Childhood Days of Fun

A move to a new place.

Childhood Days of Fun

 

By Elton Camp

 

            My family lived in a middle-class residential section of the small town of Albertville in north Alabama until I entered the first grade.  As far as I was concerned, it was ideal.  There were many children my age and some older ones to take the lead in our play.  All of that changed when my father decided to move us to a distant country location on the pretense of “doing it for you.”  The result was to isolate me from the children that I knew in school and to disrupt the normal creation of a circle of friends that starts in elementary school.  In fact, he did it for himself in an attempt to live cheaply and to be able to cultivate an enormous garden.  I was forced to adapt to a radical change in environment. 

 

            There were youngsters at the new location, but not many and the houses were far apart.  My best friend was Charlie Johnson who lived diagonally across the road. Since we didn’t have phones, the two of us worked out a series of hand signals so we could communicate at a distance.  I still remember some of them.  Arm upward and index finger circling meant, “I’ll ask if I can come over.”  The same signal ending with the index finger pointed at the other boy meant, “You ask if you can come over.”  Arm at waist level and index finger making a circle meant, “Meet halfway.”  Arm extended upward and fist repeatedly clinched and unclinched signified “I can’t.” 

 

            Charlie’s father was Woodrow Wilson Johnson, a tall, stout man with gray hair.  .  A reformed drunk, he was a good-hearted person, but was dominated by his wife.  He left Charlie’s upbringing to her.  His role was limited to that of family provider.  A worker at the Goodyear plant in Gadsden, he was, thanks to a strong union, paid far beyond his actual worth.  Despite her best efforts, Mary was unable to force him to attend her holiness church.  He disapproved of its doctrines and practices, but seldom expressed those views in her presence.  She “wore the pants” in the family in the worst sense of that expression. 

 

            Mary, was a strange person physically and mentally.  Little taller than a dwarf, she was almost as wide as she was tall.  Her long, brown hair was perpetually in a tight bun at the back of her head.  She never wore jewelry or makeup.  Born into a fundamentalist holiness church, she rejected medical care.  Among the tenets of her faith was the handling of serpents.  Since that dangerous practice had been outlawed in most of the South in church buildings, the group sometimes held the sessions in individual homes of its members.  My family learned how to know when that was taking place at her home. 

 

            “Never go to Charlie’s house when there are a bunch of cars parked in the yard,” my mother sternly ordered.  “They’re handling snakes and I don’t want you anywhere around a mess like that.”  The warning was unnecessary.  I had no pathological fear of snakes, but according them respect and kept as far away from them as possible. 

 

            I didn’t often go inside Charlie’s house.  The furniture was of the lowest quality, the floor usually unswept and the bed unmade.  There was a distinct odor of dirty clothes, mothballs and greasy cooking.  The front porch was fun as it had a make-shift trap door that allowed us to enter the crawl space and make our way toward the back of the house.  At that point were two openings into a semi-finished basement room used only for storage.  Most of the time, we played in the fields and woods. 

 

            An old barn below his home served as our headquarters.  It had never seen paint and the boards were beginning to decay.  The front room, partly filled with bales of hay for some long-ago cow, was fully enclosed so we often played there along with other neighbor boys.  Dense bushes surrounded the barn, so we cut a meandering trail to be able to reach it.  A stacked stone wall had been built at one side of the barn so we sometimes hung out below it.  With its good sized rocks and large spaces between them, it was a perfect hiding place for snakes, but we never encountered a single one.  Nor did we run up on the feared “panther” that everyone declared lived on the side of the mountain.  Periodically, sightings of the beast were reported, but none were ever captured or killed.  The creature was the rural version of the “urban legends” that became widespread years later. 

 

            The biggest problem Mary made for Charlie and me revolved around his young sister, Laura.  His mother viewed him as her babysitter.  “Tend t’ thet youngun,” she commanded sharply most times when he wanted to have fun.  That put a crimp in what we could do.  Tending her had to be done in his yard or mine.

 

            At other times we were free of Laura, especially as she grew older.  We were then able to roam the countryside as long as we didn’t go down the side of the mountain.  Charlie’s parents had strictly forbidden that, but I never knew why.   We lived near the brow of Sand Mountain.  The valley and Lake Guntersville lay in enticing view.  I wanted to walk down there and explore, but not alone.  “Let’s go anyway.  They’ll never know,” I urged many times.  “I can’t do that,” was his one response.  Charlie wouldn’t violate what was, for him, the Prime Directive.  We never went down the side of the mountain.  

 

            As we progressed through school, Charlie and I gradually drifted apart and finally broke off association altogether, but not in anger.  Our backgrounds and aspirations were just too different for our friendship to continue into teenage years.