Gralen's Growing Garden of Garbage

My entry into the world of h2g2 commences this the twenty seventh day of February 2010. I am not quite sure what I am here for, or what I might use this space for, but I am sure it will be momentous, mesmerising, and mellifluous if recited by melancholic angels.


A POTTED AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Chapter 1 – I am Born

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children opens with a punch. The central protagonist tells of the time of his birth being exactly at the moment of India’s independence. I would like to begin my personal story similarly. However, the truth is I was born somewhere around mid morning on the tenth of January 1947 in a nondescript hospital ward in Bromley by Bow. Within the sound of Bow Bells: a Cockney.

I think that I was as skimpily built then as I have remained for the whole of my life. I believe that the general medical opinion around at the time was that I should either have been a lot heavier for my length, or a lot shorter for my birth weight. I retained that sand-in-the-face, seven-stone-weakling physique throughout my painful school years and beyond. I remained similarly self-conscious about my facial features, and, particularly during my formative years, always suspected that the nursing fraternity's comments on my body mass ratio must have been eclipsed by their astonishment at a three-inch nose on a four-inch face.

It could not have been a pretty sight, and my mother probably should have been congratulated on her temerity in being able to spring us both from the hospital without some form of wildlife license.


Chapter 2 – I Gain Consciousness

I don’t know whether we actually lived in B by B, but I assume so as I was, reportedly, born there. But I don’t think I actually woke up from my birth-sleep until we arrived in Buckhurst Hill.

I remember the cottage, the railway that ran behind our garden, the tiny school, our wind-up black-box record player (78s), the box that stuck a nail in my forehead, the black range nearly going up in a fat fire, the 6’ x 6’ rug that almost fitted our entire living room, chickens and eggs, the jumping cracker that chased me down our neighbors back yard on Guy Fawkes night, brief moments of childhood happiness; oh, and my dad buggering off back to Portsmouth when I was about four or five.

Memorable, and vaguely memorized, people from that time include: the lovely Miss Speeds (2); the somewhat older Geraldine from next door who insisted on showing me her chest; Geraldine’s family who always had more than us; a family down the road who always seemed to have more than us; a few kids I played with from the corner by the school who had more toys than me (easy); oh, and an ‘uncle’.

I don’t know why we left, probably something to do with the fact that the term one-parent family hadn’t been invented in those days, and we were just mum with monster and rent to pay.


Chapter 3 – Loughton

A flat. Not so much a flat as a couple of rooms in a tatty old house at the bottom of Traps Hill (associations with Dick Turpin). I remember it as a really nasty place, with flaking distemper walls, one stinking toilet shared by the whole house (cut-up newspaper on a nail), a smelly and precarious paraffin heater, and very dodgy and ineffective gas lighting. I think we shared a kitchen, and baths were in a tin tub in the living room. Also see my poem – The Room.

There were some good memories though. The garden was great: half was just unkempt, the other half jungle-like. Brilliant when you’re a kid. I remember the High Road being lined with people for Queen Lizzie’s coronation (1953). She didn’t come by herself of course, but there was a parade of sorts – and us kids all got a souvenir mug and stuff. I had a best friend called Nicholas. But I seem to remember his mum got fed up because I was always going round there for tea after school, and we never seemed to reciprocate. Or perhaps we did reciprocate, but once my pal set eyes on our gaff he decided that cholera was too great a risk to continue the relationship.

Entertainment was: the radio (it had two batteries, and one was like a small car battery that had to be taken somewhere or other to be recharged), free cricket in the field down the road in the summer, and 78’s on our old wind-up. Mum wasn’t too impressed one day when she got home from work to find that, as we’d run out of needles (needles = pre-styli, styli) I had substituted one from her sewing box and was using it on her latest Mantovani. Mum worked at a café down the road (I have never, and I mean never, had a fried egg sandwich since that tasted half as good as I remember the one I had in there in circa 1954 tasting), and the local cinema. Her working at the cinema meant I got to see almost every film released. It had just the one screen of course, but three programme changes a week: each one with at least two films. I saw Lady and the Tramp at least ten times (1955).

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