I Remember . . .

Every now and then I cast my mind back to the days of my youth, often triggered by something that I see. This morning I looked out of my window when it was still dark and saw lights reflected on the road outside my house, and it took me back to the days when I was a schoolboy travelling home from school when it was dark in the rain (often). As I got closer to my town and my bus stop, I would marvel at the street lights and the shop window lights reflected on the wet pavements and roads. Somehow they managed to make the mundane magical for me, and brightened up what was otherwise, by virtue of constant repetition, a boring journey.

Often it is the little things in life that make the most difference. Of course the major moments will stay with us for ever, but its the little things that have created magical imagery in our minds that we more often recall in later years.

As a child I would often sit in the window-seat that was built into the wall of our lounge, gazing out through rain-spattered window panes, watching the garden get a wash that would cleanse it for another day. I would focus on a raindrop as it hit the pane and watch it gathering momentum as it joined others and created mini-waterfalls, and I would be transported to another world which my imagination created and peopled. Were these the moments, I wonder, when words started to form into the verse that I would one day write?

Even as I write this post I can, whilst recalling looking through the front window travelling homeward, upstairs on a double-decker bus, almost smell the odour of wet clothing and the tobacco-smoke filled air, as it assails my nostrils once again for a fleeting moment. I can hear the chatter of fellow-travellers, somehow detached and distant, all around me, gradually lessening as the bus disgorged them at the various stops along the way until at last it was time for the bus to spew me out onto the pavement for another day.

I got off the bus outside Bulson's Electrical shop, which was a wonderland of TV sets, radios, and other products, all displayed in bright light, and the light, not satisfied with being contained behind the glass of the window, would spill out in a riot across the pavement outside. On wet wintry evenings the light would be transformed as it reflected from the street outside the shop, and once again a small boy would have an image painted onto his memory.

All these thoughts remind me of hurrying around the corner to get into the warmth of my home, preferably in front of the open fire, where maybe my mother would let us toast some crumpets. After toasting they would be spread with butter that would quickly melt into the holes on the crumpet surface, only to be clutched into eager hands and gobbled up.

Aah! Isn't memory wonderful!