A re-run of something that I might have originally seen when I was 6 or so, perched and pushing the boundaries in front of the coal fire, hating the dark and cold before the fateful ascent of the wooden hills to Bedfordshire.. And there they were, the eyebrows of Simon Templar the good knight, upstaging the man himself as they darted about the screen with a lofty yet personalised dramatic irony. And now an outside scene in Trafalgar Square, with no traffic apart from collectable classics; red boxes and ello-policemen and Carnaby Street, The Beatles and my aunty and uncle wowed and laughing as they told us about films I couldn't see like Casino Royale.
I remember real dustbinmen with leather tabards, loading real metal bins into sideloading bin-lorries; I remember coalmen, bent like dwarves and as black as soot with eyes that blinked like lights: supermen from beyond the horizon where the coal-trains came past, always 31..or was it 32 that time..?...and then the thunder-rumble as it went into the bunker next to the house, so that in summer when it did thunder I wondered, was that what coalmen did when they rested from delivering coal in the summer...?
And I remember, down our street, bullies and brothers and swearing, and me not having a brother; and falling forever in love with Carol from up the street who was six and playing kiss-cats at blackberry-time. Little families who were English, but not the ones from Newcastle, Poland, Germany or Italy who had large families and were all from Somewhere Else, so I stared for ages before I said anything.
There was Mr Morris from our end and Dan and Maud from the top end. They were old, as old as their gardens or older. Their gardens were overgrown and had caves of laurel or rhododendrons, and they had black doors in their houses that never opened. They wore overcoats in the summer and moved along slowly as if in a film from the 19th century. When grownups spoke to them, they would take their hats off and say "good morning" and the rest of the grownups put on shop-voices and laughed shrilly like ponies. I thought he was God, Mr Morris, at one time: slow and far-off, able to see things that you didn't want to be seen; sitting somewhere indoors in front of a mantelpiece with clock, in his coat, smiling slow with his hat on. His pockets were infinite, and there lived the mint humbugs, which were a gift from Before Time when there were carriages. These old people shone, though you were not supposed to see it, as though they had overcoats to cover a light, as the moved along slowly as if their life was a replay, a film from somewhere better played so often it had begun to wear out.
And when they died, it was with no fuss and no one cried; they just were there one moment and faded away the next, and their gardens stayed overgrown and their doors stayed dark...so you thought that the film of them was still playing in front of the mantelpiece, until it went out like a fire dying down.
Mrs Parker was one of these too, loved and visited by by mum, and we saw her every Thursday when we went to see Uncle Harry who made newspapers and could read upside down and back-to-front. Again, why was it that grown-ups went all nervous when they wanted to give us things, as though it were wrong and shameful to get what you wanted, as though parents were there to stop you? I had started to replace being seen and not heard with responding to being liked, when she died or wasn't there one Thursday. But her daughter was, who was still old; and I thought how odd it was to be a daughter and be grown up, as daughters were supposed to play in the street and laugh. And she was crying, which I could not understand, as mum told me Mrs Parker had gone to heaven: if heaven was nice, then why was her daughter crying?
And I wanted to say it'll be all right, as she's in heaven...but being little, curiosity got there first:
"Did you see her go to heaven?" I asked, as when I thought of Mrs Parker dying, it was seeing her sitting in her armchair and being lifted up, borne up so she was light as Peter Pan, and was not heavy and slow any more but happy to be in the air, and she was smiling as she left the room through the roof and passed away upwards, all light and full of the air...
And there was me, expecting totally for it to be as I'd been told it was. But seeing the panic, the shock, the apology, the shame on their faces, I knew what it was like to be both wrong and lied to. And at that moment, it seemed, I learnt 2 things: that heaven was false and I should keep my mouth shut around grownups.
Isn't there a bit from The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles that refers to life seeming like "an inexhaustible well" when young?
"Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."
I need the limitless in my life with even more insistence than I did then. And why would we see with such yearning as children, the pull of that without limit as being so vital?
I remember copying what I saw and heard, then becoming the same, then believing it as true, then using this as a template for what I should become...and surely upon surely, I have ended up seemingly a different person than the one I could have become. I get older, and the boat leaves so fewer times I fear that one day it will not leave at all and I will be stuck, drawing from the well of memory, but of memories that might only be treatments of reality and not real at all.
Time blows on, remorseless and scouring, and like the sisters in the Sahara, the cups fill with sand.
Ho hum, here's a picture that I'm not including to underscore anything I've written:
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