With each passing year, we all move further and further away from our childhoods and the recollections we have of those crucial years become blurrier. The store of vivid memories shrinks. Some names get forgotten.
Anyway, anyway, I have set myself the task of recording a few of my childhood memories. Things that still stand out for whatever reason. I am pinning them down before they entirely dissolve. And before I begin I might ask: Is there any logic in the business of remembering? It doesn't seem so to me but the psychology of memory is no doubt complicated like the electrical wiring on an ocean liner.
Before I begin, let me just say that mine was an unremarkable but generally happy, healthy childhood. I wasn't sexually or physically abused and I did not have to battle with some awful ailment or physical condition.
There was Mum and Dad and their four sons of which I was the third. We lived in a late Victorian schoolhouse attached to the village school where Dad was the headmaster. It was in the middle of The East Riding of Yorkshire...
One
One chilly morning before school started, I was playing football in the school playground. I would have been seven years old at the time. A hundred yards away, a service bus had just disgorged several pupils near the T junction outside "The New Inn" pub. They came from a nearby smaller village called Catwick which did not have a village school of its own.
Normally, these children would just walk up to the village school without fuss but on that morning they came racing along, their excited breaths visible in the cold morning air. A couple of them headed straight for me.
"Your Robin's been knocked over! He might be dead!"
Hurriedly, I went to the pavement in front of the school gates and looked down to the T junction. Cars had stopped, people were gathering. Something had clearly happened just as the Catwick bus had arrived.
"Go and tell your mum!"
I ran to our house and pushed open the front door. Mum was still upstairs. I yelled up to her and she came to the top of the staircase in her nightie.
"It's our Robin Mum! He's been knocked over!"
Robin had mounted his bicycle that morning and pedalled up to the cafe at the far end of a road called High Stile. His mission had been to buy a packet of sherbet with a lollipop inside. But he did not get back home for he had made an almost fatal error at the T junction and had been hit by a car overtaking the stationary bus.
Mum quickly donned her slippers and her nylon housecoat and ran out of the house like an Olympic sprinter.
There were no words. It was as if I had lit the blue touchpaper of a firework rocket. It did not matter that she was still in her nightwear and had not performed her habitual morning ablutions. She was running across the playground and down the road. One of her beloved boys was hurt and she had to get to him as soon as she possibly could. No forethought - just instinct.
⦿
Robin was unconscious. An ambulance with a flashing blue light came to take him to hospital but I do not remember any of that nor any of the weeks he spent in hospital. He had a badly fractured skull from which he took ages to recover.
The medication he was given and his inactive recuperation period made him put on weight. He became fat and lethargic with his brain power diminished. That accident changed him but happily he fought back. Though he did not do well at secondary school, he possessed many practical skills and had a talent for engineering and fixing things.
He was a damned good worker and partly in spite of the road accident he was very motivated to make a success of his life and that's what he did. He had earned enough money by the age of 52 to buy a French farmhouse in sight of The Pyrenees and retire there with his cats, his motorbikes, his campervan, his cars and Suzie - his girlfriend of many years.
It wasn't long ago that I shared my memory of that awful morning with him. He had no idea that I possessed it. He was moved to hear what I said.
And still, after all these years, I can picture our Mum, flying out of our house in her nightgown to be with Robin as though it was just yesterday but it was probably 1960 - sixty five tears ago.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/IgyD1tK
