Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Autobiography
4: From the Big Bang to Steady State
The latest scientific speculation suggests
that there had to be something before the Big Bang, poetic flat universes like
bed sheets occasionally coming together to create a terrific flap and give
birth to yet another. If the first of this series of posts on my childhood began
with a memory of my own big bang – the lighter striking fire and the curtain
conflagration, I’d like to borrow from the pre - Big Bang scientific supposition and make mention of what existed before.
My first memory did not kick start my life,
of course. That was done in India.
I was born into an exotic, even traumatic medium of events and emotions which
are now, at least temporarily, lost to me. I was a second child, the first, a
sister, having mysteriously drowned aged six in India before I was born. From
having a dedicated servant and hot earth I was in no time seeing only white
skins with a cold ground under my feet. From bilingual at four – Urdu and
English - I was made monolingual by the new culture of the unrelieved, accented English of a Geordie pit village by the time I was five. I started wearing
spectacles suffering from very short sight.
All this pre-history and early existence conspired
to make me feel different, a bit of a loner, at least this is what my adult
self now informs me sagely. I
remember having many friends but no blood brothers. My sister came along four
years after me and by then my sparateness was somewhat determined. I spent the first
hour in bed this morning trying to uncover early memories after the Big
Flame. Here are a few.
A square cube known as a ‘blue bag’ on the
kitchen window sill to ease the pain of frequent bee stings. My mother’s horror
at a jam jar of pond water and a beetle so big inside it, it seemed to fill it
entirely with its black back and red belly. Plodging in the stream on the way
to school and through the dark and terrifying tunnel under the road to the
other side. When I revisited this landmark as an adult it seemed impossible
that a child could have crawled through, never mind stooped his fearful way in
his wellies. Birds eggs in boxes padded with cotton wool. Butterflies in jam
jars as well as bees. A man my parents called my ‘uncle’ who was a magician and
bandaged his thumb and cut it off making it bleed copiously before re-engaging
it and restoring it to health upon undoing the bloody linen. He gave me a
silver coin of some kind. Our pebbledash, tiny cottage with its two small
bedrooms, and in winter the ice on the inside of my bedroom window which refracted
illumination from the street lamp outside, casting monsters on to the bedroom
walls. My father having his zinc-filled bath before the fire and the prudery of him. Our dog which was a black Scottie and yapped. Our cat, that frequently
attacked a neighbour’s Alsatian so that it cowered, ears flat whenever passing
our house. A peck on my willy by a
hen that came to watch me pee through chicken wire, causing me to scream and my
mother to laugh for minutes on end. Reading. Every day a new book from the village
library which was in my primary school and was on revolving shelves that served
the children by day and the adults after school and on Saturdays. By six I did
not differentiate and the librarian indulged my tastes. I can still see Captain Hornblower R. N. by C.S. Forester in its vivid, adventure suggesting dust cover. The Scarlett Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy.
These memories are like dots, not joined up
yet into proper pictures, isolated stars not yet sufficient to make the Milky
Way. But, as Dylan Thomas says in Welsh Incident , “I was coming to that…”
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