L’enfance, ce grand territoire d’où chacun est sorti – Saint-Exupéry.
There’s a song I play in my head that floods me with happiness. I’m not going to name it and weaken a powerful memory. It must have been on the radio when I was five, doing something satisfying. I can only describe the satisfaction as structural in some way, something falling into place, something being achieved. I don’t think it was my usual activity, cutting out a picture of an aeroplane. It might have been when I surprised myself by drawing a ship in perspective. (I still have that drawing.) But I really can’t remember, and don’t want to, preferring to preserve the mystery.
Cutting out pictures of aeroplanes was my favourite activity. The subjects were mainly warplanes – for a reason I will explain – but I considered them works of art not killing machines. I rejoiced in the curve of a wing, whether tapered or squared off, in the different outlines of tail fins (why so different?), in the smooth or bumpy transition between fuselage and cockpit canopy or gun turret, in the difference between grinning radial engines and shark-like in-line ones.
Our habits are set early in life, and we can’t escape their consequences. Attaching myself to appearances was a hindrance later. For example, I failed as a trainee pilot. I was inside the machine, having to control it, my view restricted to an instrument panel and foreshortened nose and wing. It was no longer elegant. I also failed as a scientist, seduced by the smells, colours, and names in my home chemistry set, unprepared for the grind of molecular mathematics.
What I enjoyed aged five was making tricky design decisions. Cutting out a fighter or bomber, how could I deal with the projecting guns, which were awkward to cut round but whose absence would spoil the look? I did feel I could ignore the mast for the aerial, and any undercarriage I could always assume was retracted, unless of course the subject was a Stuka or Lysander.
I also liked the heraldry of aircraft markings. My favourites were those of Mussolini’s air force: three stylised fasces in circles on the wing, a single one on the side, and on the fin a beautiful white cross embellished with the arms of the House of Savoy. My fascination with such devices is embarrassing – I’m no fascist, and one of my favourite songs is ‘Bella Ciao’. In fact my aesthetic pleasure in flags, coats of arms, and military rank insignia in general is tainted by their association with nationalism, feudalism, and war.
The pictures I cut out were from aircraft recognition magazines, published by the RAF and marked ‘restricted’. I was given then by our neighbour Auntie Leigh, whose elder son had been killed in action as a pilot. She lived a few doors away in our cul-de-sac in Blackley (pronounced Blake-ly) in North Manchester. For some reason I once had to stay the night with her. She placed on the bedside table a framed photograph of a tall figure in uniform in strong sunlight – perhaps in the Western Desert. She said, ‘He’ll stand guard over you.’ She showed me small model aircraft he no doubt made before enlisting. They were fragile, and to my embarrassment I crushed one when I held it.
There were no boys my age in the neighbourhood, so my friendships with adults were special. Auntie Lesley, my favourite, lived in the adjoining semi and was kind and encouraging. I called her Auntie Lesley. Years later when she was very old my mother and I called on her, and she remembered with pleasure how as a four-year-old I would run up the path towards her. My only memory of her house is a gloomy living-room with wax imitation fruit in a bowl. Some years later, after our move to Stockport, I was sent to stay the night with her. She said, ‘Tomorrow is Sunday. We’ll go to church.’ In the morning I heard her and her husband talk in low voices and knew I should get up, but pretended to be asleep. We didn’t get to church. Sorry, Auntie.
Another rewarding friendship was with a lad of eighteen called Geoffrey. Nowadays people would be horrified by a five-year-old spending time at his house, yet there was never the least hint of anything inappropriate. I learned a lot from him. He told me interesting things about the war: Hitler used to paint pictures, Göring designed his own uniform, and Japanese houses had screens instead of walls.
In an upper room in his house he showed me Billiken, ‘God of things-as-they-ought-to-be’, a gnomelike statuette in pale ceramic, whose shrine must have been so neglected he failed to stop the war. Was it Geoffrey who showed me newspaper photographs of emaciated beings in striped clothing? Or did I see them in one of the newsreels that accompanied, in piquant contrast, one of my favourite slapstick films?
A girl in a house opposite was about three. My only memory of her is standing at her front door. I must have had some errand to her parents. There was a glazed porch, unusual in that neighbourhood, which her mother called a ‘lobby’. The girl, whose name I forget, watched rain spatter the glass and said, ‘Poor Mr Rain, he hasn’t any eyes or ears.’ That impressed me. She also mystified me by saying ‘Daddy Kimmus’ was going to visit. Only after being a shepherd in the school nativity play, and waking on Christmas morning to find a toy fort beside my bed (made by Auntie Leigh’s younger son), did I realised who was Daddy Kimmus.
