The First Thing.....
The first memory is shadows. Dark
verticals separated by grubby green and oblique lines beneath me. I
am excited about something. There is a figure approaching through the
shadows, but I'm not afraid. I am looking down on and the figure is
coming upwards towards me. It hears me and turns its head, looking
upwards. It is my Dad.
That is all; everything else is what I
have accreted to these impressions, but I am confident this is the
earliest and is probably when I was about 2. Soon after this I know
that we moved to the house where I grew up and lived until I moved
out to share a dump of a garret with another dissolute youth when I
was 20. This fragment of memory fits nowhere into this new family
home, moreover my next recollection is of riding in the front of
whatever vehicle Dad had begged or borrowed to take their few
chattels across London.
So, I guess it to be on the landing of
the flat in Southampton Row, Chalk Farm, where Connie and Bob spent
the first few years of marriage. I am pressing my face between the
thick bannisters and looking down to see who has come in. Maybe Mum
has sent me out there to get a moments respite, telling me to see if
Dad is home yet. I have called out to the figure and that is why he
turns and looks upwards.
And so, that journey across London some
time around the dog-days of WW2, to what was to be the place where I
grew up, marks the beginning of what little of my childhood I can
recall. 337. A house number that summates an uneventful childhood,
mercifully free from traumas, where the devastation of the war was
all around , but was nothing more to me than unregulated adventure
playgrounds. The bomb site about one lampost away was soon filled in
with new houses, but the brick-walled fire-hydrant in Landcroft Road
would be left long enough that I was able to access it when allowed
to roam. (It seems the practice was that where houses had been taken
out by a bomb, a brick wall was built around the hole and used as a
makeshift water reservoir to be available the next time a bomb
dropped nearby.)
We first moved into the top flat of
337, with the Rolfe family down below, and I have vague memories of
playing in the back garden with two older girls, but they soon moved
on and we took over the whole house, renting it from a Mr Teale. As
Dad's mate at work Jim Mowat and his new wife Hilda were looking for
a place, the top flat was sublet to them. These moves probably had
something to do with the arrival of sister Anne and John Mowat about
9 months later in 1946!
Dulwich in the late '40s is a divided
district; the long sinuous Lordship Lane dividing the already 'posh'
Village from East Dulwich which borders Peckham and is peopled with
the respectable and aspiring working classes. We fit well here; Dad
is always in work and Mum is a stay-at-home mother, the norm for
those days. They are regular Baptist church attenders, drink is
limited to perhaps a glass of Cyprus sherry at Christmas, and there
is always enough food. There is even a modest holiday to Herne Bay
or Broadstairs,saved for in a savings 'club' that Dad keeps the kitty
for.
Probably the worst thing that happened
in my childhood was something that hardly registered at the time! I
was unwell. The doctor was called and diagnosed 'german measles'
(rubella), prescribing keeping the curtains drawn and plenty of
fluids. In reality, I think I had some kind of rheumatic fever whch
over the next few years seemed to affect my physical development
(round shoulders, knock knees, fallen arches) so I was bad at games
and sports, poor eyesight, so was easily labelled '4 eyes' , and had
the sort of hand/eye coordination which meant that if the ball went
one way I would go the other. It seems that I coped by withdrawing
into myself and so began my long career of being a contrarian
outsider!
