9.Spring 1956

A cold spell early in 1956, brought an end to my stint at the hospital. Before that, there had been snow, with reports of emergency deliveries to stranded farms and villages. One day, as we worked our way up the ward in the morning, an aircraft flew so low overhead we thought it was coming through the roof. Everyone ducked, except for Mr Dollery, propped up straight on his pillows. ‘That’ll be the bread,’ he said.

It wasn’t snow but ice that stopped me short. There was a lake near where we lived. Now it was frozen and a group of staff and boys from my old school came over to play ice-hockey. Health and safety rules were more lax in those days, and freeze-ups more frequent. It was eighteen months since I had left school and the boys on the ice were ones I’d supervised for prep, now grown as big as me or bigger.

I wasn’t a bad skater, after years on roller skates at an earlier school. I think it was a collision, rather than showing off, that brought me down and my ankle folded under me. My pride was hurt, and I made light of the break, using my hockey stick as crutch to get back to the car (my parents’ car, which I’d borrowed for the afternoon). I drove home with one good foot hopping between pedals.

The plaster came up to my knee and stayed on for two or three months. Apart from finding new ways of scratching my leg, I can’t think what I did with that time. My mind’s a blank, except that I remember using the plaster leg as a pivot in a jive routine, and some evenings when the pain got through to me. Try as I will, those three months is blank. Perhaps it was then that I first read Camus, or listened to Charlie Parker.

A broken ankle doesn’t rate high on the scale of Pains. My broken ankle was bearable if only because it was such a long way away. Toothache and earache are closer and less easily forgettable. As a small child I remember lying in bed with earache and not knowing what to do. One moment I tried to bury it in my pillow, the next to shake it out into the air. When my mother came to comfort me, we both knew there was nothing she could do. But perhaps there was, she did it by being there and I recovered . My teeth were bad. At the dentist, most fillings were done with no anaesthetic. I used to grip the chair arm as hard as I could and look around me or out of the window. The drill was driven by a long thin belt or cord that snickered as the drill ground in. Later I learned to relax my hands. When I go to the dentist now, it’s easy. Most of the roots are dead, injections are routine so drilling doesn’t hurt. The dentist must be Christian, he still takes NHS patients and has a bible in the waiting room among the magazines. He's also into films, with old film posters on the walls. From Here to Eternity, Roman Holiday and African Queen. From my reclining seat, I look up at another poster, a version of spot the ball, except that what I'm supposed to look for is a little boy in a striped jersey, one of hundreds in a crowd of rather similar. One dentist I went to as a child had a glass-sided beehive set into the window so patients could lie and watch the workers work. 

 

The next thing I can both remember and locate in time is an improbable workcamp in the Swiss Alps. That accounts for most of May and June 1956, but that still leaves a gap of three months in spring. The best I can do is describe a couple of events that I know did happen at about that time.

My mother annoyed me sometimes: when as a child I forgot something I wanted to say and was still trying to recall it, she would cut in ‘It cant be important if you cant remember it.’ Might it not have beenTOO important?

Two events concern an army camp, the Arborfield REME base across the fields from our  redbrick Field House, Barkham. When I got home from some a work-camp before or after that spring, the wood at the bottom of our own little meadow had disappearedi. It was only when I got down to writing about my past that I realised how many big event events took place while I was away from home, like two brothers and a sister being born.

The wood was disappeared because news got out that the the army had selected the site for a firing range. Farmers and other neighbours who had hardly talked to each other before now got together in a flurry of common purpose. My father's legal and civil service background helped. The surest way block the army's access to the wood was to get the site reclassed as agricultural land.

I’m sad and glad I wasn’t there when the wood was destroyed. It had become a playground for Martin and me. We had a golf-like game with bows and arrows, selecting a target as far away as we could see, and aiming for that. We also risked our necks by climbing up young birch trees until they bent beneath our weight, until we got to within dropping distance of the ground, or the top of the trunk snapped off with one or both of us on it.

I was sad to come home and find the wood gone, and sad to miss the drama of its going: cha-nsaws, bulldozers and gelignite for intractable stumps One splinters, a yard long and thick as a thigh came in through our roof. By the time I came home and the public planning enquiry was due, the land the army's designated land was green with barley shoots.

Perhaps we did something to make up for it nearly 40 years later. Very cheaply, and with Martin's help, we bought a bit of clear-felled Forestry Commission land behind our house in Wales. Replanted it with borrowed, begged and stolen broad-leaved trees, and went on to establish a much larger 'commonwood' along the river valley belowI (www.Troserchwoods.co.uk).. 

 

My other ‘imported’ memory, which may date from just before that spring, begins and ends at a Christmas dance put on by REME officers' families. Perhaps they didn't know that my parents voted Labour and that I had refused military service. Perhaps suitable boys were in short supply. Or it may be that some army families are more open-minded than is generally assumed. More recently, I have often felt that army officers talked more reasonably than the politicians commanding them.

At the Sandhurst (?) hall where the dance was held, we found a polished wood sprung-floor that rose and fell beneath us. The tall young woman I spilt my beer over didn't fuss when I tried to mop it off and stop the stain from spreading down her long blue dress. But the girl who captivated me was smaller, younger, lighter on her feet. When we danced and talked it felt as though we'd known each other all our lives etc. She had smooth dark hair that round an oval face, wide eyes and soft clear voice. She seemed to take in what I had to say, and open it up for me. There seemed no impediment between us. By the time the music stopped, after the usual cloying last waltz, I had learned this apparition was still at school and her father due to leave the following week, with family, for a military attache post in South America. I could have asked for an embassy address, or the name of whatever boarding school she might still attend in Britain. But that didn't occur to me. Perhaps because she was so young, or it might have felt like cheating: if our first meeting were providential, why not a meeting-again? Except that it didn't happen, or we didn't notice when it did.

I didn’t fall to writing poetry until some years later when I got to know a woman who already did. An early effort of mine may have stemmed from ‘You’re skating on thin ice,’ which I can hear ast said by the teacher who organised the ice-hockey that day, who had also been my housemaster and taught me A level French – which I duly failed, My early poem was a rush of short lines, brittle light above, cold depths below and a blind white fox that swam and gnawed. I gave my poet-playwright friend the manuscript and she lost it. More surprisingly, she rewrote most of it from memory on two foolscap sheets, with blanks for bits she couldn't recall. By the time I got this labour of love in the post, I couldn't recall them either.