Part I
Playgroup and nursery belong to a time in my life without benchmarks or precedents. I remembered nothing beforehand, obviously, and I was not minded to quiz my contemporaries as to their own routines. Life simply happened. My mother - who I believe at that point was working part-time as a laboratory technician at a local secondary school - ferried me hither and thither, generally on foot, but occasionally, for the longer journeys, in a pleasant and fusty pale green Nissan Cherry. The interior was non-committal beige faux leather, and it smelt lightly of petrol. The windows could only be wound up and down manually. It was mummy's car. Daddy drove the Saab, and later the Volvo, but neither were as characterful and aromatic as the Nissan Cherry. (It was a sad day when the Cherry made way for the Primera, in my early adolescence, and then the Micra, in my mid- to late-adolescence, and later on the Juke, by which point I had left home and didn't care much.)
I have only a few memories of playgroup (in the Sandridge community centre) and nursery (Lemsford Road, St Albans). Of the former, I only have a sense of the location, and a vague recollection of walking to and from it. Of the latter, I remember peering through a tunnel in the playground and seeing the face of my friend Michael (or was it Frank?) peering in from the other side. Michael/Frank was my first friend, and although I remember nothing of him with certainty - including his name - I do sometimes wonder where he is now. Is he married? Where does he live? Does he recall Muriel Green nursery, and playmate's face in the tunnel?
I do also remember a field trip of some kind at nursery, during which I ate a raisin which I had found on a bench. Someone, I can't remember who, grassed me up to the teacher (do nurseries have teachers? What I mean is, whichever lady was in charge). It goes without saying you aren't supposed to eat raisins which you find lying about. I learnt my lesson and moved on.
James, my brother, must have been born by the time I was in nursery, but I don't remember him very well at that age, nor my elder sister Katie. Perhaps I was too wrapped up in play tunnels and furtive raisin-eating to have noticed them at all.
Eating was, and always has been, a fixation of mine. As a young child I adored bananas, and so much so that I concluded - as only a young child would - that all bananas were purchased for my enjoyment. Upon discovering my mother eating one - oh, foulest treachery! - I am told that I burst into tears. Scarred, perhaps, by that early trauma, I gave up on bananas and even now I'm fairly indifferent to them. I enjoy them most sliced on white bread toast with lots of butter.
(There was a phase when James and I would mash the banana onto the toast, and smear honey on the top. We only ever did this, I think, at our grandparents' house in Bournemouth, near the seaside. Why? Because at home in St Albans we were watched like a hawk, and banana-honey mashed onto toast would definitely have been proscribed as being messy, frivolous, unhealthy or all three. When staying at either grandparents' houses, or when either sets of grandparents came to stay, the rules were relaxed a little and we were left to our own devices.)
After nursery came primary school, St John Fisher in Marshalswick. I was not gregarious, athletic or fanciable, and academically was near the top of the class, but never quite there. I spent all my free time with my best friend Joey. We invented an insanely elaborate imaginary world called "Maderup", which comprised a single large continent, "Monilane", and several islands of varying sizes surrounding it. (We took inspiration from, amongst other things, the decorative linings of our outdoor coats (featuring a deer's head, I think, and possibly also a mountain). My coat was bright green. Joey's could be rolled up into the hood and secured there, creating a kind of coat-ball. I envied Joey his coat-ball.) Other inspirations came from our respective Lego collections (Joey's included a pirate ship and Medieval Knights, which mine lacked) and even Star Wars, which had filtered through to our consciences and which we both rather liked.
One nation, New Greensland, was inspired by a particularly green and verdant-looking Lego forest. We even had a national anthem for it:
"Inglorious, inglorious, Newgreensland are victorious..."
Or something like that, anyway.
Occasionally I would bring my brother into our games. I didn't actually believe in Monilane, or Maderup (although I did have vague plans at that age of one day creating it; plans which centred around inflating a very large beach-ball-type object until it was approximately the size of the globe, and on which the various florae, faunae and nation states could be placed), but James for a while did - or perhaps he simultaneously believed and disbelieved, in the way that only young children can do.
But how to explain why Maderup looked just like our house and garden on St Albans Road, and its inhabitants just like his older brother? This plot-hole was patched up with "magic dust". James would close his eyes, I would throw "magic dust" in them, and voila! Playtime in Maderup could commence. (My sister occasionally also partook in this deception, although I don't know why exactly. She was often scornful of Maderup and did not in any case play with her brothers very often.)
James's own contribution to Maderup was the mythology of Badaboogie, a kind of tyrant dinosaur king (perhaps not unlike a triceratops) who lived in the northern part of the Monilane continent, which coincidentally resembled a mirror image of the American continent. Badaboogie's arch-nemesis was Monilane southerner Pinot-Pancher-Poncher, a bipedal sauropod and local despot. Pinot-Pancher-Poncher's wife was named Pinot-Noir-Oir, whose etymological provenance is rather more obvious than that of her husband. (It may be that his name also derived from Pinot Noir, a wine which I must have overheard my father discussing, or from Augusto Pinochet, the South American despot who might well have been in the news around the time of Pinot-Pancher-Poncher's inception.)
I suspect it was long before he openly admitted it that James lost his faith in the magic dust. For the sake of easing playtime, he went along with the pantomime. After playing in the eaves (or "attic", as we called it) in the roof space, which we had been expressly forbidden to do by mummy, James confessed to her our crimes and we were given a thorough dressing drown. My sister Katie and I were so furious with James that we threatened to ban him from Maderup. The threat had little impact on him. Nonetheless, despite his treachery, we continued to explore the attic space, finding such treasures as an old empty box of Swan matches, which we speculated was from the Second World War. This is particularly unlikely given the house wasn't built at that point.
School was within walking distance of home, around twenty to thirty minutes' walk. Mummy, walking her bicycle, escorted us. She then cycled off to work. The reverse occurred at the end of the day.
Dizzy dizzy show. Water drinking competitions.