The happiest of happy times - David Bowie and the remembering of childhood

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And we were a happy crew, me and you
We were a happy crew, me and you

Now this isn't a piece about how important David Bowie is to me and how my life will never be the same now he's gone - the great man's relevance to my life is about happenstance, about the fact that he was there at a happy time.

I've written before how the presence of David Bowie in my life was only realised some while after that presence had ended - for the simplest of simple reasons. The great man was still to be great and his nascent stardom wasn't of interest to a nine year old. But now, when I think about Bowie it's not a memory of a concert or how his music and lyrics meant something but of a time and place when I was part of a happy crew.

And this is how remembering works. It's one thing to speak of the influence and importance of a man just gone - if nothing else, within his genre Bowie was both influential and important. It's quite another for that passing to bring about a recollection of our own life and experience. I guess this is why those closest too us are mourned (and missed) most.

This remembering - informal, emotional, connected remembering - is even stronger when, as is my case with Bowie, when the recollection is of fun, happiness, joy and pleasure. I described the time I met Bowie like this:

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Richard Finnegan and I were - in Spirogyra's words - a 'happy crew, me and you". And my remembering those happy times - and for me being ten was great - was triggered by the sad death of David Bowie. So in writing that they were the happiest of happy times, I have the child of a little tear in my eyes. Both at the death of a man who, in the tiniest of ways, was part of my life and also at remembering something fine that cannot be recreated - there's no going back to being ten except in that remembering:

When the subbuteo men broke (and finally refused to be re-glued) we played the game with my sisters farm set – minutes to go and it’s Sheep 2, Cows 1…

And climbing the cherry trees and digging for Roman remains in the garden (which of course we found in abundance)

Playing cricket with a big plastic ball and the roses as fielders – and ducking my Mum’s sandals when we knocked a flower off

Back then bikes were old, slightly rusty and lacked brakes – but we still raced down The Glade (with my little brother in the old pushchair – and that didn’t even have steering)

I hope - and know it's probably, mostly true - that today's nine and ten year olds have the same happiest of happy times. And I know that there will be something, not always a sad thing like a death, that will trigger the memory of those times, will bring the recollection and reflection - even the ghost of a smile to their lips. For me the opening chords of 'Space Oddity' will always take me back to that garden on Foxgrove Road, to the hippy bloke with the beard doing yoga, to Siddhartha (who'll be in his late forties now) and to our happy crew crashing through the undergrowth hunting aliens or seeking lost treasures.

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School friends, parties and a rock god: commenting on Katie Hopkins

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My best mate at primary school was called Richard Finnigan. He was the sort of kid who Katie Hopkins would dislike:

Call me controlling, call me ruthlessly aggressive. But I'm convinced one of the best things I can do for my children - India, eight, Poppy, seven, and Max, four - is to choose their friends for them.

Richard's parents were separated and, since it was the 1960s and a Catholic school, this was a big deal. Moreover Richard's Mum, Mary, was a real hippy - trips to Kathmandu and everything - who famously lived with a rock god.

Breaking up with Farthingale shortly after completion of the film, Bowie moved in with Mary Finnigan as her lodger.  Continuing the divergence from rock and roll and blues begun by his work with Farthingale, Bowie joined forces with Finnigan, Christina Ostrom and Barrie Jackson to run a folk club on Sunday nights at the Three Tuns pub in Beckenham High Street.

So it's no surprise that, when Richard had a birthday party, only two of us - me and Andy Bower - turned up. You know - drugs, long hair, tut, tut.

The Finnigan's lived in one of those huge Victorian houses on Foxgrove Road (now mostly demolished and replaced with soul-less blocks of nice flats or twee little cul-de-sacs of town houses). The house had a huge and rather overgrown garden, a tangle of rhododendrons, self-seeded ash and sycamore and the vestiges of paths, statues and ponds that marked its former glory.

For us boys this was brilliant - we weren't interested in the presence of the rock god but in the prospect of jungle adventure, tree climbing and the discussion of those things that matter to nine-year old boys. And we were looked after in that slightly offhand but rather sweet way of hippies. Someone fed us - usually something slightly spicy and pasta-y, probably vegetarian. It might have been Richard's mum, or the couple with a little toddler called Siddhartha, maybe even the rock god himself, this didn't impinge on us - we just welcomed the food.

