A town and time when I could ask a girl for a lick of her Mivvi and not get slapped. An innocent time, when double entendre ruled, but not us.
The jam jar was racist, so was our neighbour. Neither offended though one was delicious and the other, rank. My best friend was adopted and black. I couldn't tell you why. Nor could she.
Three strikes was a match. Six of the best were the worst that could happen. A fiver was a conker on a piece of string.
Rationing was past but not gone. Bread and fat. Clover sucked for scant nectar. Raw rhubarb bounty, and raw Jello… chewy treasure.
We crawled chalk trenches, bramble-deep, for hide and revenge: Bosch v. Limey. Leather shoes could not be un-scuffed, only pitied and patted with poor wax.
Madame Le Lacheur's nails, pitted and ruined — whispers of gestapo torture, not the psoriasis of nature.
Dragging days and satchels. Frenzied British Bulldogs, banned clackers and secondhand gobstoppers. A rancid dish could sit before me for an hour, a day, a life, then choked down.
Winter rugby inner thighs chafed raw and Vaseline applied with fingers that lingered too long.
Scout daggers and two-twos afield. Pebbles for windows in pockets, Haggard and Doyle at heart, Mayfair's under the thin mattress.
Thruppence in the tray, Father. Serge shorts pre-loaded with lifted ha'penny blackjacks. Canon Docker sat at the end of a poxy infant’s bed. His natural tonsure nodded through the tale of a namesake saint.
Rigid bedtimes and dead hours. Languid Sunday afternoons of drafts and trickling noses. Meals to meet, mischief to tunnel.
Springs squeaked. Feathers poked. Mattresses sagged and blankets, always tartan, itched and were your own.
Foreign was a county. Bacon had blue stamped skin to chew and pull between missing teeth. Eggs weren't ever easy or over — slimy or solid, that's yer choice. Green yolks.
Taps never met in the middle of ice and fire. Soap bars had cracks and magnets embedded for nothing.
And yet around us they starved. But we never saw it. They burned, but we never felt it. They lied, but we never heard it.
We were protected by paper. Slow news. Adult news. Never shared except in strips of Peanuts and Andy Capp.
Bread and fat. Bread and fat. And you were lucky.