For the prelude to this, please read The Story of Me, and everyone I know
This is the first photo of me I can find. About two years old I think.
That's my mum holding me on the swing in our back garden.
The swing was red, I remember I loved it. Sometimes as I got older I would swing so hard it would tip over and I would be told off.
It just had tent pegs to hold it down. And I was tougher than tent pegs. I wanted to be Action Man.
The photo was taken in the early sixties before my mum got ill.
This is the only photograph I can find of my mum before the illness took hold and she changed.
Cameras were scarce then. The photo was taken on my dad's box brownie. That was the only camera we owned until the late 60's were booming and our family began to inch up from working class to lower middle class. Then we bought a Kodak Instamatic and rented a black and white television from Radio Rentals.
The photograph was taken in our back garden. The house was a medium size semi-detached house in the Home Counties. My parents bought the house in 1952 for only a few hundred pounds.
I was born there, raised there and lived all my life there until I moved out into my own place when I was 25.
The neighbours
Next door was the vicarage. There was a succession of Church of England vicars that lived there through my childhood. One I remember most was Father Gay.
The other side was a rented house. People came and went quite regularly. Before I can remember one of The Barron Knights lived there before they were famous.
In the sixties a Scottish family came to live there. That was great. They had a son called Frankie who was just a year younger than me.
Sometimes we were the best of friends. Other times we were the worst of enemies and we would regularly get into fights.
One time I remember we were having a good punch-up at the bottom of the stairs just by the open front door. Frankie's dad was cheering us on. My dad heard the commotion, came round and pulled us apart. I got a good telling off. Our families were different.
The balcony
At that time our house had a little balcony outside the back bedroom. A few years later it had got too rotten to be safe. By the end of the sixties it was taken down and a conservatory was built. My Uncle John was a builder.
The balcony has always been in my mind. To have a house with a balcony is one of my Five Dreams. One dream not yet realised.
I was wearing short trousers in the photo. I kept on wearing short trousers all the way through my primary school. Boys did in those days. It was not until I was eleven and going to secondary school that I graduated into long trousers.
The fatal roundabout
Sneaking in the bottom left of the photo was our roundabout. This roundabout remains imprinted in my mind, quite literally, to this day.
The roundabout was metal with rather sharp edges. One day I was crouching near the roundabout picking up my soldiers. A friendly friend spun the roundabout round and caught my head. Screams and blood were everywhere.
I had my first trip to the hospital and got stitches in the wound.
I remember I had a butterfly stitches for one head injury. But I think that was a few years later when I walked through a glass door that was closed. I am sure I had seen Hazel do it first.
Well, that's about 600 words. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. So I've sold you short this time by 400 words. But I was only two at the time so you can't expect me to remember everything. 😊
[Main image by Pennsif // camera images from pixabay - Creative Commons CC0]
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