Author: Moobs

Today London is being lashed by wind and rain. The streets around our temporary home are empty and the only noise is the hissing of cars up and down the Kingston Road. Penny is out riding her horse and trying to avoid thinking about preparing her case for tomorrow. The cat is lying stretched out on the carpet at the top of the staircase sleeping and snoring with a soft whistle. I am nursing a cold and wishing I was by the sea.

Until I went to university I lived by water. From ages three to seven I lived in Gravesend, a town with a viking name in the lower tidal reaches of the Thames. I remember it as a gloomy marshy place in whose embrace, with a startling flash of glamour, Pocohontas had died. For a time it had enjoyed a reputation as good place for Londoners to holiday. It was sufficiently removed from London that the sea had diluted the effluent in the Thames and removed the risk of Cholera. Families paddled in the mudbanks or stood wind-blown on the salt marsh as tall ships moved creaking up and down the great river travelling to and from the outer reaches of the empire. Charles Dickens had a home there and the bleakness of the Kent river coast features repeatedly in his works. It is, for instance, by Gravesend that he has Pip row Magwitch in the hope of getting him aboard a steamer in Great Expectations.

At age seven I moved to Frinton-on-sea. Frinton is well-known in South East England as an eccentric bastion of middle-class values. It developed from a small village from the turn of the last century and peaked in the 1920s. It was a place for senior civil servants and bankers to retire to. Grand houses and still grander hotels had been built. It was bounded by the railway and to get into the town you had to cross a level crossing with a gate that had to be opened and closed by the station master every time a train passed. Within the gates no public houses were allowed (though there is one now). Instead what flourished was tennis and golf, drinks at the Memorial Club and Sunday School. Frinton has a long esplanade with a greensward running two or so miles in length. A steep slope runs from the greensward to the sea and strung along the slope are lines of carefully-maintained wooden beach huts.

As a child I adored the sea. When school stopped for summer we would dash down the seaweed covered steps onto the shingle and kick through the tidepools at the water’s edge. We would sit and let the green North Sea waves break over our heads and shriek as they lifted us and pushed up the beach. The more adventurous would swim to the rafts chained to the seabed a 100 metres or so from shore and lie on our backs watching the clouds dissipate in a sky so blue it hurt to look at it.

Come July university students would arrive to teach bible stories to us and lead us through town on fancy-dress treasure hunts.

As I grew older I became fonder still of other seasons. The walk along the seawall in the aftermath of a Christmas gale with grey waves breaking hard and throwing spray 10 yards into the air left you breathless and with skin stinging with salt. I loved the early autumn when the dusk gathered earlier and earlier and I would sit with friends in the wooden shelters on Victorian benches and we would let the breaking of the waves dictate the pace of our breathing. There in front of us was a body of water made up of countless molecules all in ceaseless agitation; the whole sea dragged by the moon and yet it could somehow communicate only calm.

Landlocked now and on days like today I miss it terribly.

My Criminology and Penology tutor once asked why we don’t punish children. We students started scratching our heads and, before we all choked to death in a blizzard of dandruff, he gave us the answer: children don’t know right from wrong.

That answer sat uneasily with my own experience as what I remembered of my childhood was dominated by regular updates from my parents about just how naughty I was being. I think kids generally do know what is naughty and what isn’t without too much prompting but what they don’t appreciate is just how serious the consequences of their actions can be.

I might as well confess immediately: I was a juvenile delinquent. I went through a phase which started somewhere after my third birthday and came to an end somewhat after my fourth. Like most criminals I began with some mindless vandalism. My friend Nigel and I were playing in the background when he spotted that the Big Bad Wolf had appeared in Mrs Devis’ garden next door. We crept to the chain link fence and satisfied ourselves that it was him. He seemed to be sniffing the air as yet unaware of our presence. Of course he might have been pretending not to see us. As the stories we heard at Nursery School made perfectly clear, he was a devious creature.

