Thus it was that on a wet and windy September morning I found myself running along - somewhat unenthusiastically - behind my mother, en route to the school-bus pick-up point. Even on the worst of days there is joy to be had by the adventurous of spirit. What kind of joy would this be, you might say, on such a torrential, windswept, school-looming slop of a day? Puddles, I answer, unhesitatingly! Puddles, scourge of the adult, manna to the young and the young at heart! “ ‘urry up, we’re goin’ ter miss the bus! Git out o’ that warta, I’ve jus’ polished them shoes! What the dickens d’you fink yer up ter?” Ah, joy to the ears it is, even now. What child - one conjectures - has never experienced the pleasures of teeming rain? Not least - one suspects - because of the growing awareness that the very same natural phenomenon is the one most despised by their elders and betters. What adults even, when propelled down the conduits of memory by the flashfloods of recollection, cannot remember - albeit with a sigh - the Pooh-stick escapades of their former lives? There by the raging gutters - oblivious to the screeching of my mother and the imminent inclemency of spilt ink and arithmetic - I followed my lolly-stick canoe down the Zambezi-like water courses of my imagination until it was lost forever over the precipitous edge of a gully-sucking drain. Onward I splashed under the dripping trees. Out into the cats and dogs, lashing at a slant, full pelt of the earlier than expected equinoctial blast. I crossed the main London Road without a care. Was scolded and ear-clipped for my thoughtless trouble and told to shut-up and shelter in the louring doorway of a nearby shop. I wiped the rain off the window and peered inside. That was a real shop. Not in a million years would it have qualified for a hygiene-certificate. There, everything was dusted with flour, and floured with dust. Produce and packaging were in enmity in those days. Barrels and bins were full to overflowing with all kinds of powdery and granular substances. Sugar and flour - webbed and foot-printed by mice and spiders and speckled with unspeakable black excrescences - vied for my attention with the rolled down sacks of split peas and pigeon-mixture. Butter was in slabs, cheese was mouldy, and bacon sliced wafer-thin and salt-cured wispy before one’s very eyes. The proprietary brands come flooding back: Brasso, at its knick-knack polishing best, Cherry-Blossom, for boots black or brown and for the smudged unsightly thumbprint on a stiff, studded and detachable collar, Blue-Bags for white washing, and Sunlight Soap for the dreaded duck-bobbing, ear, nose and throat clinical scrubbing on a Friday night. Next door to that shop was the shoe-repairers, known locally as the ‘snobs.’ There it was that a grey-haired, wizened, little old man, wearing a leather apron and with gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, hammered away at his last. He was then - and still is to my retarded mind - the template for every idea I’ve ever had about elves beavering away for Father Christmas in the frigid but frolicsome workshops at the North Pole. What a lovely, leathery smell exuded from that place. What a tick, tacks in the mouth, tock of a rhythmical music came from the swing of his arm’s precision. Here was the world of William Morris, writ large, the life-enhancing qualities of craftsmanship. Here, and by these methods, the workingman would overcome the tyrannical predations off his capitalist overlords and reform the social system to one of equality and justice for all. Work and workers would become as one. Opposites would be united. The last and all-redeeming higher synthesis would be finally and irrevocably achieved. Thus spake the personifications of hope gathered collectively in the precincts of that pivotal decade. Thus speak they still from the precincts and shopping malls of the nihilistic nineties. Here in this no hope, hole in the pocket, terminal brink of Giro-mania.
