1956
15th December 1956. Five Crossways Hospital. Yeovil. Somerset. 16:55
Just Walkin’ in the Rain by Johnnie Ray is Number 1 in the charts.
“Yep. It’s true, Chris. You and I were mixed up when we were born and we were given to each other’s mothers by mistake – until someone discovered the error!” school friend, Raymond Trask, told me later in 1965?
How do I recall the date?
I recall the date because the Beatle’s had a hit with “We can work it out” that year and I used to put my hand over my ears at the point in the song where they would sing,
“Life is very short, and there’s no time
For fussing and fighting, my friend”
We’ll meet Raymond Trask again later though earlier back in time, (1962), when he and I are about 6 years old and I’m threatened with a knife by a teenager named ‘Ayling’ adjacent to Raymond’s house in Westfield Place but first …
1957
I’m fully aware of what I am about to write.
There isn’t a narrative though. In fact there isn’t anything I can say or write to ‘back up’ these following words other than … I can recall the first time I was given “solid food”.
A meat / veg puree of some kind.
The experience and shock of its unique, novel taste writing the first piece of data into my memory or mental storage!
That sensation representing the first time I’d known or felt or become … me!
And it is likely that I experienced that event as a preverbal sensory memory between 10 – 18 months.
I’ve researched this phenomena since and learned that my own idiosyncratic account being represented as a sensation rather than as a mental recall makes my account extra-ordinary but possible / probablr for one important reason.
At anything from 12 months to 2½ years, it is extremely rare for a young human to be able to encode information in a retrievable narrative form and the average ‘recall’ of early childhood experience is more likely to kick in at around 3 years.
This figures and adds up when I recall that the experience of eating solid food for the first time was a sensation and not some ‘memory’ I could see in my mind or describe as a story or narrative.
1959
Meanwhile, memories of my earliest childhood when considered in narrative form as expressed in individual events or episodes always return me to lucid, coherent accounts of being a very young pre infant school toddler wandering as far as a mile from home around the streets, fields and dens of a late 1950’s Yeovil and we might assume that being shown little interest by my own parents, I was always going to venture out and explore whatever and wherever took my own attention!
Sure. My autobiography, proper, was never going to start any other way in as much as I was born into a family with adults who cared little about my emotional, physical or general well being and, sure, I’ve chosen the image accompanying these words very purposefully.
Why? Well imagine you or a child of yours, (far too young to be wandering the streets), often venturing nearly a mile from home kicking their heels bored and aimless with no company, purpose or direction to guide them.
The particular location that day? It was a lane running parallel with Johnson Park. Rough ground just off the top end of Coronation Avenue, Yeovil, Somerset.
I mean … that’s where I was as a little boy. 3 years old, 4 years old? And I remember just staring up at a wall of bushes and hedging before looking down, examining my own clothing, wondering why it smelled of ammonia. Wondering why I had a deep yellow patch staining the front of my pants.
And the answer? The answer was that I’d been wearing the same clothes, underwear, khaki shorts and a striped T shirt, (clothing that was already too big for me), for 5, 6, 7 or more days in a row?
We might wonder. What sort of people lets a toddler, a youngster, just wander the streets, cinder paths and back lanes of a town unsupervised for hours on end anyway? And what sort of people care little enough to even change their little boy’s clothing either daily or whenever appropriate?
I was obviously too young to comprehend or address this disconcerting reality but I was not too young to be delivered a very acute conscious sense of self that either as an act of survival or an act of creativity, soon delivered me an inner narrative that, had it not been such a powerful internal voice, might otherwise have been simply labeled imagination – as a coping mechanism.
But it was far more than that.
Despite little love and attention from within my own immediate family, like every human being, even at such an early age, I had gauged and measured the importance of friendships, connections and the value of other family members and soon learned to charm, chat or inspire others to play my games or pursue my own adventures as a way of compensating for or filling in whatever I felt was missing from my own family environment.