We looked around the garden for the weapons that we knew we would need. There was a pile of half bricks that seemed ideal. With as much stealth as a three year with a half-brick can muster, we crept to the low chain-link fence that divided our garden from Mrs Devis’ and hurled the bricks as hard as we could. They plopped into the Mrs Devis’ beautifully-maintained lawn a few inches beyond the fence. The Big Bad Wolf was unharmed but now roused and vengeful. Panicked, we ran back for more ammunition. Over the course of half an hour or so of staggering and lobbing, the pile of half bricks had clunked and bounced its way onto the lawn next door and the Big Bad Wolf was vanquished. We headed off for tea awarding each other imaginary medals for bravery.

(Portrait of a Serial Killer – that’s me on the right)

An hour later I was confronted by my irate father who had been on the receiving end of a lengthy and vividly worded complaint from our neighbour. He was discinclined to accept that we had acted in self-defence and that Mrs Devis’ garden had, for a short while, been home to child-eating wolf of notorious cunning and terrifying dentition.

Where were our parents whilst we were saving lives with building materials? The answer is that they were sat in each other’s kitchens smoking and talking which is all parents ever seemed to do in those days. Children were put out the door and left to get on with things to an extent that would terrify modern parents and have social services patrolling the suburbs with a big net. Usually we got onto our little bicycles, found a hill with a base thick with nettles and let nature take its course.

One consequence of this enforced community of the tiny is that you had no real choice with whom you played. One child in our street was particularly unwelcome: Jane East. In the first instance Jane was a girl and any little boy knew that that was unforgivable. They were soppy and obsessed with ponies. They tended to break things and tell tales. Jane was not just a girl; she was a noisy, bossy girl. We made a deputation to our parents and asked to be spared any further visits from Jane and received a pithy lecture about the need to get on with each other and not to interrupt the smoking and the gossiping without a very much better reason.

This left us with no choice but to take matters into our own hands. Jane would have to go. My first thought was the red berries on the bush at the front of the house three doors down. They were a bright red and, when crushed, squirted out a dirty yellow paste that we had been warned would lead to instantaneous death if eaten. We offered some to Jane. She looked at them dubiously. It took perhaps 5 minutes of persuasion. She lifted one to her lips and we held our breath. She bit at it and our eyes-widened. Nothing happened. She tried another. Nothing happened. She consumed them by the handful and nothing happened. Foiled.

Then we had another idea. If you put soap in water and stirred it hard, it looked like milk. Or at least it did for a few seconds before it separated like curds and whey. Mum found us gathered around the sink looking guilty. She eyed us supiciously and asked us what we were up to. “Washing our hands, Mum” I said. She knew that couldn’t be true but all the evidence seemed to point in that direction. Four pairs of young eyes gazed back at her. She shook her head, sighed and went back to cigarettes and coffee in the kitchen. I stirred as hard as I could and then ran to Jane whom we had left sat on the front lawn. “Here – drink this” I urged “It’s milk”. Jane may have been as irritating as wire-wool underwear but she was no idiot. She harumphed and went back to smashing toy cars with a rock leaving us standing thwarted and clutching a cup of soapy water.

Then came the call for tea and off we trotted. Fish fingers and beans for everyone and my career as killer was over before it had begun.

 

Pop music has posed a lot of questions but provided very few answers. It falls to us to fill in the blanks.

Q: “How can we sleep when our beds are burning?” (“Beds are burning” – Midnight Oil)

A: You can’t. Furthermore, you would be well advised to evacuate the bedroom.

Q: “What becomes of the broken-hearted?” (“What becomes of the broken-hearted?” – Jimmy Ruffin)

A: Commonly they form unsatisfactory relationships with rebound candidates or else slide into self-pity and alcohol abuse.

Q: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64?” (“64” – The Beatles)

A: No. I intend to leave that to Social Services.

Q: “Should I stay or should I go?” (“Should I stay or should I go?” – The Clash)

A: Your cab is here.

Help me put an end to all this rhetorical nonsense. Leave me some questions and answers in the comments.