Fragment, 26 Feb 2017 - Background radiation

The past.  Childhood.  All those hazy memories of places, people, small things.  The colour and texture of new bricks – and did they have a smell?; the sound of old buses belching smoke and leaning on their springs; the cool feel of lino on the living-room floor; and what was that toy?

The songs on the wireless: did I really hear them, or was it their replaying in the years since?  All those half-remembered scenes: memories from a time when I was too young to understand, but old enough to be aware.  The background radiation of my life.

What is it to me now? A place? Yes, it’s a place.  A time? Yes it is.  A period of consciousness that cannot be regained.  The innocence of unmediated sights and sounds. Tides of emotion – feelings that I had no name for.  Everything at face-value.  In the moment.  No analysis, no scepticism, no doubt.  Only curiosity and imagination.

An infant mind that grew first to occupy the rooms of the house and, on washing days and summer days, the garden that was virgin, featureless and flat like those around it.  Beyond was the street, viewed mainly as comings and goings through the window: milkman; coalman; the big green machine that cleaned the drains, labelled “NRCC”. 

Neighbours. Cousins.  And their grown-up counterparts.

Walks with my grandad: great adventures fuelled with monkey-nuts and apple, peeled and sliced with a secret pen-knife.  Out beyond the street, past the factory where my dad worked, over becks and through fields, following trails more mysterious than the Silk Road; the receding noise of the factory soon forgotten.

School.  The smell of polished floors and school dinners.  The affection of teachers, dinner-ladies.  The slap, the ruler across the legs.  Loss. 

Extremes of family life.  Rows. Fighting.  Hiding.  “This is all your fault.”  Everything at face-value.

Growing and discovering.  Books donated by the neighbour: made surplus by divorce.  Friends and freedom: on foot or biking to the river or the aerodrome.  Dens.  Secrets.  Shame.  Cigarettes and fire: burning river banks, scorched clothes, smoking dry stems of grass – “lock-jaw” was the wisdom of the elders.  Taking buses into town.

Later, factory, wages, alcohol, motorbikes and endless roads.  A world at once too big and imprisoning; so free and so constrained.  Confusion.  Mistakes.  Failure and disaster.  Real loss.

Leaving; wanting never to go back.

Falling.

Learning how it is – no control.

New places.  New risks and dangers. 

A guardian angel took my hand.  “Who are you?”

Good people.  A lesson never to forget: that there’s no greater gift than generosity itself.

A mirror held up for me to look in; seeing myself for the first time.

A chance to reinvent; to start again from scratch.  Luck.  Timing.  The guardian angel.

The education my brother craved and I’d never wanted.  I never even looked at the prospectuses he brought home.  His dream.  Too complicated, then.  Too many barriers.  Too much life.  He left it: dream and life. 

I got his education handed on a plate.  My father: “You won’t learn anything from books.” A sullen Saturday night – both drunk, of course: pain control.  I don’t blame him.  We’re all the same.  Us, I mean. 

Well I did learn – just as my brother would have done, if only he’d have broken out.  I learned from books, from people, from breaking out.  Out from the crowd, the herd, mutual dependency of the self-defeated, the serially-damaged.  I’m one of those, but I despise the herd.  They did it.  Still do, I expect, then demand fealty.

I learned that much of what I’d been told – much of what I believed about the world – was wrong.  Imagine if I’d never fallen through the floor; if I’d never broken out from the herd.

My education broke my father; broke his world.  Years didn’t count so much anymore: the tyranny of years, drawn and quartered by Academe. It broke my heart.  We could never be the same.  The last look from his deathbed: is that what it was?

I got away, but it follows you: tracks you down on sleepless nights; lives in your anxieties, adds its weight to meeting room doors, whispers poison in your ear on Metro platforms.

I took the road whose aggregate is letters; whose kerbstones, values; whose shade is the kindness of good people.  That kindness sometimes makes me weep.  Often. 

I’m me-before and me-after.  Sometimes, I don’t know the me-before, nor do I want to.

I lose myself in thoughts of: what is home?  Is it a place?  A situation?  Or a person?  Is it fixed, or mobile?  A state of mind, or way of life?  Or just a place to pause?

I know one thing: it’s not the place to ship my corpse to bury with the rest.  Leave it where it drops; where the earth has been good.

And the background radiation? Unmediated sights, sounds and smells; feelings and emotions from a time of innocence that will never be regained.

I feel peaceful, suddenly.  An exercise in catharsis.  Make of it what you will.  I need to eat.