Remember the First Time? - A Collection of Childhood Memories

Introduction

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen

– from Louis MacNiece’s poem, “Autobiography”.

For me, there is something especially magical about writing that arises from childhood memories – attempts to recapture a world that was so much bigger and full of the unknown, where so many new territories still lay undiscovered. Often such writings chart the first incursions into these virgin landscapes. The pathways of memory, whether or not they have been well trodden, are laid down in such a way as to lead us back to those times and places where we were opened up to intensities of experience and emotion for the first time.

I was delighted to be given this opportunity of working with a group focussed on childhood memories, especially as the timing coincided with intense work on my own autobiography. The chemistry in the group really worked; each person’s writing grew and flourished in an atmosphere of mutual inspiration, fascination and encouragement, and we also had a lot of fun on those gradually lightening evenings in the QueenSpark writers’ room. It soon became apparent that everyone’s work had the potential to be developed into a whole book. By the end of our ten sessions together I think we were all sorry to part company, eager to write more, and to read more of the stories we’d heard unfolding as winter gave way to spring.

I hope that readers of this book will also have their appetites whetted by these slices of eight very different lives. I hope that, like me, you’ll be left wanting more, and that each of these writers will be encouraged by this first foray into print to venture further and deeper into those lost worlds that we’ve all grown up out of.

River Jones

This is a Magic Story

Karen Monaghan

Deep, deep in the night
someone touches my hand.
Wake up! Wake up! says Little Ted,
Dick’s already there!

Awash with moonlight, he sits at the top
of the stairs in his Batman pyjamas,
knees hunched up under his chin.
Do you think they’re fast asleep? I ask
Yes – I’ve heard dad snoring.

Who’s going first, mouths Little Ted,
Me, me! I blurt.
Holding out my nightdress,
I fly to the bottom of the steep, steep staircase,
landing with a plop on the doormat.

Ted next- a little dance as usual and off – flying fast.
Now Dick – toes gripping the edge of the top step,
he makes a slow motionless flight,
landing gracefully.

After an unknown time, we go back to bed.
In the morning, excited whispering.
It’s a pity it’s not wider – we could fly together!
Nods of agreement.
Never mind, we’ll try next time!

Untitled

Celine West

1 It was the puppet’s fault. Coin operated, behind a see through screen in a little pink box, a clown puppet with dangly arms and legs. It would dance when you put money in the slot at the top. It was on the front seat of the car. I was sitting up on the armrest in the middle of the backseat, like usual. Mummy was driving, taking me to school. This was a suburb of Lagos, the roads were bad, people said the potholes sometimes got so big that in the rainy season whole cars were lost in them. I once saw a tanker with its back end sticking up out of a flooded road by Tin Can Island so they were probably right.

The car was a big silver Peugeot 505. We went over a bump or one of those little holes, something. The puppet box slipped from the seat down into the space around the gear stick. I was about to reach forward and pick it up but Mummy had already looked down at it and in looking down had turned the wheel, just a nudge following her gaze and the car was slowly keeling over on to its side.

I drifted through the space between the seats and landed in my Mum’s lap; it was so quick and slow all at the same time. After that I watched everything from outside myself. I was somewhere over on the other side of the road as I watched Mummy pushing me up towards the door above us. People from nowhere had suddenly gathered, arms reaching down to lift me out, a woman holding me against her hot wrapper, my arms around her neck, sweat in the folds of dark brown skin. I watched the people trying to comfort me, speaking in their Pidgin English: “Ok missa, ok. Mamma ok.”

It was more than the puppet; there was a lamp post fallen down in the long grass that edges the roads. Pavement is something I only discover once I live in England, along with how drawing on it with bits of chalk dug up from the garden is a great pastime. By the time we get home Daddy has been told about what happened. We walk into the huge downstairs, the ceiling goes all the way up to the roof here. There is only half an upstairs and from up there you can look down at people and they don’t know. Daddy sits at the corner bar, red leather topped bar stools.

“So, is the car alright?”

“God, is that all you can say?”

“Well I can see you two are fine,” his smile is too big for his words, “so what’s the problem?”

Mummy is carrying me, with my legs around her hips.

“The company will sort it out won’t they.” She puts me down, pats my bottom, the signal. I run along the pale blue carpet runway to the spiral staircase and up into my realm, leaving them to say whatever they say when I am not around.

Beneath such moments are situations and feelings I would have no comprehension of for many years. He had an affair when she was pregnant with me. She swelled and sweated through the humid months and suspicion grew alongside my body; rumours in the background of coffee mornings, a friend looking away at a party. She was insulted that he thought he could fool her, disgusted at the banality of it, an expatriate businessman and another businessman’s wife. There was no direct confrontation, she set a trap. He went to meet this woman in England and her husband was in the Arrivals hall. He returned silent, not denying but not discussing. She considered leaving him for a brief time but single motherhood was not for her. They patched it up, smoothed the surface in silence.

2 Up in my bedroom, I am thinking about the cat that walks along the high walls around the house, a Siamese cat. There is broken glass embedded in the tops of all the walls. The night watchmen come into the garden through a gate between the bricks. They wear long straight dresses with trousers showing at the bottom and close-fitting flat hats. Their clothes are plain milky colours that show in the dark. They spread out grassy mats in the back garden, kneel down, bending right down to touch their hands and faces to the mats. They bend and sit up, bend and sit up. I am told they are Muslims and this is why they do this but the word “Muslim” means nothing to me. I don’t see them very often, I don’t look out into the dark very much, the curtains are closed.

I am in bed when suddenly I cannot hear any noise at all. There is a power cut, as there often is and the constant humming of the air-conditioner has stopped. Without it we will all soon be sweating and twisting under the sheets. The windows are opened and with the dead air come mosquitoes. I have heard of the mysterious malaria that they carry, a girl in my class, her father died from it. We must sleep under old-fashioned mosquito netting, draped down like a tent from a ring in the wall above the big bed. There is none above my bed so my mother makes a place for me to sleep out of some squashy pillows and her thinly quilted dressing gown. This nest is next to the edge of her side of the bed and the mosquito net is tucked under the outside. The dressing gown is white with pink flowers spreading over it in clumps and big flat pink buttons; it smells only of her and I love this smell and being near her in the silence and the dark.

I adopt this bed sometimes when I am ill, as with earache, which I get from diving to the bottom of a swimming pool over and over again. I like diving down and swimming between people’s legs as they stand with their feet apart. When I can persuade my father to do this he tricks me by closing his legs around my body. There is a delicious feeling of danger – will I escape before the air runs out, I might die laughing underwater – a thrill that I always fall for in the safety of knowing he will never let me be hurt.

3 Daddy often romps with me. Lying on his back he bends his legs and bounces me. Standing up he spins me round by my arms, picks me up so I’m upside down and all my hair is hanging down to the ground. At parties he dances with me like he would with Mummy, except he’s holding me up. I want to show him off to my friends, I get him to spin them round too, they really laugh then.

After work, Daddy plays tennis at the Ikoyi club. He wears white and his arms are really brown and hairy. He gets very sweaty. He tries to teach me sometimes. After tennis he sits at the side of the dusty courts and we do a deal. I give him some of my Sprite and he makes us both shandy with his Star lager. Star lager is Nigerian, everyone drinks it. At the Ikoyi club you get drinks at the straw huts, green glass bottles of Sprite or Seven-Up with a straw in the top. The taste of Sprite is always the taste of hot afternoons at the Ikoyi club. When I am first in England, they don’t have Sprite or Fanta orange, which is very odd. Once we lived in England, my father wasn’t there. Well, sometimes he was, but then he had to go to his head office in Manchester. When he was at home on a weekend he sat in an armchair and watched Grandstand. He was the only one who ever pulled the thick sea green curtains, so the sun didn’t shine on the TV. He put a bet on and he usually asked me to pick a horse’s name. I felt funny about this as Grandma said horseracing was awful and the poor horses and it was ungentlemanly, unlike snooker.

When he wasn’t there he sent me sweets and when he came to stay he brought clothes, tie-dyed wrap around skirts and calendars made of material that they made in his factory. He complained to Mum that I was getting fat but she just said he shouldn’t spoil me. He called me “Missy” –

“Come here Missy, I’ve got something for you.”

“Now then Missy, don’t cheek your father”-this was meant to tell me off but I could never take it seriously.

He didn’t say much, really, it wasn’t like with Mum and Grandma and me, with Grandma saying “quieter, quieter, you have a voice like a foghorn”

“The drama teacher at school says I have natural projection.” “Is that what they call it?” Grandma said.

4 At my Grandma’s flat in Denmark Villas I have a slice of homemade bread and honey for breakfast every day, sitting on the top of a blue, paint-flecked stepladder that acts as one of those high stools people have in their kitchens. I sit at the kitchen counter in front of the window and look at the trees in the car park. They had leaves but now they are bare and spiky. The kitchen is shadowy compared to the brighter sitting room behind me. There is a radio on the counter, a small oblong with wood around the speaker. It plays piano-violin classical music all the time, except when dreary voices mumble odd names. I miss my tape player that I had in Lagos. I had two tapes then and my favourite song was Rockin’ Robin by the Jackson Five. I tell my Grandma this as I think she will like it as robins are her favourite birds. She loves birds and keeps nuts in orange string parcels on her little balcony to feed them. Except she hates pigeons. She keeps all the paper bags from shopping at the greengrocer’s and when a pigeon lands on the balcony to eat the nuts she blows up a bag like a brown balloon, twists the opening shut and slaps her hands together to burst the bag with a loud pop. All of the birds fly away.

