First Memories

It was a bright morning and the sun was warm. I was sitting on top of the front gate looking at eye-level along the top of the box hedge which bordered the small front garden, looking deep into the world of the hedge. Then, out of nowhere I became aware of my self as separate from the world outside me. At three or four years old it was easy to examine the tiny cobwebs and watch the ladybirds come and go. For the first time I began to feel that I had an identity and a destiny, although I didn't think of it with those words.

I remember making an effort on that sunny morning to hang onto this new awareness, to try and make something of it, understand it. I did not fear losing it, but I did not know what I should do with it. It made me feel special but also that now I possessed a mysterious responsibility. In the sun and the morning air, alone with the hedge, it was a dazzling epiphany that I've retained till now.

Already I liked sunny days best of all. Already I understood the driving force of love and already I wanted more freedom. Freedom from the looming promise of school, from the worry of growing up? Did I sense pressures ahead already? At least I would not have the responsibilities of a boy. All I had to do was go to school, climb onto the plateau of adulthood to find a common knowledge, and then get married. If this feeling was a symptom of modern society I acquired it before I knew anything about the ways of people. I knew about my parents, my two older brothers, the street beyond the front gate where other children played, and the school over the big fence where soon I would have to go.

Life before school was as sweet as Mother's home-made ginger beer. My house stood next to the school fence. I would look out of my bedroom window during the afternoon - when at my most alert I was supposed to nap - over to the playground full of noise and movement. This was not something I was looking forward to. I felt best when I looked out of the window at the early morning blue sky and heard the sound of machinery from the nearby gravel-pits. Everything seemed vast and endless, uninterrupted by people and confusion. The day smelled fresh and new. I was one with it all. I also liked the dusk when the people whose energies consumed the world's energy gradually faded back into their houses, and the bright day's noises stopped.

On these early mornings, unable to restrain myself and without knowing why, I quietly escaped the house while my parents slept. I would scale the huge side-gate and then run like the wind to the other end of the road where it met the busy main road into town. Here was the bridge over the fast River Lavant where I watched the water-weeds sway in the current, and then I'd climb down the bank to look for brightly coloured newts. What made it thrilling was the early hour. It was even worth the punishment.

Some people, like me, feel divided by the number of people they are with, some feel multiplied by the presence of others, more complete. I knew before I started school that I would have to go there for such a long time that the end was not even in sight. Before school-age, time was all around me, unstructured. When school came, time stretched ahead interminably. I realised there was no way out of it. I would have preferred to skip it altogether, to just watch from a distance. I would have preferred to move straight to the safe plateau of adulthood, to avoid all the snakes and climb one long ladder. I did not need to prove myself or compete with my peers. Undistracted, I could have learned so much without education.

Without the remotest chance of ever being allowed to do what I wanted, and constantly taunted in the school playground by the sight of my home over the fence, I would lie to the dinner-lady, that I wouldn't be able to come to school much longer because I had to go to America. I think she believed me - it was an improbable thing for a five-year old to invent in 1957. I didn't know where or what America was, but it must have seemed to me the ultimate in big and far-away.

To kill time I found escape in loving. My first teacher was the most important person in my life, wiser even than my parents, therefore the first object of my affection. I found escape in this feeling of loving attachment. In my newly crowded life at school it was the nearest feeling to that which had stirred me in those early mornings and dusks but which seldom returned now that I was burdened with my schooldays. In my dreams I was a sort of Peter Pan - and I would rescue my teacher from different perilous situations to earn praise and affection. I longed to lose myself in these dreams; I fell asleep at night dreaming them up before I fell into sleep. I never told a soul and it didn't interfere with my equally intense love for my mother.

In junior school there were times when I was so bored that I couldn't join in - I was willing enough, not yet a rebel, but it was as hard a suffering as I had yet had to bear to sit in a classroom listening to a boring person telling me boring things I didn't care about while the real world beat down outside the windows and I was missing it. I remember the fresh grass-smell of escape at break-time.

And in those long lessons I would think: here I am now, it is now, and later I will be able to look back on this time, this time will not last. And my sense of me would grow so big that it filled the room, and the teacher with the droning voice and the other children and the blackboard faded a little.

By secondary school the family had moved to the other side of town and by a strange quirk of fate our new home was again situated next door to the school. Another life-sentence: I counted up the years still to go - seven - beyond which I could still not see the future. For the first two of them, dressed in a large, brown and green uniform with thick bottle-green worsted bloomers and a brown pill-box hat sprouting an embarrassing tassel, I joined in the fiasco as best I could, terrified of some teachers, in love with others.

And then, one day, I discovered the local riding stables and as soon as I encountered this new world it immediately took precedence over school and I was able to allow myself early release from my sentence: attending as required, but in body only, never again in spirit. Somewhere into year four I gave up attending on a regular basis altogether. I would furtively change out of my uniform behind the bushes on the canal tow-path, and then cycle the four miles to the stables, drowning in freedom. I was finally expelled in year six

These schooldays spent at the stables were the best of my young life: I'd been waiting for this since consciousness dawned on the garden gate by the box hedge. I loved the animals, I loved my liberty and, inevitably, I loved the one in authority. I lost my heart, I thought of nothing else, this was all I ever wanted or needed.