The Memory of Bridges

Introduction

In 2006, I have a recurring dream of crossing a bridge at night. I am trying to get home to the village where I grew up in the 50s and 60s, the place I left after my mother’s death in 1983. In the dream my mother is reading a book: the history of Wilford Village that she was writing when she died. The book that was missing, when I came to sort through her effects.

I too am a writer. I have been a writer of historical fiction, a writer happiest in fictional worlds. The story I have never been able to tell is my own, and it is the story I must tell if I am to reclaim my life. At the start of the memoir, I visit Wilford as an adult, looking for relics of my past. There are houses I have lived in, fields where I played. Most of all there are bridges: some still standing, some disappeared. These bridges are my routes into the story of my past. I have to cross to the side of the river where I once lived, to find my buried memories and tell my story.

From The Memory Of Bridges: Chapter 3, Gods and Eyebrows

In 1961, I know exactly what God looks like.

For the first seven years of my life we live in a rented house on Vernon Avenue, an end terrace with a small front garden and a rear garden that backs straight on to the railway embankment. I am an only child, and in my early years an only child feels like a good thing to be, a wonderful thing. I have a specialness, a place at the centre of things that I will cling to long after it has ceased to do me good. For now, I am too much myself to feel loneliness, but loneliness is there, waiting in the darkness for its moment, like the shadow on a lung. As a child, when I find myself too much alone, I sing. I sing hymns, and the songs that Uncle Mac plays on Saturday mornings on the Light programme. My current favourite is Tommy Steele's Little White Bull, which I like because there is a story in it, a story with a happy ending. I am a great singer, on the trolleybus, in town, but most of all in my back garden or sitting on the kitchen step, waiting for the trains and playing with my ball.

When I hear a train coming in the daytime I run into the back garden to stand by the hedge and watch the long slow line of maroon carriages go by. Or, if not carriages, open trucks with sand or gravel for the brickworks up at Ruddington, next stop along the line.

Or coal. There is still coal, lots of it, in those days.

Top
As the train passes, I listen to the slow, familiar four-part beat of wheels on rails, duh-duh-duh-dur, duh-duh-duh-dur. I stand very still, because God is coming, and God will come last, when the rest of the train has passed by. At the end of every train there is a brown truck, like a shed on wheels, where the guard lives. The shed has doors, at both front and back ends, because you never know which way the train will be facing, and a small platform with a rail around it outside each door, so that the guard can stand and look out or merely lean on the rail and watch the world go by. He has a black uniform and a black cap with a glossy peak and when I see him leaning out I wave, and he waves back, the slope of the grassy bank between us, him looking down and I looking up. When he waves, I am proud. I know he can see that I am a good child, not like the boys from the Deering who scramble up the bank and throw stones at the trains, or fling showers of gravel down into our gardens, dirty boys who laugh and run when any watchful parent appears. I am small, in my gingham dress, but I understand the rules of the world, the way of things. The embankment is the border of my territory, its shiny level rails gleaming above me like the horizon of another world, the dark lines of telegraph wires strung out along the border to signal the danger, to remind me that on the other side of the embankment is wilderness.

The train recedes. It leaves a burning smell, a grey tattered trail of smoke floating above the embankment, a fading vibration in the ground. And a soft fall of black cinders tumbling down the bank, cinders that will run out onto the back lane, carpeting it with dark snow. And on Sunday, when Mr Schofield says Let us pray, I know that God does not look like the white-bearded old man in the Sunday schoolbook illustration, the picture copied from the Sistine Chapel ceiling. I know that God is the guard on the train.

Of course, we never speak of this out loud. You do not speak to God, you pray to him. You pray that he will forgive your sins, and I try my very best not to sin, because I know that if I do God will be angry, and if he is angry he will stop loving me. I know this not because there is anger in our house, but because there is no anger, and my parents love me.

The anger too will come later, like an echo, or like a sound from outer space, years in the travelling.

In this angerless world I am, almost exclusively, a happy child. While I am still very small, my Granny and Grandpa Bailey buy me the first present I can remember, a teddy bear. The fur of this teddy bear is not golden but black and creamy white; he has black arms and legs and black ears, but a white face and body. He is not a teddy bear but a panda, and this new word, a perfect fit for a child's voice, becomes his name. Only when presented with my panda, I cry, which upsets Granny and Grandpa terribly.

