My childhood was idyllic

My childhood was idyllic. My world has rarely been better. There’s no easy explanation of loneliness. It is an unpleasantly painful yearning for contact with another person, an absence of any real feedback from anyone and wanting a friend but not really understanding what is a friend. My childhood was spent alone, but I don’t recall being lonely. That state of mind came much later in my life, and not because of the act of being alone, but through knowing that nobody really cared.

Childhood is a life filled with wonder and my world was wonderful. I was born at 239 Harwich Road, Colchester but we moved to 63 Braiswick, Colchester when I was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old, in part to find somewhere quiet for my sister, who had become the subject of ridicule by the local children, especially those who lived on the Council estate across the road.

I remember standing up at the Harwich Road house, grasping the leg of the piano and launching myself at the barley-twisted legs of the dining table. There was a ripple of applause as I reached my target and some time later I found myself in the garden, stumbling, and falling, down the pathway. We had visitors that day as I remember snatches of conversation and my father pointing out across to the fields that sloped away from our garden.

Today that land is covered with the infamous Greensted estate, tacky little houses that are a blot on the landscape and upon the psyche of those forced to live there.

Thankfully I have always been able to recall some episodes of my early life, so Alzheimer need not take all the credit, not yet.

I don’t remember the night of my birth, a time when Colchester was being bombed during the Second World War. Dr Cameron, our bluff Scottish doctor, had been attending my mother in a bedroom upstairs at Harwich Road. He shouted loudly at my father, telling him to bring a suitcase immediately. Dad feared the worst, believing that I had been stillborn and the case was needed for Dr Cameron to remove the corpse. That was not the real reason, as I was alive and well, and put into the case and then placed in a makeshift shelter under the dining table to obtain some protection from the bombs.

Those must have been frighteningly uncertain times, and it says much for the stoicism of the human race that we can withstand all sorts of pressures before we finally succumb. The European wars of the last century were dreadful examples of man’s intractable attitude and desire for power and control.

My father was in a reserved occupation, making ships boilers and other equipment rather than donning a khaki uniform and marching off to the front. I can’t place myself in his position but it has always seemed to me that he was in the right place, using his skills to help his country, while looking after his wife and child. That said he later had a growth in his lung, very likely caused by over-zealous use of asbestos or working with lead in the factory where he assembled the boilers.

Before me came Janet, my sister. Born 17 November 1933 she had Downs Syndrome. In my childhood she was mentally handicapped, today she would probably have learning difficulties. Whatever she had a profound affect upon my life, and there will be more about her as this tale progresses.