“When I think of my childhood it’s like a broken wine bottle smashed on the floor. The memories are shards of glass, all messed up. It’s impossible to know what fits where.”
Flesh WoundsRichard Glover
This rings true of my memories of childhood, except that we never had an actual bottle of wine in our house ever, that I can recall. Flagons of Hock for the occasional tipple of the aunts: my mother’s sisters and pseudo aunts from pre-marriage days. Hock lime and lemon was the guilty pleasure, for all except mom that is, but bottle of wine, no. I also recall stealing from said flagon in adolescence and so regretting the experience.
The earlier quote brought to mind so many childhood moments, I felt obliged to list possible contenders for examples. Not that I will elaborated upon them all.
Perhaps my earliest memory was long before the sleep-out was built and this was before we had a brother, but I do recall having a golliwog, never mind how politically incorrect that became, with eyes that glowed in the dark. I would wake convinced it was staring at me and then stare wide eyed at the ceiling myself afraid to look at it, not daring to rouse the rest of the household.
I have an astoundingly clear memory of taking the local train to Nana Riddle’s house. Mum dolled up in heels, a pencil skirt, 1940’s style, maroon, woolen, cape jacket looking movie star elegant, with a pusher in the baggage compartment. Its wheels locked and it was stationary while we children attempted to remain upright clutching it as we were unable to reach either the rail or straps, to which my mother clung for the ride to Bowden-Brompton, where the adjacent playground was far more enticing that the prospect of an afternoon at Nana’s house. As for if it was a younger sister or brother in that pusher, I have no idea.
Around the same era, we children were sleeping in the dining room while the sleep-out was built. It quickly became referred to as the girls room and was the perfect solution to four children in a two bedroom house. Was that when I began to loathe the colour green?
It was definitely the scene of terrified nights when pseudo aunty Eunice was babysitting and scary tales of Marmaduke were told immediately before enforced bedtime, and just to reinforce the idea, noises and sounds, not all of them natural, accompanied the dark that ensued. “Marmaduke wiiiiill get youuuuu…” Could this be when I started not sleeping well or did the spider nightmares do that later?
A canvas wading pool in the yard also comes to mind, along with darting in and out of the sprinkler on the front or back lawn as a cheap and safe way to escape the sweltering summers with out aircon.
When we finally acquired a black and white TV, I do not actually remember myself but have had imprinted on my memory by the constant retelling of my parents, that I was far more interested in converting the huge cardboard box, in which it was delivered into a cubby house, than I was in sitting cross legged on the floor inches from the screen.
Eventually, there were programmes I was infatuated with, however, and constant demands to sit further back or we’d go blind definitely punctuated our viewing time. I also recall that the TV was sometimes moved to face out from the front door so we and the children of neighbours yet to acquire TVs could all watch sitting together on the front porch or it was moved to the doorway of the kitchen so that we could watch the news while eating tea.
That same gang of TV viewing children were the playmates, with whom we socialized daily. We all learned to ride bicycles in our driveway and then practised riding around and around our front lawn before graduating to the street. We played street cricket, enacted games of war, utilized the slippery dip, swing set and seesaw in our backyard and staged musical productions for our own entertainment performing and playing in various homes and yards.
Every single individual had an enormous fear of Mr Franklin, aka Frankenstein, because he would loudly admonish us from his front door or if we dared to approach his house, the door would spring open and out came a little red book, in which he wrote the date, the name of the child and the violation which had occurred, or at least he made an elaborate show of appearing to. Any ball that landed on his property could never be reclaimed.
It was around this time I also discovered that our post WWII street had housing designs of only about 12 different varieties, which repeated along the entire length. I can recall returning home astonished that the house, to which I had been invited, was exactly like our own in layout down to the trees in the back yard. In our case it was one peach small and stunted, one apricot huge and hogging all available light and one mandarin, which almost never produced any fruit. Maybe, that was because we did use it as a landing target when jumping off the top of the stairs on the slippery dip with tea towels tied around our necks, pretending to be Superman. My mother, with customary disinterest, elaborated that yes the Tun’s house was the same as the Hallion’s and the Jame’s identical to someone else’s place, as though that was completely obvious.
Those backyard trees were sheer brilliance. Neighbours swapped lemons, plums, almonds, nectarines, oranges and gossip as well as the jams, jellies, chutneys and pickles produced from their bountiful crops. Unfortunately, many of those yards have now been carved up and redeveloped as soulless units and blocks where there is no back or front yard and instead a sense of isolation not community. Why don’t housing estates today adopt such practical, community-building design features I wonder?
Well, inspired by that quote from a book that is now long finished, I seem to have recalled a number of fragmented anecdotes that exemplify, at least to me, jumbled, disjointed recollections of a childhood that doesn’t coherently hold together as a single time period. This evidence proves the author’s original statement holds true for many of us raised in the 1960s in suburbia. I’ll stop my rambling still contemplating the very long list of further evidence, I have not fleshed out at this point, but may yet return to at a later date.
My mind has moved on to yet another quote, from the same author and title, and that too is well worth pondering.
“It seemed like we’d been told the meaning of life: to give out more good than you’d received. Or, to put it in the negative, to pass on less shit than you’d suffered.”