When we get ready in the morning, she draws on her eyebrows in brown pencil, narrow and high up her face. She holds onto the chrome towel rail to do bends and stretches, only letting go to touch her toes. She is very proud that she can do this. She gargles and snorts water. This is good for you. She has a daily morning bath in tepid water. (Once, at our house, she lay so still that the cat jumped in and they were both in shock for some time after). She has a pale yellow shower cap to protect her short dark dyed hair. My own hair is getting longer but I always put it up myself. I brush it myself and I choose from the neutral school hairbands. It has to be a ponytail though, as I can’t do plaits. I am taken to school by my friend Sarah’s Mum. Every morning I wait outside in my bottle green uniform and the silver estate car with panting dogs in the back pulls up. There are hairs everywhere and I brush my coat with my hands as soon as I get out.

At school we make pictures of fireworks. I watched them on Bonfire night when I was supposed to be sleeping. My bedroom window looks out onto the backs of other squat blocks of flats and the fireworks were bright above them all. With our plastic coated aprons on, we brush black paint over unreal colours in wax crayon. It looks nothing like it was.

This life with Grandma started in Gatwick airport. We three are inside the airport, me, my mum and my Grandma. I keep looking down at the dark grey floor tiles covered in grey speckles. There are grey metal structures everywhere round the edge of the wide shiny floor and people moving around in a haze of purpose. I am limply holding this white fluffy thing, which has a long loop of thick string attached to it. It’s a muff, for warming your hands, I’ve just been given it by my mother, I have no idea what it is, I haven’t really had time to think about it. This unknown thing is a horrifying consolation gift for her departure. I cry. I feel uncontrollable. I don’t want to cry, as I do I want to stop. In my chest I am swallowing a stream of tiny sharp objects.

I cannot understand why this is happening. She tells me so often how special I am. We have never been parted. And yet, here is undeniable action, she is going back to Africa and I am staying here with Grandma. These things cannot be reconciled. The confusion hides sharp, untouchable anger. All of this outrages me.

Three years later, by the time I am ten, the memory of this time has fixed itself in a certain position. I don’t find out until much later that this memory is wrong. The memory is that I spent at least a whole school term living with my Grandma, much longer than the month that it was. And I don’t remember it any differently now, even though I have been told it wasn’t that way. There is no memory of my mother’s return. She says, she didn’t know then and still doesn’t why she went. Obligation, she says. She cried on the plane. My father says, you should have been sent to boarding school.

Ferry to Dublin

Karen McMahon

We had to get up at 3am to begin the seven-hour drive to Holyhead to catch the ferry to Dublin. The dog was drugged so that he slept all the way (when he wasn’t being sick that was – a horrible side effect of the drugs). He would then be hidden in a large shopping bag for the ferry ride as my parents were never sure of the quarantine laws and were not taking any chances. Once aboard we would take turns to sneak the dog onto a remote part of the deck so he could go to the loo.

The thought of the ferry was a lot more exciting than the actual reality. My dad was always at pains on these occasions to look after my mum’s well-being which annoyed her more than anything.

“Don’t be fighting over the seats” he’d say “let your mother sit there she’ll have more legroom.”

“Leave them alone, I’m fine here go on sit down.”

As soon as we set sail the shutters would come up on the bar and my Dad would head straight for it. “Right, what’s everyone having?”

“Jesus I don’t know how you can think of drink with all this swaying going on.”

“Will I get you a cup of tea Mag?”

“Only if its in a proper cup.”

“God what’s that smell,” asked my sister.

“I can’t smell anything.”

“It smells like dog sick,” she said, “oh there it is!”

“Where?”

“On your arm!”

If my Dad was in a really good mood we’d get shandy but not long after you’d finished sipping it you had to negotiate the torturous trip to the loo. Swaying backwards, forwards, sideways, god help you if you were in a hurry. We used to take bets on who would make it before throwing up and then when you finally got there you had to try desperately not to look at the sinks clogged up with vomit and paper towels whilst holding your breath against the stench of iodine mixed with sick.

Anyway, once the drink had kicked in my Dad would take us all out on deck for a breath of sea air. To say it was bracing would be an understatement. You had to use all your might to push against the gale force wind that took your breath away and threatened to sweep you over the side and I would make sure to hang onto the railings for dear life. On the few occasions that the sea was calm I could spend ages staring into the foamy mass leaving a trail behind us although it always worried me slightly that you could look around as far as possible and only see water. Then just as you were about to relax the sound of the horn would blast in your eardrums. A sound that loud indicated a dire emergency as far as we were concerned and so we would turn and run back inside as fast as we could. I remember my sister Val being so panicked by this sound that she would even push women with a young babies out of the way in her haste to escape it. She gave up going on deck altogether when a man got sick into the wind and it blew back in her face. I don’t remember my mother ever coming on deck with us or even going on her own.

When we finally arrived in Dublin it was hard not to relax while the adults were consuming large quantities of duty free vodka and chain smoking Rothmans. My Irish relatives were a lot more fun than my parents. They constantly swore and told filthy jokes and would break into song at the first opportunity. While they were otherwise engaged we would go off with my cousins, drink cider, smoke in the fields and kiss boys down the lanes. Being an English girl kept you in demand and gave you a great sense of superiority. Because my cousins came from large families where eight children was the norm it was impossible for them to be monitored closely so consequently they were naturally wild and we joined in whole heartedly.

We would all have to sleep in the same bedroom at my nan and grandad’s two up two down and my mum would put a stop to any resistance from us by telling us stories of when her and her nine brothers and sisters would have to share the same bed in that one room. The bed had a hole in the middle and they would fight over who got to sleep in the hole.

I would often wake in the night to the sound of my grandad pissing in the Po which was kept under the bed. Once I walked into the bedroom on my nan getting undressed and I remember being stunned by the sight of her drooping breasts which were only prevented from reaching the floor by her enormous belly. I couldn’t comprehend how a body could become so unlike the bodies I had up to then caught glimpses of, but it was obviously the result of giving birth to and breastfeeding eleven children.

My grandad would be up at 6.30, the middle of the night as far as I was concerned and when you came down you would always be given a plateful of hot porridge with a perfect ring of cold milk around the edge. We would play out in the street most of the day although every now and then we’d be taken to Dollymount or Bray by the Sea where the water level rose so suddenly you barely had your ankles in before you were up to your neck in it. We would all hold hands and brave it together.

My parents appeared to get on extremely well on these rare occasions and it offered a brief insight into how they might have been in past times.

As the years went by, one of my cousins, Siobhan seemed to become increasingly unruly. Her friends were heavily into glue sniffing although I never saw her doing anything like that. At night we would go out round the streets with her and certain friends would always be sure to stop and tell us of various people we knew who were involved in the latest gang war going on down the road.

One particular night when we were just hanging about, we bumped into a good friend of Siobhan’s who I’d met a couple of times up until then and got on quite well with. The conversation started off friendly enough, “How’re ya, what are you up to” and so on. However, as we continued to talk he pulled a knife out of his pocket and began twirling it around in his hand. All of a sudden he turned nasty and said to me, “You think you’re so clever you stuck up bitch, well if you’re so clever tell me everything you’ve said to me so far this week.”
“Like what?” I said trying to appear calm. By this time he was pointing the knife at my neck. “Repeat after me ‘the horse has bolted from the stable’,” he said. It was at that point I noticed his sunken eyes red round the rims and his edgy shifting about and I realised he had obviously been taking something heavy. I vaguely took note out of the corner of my eye that the knife was very clean and shiny, either unused or polished well after his last victim. I was physically shaking which was causing the knife to move against my skin and I was desperately trying to remind him that we were friends, to bring him back from wherever he seemed to have gone. For no apparent reason he suddenly let me go with a smile, clearly expecting me to carry on as his friend, as if I had passed some weird initiation ceremony of his.

I walked away, although I really wanted to run like mad. I was so relieved and amazed to come away in one piece. I thought of how I could have so easily become a major news item, only then would my parents find out the grim reality of the company I was mixing in. I decided to tell my mum, but only half the story as the truth would have sent her flying into a rage which I didn’t feel up to. I thought Siobhan was going a bit wayward and could do with some adult intervention but I also felt sad that the romanticism of our earlier escapades down the lanes had progressed into something that I no longer felt able or willing to be a part of.

It only occurs to me now that no one on those holidays mentioned the split between my parents and the fact that they led very separate lives even though my aunts and uncles were well aware of the situation. In fact I think my parents even slept in the same bed on these holidays and I can’t imagine them doing this without visualising them clinging to their own corner so as to avoid any physical contact. It is a possibility that they hadn’t even told my Nan and Grandad that they were apart. I suppose maybe they thought it would be too difficult to admit in the face of such rigidly held Catholic beliefs.

I wonder now how happy my relations’ families really were in comparison to my own. At the time they seemed a lot more together than us and to this day only death has actually parted any of them.

