About “Flash­backs”

I stayed at my par­ents’ house dur­ing the sum­mer of 2005, my twen­ti­eth sum­mer, and mem­o­ries felt almost tan­gi­ble in the air. I walked by, or near, many of the places that fill my thoughts of a child­hood long-gone. The mem­o­ries aren’t gone, though, not by any means. They come to my mind, one at a time or in an uncon­trol­lable rush, as vivid and emo­tional as they were on the day they really hap­pened — or, in some cases, the day they didn’t happen…

This page is an attempt to record some of those mem­o­ries, the events and places and peo­ple that shaped my youth. There’s noth­ing chrono­log­i­cal, or geo­graph­i­cal, about the order I have recalled things in here. Just the order in which those mem­o­ries came to mind.

Ego­tis­ti­cal? Maybe. Of inter­est to oth­ers? Prob­a­bly not. But there’s days when my mind feels full of fuzz, days when I feel like I might just for­get some­thing and let it slip away. This is to make sure that doesn’t hap­pen, to keep my past from dis­ap­pear­ing, to anchor me some­where, to stop me becom­ing some­one who knows only the present. And maybe one day a psy­chol­o­gist will read this and be able to find the point at which I became iden­ti­fi­ably ‘weird’…

Flash­backs

My Ear­li­est Memory

Where my mem­o­ries actu­ally start has proved a trick­ier ques­tion than I’d have thought. I used to think I remem­bered falling asleep in my din­ner of spaghetti at age two, but on think­ing about it more I realise that I prob­a­bly don’t actu­ally remem­ber this — after all, who does remem­ber falling asleep? — but was prob­a­bly told about it at a later date.

Rather, what prob­a­bly counts as my ear­li­est mem­ory was a trip to my Nana’s at age three. There is a pic­ture some­where, taken just before the visit, of me wear­ing a wastepa­per bin on my head — for some rea­son, remem­ber­ing that pic­ture brings back a few more mem­o­ries of that day. Noth­ing about the visit itself, sadly — things like the feel­ing of green deep pile car­pet beneath my sock­less feet.

Rowans and Rose­bushes: The Places We Lived

We lived in a house in Strat­ton Road until I was about two. Apart from one photo of us play­ing in the front gar­den, I can’t remem­ber the place at all. I prob­a­bly wouldn’t even be able to pick out the house if I were to walk down that road these days…

From then until two days before my eleventh birth­day, we lived in Thorn­combe Close. That place I remem­ber in vivid detail, from the liv­ing room with its exposed brick and uncom­fort­able sofas to the upstairs room that was at times my bed­room, my play room, the study and a stor­age room for Christ­mas presents on the day I snuck in and saw the bike that I was to be given in a few days’ time…

Not My Fam­ily, but Other Animals

(Ger­ald Dur­rell ref­er­ence entirely inten­tional. I read the book whose title I just mis­quoted when I was about eleven, I think. I don’t remem­ber it very well, per­haps I should read it again sometime.)

Thanks, I think, to my dad’s aller­gies, I never did have very many pets. My first were gold­fish — I think there was a gold one called Goldie and a black one called Blackie, and there may also have been a smaller one that we had. I for­got the name, if I do remem­ber correctly.

We had two ham­sters at var­i­ous points in my child­hood — the first, Hammy (orig­i­nal, huh?), had a fond­ness for yoghurt and for gnaw­ing at the lit­tle knobs on the side of the mahogany mag­a­zine stand. I think she died not long after I first had some idea of what death actu­ally was, and I cried for hours — in my par­ents’ bed, if I recall cor­rectly, which prob­a­bly ruined their plans for an early night.

The sec­ond ham­ster was named Haf­fer­tee, I think after a ham­ster in a children’s story. With hind­sight we prob­a­bly should have called her Hou­dini instead, for she pos­sessed a remark­able tal­ent for escapol­ogy — and for sur­vival, as after one escape she remained in hid­ing for four days until we even­tu­ally found her curled up in the lit­tle warm space behind the oven. Look­ing back, I guess she really didn’t like that cage. I don’t blame her, trans­par­ent plumbing’s not really my thing, either!

