5. Swinging in the park

REMEMBERING THE FORGOTTEN THINGS (5)

That was a strange night for me once I’d arrived back home. I found myself trying to fettle out old memories to see if there was anything or anyone that might take me by surprise, but there didn’t seem to be any such thing. Either my distant past was forgotten or was devoid of anything remarkable.

But a little waft of thought whispered the name Amanda Rosebud to me, the girl who had told me she thought that I was brave asking to go to the toilet when I did, and who sat next to the quiet Perry Smith, the boy who always seemed to be sitting next to her in class but who always claimed not to want to sit next to any girl. I’d been friends with Amanda, oh, at Secondary school, but I suppose I was a bit of a nerd back then. That might be why I’d befriended the Professor in my nursery school: we were similar characters, though he’d eventually gone on to University and the best I’d managed was the local technical college. Back then University places were few and far between. But all that was to come much later, after school and the sixth form.

Had I ever been what these days they call an item with Amanda? If I had then the relationship had been far from memorable.

After having reduced sleep because of the questions haunting me I awoke and resolved to return to Professor Josiah Dingle that very day. What had I been to Amanda in my early teens? I simply couldn’t remember, though I couldn’t help wondering if she’d been my first ever girlfriend. After all, she had seemed to like me that day when I read my essay to the class.

Dingle was delighted to see me and the very first thing he did was to put the kettle on.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Yes please,” I responded automatically, and thought it best to explain my presence so soon after the previous day’s activities. “I was fascinated yesterday,” I confessed.

“I’ll bet you spent half the night wondering what else was lurking inside your head,” he grinned “like I did when the chair was ready to be switched on the first time! It’s a road that it’s impossible not to follow!”

“You’ve hit it in one,” I told him.

“Before we do anything, look what I’ve fetched from storage in the attic,” he said, and produced a small and very fragile plaster cast that had once supported his tiny broken arm

“See your drawing?” he pointed to a tracery of red pencil lines, and to my eyes it was a gross exaggeration to imagine they would ever be converted into the neat rectangle of the headstone cartouche at the cemetery.

“I know I did a bit of imaginative sorting of some of the lines, but in essence I really did trace it,” he said.

“Maybe you’ve left a little bit to the imagination,”I suggested with a smile.

“Well, you were young! Still learning to hold a crayon! Now is there anything else in your memories you want to find out a little bit more about?”

I paused, then “There was a girl,” I said, nervously.

He laughed. “Isn’t there always?” he said.

“The thing is, I’ve almost forgotten her,” I confessed, “but I can remember one day sitting on a swing in the park, next to her, and talking to her. The truth is, all the boys thought she was pretty and it’s not really like young boys to think things like that.”

“I know,” he shuddered theatrically, “there was one girl when I was young who put me off girls for, oh, ages. She always seemed to emanate a most unpleasant odour!”

“Amanda wasn’t smelly, at least I don’t remember ever thinking that she was,” I told him.

“I suppose most girls were antiseptic, unlike some boys,” he said.

“We look at them these days playing, say, together, and forget that hygiene’s gone a long way since the post-war years,” I murmured.

“Then why don’t you refresh your memories,” he grinned, “just take a seat in my memory chair and we’ll see what we shall see.”

I needed no second invitation and stood up wearily before sinking into the chair with its frame round it and pole reaching up and past my shoulders. He adjusted it, carefully when it came to the disc above my head, and switched it on. It hummed gently like it had yesterday. A tingle of hope and anticipation flooded through me.

I searched through my mind to an almost unrecognisable image from my memories, me sitting on a swing and next to me, on the other swing, sat Amanda. I guess we were about twelve or thirteen, a bit young, maybe, to be able to call ourselves a couple other than in the broadest sense. And then, clear as a bell, I heard her speaking to me within what had been a silent memory. Her voice was the same as it had been sixty-odd years ago, instantly recognizable despite the chasm of time, and instantly familiar.

So much in my mental image had gone, had flitted to various storerooms in my head. But it slowly came back, bit by bit, the expression on her face, her hair (why had I forgotten the bronze colour of her hair and the way she grew it, long and wavy?) I could look at even the clothes she was wearing, but not quite as if it was the first time because the chair had gathered together fragments of memory lost somewhere inside my brain and slowly built them into a cohesive picture. And she was dressed in a gingham dress, pink, with a white band round its skirt, one that caught the sun on that particular day. But it was what she was saying that gave me pause for thought.

“You know I like you, Roger,” she said quietly.

Had I? Known that she liked me? But a bit of me liked her, probably because once, a few years earlier, she had called me brave!

“You’re nice,” my just-about teenage self said. It sounded like a feeble compliment even to me, but that’s what I’d said.

“The kids, they think you’re my boyfriend,” she murmured, her eyes on my face as if to catch the least flicker of emotion.

I recollect mentally recoiling. Boyfriend? Remember, it was still the fifties and children just had to be children and not get soiled by injudicious adult relationships, though I knew quite a lot of my classmates loosely used terms like girlfriend, but I doubt the liaisons were ever particularly serious, and neither were the tales of dark corners and secret trysts that they told.

“Do you want to be my boyfriend,” she asked, coming our with the question displaying a bravery that equalled what she had once supposed my own to be.

Did I want to be her boyfriend?

I hadn’t a clue. It would be nice to be included in the group of lads who could boast of this or that intimacy with girlfriends, but I knew such boasts were largely based on imagination.

“I … I er, don’t know,” I stammered.

“Perry does,” she told me, quite blatantly, “He kissed me. Not once but loads of times. And on my lips. He’s nice.”

Perry, the boy who had always claimed he didn’t like sitting next to girls?

“He wants me to be his girlfriend,” she continued, “and I like him. What do you say to that?”

Then it was that the geriatric old me sitting in the professor’s chair sent the tiniest nudge to the anti-heart-throb that been my youth.

“I like you and I like Perry and I think you’d be fine together,” I found myself saying.

And at that the memory faded with Amanda running off towards Perry who was sitting on a playground rocking horse, watching us. Her gingham dress fluttered round her knees and she flew into Perry’s arms as if that’s what her life was all about. I was left on one of the swings on my own and a blurred mist descended onto the park, the playground, and Amanda.

There! In that simple way I suppose I’d been chucked, but it hadn’t seemed like that. It seemed that I’d suddenly been relieved of a burden that I didn’t want or deserve, that of being seen as part of a twosome with Amanda Rosebud.

“Goodness me,” I said to the professor, “she wanted me to be her boyfriend! At thirteen!”

“It happens,” he murmured, “girls start young these days.”

I nodded, though the image of her in what was basically a school summer dress gave a sort of innocence to a lovely young girl.

“It wasn’t exactly these days,” I comments, a little dryly.

He nodded, grinned, and “Anything else?” he asked, “feel free to explore your memories using the chair. I rather think I’ve exhausted my own. But I might feel like telling you the odd little thing I sort of discovered about my life if you can’t keep away!”

© Peter Rogerson 12.06.20