Owning Up: The Trilogy Read Free Page B

molested children. Despite this he had alarmed my parents by offering to take my younger brother to ‘see some chickens’, but Bill had sensibly refused and run safely home. There was another simpleton, harmless and much loved. He was small and wore a huge cap. His name was ‘Silly Syd’ and he would stand up in the local cinemas during the ice-cream interval and shout out: ‘Give me a penny, I’m daft.’
    Carol Ann told me that Lark Lane was becoming quite fashionable. There was a wine bar nearer the park. The bistro, a word and concept unknown to my parents, stands on a corner with big windows along both sides. It was a junk-shop in the fifties and before that a record shop. I had bought many of my first jazz 78s there in the holidays from Stowe and on leave from the Navy.
    You ‘come-to’ as a child as if from a major operation. Pink blurs loom up, solidify into faces, become recognisable. Objects materialise. Continuity establishes itself.
    Early memory is fragmentary: a boxful of unsorted snaps, many of them of people and places whose significance is lost; a few film clips of random lengths shown in no particular order. Nor is it possible to distinguish in retrospect between what you can really remember and what you were told later, and anyway many early memories are false.
    I am sitting beside my mother in an open car. She is driving along a seaside promenade festooned with fairy lights at night. Everything is in shades of milky blue: the sea, the pier, the boarding houses. I am very happy. I smile up at my glamorous mother. The only flaw is that my mother never drove a car.
    A real one. A maid, a friend of my nanny’s, is hanging up sheets in a small garden on the side of a house opposite ours in Ivanhoe Road. A blue sky full of little clouds, blossom on a stunted soot-black tree, the sheets very white, the arms of the maid red from the suds, the whole composition cramped and angular, without depth. Why this image chosen from so many which have been forgotten? Why a white horse galloping across a green hillside in North Wales lit by brilliant sunshine under a dark sky? Early memory has no discrimination. When everything is equal, without associations, without any meaning beyond itself, there is no measure available, no scale. My mother drives her car; the maid hangs up the washing (wooden pegs bought from gypsies who came to the door); the white horse gallops under the dark sky.
    I was a discontented baby. My mother, to amuse me later, would recreate her nights in that small bedroom in the flat in Linnet Lane. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail. Her leap from the bed before my father could wake up. Her walking the floor, rocking me in her arms, crooning one of two songs: Paul Robeson’s ‘Curly-headed babby’ or Harrow’s ‘Forty Years On’. My subsidence into silence and careful replacement in my cot. Her return to bed. The approach of sleep. A whimper leading to a prolonged wail…
    On my afternoon walk I would scream in my pram and could only be quietened by her drawing an umbrella along the railings. By the time we moved to Ivanhoe Road my parents could afford and had room for a nanny, and anyway I was beyond the screaming stage.
    We spent my early summer holidays in Llandudno or Colwyn Bay, those adjacent Victorian seaside resorts on the coast of North Wales. My maternal grandmother was often with us. My nanny, Bella, always. My father would spend a fortnight there and commute at weekends for the rest of the month. Sometimes his parents visited us in their chauffeur-driven car. Still an only child I exercised an iron will, insisting on a rigid and rather extravagant routine: a visit to the pier to feed the seagulls, to watch them banking down out of the salt air, beady-eyed and sharp-billed, to grab the biscuits. The biscuits came from a special kiosk. There was a notice in its window: ‘the biscuits the birds like’. The birds were selective in their tastes; the biscuits they liked were rather