Glimpses of the Past
Twisting from the waist in a squatting position I can see beneath the gate… there is a footpath alongside the road beneath the tunnel, but while the footpath stays at my level the road dips down and is awash with water.
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White light screeches across my eyes and lightening races from the palm of my hand as I pull it away from the inside hinge of the pram hood. There is blood and pain and woollen blankets and a soothing voice.
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The sandpit is vast and filled with damp sand. I leap into the grains and land with lightening pain like squealing car wheels from my twisting ankle. Pulled into the pushchair I whimper.
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The tunnel is dark alongside the house and blocked by the slavering terror of a hell-hound. I hold my wooden sword aloft defending my big sister from its jaws. I feel triumph as the tail-wagging retriever trots away without concern.
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My sister holds my hand, pulling me along as I tire from the trek from house to corner shop half a dozen houses away, passing the cooked cabbage smell of the Scottish neighbours – the Bryant’s brood. I later know they are poor, surviving on broken biscuits, leftover fish and chips and boiled vegetables their house is bare compared to ours and ours is scant. Mr Bryant was a policeman like dad. The shop smells of tea and brown paper. My head is below the counter, my sister’s not much above. She hands over a book and coins. The book is stamped with an octagonal mark and handed back with sherbet lemons and sugar satin cushions. I am dragged out of the shop and into the alley halfway between shop and home. Jean pushes at a knot in the fence until it pops out like the eye of a dead fish. I put my eye to the knot-hole. The mown grass has several hard, brown lumps. The lumps move and a shrunken leather neck protrudes and a beak clamps on scattered lettuce. It seems mechanical as the mouth opens and closes. I wet myself with excitement.
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I sit on the floorboards with a tin full of aging electrical fittings. Ceiling roses, Bakelite light sockets, fat, black round brass bars protrude from the Bakelite shells of wall plugs with missing screws and twisted, cloth-clad cables. There is a battery with flat brass contacts which taste of metal when touched to the tongue. I make the sockets and plugs cavalry and artillery. I play happily alone.
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The big day comes. Mum is excited and dad proud. Newspaper is laid across the floorboards in the scullery and living room. I am held back as dad rolls out the lino dark green with swirling streaks of lighter hues. He sweats and swears and cuts, tailoring the covering until it is a flat shining sea of luxury. I am left to sit and slide on the placid ocean while dad fits the leftover across the scullery floor around the deeps sink and wooden drainer, corner copper and gas stove. Weeks later the ‘other room’ is clad in brown lino and rags rugs tatted by mum from cut up clothes and blankets on a sacking base.
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Its Autumn and a fire hisses in the grate of the ‘other room’. Jean is ready to go to tea with her friend Sandra and sits clad in her gaberdine mac against the cooling afternoon. The tin bath has left its hanging lie on the yard wall and sits on the rag rug being filled by mum with saucepan and bucket from the copper. Bath filled and temperature tested I am stripped naked just as Veronica arrives to pick up Jean. I wince and cover myself in shame. Mum laughs at a toddler’s embarrassment. Inside I quail… I will never recover from this indecent exposure. The clock is forever set on my body image.
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Our begged-for occasional treat is the marvel of quicksilver. When pressed dad will retrieve the matchbox from the high scullery cupboard and show us the miracle of metal that runs and pools at each tilt. Scattering and coalescing mercurially.
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November the fifth – Bonfire Night – Jean enjoyed the bonfire and handful of cheap fireworks in the garden having fully recovered from chickenpox. I was still covered in their crispy scabs and watched from indoors, wrapped in a blanket. I watched the Catherine Wheel spin and the Roman Candles flare but could not wave sparklers indoors. Illness cheated me of the smell of gunpowder and burning spuds, but not the joy of light and fire. I picked at the crispiest pox between my eyes to ease the itching.
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My Christmas treasure was a blue plastic pen knife. Useless as anything other than an empty threat it was a marvel of technological innovation! Bakerlite be dammed the age of plastics had been born and already weaned to toys from Hong Kong. I brandished the knife over the wall to where Richard Ng lived. He could climb the apple trees to perch on the wall and instruct me in the ways of Redskins. From him I learned the truth that they danced around fires shouting oompah oompah! I learned another harder fact of life from Richard one day when he climbed back over the wall and my penknife went with him, forever!
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Black-eyed Susan visited her grandfather at the end house. It had a hard wire fence. We talked with her but could only play games where separation was no disadvantage. Our neighbour was Mrs Mabbet and she has a grey fur ball of a tabby cat. Nothing else was known about her or the cat, except she told us another fact of life. Babies were found under gooseberry bushes. She knew, she had gooseberry bushes. Mrs Skuttle lived the other the other side. This was all that was known. Another house in the row must have contained the Bates family, because Pauline and her baby sister Linda sometimes played with us.
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Linda Bates wore nappies. They were badly secured as it was her habit to leave a brown trail of her own making along our garden path. Pauline was better trained. The day she needed to go I accommodated her need by holding up an old curtain between us as she made a deposit in dad’s half-finished chicken house.
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The world turned upside down when dad was ‘transferred’ to another division of Kent Police. We left Faversham not long after the great floods broke the seawalls and inundated the town and around. I arrived in West Malling still not quite five years old and unafraid as I was as yet unaware that schooling was compulsory and full of the terrors of playmates and pedants.