Jumbled but still there (Childhood Memories)

Member Name: miriamb

Product:	Childhood Memories
Date:	23/08/02 (259 review reads)
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This is likely to be one of those rambling, stream of consciousness type ops. It's so difficult to try and pinpoint x memories that define childhood, and hats off to those who've managed to give their memories some order. Mine seem to be more of a blur, but to try to structure it somehow, I'll keep it in the town where I was born and spent the first 5 years. So if you don't mind, I'd like to set the scene quickly for you...

47 Ramsbury Road, St Albans, Hertfordshire. I don't remember much about the house, just odd things that probably come more from photographs than memory. One thing I do remember is the back door that went out from the kitchen into the back garden, and the spice rack on the wall behind the opened door. See, I had a dreadful nightmare about a Baboushka doll (you know the wooden Russian dolls with increasingly smaller dolls inside) that lived on said spice rack. The oven was on fire and I had to get out, but I couldn't get past this Baboushka doll. Of course that was a dream, but the door did open onto the garden, and the spice rack was there.

We had a lovely garden, steps that went down a rockery onto a lawn. Down the side of the lawn were random stone slabs forming a kinda path, and between the slabs grew forget-me-nots. And a buddleia bush at the side that attracted butterflies. And a pond, which was home to newts and tadpoles, and inevitably frogs, and had fish, and maybe leeches although that may have been my dad's way of stopping me and my younger brother from getting so close we might fall in.

My dad was good at that, telling stories. My great uncle and aunt had a dairy farm in Cornwall, and as you can probably imagine, this created a great deal of manure and waste, I think it's called silage. Well anyway there was a silage pit, or heap, or something, I remember it was really big and really smelly and generally grim. The first time we went exploring, my dad told my brother and me
that only the other day, a young farmhand had slipped and drowned in the silage, so we shouldn't get too close and should probably avoid it completely. He elaborated the story with our questions about how you could drown in the stuff, and it worked, we didn't go near the silage again. Today, I don't believe for a second that anyone did die in that silage pit, but the story definitely struck sufficient fear for us to stay away.

Another time, less believably, he told us we should eat our carrots because that's what our mum had been force fed when she had been a fighter pilot in the Second World War, for her night vision, you see. My mum wasn't born until probably around 1950 and I don't seem to remember her being particularly amused. I remember my dad alternating with earnest deadpan insistence and deep belly-laughing as he reeled off tales of my mum's successes in destroying Nazi buildings and operations.

My dad's laugh. He still has the same laugh, of course, a deep, booming, bassy laugh, utterly infectious. And how he laughs so much sometimes his face screws up and he just kinda shakes silently, and tears come to his eyes. He has always been like this. Even if sometimes you don't find what he's laughing at that funny, the fact that he's laughing makes you laugh. This is why I still have fond memories of the Two Ronnies or Allo Allo, not because I necessarily found them funny, but because they made my dad, and therefore me, laugh.

Anyway, back to Ramsbury Road. The road's actually quite a small cul-de-sac, and was, looking back, a real Ramsey Street kinda set-up. Everyone knew everybody else, and all us kids used to play together. There was Daniel and Vicky and their Red Setter about six doors up, and American Dinah next door to them, and Dutch Marieke and her brother Ben across the road, and the big Kesner family next-door to them, and Nick and his little brother (whose name escapes me) f
urther down the road. Next-door to the Kesners lived an old man and his wife called - and get ready for this - Mr and Mrs Punch. I only went there a few times but their house always smelt of pipe tobacco and they always had a tin of pink wafer biscuits. To this day, the smells of sweet, faded tobacco smoke and pink wafer biscuits are interchangeable, although I'm not really sure that pink wafer biscuits have a smell...

Marieke was my best friend, there was only about six months between us I think. Her grandfather gave her this incredible doll's house, furnished with miniature tables and chairs and beds and ornaments, and carpets, and with working light switches and everything. I coveted that doll's house with a passion, but my mum told me I couldn't have one as I'd only break it. Thinking back, it must have cost an absolute fortune, it really was amazing, and yes, breaking something like that would have been a real shame. Saying that, I don't think Marieke ever did.

Anyway, my dad knew I wanted a doll's house, and bless him, he built me one. Standing about a meter off the floor, with three floors and stairs, and papered on the outside with scaled-down brickwork, and a chimney on the roof, it was so, so cool. It didn't have the same expensive miniature candelabras and dinner service that Marieke's had, but it was carpeted throughout, and the rooms were all decorated differently from each other, and it was connected to a chunky square battery so you could switch on the little lights. That was such a great present, possibly the best I have ever had, thinking about it.

