Where Did It All Go Right? Read Online Free PDF Page A

those September evenings when the night rolls in without warning, and in all the excitement of midget freshwater angling neither Simon and I nor any of our mates had registered that it was pitch black. Suddenly, from out of the darkness Dad appeared to drag us angrily back home, unimpressed by the fact that we’d just caught a ‘jopper’ (i.e. a big fish, name derivative no doubt of ‘giant’ and ‘whopper’ but again not legitimised by any dictionary). I don’t suppose it was
that
late, but you don’t want your boys out after dark, do you? We were sent to bed with our tails between our legs (and the jopper’s tail in its killing jar out in the garage). Why? Because Mum had been ‘worried about us’.
    The other vivid instance of Mum being worried about us in our absence occurred in broad daylight. Simon and I had arranged to go and meet Pap Collins at his allotment on Billing Road, 3 easy cycling distance from our house, just the other side of the field. We used to love it when Pap appeared on his little moped 4 in that trademark piss-pot helmet – not that we called it that then – and we relished helping him dig up carrots in return for a piece of chocolate in his tiny, smaller-than-a-man shed. However, on this occasion, Pap never appeared.
    We waited and waited at the entrance to the allotments, but no Pap. Not that we were worried about
him
– our young imaginations extended as far as blowing up the guns of Navarone, but not to an elderly man having a moped accident. In the event, Pap had simply changed his mind about going down the allotment, and had phoned Mum to let us know. But we’d already left the house.
    Oh well, we thought, let’s call on Johnny Green – his house is right next door to the allotments and he’s got Mouse Trap and a pond and everything. Ace! (To use the vernacular of the time.) Johnny was home, and the three of us wiled away most of the afternoon there, playing hide and seek in his oversized, tree-filled back garden – quite a luxury, as our little back garden offered the choice of precisely two hiding places: behind the coal bunker and inside the coal bunker. Meanwhile, back at home, ever since Pap’s phone call Mum had been beside herself: why hadn’t we come straight back? Where were we? Had a stranger offered us sweets? Had we flown a kite too near an electricity pylon?
    When we gaily strolled back up Winsford Way (it wasn’t late or anything), Dad was out looking for us while Mum sat at home fretting and waiting for a call from Mountain Rescue. Dad shouted at us, Mum cried, we cried, and it was a right old scene. We’d only been in Johnny’s back garden!
    We learned something that day, as Kyle says on
South Park
: you can go anywhere and do anything as long as Mum doesn’t know where you are or what you’re doing.
    It’s funny how insightful I must have been at that young age, because deep down I knew Dad wasn’t as worried as Mum (she was always the worrier), and I knew they only shouted at us out of relief at our well-being.
    What measure of idyllic childhood was this? I was essentially free to do whatever I wanted, providing I returned before sundown and didn’t do one thing when I was supposed to be doing another. I got told off all the time, and had the backs of my legs slapped on more than one occasion, but Mum and Dad managed to care about our welfare without keeping us on a string. Perhaps that’s why we didn’t rebel – at least not to the point of having to be picked up from the police station or scraped up off the road.
    I smoked my first cigarette down the field with a ruddy-faced boy called Pete Thompson in the last year at middle school, when I was 13. When I say
smoked
, I wet the end of it and made the other end glow. It was a vague thrill, but did nothing for me, and I’m grateful for that now.
    As a kid you tend to do exactly what you’re told not to, and maybe if my parents had constantly warned me not to smoke and threatened me with cancer