Actu­ally, on an animal-related note, I do remem­ber one embar­rass­ing thing… My mum always used to shoo cats out of the gar­den by mak­ing a kind of rasp­ing noise — “psh­hht!”. I guess the asso­ci­a­tion stuck in my young mind, as at some later point I demon­strated my ani­mal knowl­edge by recall­ing, with pic­to­r­ial prompt­ing, that cows go “moo”, dogs go “woof”, and — guess what — cats go “psh­hht”. I think my mum’s still get­ting me back for all the times I embar­rassed her when I was a kid.

The Kids Next Door

There were two boys who lived next door. I’m not sure if, between the three of us, we were the only kids in the road, but it cer­tainly felt like it. I don’t remem­ber any oth­ers. The eldest, a year older than me I think, was David — the other, about two years younger, was called James. I think. They may be the other way around, or I might be com­pletely wrong…

Either way, time obscures from my mem­ory just how good friends we were. I sus­pect we were pretty close friends, because I can’t remem­ber play­ing with any other neigh­bour­hood kids.

I’m told David joined the army and served in Afghanistan. For all I know, he may still be there, patrolling the streets of Basra. As for James, I have no idea…

Slides of Blue and Orange

About ten second’s walk from our gar­den gate was a park with a see-saw and an aging blue-painted round­about, and I think some swings. Thoughts and mem­o­ries of this place have the over­whelm­ing emo­tion of “ours!” attached to them — this park was where we went so often as kids, and it was so close, that even if oth­ers did use it from time to time it still felt per­sonal to us.

At age three, I fell off the see-saw there and had to have stitches in hos­pi­tal. I still bear the whitened scar on my head, start­ing just below my hair­line. I have no idea how far up it goes. I don’t remem­ber the inci­dent itself — I guess I prob­a­bly would have been knocked uncon­scious — but I do have very faint mem­o­ries of the hospital.

Only a few min­utes’ walk up a con­crete path was another park, this one hav­ing a slide that was almost iden­ti­fi­able still as orange, although in truth it was prob­a­bly nearer yellowy-pink. The whole place was over­shad­owed by tall trees, and the floor lit­tered with acorns that we occa­sion­ally col­lected. We didn’t go there much, though. The park with the blue slide was ours; this one wasn’t.

The Fire

There was a fire, one day, at one of the houses that had a back gar­den touch­ing that path between the parks. I don’t think it was any­thing seri­ous — I don’t even remem­ber there being a fire engine — but I remem­ber some of the peo­ple who lived around there stand­ing with us, a tall fence between us and the house, try­ing to work out whether it was a proper house fire or not. We (pre­sum­ably David and I) had some kind of radio-controlled car with us that day, and we were dri­ving it up and down the path when we first saw the smoke.

Cycling on Grass

Cycling on grass, as I dis­cov­ered not once or even twice but three times, is not as easy as on a path. It was the same field where I first was taught how to ride (and fell off), first rode up and down the embank­ment (and fell off), and where I first tried to do hand sig­nals (and fell off). I think I was too fright­ened to try it on the smooth tar­mac path, real­is­ing that it would be eas­ier but know­ing it would hurt so much more if I did fall…

The Fields They Built On

Although “I remem­ber when all this were fields…” is a bit of an exag­ger­a­tion, bits of my child­hood revolved around fields that aren’t quite the same any­more. There was the big play­ing field where we spent so much time — I still remem­ber when they tar­ma­cked the path, when they built the hill with the big slide on it, when they built the com­mu­nity cen­tre, and when they built the bas­ket­ball courts too. Thank­fully, though, there’s still to this day plenty of field left.
Inci­den­tally, the only time I went into that com­mu­nity cen­tre was for a party of some kind, when I was about six. I won an award for best danc­ing. They must have had really low standards.

There was another small field up the road next to the doc­tors, full of lit­tle hills and tall, dry grass — per­fect ter­ri­tory for adven­tur­ing. Not long after I moved away from the area, aged eleven, they lev­elled it and built an old people’s home there instead. They call it progress.

