When I was a boy I thought life was like this railway station in Switzerland: a bell rings, giving everyone a polite warning; the crossing guard comes down, the train draws up safely to the platform. We board and leave. All is orderly and controlled, laid out without drama or disaster, always working, the lights blinking in time.
The scene out of the window is of an immaculate hillside of deliberately placed chalets, the train track snacking like a brush-stroked filament through the greenery. A background of immovable majesty and in the foreground a toy town immerges with all the ingredients in place, in the right place without complaint or complication. As a boy I loved Babbacombe Model Village in Torbay, Devon. I would stride amongst the miniature world woven together by steaming trains. Cities made manageable and intimidating landmarks reduced to a size that compliments us onlooking gods. I hoped the whole world would look like this - me staring down while holding the hand of parents above me. Always trains are the best part and still a fascination. Why trains, I wonder, looking at a model of the Gotthard railway in the Lucern Transport museum – the trains sneaking up, over, through and around the massif. Is that raw machinery, the substance of heaving iron and gas and sweat? Is it the visible complexity of all the moving parts? Is it the innate democratic intent of dedicated people working together to move masses of people to places of wonder in some kind of comfort? Is it an inherited cultural joy of something glorious but lost when the cars crept into our familiarity? The train remains my favourite form of transport. Looking out of the window at the fleeting imagery is still the best therapy, the most stimulating of day dreams. Out there is the real world fixed in place for a few flashing seconds. The imagination bubbles up and the train can take me anywhere, back to boyhood and the model villages or into dreams of worlds of my own making, ever the tiny human playing at being a demi-god, hoping to fix everything into its rightful, undying, satisfying place.
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An occasional Saturday treat was getting fish ‘n chips with my brother and father. This was a rare moment when just us three boys would go on an adventure to hunt and gather the evening’s meal. Like all male bonding expeditions, it possessed a series of special rituals and trials.
First of all there was the journey itself: a half hour walk from Epsom Common, past Stamford Green pond, up West Hill and then through the back roads of semi-detached middle class homes on West Hill Avenue. A worryingly dark alley spat us out to the Pound Lane estate area - home to my Dad’s old primary school and any number of loitering working class teenage gangs who sometimes would mock us. ‘Ignore them,’ said Dad dismissively. He had the strongest hands of anyone I knew but never raised them against anyone. The fish n’ chip shop itself was on a small strip of shops on Pound Lane, opposite the primary school. There was the predictable range of options: an Indian take-away, a hairdressers, a bike repair shop and a newsagent outside which the teenagers lingered, roughly requesting passing adults buy them cigarettes and alcohol. Secondly the shop itself: a sweaty hive of frying activity run by a middle-aged Chinese couple, hyperactive in their cooking and serving, and speaking English with a very pronounced accent. The wife took the orders and then fired instructions to the husband in a language that sounded exotic but incomprehensible. Thirdly, the walk home: the piping hot meal to be pecked at through a hole picked in the oily layers of newspaper wrapping. The glorious grease of the chips, the flakes of white fish meat, the occasional deliciously devilish battered sausage. We walked slowly, eating, sharing grunts of approval, unaware this was one of the best times together. Fourthly, all of the above happening in autumn and winter: the darkness with it’s fears and cosiness, the blinking street lamps, the orange luxury of large living rooms in the houses we passed, the splatter of rain on fallen leaves. We finished the meals off at home with Mum’s cooling order and started drooling about the next visit. Queuing up on the autobahn in Germany on our way back from a weekend in Erfurt. Autumn chilling the stunted fields, undressing the trees. Ahead, the blazing lights and sirens of an ambulance nudging through. We wait for minutes that leak into a frustrated hour. Bored drivers and passengers trudge up the verge for a peek, waving each other on to come and view the cause of their stalemate. Their cars and lives going nowhere.
