So what was? After many years’ reflection, I think it came down to practicality. My folks weren’t practical people, not in the everyday way-of-the-world sense. They were hopeless with money, gambled away much of it so that we were in a regular weekly cycle of having cash for three days, then having very little for four. Bills went unpaid — the most tangible outcome of which was a twelve-year period of being continually evicted from rental property for non-payment of rent. Other bills went unpaid too. Occasionally my father shoplifted; more than once he was caught.
Yet when it came to me — at Christmas for example — they tried to give me whatever I had hoped for (on at least three occasions a typewriter). In one sense I was spoiled. I used to be able to get my own way too easily — for example to bunk off school feigning illness — and they were never, in any sense, strict with me.
Part of me wishes they had been — both more strict and more practical. I wished they had been better with money, more disciplined, less addicted to the lure of bingo and the horses, to chasing petty dreams. Did I wish for a more stable upbringing at the time? Maybe. Probably.
And yet it was across those formative years — from about five to sixteen — that I was irrevocably shaped; that was the time the mould solidified. If I’d not had such a difficult upbringing then would I have become the person I am now, the writer I am now. Inevitably my outlook on the world — my observations and interpretations of it — would have been transformed had we not been forced to move every year or so, had there been no short periods of harsh poverty, no social security, no skipping school; and because of that, undoubtedly my writing would have been different too.
That’s a difficult equilibrium to maintain in your head, to be both resentful and grateful at the same time.
There are lessons you learn and take with you; some you execute better than others, but mistakes are still made along the way. Perhaps the best thing we can hope to be is an ‘upgrade’ on what/who went before us.
Against that backdrop, some poetry was born from reflections on those harsh years. The first of the following two pieces comes from The Homelessness of a Child; Escape was published in the anthology, At the Fraying Edge of History. I don’t think I’ve shared them here before.
Another Christmas Then Christmas arrived as an apology, wrestled from tinsel-filled dreams with obvious sleight-of-hand. A prematurely balding tree embraced the blooming of impossible colours, fairy lights’ celebration transmitted via morse-code flicker. Yes the typewriter’s carriage return sang with its magical ‘ding’ (just like the last machine you’d been forced to hock harvesting cash for sliced white and Cadbury’s ‘Smash’), but the four-lane Scalextric would have been more exciting had you three friends to play it with. Now a lifetime beyond the giddiness of unwrapping, past the inevitable repetition of just what I wanted, you see that passion play for what it was, an abundance of ‘sorry’, scant compensation for another year of turmoil and heartbreak.
escape
when the money ran out
sometimes he would sell a toy for cash
a Hornby Pacific loco - with steam! -
traded for half-a-dozen sausages
a tin of carrots
some Cadbury’s Smash
it was an odd exchange
as if they had landed in a foreign world
with a different currency
where joy and innocence had been devalued
their shares lasting no more than a week
he was a refugee of sorts
banished from his native shores
forced to acquiesce to new rules
imposed by those who should have known better
and if there was a bunker
in which he could settle
undisturbed
he did so
locking the doors to his mind
inventing new worlds to live inThis is one in an occasional series of articles where I share some of my work using a ‘theme’ of one kind or another as the jumping-off point. In this case some personal experiences from my childhood.
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