Two fields down the road that I only vaguely remem­ber have now become a pri­mary school and, I think, a grave­yard. I never called these fields mine as a child, but if I’d lived a lit­tle closer to them I would have done — and now they’re gone too. I guess things like that are nec­es­sary, but every lit­tle “com­mu­nity build­ing project” is another few people’s child­hoods slip­ping away…

The Water­fight

Per­haps the most vivid child­hood mem­ory I have is the water­fight. We must have been about six or seven, a boil­ing hot day in the mid­dle of our long sum­mer hol­i­days… An old man walked past as we were squirt­ing each other with water pis­tols, com­plain­ing that we shouldn’t be wast­ing water when there was a hosepipe ban on. We squirted him too. I don’t think he was impressed.

Time wore on, and the bat­tle became more seri­ous. At the end I was inside our gar­den, stand­ing on the lid of the wheelie bin so that I could see over the wall and fire my water pis­tol down at David and James below. Sadly this didn’t quite have the tac­ti­cal advan­tage I’d hoped for, so I brought out the big guns — or in this case, the hosepipe. I claim that water­fight as my vic­tory although per­haps it wasn’t, for at that point my par­ents noticed what I was up to and ordered me inside while David and James con­tin­ued to play…

Tread Softly, for you Tread on my Wasps

(I won­der how dif­fer­ent the world of poetry would be if Yeats had been as weird as me…)

On another hot sum­mer day, prob­a­bly an ear­lier sum­mer than that water­fight, the house was full of the smell of sugar from the pan of jam bub­bling away on the cooker. Entic­ing for humans, and sadly also for the wasps that made their way in through the key­hole in our back door. My mum had spent some time swat­ting them and pil­ing their bod­ies by the door before she had the good idea to stick sel­l­otape over the key­hole, so we had our own per­sonal wasp mor­tu­ary. Sadly, at the time, I didn’t quite grasp that you could still get stung by a wasp even after it was dead, and even more bizarrely I also didn’t grasp that stand­ing on a pile of wasps was a bit, well, weird.

Twenty min­utes and a trip to the phar­ma­cist for some anti­his­t­a­mine later, I was feel­ing very sorry for myself…

Down To The River

The place I remem­ber most from my child­hood was the river. I recall it in every detail, in every sea­son, we went there so many times… Over the logs and across the orange gravel car park, down the path between pic­nic benches or across the grass, down the steps and across more gravel until you got to the river­bank where I pad­dled in red Welling­tons and my par­ents warned me not to go too deep, where the dogs pad­dled and shook them­selves dry, and where the two swans nested year after year.

Then along the path or the muddy bri­dle­way along­side the river, past the jet­ties where grumpy fish­er­men sat or some­times you could catch min­nows in a net when the fish­er­men weren’t there. At the end of the path you could carry on along the grassy bit of the bank or head up towards the road, from where you could turn left up the steep steps with the handrail in the mid­dle, or… turn right…

Bronze Lake

I can’t remem­ber, now, whether that right turn really did exist, or even if it still does. If it did, then what I’m about to say really hap­pened. If not, then this is almost cer­tainly the first time I had a dream that I was unable to dis­tin­guish from reality.

It was a clear Spring evening fol­low­ing a damp morn­ing, the first time I turned right at the end of the path along the river­bank. The path, although it didn’t deserve the name, was in equal parts grass, mud and water. Some pud­dles were deep enough that water spilled in over the top of my Welling­tons, and most were so thick with mud that you could hardly tell them from the sur­round­ing tra­vers­a­ble ground. I’d gone this way while my par­ents waited by the steps — they dis­cour­aged me, of course, but there are times in one’s life when the desire for adven­ture, how­ever small, is unquenchable.

I headed over towards the trees on the left of the path, as the ground was more solid there, and kept walk­ing for a few min­utes until, away amongst the tall trunks to my left, I saw a lake shin­ing bronze in the evening sun. I felt proud and spe­cial to have found this place, a place of serene beauty that most peo­ple never even knew existed.

After a few min­utes I moved onwards, until my pas­sage was stopped by a water­logged field, flooded by the spring rain­fall mak­ing its way down­river. I headed back slowly to my par­ents, and we went home.

I think one day, many years later, I did go back there, and dis­cov­ered houses had been built where I remem­bered the pond being. Of course, that might have been a dream as well. Dreams and real­ity are inter­twined in my mind at the best of times, but years’ dis­tance does noth­ing but hin­der the dis­tinc­tion. Maybe I should go back again, and find out for sure what became of the place, and whether it was even real. Or maybe I shouldn’t, maybe I should stick with just the beau­ti­ful, won­der­ful mem­ory I have — just in case it was all a dream after all.

