This Much I Remember

                   

  It had only been minutes since our mothers had walked away from the school gates and leaving us in the charge of Miss Fielding.  She bundled us quickly together - some in tears, others stunned into a confused silence - before leading us all into a squarish room, chaotic with wooden desks sat at angles on a red tiled floor strewn with a rubble of damaged toys, lettered bricks and ragged books. The walls were stark, creamily bricked  like the inside of a prison, but colour-splashed with impressions of blazing flowers, disjointed animals and mini-sized hands: scumbled onto beige, peeling paper -  patty-caking at odd angles; the ghostly residue of a previous term's pupils. The windows were opened wide with the skinny bunched curtains ruffling at the edges. It looked as if something or someone had been trapped in the room and had with panic and relief bolted outside into the swarming heat, amid the exploding bushes and the emerald expanse of tightly cut grass. 

   As it was so hot once our bags were dropped we were taken outside to sit under a willow tree to cool off, and in some cases, dry our tears. We were placed in a concentric semi-circle with Miss Fielding sat in the middle to our front  - all of us surrounded by the drooping fronds of the buzzing willow tree. After asking all of us our names and ticking them off, she suggested that today as it was so warm and sunny we would sit right there and listen to stories until it was time for lunch. Those who were still inconsolable after the still recent parent child separation episode, sat slightly apart, their moans quietly irregular - tucked inside the hushed breeze and the faint birdsong. The rest of sat with mute acceptance, waiting for Miss Fielding to open the book and read to us. 
   I had not been overly upset at the wrenching some had felt when their mothers walked away, but was contently confused to go along with what was happening. I sat quietly under the tree, my naked legs feeling the pin pricks of the nipping ants and the grit-sting of the small stones, and my bottom going steadily numb. I could feel the cold tickle of the grass blades on my wrists and smell the wet hum of the tree as I listened to Miss Fielding, her unbroken voice creating an invisible wall, trapping me to the spot, gradually rendering all of us silent. 

 After a while, new feelings of discomfort caused me to fidget. Unable to break the spell of Miss Fielding's voice a sense of panic throbbed through me. I knew what was going on, but I was powerless to do anything about it. It started as an itchy fidget, which I knew I could handle. Then, it changed to something more pressing, more urgent than usual - painful almost. In no time at all I knew that something had to give, and I knew I had the means to make things better, to let go, to turn pain away. My eyes closed and a warm, moist, oozing filled my pants, a damply sublime, guilt-filled relief.
    Gradually a terrible smell wafted through the half circle of children, who started to fuss and whine and pinch their noses. I wished it wasn't me. I wanted the cause to be something, anything else but me.  My heart punched my chest and my eyes tightened as I visualised the vapour trail snaking towards Miss Fielding’s nostrils, who seconds later after a moments exploratory pause, closed the book with a thud. 

   I was extracted from the group by the headmistress who marched me to the place considered the sole domain of Mr Dickson the caretaker. I remember seeing his brown coat draped over one of the chairs and noted the frayed collar and the little row of screw drivers and pens sticking out of the top pocket, and a copy of the Racing Post rolled up and poking through a lower one. His glasses were sat on his chair as if placed there to reserve the seat. There was a smell of disinfectant from a tin bucket with a mop planted in it like a stake, the head looking like a dead sea creature, lifeless tentacles partly concealed in a scummy fizz of poisonous water. On the drainer there were two tins of Ajax, a slab of soap, a nail brush, a yellow glove that looked like a dismembered hand, a bunched up cloth and a silvery bloom of wire-wool all placed out like a janitor-themed Kim’s Game. 

 A nurse in a blue coverall and plimsolls silently appeared.  She nodded at the headmistress who then clacked quickly away along the corridor. The nurse then blasted steamy water into a large ceramic Belfast sink which bubbled and foamed. My punishment was to be publicly washed in a sink normally used by Mr Dickson for only the dirtiest jobs. I was stripped and dunked roughly into the wet boiling heat by the nurse who proceeded to wash me as if I was muddy pet, continually sluicing me as if trialing a new torture technique. Each sloshing leaving me momentarily breathless, my secret tears melting into the brown froth. The air was full of steamy soap-scented excrement and the distant shrill sound of children’s voices. I felt sad, confused and worried.