Jack

Karen McMahon

My parents would often go out and leave my sister Jack in charge of us. She was seven years older than me and so I suppose she must have been about eleven on this particular night. We were under strict instructions as usual not to turn the TV on in case it blew up so we would always listen to Stuart Henry’s Flying Trousers on the radiogram. At some point in the evening Jack and Ken my brother who was eight at the time went into the garden to play hockey. I remember the garden seemed a long way from the living room even though the house was small and it took a while to realise it was my brother screaming. My sister had swung the big pole back that was used to keep the washing line up and knocked his two front teeth out. I met him coming into the hall with his hand over his mouth and blood seeping through his fingers and it was so bright red that it looked like he’d bitten one of those trick tablets but the look of horror on his face told me this was no joke and my sister and I ran to get the next door neighbour.

Although Jack was very small and fragile looking this belied her cruelty towards us which was particularly aimed at my brother. Her frustration at being left to look after us brought the worst out in her and I can remember times when she would shut my brother out of the living room when my parents had left only to let him back in five minutes before they returned, knowing he would never dare tell. I think she was exposed to a lot more of the marital problems which we were to some extent protected from being so young.

The whole of my sister’s life seemed to be building up to the moment of her marriage. All her previous boyfriends up to this point were like testers, warm ups for the main event. When she met John her husband to be, we couldn’t quite work out what it was he had that the others had lacked; he kept his secret well hidden. His hair was the straightest, lank lifeless kind that parted in the middle like a pair of cheap curtains opening up on the largest most crooked nose I ever saw. He had a completely dopey smile that went well with his Frank Spencer type antics which he became well known for. I had to point out to him that the kettle was actually electric while he was waiting for it to boil on the gas cooker once and my mum deeply regretted the time she asked him to decorate when he tipped the paint pot up to see the price on the bottom while the lid was off all onto her new kitchen carpet.

My sister Jack was never that easy to live with. She was seven years older than me and would take full advantage of this age difference by making me and my sister run errands for her. One particular job we hated was to take her hand washing to the launderette for spinning and drying. She would separate every slightly different coloured item into carrier bags which we would have to spin separately before drying and often there would only be one pair of knickers or one top in each bag. This could take anything up to a couple of hours.

She was a rule unto herself. As she was the first wage earner, she promptly exempted herself from any housework whatsoever and treated the rest of us like some sort of domestic help.

Nevertheless I did feel slightly sorry for her the morning after her wedding when half the guests were around the house and she didn’t really seem in any hurry to be going. The post celebration come down was hanging in the air which I’m sure she felt more than most as she had been plied with Brandy by my mum from early in the morning of the wedding to calm her nerves and possibly obliterate any last minute reservations.

Dad had come back for the wedding and we enjoyed having him around again although it was still very strained between him and mum. It was amazing on these family occasions how they could be at the same event whilst remaining totally separate. If a moment arose when they had to actually speak to each other it seemed like everyone held their breath whilst desperately trying to glean some clue of intimacy between them, but their clipped conversations never strayed from straight questions and answers. I remember coming across their wedding photos not long ago and thinking that even then they looked like separate people, almost like they had paid to put on clothing from another era simply to be photographed.

Bawling Bairn

Karen Monaghan

Cantankerous bawling bairn,
she’ll be the death of me – mother wails.
You’ll find her buried at the bottom of the garden one of these days,
mark my words. I need sleep, sleep, blessed sleep.
Oh Frank, can we survive this child?

The clocks have been stopped, the doorbell disconnected.
No one breathes – baby is sleeping.
Tonight maybe my man can take his clothes off and go to bed.
Nightly treading the carpet with bawling bairn – exhaustion.

A challenging child Mrs Ruth! The doctor peers into the cot.
How often do you feed her?
Dr. Spock to the letter, mother replies proudly. But the crying
NEVER stops! Umm, all looks well. I’ll call next week.

A nervous moment …….. Frank, I think she’s hungry!
I am going to feed her
when she asks. Eyes meet in desperate hope.

Life is better now – lessons learned.

The Third Hole

Karen Monaghan

A hot sunny day.

Mummy can we go for a walk up the glen?

Silence.

Please, please, please?

We’ll see, Julia answers – already planning and rescheduling.

At mid-day we leave the house, cross the back road and make our way along the gravel path into the glen. We cross a shallow gurgling stream using the well worn flat grey stepping stones. I race ahead – be careful’s ringing in my ears. We head for the Third Hole, one of a series of deep water pools constantly filling with rainwater from the hills.

Mother always enjoyed these impromptu trips to the glen; loving the coolness, the rich enveloping earthy life smell, the solitude, glossy leafed bushes, closely packed trees, pale green frothy ferns, the chocolate brown spongy carpet of decaying leaves.

Pushing back her unwieldy red hair, while watching me, her dancing daughter, move ahead, in and out of the dappled sunlight – lithe slim little body, fine blonde hair. What have you brought to eat? I ask, turning round.

When we get there – wait and see!

Eventually we arrive, stepping into a clearing – a small meadow, surrounded by tree size rhododendrons. On the opposite side a deep bank, about six foot down; and below, the third hole, smooth and glistening in the sunshine.

Julia places an old grey blanket on the grass and plonks down, starting to unpack the picnic. Home made scones, seed cake and Irn Bru.

I’m hot mummy, can I cool my feet?

Yes – but watch out the rocks are wet.

I clamber down. Behind me the inlet stream – very shallow, full of stones, overhanging trees and shafts of insect filled sunlight.

Sitting down, I take my shoes off and dangle my toes in the deep pool. Stretching back, I put my hands behind me to steady myself. Suddenly my grasp evaporates. I feel only slimy moss and slowly …….. silently, slither into the water.

COLD, COLD. The strong eddy pulling me down.

Mummy, Mummy!! I cry as my head goes under. I splutter up, hands flailing.

Mummy, Mummy!! Down again – the pull even greater. Blackness, fear, helplessness!

Excruciating pain on the top of my head. I’m on the rocks, yanked out by my hair. Mother, ashen faced, standing over me.

Back home, the sun has gone. It’s teatime. On the washing line a heavy, still sodden, tartan kilt pulls the line down in the middle. On either side; white ankle socks, white knickers and a white school blouse.

Auntie Kate made that kilt, says mummy, staring out of the kitchen window, her face still pale and shocked, not able to remember how she got to the rocks so quickly.

I feel shaky and strangely out of this world. Closing my eyes I see myself in the water, the kilt floating round me, flowerlike – a cloth lifebelt.

Dumbuck Hill

Karen Monaghan

Resplendent in new school beret and new school blazer
I sit astride the turret on top of Dumbuck Hill.
Up here is wonderful! King of the Castle!
Cupping my hands over my eyebrows, I can see far across
the Clyde to the opposite shoreline.

As I look left towards the quarry ridge the foghorn sounds!
I quickly jump down. Two fat pigtails bounce and swing against
my back. Loud explosions – frightening.

Rolling and tumbling through the gorse and heather
I speed down the hill.
Nearing the bottom, the momentum takes me headlong
into a prickly bramble bush.

Scrambling up, I race through the fields
disturbing two grown ups stretched out on the grass.
Gritting my teeth I charge past scary cow’s field –
and, without looking,
past black bull’s enclosure. He’s terrifying!

Gulping a mouthful of grit and sand,
I reach, at last, the boundary fence.
Wriggling under and out, I head for home.
At the garden gate Mother waits.
For God’s sake – look at you,
where’s your beret? …….. INSIDE, NOW!

Sunday Morning

Karen Monaghan

We file out of the pew, genuflecting one by one; Mother, Father, Dick, Little Ted and me. Service over, the huge doors of the church of the Sacred Heart are open wide. Father Andrews, fresh face and button eyes, already at his spot.

Good morning Mrs Ruth. Family all well?

Yes thank you, father – her church going “respectable woman” face on full display. Head slightly bowing reverently under a large felt hat.

Good morning Mr Ruth.

Father nods his head and walks on.

We scuttle past and I manage to miss a heavy pat on the back of my head.

Icy winds swirl around our legs as we stand shivering outside the church, Mother and Father moving amongst the throng.

Obligatory small talk to aunts, cousins and uncles. We three try to be invisible, but I see Auntie Kate bowling towards us, a huge dark fox fur hanging around her neck. It has a face – disgusting and very, very scary. I look away.

Frank, how is the child? she asks Father, imperiously.

Fine now Kate, thank God.

Unfortunate accident!

At last, we begin the one and a half mile walk home. Striding along Round Riding Road, past pretty cottage style bungalows with memorable names; Green owl Cottage, Cornflower Cottage, and our favourite – Mickey Mouse Cottage. It’s snowing, small slushy droplets. We all shuffle up close together. I hold on tight to Daddy’s hand, the boys on either side of Mother, buttoning up top buttons and tightening scarves. We pass the rusty red brick grammar school, the play park, over the Silverton burn and into the avenue.

An hour later, the smell of delicious bacon and eggs still in our nostrils, we are all huddling close to the now blazing coal fire, feeling warm and full up.

Mummy why did Ted and I have to cook the breakfast AGAIN? says Dick sulkily, giving me a big shove off the end of the sofa.

It’s not fair she never does anything and she’s a girl.

Stop it now, says Mother firmly, you boys have to learn, Nuala will just do it when she has to.

I don’t know what you mean Mummy, says little Ted wrinkling his forehead.

You’ll understand one day son, says Father glancing at Mother, it’s important to learn to look after yourself.

