebody at school's birthday, and their party was taking their friends to see Grease in the big cinema in Brighton. Yes! Finally, I'd have something to talk about at school that wasn't the Marti Caine Show.
We got there, and there were queues round the block. The excitement! It really was a hot ticket. I heard there was "mooning" in this film! Impossibly rude.
The birthday boy's mum decided she couldn't be arsed queuing, so we went to the Dolphinarium across the road instead. The Dolphinarium where I'd been on a school trip the week before. The disappointment was crushing.
As I looked out of the seal house window, away from the boring seals who hadn't changed since the last time I'm seen them, I could see a load of strangely dressed men running down the steps, trudging slowly up again, then, shouting their heads off, running back down. Some years later, I realised I was watching the filming of Quadrophenia. But that wouldn't have cheered me up then, even if I'd known. And I'm still not that bothered about it now.
I would say, I had a mostly enjoyable childhood. I spent my time quietly drawing and writing. There was a library just down the road, so I read a lot. For birthdays and Christmases I usually got felt tips and computer paper (a Beano book too, at Christmas) and was very happy with my lot. I always knew we had no money, so things like clothes, cinema tickets, or any other luxury items were so far beyond my reach it never even occurred to me to ask. My dad worked in London, and brought home the Evening Standard and reading it, just before my ninth birthday, I was bewitched by a film listing for The Big Brawl, a Jackie Chan film (though I'd have had no idea who Jackie Chan was). I was desperate to go and see The Big Brawl for my birthday present, and my dad sort of agreed, even though it was only showing in London. But my plans were scuppered when he found out it was a 15 (or more likely an AA ) and that was the end of that. I've still never seen The Big Brawl. I wouldn't now. The moment's gone.
Never hope for anything, John. Stick to your pens, your paper, your books, your Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World. The wider world isn't for you.
But of course, I was very happy then. These jagged little memories are outliers. They stick out of my joy like hangnails.
Those memories are jarring things, the times I was dragged from the warm amniotic everyday of my life, forced away from my pens, my books, and all my friends on the rented T.V. and made to do activities, away from my nice family in our featureless house. I remember these intrusions, these confrontations, because generally I was quite content, in an amorphous big, cosy, happy. These moments, these intrusive memories, they're like grit on scallops, obvious for not being delicious, minor irritants in the general swoony pleasure of it all. They have rarity value.
I was loved. I had a family. I had a roof over my head and some food—though it was the 70's, so it might not be recognised as food under current EU guidelines. And I had my made up world, my safe place, my fortress of solitude, impregnable against the slings and arrows of outrageous physical activity. Some marge on toast, grey socked feet up on the radiator, Monkey on the TV. Do your worst world. Nothing can touch me.
Until it did.
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