GRAVY EVERYWHERE
Finish your plate they said, because Chinese children don’t have enough to eat. Where was the logic to that? Anyway, we had to finish whatever bad-smelling rubbish they put on our plates.
And once, one end of a trestle table we were sitting at collapsed and all the plates slid off on to the floor. Wonderful, but scary. Several of us were called to the headmaster’s office to explain what had happened. Somebody had loosened the screws at one end of the table. Not me.
Oh nice. Gravy everywhere. Boys could have slid around in it, made slides, as they did in the playground during winter time. Long slides, until the bloody teachers put salt on them. .
But I didn’t do it, sir. And I didn’t do it.
Those shit meals, they deserved to be tossed on the floor.
PLASTICINE
Take some plasticine to make a model. You can roll it in your hands and make long worms of it. And eat some on the sly because it tastes nice, though somewhat gritty. .
BUDS
The playground was where boys played football against a wall. They didn’t invite me and I wasn’t interested. I looked instead at the branches of trees. Something sticky there and budding. The teacher brought the branches into the classroom and we watched them explode with green leaves.
YOUR FACE
Your face, like a mask or helmet – perfectly symmetrical – but I didn’t know I loved you, as the word had not yet been born in my mind, let alone in my mouth. Only the feeling was there. But you were definitely a hero, of sorts, me trotting after you like a dog. Until you invited me to go swimming one Saturday morning and I said yes. But didn’t go, out of shame, because I couldn’t actually swim. You were angry and after that we never spoke again.
MR KING, TEACHER OF THE TOP CLASS AT JUNIOR SCHOOL
Frightening old bald man with my father’s name. He loved Gilbert and Sullivan. He asked me to sing some and I sang what I knew and loved – a short cadenza from the Yeoman of the Guard. But he wanted a tune, complete with “comic words”. He showed his disappointment. Another time I stole a swig of some home-made dandelion wine from his cupboard. Daring. And it tasted nice. It’s possible I still like cadenzas more than tunes. And I don’t bother about words, comic, or otherwise.
RADIANCE I – SOMETHING IN THE SKY
Once, sitting on a low wall I saw something bright in the sky. What was that? There were no words even to think it, let alone describe it. But I knew it wasn’t meant to be there.
CRAYONS
The teacher promised us a gift of crayons and I was delighted. But in the end we received only wax ones – which babies used. I took them home. My sister saw me walking up the stairs in a rage and asked what was wrong. I explained and she said she wanted the crayons. I threw them down to her and they broke in pieces at her feet. She cried. We were very poor. Couldn’t even afford coloured pencils. That’s where the rage came from I guess. There was a lot of crying in that freezing cold, dark, empty, broken-down home.
RADIANCE II – A MAN IN BLUE
Once, crossing the road diagonally to our house on Boswell Road, I passed a young man who was so radiant I turned round to stare at him and just stood there. I was too young to know I shouldn’t do that. He was dressed in blue. I would like to know now what that exact image was, because, sometimes, when I see the colour blue, the feeling of that radiance returns – radiance, with no words, like music.
BEST DAY AT SCHOOL
Right before Christmas, we got to make paper chains. The coloured strips had glue on the back which you licked. They came in packets, each packet one colour. You made a circle of one strip, then looped the next one through it, making another circle of that one. And so on, in an interlocking chain. Nowadays I would be busy calculating which order to put the colours in, but in those days, I hadn’t developed an interest in numbers. On the other hand, I still appreciate Christmas for its colours, its lights and the stillness of winter.