Happy Daze

Keith Jago

I was part of the post-war baby-boom and my life began in 1949 in Woodingdean, Brighton – then just a “village” on the outskirts of Brighton & Hove, now the proud ‘city-by-the-sea’, and an important cultural, educational and holiday centre with two universities, yet still maintaining the dubious reputation as the place to go for an elicit encounter by the seaside. The General Hospital is where I first saw light of day – an imposing Victorian building close to Brighton’s historic Racecourse, where the terrifying Razor Gangs in Graham Greene’s famous novel, “Brighton Rock”, would confront each other high on the downs above the city.

Despite the mood of hope and optimism that swept Labour into government by a landslide in 1945, life in post-war Brighton was austere, but things were to improve dramatically for us, when in 1950 my family moved to Lockwood Crescent, Woodingdean. Home was a new-fangled bungalow or “prefab” on one of many prefab estates that rapidly mushroomed throughout Britain as a quick, stopgap measure to satisfy demand for decent housing following the widespread wartime destruction. A prefab was essentially a neat, white aluminum box, made on a production line because traditional building materials were in short supply after the war, and was considered to be the ultimate in luxury living for the masses. Each prefab came with two bedrooms, a front room and kitchen complete with all mod cons. like a fridge, cooker etc. and an indoor bathroom with both HOT and cold running water, as well as a proper, full-length bath – no tiny tin baths that my parents had experienced. Being a typical boy with a profound affinity for anything filthy, together with a strong aversion to water and cleanliness, bath time inevitably figured significantly in my life.

Usually I was bathed in the kitchen sink, but once a week came my “treat”- a proper bath, which despite my protestations, I would soon settle in to, and even enjoy. The bath was spacious – large enough for me to play ‘boats’ with my favourite plastic cruise-liner – which I christened “The Titanic”, because the plastic bow was cracked, and my Titanic would slowly fill with water, gradually submerging until finally disappearing into the murky water which had turned a filthy ruffian into an angelic cherub – fit for the land of Nod, as my Mum used to say! As well as this pinnacle of luxurious living, our prefab came with a flat roof on which could be heard the rain falling, and a real fire in the front room, providing a wonderful feeling of warmth and security on wild winter nights in Woodingdean when rain lashed the roof outside, and I was warm and cozy in front of a roaring fire after a long, languid bedtime bath. Heavenly delight!

Someone’s bright idea of these prefabricated metal “little boxes that all looked just the same”, was the first home I recall and these early years were overwhelmingly happy times. Sure, there were lots of painful bits – who didn’t have them – like poverty and prejudice and parents that always checked your ears were clean before bed, but despite these minor encumbrances to childhood, it was, on the whole, pleasant, blissful even.

Altogether some 250 or so, identical prefabs comprised this estate of “homes-fit-for-heroes”. Doubtless, a comfortable middle-class Civil Servant somewhere in the Ministry for Social Improvement for the Masses planned it all at Labour’s behest, while seeking to further the Victorian cause of moral improvement, by adding a literary slant with place names derived from Rudyard Lockwood Kipling, no less. We had Rudyard Road, and Kipling Avenue bounding our road, Lockwood Crescent. As a child I knew nothing of RLK, but now I feel somehow rather honoured to have been part of such an august literary tradition, as it were! RLK, like our council estate, wasn’t always popular in some quarters – with his praise of ordinary folk, and his anti-imperialism that ruffled feathers. He had lived at Rottingdean, close to Woodingdean, a place that I would often visit. Whilst I never knowingly went to Rottingdean to escape – looking back, I wonder if I wasn’t searching to be free of the uniformity and oppression generated in me by these mass-produced identical white metal boxes that all looked just the same. But as a child I knew nothing else, and as they say, a house is what you make it – and my parents made it a smashing place to live – a real home for our family – my Mum – Mary, from Tipperary, my Dad, Bill from over the hill – Whitehawk, that is, my Brother, Michael – 11 years older than me, and yours truly – the baby.

Now, while each prefab was identical, ours had a bigger garden than most because we lived on the bend. It was enormous – maybe 100 yards long, providing playground, allotment, poultry house, rabbit hutch, garden shed and still with sufficient lawns to keep my Dad mowing endlessly. It was self-sufficiency par excellence and my Dad grew the biggest vegetables you have ever seen – onions to bring tears to your eyes. We had animals in abundance – chickens, ducks, geese, rabbits, newts, lizards, slowworms and even snakes as well as a cat and dog. This was real self-sufficiency – not the jolly old “Tom and Barbara, Good Life” stuff, but the real thing – that’s how it was then. Rationing remained, poverty was widespread and self-sufficiency offered self-preservation and survival, and my Dad was good at it, and it gave me plenty of fun, too. For me, though, the high spot was a children’s playground where I, and most of the other kids in the neighbourhood would play contentedly, or harass the poor chickens, or something equally dastardly.

My abomination was Sunday school – a real obstacle to fun. A new Methodist church was soon built close-by, and on Sundays, dressed in Sunday best, I was destined for this dubious pleasure every week. The occasion was always rather solemn and serious – no mucking about here. How I was supposed to get hooked on God when I wasn’t even having fun, I shall never know, and I remained ungodly and uncouth. I just wanted to be outside and back in our garden – that divine heaven, chasing a ball, or playing with my bad or giving the chickens a hard time or something equally enjoyable. This is where my heart was – in England’s green and pleasant land – and I never really took to church. In the gloom and doom of the church hall one of many biblical stories narrated was Noah and the Ark – it was the sole saga that really enlivened me.

But surely they’d got it wrong? Our menagerie of God’s creatures able to roam free and enjoy Sunday out there in our garden, and me imprisoned in here, cooped up, being preached at and having my soul saved. Didn’t they realize they’d got it the wrong way round? I just couldn’t wait until we got to the bit where all the animals came out of the Ark, two-by-two, because I knew it would soon be going home time, and I could escape Sunday School for another week! Thank God.

Back in the real world, my favourite creature of our backyard brood – was Donald, a Khaki Campbell duck. Now, I’ll share a secret with you, never before made public! My initials are K W D – and guess what the ‘D’ stands for? Donald was my pet really, and he followed me around the garden faithfully, even indoors waddling apprehensively into the kitchen awaiting the wrath of “She-who-must-be obeyed” – my Mum! Despite being chased from the house repeatedly, my Donald would waddle back in faithfully following me again, and again and again, while She suffered paroxysms!

It was great fun, but my poor Mum, trying to prepare a Sunday lunch with ‘that damned duck’ under her feet all the time, was driven to distraction. Donald regularly came close to premature death by being stuffed into the oven, feathers and all, in her attempt to be rid of my “damned duck”. But for me, he was a delight and despite the terrible torment he suffered at my hands, he was always close-by quacking contentedly. I never knew of Donald’s fate, for sure. One year, just before Christmas I was told Donald was “hibernating” – whatever that meant. My Gran and Grandad came to stay with us that Christmas and the festive banquet was duly served amidst great excitement and expectation.

“Gorgeous duck” said Grandad, “not at all greasy” he added cheerfully. Then there followed an awkward, uncomfortable silence when eyes focused downward and nobody knew quite what to say next. I never saw Donald again and never asked, but I think I knew in my heart the fate of my delightful namesake. Gone, but never forgotten.

It was an idyllic situation and I remember lots of sunny days. Doubtless, we experienced similar British weather, then as now, but my memories are of early morning searching the hen boxes for a couple of new laid eggs to be my “solja eggies” for breakfast, or of being chauffeured around the “estate” by my Dad cutting the grass in the sunshine, with me sat on the grass box of the lawn mower waving regally to the mass of kids that came from here, there and everywhere to play in our garden. It was magical.

Talking of magic, it was not until 1952 that I saw my first TV, then a black (and white) art!

A growing air of excitement told that something important was looming – a mysterious event called the “Coronation”. For me as a toddler this meant little until somehow my Dad managed to borrow a “telly-vision” – with a nine-inch, black and white screen. After he’d explained it, things seemed rather more interesting, and I too, became drawn into the web of excitement.

Word had spread far and wide that we had this “TV” and the entire world wanted to be there in our house for this mysterious event. When the day arrived tension was high – and it rained hard! People came from far and wide to witness the spectacular occasion on our TV. Nine bloody inches AND glorious black and white. Just imagine it, thirty excited souls, maybe more, crammed into our tiny front room like sardines in a tin, squinting at this miniscule screen – Mum, Dad, Mike, Nanny and Granddad, aunties and uncles, first cousins, second cousins, second cousins thrice removed, next door neighbours, next door neighbours’ kids, even next door neighbours’ cat – oh, and the spirit of Donald, trying to join the party but fearing reprisals from the dreaded ‘She’, all of us fixated and gawping at this Royal occasion being brought to life by technology, the BBC and Richard Dimbleby! The pomp and emotion was powerful. It started somewhat serious and solemn, gradually becoming more regal with uplifting music, before the nationalism and triumphal gloating of “Britannia Rule’s the Waves” and such like reminded us, the Germans, and the world, of how we had wapped those Krauts only a couple of years before. What I didn’t realize then was that our regal new queen – Queen Elizabeth II, was German! The House of Windsor isn’t Windsor at all – it’s actually the House of Hanover, in High Germany. So all these blokes like my Dad, who’d fought the Germans for the cause of freedom and all that, and “won”, were really watching a German being crowned as our Queen. Amazing really!

