FROM THE PAST

We're all different, but this is a bit of me.

When did my story begin?

I don’t mean when did a particular work of fiction that I’ve wasted my time writing begin, but when did I, the spirit and the flesh of this imperfect member of an imperfect species, begin?

I wasn’t there at my conception. It would have been interesting but plainly impossible with the absence of a Tardis (Time and Relative Dimensions in Space machine for those who’ve never seen Dr Who). And what makes it even more annoying is the simple fact that I can’t remember anything whatsoever about the man who contributed half my genetic material to what would, nine months later, squawk itself into life. Added to that, the woman who suffered the pains of my birth died above fifty years ago and even there my memory’s faded quite a lot.

So, to cut unsavoury ruminations short, I didn’t see the conception and I certainly never shudder when I try to imagine the heaving bodies (was it missionary position or something more imaginative?) How the hell would I know and anyway it doesn’t matter and is best left not pictured by the imagination.

So when did the story begin?

Well, my genes shaped me, or so they say. Fifty percent from him and fifty percent from her, and here I am, a unique individual with no real claim to that uniqueness at all because it emerged from previous equally unique creations born a generation earlier. And those did the same. Go back far enough and I might find Caligula somewhere in the chain. And further still to Owongo. And although Owongo is fiction he’s my fiction and as likely to be a real pulsating human being as Caligula or my unremembered dad.

So when did my story begin?

And why am I such a contrary creature who can’t just accept that nature does stuff and people get born? I’ve no mystical faith if that’s what bothers you, no concept that the dreams of prehistoric men in the Middle East got visitations from cruel and domineering deities who needed, above all else, worship and praise, might have been real. But I’m pretty sure they didn’t have any more reality than other dreams born of magic mushrooms or hallucinogenic poppies throughout history.

I’d better fathom my way through the conundrum soon or my story will be over before I understand what it’s been about. That’s the trouble with life-stories: they/re time limited, and only occupy that ridiculously short space between birth and death.

So I was born if the theory of my conception tallies with everyone else’s and not with a private little hypothesis of my own, one that involves magic, mystery and eternity. No, let’s forget the unreal and focus on actuality. I was actually born and as a kind of proof my mum told me before she lost her inciteful lucidity that there had been a problem with my entry into the world, one that involved the rushing from one pre-NHS hospital to another across town by a doctor who was needed to do something about my breathing which, apparently, was malfunctioning. Maybe repeated attempts by a midwife determined to start my engine are responsible for the excruciating pleasure I experience when my bottom is lightly tapped by a loved one. Or maybe not. Strike that last point. Forget it.

1943 was the year. It was a forlorn one though optimists and those who studied the heavens started to believe that the bloody second world war would be won eventually and Hitler would be lain to waste. But there was oxygen in the air, and I started to breathe it. That was the beginning of the physical story of me if you disregard the conception bit, which nobody alive today knows a blind thing about.

Apparently my first non-mama or dada word was “slags”, exclaimed in a loud and joyous voice in church (my parents went to church quite too often, I believe). “Slags” was my one year-old attempt at pronouncing “flags” as my babyish tribute to the bunting and flags that were everywhere following the cessation of hostilities. Or so I was told. That’s it. I was told.

So the first part of my story is what I’ve been told. There’s nothing deeper in my memory than words and descriptions proffered subsequent to the events. I was told that I shouted “slags” so that’s what I must have done. I was told about my problem regarding breathing and had to believe it.

Those first years have just about gone, too. I grew old enough to be educated, started school (not so kindly an institution, though nobody beat me, but I was obliged on one occasion to keep a piece of gristle from my school dinner in my tiny mouth until I could, undetected, spit it into the toilet what seemed like hours later. There had been horrendous shortages, especially of meat, and teachers thought a child must be obliged to consume what was on his plate or suffer the consequences. I couldn’t swallow gristle. I tried, I’m sure I did, but I couldn’t.)

I lived above a mile away from that first school yet more than once sneaked into a corner shop on my way home and spent my bus fare on liquorice root. Nobody cared that I’d walked home. I doubt anyone noticed I was late because my dad had died already (mum told me that he smoked and that’s what did it)…

You’re not going to school today, Peter, daddy died in the night…

Yes, that’s there along with the liquorice root and gristle and whatever other fragments survive somewhere in my head.

So is that my story? Or, at least, the start of my story… In the beginning was the sperm and the egg and they begat the child and he rejoiced in slags and chewed the gristle…

And it must have been from those seeds that my story began. And here’s the important bit, the bit I started writing this about, the part that really matters, and it has to do with my mum’s politics. And my dad’s too, maybe, I don’t know.

I can’t quote her because, well, it was a long time ago, but I’ll try…

Peter, me and your dad always vote Liberal… that’s what we are, liberals, we don’t vote for extremes…

I bet she didn’t mention extremes, but that was what she meant before her little grey cells got curdled by time and she forgot how to think altogether.

And when General Elections come around like they are now I’m reminded of those words, or my interpretation of what they might have been, and wish things were as simple now as they were then. And, you know, I really, really want to follow her example. I really, really want to vote for her, a forgotten widow in the corner of a forgotten graveyard, put a cross against her preferred candidate, but I can’t.

Because that’s not what I am. I’m not a mindless echo of the past but a thinking old fart of today.

And I might vote Liberal, but for myself rather than for her. Or I might not. No, I probably won’t. Too much is going wrong in the world for me to try to resurrect a corpse and give her a vote in such very changed times. And there was that gristle. Never forget the gristle.

It was there because of war and conflict leading inexorably to shortages, and we don’t want that again. Though I’ll bet you a pound to a penny that it will, sooner or later, with the fresh and foolish fragmentation of Europe. Dear mother, I’d like to learn from the past, like to grab hold of today and point to the bloodshed and gore and that chunk of gristle from a catastrophic yesterday, and say something like we joined together, became friends and stopped all that nonsense, but I can’t. Because there are morons who want a golden age that was war, war and yet more war.

And gristle.

© Peter Rogerson 14.05.17