I think I remember the moon landings in 1969. I think I may have stayed up all night with my mum, watching that little black and white television crackle and fizz in the corner of our living room. I may have watched it or perhaps I just think I did. I can’t be sure of anything these days.
It was around that time that I had the first mental health blip of my life, a ghastly combination of night terrors and panic attacks. There are whole years I don’t remember as this young boy fell to pieces. Perhaps, I can persuade the BBC to run a programme commemorating 50 years of poor mental health?
Even the photographs I still have, all stored in old biscuit tins and chocolate boxes, represent not real memories, just prompts of how I used to be and images of people, nearly all of whom are dead and have been for decades.
I am not even convinced my early memories are really memories at all. Little me, standing in the back garden sometime during the winter of 1962/63, next to a rather impressive snow dwarf was, I thought for a while, my oldest memory. It occurs to me that maybe it’s not a memory at all. Just a photograph of a simpler, more innocent time. I honestly can’t tell the difference.
Of course, there are some happy photos in my little collection. Me playing football with my dad in a London park, me playing with the train set I still have in the loft, me with our labrador dog (Kim), me chalking up an historic cricket Test Match victory against my grandad in Keynsham Park. Try as I might, apart from the train set which I played with every day and every evening of my young life, the photos might as well be mock-ups.
The really odd thing is how little I remember about my parents. It’s not surprising regarding my dad because he was in the Merchant Navy and some level of absence can be explained. The absence of my mum in my memories is utterly bizarre, given that I lived with her for the first 20-something years of my life. I have a theory about that.
I suspect life with my mum has blended into one very long day because the pattern of each and every day was exactly the same. She would go to work early, dropping me off at school, I would go to my grandparents after primary and junior school from where my mum would fetch me after work, we would walk home and she would cook whatever leftovers she had managed to buy on the cheap at the butcher’s shop before it closed. We would eat sometime after 8.00 pm after which it was bedtime.
It sounds routinely grim, yet in most photographs I am smiling. It was only when I went to senior school, and when man landed on the moon, I fell apart. Falling apart has been my default position ever since.
I’m doing a lot of thinking about life as a child and beyond and I am not going to lie to you, it’s very tough. I need to confront all this stuff and to write about it, mainly because I want to cleanse my soul and also because I think I have a story, of sorts, to tell.
It’s taking me to some very dark places and I kind of expected that. Look at one happy memory and there’s a very sad one lurking up around the bend. And the memories of the sad memories are more powerful than the happy ones.
So much of my life is not so much tinged with regret but overwhelmed by it. My dad always told me to look forward and not focus on what went before. He was right about this, of course, as he was about so many things. I was so blessed to get to know him better in his latter days. Without his words of wisdom, I am not sure I would be here today. I still wonder, though, how different my life would have been had he been with me all my life instead of on the other side of the world. (Important note: the way things turned out was not his fault.)
Don Henley once said in his song ‘Boys of Summer’, “Don’t look back, you can never look back” and didn’t he have a point?
I’m always looking back with sadness and regret at what happened and what didn’t happen and the person I think I could had should have been. Survival is probably the best thing I have managed in life and I suppose I should be grateful for that.
Soon, you will be able to read about all of my life, should you be so be so inclined. There is hope amongst the hopeless and hopefully some light in the dark. Even if I don’t remember the words, “The Eagle has landed” being said at the time. Or maybe I did?