Only possibly the best because a few years later my dad built my brother and me a spaceship. You could sit in it and there was a control panel with dials and buttons and switches that might make some lights flash, or emit a sound, or sometimes do nothing at all. It had a door you could close behind you and lock (for safety obviously) and a
windscreen made of clear plastic. Painted metallic silver and big enough for the pair of us to both sit in, that was another wonderful present courtesy of my dad. I think the spaceship now lives in my 22 year old little brother's bedroom, probably hidden under all his junk, bless him.

Anyway, sorry, back to St Albans. As I said, it was very Ramsay Street, so much so that I would quite often disappear in the mornings over to a friend's house if my parents weren't up and I was bored. I remember having pancakes for breakfast at Marieke's, her mum making piles of the things. Apparently my parents got up on a fair few occasions to find a chair by the front door and the door slightly ajar, and me gone. I must have worried them, at least the first time, but then again it was such a safe little street.

One time I really did worry them was an afternoon when I'd gone up to Daniel and Vicky's, just up the road. Daniel and Vicky weren't in though, and I recall being told by someone (can't remember who) that they'd gone to the lake. Now, St Albans has a lake, with ducks and I think swans, which is where they'd gone. But in my little 3 year old mind, they hadn't actually gone there at all. You see, very close to where we lived was some sort of marshland. Looking on a map now, it seems to be the edge of a big golf course, but it was definitely wetland, not very big I don't think, but wetland nonetheless. So, I decided this must be where they were, and off I wandered. I found the place, and wandered and wandered and couldn't find them at all. Eventually I found a family, not the one I was looking for, mind, and asked them if they'd seen Daniel and Vicky. The family was quite rightly concerned that a little girl was on her own, and somehow, not quite sure how, they took me home and I was reunited with my frantic mother. It turned out that a small child had gone missing from that area only very recently, and
of course she'd been tearing her hair out with worry. But, see, I'd only wanted to find Daniel and Vicky...

When Charles and Diana got married, we had a street party. I remember this quite well, despite being only 4 at the time. Everybody in my street put tables out with food, sandwiches, sausages on sticks, punch, maybe even a barbeque, and there were banners and balloons hung from houses across the street. Saying that, I don't recall what actually happened, except that there was a fancy dress parade for the kids. I was a witch/medieval princess with a conical hat and a gown made from sparkly black fabric, my little brother was a page or something like that, a pink velour tunic with white ruffles down the front. He must have only been two and a half, looking at the dates, and he cried and cried and cried and really didn't want to wear the outfit at all. Not too surprising really, don't think I would've done either. Even in the photographs he's sulking, but I definitely remember him making such a fuss about the ruffles on the front being scratchy. I don't think he was even aware that it might look silly! I loved my outfit though, I think I was in my romantic flower fairy stage, and the gown and hat were suitably impressive. To me at least.

Talking of celebrations, some of you know that my birthday is on October 31st, which again some of you will know is Halloween. So the few birthdays that I remember in St Albans followed a certain format. First, there would be a birthday party at my house (can't remember too much about these), then everyone would go home quickly to get changed. And then, in the early evening as it was starting to get dark, we'd regroup and go trick or treating. I think I used to throw a bit of a tantrum when it came to dividing the treats after we'd worked our way up and down the road. Well, it was my birthday so surely all the sweets had to be for me right?! In fact, I think I always u
sed to end up with the lion's share so my tantrum-ing and sulking must have worked. Parents will agree to anything for a quiet life, eh?

Oh I could go on and on here, about the back gardens that you could get through from one to the other if you went right down to the ends. Or the gooseberry bushes that grew in Dinah's garden. Or the little bushy path that led from the end of my road to a bigger road and that the bogeyman lived there. Or the time that the toys from TV's Play School came to visit my actual playschool. Or the first time I saw a squashed hedgehog, or how I learnt to recognise deadly nightshade and Painted Ladies, or saw snow. Or how the theme music to Last of the Summer Wine still makes me want to fall asleep on the sofa in front of the telly. Or the corner shop that sold Mojo chews, or the time when I inadvertently smuggled a bag of marshmallows through the Presto checkout and then had to take them back and apologise to the girl on the till... And look, a paragraph written already!

Rather than give you all that though, and despite all the words that have led up to this point, my childhood memories can I think be summed up quite easily. They were very safe, and consequently full of life and colour and energy. I know the late '70s aren't very long ago at all, so I guess the facts that people left their front doors open and cars unlocked and didn't immediately panic if their child had left the house first thing, are evidence that the road I grew up in was an incredibly unthreatening place. Maybe it's because my memories are childlike and therefore very naïve, but I've never known a community like that since. Happy, happy days.


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And yes, yes, I know I am 'on a break' but this one wanted to be posted!

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