The nurse said, ‘Stop moving, there’s no one around who can see you.’ I was turning my head like an owl, checking desperately.  No one was around. But it didn’t help.

 ‘Right, you’re done,’ she said, and lifted me from the sink. ‘Dry yourself and put these on.’ She showed me a set of clothes that looked like they’d been retrieved from a nearby orphanage, like the ones I’d seen my father wearing in the creased black and white photograph he kept in old musty cabinet drawer in the shed.  Dressed, I looked like one of those evacuees you see clambering on and off trains in those wartime news reels.

 As I tidied myself I saw a lone girl peeping from behind the bag pegging area. She’d watched the whole thing in complete silence. She had ginger hair shaped like a wasp’s nest, and I liked her. But she’d seen me undressed, scrubbed and sluiced like a dog so I hated her instead.  I never wanted to see her again, but a bond was already quietly forming.  Later, sports day brought us back together again. 

                                               

Sports Day.

On the day the boys wore capacious shorts. Those tight-squeezers that made footballers in the Eighties look like they were wearing swimming trunks hadn't yet caught on.  The girls were even more unfortunate, forced to strip down into what appeared to be heavy-duty, navy- blue knickers which made even the slim girls look horrid.  I suppose this was intended to thwart the stirrings we boys tended to get and the old navy blues were a good defence against any surprise twitches or unscheduled bulges appearing on sports day.

   Looking at the group of girls mustering I noticed the ginger frizzy- haired girl sat with a teacher. She was fully dressed, quite plump.  

I was also going through an unpopular phase as that toilet business hadn’t been forgotten, and I’d started to wear glasses to correct a squint recently spotted at the clinic. But at least I would be involved as soon as the pairs were settled. 

   Once the ramshackle of minor events involving sacks, buckets and plastic objects were over, the wheelbarrow race was announced. Girls must choose boys to push.  Boy’s legs to be tucked under girl’s arms and pushed along, wheelbarrow style.

Boys with their strong taut little arms would crawl, whilst their bitty legs were tucked under the arms of the girls who would then push them along like a barrow, as fast as possible towards the winning line.

    As the pairing off neared completion, feelings of dejection began to come over.  The final girl made her move and selected the boy next to me. The balance was wrong, and I was left out.  There was to be no wheelbarrow race for me. No more pushers were left.

Suddenly there was a commotion, a swirl of mums and teachers, all permanent waves and flouncy dresses, fussing over someone reluctantly being pulled into the open. It was the ginger girl sprung from the safety and anonymity of the spectator’s seating. She was ordered to strip down to her knickers and fill the gap. I was going to be barrowed after all, by this little ginger tank.  My secret ginger girl.

The starting whistle was blown shrilly and, before its pea stopped rattling, the navy blues and their hand crawlers began. Pretty soon boy's legs were being dropped by slim pig tailed girls, their ribbons flicking in the wind. Tears and pouting accusations soon followed.   But I was still going, pushed by a pile driver, my bony legs clamped tight by pudgy arms and the pent up emotions of this strong girl. 

    My twiggy arms and hands were a blur of desperate skittering. They had to be. If I hadn't kept them going I’d have fallen face first into a wreck of bloody nose, grass-stained teeth and comically twisted specs. She kept pushing. My weedy chest heaved; fear of worse pain drove me on and on. My lungs felt hot and sore and I could taste sweet acidy fluid in my mouth. But then, other feelings deeper inside me changed: I felt angry and proud and I wanted to win. I could tell that she wanted it too, the frizzy ginger girl, as determined, intent and as full of desire to win as I was.  