For the children, though, it wasn’t so much the Coronation on TV that really captured their imagination, exciting though this little black and white box was for us, no – it was the street party we kids awaited most of all. Oh, what fun it was! The whole street was assembled, all the kids and parents and relatives and everyone, in wonderful festive mood, for this party outside in the open air – a street party, like no other party anyone could remember. Somehow the long tables from Sunday school had been borrowed and set up in the road further up Lockwood Crescent. Lamp posts were festooned with bunting and flags strung between adding colour and excitement to the occasion. The entire neighbourhood came, though I suspect a few of the parents were present only in body – already well on the road to oblivion. Though who could deny them on such an occasion – Britain partied, Brighton partied, Lockwood Crescent partied, and I suspect that even RLK was up there somewhere partying that day! We children were all given party hats, and the Mums provided the food for the feast. There was singing and dancing and laughing and joking and party games, and lashings of lovely food and things for the kids to gorge on. Lemonade and, my favourite, Tizer, seem to flow endlessly. For us in those austere times, it was the party of all parties – like the land of milk and honey had arrived!

Later as evening approached, came the parents’ party and everyone was expected to do their party-piece. Our nextdoor neighbour, Reg Clark, had been a soldier – in the Signals, I think, and he caused great interest with his recital of a Kipling classic,” Tommy”:

“I went into a public ‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer’,”

he started off, immediately winning attention with such an enthusiastic suggestion. He went on:

“The publican ‘e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’
The girls behind the bar they laughed an giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street agin an’ to myself sez I:
O its Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away:.
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins’ when the band begins to play

The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins, “when the band begins to play. ”

When he reached the final verses his audience was spell-bound.

“You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extra rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For its Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country’ when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool – you bet that Tommy sees!”

It was a day to remember all right, and the experience even more magical than the TV we’d previously witnessed the Coronation on.

Looking back, I now realise the Coronation was symbolic too, of the hope and optimism of that young generation of Churchill’s children whose spirit and determination had defeated the Nazi menace that threatened to overrun Europe and Western civilization. My Dad used to mimic “Winnie” as he called Churchill, with his impersonation. I can still picture him now, cigarette in place of the cigar… performing his party-piece:

“we shall go on to the end,
we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and the oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender .. ”

Stirring stuff it was, and right for the Coronation of this bright, exciting young Queen – Elizabeth II, who gave Britain such hope for a better future and a better world. The spirit of fun and occasion that the British created then, in difficult circumstances, for her Coronation was incredible – that spirit, that determination not to be beaten, that desire for good to triumph over evil – it was this doggedness, this essential Britishness, that had won the war – if there are ever “winners” in war, and enabled us to be there for that festive day.

And as a model of shear human endeavour, ingenuity and creativity – against the odds, this took some beating; even now, fifty years on, I remember 1952 with great pleasure and affection as a particular highlight of my early, happy years in wonderful Woodingdean.

Rocket

Margaret Heal

We had various animals as I was growing up. The tortoise must have wondered about the continual changes of scene and different quality of grass as we moved from place to place. In transit it was put in the ‘belly box’, the spacious cupboards under the wagon where things could be stored. The Mynah bird – another exotic addition – sat on a perch in a big cage outside and could mimic people’s voices with great clarity. My mother was the one who looked after them and they became part of her brood, like the itinerant workers whom she often cooked for as well as the family. My brother Charles, ten years older, had a dog, Rocket, named after the fairground ride that my grandfather had bought which was one of the main attractions of the big country fairs of the ‘back end’, or autumn.

Rocket, a black and white Alsation, looked like a wolf and had the same fierce lupine loyalty to the family and his pack. In the winter months, he would sleep downstairs in the house, and on the rare occasions that my father was away from home for the night, he would take up position outside my parents’ bedroom on the landing, as deputy head of the family it was his job to protect my mother and us. No one told him to do this – he sensed a change in atmosphere and followed his instincts.

He could also be very playful. We had mice at the house at one point and he sat full length outside the hole just waiting for a mouse to appear and then nonchalantly raised a paw and swiped and stunned the unfortunate creature. To the family he was a good guard dog and a great friend but was rightly feared by outsiders. He narrowly missed being put down for sheep worrying, but the farmer was paid for his loss.

One morning in the summer, when I was about 4 – maybe younger as I still had a pushchair but then, I was known and thought of as “the baby” until I was 10 years old – I left the wagon and clattered down the steps. I stopped for a while to coax the tortoise out of its shell and tried to cajole it with food, only succeeding in making it disappear in terror. My mother watched me from the kitchen window.

“Leave the poor thing alone” – “Why?” – “How would you like it if someone poked lettuce in your mouth?” Thinking I probably wouldn’t, I stopped.

“I’m going to find Daddy.”

“Alright but don’t get in the way and don’t go on the dodgem track. You might fall over and bash your nose again and get a nosebleed. Next time it might not go back into shape.”

“OK – come on Rocket. Let’s go and find Daddy and Charles.” The dog, twice my size, followed obediently, though it would have come along as bodyguard uninvited.

Mornings were the time that repairs were done on the fairground equipment. My father and brother I knew would be on or around the dodgems, working or chatting to other travellers. I walked through the gap between the covered stalls making sure that I avoided the Hardys’ wagon site. They had a Staffordshire Bull terrier, a dog with its long nose and offset eyes, that was particularly ugly and vicious. It was kept on a chain outside their wagon and would leap out straining at the leash at any passer-by, barking and slavering at the mouth. The Hardys thankfully didn’t often travel with us. My father was a Riding Master which meant that he was the person who had the major rides like Dodgems, Big Wheel, and he rented sites around the West Country from farmers or the Council for the fair. Stallholders would then pay him as tenants, some of them travelled with us on the entire circuit, others only for one or two sites. I didn’t like the Hardy family as a whole. They had gravelly voices and were stocky and squat like. I don’t know if they had come to resemble their dog or vice versa. Certainly I avoided both.

I wandered around the circular stalls covered in tarpaulin until opening time, the dog and I sniffing the air, looking for company and someone to play with. We walked out into a clear area near the dodgems, and I came face to snout with a stocky white body – for a second – the next instant it leaped in madness at Rocket behind me. I caught the full force of it and was knocked backwards onto the ground. Rocket ran at the Bull terrier, teeth bared for fighting, half crazed because I was underneath. I watched them over me, time suspended, like a person drowning looking up through the water and coming up for air – except that I couldn’t move – I was trapped by this muscley torso, vicious snarling in my ears. The strong front legs were either side of my head, protecting its prey, the claws splayed out. “Please don’t gouge out my eyes” I screamed silently.

“Get the bastards off my baby” – a visceral cry as the dogs were pulled off me by strong worker’s hands. Other men came running, one of them started beating the Bull terrier with a stick. But the dogs were in a fight to the death – Rocket to protect me – and the Bull Terrier wanting the victor’s spoils and the glory of the kill. Men caught at the collars of both and tried to wrench them apart, but the Hardys’ dog had locked its jaws into Rocket’s ear and tore it in half before it was prised free; a war wound he would always have.
And the scars I still bear? The sight of that ugly body above me, and the fear when I see dogs rearing at each other in the street.

Minehead

Margaret Heal

My first school year over and the long summer holiday stretched ahead. A sense of excitement and the fact that I really had come home to my family whose travels had brought them to Minehead, a small town on the Bristol Channel with its own sandy beach.

Heartsease is what I felt, the anxiety of separation for now suspended. I woke in a space that kept me, womb-like, safe from the world. My bed was the top single bunk at the end of the wagon that I was born in. Shutters would enclose it to make it into a nesting space. The night before my teenage sister and cousin had brought glow-worms in to entertain me. We raised my covers, tent like, and watched in fascination, as little dark bodies gave off phosphorescent pins of light.

This morning I opened my little window onto the fair site – a large open field part gravelled and used as a car park. At our back were green hills and next to us the open air swimming pool. The tang of sea air drifted in mingled with a whiff of chlorine. The gulls were calling us awake and in the distance a donkey – strange unfamiliar creature – brayed a greeting in a neighbouring field. Nature took a breath and held it, smiling, before giving life to the new day.

After breakfast, which I often ate sitting on the top step of the wagon if it was fine, I would go to one of the other trailers to fetch my cousin – a year younger but bigger, his blonde head a contrast to my dark one.

He and I went across the road – an adventure made all the more desirable as it was not strictly allowed, but never definitely denied – to the promenade where holidaymakers were strolling or sitting on deckchairs, looking out over the low wall to the sea, and North Hill to the left with its clusters of houses.

I wore a dress with smocking on the top, on my feet were Clarkes sandals with a little buckle. They had been checked for size. I wiggled my toes as I peered down through the visor of the x-ray machine and saw the outline of the shoe. Now we left our shoes with any benign looking old couple that would look after them. Then we went down the wooden steps carefully, to avoid splinters and over the few hard warm rocks and onto to the soft sand, gritty between our toes. We went to the storm water outlet where we could gather tiny scuttling crabs in a tin bucket decorated with scenes of the beach.

“Margaret, Margaret.” There was no denying finally, that this was my mother’s voice calling on the dodgem microphone. Partners in crime, we reluctantly retrieved our shoes and made our way back. “Can you see us across the road please?” “Of course, dear.”

Bridgwater

Margaret Heal

One of the larger fairs of the season in line with the Autumn Equinox. We picked up the biggest conkers from the huge oak chestnut tree in the field. I kept them in a special tin – I didn’t like getting my knuckles rapped in fights, but I loved their smoothness that fitted round and satisfying in my hand and their glossy brown warmth, matured in the heavier heat of summer. Travellers wrapped up against the evening chills of late September and stoked fires in trailers and wagons whose embers stayed all night to drive out the dampness that hung in the air outside. People who knew what this damp could do to the lungs and joints were careful to keep it at bay.

