Many Worlds

I want to take a moment this week to recall what was for me a very special place at a very special time in my life. It was a village called Bitton, on the southernmost tip of Gloucestershire, and I lived there between 1971 and 1975.

It began when our dad got a teaching post at the school and we were all bundled onto a train for my first ever experience of exodus. We left the East London suburban semi where I’d been born six years earlier, and headed west.

A rented house came with the job, nestled all alone, right on the edge of the school playing field, slap bang on a busy road between Bristol and Bath. It was a fascinating old place with a chilly outhouse toilet (complete with resident woodlice), and an old air raid shelter out the back, from whose low roof I would one day leap in the certain faith that I could fly, my conviction quashed in one jarring impact to the coccyx.

Outside school hours, we had the run of the place. The smell of the central heating oil tank is still in my head, and the conifers in a rank down one side of the grounds, most of which were ripe for climbing and bruising shins. From the front tree I recall watching a putt-putt-putt diesel tipper truck working on a road maintenance job, fascinated by the exhaust, and careless of the evil it held, knowing only the joy of machinery as I invented in my head.

I took my first trip into writing, with my Book of Missions. And these included not only space ships, huge explosions and a mysterious martial art known as the Cumberland Grab, but also fantastic birds called Red Dragon Eagles. I have the stories even now, including the original book in which I scribbled them.

Our car, named Flossie, was a pale blue Vauxhall Viva. Our house had no drive or garage, and Dad would park in the playground out of hours. Sometimes when we drove home and were safely through the school gates, he would let me change gear from the passenger seat.

Dairy farmland lay behind the school, beyond a wall not quite easy enough to climb. But the beech tree in the far corner afforded an easy ascent, and we would sit and talk to the cattle. Bullocks and heifers I remember, practising mating for later life and making us giggle. They had personalities. A young bullock, ear-tagged 741, would always amble over to see us. To wonder whether I might one day have consumed his flesh occurred to me only recently. I no longer eat meat, but I did for most of my life.

My memory of this time and place is like an overpacked suitcase that can’t be shut and continually spits out familiar items. The branch line running through the fields, soon abandoned and made into a cycle path that took us almost all the way to Bath, ten pence in our pockets for the phone and fizzy drinks and sandwiches in our bags, picking blackberries all the way; the housemartins nesting in the school eaves; Match Target Lane, thus dubbed by us after we found a piece of clay pigeon bearing those words; walking over the fields to Keynsham to go shopping; carol singing at Pucklechurch (or, as we knew it, Chuckleperch); the “haha” around the big house east of us; sitting cross-legged on the herringbone-tiled wooden floor of the assembly hall, and later gathering there for school dinners; having my dad as a teacher; beard, sandals, guitar and Kumbaya my Lord of the Dance and The Streets of London; learning to ride a two-wheeler and toppling sideways into a cow pat; being constantly late for school despite living thirty seconds’ dash from the place; the smell of cut grass; losing my pop gun by the bridge of a winter stream; finding it a year later, all rusted; the yellow-painted metal garden gate, whose square grid taught me of depth perception as I played tricks with my own eyes while staring at it; the school gate, whose bars showed me polyrhythms as I struck them; the substation next to our house with the scary posters showing cartoon electrocution; the pear tree; Dad’s tomato plants; Mum’s ginger macaroons…

I could go on for an hour. How could it possibly have been only four years? Four short years of a life? It feels like an entire lifetime to me.

And finally, above all, I remember imagination.

We had only a grass field to play on, but to us it could be the Kingdom of Rola, or a plain upon which we were all horses, or once, a stage for Grandad’s 8mm camera tricks: The Case of the Teleporting Children. Putting on a play to the music of Mussorgsky. And the sycamore tree, showering us with helicopter keys year in and year out, had sloping roots, perfect for Matchbox car ramps – and a special knot in the bark, which my older sister swore was there, and would open the trunk and lead you to Narnia, if you could only find it…

Of course, I never did. But, in hindsight, with everything we had at that time, and in that place, why would we need a another fantasy land?