                                              

The Little Fishes

I made a massive chore of learning to swim on account of being a bit of a coward. Actually, as a baby, I could always swim. My body understood the rudiments of breath holding and doggy-splash, even though I couldn't know it did. No one told me it was one of the purposes of survival, and that God was smart enough to give us this basic survival tool - our lungs being well attuned to watery breathing due to the whole getting born thing.  And I guess there always existed the possibility that when you clambered out from your warm soaking prison, you’d slip into a cold river and live long enough to break the water’s surface like a pearl diver.  
It’s a bit like the giraffe thing, they’re all born as walkers: shaky and uncertain, but solid enough to wobble into a safe area once they've slid into the world, instead of lying down and glistening with animal sweet-stickiness waiting to be gnawed alive by any lions lounging in the neigbourhood. But having unlearnt to swim over the next 6 years or so, I had to find my fins all over again if I was ever to swim properly in the junior school swimming pool and receive the coveted width distance certificate. 
   As time progressed, and certificates and praises were received, I was one of the last ones still flapping about unable to swim without the aid of enough buoyancy assistance to keep a blacksmith's anvil afloat. Water wings pumped up so tight you could almost hear them squealing in agony, and floats shaped like little tombstones made of polystyrene that squeaked in your hands as you squeezed them between your meagre thighs to keep your bum upright in the water. These floats had minds of their own and lines of them could be seen making little bids for freedom all-round the pool, leaping out of the swimmers thigh-grips and jumping into the air like shoals of passing river salmon on their way to safer waters for breeding. As time progressed the last little group, which included me, were told to dispense with the floats and make do with the arm bands. Reluctantly we did, which left us swimming about with crazy arm movements, scrunched eyes and legs that felt as if medicine balls were tied to our feet. But a momentum had been established and today the Z group were going from concrete lumps to slick mermaids. 
   It was time for the great con called the 'graduated confidence process' (though they never told us it was called that). Each time we managed to shimmy-splash our way clumsily to one end of the width, Mrs Spangler would release a little air from our taut arm bands. Even with the smell of chlorine rinsing through my nostrils I could smell that rubbery wind as it hissed out of the valves that bubbled, and I heard them blow mini raspberries at Mrs Spangler as she fumbled the caps back on. How I envied them their brazen impudence. Then more widths, then more air releases before being told to give up the floats.  Gradually as all kids emerged shaking slightly, glistening like frogs, each of them dropped their float before reluctantly clambering back in.  A jumbled white heap emerged by the benches looking like a cluster of discarded teeth pulled from a giant's mouth. A pile of white flotsam. 
   Up and down we swam, splashily; eyes tight and sore. Mouths, chemically dried, throats raw, noses numbed, lungs on fire; hearts flicking through our skinny chests like little gasping fish. 
By this stage I was happy, I'd made enough bragging progress to get out. One arm band looking sad and deflated, the other no longer in full bloom; the old pumped up look now consigned to the shrieking dwarves in the shallow end. I had achieved enough; the certificate would wait another week. I looked forward to getting out and enjoying the sublime comfort of dryness. But no, I wasn't allowed out. Miss Spangler was on a roll and no-one was getting out yet; no drownings to report - the great Health and Safety push was a long way away in the future, germinating in the back of someone’s mind - perhaps one of these little would-be eels struggling along with me. It would have taken a drowning to call the session to an end. Even Stuart Stickler’s tears weren’t helping:
   ‘Stop being a baby!’ I heard Mrs Spangler shout as Stuart wiped a bubble of snot from one of his nostrils. I made a mental note: tears aren’t working today.
More deflation visits to the side of the pool. I couldn't work out why they bothered as by now it didn’t make any difference. I'd rest my elbows on the cold slippery surface, shaking and making spluttering comments that made no sense, listening to the trebling echoes and shouts of encouragement all around me and the stuttering snuffling and mad splashing coming from Stuart who was going the opposite way with a face that was part terror, part grim determination.  Then with another gurgled hiss from one of my arm bands I was tapped on the head and ordered back across again. I was swimming. I was a winner in everyone’s eyes, except my own as nobody had told me I’d been swimming for 10 minutes and attributing my success to two flat pieces of plastic and rubber that hung limp and breathlessly from my arms.

                                               

       The Lockable Diary

When I was about 8 and 10, always at bedtime, and providing she left her door open, I’d watch my older sister sitting on the side of her bed with her legs crossed, hunched like a crab, writing something into a red leatherette covered book. I'd watch her peering through her little Gandhi spectacles, writing in that round curly lettered handwriting of hers as her plaits dangled in front of her. Then she’d dart the page before locking the book with a little in-built padlock and attach the key to her constantly worn charm bracelet. My interest in this item grew from bored curiosity to a maddening need for answers. It was the lock that did it.