I jump the road barrier and bolt into a wood to relieve myself by a tree. Looking down I notice a vast line of ants, teaming back and forth in busy millions. I had drowned hundreds before I realised. A guilty god, I redirect my torrent of random deluge and ask the ants to forgive me. No individual loss for them, just replacement. There’s a sudden excitement beeping from my wife and I rush back, unaware I had hitchhikers on my shoe. My wife is waving at me, all smiles and tidal urgency. Her waving reminds me of every other time she waves at me from windows: her frantic arm pebbles me into worrying if this is the last time, if this parting pain is the most important current in the universe, reminding me to love her more than I can manage - when the water subsides. The police wave us on, wanting to get traffic moving, the show over. We drive off slowly and skulk past the wreckage of an overturned removals van, the junk of life scattered on the road. No sign of the driver - perhaps already whisked away. No blood signs, just broken promises of delivery. We stay quiet, thinking of the times we have moved, the luck we’ve had. Within seconds, impatient cars roar past. The lack of a speed limit a lesson already forgotten. Back in the woods, the ants ignore the damp soil, the fallen comrades, the inexplicable footprints of God, and keep on marching. One ant appears in the car later on, antennae twitching with questions. Too late to return it to the clan, I let it wander off on a pointless search for meaning in the dark corners of the car. When I was a teenager and young man autumn was my favourite season. My romantic soul was drawn to the melancholy of the declining days, the chill slipping into the spaces left by a fractured summer. The poetry of the winking street lamps and the sky sunk in a gloominess that suffocates the too early evenings like an old London smog.
I would take walks around the neighbourhood, wrapped up against the cold and peering enviously into the warm yellow homes of neighbours. Returning home to the warmth, a hot drink, a sense of childhood sustained for one more year. The sense of loss was a strange shiver of happiness. Fast forward - as life appears to do - twenty years and I am forty years old and enjoying spring for the first time. The punch of new greens in the parks, the sharp green blades of grass and suddenly unfurled leaves - a fresh reminder that life returns. The tulips and daffodils spearing through frosted earth; a gift of colour after months of austere blandness. A new romance for the middle age of life when you sense the sad truth of autumnal melancholy. Now a few years older I am less in need to fix my loyalties to a specific season. I am more interested in the subtle moments between seasons as they bleed into each other. This year, in late spring, in the Graubunden Alps, the crickets sang as the evening emptied. They taught me in each chirrup: the males beckoning Natural Selection with their rubbing legs. A similar repeating moment of cicada music in the shade of two parallel rows of hundred year old chestnut trees lining the Medieval wall of Lucca, Italy. The mountains have been teaching me with their stony wisdom; their beauty towers throughout the seasons, the decades. I have heard the music reflected off the lakes: the slow strings of time and tectonic percussion. The mountain valleys spell ancient words with their cursive peaks. As you grow older you appreciate the beauty is all the seasons, in all the little moments you have, in all the music and colours, in all that is gained and lost. For book worshipers in America, the ultimate temple for adoration is Powell’s Bookstore, in the Pearl District of Portland - the largest independent book shop in the world. The hardware-store exterior appearance, unchanged since the 1970's, belies the treasure trove within. Entering Powell’s is akin to a medieval laborer entering a Cathedral: you gasp in awe at the towering walls around, filled with visions of angels and glittering glass.
The books talk to me, hundreds of them; they are lost souls looking for a good home and I want to adopt them all. Within minutes I have transcended into the airy, wonderful otherworld of wordcraft. All those saintly publications on the shelves telling such epic stories of love and life, redemption and fulfillment, longing and acceptance. I want them all. I want my name on them all. Half an hour later, I am overwhelmed and need to sit down with a coffee in the reassuringly unhurried purgatory that is World Cup Coffee and Tea, right next to the Graphic Novel section - perfect for the Peter Pan men, like me. At this point my head hums and my eyes flicker. I hear my own terribly distracted ego wishing to write the future books that will appear on the shelves - a dream that has festered for years. Now I am more like the medieval flagellant, beating himself with a whip made of half-written projects, fetal ideas and unrealised notions clamouring to be heard. I have to unfold my wings and flee heaven. It's not so easy getting back down. I pass back through the cloudy sections and I'm distracted again, drawn in, blanketed by the brilliance of the books. I pull sharply away and beat my wings hard. I'll just buy one, no, two books today, maybe three. No nothing – I angrily reject all the purchasing ideas. Leaving the shop, I immediately fall back down to earth, to the sidewalk, to the field to toil away. I spend the rest of the day nursing myself, groaning at reality, hearing the faint echo of all those desperate souls. I will now look forward to returning, to suffering the whole bitter-sweet experience all over again. When I was in the upper grades of primary school I never reminded anyone about my birthday for fear of that most dreaded of all school rituals: the Birthday Bumps. Somehow, somebody remembered, perhaps thinking back to one my one and only birthday party in June years before, held in a desperate bid to make friends. Having the Bumps on the exact day of your birthday didn’t matter; you have a birthday at some point, so the right month was good enough.
