Dosed up on steroids, having difficulty breathing, and waking in the early hours of the morning, going back to sleep was not easy. Think something positive before the black stuff comes clouding in.
Think of five things that made you feel secure in childhood days.
Points West – the BBC local news programme broadcast from Bristol each weekday at 6.00. It had always the feel and the reassurance of a local newspaper. Living in Northern Ireland from the age of 22, too often the local news was a repeat of grisly stories that had filled the national news. Points West rarely had anything grisly to report, it was a daily reassurance that all was well with the world, and where things weren’t perfect, then some earnest person would appear on camera to explain how things would be put right. Once, a couple of years ago, when walking down the Whiteladies Road in Bristol, I was tempted to walk into the BBC offices to say ‘thank you’. They would have thought me a lunatic.
Car headlights on a country road – living in perpetual light, with street lamps so bright that it is possible to read standing in the back yard at anytime of the night, there is reassurance in real darkness. Standing watching from an upstairs window, it was possible to follow cars making progress towards our tiny village from the small town three miles away. There was not a single street light in the village; the illumination of hedgerows, garden gates, parked cars, and night animals, will forever create a childhood sense of being homeward bound at the end of a long day.
Grocery vans – Shopping options in the village were limited, but each Monday teatime a man called David Macey would arrive with a big old van that was more the size of a lorry. It had a long nosed bonnet and you could step up inside it through the back doors to buy stuff from the shelves on either side. He had his scales just behind the driver’s seat and it was here that you paid 3d for Barrett’s Sherbet Fountains. Looking back, it was hard to imagine that there was much of an income to be derived from kids with thrupenny bits and the odd villager buying a few things, but even now when I see the Tesco Online delivery van, I think of David Macey.
4.45, it’s daylight, but too early to get up.
Two more things?
The Western Morning News – Is this an imagined memory, Ian? The Western Morning News is a Plymouth paper, why would it be on a kitchen table in Somerset? Are you sure it was not the Western Daily Press, that would be more likely, it’s Bristol, that’s our area. The image remained firm, the Gothic type of the newspaper title. The paper was on Mrs Vigar’s kitchen table at Manor Farm. Manor Farm was where we went to be collected each morning by the car that transported a handful of us to the grammar school, plucked from our friends and community at the age of eleven. I still see Mrs Vigar each summer; she has never grown older, still the same smile and word of welcome. The newspaper on the table perhaps suggested continuity, stability, an order in things. But maybe I have imagined it, I shall have to ask her.
What was the fifth thing? I forget now.
I look at the clock, 6.55.