When you are a
youngster you dream of growing up, having a bike, running away from home or eating
ice cream or cake until you are sick. Most of us will remember collecting the
last free card in a set or a plastic toy you really wanted in the cereal packet.
In my day we collected cigarette cards.
However as time
goes on your dreaming alters to more worldly needs. Such as getting the girl in
pigtails sitting in front of you in class to turn round and smile at you or
scream because you pulled her hair. Unfortunately this sort of dream often
comes at inappropriate moments and the first thing you know is the teacher
glaring at you if you are looking at the girl in pigtails.
When I was a
child I was a bit of a wimp as I had a bully for a brother. I don’t know what
he had been told about my impending arrival but as I was a clingy, hungry,
smelly baby that took all of his mother’s attention, I was clearly not welcome.
I wasn’t supposed to be a brother, the name chosen some time before my birth was
Judith so clearly I was a disappointment all around. Luckily I was born in the
morning at home and there was a bird singing outside in the garden, a Robin, so
an alternative name sprung my mother’s mind. I am quite pleased about this as
they could have been particularly cruel and called me Judith regardless.
So I grew up as a
brother, and soon had few boy cousins and sundry other male relatives too but
only one girl cousin She was the oldest relative of my generation and
completely opposite to me in every way. She was clean, polite, clever, musical,
and was an only child. So my dream then was to be a girl. So I liked dolls but
didn’t have one of my own. I did have a stuffed toy monkey named Beppo who was my constant loving companion as
opposed to my brother who was an inconstant hateful one. I didn’t hate him it
is just that as I followed him around he saw me as the enemy that would take
all his food, toys, love and attention, which had been his right until I came
on the scene, so eventually I tried to keep out his way. His recourse at the
meal table was to eat very quickly and then steal the food from my plate when
no-one else was looking. This is why I am so thin.
As I wanted a
dolly, and I moaned a lot at what I saw was deprivation the message finally sunk
in. As there was a little girl that lived at the top of the street my mother
was game enough to talk to her mother to ask if she could make my dreams come
true and I give me one of the little girl’s cast off dollies that she didn’t
need. My guess is that she probably did have a few but when she heard that this
dirty, thin, ugly little boy from down the road wanted a dolly suddenly all of her
dollies were very precious to her. So I never received one.
So I had to grow
up as a boy with just a toy monkey and a few dinky toy cars to play with. The
monkey I may add was my constant loving companion for many years and of
necessity had a number of replacement faces sewn on when the other ones had
worn away with love. Eventually I stopped dreaming of dollies and settled for
dreaming about the next best thing…girls.
The problem with
girls is that they don’t dream about you. I discovered the opposite sex in
class at school. Then as a boy in the between age of being a lovely little chap
and an obnoxious teenager I found myself as a new pupil in a new school. At the
music lesson everyone had to stand up at the back of a large room all huddled
together. As luck would have it a girl of my own age and size stood by my side
as I was at the end of the row of boys and she was at the end of the row of
girls and the two had to meet somewhere and that was us. So we sang along
together. I would say we sang in unison but that would not have been the case
with me as I had a voice like a cross cut saw as one music master later said of
me. However she did reach out and hold my hand which had never happened to me
before. It was something like having ice cream for the first time. I am glad
she didn’t look to see how dirty it was.
In those days
children were quite independent of parents. We walked to school by ourselves
and walked back home afterwards either alone or with friends. That is not true.
Girls walked or skipped, boys ran or dawdled, pushed each other in the bushes
or tripped each other up. This is just a male thing. So that afternoon when the
last bell rang the little girl waited in the playground for me to walk her home.
It wasn’t far, so we walked down road turned right into her road and took her
to the door where her mother met us and ushered us inside. She gave us a drink
and when I had finished that I was ushered to the door and that is the last I time
I ever spoke to the little girl. She may have noticed how dirty my hands were.
Another reason may
be that I was an unaccomplished liar. When I first attended this school as a
new boy I had no standing, no history so I told them that we had just come from
Africa where I grew up with the natives. Now
you will say this was untrue. Not entirely, for years I had lived in a dream
world of looking after a pet monkey and through ill luck had a spear thrown at
me by my best friend that went in my calf. So I had an entirely different
history in my mind which others saw this as me being a lying little oaf.
My life has been
littered with such experiences. Not all of them involving little dark haired girls
that wanted to hold my hand; probably like the Good Samaritan that would help
even the lowest of the low. And the girl? Sadly I don’t even remember her name as
my mind is a little fuzzy these days.