The only child in the avenue my age was Margaret. On the Back Field, reached by a ginnel next to Auntie Leigh’s house, we compared bodies. For some reason I was more interested in her back than anything else, and annoyed her by pulling up her dress to look. I think I felt scientific curiosity rather than sensuality. What was really sensual was her bedroom, which I was allowed to visit briefly. So unlike mine, a voluptuous nest of soft pink furnishings, like a bedroom in an American film of the period. A character in one of John Updike’s stories confesses that what he most enjoys about his affairs with women is seeing their bedrooms.
The Back Field encounter put to rest an embarrassing episode. In my ignorance I had wondered why women sat down to pee, and decided they had the same equipment as myself, attached behind instead of in front. Being good at drawing I was encouraged by the older girls in the avenue to express this theory as a diagram. My effort was passed among them to great hilarity, and I was encouraged to do further versions to share around.
One of those girls, Joan, aged eleven, lived next door but one. Her interest in my anatomical drawings must have aroused my worst instincts. I wrote her a scurrilous missive with such phrases as ‘there are bugs crawling up your bum’ and ‘you drink your own wee-wee.’ I remember her father confronting me in the avenue furiously waving the letter. I said in my defence that I hadn’t meant to send it until Margaret egged me on. She may even have helped me to compose it.
At school two girls attracted me. I wanted them to notice me, or even admire me, but they remained indifferent. My fascination was no doubt pre-pubescently sexual, but I also viewed them with the eye of an artist. Barbara’s red hair and full lips, Susan’s long blonde plaits and rosy cheeks, were delightful. Maybe there was the same dichotomy as with the warplanes, death and sex existing in a separate dimension from aesthetics.
In the playground there was no segregation of the sexes. (I was surprised to find there was at a school I attended later.) Even aged five girls could be quite bossy. They would tell me off for slouching or calling another boy a ‘sod’. But they also told me interesting things. One showed me the gills under a mushroom, which she called a frogstool, and said, ‘This is where the frog plays the piano.’ Another said, ‘Jesus makes robes for angels with a big sewing machine in the sky. That’s what you hear when it thunders.’
The playground was a large rectangle of tarmac with the odd patch of grass to sit on. On walls at opposite ends were painted the outlines of goalposts, CITY on one, UNITED on the other. It’s a space I revisit in my imagination. The memory of enclosing walls and iron fences gives me a sense of security . . . and community. I was an odd child – I drew designs for flying vehicles based on butterflies, and showed them to bemused teachers – but I never felt estranged from my classmates. My occasional fights were always with equals, and I wasn’t bullied.
At playtime the girls amused themselves with skipping ropes or whips and tops, while we boys fought one another, played cops and robbers, or swapped cigarette cards. But there were games we all joined in. Some enterprising child would march round shouting, for instance, ‘All in a game of staggy-in-the-buttonhole,’ stag being a game of tag in which whoever was tagged joined a growing skein of those who were ‘on’.
What I remember best is a lad shouting, ‘All in a game of the Daring Dexters.’ I didn’t know who the Dexters were – I now discover they were a circus family in a radio serial – but I was eager to join in. The organiser lined us up and named us: ‘You’re Dan Dexter, you’re Sue Dexter,’ and so on. Sadly, by the time he named us all the bell rang.
We also played ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ and ‘May I?’ in which the person who was ‘on’ stood at a distance from the rest. If Mr Wolf said the time was three o’clock the child who asked could take three paces forward. When we were all getting close, Mr Wolf would answer, ‘Dinner time!’ and turn and chase us. The person caught would be the next wolf. ‘May I?’ was similar. The ‘mother’ at the front would answer the request by saying, ‘Take two pins forward’ or maybe back. In our variety of the game the movements were expressed in sewing terms – pins, needles, or types of stitch. The person who got nearest the ‘mother’ won.
Soon after starting school I was given a large card with the royal arms in full colour. It was signed by the King, and began, ‘Today, as we celebrate victory, I send this personal message to you and all other boys and girls at school. For you have shared in the hardships and danger of a total war and you have shared no less in the triumph of the Allied Nations.’
I remember little about the war, which ended when I was four. Unlike many others I never experienced hardship or danger, and as for triumph, the word rings hollow today. Barrage balloons punctuated the sky, but I thought nothing of them – they had always been there. I was intrigued by the two little buttons on the front of my father’s khaki side cap, and the rifle he kept in the wardrobe.
Dad’s experience was nothing like the TV comedy series. My mother tells me he was often exhausted from exercises and manoeuvres and constantly giving blood, and deafened by Thunderflashes. His knowledge of aircraft didn’t impress me – the Lysander was all he ever mentioned (though he did call midges Stukas). My only other wartime memory is one day in May when my mother burst into my bedroom and announced, ‘Himmler’s dead.’ I said, ‘Don’t you mean Hitler?’