The Bumps is when your whole class chase you around the Year 6 huts, blocking off the exits, blocking their ears to your pleas. There’s no escaping your turn. This includes all of your friends: either directly as part of the baying group, or indirectly as they loiter on the sidelines watching, wincing Your classmates grab you and throw you to the ground, ignoring your begging tears. Then they toss you high into the air, as many times as you are old, so the older you are, the more it strains your arms, legs - the more humiliating it is until you are dropped, knee height, enough to hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. Everyone slinks away laughing as you gasp in winded silence, your friends looking back, guiltily. Where were the teachers? One or two on duty for a huge playground with many blind corners and oblivious to the ritual - complicit in coffee cup ignorance. You molt tears and totter back to the classroom, bumps bulging over your body. You hate the day you were born. It wasn’t always this way. When I was six or seven my parents acquiesced to my demands for the working class birthday treat of its time: a party at our local McDonalds. I invited all the popular boys, hoping their magnetism would attract me some friends. All the boys gobbled up the junk and embarrassed me by asking my parents to buy more. When no seconds arrived, there was argumentative swapping of Happy Meal toys and demands for Ronald himself to appear with a cake. I hoped I had done enough to make friends. My exhausted parents vowed never to have another birthday party for me. My first conker of the year collected in sniffling September. The crunchy thuds of the spiky horse chestnut shells bombing the paths, splitting and spewing out seeds. I rub my thumb over veneered surface, the deep browns and burgundies lined with curving veins - a rough heart-shaped head potential of wood.
Every September I find my childhood seeded in my hands, the same hands - smaller and less lined - that collected conkers with such excitement when I was in Elementary School. The grief of the lost summer holiday allayed by the bounty tumbling down from the horse chestnut trees, the long green leaves already browning and crinkling. Under every tree in my hometown, every town across England, children gathered and giggled. We collected buckets of conkers and selected the fattest, roundest, hardest ones to be used in the greatest game of boyhood, the simply named Conkers. Preparing the conkers meant stabbing the heart of them with a threaded steel skewer - delicately so as not to split the embryonic wood. Then we’d thread the conkers on spare shoelaces and practise the swing: conker hooked behind two fingers like a longbow arrow. The vicious overarm swing to smack down on an opponent’s conker. The school playground then rang with the sounds of cracking conkers; the swish of string slicing the air; cries of success or sudden dismay as a conker shattered; muffled swearing when the conker clips knuckles and fingers instead of the target; gossip about winning conkers. How are they lasting so long? Were they pickled in vinegar? Grumbling from the teachers: this game should be banned. Conkers was a game of reverse survival: the smallest, unfit conkers were never used or destroyed but instead planted in pots or in the garden. They rarely grew or the saplings shuffled through months later, forgotten.. In my last year, my school finalised its adult threat: the game was banned. Health and safety. Too many sore hands. Conkers would have to be a black market weekend game. Thirty years later, the International Union for the Conservation Nature puts the horse chestnut tree on its Red List as it declines across Europe, taking conkers and childhood innocence with it. I wish I could say that I love jazz. I appreciate the tremendous skill involved in playing this important musical genre, and I’m willing to go to concerts, especially if they are...free. Such an opportunity came when my wife, teacher friends and I were at a teaching conference in Hannover, Germany.
