I was five. I had already started school which was only two roads away. I went with my sister everyday yet I have no actual recollection of any part of the journey except once when I found a St Christopher medal stamped by accident into the fresh tarmacking of the road. I retrieved it with eager anticipation, joy even. Having a St Christopher- which all the Italian and Polish Catholic kids at my school did- was something I most dearly wanted. And now I had my own. The patron Saint of travellers had bewitched me before I even knew it. But the medal belonged to a beautiful silent boy called Ricardo who I adored- in fact by the kind of amazing coincidence that characterises normal life it was his medal, the one that I had for so long coveted, so I had to give it back to him and so I never got one, not even now.
I lived in the small English spa town of Leamington. Once it had been rather a refined place to live. The pump rooms in town where people had taken the cure were now only a minor attraction, an adjunct to the municipal baths where I clung with timidity to the poolside every Wednesday during a swimming lesson before going home to a supper of Brains faggots and frozen peas and potatoes. I was never adventurous when surrounded by a group. I was only given to bravado when I was alone.
No. Hold on. I was four. It was before I went to school. I was still at home being looked after by my mother because I hadn’t liked the nursery my sister went to. I wanted to be at home. I didn’t want to go to school or be with other kids at least not now. My mum was going to the shops and I went with her with the promise of watching the diggers at work on a reclaimed bombsite they were finally building on. Three big diggers at work while my mum went to the line of shops only a couple of roads away from home. The roads were straight, lined with pollarded limes that shook a black knotted fist of tree at you. My mum would go first in the grocers, then in the vegetable shop and then the butchers and I stood watching the diggers when a man in a long dark coat the kind that get a fur of moisture on them in very cold damp weather appeared by my side and started talking. He had a black old fashioned hat on and a dark scarf. He asked me what I was doing and I told him about watching the diggers. He said that my mum had asked him to take me home. He put out his large leather gloved hand, a paddle of a hand and grasped mine gently. We set off walking down the long straight stretch of pollarded limes, the empty November sky. He seems a nice man I thought though this isn’t the way home but I said nothing. Maybe he knows the way home a different way I explained to myself. We were now about a hundred or more yards away from the diggers when I could hear the agitated noise of leather soles on tarmac and a flapping coat of someone running. I recognised the grey shop coat of the nice man Mr Hilton from the grocers shop he was red faced from the run he said my mum was waiting for me the man in the hat without a word slipped my hand was gone hurrying as if sideways down the street. Gone, fast, without a word while Mr Hilton watched him with a puzzled look on his red face. My mum was so happy and upset and said she would never let me watch the diggers alone again and I must never go off with someone even if they said they were taking me home. But what about Mr Hilton. Unless you know them she said.
OK, so I was now five, going to school and I found Ricardo’s Saint Christopher which I dearly wanted to keep for myself and did for a day and then by evening I told my mum and she said I had to give it back or at least tell the school as it probably was someone from the school even though I had found it in the street. After Ricardo I fixated on a girl called Helen who I asked to my birthday- maybe my sixth birthday but she didn’t come and I asked my mum to phone her during the birthday party but still she didn’t come. But another girl called Naomi, a robust boyish girl with dark arched eyebrows who once beat a boy up, she did come and wanted me to be her boyfriend. One day I had done a painting I didn’t want to take home and Naomi agreed to take it home if I agreed to let her call me her boyfriend. I agreed but managed to wriggle out of it later like all things kids do things are soon forgotten new stuff crowds in and life must go on. It is the stuckness of things that characterises the adult world and when they depict childhood- be it the bullying or parentally caused problems they always miss this moving-on-ness of things, the way people always forget, the windows of light in the enshrouding dark of some periods of life.
But my life was not dark. I enjoyed helping a road cleaner pull up weeds in our road. Far away at the end of the road somewhere lived the famous Radio broadcaster Richard Baker. Sometimes he was seen by friends of my mother’s but not ever by my parents who had little time for celebrities. When a jaguar car overtook us my dad would mutter ‘pop stars and criminals’ are the only ones who drive these.
I went up the road on my trike quite a long way in the general direction of Richard Baker’s house but I turned back because of the magnetic pull of our house and the fact that I knew I was never meant to go far. One day however a new boy I liked call Anthony invited me to come round after school. I knew I was not allowed to do this but he explained he only lived one road over from me. It seemed grown-up to just go with him but halfway there I realised I was quite a long way from my house and did not in fact know the way home. I told him I had forgotten that I had to be home and left him. Excuses when you are a child can be anything. They can be purely symbolic. No one argues with them you just make them and go but you have to have one. If you can’t think of a good enough one you stew in silence and go along with whatever happens even though you feel no part of it and that you are being held there against your will.
So I made my excuse and headed down the road towards what I thought was my road but it wasn’t. I went down this long road and slowly I began to realise that I was lost, though everywhere looked familiar. I was not scared but I knew it would take some time to get home. I was troubled that my mum would be worried but not overly so. I kept wandering down streets that all looked a bit similar to mine but none were. However I knew that by a process of elimination (words I naturally did not know but the concept I did already grasp) I would eventually get to my road. So I was not worried. Then I saw something familiar cycling towards me: my mum on her bike with my little sister in her seat on the back. She had come out searching for me. My mum was furious and did not listen to my logical reasoning about eventually it being absolutely certain I would get home. I could not see why she was upset. For many years I never understood adult anger at things that seemed quite logical to me.