Tuesday 6 April 2010

Childhood

People get old. That’s a law of the universe. Every one of us is stuck to the surface of a spherical rock by something we have yet to understand called gravity. Maybe the term ‘rock’ doesn’t do it justice. This rock is quiet special – it contains life, as you’ve probably already found out. This rock twists and turns and interacts with other rocks, doing all sorts of gymnastics. We use these movements to measure time. Few of us will be lucky enough to see the Earth spin around it’s parental star 80 times. I’ve spun around that star nearly thirty times now.

I mentioned that fact earlier that people get old. Sadly, I was not lying. People do get old. They start to look shit. Things stop working. Their DNA struggles to keep things together. Eventually, once things seem as shit as they’re gonna get, people die. This in turn makes life a little bit more shit for everyone that knew them. There is however one happy thing about all this and that’s the fact that to be old, you have to have already been young and being young is great!

Let’s get back to this rock. As a special treat we’re gonna go back in time a bit too. On the surface of this rock in the 1980s was a small village on a former island in the Thames Estuary called the Isle Of Grain. If you want to know what this area was like in 1812, read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In the 1980s I lived here. That’s where I spent the majority of my childhood, details of which I am now going to relate in this blog.

Picture a small English village surrounded by about 20 square miles of woods, small paddocks, small fields, beaches and coves, marshland, a large power station, numerous crumbling Napoleonic era fortresses, gravel pits, and general unwanted wasteland, accessible by only one road. This is the Isle of Grain or ‘Grain’ as we called it. In the 1980s this was a wonderful place to live. I mean that literally – it was full of wonder. It was a paradise for young, curious, slightly naughty boys.

The village had a small primary school, a church and vicarage, two pubs – one red-bricked, grand and looming called The Cat And Cracker and one quaint and Tudor called The Hogarth, and a few shops, including a butchers, a sweet-shop, a grocers, a newsagents, a wool shop and a bakers. There were maybe about 200 houses, two large unshapely playing fields, long empty roads that didn’t seem to lead anywhere but some other beach a few miles away or some long forgotten 1920s gravel car park, a Scouts hut, and different woods with various well worn paths through them (we never stuck to them).

This was a place where every single person knew who every other single person was. Even if you didn’t know them to talk to, you probably knew their name. I remember priding myself on knowing where every single person in the primary school lived, including the teachers. It was a very small community but in the days before social networking, before each family had a car, and before mobile phones, it was a good community. My mum used to get knocks on the door several times a day from friends just dropping in for a cuppa. More often than not in the summer, our door was left wide open and friends would knock then walk in. I don’t remember a single incident of crime in that village.

The village itself would never win any prizes for beauty. Not in a traditional sense. The place wasn’t developed, polished or preened but it was naturally very beautiful. What it did have was lots of green - trees, grass, wild flowers, nettles, brambles, the lot. All but the main paths and roads was overgrown. A lot of land was owned by the power station people who didn’t really give a second thought by them. There were abandoned car parks and roads and partially fenced off land that no one could remember why it was fenced off. None of it was standard or made much sense. There was so much to explore.

Each year, at the height of summer, there was a big celebratory village fare on the playing fields closest to the school. A large fairground arrived, floats went around the village laden with fancy-dressed kids, art competitions were held in the Village Hall, people did garage sales, things were done by the school. All sorts happened that day. A few decades earlier a wicker man was probably included in proceedings. The best part of that fair was when, on the first night, they gave about an hour of free rides to the kids. Apparently it was to ‘test out’ all the machines but in truth it was probably just a dry run and a way to get some word-of-mouth excitement going around the village. You’ll never beat the excitement got from being in a free fairground at dusk with all the lights flashing and all the different noises competing to be heard!

This was the ‘80s. These were the days before both parents had to go out to work to pay for two cars, or to pay for a childminder or to pay for all the technology that has come onto the market since. We had a black and white telly for years. I remember being surprised when we did get a colour telly because I saw things in the colour they were supposed to be in and I’d been envisaging them all this time in my own colour palette. It was only when Youtube came along that I first saw Trapdoor in the true colours that were, for one reason or another, intended.

People weren’t so hung up about technology in those days. It wasn’t really on people’s radars. Technology didn’t really equate entertainment. If you did have a bit of extra money, a video recorder, a very limited computer (games came on tape cassettes and took weeks to load) and a microwave were the most exciting things you could aim for. The main things people did in the home back then were watch telly, read books and listen to music. It sounds shit to you reading this now and I forgive you for that, but so will this era seem shit in 20 years time to the people with no experience of it. Reading was a great joy, not seen as nerdy (to use an Americanism) at all. I remember the most popular books of some time were the comic annuals (Beano, Dandy, Whizzer & Chips, Beezer, Topper), the Roald Dahl books and the Narnia books, usually after they introduced them to us in the school. A lot of the things we took for granted then are just forgotten oddities now – board games, homemade swings, matchbox cars, Action Man, etc.