Dear reader, do these seem like pages from a dusty history book? If you too reach the age of eighty-two I hope you find your childhood as alive as mine. T.S.Eliot writes, ‘What might have been and what has been/Point to one end, which is always present,’ but it disturbs me that nowadays the past is so easily exhumed. Films, songs, and radio programmes I never thought to see or hear again are there online. On Google Earth I can look down on houses I once lived in, and ‘walk’ along long-forgotten streets. Even the Second World War is still present in a way, as new papers are released for a new generation of historians to sink their teeth into.
Having no male friends my age I sought companionship from artifacts – pictures in magazines, songs on the radio, my drawings, domestic objects. This poem appeared in THE SHOp No. 6:
Artificial Friends A screw I'm using rolls head first into a crack. There are a hundred more but I can't leave this one lost like someone stuck in a well so struggle to get it back and suddenly remember from being four years old the features of my artificial friends. Dark haunting eyes of a horn two hole button, neat ears of an Art Deco vase, gob-struck mouth of a standing pewter ashtray, fresh face of the boxwood wheel Mother missed for pastry, belly-button and ballet legs of the dancing scissor-tongs.
I was perfectly happy to be on my own. Did I love my parents, or did my love of shapes and forms make me cold and unfeeling? My mother was warm and nurturing, and I loved her when she sang to me – ‘On Wings of Song’ was a favourite – but mostly I took her for granted, as I did my father. He often seemed remote, but I cherished a badge he gave me from the British Industries Fair. It represented two interlocking cogwheels and made of plastic – ah, the days when plastic seemed beautiful!
Dad could be stern – for example, when I knocked over the aforementioned ashtray then lied that I hadn’t done it – but sometimes read to me from A Book of Scots: ‘Wee Joukie Daidles’ and ‘The Bairnies Cuddle Doon at Nicht’ for instance. He made jokes. Years later, in our first car, we drove through Carlisle en route to Scotland. An advert on bus read: Shop at Binns. Dad said, ‘Cats do that.’
Every night I prayed, ‘God bless Mummy and Daddy,’ and when my little sister arrived, her too. I loved Jesus in the picture on the wall in the school corridor, tall, blond, and smiling, surrounded by skipping children and leaping lambs. But his dad was scary. He sent floods to drown those who misbehaved, or cast people – even children – into outer darkness to gnash their teeth.
Also in the school corridor were two paintings I admired: ‘Ruth and Naomi’ and ‘The Golden Apples’. I saw no difference between Bible stories and scenes from Greek mythology. I must have been taught about the Trojan war, because – to my later embarrassment – I wrote that Hector was a coward because he ran away from Achilles.
My walk to and from school was an ordeal. I often had to walk gingerly with clenched buttocks, desperate to avoid an accident. The distance was exactly half a mile, but seemed endless. Sometimes I took the road directly from the cul-de-sac to the schoolyard, other times a ginnel which ran parallel, beside a brewery whose dark cloying smell I found unpleasant. In the ginnel I was sometimes confronted by a bigger lad who laughed at me and shoved me around, so I preferred the road, which passed a dairy owned by Susan’s parents.
My struggle to contain my bowels was usually on the way home. Sometimes I could distract myself with a phrase from my favourite picture-book, The Cock, The Mouse, and the Little Red Hen, such as ‘A bold bad fox and fourteen little foxes, or a line from a hymn: ‘Sufficient is thine arm alone.’
Or I counted flagstones. These were two feet by one foot six, like the ones in the avenue Margaret and I chalked for hopscotch. I focused on their individual characteristics – a broken corner, an amoeba shape of flattened chewing gum, a white bird dropping – or noted whether joints between were intact, or hollow, or decorated with bright green moss. Sometimes I crouched to look more closely, which seemed to help. Occasionally I had a companion – Margaret, or a boy who lived on a side road near the dairy. If they were with me when I had to crouch, I pretended to see an interesting worm or beetle.
Once when I stopped for a beetle inspection Margaret walked on, and when I pleaded with her to wait said, ‘No, serves you right.’ I remembered that on another occasion I had refused to wait while she examined a coltsfoot (the most common flower in those parts). But I had no interest in Nature, maybe because there was so little of it around.
I didn’t often fail to contain myself. When I did, shame was mingled with relief. My mother was neither cross nor sympathetic, just cleaned me up as matter-of-factly as if mopping the floor, though with an air of resignation and occasional sighs. She never said I was dirty or careless.
My own children had a similar distance to walk to school at that age. I wonder how many five-year-olds do it today.
For what must have been the first holiday after the war, my aunt and uncle and three-year-old cousin joined us for a week in Abergele. My only memory of the boarding house is the view across the road. I irritated the adults by repeatedly telling my cousin, ‘That’s Mr Coconut’s house.’ In Mr C’s garden were what my father said were wallflowers, and I irritated the adults further by protesting that they weren’t on a wall.