Fire was generated in other ways too. The town welcomed the Fair, and warded off the frostiness of the approaching winter with a Carnival, the long line of floats with their brightly fancy-dressed passengers lighting up the wide main road with food stalls on either side selling hot dogs and toffee apples, blocking the narrow side streets to traffic but funnelling people later into the Fair field.

Many different rides converged on this fair, the prime sites jealously guarded and protected by a two-year ruling. Anyone setting up there without this right would find themselves in a bitter dispute at the Showman Guild Committee meetings and liable to huge legal costs and fines. My father was sometimes President of the Guild.

Besides the rides there were a large number of stalls all hoping to do well in the last big fair of the season. Rifle ranges, bingo stalls, slot machines, hoop-la’s with their prizes of cuddly toys, goldfish or fragile ornaments. The Booths were there too, strange even to travellers, with their long-legged dancing girls in sparkling costumes and feathers, who gave a preview on the high stage outside of the shows attractions. Travellers’ children could usually get on free to rides if they introduced themselves to the owner – often a relative, at the slacker times. At busy times they might be working themselves if big enough, or tucked up in bed out of harm’s way from the crowds. And the crowds did come to this Fair. Country people undeterred even by heavy rain would put on wellies and wade through the mud, made less slippery by straw scattered on the ground. Some of them made their way warily, head down into the dark interior of the Booths to see the fan dance. I only managed once to sneak my way into this taboo area with a friend, giggling behind our hands. I expect the owner was on a meal break and the temporary cashier less vigilant about keeping us out. An older woman not seen outside held 2 huge fans with splayed feathers like Angels wings deftly covering her body, and we glimpsed Eve’s nakedness wide-eyed, as she swapped the fans quickly from front to rear. A man came out and drew a curtain veil across. He re-appeared a few minutes later, stripped to the waist, and lit two firebrands pungent with the smell of turps, which he stroked up his arms and chest. Tilting his head back he put them out quickly in his mouth and brought each one out black and smoking. A fire dragon of the night, shades of the travelling fairs that must have roamed these villages in medieval times.

The Gollonades

Martha Buckley

Our cousins John and Kristian are in a mysterious gang called the Gollonades. They ride round on bikes in a place called Southend and have airguns and a Tin Pan Alley. The Gollonades is so secret none of them will tell me and Christopher what exactly it is and we are desperate to get in the secret.

Their sister Biz is in it too even though she’s a girl and only three months older than me. We only see each other about three times a year but when we get together we are as close as thieves even dressing alike to pretend we’re twins. She is allowed to watch as much television as she wants and knows the words to all the songs on Top Of The Pops. She helps herself to lemonade, which she says in a funny way like lemonaaaade. She has straight silver hair, velour dresses, jeans and trainers and her family have got a Cortina. Me and Christopher hang on to her every word, desperate to pick up some knowledge of the pop culture we are sheltered from at home.

With my home-made dresses, BBC voice and well-stocked bookshelf I know I will never be as cool as her. But am happy to let her boss me about, leading me into daring games which I know will get us all into trouble.

When we all stay at Nanny’s I know I will end up getting told off. My mother will look at me in a hurt way and wonder how I could be so badly behaved when I’m not normally like that at home. But it is worth it for the giggling thrill of danger and the feeling, however momentary, of being part of the gang.

Every year when we arrive Biz and me run upstairs and lock ourselves in the bathroom or box room, using our hands to wipe off the unpleasant memories of the puckering kisses on the cheeks from Nanny and aunties and uncles. For once my brother Christopher does not want to be in with us. He is too busy making a base with John and Kristian in the big bedroom, hanging admiringly on every word they say. I am too shy to talk to them on my own without Biz but Christopher doesn’t seem to care.

Me and Biz share gossip, giggling and showing off our Christmas presents. This is the time when she lets me into the secrets, everything from lurid bits of grown up gossip to blow-by-blow accounts of the scrapes her brothers get into at home. But this year she is full of the Gollonades, throwing out dark hints which I half understand, half not, giving a picture of glamour and danger but without ever telling me what they do.

She says: “They meet in the shed and no one’s allowed to know what they do.”

“Why?” I say.

“I can’t say because only the Gollonades are allowed to know and they’d kill me if they found out. You have to be ten to be in it and you have to pass a test as well.”

“I say: “How come you’re in it when you’re only eight?”

“Because I’m John and Kristian’s sister and I found out about it and they didn’t want me to tell.” says Biz.

“Can I be in it?” I say.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to ask John because he’s in charge.”

We go downstairs to open presents and I rip open the paper as fast as I can to show off instead of doing it slowly like I would normally. Mummy wants me to stay and show her them nicely but I run off rudely upstairs to giggle with my cousins.

Nanny cooks a vast and tasteless meal – boiled cabbage, boiled floury potatoes with black bits and boiled bacon which is served up by Mummy and my aunts in the back room. They are busy talking and eating as we creep down the stairs to the study room and close the door. Away from the coal fire in the back room and the heat from the cooking, this room is cold and smells unused. Various people’s possessions line the walls, suitcases, bicycles and skis.

Around the edge of the net-covered bay window and down the side of one wall is a neatly arranged row of alcohol. There are bottles of spirits and wine, whisky, vodka, several kinds of sherry and some strange stuff with foreign writing. Some of them have been gathering dust for several years.

“Right.” says John. “Who wants to be in the Gollonades?”

“Me! Me!” says Chistopher, his curls bobbing in excitement.

I don’t want to seem too keen.

“Okay.” I say.

Biz hops eagerly from one skinny leg to the other. “What do they have to do?” she says.

Kristian walks over to the window and picks up a dust-covered bottle filled with a bright yellow drink. The red label says Advocat.

“Is that the one made from egg yolks?” I ask, my stomach sinking.

“Yes” says Kristian, looking at his brother. “You’ve got to drink it if you want to be in the Gollonades. And you’re never allowed to tell.”

“Who wants to go first?” says John.

Normally I will argue with Christopher to be first at anything we do but this time I decide to let him go first. John opens the bottle and pours half its thick stinking contents into a pint glass from the sideboard. He gives it to Christopher who needs both hands to hold it. I stand near the door listening to make sure no grown-ups are coming. His eyes shining, he takes a gulp, throws back his head and starts to drink. We are rooted to the spot. Even John looks impressed as he drinks almost all of it. None of us move.

“It’s your turn next,” says Kristian, looking at me.

I am trying to think of a way to get out of it without losing face when Christopher flops forwards and is sick. Most of it goes back in the glass, still yellow but with more lumps. The rest is over his brown cords and the brown study room carpet.

“Quick. Let’s run.” says John. We open the door to bolt upstairs but are met by Mummy coming the other way to tell us our tea is ready.

“What’s going on?” she says, then notices Christopher, who is crying, and next to him, the half empty bottle.

“What have you been doing?”

Christopher says “Nothing.”

“He just felt sick.” I say.

She looks angry and scared as she shouts for Daddy who comes with a bowl for Christopher. I am sent upstairs on my own. I sit on the top bunk in the big room listening to distant shouting. Daddy brings Christopher upstairs and puts him to bed.

“I’ll talk to you later.” he says.

Elizabeth comes and tells me she’s not allowed to stay the night after all. All three of them are being sent back to Southend in disgrace.

“John’s in really big trouble.” she says. “But he said to tell you you’re both in the Gollonades.”

William and the Bull

Martha Buckley

We have left the supermarket carpark and are driving along one of those narrow Normandy roads with high leafy hedgerows on each side. The sun is beaming and we are crammed into the back of the almost brand-new Peugeot, sharing the seats with polystyrene surfboards, wet sandy towels and coolbags full of sandwiches, gone slimy in the heat. Bottles of wine roll around between the back row seats, clanking against the metal seat supports every time we round a bend.

The car has three rows of seats, the only one on the market for a family as big as ours. This is the first time we have taken it on holiday but a politics of seating arrangements has already evolved between us.

To start with, we all wanted sit in the back row, just for the novelty and when our friends have a lift, that’s where they want to sit too. But now we have endured the three-hour drive to Portsmouth, the four-hour journey from Le Havre and the hour and a half trip from the campsite to the beach each day we have changed our minds. It is hot it in the back, the windows do not open and the seats are cramped. The tight conditions are made worse by the ever-subsiding pile of sleeping bags, boxes filled with tapes and games and other assorted luggage which is piled in the middle of the seats.

Every time we get out of the car, even if it is only a toilet stop on a motorway, the seating positions have to be renegotiated. This is a subtle and delicate game, at which, as the eldest, I am fast becoming an expert.

Daddy always drives and Mummy sits next to him in the passenger seat, the envy of us all. Emmeline, sits in her baby seat in the middle of the middle row, where she either sleeps or cries unless buoyed along by Mummy’s out of tune singing or the even more annoying nursery rhyme tapes. One of us older children has to sit either side of her and the others are in the back.

On this occasion I am smugly settled in my left hand middle seat, my feet resting on crate of supermarket beer and my long, still-wet hair arranged so it drapes over the back seat and brushes on Christopher’s knees. More placid than William, he will probably wait about five minutes before he starts complaining about this.