Black­ber­ries and Autumn Scarves

Near to the river, there’s a place where you could turn off to the left, I think, and walk down an avenue with black­berry bushes down one side. We went there a few times, in early autumn time, to pick black­ber­ries and eat them or save them for a pie, and tram­ple the first of the season’s fresh brown leaves underfoot.

The Old Mill

Throop Mill has been aban­doned for as long as I remem­ber, and prob­a­bly for a much longer time than that. Once, no doubt, an indus­tri­ous place where flour was ground; now it’s just an old red-brick build­ing that’s on its way to slowly falling into the water below.
There may once have been an open day there, but that might have been at Christchurch mill instead. Either way, I don’t think it ever opens any­more. There’s just the path around the side, past the sluice gates that long since rusted shut, across the grass and over the big bridge with the diag­o­nal sluice gates that cry out to be kayaked down, and onwards to the vast fields beyond…

I went back there not so long ago, at night. They put up a new handrail along­side the rusty sluices, so there isn’t a six-foot drop there any­more. But apart from that, nothing’s changed. It’s still famil­iar to me, even in the dark. With the pass­ing years, only the painted sign on the wall announc­ing the building’s for­mer pur­pose fad­ing slowly into the brickwork.

We used to visit the mill a lot; walk­ing or cycling there along a stony lane which feels like the cycling equiv­a­lent of a rally track. I once made the mis­take of brak­ing with my front wheel first on unsta­ble, damp ground, and ended up being pro­pelled uncer­e­mo­ni­ously for­ward over the handlebars.

And, near the end of the track, there’s a farm­house with a blue roof behind a gate bear­ing the sign “This is NOT Blue Roof Farm”. I still have no idea where Blue Roof Farm actu­ally is, nor even if it has a blue roof. It’d be nicely ironic if it didn’t.

Hold­en­hurst and Hurn

Beyond the mill, beyond the bridge, beyond the fields that I once thought might stretch for­ever, there is a muddy track that’s impass­able for the non-Wellington– or bicycle-endowed for most of Spring and Autumn, and a bridge over what appears to be a lake. As far as I can tell, though, no river feeds this lake and none draws from it — it’s just a huge, per­ma­nent pud­dle. I think there might be fish in there, but I’ve never caught one if there are.

Beyond there, mud turns to path and path turns to road, wind­ing through Hold­ern­hurst vil­lage and on to Hurn where the air­port they now call “Bournemouth Inter­na­tional” is. After cycling all the way there, we used to stop and have a drink and a snack in the cafe there. I don’t think it’s as invit­ing a place as it once was, now.

Elec­tion Fever

The first gen­eral elec­tion that I remem­ber must have been the 1992 one, about the time I was turn­ing seven, although I think I remem­ber John Major becom­ing PM so pre­sum­ably I had some knowl­edge of pol­i­tics before that. My mum, dad and I cycled down the lane lined with cab­bage fields to the church right at the end. I think the Labour party’s cam­paign slo­gan was some­thing like “It’s time for change,” and I’m fairly sure my bright-red bike bore a piece of A4 paper on which was writ­ten some­thing based on that slo­gan, get­ting as close to say­ing some­thing insult­ing about Neil Kin­nock as my seven-year-old mind knew how. I guess I never have been a fan of the Labour party. These days though, I can’t think of any­thing to say about Blair that hasn’t already been said…

A Fan­boy is Born

I must con­fess that, dur­ing my early child­hood, I had some­what of an obses­sion with Thomas the Tank Engine. One par­tic­u­lar event, which I think my mother secretly enjoys remind­ing me of, was a morn­ing at church when (while wear­ing a Thomas the Tank Engine jumper, knit­ted by some­one I think) I refused to respond to being called “Ian”, and insisted I be called “Thomas” instead.