My uncle aroused in me a fascination for boundaries, which I still enjoy. On an unremarkable stretch of promenade, beside a beach strewn with concrete tank barriers, he made me take two steps backwards and said. ‘Now you’re in Llandudno.’ Then two steps forward. ‘Now you’re in Llandulas.’ I thought of that years later when my wife and I bestrode the equator at Mitad del Mundo in Ecuador. Nowadays I like to study illogical enclaves – odd bits of Belgium scattered in Holland, a fragment of the United States marooned in Canada at Lake of the Woods.
I think I was an annoying child, pig-headed and self-centred. If something went wrong or proved awkward – if a piece of card was too thick for scissors, or a tube of watercolour was blocked – I was furious. I remembered that just now, spreading a cracker with soft cheese which wasn’t sticky enough. It kept falling off the knife, and broke the cracker when I spread it. As a child in that situation I would have screamed, kicked the kitchen cupboards, and thrown cheese, knife, and crackers on the floor. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn patience and loving-kindness, though feeling goodwill for the cheese wasn’t easy.
One example of my cussedness was when Dad was making Christmas presents, bought ones being in short supply after the war. I was idly scraping a piece of wood, and he told me to stop scoring it. I didn’t stop. My mother said, ‘Perhaps he doesn’t know what scoring means,’ which I took as my licence to carry on. Another example was when Geoffrey offered to set up his model railway for my amusement, and showed me diagrams of possible layouts. I chose the most complex. He said, ‘I haven’t enough parts for that one.’ I carried on and on insisting until – to my chagrin – he abandoned the project.
The greater an anticipated pleasure, the greater would be my frustration when denied it. I loved short slapstick films. The Three Stooges made me laugh aloud, especially when one got trapped in a bed that folded into a wall. Laurel and Hardy I couldn’t get enough of. One evening when my father and I set out to see one of their films there was an exceptionally long queue. He made us turn back. I was furious with disappointment, moaned and kicked a wall, and got a severe telling off for scuffng my shoes. I don’t remember Dad ever slapping me, but he had a terrifying bellow (maybe learned from a Home Guard sergeant-major). Only years later did I realise it was ‘put on’.
Two aspects of life in the cul-de-sac, which might seem like ancient history, are still vivid in my memory. One is the pig bin. Its primary function was to stand in the middle of the avenue and act as stumps for a game of cricket. The ball was soft but made a satisfying clang against the galvanised steel when a batter was bowled out. The secondary function of the bin was to collect food waste to feed pigs, a hangover from the war effort. Food was still strictly rationed. I never saw who emptied the thing, and wasn’t interested enough to find out.
At the lower end, where Auntie Leigh’s house stood, the cul-de-sac swelled into a circle. Sometimes the bin happened to be placed at its centre. I had just become the proud owner of a pair of compasses, the kind with a hole for a pencil held in by a screw, and imagined the bin there from time immemorial. A giant pair of compasses, centred on it, would have set out the curve of pavement and garden walls.
The other aspect was the horse-drawn milk cart. The milkman appeared to have a foreign accent, which worried me in case he was a spy, but I was told he had damaged his jaw. To my delight he always let me ride the cart from our house to the top of the avenue. I loved the swaying motion, the creak of leather, the friendly smell of the horse (I still love horses). The cart fascinated me, so unlike any other artefact in my domain. Tables and sideboards had straight sides and horizontal tops, and their construction wasn’t obvious, but the cart had sloping sides with curved, tapering members and the joints were clearly visible, with wooden pegs projecting. Its floor sloped upwards and was mounted via two steel steps fixed to brackets, shiny from the milkman’s boots. Our progress was often attended, like devotees hurling themselves at a juggernaut, by housewives with shovels eager for the steaming manure.
A finale needs music, so here are my favourites at that time, mostly heard on the radio. There was the one I won’t mention that brings the flood of happiness. There was ‘Lili Marlene’, the first song I ever heard, so sad, so poignant, sung by Allies and Germans alike. There was ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People’ sung by Bob Crosby and the Bobcats, and ‘Mairzy Doats and Dozy Doats’ sung by The Pied Pipers. The overture to Carmen thrilled me so much I danced around singing, ‘Frank and Elizabeth, Frank and Elizabeth’ which fitted the tune nicely, until I noticed my parents watching and stopped, embarrassed. At school I learned hymns. ‘O God our help in ages past’ felt like a thank you for the recent victory. ‘Summer suns are glowing over land and sea’ was joyful, conveying the idea of more than one sun.
I remember the sky as mainly grey. It’s still my default weather, familiar enough for me to work indoors without feeling trapped. Strong sunshine disturbs me unless I can be out in it. Maybe if I was born somewhere like California I could be blasé. Ah well. I’m writing this finale on a bench overlooking Fishguard Harbour. The white stern of the ferry to Ireland has just disappeared behind the headland. The bright sky that brought me here is clouding over. Time to go.
