Meg has tagged me in the latest skirmish in the current meme wars. Intending only an appropriately flippant response, I seem to have gone all Dylan Thomas & what should have had me done & dusted by 10.30 & abed at a decent hour has me still tidying away the out-takes at 11.20.
So – meme alert:it's coming your way..!
Name 5 things you miss most about your childhood
As with chain letters, there are, I guess, certain orthodoxies governing procedure in meme participation. The first golden rule must be don’t mess with the menu. However, my problem with this meme is that there’s nothing about childhood that I actually miss. Maybe it’s having hung out with kids for the entirety of my professional life: maybe that has induced an over-familiarity with the processes of childhood experience, resulting in a kind of leavening of my vivid recollections of my own.
But more likely it’s down to the curious relationship I have with my memories of childhood. As an only child, events & my subjective reaction to them, & my subsequent rational interpretation of them, have been shared with no one else. They have been unique to me &, over time, they have coalesced to form a vast emotional database, each discrete memory element chronologically filed, the sum of the individual parts amounting to a series of interlocking maps, each one delineating some aspect of my journey towards the moment now.
It's late at night & this is haltingly expressed - &, for chrissakes, this is only a meme game such as we all play when the wind’s blowing & the rain’s beating on the windows. But as I’ve grown older & the distance from those years of intense experience & rapid change has increased, so has my perception of events long past become more dispassionate, more detached. Nostalgia, with its acute sense of the inaccessibility of those ‘happy highways where I went & cannot come again’, has lost its edge & I can consider events now with a clarity & understanding not possible when the memories were all contained within a ‘land of lost content’.
One certainty has become increasingly apparent in recent years: for better or worse, the greater part of the poetry that I write takes its directions from that atlas, drawing on its territories & the pathways mapped so clearly through them.
So these memories are not of aspects of childhood that I miss & would wish to revisit. But each one has does have a particular resonance & significance, sometimes for reasons no longer apparent to me…
1. Aged 2. Kneeling on the sofa beneath the living room window of our flat in Balham, South London, looking across the common to the railway embankment, watching a stubby black tank engine shunting trucks onto the siding. The shifting patterns of sound, muffled through the closed window, as the locomotive accelerates & decelerates, the hammering pistons & rhythmic discharges of steam like an angry monologue…
2. Aged 3. Standing in the walk-in larder of my grandmother’s cottage in Hockenden Lane, watching through the narrow perpendicular window for my grandfather’s return from the farm. Seeing him in his oily brown overalls opening the garden gate with one hand & guiding his old black bike through with the other. Knowing that he knew that I was watching for him. Peering up the angle of the path alongside the cottage until he briefly disappeared from view only to emerge suddenly, blocking the light from the window, pausing only to leer in at me. Running across the stone floor of the kitchen to greet him & burying myself deep in the scent of motor oil…
3. Aged 7. Filing into the Latchmere Road Junior School hall for special prayers for the soul of King George VI, who had just died. The shuffling of feet on the blockboard floor; the green light filtering through the high windows; the awful shocked but uncomprehending silence as children were drawn into unwonted communion with adult grief; an overwhelming apprehension of events so charged with feeling that they constituted a kind of obscenity, a sense almost of shared shame. And then the grinding hymn gradually gathering shape & form – several hundred voices, pre-pubescent altos & rumbling adult basses, wrapping themselves around Abide With Me. My collapse into wracking sobs as the wave of sound rose up & crushed me…
4. Aged 10. At New Sherwood School in leafy Epsom, just at the foot of the downs, a mile from the Derby racecourse. A warm spring evening with a full moon early in the dark blue sky. Mikey Bray, Robin Marshall, Jules Rhey, Leo Saldhana & I racing down the side of the paddock pursued by German guards determined to drag us back to Stalag Luft IV by nightfall. Fighting for breath, crippled by a stitch in the right side, but driven forward by the certain knowledge that just beyond the rusting metal five-barred gate at the top of the field lay freedom& security…
5. Aged 15. At Wennington School in West Yorkshire. Standing in the deep December snow outside the Ballroom, staring through the deep, mock-Regency window at Peter Kircup dancing with Pat Waters at the end of the Christmas Term party. Wanting to look away but transfixed, almost willing him to kiss her now so that my desolation might be complete. Tearing my gaze away for a moment to look back & see them slip through the doorway into the Music Room & thence, as I knew with grim certainty, down the main corridor & out into the winter night. Stepping onto the terrace nursing a burning pain that I knew with grim certainty to be from a broken heart. Falling back, arms stretched into crucifix formation, onto the untrodden snow. Watching shooting stars criss-crossing the empty night sky as melting snow soaked through the jacket & trousers of my new suit…
Remove the #1 item from the above list, bump everyone up one place and add your blog's name in the #5 spot. You need to actually link to each of the blogs for the link-whorage aspect of this fiendish meme to kick in.
Ultrablog
Snidget
Chew Toys
Blogcabin
Dick Jones’ Patteran Pages
The cup now passes to…
Feral
Blaugustine
Dr Omed's Tent Show Revival
11:28:34 PM 
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