50 scribblings from a childhood notebook.

 

Memories, like watercolours, bleed into each other, creating shades that only exist in the imagination.

My fist is clasped around a branch, recently stripped from a weeping willow. Willows are best when you want to make a bow and arrow – not in the fashion of the ancient longbows that needed to be made of stronger wood – but, for the purposes of a childhood game, just right.

Fingers sticky with sap, the penknife I’d been given peeled away the bark. I’d sharpened it against a brick to the point that it frequently sliced my fingers open for a brief spurt of blood fascination that tasted as metallic as the blade itself.

Down among a copse of trees and bushes – an oak, elderberries and a chaotic stretch of brambles with their sweet, black berries and the fringes of nettles below – I was a knight. A knight with no armour, just a stick sword and my bow and arrow, ready for… something.

The donkey tree was a good place to think, with its enigmatic trunk that dipped parallel to the ground forming a comfortable seat. You could sit there with your feet swinging for hours, dreaming of treehouses and rubbing the moss away with calloused hands. A rope dangled from higher up in the tree, and there was another rope in a tree nearby, but any attempt at a Tarzan swing from one to the other ended up in a breathless bump on the damp ground below, with skinned fingers.

Long walks with families had taught me the lore of the meadows: buttercups, when held to your chin, reflected yellow - you loved butter. Dock leaves calmed the white rash of nettle stings. Spit blobs on grass belong to insects. Streams can be dammed with rotting piles of wood and cabbage white butterflies are hard to track on their flight paths as they dance into the sun, making you squint. Many plants and berries are edible, just like that, while others will kill you. There’s neither fair nor unfair to that balance, it just is.

It’s not wise to shelter under a tree in a thunderstorm, with the dense, rich smell of the earth rising in an eerie warmth to your nose, but it’s the best place to watch the whole world turn to water. Heavy drops of rain are like the first tears of grief before they multiply into the lashing rage of mourning.

I knew every blade of grass – or so it seemed. A single head of cow parsley bobbed in front of an old gate that I never entered, behind which there was an empty swimming pool, a shallow one, perhaps hundred years old and an abandoned car. In those places, older kids had been with their confusing litter and graffiti. One boy had lost an eye after lighting something and tossing it into the petrol tank of the car, causing a brief blast of fire and terror that changed his life forever.

Up on the road, the kids rode their bikes in listless circles, trying out skids into gravel patches or wobbling their wheelies as they tried to ride without holding onto handlebars. We’d turn an old tractor innertube into a toy and roll inside it down the same hill that was, in winter, perfect for sliding down on a kitchen tray across the snow.

I should let these memories rest, but they bubble up. They don’t deserve to vanish just yet. They have no impact at all on who I am now, this grown up person who can Google everything except memory.

Turning fifty years old is to look out across time and recall those experiences as if I was, at one time, as wild as Tom Sawyer and innocent as Huckleberry Finn. The difference is that those kids never existed – my childhood did (at least, I think it did).

Long may these painted memories continue to wash over me.