Childhood doesn’t end, it just has loose ends. At a formative moment in the soundtrack to my own youth, Betty Boo was “Doing The Do” – and since no news has reached me to the effect that the Do is now done, I’m haunted by the suspicion that Betty is still out there somewhere in her silver PVC bodysuit, doing it. I worry that it must be exhausting for her.
I feel the same about the girl in Duran Duran’s “Rio”, who still – insofar as we know – dances on the sand. While this must have been very nice for her at first, with a beneficial exfoliating effect on the feet, surely I’m not the only one who frets that her legs must be worn down to the hips by now.
I worry too about the kids with whom I shared my primary school. Since I’ve received no news to the contrary I assume that most of them are still there, sitting on tiny plastic chairs, bothering crepe paper with glue and spatulas. This is lucky for them, because a terrible thing happened to those of us who left that place. We became old, and afflicted by an occasional unbearable yearning to tie up all those loose ends of childhood.
You could call it nostalgia but that suggests something warm and fuzzy, not the jagged and unsettling feeling that came over me this week when we went to see our six-year-old’s assembly. His class put on a show about Victorian childhood, and as we stood at the back of a hall of two hundred kids in blue v-neck jumpers, surrounded by wall bars and gym mats, I found that I could see, with absolute clarity, my own school’s near-identical uniforms in a near-identical hall thirty years ago. I could bring to mind my classmates’ names and faces with a precision I don’t possess when recalling people I met last week.
What the shrinks say might even be true: that our childhood exists in the memory intact, although we lose the facility of recalling it at will. There in the school hall I could see myself at seven years of age, standing next to my friend B – whom I have not seen in nearly three decades – as we both queued to collect a boxed commemorative jam spoon on the occasion of Lady Diana Spencer’s marriage to Charles.
B came round to my house afterwards for tea. My mum had hung red, white and blue bunting and our neighbours had painted a Union Flag on their garage door. B and I solemnly decided that the awful, tacky, shoddily-made jam spoons were far too beautiful and precious to ever be used on anything so prosaic as actual jam, and we vowed never to do so. Recalling these things at my son’s class assembly I had to wipe away a tear, which was easy to blame on the occasion in hand.
Sometimes as a parent it is quietly terrifying to be responsible for a human child. You realise that out of all this precious and prosaic mayhem that is family life, not one moment goes unrecorded. Our children are too busy trashing the house to analyse life now but in thirty years’ time, equipped with perspective and understanding, scenes from today will flash before them. I hope my bald patch doesn’t show.
I’m not one of those people who suffer excessively from nostalgia. I don’t want to go to a school disco-themed night. I don’t want to search Friends Reunited. I don’t want to bother people who, lord knows, will have lost touch with me for a very good reason. But a small part of me does just want to know if B ever used his Diana spoon on jam. Because – with my hand on my heart – I can say that I still never have.
Entries (RSS)
So Damn Facebook and friend-requests from stout middle aged men with receding hair, who until a thumbnail picture was glanced at could stay for ever in a memory of a six year old birthday party.
Funny how everyone from your school years is remembered with first and surname intact, where as in adult life you can go years in good friendship without being really sure of a surname.
Anyway, love your work.