Page 87 - Exile-ebook

86 AN EXILE OF THE MIND TIDDLERS IN A JAM JAR 87

Photo: Frederick Wilfred.

Home-made go-cart made from pram wheels and scraps. Coal was delivered by horse and cart.

a stranger in khaki, brought home As a peacetime bonus I was taken “Geroff you little shit, you won’t get The backyard was no place for the
with him breadline poverty and to a strange man in scarlet who nothin’.” dynamics of boyhood combat. Instead,
a hubble bubble water pipe from lifted me unwillingly to a bouncing That day the moon lost its magic we played in the ragged ruins of
the Middle East. Many demobbed knee. I greeted glazed eyeballs and became a lump of rock. It was bombed houses. Flowered wallpaper
servicemen were pushed to the back squinting through woolly whiskers. a Grinch of all my Christmases to fragments fluttered at half mast in
of job queues in the wake of those A gap in the yellowing curls exhaled come as my mother later rocked in the breeze, on crumbling walls amidst
who had stayed home. a boozy mist through tobacco- the throes of an intolerant religion the rubble where families once lived,
stained molars as he promised me which believed celebrations were a laughed and cried. Within this fairy
presents never imagined. Years of cardinal sin. ring playground of broken humanity
scarcity and doubts surfaced as I The cobbled street plunged in rimmed a yawning bomb crater
sat in knee-jiggled thought on this scary descent to the blacksmith where shabby boy soldiers clashed
squiffy Santa’s knee. below. A death-defying track for with stick rifles and stone grenades.
Something didn’t seem right. I primitive go-carts, homemade and No modern computer game
tugged inquisitively at the woolly brakeless, fashioned from a hotch- could match these fierce battles of
beard. Elastic stretched like a bow potch of wood scraps and pram neighbouring children divided into
and slapped against astonished wheels. We made our own enter- friend and foe. We dragged ourselves
eyebrows. The boozy apparition tainment from whatever odds and homewards, battle grimed and clothes
My father home from the war. growled in my ear for no one to hear, ends we could find. shredded, to sleep the sleep of heroes.