William has won the fight for the right hand middle seat making Hannah cry in the process. The mood in the front seats is tetchy. It is the height of the day but instead of being on the beach we have spent almost three hours looking for a supermarket which was open to buy bread, food for dinner and an airbed repair kit for Mummy and Daddy, who have spent the last two nights feeling every lump, bump and cowpat under the ground sheet through the canvas of their deflated bed.

“William. Leave her alone,” says Mummy, turning round and glaring at her second son.

“Would you like to listen to a tape, Hannah? How about the new singing one we got in Smiths?”

“Yes please,” says Hannah, snivelling.

Creep, I think, annoyed, as now I will not be able to concentrate on the book I am reading, which is the only thing which makes car journeys bearable.

“Oh what?” says William, spoiling for an argument and never one to let an opportunity pass. “Do we have to listen to that rubbish? I can’t concentrate on my book. Why don’t you ever let me listen to my tapes? Why does she always have to get her own way?

“She doesn’t always get her own way but she’s younger than you and anyway you still haven’t said sorry for whatever it was you did to her earlier on.” says Mummy.

“I didn’t do anything,” says William. “She started it and then she went crying to you just like she always does.”

“He didn’t do anything.” I say, unable to resist chipping in.

“He did, he hurt my arm,” says Hannah from the back of the car. “He said he didn’t want to sit next to me because my toys are like jumble sale and my hair is a bird’s nest.”

“William!” says Mummy, “Why can’t you be nice to your little sister?”

“Why should I? She’s just stupid like you.” he says and I can tell from the look in his eyes and the way he’s smiling with his mouth closed that he knows he is asking for trouble.

Daddy has kept quiet until now, but I can almost see the steam rising from the back of his head, which is just visible above the headrest in front of me. He keeps his eyes on the road and uses his angry tone of voice, with a touch of the East End as he says “William. I’ve had just about enough of your lip. If I hear another unpleasant word out of you I’m going to stop the car.”

William can’t resist the challenge. “I ‘ate you.” he shouts. “I ‘ate all of you. Don’t worry. I’m getting out anyway.” He makes a pretence of trying to open the door though I know he knows the child locks are on so it won’t.

“That’s it”. Daddy slams on the breaks and the car screeches to a halt. He gets out, storms round to William’s door and wrenches it open.

“Get out.” he shouts, eyes bulging, already yanking William out by one skinny ten year-old arm.

The rest of us sit like statues, scared any word or movement could attract his anger onto us as well.

Daddy twists him round and smacks his bum. “I didn’t bring you on holiday to have you behave like this!”

At this point I would have given up, started crying then settled in for an hour or so of accusing and rebellious sulking but for William the show is not yet over. He wriggles out of Daddy’s grasp and starts running down the road in the direction we have just come from. After 50 yards or so he finds a gap in the hedge and we see him squeeze through. Daddy reverses the car after him down the lane until we get to the gap where we stop, craning our necks to see where he has gone.

William is running full tilt across the middle of a field filled with rough grass and buttercups. His head is down and he clearly has no idea where he is going. Daddy goes to the gap and starts shouting.

“Get back here! You stupid boy!”

We notice about the same time as he does the large angry brown and white bull at the other side of the field. Seconds later, William sees it too. His stride falters and he half turns his head towards the road.

He is trapped. On one side his angry father and on the other side the angry bull.

He glances round. There is no other way out. For a few tense seconds we wait to see what the bull will do. It seems to take it a while to make up its mind so William starts a kind of backwards shuffle back in the direction he has come from, unwilling to risk turning his back on the bull.

The movement seems to annoy the bull who slowly lowers his jowelled head and starts pawing the ground. Realising it is about to charge, William gives a terrified yelp and starts to sprint as fast as he can towards the car, his feet tripping and stumbling on the hummocky grass.

His mouth is open, his eyes wide and he looks terrified as the bull, running surprisingly fast, comes thundering across the field behind him.

Daddy opens his arms as in slow motion and grabs him as he leaps through the gap and both of them run for the safety of the car. They slam the doors and we drive off, the anger slowly melting into excitement as we ask William what it felt like to be actually chased by a bull.

In the rear view mirror I can see Mummy and Daddy grin and exchange glances. Daddy puts on a stern look but not a stern voice, “William. Let that be a lesson to you,” he says.

Accident

Rachel Collins

“Lots of people are accidents. You were an accident. I thought I’d got a stomach bug, but it was you! I was sick every morning for four whole months, your Dad said I was putting it on, but it was terrible could only eat dry toast for four whole months.” An accident. Me? I wanted the words to drift off with the others but they had hooks and stuck fast. An accident? The sound of glass smashing, mouths red gashes and blood. Why does she touch her hair like that? Like I’m a mirror she’s looking into. A shudder started at the nape of my neck and shot like a mild electric current to the base of my spine.

“Do you know when the Nightingales are off?” She was looking at me, still preening herself, expecting something. I pushed my unwashed hair behind my ears.

“The Nightingales, when are they off?”

“Soon,” I replied “off soon.”

“It must be awful for them,” awful yes awful I felt awful. “I bumped into her at the corner shop, used the last of the milk in the Yorkshire pudding, couldn’t look her in the eyes…”

I couldn’t look her in the eyes. I looked right through her apparition, perched and twittering on the velvet armchair. She’d said an accident, me an accident, my heart beat in my ribcage fast as a rabbit’s I’d once held in my hands. Nothing seemed safe any more. She’d pecked the string on which my world span. I saw it pointlessly hurtling through space with me trapped on it. I thought I could just turn my back on her and walk away but the thought wasn’t enough.

“I’m going to the toilet,” I heard myself say and immediately I became an automaton beginning a program which, when I reached my destination, would result in me jamming my fingers hard into the back of my throat until I felt the relief of the lunch she’d cooked mixed with stomach acid shooting a burning trail up my oesophagus and splattering into the toilet bowl. I felt a sense of peace as I walked towards this certainty.

Afterwards, as I baptised my face with cold water from the basin below I thought “Fuck the Nightingales. Why give a fuck about them? Why give a fuck about anything?” I laughed to myself. It was the first time I’d thought the word “fuck”, it felt “fucking good!”

Tea

Rachel Collins

“I’d love a cup of tea,” mum said. I slump down further into the sofa, fingers ruffling and smoothing the grey velvet. Beth, my sister, pulls a cushion over her face. My dad becomes engrossed in the teletext. I wish the three little numbers on the screen would move faster to match the numbers he’s chosen.

“Who loves me enough to make me a cup of tea?”

I know I do, but instead of answering I scratch velvet pathways which lead nowhere in the arm of the sofa. Beth throws down her cushion and runs through the doorway laughing. Shutting the door as slow as possible, so that she can gurn at me for longer through gap. The handle snaps, the stairs rumble and then there’s nothing but my breath, the sound of saliva in my dry mouth and a feeling like sadness. I look up at the light bulb just hanging and wonder who put it there.

“Jaqueline if you want a cup of tea for God’s sake make one.” I think of its fuse wire holding things together, waiting to break.

“I made the last one, it’s got to be someone else’s turn.” I look down at the bits of fluff on the carpet, which is burgundy to make the room seem warmer, and recognise a crisp crumb which could be mine and a piece of white thread which is definitely mine.

“You’re splitting hairs.”

“I don’t see why I should do everything in this house.”

I think what a cow my sister is and suddenly I’m up putting one foot in front of the other, heading for the door, ready to bolt up the stairs. At the threshold I stop.

“Do you want a cup of tea then?”

Untitled

Tony Gates

Marshside in the 1950s was a great place to grow up. Now it’s very much a part of Southport in Lancashire, but it wasn’t always so. In the nineteenth century it was an independent Shrimping community that had witnessed riots as the Shrimpers had fought to defend their independence. They had their own Parliament, and the building still stands. It was boarded up for a long time from the 1970s, as it decayed into disrepair and became a venue for substance abuse. Now it’s used as a hide by the R.S.P.B.

The once-isolated cottages of the Shrimpers remained, as did the Shrimpers and some of the wonderful nooks and crannies that passed as addresses; Sea Cop, Millers Pace, Knob Hall Lane; but they were now surrounded by a mixture of private and council housing.

Our house was part of an ongoing private development and for a few short years our back garden opened onto fields where we seemed to spend every waking hour, especially in the summer. Bordering the fields was a sandbank formed as they pushed back the ground for development. Immediately over the bank there was a track running parallel that the Shrimpers – in their sou-westers and waders in their horse drawn carts – used, to get to their favourite grounds. We’d wish them luck on their way out and ask them for crabs on their return.

The summers WERE long and hot, and they were measured by the number of bottles of calamine pasted on to our puny white bodies. We’d catch butterflies and grasshoppers and bees in jars. Or we’d cross the bank to fish in the irrigation ditches for sticklebacks and red throats and elvers. The more daring might wander off over the second bank and onto the marshes. Not me, much too nervous. Well, people died out there. We once stood and watch a helicopter bring the body of a wildfowler to the edge of the first bank where an ambulance waited. It was the first time any of us had seen a real helicopter.

The side of our house opened onto a cinder patch, that fronted the communal garages and here we played football and cricket using the garage doors as goals and wickets. We also learned to ride our bikes here, and I can remember sitting on uncle Rex’s lap as we drove round and round in the butchers van he used to drive.

There were eight garages, all brick built with corrugated asbestos sheet roofs. Ours was number 4. A few of the garages were left open and we grew up using them for all sorts.

