OPC as a boy

As a kid I spent more time in a sweater than I care to remember. So I will not be writing about that. Instead I’d like to tell you about the memories I stored under the floorboards of my childhood bedroom. I crammed my entire childhood under that floor. It was quite a large floor. But I forgot to take them when I left home. You always forget something, don’t you? So, I shall just have to make something up.

My father was a mechanic, just like his mother and her mother before her. His father was disappointed. Why couldn’t he have chosen a more masculine career? Was there something “wrong” with him? But my father could not be swayed, the big girl’s blouse.

Freda, my mother, was a rather forlorn woman. I don’t think I ever saw her smile. She constantly told us about all the terrible things that were happening in the world. Whether the smallest misfortune, such as the loss of ten pence, or something of the order of famine or war, all news would be recounted with the same grave, almost rhetorical "Isn’t it dreadful?", to which we all had to reply, solemnly, "Hmm, yes, isn’t it," or she would come over all discombobulated. Sometimes we wouldn’t reply at all, just to watch her agitation. If she’d known this I’m sure she would have thought it dreadful.

It was myself and my brothers who liked to see our mother agitated once in a while. I had seven brothers, one for every day of the week. Although I preferred Thursday, my parents insisted that I play with the others too. I tried to swap them with my friends who also had unwanted brothers, but they always found their way back eventually. Come to think of it, if I recall correctly, there was quite a trade in unwanted siblings going on amongst the kids at my school. Sometimes it would disrupt lessons and the teacher would confiscate them all. "Come to me at the end of the day and you can have them back," she’d tell us. Of course some of us would just leave them there. My best friend Larry’s brother once spent the whole of Spring term in a teacher’s drawer living on confiscated sweets. He was very thin by the end of it and fortunately it was only his baby-teeth that had rotted away.

Like many other families have done, both before us and since, we owned pets - two cats and two dogs. My brothers and I were allowed to name them and were supposed to look after them. But we got bored and they never got properly trained. Consequently they were a terrible, unruly bunch of creatures, forever fighting, making noise, chasing eachother and generally causing chaos. (The animals, that is, not my brothers. Although, them as well). It was very rare that more than an hour or two would pass without one or other of my parents having to discipline or separate the animals in some way. I dread to think how often our neighbours would hear my parents yelling at Yes, No, Go Away, and Voices, telling them to "stop it," get outside," "behave," or "be quiet." They must have thought we were dreadful pet owners.

Incidentally, we rarely saw our neighbours. When we did do, they seemed very nice. If a little shy. Most times they would just smile or nod at us, then quickly disappear back inside their houses. I suppose it would have been nice if we'd all become friends, but at least they never caused us any problems. After all, some people have terrible difficulties with their neighbours.

We did see people from Social Services a lot, though. I never did find out why.

#

I was a very literal-minded child. At the age of four, someone told me that the good die young. From that moment on I believed that all old people were evil, and that the older you got the more evil you must be. I now know that this may not actually be true, but still I can’t help harbouring a profound distrust toward the elderly. They can’t all be as harmless as they look. And those smiles are as false as their teeth.

Although I love my parents, I didn't have a good relationship with my grandparents. My great-grandparents I killed.

It just seemed the logical thing to do at the time and I couldn't work out for the life of me why no-one had done it sooner. Maybe they were scared? Anyhow, when I remind my parents of this during family get-togethers, you know how such events always get to reminiscing, they always deny it:

"Really! I don't know how you got that into your head. We've told you before, the coroner recorded a verdict of misadventure."

"No I don't know why they were both making toast in the bath… but you can't keep blaming yourself."

Parents don't like to think the worst of their offspring. The elderly, though, they will quite happily credit with all kinds of stupidity. Especially when a great uncle has already died in similar circumstances.

Fortunately, murder turned out to be just one of those passing childhood phases, like wetting the bed; most unfortunate, but you'll laugh about it later. By six years old my interests had turned to those of any other six year old boy my age: football, cartoons, sweets, cowboys, monsters, sustaining minor injuries, playing with guns, pretend fights, wrestling, playing war, getting muddy and banging things. Many of these activities could, of course, be combined and indeed were, though at that innocent age, mercifully, we had no notion of such invidious things as multi-tasking, efficiency or time-saving (or so many of the other things that would come to blight our adult lives, such as proactivity, bank charges and still waking up at 6am even though it's your bloody day off).

By far the most popular game at my school was playing war. For some reason, my friend Larry has always had an encyclopaedic knowledge of both World Wars. Even at six and a half years old he could discuss in detail the Battle of the Bulge, the effectiveness of Allied propaganda, and why Hitler was mistaken in his belief that he could fight a war on two fronts. He was also the only boy I've ever known who could quote Sun Tzu. However, a boy called Luke was more popular than Larry (Star Wars - Return of the Jedi had just come out), and he favoured more modern wars, such as the Yom Kippur War or the US invasion of Grenada. Consequently we usually spent playtimes trying to take the Golan Heights or stabilise the political situation following the Stalinist coup by Bernard Coard. Not that the politics concerned any of us particularly, it all just seemed like good fun back then. Fortunately we grew out of such silliness. Unlike a certain Texan and his idiot son. Anyway, like I said, mostly Luke got his way, but on one memorable occasion Luke was off sick, so Larry managed to persuade us all to play a game of Nazis versus Allies.

The Nazis lost, of course, but real fighting broke out when the Allies, upon trying to claim reparations, were informed by Larry that all his sweets were safely deposited in a Swiss bank vault under an assumed name. All of us demanded to know the passwords, even those who had been on the Nazi side. Admirably, despite hideous torture, he never cracked. Although some of his bones did. We weren't allowed to play that game again. As Larry later said on being told the sad news, once he could talk again, "Perhaps it is not so good to get what you want," a realisation that took Schopenhauer many more than six and a half years of his life to arrive at. Despite such precocity, like many of our nation's finest young minds (and many of its most stunted, it must be said), Larry ended up working in a call centre. He is now a team leader. I can think of no more tragic fate that could befall a young man.

And on that sorry note I shall end my childhood reminisences for the time being. Not for any particular reason. I just can't be bothered to write anything further at present. Except this. And this. But nothing else. Except that. The "nothing else" bit, that is. Well, and that last bit. And that one. Erm... Oh, whatever, I was never any good at endings.