| Earliest memories Scruff Wellington Tales Contents |
Well, here goes. Most autobiographies are about
unhappy or deprived childhoods so this one will be unfashionable and
unsellable. There isn't a title yet but it's likely to be something
along the lines of 'An Amusing and Uncomplicated Childhood: Happy
Memories of the Fifties and Sixties' by AN Other (someone I used to
think existed and was lucky enough to play in lots of different cricket
teams, until one day my Dad with an incredulous smile told me what it
meant. I suppose I have never been good at languages and that shows you
how little interest I had even in English.) We went to Germany in 1956 so all my earliest memories are when I was five or younger. Of course, I can't remember whether I was two, three four or five and I suspect that for most of them I was four or five. But I like to think it was Timothy in the pram when I was dragged round the park by the au pair and he was born in 1953 when I was two 'and a half' as we always said for every intervening age between birthdays. And certainly, there was no-one else around for most of my earliest memories because Christopher (four years older) was always at school or, as I now know, up to a load of pranks during his school holidays. He only appeared occasionally in those five years before we took the plane and I'm pretty sure he wasn't on the plane with us since it was another of those days he was at school, having become a boarder, (whatever that was, as the linguistically uninquisitive Nicholas would have thought.) In fact, my earliest memories were not happy although they are pretty well the only ones I can remember that weren't. They were dreams. I'm moving along a line which is like shallow treacle, towards a monster's gaping mouth. I'm screaming and he's going to devour me. As he does I wake up only to fall asleep and find myself back on the right handside of my mindscreen moving left along towards the mouth. There are other things around. Everything is very fast. I'm terrified. When I was a bit older (about four) this dream could be suddenly transformed into a brick cladded vortex and I'm spinning towards the small hole at the bottom. The first version gradually became rare and the second lasted at least until I was about ten. Not every night; not even every month or even year. But I knew it and lived in fear of it. Especially the first one. So the rest is happy and even the severest 'tellings off' weren't too traumatic. One of those followed and innocent comment on the size of my Dad's willy (known as a u-u in our family). Thwack. I was naturally very upset but was reassured by the smile across my Mum's face just before the punishment was inflicted by the Squadron Leader. I was, in those days, fascinated by my own u-u. One day I'm lying on the floor reading The Topper. Well, Mum thinks I'm reading it because she's taught me how to read, she thinks. I'm actually pretending and am working out the story of Wild Young Dirky from the pictures. Stimulated by my movement on the carpet, my u-u starts to grow and becomes uncomfortably hard. It can't be the first time since I say to my Mum, who is cooking in the kitchen, that whenever I lie on the floor in this way, up he goes. 'Just ignore it dear and it will go back down,' she said. Looking back, she missed a chance for a sex lesson here. And who knows what my life would have been if she had dared? Sex, of course, is not supposed to be something that concerns four year olds. Well, in my case it provides me with many of my earliest memories. I took a liking to girls' bottoms and, just across the road, Julie Smith had a particularly attractive one. I remember admiring the roundness of it, covered as it was by her navy blue underpants. The curve seemed the most perfect of shapes and I simply wanted to touch it. Julie Smith had no problems with this but my honest upbringing made me feel I ought to ask someone permission. Despite Julie telling me that it was fine by her, I trotted along to ask not just her Mum but mine. After a friendly discussion, they decided against it and so that was that. I next saw a pair of navy blue underpants in Germany. My parents had been invited for cocktails, the fashion of the fifties, and we were in the hall. "Do you think I can have a closer look at your underpants?" I asked; this time ,at five, with absolutely no intention of asking anybody else. But blow me if she didn't bounce up and denounce me in front of all the Wing Commanders, Group Captains and their lady wives. An ex-pat officers' cocktail party is not as liberal as the drawing room of modern looking housewives back in Bushey, and I remember we were on our way home rather swiftly. Then there was the girl down the road, again before we left for foreign climes. She came up with the brilliant idea of carrying out our explorations behind the large fir tree at the bottom of the garden. Her suggestion, that she stood on the lower branch facing the house in order to keep watch while I had a look at her behind, seemed to me to be wholly admirable. But just as I began to lift her skirt, I recoiled. "Ger orne," she ordered, in a voice that was to anticipate estuary English but which was in fact closer to cockney, "ge' orne wif it." But it was no use. I had come across something that was entirely new to me, the smell of an unwashed body. I had no idea, even in those days, that some households did not have baths with hot and cold running water, and I would have been horrified if I had realised then that this was the reason for not only her smell but the (at the same time) powdery and oily nature of her skin. And that was the sum of my sex education before the age of seven, all before I was five. I suppose, therefore, that I became a little snob through my own discoveries. It was certainly not encouraged in me by my parents. Television was what brought out the worst snobbery in me........ |