 She had a money box too; like a miniature bank cashbox – an ugly black square thing that looked like it had been made from left over armoured plating from a tank factory, totally immune to the hairgrips and paper clips I’d used to try to get it open. But I knew the contents of the box amounted to little more than three apple snail shells, a folded picture of Cliff, and a couple of defunct farthings. Compared to the book, this was only of passing interest, fuelled mainly by brotherly menace.

 After several attempts at stealing this mysterious book thing from her desk and prising open the pages, nearly breaking my finger nails; and a failed attempt to obtain the key once by slipping her charm bracelet into my pocket after she’d left it lying around outside the bathroom, she informed me that it was her 'secret diary.’ After allowing for this exotic fact to sink in, I dug out my ongoing Christmas list and looked at the items listed, staring at it with new eyes. I then scratched out the number one entry: ‘Magnetic Robot ‘and inserted the words ‘lockable diary’ in its place.

   That Christmas, I got one. It wasn't lockable. Instead it was a ‘Scout’s Diary,’ full of kids doing stuff I didn’t do like tying knots and earning merit badges for good deeds. But it was a diary. My initial disappointment that it wasn't lockable waned when I found a loose floorboard in my lair and a secret cavity in which to stow it. I could now record my life in complete secrecy; I’d write in it every day and one day show it to an astonished world.

                                              

            Not Feeling Well.

Thursday 18 October 1968.’ Dear diary, I felt poorly at school today and had to sit in the assembly hall with my sister. She was made to sit with me until I told the truth. Spangles is always suspicious if we say we feel ill in class.’ (Age 12)

    

 My sister sat and glowered at me. Her hair now brushed moodily forward, tumbling over her suspicious face where her girlish plaits once hung sweetly. I was her brother; therefore I was a liar as well as a thief. And here I was, lying my way out of lessons. She was relieved and skipped off to her friends when Mrs Spangler, who made no pretense of her dislike of boys, her patience exhausted, sent me home. The hobble home wasn't a tough, sports injury limp, it was one of those clutching belly, ‘I feel fragile’ hobbles. I felt sick and depressed. One light however shone my tortured route home: it was a Thursday, and my new Tiger comic would be waiting for me.

 Very little interrupted my comic obsession, whether sadness, illness or pain. I’d stuck with my Tiger through crippling migraines, breaking off only to stumble to the bathroom to release the headache demon by inducing warm, sour, throat-scoring vomit that filled my nose with the sore-stink of acid. But, eyes still fizzing, my mouth sluiced and sweetened with toothpaste, I’d be back to the comic. Even when the words wavered, and the superheroes looked like smudges, I’d carry on. Comics were my solace and my comfort, a sublime private entertainment no matter how I felt. On new comic delivery day I’d be almost paralysed with delight.

  Home at last, stumbling through the door, I looked across the hall and saw my Tiger, sleeping on the worn mat in the porch; pristine, lit by a dusty ray of late autumn sunshine, shimmering with seductive newness. I took it to my private lair, slinked away with my prize as a real tiger might, then sat on my bed to inhale the inky flavours of its print, its pictures and its promise. Wrestler Johnny Cougar would face another terrible adversary, Skid Solo would be racing against cads with superior technology, and the opposing football team would be out to knobble Roy of the Rover. It didn’t matter that I knew this. It was the familiarity I craved the most.

  And then the unthinkable happened. My interest waned. I was page flipping, not getting to the end of the stories. Suddenly Roy of the Rovers didn't seem quite as captivating. I closed the comic and lay down. Put on my pyjamas and sat in bed clutching my belly. I looked at the comic. The strength of my feelings for the comic now locked in battle with my pain. I picked it up again and read the cover. Then I was flipping again, backwards and forwards.  Finally, I dropped the comic to the floor and it flapped lifelessly to the carpet like a flattened hero. My eyes felt full.  Fluid rattled in my nose. I didn’t feel like being brave. Further down, my appendix grumbled, preparing itself to explode and fire poison into my blood.

