My life as a frog

By drew_gummerson

Mon, 19 Nov 2007

1123 reads

I was a precocious child. I went straight from Peter and Jane to Lady Windermere’s Fan. Of course I returned later to Enid Blyton but it was with a certain aesthetic detachment. ‘Aesthetic detachment’ were such strange words from a five year old. Especially while drinking a dry Martini.

By seven I had the reading age of fifty-two. I was secretly consuming Kingsley Amis’s complete oeuvre and raging against the iniquities of late middle age. I had completed my junior school’s reading curriculum even before I got there and while my classmates were busy with a b c I was sent to the library on my own.

Actually it wasn’t a library. The school merely had some bookshelves a short distance from the headmaster’s office.

The first book I read in French was Camus’s L’Etranger. My dad gave it to me when I visited him one summer in France. He was working then on a roller coaster in a French fairground. I made friends with the guy who worked on the pirate ship ride - he actually lived under it and always had grease in his hair - and on the days when he wasn’t working we’d jump trains and swim to secluded rocks from idyllic beaches.

I loved the absurd.

By the time it was time for uni I only knew that I wanted to travel. I chose Russian at Exeter because of this. One year in Yaroslav, what could be better! But Exeter didn’t suit. It was all 4*4s, Wellington boots, and the confidence of a public school education. I left and went to Nottingham a year later. This time to study American.

I went to school in Milwaukee. What could be better! Morning classes of ‘Baseball and Literature’, afternoons on the beaches of Lake Michigan. At the end of it I bought a Greyhound pass and travelled the States (all paid for by my LEA. God Bless Them!). I went to Chicago, New Orleans, Washington, New York, San Diego and when my money was running out, which it always does, I headed south to Mexico.

For one week we were holed up in a brothel - quite by mistake - while trying to get out of a tin-pot town. Every night the local band would gather outside the window to serenade the muchachas.

Next stop was a former mining town. There was a church there, designed by Eiffel, made of tin. I later read a book about this - Air and Fire by Rupert Thomson. Not he is quiteaguy.

After uni I went straight to Prague. Mum thought it would be grey and communist. But it was spectacular. I worked in a university there but I’ve written about this before.

After Prague was Tokyo. I arrived on New Year’s Eve and paid £100 to get into a club in Roppongi and danced with sumos. I lived in a flat with tatami on the floor and paper doors. There was no hot water and no heating. Until it got warm it was cold.

While in Tokyo, Jonathan, a friend from school who had moved to Sydney wrote to tell me he was going to Bolivia and would I look after his dog. I didn’t need asking twice. Sydney was as spectacular as Prague but in its own way.

When Jonathan came back I moved into my own place. My landlady was 110, my apartment was Art Deco. Errol Flynn had lived there once. But he’d moved on. I could understand that.

I was in Sydney for two years and two other trips back for months at a time. I fell in love and out of love but that’s a long story and it’s the kind of story that everybody has.

When I came back from Sydney I decided enough was enough.

I wanted to write. So I did