Young boys like me went out to play. Staying in was a very girly thing to do. We’d leave after breakfast, get on our bikes and go off to find our friends. If they weren’t at home they’d be somewhere out and about. Usually we’d be going through some phase – building a tree house, digging a hole, racing our bikes down a hill, chasing sheep, or something else similar. There was always something. Your friends were your life in those days. You shared everything together. ‘Fun’ wasn’t something you did with a Playstation or PC, it was being with your mates getting up to stuff. You didn’t sit in school dreaming of sitting at home, in the dark, looking at a screen. You dreamt of being a mile from your house, in the sun, laughing and messing around with your mates.

Adults always found things to do too. Men were always working on engines or doing some sort of DIY. My dad and stepdad were always outside in the sun, with the car in the drive, garage door open, radio on, head under a bonnet. My mum was always doing some art or something else creative. The attitude back then was this - you’d have an idea then give it a go yourself. People seemed to be more capable of making do and keeping things going themselves. Now people are quick to buy something brand new or pay someone to come in to fix something. We used to bother all kinds of men. If we came across one painting his fence we’d stand and watch and ask questions. That was our Youtube.

We used to hate bad weather days. More often than not we’d still go out to play anyway. In those days kids were kicked out for the day because they were being too boisterous and getting under their parents’ feet. But usually back then we went out first thing in the morning and stayed out until hunger got the better of us. Then we’d come back, make a sandwich, drink a pint of water straight from the tap (no glass), and go back out again. Food was more basic too. Hardly anything came ready-made or in much packaging. By some glitch in the weather system it was always summer back then and most of us didn’t have to be in until it got dark. We used to just sit for hours somewhere out in the countryside or on the beach chatting. Loads of people did.

There was none of this hanging around by shops being intimidating like some teenagers like to do today, wearing sportswear, one usually straddling a bike. Adults were still very much in control of things back then. And fashion wasn’t something we gave a second thought to. That was another thing girls did. We just threw anything on – usually pulling it out the ironing pull, all wrinkled up, in order to do so. Houses weren’t Ikea showrooms either. Furniture was made better and looked more at home. Sometimes, you’d get the opportunity to go into someone else’s house who was a friend of a friend and it would be all dark and musty and mysterious in there and their mum or dad would be sat there watching telly and smoking. If you were lucky they’d give you a few pence to go and get some sweets.

Boys were real boys back then. We used to scrap (fight) all the time. It was the best way to resolve disputes (usually the dispute over who was the toughest). There was none of this stabbing each other with knives business though. We all had penknives but there was never ever any thought entertained of stabbing a person. We climbed anything we could find, we read comics and lent them to friends in exchange for the ones they had, we collected stickers and cards, went trespassing in people’s gardens and nicked fruit off their trees, played hide and seek, made ramps for our bikes. We weren’t into pop-culture at all. Only girls liked pop music and that sort of thing. I do, however, remember buying Look-in magazine for a few weeks but I can’t remember why. I think I just liked the idea of them reserving it for me in the newsagents like they did for my friend Stevie.

We didn’t have a youth club in that village but what we did have was Beavers, Cubs and Scouts which were much better – building things, tying things, penknives, lighting fires, all that boy stuff! My mum used to be involved in the Beavers which I was very proud of. When I was old enough I joined the Cubs but that was held in the school hall rather than the old damp smelly Scout Hut, out near the Big Woods, so it wasn’t as fun.

People were still very English then. Most of our slang we got from the Dandy or the Beano or from our parents. All the cartoons we watched were still English. I miss that undiluted purity. Today children are speaking Valspeak and street/gansta English without even knowing that’s what it is or how foreign it is. I used to sit on the beach and look in wonder across the water to Southend-On-Sea which had all these tall buildings glistening in the sun. I used to think it was San Francisco. My only real interest in America was a slight obsession with the Wild West. I even had a red and black cowboy outfit for some time.

Those were great days. Part of me still wants to dress up as a cowboy and go out, acting like an amateur Ray Mears, but that’s over. I’ve had my childhood and now that part of my life is finished just like I will have soon have had all my life and that will also be over. I think the best thing is to try to capture what we have left of that spirit, try to listen to that inner child and more importantly still – make sure we give our own children the most memorable childhood possible.