On a sim­i­lar theme, my mum once (I must have been about three or four) helped me record the theme music for the show on a clunky brown Fisher-Price tape recorder. I thought we were record­ing the whole episode though, so I was upset that only the title sequence got recorded. I guess I didn’t really quite under­stand about tape recorders, then…

Humour Pro­to­type

One thing I don’t remem­ber first-hand but get reminded of by my mother occa­sion­ally (it’s always the embarass­ing stuff, isn’t it?) was one day at nurs­ery school, after they’d been teach­ing us the names of shapes, we were asked to demon­strate our knowl­edge to the par­ents who arrived to pick us up. I’m told that, even though I knew the cor­rect names, I delib­er­ately got them as wrong as pos­si­ble to make the point that the task was so sim­ple. I make that my first attempt at sar­casm, a trait that I’m sure is genetic (thanks dad).

Embar­rass­ments at Swim­ming Pools

As soon as one embarass­ing thing comes to mind, more seem to shuf­fle in sub­tly and demand to be writ­ten about. Well, here goes two more embarass­ments, both at Stoke­wood Road swim­ming pool, and both involv­ing swim­ming trunks — or lack of.

Dur­ing my first week at St Martin’s pri­mary school, I was entirely unpre­pared for them hav­ing swim­ming lessons. I couldn’t swim very well at that point, but that wasn’t the worst of my prob­lems — I had no trunks, either. Unfor­tu­nately I decided that the proper approach to this prob­lem was to go swim­ming in my under­wear instead. Need­less to say, as soon as I entered the pool, the rea­sons why swim­ming trunks are not made of cot­ton became abun­dantly clear. My error of judge­ment was, sadly, quite obvi­ous to every­one else around the pool at the time.
The sec­ond — per­haps worse — embarass­ment must have been only a few years later, when my absent-mindedness resulted in me for­get­ting to put my trunks on at all, and thus I turned up at the pool­side entirely naked, no doubt to the shock of the onlook­ers (a group which included my mother, who hastily ush­ered me back in the direc­tion of the chang­ing rooms).

The Dreaded “S” Word

For the first year and a bit of my school life, which started when I was four, I went to a school that I remem­ber very lit­tle about. In the first year there I remem­ber some kind of brightly coloured play appa­ra­tus in a cor­ner and, next to it, a com­puter run­ning some kind of “edu­ca­tional” pro­gram that today’s four-year-olds would prob­a­bly shun for its poor graph­ics. The class was split into groups, each named after an item of cloth­ing — allegedly they were cho­sen ran­domly, but accord­ing to my mother there was some­thing of a cor­re­la­tion between a child’s intel­li­gence and the height at which their group’s item of cloth­ing is worn. Usu­ally worn, any­way. If I’d thought then like I do now, I’d have come into school one day wear­ing hats on my feet and with my socks tied around my ears.

Lessons I Learned

I don’t remem­ber an awful lot of my lessons at that first pri­mary school — or even, for that mat­ter, if we even had rigidly-defined lessons. Still, there’s some things I do recall.

At one point my dad showed me another way of writ­ing the num­ber eight — as two sep­a­rate cir­cles rather than the usual crossed loop. I tried it out one day in what passed for a maths les­son, and I got told to do the ques­tions again on a new sheet of paper, “draw­ing my eights prop­erly”. I guess this was prob­a­bly the first time I was pun­ished by some­one other than my parents.

There was the day we were taught about syl­la­bles, too. We were asked to think about how many syl­la­bles were in our name then, one by one, stand in groups accord­ing to that num­ber. I guess I didn’t really under­stand the con­cept that well, and I couldn’t work out how I could have a three-letter name with two syl­la­bles while oth­ers had names of five or six let­ters but only one syllable.

Before I really knew about punc­tu­a­tion, we were asked to write some­thing — I can’t remem­ber what, but I remem­ber it was about trains (at least, mine was). Rather than the punc­tu­a­tion that the rest of the world (but only a small frac­tion of the inter­net) uses, I drew what were sup­posed to be rail­way buffers between each sen­tence. Some of our work, mine included, was dis­played on the wall for some time. It was still there when we were actu­ally taught what a full stop was, and I remem­ber being faintly embar­rassed that my pre-punctuation work was still on display.

