Memory

My earliest memory, honestly, goes back a very long way. It's not all that pleasant, either, which may be why it made such an impression on me, but it ends up all right.

I'm in our living room, at West End, and it must be early evening because the light is on and I'm looking at it. I can't move my arms and my face hurts, just for a moment, and I cry. Next thing there's a bottle teat in my mouth and I can taste the warm milk and my mother is cuddling me. That's it - end of scene. Years later I mention the memory to my mother and she tells me I had a boil, spot, whatever on my cheek and she had to, gently, bathe it and squeeze it. She says I was 9 months old at the time.

I must be around the same age for the next memory. I'm being wheeled in my big black pram and it's a sunny day. We must have just been to Auntie Elsie's baker's shop because I am lying back on the pillow, holding a newly baked loaf in my fists and sucking a corner of the loaf. The bread is still warm and tastes wonderful. There's a chain on the side of my pram that hooks on to the wheel as a form of brake. I can slap that chain against the side of the pram and it makes the most satisfying noise.

Another pram memory sees a very wet day. I'm in the pram with the hood and apron up and one of my brothers, I think it's Tony (Big Bro 2), is pushing me along. The rain has made a lovely puddle on the apron and I can just get my hand over the bib-front of the apron to splash in it. Oh, bliss!

Always foremost in my mind is going to the doctor's surgery for innoculations. I'm on my mother's knee and Dr Stewart, who fascinates me because he has prematurely grey hair and a moustache, just like my dad, has got up to go to his cupboard. He comes back and advances towards my exposed left arm holding what, I am quite sure, is a fountain pen in his hand, and I know what he intends to do with it. I beetle my 12 month old brows, as best I can, and give him one of my best scowls. This man has to be told, warned, scared if possible, so I give it to him straight.
"If oo pick me," I growl, menacingly. "Me pick oo."
Damn the man, he has the audacity to laugh - and does it anyway.

There are many memories after that.

There's VE night, I'm 2 years old and we go to a bonfire in Jack Douthwaite's garden, along with most of the neighbours. I've no idea why we're there but I remember the huge fire and the potatoes Jack and my dad have "cooked" - black on the outside and raw on the inside - and everyone laughing and a few crying.

There's a chap in West End coming home, after years as a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese, and they put flags out and make a fuss and he doesn't want any part of it and everyone is sad.

There's dad's policeman friend, 6'4" and 20 stone, 10 years younger than my parents, who lodges with a shopkeeper across the road from us, and calls in to our house most days. Our front door is never locked and, like most people, Tom always just walks in but he always gives a little whistle, when he's in the hall, so we know it's him. I like Tom, a lot, but I'm a bit scared of him, especially when he's in uniform with all those silver buttons down his large front. Forty years later, when my dad's dying, Tom will come over from Preston and sit with him every afternoon, in Queens Park Hospital, holding his hand and talking to him. Tom will have shrunk a bit by then, as a man in his late 60s, and I'll hug him and thank him for his friendship and loyalty and just for being himself, and wish I'd known him better than I did.

There's me starting school at West End Council School, when I'm not quite 4, walking up the lane (Aspen Lane) which is surrounded by fields and, in the terrible Winter of 1946/47, the snow being over the tops of my wellies. I have to leave the school when I'm 5 and go to St Mary's because the priests at our church have persuaded my mother I should.

There's my mother's constant battle to get enough coal, that Winter, and her seemingly endless problems with the coal merchants, Nuttall and Whitehead. I write a letter which starts "Dear Nuttall and Whitehead" and asks them why my mummy has no coal. It looks like a series of squiggles, to the uninitiated, but anyone with any sense knows what it says. I trust my mother to send it but I catch her "reading" it out to a neighbour and I'm outraged. She says they always send letters back when they've read them so that's OK.

Memories after the age of 4 are too numerous to mention here, I could write a book - one day, I just might. One thing I'm glad about is that Nature gave me a phenomenal long-term memory (not always a comfortable gift).

I just wish I could remember last week half as well as 60 years ago.