And by the time I actually did attend school, in harvesting the fruits of my own social ingenuity, I soon became a very gregarious, upbeat and optimistic little boy despite the life of neglect, constant parental rowing and fighting I endured and lived with at home.
1960
I can’t tell you when things changed or got better, if they ever did, but at the age of 4 or 5, I lived in a bedroom that, as far as I was aware, had never been dusted, hoovered, tidied or cleansed; and neither had I been taught, trained, told or otherwise threatened to keep said bedroom tidy myself.
And the weirdest thing? The weirdest thing was that the rest of the house was usually, well … presentable.
Likewise, there was never any concept of hygiene or tidiness or anything remotely resembling such a discipline just as I had never been tutored in the concept of washing my teeth last thing at night or first thing in the morning.
Tough to acknowledge now, (and we haven’t even got to the violence and the physical and emotional assaults yet), but my individual case being related here probably isn’t likely to be a unique or rare thing for lots of children growing up in the the 1960’s.
Oh, and I might as well add the following here as anywhere else when I relate something my elder brother told me fairly recently.
My very first day at infant’s school?
That special first ever day my brother, (8 years senior),had to walk me half a mile to my Nan’s, (Daisy Goodland), because my mother wouldn’t get out of bed!
NOTE: I’m well aware of how underwhelming and dull this section of the site is and, seriously, while quite disconcerting or alarming these childhood revelations may appear, I promise you they only form the edge pieces of a jigsaw we cannot get the measure of until we travel years further into my story.
1961
1962
1964
1966
1967
Longleat.
Greater World Foundation. Harry Edwards. Spiritual healing. Ouija board. Seances.
1968
1969
It is July 20, 1969, just before 4am in the morning.
My mother and I are watching crackling images of Neil Armstrong stepping out of the lunar module, beginning his historic walk down Apollo 11’s ladder.
I am 12 years, 7 months and 5 days old …
Crackle … “That’s one small step for Man” … crackle ….
At that exact moment, hearing my father’s steps across the bedroom floor above us, she interrupts and talks over what would become the most famous sentence ever uttered throughout all of human history
“One giant leap for Mankind”
“Do you know what, Christopher?” My mother pauses and looks up at the ceiling. Refering to my father still making a noise upstairs, she continues.
“It’s legalized rape, that’s what it is”, briefly pausing before adding …
“He pulls my legs apart like a chicken”.
This is my mother wilfully, purposefully sowing seeds directly into my mind with a single goal of encouraging me to hate my father.
I was 12 years old. I didn’t really comprehend the mechanics of the physical act she was referring to but I, obviously, understood the deliver and tone of the words.
Exactly 2 and a half years later, during the pitch black of the power cuts of an Edward Heath UK government, with Greg the Beagle’s lead tied to a heavy suitcase, my mother and I crept out of our house at Buckler’s Mead Rd, walked down Birchfield Rd and eventually made it to town where, from her friend Mabel’s Dress Agency address, my mother, with my own naive and brainwashed blessing, left home for the Isle of Wight where her lover, an Anglo – Indian man named Frank Keywood was waiting with a brand new bungalow he had bought her in Anderri way, Shanklin.
Frank Keywood worked in telecommunications in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The bungalow at Shanklin was bought outright with just a few months of his contracted pay and, back in Yeovil, though being just a child of 15 years and one month, I was being primed by my errant mother and her new partner to consider not just changing my name to Keywood (to hurt my father) but also to be signed over as legal owner of my mother’s half of the house she currently still owned with my father. (I know. I know. I understand how crazy this seems but imagine how I had to cope living in ‘a broken home’ with my previously good school work going down the pan a father having a history of attacking me and
I didn’t appreciate it at the time but the wicked act my mother had finally accomplished, (in poisoning my mind against my father who I still had to obviously live with), set about a devastating series of events that would peak and culminate in destabilising my own life exactly as I was going through puberty before becoming a proper young man. (At that time of my life, an added distraction I needed like a hole in the head!)
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