I remember getting up first on weekend mornings, creeping downstairs where more often than not me Dad would be lying on the living room floor on the cushions off the settee. I’d climb all over him for a bit, just to make sure he was awake. Then I’d go for the firelighter, or cigarette lighter, as he called it, which was usually lying within arms length of me dad’s mouth, on top of the Senior Service. The curtains would still be drawn and in the semi-darkness of the early morn the flickering flame of the lighter would keep me amused for all of ten minutes, or until it ran out of fuel.

These brief early morning tumbles with me dad couldn’t have lasted very long, either on the days they occurred or over the duration of time. They were, though, the only times I had that kind of physical contact with him. But what I really wanted was the keys to the car. So I’d let him go back to sleep and then go through his pocket till I found them, hoping he’d parked the car in the garage.

The garage at these times was magical, a special place. It was dark, silent, cocooned. The smell of petrol and exhaust, clinging to early morning dew. Opening those inward opening folding doors, just missing the back bumper, and yes, I’ve just remembered, it was closing them behind me, back into the darkness, but it was ok. I’d wait until my eyes became accustomed to the darkness. Opening the driver’s door, again just enough room without hitting the door on the wall. Climbing inside, locking the door. Now key in the ignition. Check the wipers – ok, indicators – good, horn – no, still too early. Then it was the lights. When the headlights went on the light seemed to bounce back and to, from surface to surface, casting ghost like shadows all around. But it was ok. It was ok.

Then the occasional trudging of footsteps across the cinders and eventually the waking world intruded completely, cars coughing their way into action. Doors slamming , the rattle of the coal scuttles, and I’d peer out to see if our kitchen light was on and go back in for breakfast.

Our garage was nearly always lined with string bound parcels of newspapers and magazines my dad was supposed to have delivered. Instead he stored them and when he’d got tons he’d phone the waste-paper people who’d send a flat back truck round to collect it all. Must have been a nice little earner! He also had lots of these hardboard sheets which were to be used as advertising hoardings. They never were. Instead we’d lay them out on the garage floor, grid like, and use them as roads for our dinky cars. Ours always had the tyres and wheels missing, twisted axles, and no doors. This was a time for inviting kids like Roy Grinrod round to play. He had loads of dead good cars.

But the garages were also used for more nefarious coming and goings. Obviously we used them as toilets! Not ours though. Usually it would be number six or seven. We never played much in them. They always seemed to have pools of oil on their floors. And of course they always smelled of toilets! My brothers also used our garage as a smoking den. They’d light up and then send me back into the house to look through the kitchen window to see if any smoke was escaping.

Some of the Marshside girls our Mike used to go to School with would come round sometimes and there was always a bit of “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” going on.

“Not while he’s here,” they’d say, pointing at me, and I’d be banished outside , but I remember looking through the crack in the door and seeing our Paul with his football shorts all rolled up , pretending they were his underpants.

One Saturday, just before dinner time, we all got ready to greet Baldy as he made his regular sojourn to the Plough in Crossens. Baldy used to take the track on the other side of the bank, the one the shrimpers used. He’d saunter along, from wherever he lived. We’d speculate about a cave or a hole in the bank, with corrugated iron sheet that he nicked off the pig sties, as doors. He’d follow the line of the bank till he got to the pub.

Those wise enough had worked out when to expect him, just before opening time. As he ran the gauntlet through our patch we’d wait, hidden on the other side of the bank, and then spring out on him, keeping our distance of course, and proceed to verbally abuse him about his lack of hair. He’d curse back at us, wave his walking stick in the air, pretend to chase us, even resort to donning the flat cap on occasions. But on this day he’d obviously been rehearsing. He left us deflated, defeated, hopeless, speechless.

“IF YOU WANT TO SEE SOMETHING BALD, GO AND LOOK AT YOUR MUM’S ARSE!” With that we all retreated, me in a state of total confusion. How did he know about me mum’s arse?

Somehow me, our Mick and Paul Jameison ended up together, sat in the corner of the cinders, up against our garden fence, where everyone would dump the weeds and grass cuttings out of their gardens. This made a tiny hillock, allowing us to sit just above ground level.

We’d hardly sat down.

“Michael! What you talking to those lads about?” Mum on the back doorstep. “Don’t be teaching them any bad habits!” She turns to go back inside, then turns back. “Don’t go away. I might want you to go to the shops.” Another double turn. “And another thing, don’t be hanging round here all day!”

“Ok.” sez Mick

I really felt sorry for Mick, he just couldn’t win, but then again, he did try to teach us bad habits.

Mick must have been about twelve and Paul Jameison a bit younger. I was about five or six. I was daydreaming, not really listening to what they were saying. Occasionally I’d try to join in but a sideways glance from one and a sneering “who asked you?” from the other was enough to send me back to my daydreams.

The Tinsleys’ dog, Rinty, came over. It sniffed all three of us in turn, cocked its leg up in the long grass and went its way.

“That were a laff, wonit?” I said.

“What?”

“Chasing Baldy.”

“It were alright.”

“It were dead funny when he fell over,” chipped in Paul.

“Aye,” sez Mick

“I din’t see him fall over. Why din’t I see him fall over?”

“I don’t bloody know, You was probably legging it by then.”

“No I wont.”

I sieved handfuls of gravel through me fingers, and then me attention was taken by a lady bird on me leg.

“Do ya think he’ll be coming back again soon?”

“Na, not yet, too early.”

I got the ladybird on my finger to try and tell how old it was from the number of spots on its wings, but it flew away.

“Wot shall we do?” I ask.

“I don’t bloody know, do I?” sez Mick, “Wot y’askin’ me for, yus can go an do wot ya want for all I care.”

“But I thought we wos doin’ somat together?”

“Aye well, ya know what thought did don’t ya?”, sez Paul.

“Wot? Wot did he do?”

“Pissed his pants an’ thought he was sweatin’.”

“Do ya know what else he did?”, sez Mick. “He walked behind a muck cart an’ thought it wos a weddin’.”

Lafter all round. I didn’t really get it, but laffed anyway. Tinsley’s dog returned, and for a couple of minutes we threw stones for it to chase. Then the dog got bored and left.

“Wish I had a fag,” sez Mick. “Ay, nip in the ‘owse an see if yu can nick a fag off me mam.”

“Get lost, I’m not, you do it!”

“I can’t,” he sez, “she’ll know what I’m lukin for.”

“Well, I’m not goin.”

“Go on ya softie,” sez Paul, “get one for me too.”

“No”, I said, beginning to feel the pressure building up.

“Go on she won’t miss a couple!”

“Aye go on,” sez Mick, “she’ll not miss a couple, go on just go an see.”

“Go an see what?” I enquire.

“Just bloody go an’ see if ya can get any fags will ya an stop pissin’ about.” Mick’s voice had that edge to it now. Running out of patience.

“Alright, I’ll go.”

I go in through the back door, get meself a glass of water, gulp it down, upstairs for a wee and then back out.

“She ‘asn’t got none.”

“Liar! Ya didn’t look.”

“Oh yes I did.”

“Oh no ya didn’t.”

“Well you go an look if ya don’t believe me.”

“Bugger off,” he sez, and it’s back to sieving gravel.

Then me mam was back on the doorstep.

“If you lot have got nothin’ to do, I’ll find you something,” she says.

“It’s alright,” sez Mick.

“We should have asked to have a look at her arse!” sez Paul.

QueenSpark Groupies

Keith Jago

For me, our Group has worked as one,
Though, sadly, the time is now come,
To bid fondly “Farewell”,
To new literary pals,
With verses & rhymes & with fun!

So, Martha, please start this rhyme off,
At her writings I never have scoffed,
Martha’s grown, which is why,
With her confidence high,
She’s sure to deliver a lot!

Now, Tony, he brought us much mirth,
I’ve laughed for all I was worth,
Please continue to write,
Words so wonderfully light,
A talent, quite clearly, from birth!

Next there’s Margaret who came from the Fair,
With her glorious flowing red hair,
She so sensitive told,
Of her life on the Road,
That I feel like I almost was there!

Now, thoughts turn to a certain Celine,
Fine writer! – one very rare seen,
With an English degree,
She’ll outshine us, you’ll see,
And of talent, I always shall dream.

Next, Karens, there strangely were two,
So double the work I must do!
There was Karen – the Scot,
In her kilt – she danced hot,
And her writing was sparkling, too!

Next comes Brigit, pure talent for sure,
Though a talent we only rare saw,
From those rather few times,
B. delivered her lines,
‘Tis a talent I truly adored.

Now, first Karen has lovely blond hair,
But next Karen’s a darker affair,
She, of Irish descent,
Vibrant writings we sensed,
Makes me rueful I’ll hear them no more!

Though to start with our class numbered ten,
But two came, then too quickly they went,
Pauline prose it was fine,
Rachel’s lines were sublime,
Such a shame, their commitment soon spent.

Now finally comes to yours true,
Aspiring talent? – says who?
Your attention’s been won?
And I hope, given you fun?
So, remember me kindly, please do.

And now to our excellent teacher,
Success for this Group – she’s key feature,
Her name – it is Jones,
River certainly flows,
And in flowing, so well did she teach us!

What’s this, it’s not over yet?
Due credit I must not forget,
QueenSpark Books, you’ll recall,
‘Twos they started this all,
And to them I am truly indebted!