The bus drew up and to my dismay another small severance of the umbilical cord was about to take place. Not only was I going to a new school, but this time I was going to a new school on my own. Apart from the driver, we had our minders. A couple of old-time Catholic women well versed in the arts of scruffing the neck and dusting the seat of the pants. The bus was a green, crash-geared, vintage Eastern National double-decker. Inside it was a wondrous mix of wood, leather and metal, and the windows had either windy-handles or popup slit-eyed louvres. I believe that the collective noun for a busload of demented children is a riff-raff. Riff-raff we were. On that bus there were more decibels per/cubic inch than would eventually emanate from the ill-fated expansion-chambers of the TR2. Upstairs, our test-bedded feet clattered across the gridded metal floors and beat out an interminable mind-numbing tattoo. Pigtails were pulled and screams were issued in reply. The sounds of slapped legs and insolence drifted from the ever-changing directions of our patrolling warders. Between bouts of tears and giggling, blood-curdling cries and hoots of uncontrollable laughter, I managed to see something of the countryside out of the rain-washed, steamed-up windows of that omnibus from hell.
Early wet September was still more part of summer than it was of the approaching autumn. All was green fields, green hedgerows and green trees. A sopping, many-toned, paradoxical kaleidoscope of greenness was all there was of the world to be seen between Pitsea and that other marshland settlement, Stanford-le-Hope. The Five-Bells, Springfield and the Homesteads, were all places hardly noticed on that particular journey, that have since become the stock-in-trade of my earliest memories. The Five-Bells, an inn at the foot of a line of low hills facing southwards to Fobbing marshes and beyond to the Thames-Haven oil-refineries, was in those days a sleepy little corner of the world meandering around the lazy curve of a slow S bend. There under a group of the once ubiquitous elms, stood the blacksmiths with its forge. It was there that the protean character of metal was first perceived by my inquiring mind. What Prometheus had stolen, the blacksmith tamed, and by Jove he knew it. There it was that I saw the lifted feathery hooves of giant shires and the enormous muscular bulk of the Suffolk-punch. It was there that I heard the resounding, resonant ring of hammer on anvil. Where white-hot metals yielded to the blacksmith’s awesome power. Where bellows puffed and wheezed and blasted. Where smoke and sparks and coal-dust erupted from the molten core of the forge, like the fiery-breath of some infernal creature. Where tongues of glimmering iron were thrust into vats of water. Where the scolded air was tempered in a cloud of steam, and the ears’ involving labyrinths rang and recoiled from the hiss of imagined serpents.
Springfield, a tiny hamlet straddling the crossroads between the Five-Bells and the Homesteads, was the birthplace of my earliest agricultural experiences, peas and potatoes being the favoured crops in the area. As one who has been gainfully employed in harvesting both of these commonplace comestibles, I would say - pod for pod - that peas are by far the easiest proposition in terms of energy expended. Although, as is the way with all economies - the rural one being no exception - the harder, bent-double, back-breaking work of potato-picking offered the better financial returns. However, my back and the potato harvest never really came to terms with one and other. Radox, White-Horse oil, and bread-poultices were no substitute for the pleasures of a vertical existence. Say what you will. Quote Darwin or Desmond Morris if you must. But as far as I’m concerned walking along at ninety degrees to the perpendicular is not my idea of homo sapiens in their most sophisticated mode. Just the memory of it is enough to start a dull, unremitting ache in the depths of my lumbar region. I gave it my best shot - as they say in more progressive, go-for-it parts of the world. - but I’m afraid that my best shot was nothing less than a blank. Potatoes need a more heroic, how-the-west-was-won, sort of spirit than I could ever muster. No, for me it was peas. Petits pois, mange-tout, marrowfat, or any other variety you’d care to mention. I could sit down on the job with just a pile of sacks and a sunny day to keep me company. What more could you ask? I can’t remember just how much I got paid for a sack-full now, pennies, shillings, groats? It’s all far too long ago. What I do remember is being bored stiff with the time it took to fill a sack with peas. They were no ordinary sacks. Oh no! They were sacks designed by a committee of niggardly Essex farmers. To fill them up, one of my diminutive stature needed to stand on tiptoe with arms at full stretch. Needless to say, in order to lessen the effort involved a number of nefarious ploys were attempted. Padding out with vines was a favourite. Though most employers were up to that one. Seeing as they weighed the sacks as well, it was quite easy for them to sort out the wheat from the chaff - metaphorically speaking. The