In the early evening we headed into town for some drinks, and my wife - ever the socially outgoing member of our marriage - got talking to a jazz musician who was playing a concert that night. The musician invited us to come along. Having no other plans, we agreed to do this. A couple of hours later we arrived at the club to find advertisements for ‘Free Jazz’. At the box office we were temporarily confused by the need to purchase tickets. ‘But It’s free jazz.’ “Yes, I know’, said the young, patient box office woman. ‘You need tickets’. ‘….But it’s free.‘ ‘I know this. You need tickets’. We explained that we had met one of the musicians who personally invited us. She went to check out our story. Yes, Ok she sighed impatiently. We entered, bemused - a cultural misunderstanding, we thought. When the concert started we quickly realised the misunderstanding was entirely ours. Free Jazz, it turns out, is not a description of its cost but of it’s form. The ‘free’ part means the music is devoid of pre-set rules: each musician is free to improvise in the purist, most experimental manner desired. This evening that meant harmonic hell. Not only were all the musicians playing an incomprehensible cacophony, but the singer started screeching scat style without a discernible sense of timing or connection to the instruments. Too polite and embarrassed to head to the exit (which meant passing the band), we stood at the back, suffering. I put my fingers in my ears, closed my eyes, and tried to meditate myself into appreciation or anaesthesia. My wife wore a hopeful smile. In the end, when there was a lull in the screeching and instrument slapping, we crept out past the band, ashamed heads down, and all quietly hurried went back to the hotel. Loving jazz remains an ongoing project. It was a rare event when my maternal grandfather, Ben Bailess, would take my brother and I out for an activity or adventure. They have left a distinct taste in my memory, flavoured by excited hopes and childish disappointments that still trigger feelings of joy and guilt.
My grandparents retired to a seaside lifestyle in Paignton, Devon - part of the English Riviera. We visited during most school holidays. One summer, he surprised us with the purchase of two wooden sailboats and the offer to take them down to the man-made boating lake at Goodrington beach. There was no chance we would ever own the radio or the less expensive remote-controlled boats sold in a toy shop on Winner Street. We saw them every time we walked from their hilltop house on Penwill Way down to the town centre. We were allowed a few minutes to drool on the window of the Aladdin’s Cave of unattainable toys: boats, some as big as our bodies, along with the remote-controlled planes and cars, Airfix models and other glamorous toys we could never afford. Granddad’s abracadabra boats had a simplistic beauty: red and blue paint, cotton sails and string line. We were grateful for the illusion and keen to learn how to cast the spell. At the boating lake we plopped the boats in with no knowledge of wind or wave directions. We tugged the string as we circled the pond, enjoying the windy gusts and sudden uncontrollable turns My impatient brother soon grunted with boredom. I was jealous of the richer grandchildren with their electric power boats: show-off turns, churning up the water with noisy revving. Our fickle sails flopped with abandoned purpose and the boats often overturned. Once righted, we pushed them out but the mischievous wind flicked them back in sniggering parabolas. An afternoon sea breeze built. Granddad got cold and sensed our doldrums. He took us home with talk of getting back in time for Nan’s dinner. We trudged up the steep sea-view hill of Penwill Way, dripping with an indiscernible disappointment. The boats were laid to rest in the shed and rarely retrieved. Best efforts over, we returned to dreaming. Some years ago, when the trees had grown small buds and there was the first breath of spring in the air, I saw Mr D, a teacher from my old all-boys secondary school.
Geography, I think, he taught. Maybe Classics. He never taught me directly but he was part of the furniture at my school - once a Grammar School but deregulated to public status. It was staffed by a range of mildly eccentric but dedicated middle aged men that belonged in Edwardian novels. Mr D was a small, quiet man who walked as if having a constant battle with gravity or a gale pushing him from behind. The kind of teacher that fills black holes, staying the same for years as the school evolves, fossilized from a fading time of scholarly seriousness. Suddenly I realized – here is a man who never once got angry, never raised his voice, never appeared frustrated or disappointed or disgusted - all of the common emotions when teaching teenage boys, many of them taller than him. I had seen him from time to time, walking the streets in his grey coat, in our joint home town of Epsom, his eyebrows gaining the hair lost on his head. Every time he appeared a little older, the walking style more stuttering, his face more lined, the eyelids drooping deeper into old lore. On this particular day I was shocked: he was now an old man. His body shook softly, his face hung decrepit, the eyelids drooping as if he was sleepwalking. I gulped down a gasp. His decline was proof of how far I had come from being a teenager, how quickly time flies outside those forever-school days. I felt angry for him, for this passive stumble into the night - no raging for him. But perhaps he was happy; there was no way of telling. Mr D passed and I lost site of him amongst the other, much taller people in the street. On the way home I noticed the opening buds on the trees again but spring did not move me. I breathed in and tasted autumn. Teachers, like your parents, should never be allowed to grow old. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
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