Parents who want to control the fun of their offspring or who think that somehow the thing we disapprove of in the parents will rub off on our children are telling us more about their own inadequacies than anything else. And, at school, children will make friends with who they wish to not who their controlling mums want them to be friends with.

Perhaps Katie should ease up a little - rather than taking the ridiculous view that consorting with thick children will make her children thick, she should perhaps consider whether her controlling nature might just be damaging them.

Mind you this is the woman who thinks that people who do things she disapproves of should pay more tax, so discovering she's bringing up her children to be ghastly little fascists like her shouldn't surprise us, should it?

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Should small children be made to work?

Shocking I know! But Meredith Small thinks so - and he's a professor of anthropology!

Look outside Western culture and watch children, even very small children, as they gather firewood, weed gardens, haul water, tend livestock, care for younger children and run errands. And no one complains because they are mostly outside and usually with other children.

By doing these chores, they also master life skills, like caring for a baby or how to herd goats, and with that comes proficiency and responsibility. 

It's an interesting point of view and Professor Small goes further and suggests that our approach to the development of children demonstrates a different - not necessarily better - cultural attitude to them:

In non-Western culture, parents expect children to learn about what it means to be an adult by doing adult work. When we were an agriculturally based nation, American children used to work just as hard and contribute in the same way. But now, Western children are trained intellectually, in school, where they are taught to think about things as the entree to adulthood, and few contribute anything to the household economy.

That cultural expectation is now creeping earlier and earlier as 3-year-olds go to preschool and 4–year-olds start kindergarten. Everyone sits quietly at their desks, thinking and thinking, just when they’d rather be out tending cows or weeding the garden.

An interesting view that is worth thinking about (while we tend the cows of course).

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Indestructible?

The one thing we all know about Tonka Toys is that they are indestructible. So - around 40 years ago - my brothers and I decided to put this to the test. The experiment was comprehensive - or as comprehensive as nine and ten year olds can make these matters.

The tests included:

Bashing with various blunt implements - bricks, mallets, hammers and stray lumps of metal.

Dropping from a great height (in this case the top of our cherry tree)

Burning - ultimately by making a fire over the top of the said Tonka

Running over with the garden roller

Throwing against the wall

The tests were repeated for much of an afternoon. And the conclusion....

....that Tonka Toys were (aside from the rubber caterpillar tracks) pretty much indestructible!

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Finding the secret places...

We built a den once. It was on the bank of a stream hidden in dense foliage. A sheet of rusty corrugated iron, some old fence posts and bits of old tow rope. It was great - we could watch the stream replete with minnows and sticklebacks, nip through the fence behind to scrump in the allotments and discuss the great matters that concerned us as 10 year old children. It was away from the boring world of grown ups - a secret place.

Except today we're not allowed secret places. Such things frighten those who know better - its not just the idea of "young children" playing out on their own next to a stream but the whole idea of the secret. That place we think is just ours - our den, our magic dell, our place of safety.

Today we just assume the worst. If it isn't that the children are indulging in "anti-social behaviour" (which is an unspecified and general allegation describing any noisy, slightly risky activity undertaken by people younger than us) or else that the riverbank is riddled with funny men just waiting to snaffle the passing 10 year old.

But those secret places are still there. We still seek them out - either in the real world or in that fairyland our minds create. And in those places we are free and calm - content to while away time unbothered by the angry, the interfering and the officious. Those secret places are where we dream our dreams. Where we make the armour that protects us from the horrid real world. Where we can experience the magic that makes living tolerable.

In those secret places dwell the things of our imagination - mythic creatures of our choice. And these things are as real as the dusty, dark, dreariness of the world we head out into from the secret place. The world of money, of toil, of anger and of duty. That world of the busybody.

I plan on spending more time in my secret place - when I find it again.

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The tallest tree....

Bumped into Lesley's 'Wheniwas8' blog - lovely stuff you should all go there and enjoy. Anyhow it got me to thinking - partly remembering when I was ten and partly thinking a little bit further back into those memories. Back to when I was eight.

Back then I had two ambitions - to kick my sister harder than she could kick me and to get to the top of the tallest tree before she did. I'm not so sure I achieved either of those things but the trying of them was important! And my route to the very tippest top of that ash tree - the swaying pinnavle of all the world - was so much harder that hers.

I guess I'm still trying to get to the top of that tallest tree. Still competing with anyone or everyone who passes my way. Losing too often for my sanity or good temper. One day I shall be there - on that tippest top. And I shall shout and scream with delight just like I did in 1969.

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