Year One Sports Day

I’m not sure if I actu­ally remem­ber this, or whether I’ve just been told. Either way it seems that, while in a race on Sports Day, I was second-to-last while my friend Kevin was last. Just before the fin­ish line, I stopped to let him catch up before I fin­ished. I assume he has for­got­ten, but in any case it’s far too ran­dom and embarass­ing a sub­ject to bring up on the occa­sions on which I bump into him. I believe he’s now read­ing Maths at Oxford, or some equally scary degree.

Chang­ing Schools

My time at that school was over within a year and three months. On a bleak Decem­ber day, my mother and I walked to the school early. I played with boards and lit­tle coloured pegs that you could place in them to make pat­terns (I seem to recall mak­ing the Ital­ian flag) while my mother talked at length with the teacher of my class. I didn’t realise it then, but their sub­ject was my forth­com­ing change of school.

In Jan­u­ary, at the start of the Spring term, I attended another pri­mary school (and this one I stuck with until the end). I remem­ber going into the headmater’s office before school the first day to be asked some ques­tions and asked to kick a ball across the room — pre­sum­ably to find out which was my dom­i­nant foot. I was a bit con­fused, I think — I’ve always used both feet equally badly.

Before Geog­ra­phy

Curi­ously, the only time I remem­ber injury from when I was young was noth­ing much at all — just a graze on my right knee from the cold, hard and unfor­giv­ing play­ground. I won­der, now, what I was doing at the time to cause such an acci­dent — I don’t remem­ber any­one else being there, except for the teacher on play­ground duty who cleaned up the cut with what felt like 10-molar hydrochlo­ric acid but was prob­a­bly only Savlon. Still — plas­tered up, limp­ing and with one knee feel­ing like it was on fire — I made my way back to my class­room halfway through a geog­ra­phy les­son, where I was might­ily embarassed to inform the teacher why I was late. I was in year three then, and it was Autumn, so I sup­pose I would have been six years old. It was prob­a­bly the first time I’d ever been late for a lesson.

Although, that said, I do remem­ber one day in year two, try­ing to feign ill­ness so hard that I actu­ally started feel­ing ill. It was a Tues­day after­noon — P.E. after­noon. Thus prov­ing, I think, that at no point in my school life did I *ever* like P.E.

The Teach­ers That Left

Although the peo­ple who taught us at pri­mary school were notable for many things, the most truly remark­able attribute of them all col­lec­tively was how many of them left the school per­ma­nently after spend­ing a year teach­ing our class.

Our year 2 teacher, whom I now can’t remem­ber any­thing about, left after teach­ing us, as I think did our year 3 teacher, and our year 4 teacher who — mostly by virtue of giv­ing us choco­late as a reward in French tests — I am con­vinced was the most awe­some teacher ever. I don’t remem­ber us being a par­tic­u­larly trou­ble­some class, so maybe it was just coin­ci­dence. And pre­sum­ably noth­ing on the level of the A-level biol­ogy teacher’s men­tal breakdown…

In fact, the only teacher we had that didn’t leave seems to have been the year 5 and 6 teacher, who prob­a­bly had more at stake see­ing as he was the headmaster’s son.

Sci­ence or Cooking?

The afore­men­tioned head­mas­ter only, if I recall, taught sci­ence (and sci­ence was only stud­ied in years 5 and 6). We only ever did one prac­ti­cal — in the staff room, which for some obscure rea­son was fit­ted with gas taps for bun­sen burn­ers — and it was very sim­ple. We heated sugar, and made caramel. Which we ate, or in my case didn’t. Right at the best moment in the carameli­sa­tion, I’d gone to turn the bun­sen off, and acci­den­tally turned it on full blast instead. By the time I’d turned the gas tap back the other way, the caramel was burned.

The head­mas­ter, by the way, rejoiced in the mag­nif­i­cent name of “Town­ley Shen­ton” — or “Sir” to us, the only teacher we weren’t told to refer to with his actual name. I believe he passed away some years ago, and I sus­pect that if the school is still run­ning then it is now headed by his son.

The Wrong Desk
Pun­ish­ments
Half-remembered Hol­i­days (Wales)
Elec­tric Shock Ther­apy (Corn­wall)
Left-Hand Drive (Den­mark)
Steamships and Ice Cream (Switzer­land)
The Impos­si­ble Shot (Germany)