                                                       

     ‘Monday 11th August 1972. ‘Dear diary,  the reason I stood today in a carpenter’s workshop wearing my new blue bib and braces overalls with four corned beef sandwiches and a flask of tea with sugar, stowed in a tartan duffle bag slung over my shoulder, was because this was my first day as a proper adult.’ (Age 16)

 ‘Am I in the right place?’ I said to a fat man wearing a brown overall as I wandered into the yard. This turned out to be the foreman, a notorious hater of new apprentices, due to, as I later learned, their callowness and youth being disruptive to the old guard of grizzled ex national servicemen who preferred to work grumpily alone. The scrappy remains of his hair were tar black but greying bits were fighting through and looked as stiff as wire wool. Filaments of hair poked from his collar showing despite his bald head, hair was thriving everywhere else. Spiders legs crawled from his eyebrows and his heavy-lidded eyes were as brown as the bundles of teak stacked by the door. I noticed a stumpy pencil behind his ear, conveniently placed, like a cigarette stub.

‘Depends who’s asking,’ he said.

            ‘I’m Mike,’ I said, putting out my hand as my dad had said I should. ‘I’m the new apprentice.’

    He ignored my hand as if handshakes were the preserve of men who’d done something to earn one. ‘Stick that thing in the grub room,’ he said. ‘And meet me by the mitre saws.’

 I nodded. The 'thing' was my duffle bag. I was never that keen on it myself but never thought of it as a 'thing'. I looked at it now in a new light, my old PE duffle bag, a saggy, toggled-up blob of a reminder of this most recent cross-over from childhood. School was all the duffle bag and I knew. We’d both once taken a beating from Billy Murray, one of the feared school bullies who God had, perhaps rather perversely, made twice the size of the rest of us.  A stomach punch for me and a kick for the duffle which rolled down the school corridor before juddering to halt at Mrs. Hardcastle’s, frozen-to-the-spot, brown brogues and twilled tights.  Now that same bag was moving into adulthood with me, now it was full of manly things like flasks, newspapers and sandwiches - both of us now prepared for the land of working men.  I didn't know what a grub room or a mitre saw was, but didn't want to ask too many questions so early on

 I guessed the ‘grub room’ was the place I first went into where two old guys were sat slurping muddy looking fluid from dirty looking flask cups and reading red topped newspapers. What the hell a mitre was, was anyone's guess. The only one I could think of was the tall hat I wore in drama when I stole the role of Archbishop of Rheims from Melvin Foreacre after auditions, due to being slightly taller, and impressing Miss Strummer with my high, flat toned diction when reading aloud. It felt a long time ago then now that I was 16 with no school kids anywhere, just old guys slurping coffee and talking about mitre saws and grub rooms and pursing their lips at pictures of semi-naked women.

 On my way home I’d mused about my strange first day in the timber yard. ‘It’s not wood,’ I was told, ‘It’s timber, it’s always timber’.  A strange day of standing in a daze watching men work and hearing them swear with an easier familiarity than I ever thought possible in an adult. I’d heard my dad swear once when he accidentally dropped a hammer on his toe whilst attempting to nail to the wall one of my mother’s  plaster of paris plate impressions. The word that sat in the air like a demon’s call put my sister and I into a shocked and fearful silence. My God fearing mother however went into the kind of hysterics I’d only ever seen her perform once before, when a black bird flew through our sitting room open window sending everyone, including the bird, dizzy with madness.  Like the bird, we were ushered out, slightly traumatized, but also relieved.

As I neared home I thought about those workmen and their odd insularity, particularly their Page 3 obsessions. If I’d wanted to see a naked female body, I thought, I only had to ask Samantha to take her top off, which she would, if her dad wasn’t home, and if she was in the right mood. Sometimes I was even allowed to take her bra off, a devilish task of finger trembling complexity that reminded me of those obsessive travails with my sister’s lockable diary and money box about eight years earlier. I’d thought about my diaries as well. At 16 I was an adult now and thought perhaps I should end them.

                                                         Today…

 I’m sitting on the floor of my lounge reading through a box of really old diaries. There are boxes everywhere decades worth.  I’m reflecting on my obsessive nature and my need to write.  If I can put find some plots amid these memories, I’ll make a start on my autobiography. I’m sure everything I need is right here.