It is my mother who works out what is wrong. Panda has dark, sewn-on eyebrows which give him a frowning appearance. My mother gets out her sewing box and snips the eyebrows away. Panda is no longer angry, and he is returned to me. I take him back into my arms, and love him from that day to this.

What is strange, or not strange, is that eyebrows run in our family. And not just in my mother's family, the Baileys, with their bushy and undisciplined eyebrows, the hairs tough as tussock grass in delicate skin; but also in the Plumbs, whose dark colouring means that eyebrows are the dominant feature of the face, not malign but definite, thick brush-strokes above subordinate eyes. We all inherit them, me included, although the Bailey element in my genetic makeup leaves my eyebrows lighter, mid-brown to mouse, of no concern to me until the age of plucking arrives. My Grandpa Bailey's brows have already turned white by the time I am born, and although people who do not know him think he has a rather fearsome appearance, this is mostly due to the round dark glasses he wears to protect the weakness of his eyes. My Grandpa Bailey plays on an old upright piano while I sing, he has a voice that sounds like the crunching of warm gravel, on Sunday afternoons there is always a small present for me hidden in the shelves of his bureau.

My father's eyebrows, though, like those of his siblings and most of my Plumb cousins, are true black. Not angry, not frowning, simply black.

As black, but not as thick, as the brows of Mike Mercury.

Top
At number 30 we have no television; few households do before 1960. When we move two doors down to our own house, though, we soon have a set, a Bush with an art deco bakelite cabinet and a small fat screen. The first pictures I see, after the set has warmed up, are the faint black forms of horses running across a grey mottled background. I take to westerns like Wagon Train and Laramie; there seems to be little else on. But when Gerry Anderson's puppet series begin to occupy the teatime schedules, I am hooked. These shows are set in the future, where spaceships are commonplace, where buildings can rise up out of the ground and sink back into it when threatened by the forces of evil, and where each futuristic vehicle is captained by a dashing and handsome pilot with a name to match, a kind of sci-fi Mills and Boon hero: Mike Mercury, Steve Zodiac, Troy Tempest. With each of these I am in love, in turn. Not all my heroes are dark: Steve Zodiac is a blond bombshell with an adoring (blonde) sidekick, Dr Venus; what they all have in common, apart from their strings, is luxuriant, beetling eyebrows. At teatime, my appetite for my Hovis sandwiches is no longer what it was. I am in love.

My first impulse is to communicate how I feel, but I restrict this need to my parents. I begin to protect myself, instinctively, from my friends.

At Wilford School, other names and faces are beginning to interest the girls moving out of infant classes into juniors. Diane Wing brings a photo into class, and tells us it is of Cliff Richard; soon it will be the Beatles. I scrutinize the photo, but the face is not quite right. There is a lack of definition in Cliff's cheerful grin, something lightweight, pleasing and yet foolish. I am polite and guarded about my own affections. I keep at home my comics with their heavy line drawings of the crew of Stingray and its black-browed captain; I am already painfully sensitive to unkind laughter, and jeers about puppets. Not until the Monkees' Davy Jones is causing girls to swoon will any flesh and blood idol fulfil my requirements of good looks and eyebrows. Troy Tempest is succeeded in due course by Scott Tracy, and nothing has changed.

When I watch the reruns of the shows now, I can see that there is something not quite right about the proportions of Anderson's puppets. In later shows, like Captain Scarlet, Anderson adjusted the enormous heads and tiny bodies which seemed to shrink in scale as you moved down the body to the feet, but in the early days, from Supercar (Mike Mercury's flying vehicle) through to Thunderbirds, the puppets' heads dominated their bodies, large and weighty because (as I would learn one day) the mechanism which allows their eyes and mouths to move was housed in there, occupying space, like the wiring of a brain. Old-fashioned strings were adequate for the bodies, for raising arms and shifting legs; after all, the puppets were rarely allowed to walk, as the comic result damaged their believability.

And believability is all. Gods and idols, men and puppets; it's a trick of the light, a case of point of view, which you choose to honour. If you intend to grow up to be the puppetmaster, then puppets will serve your needs through your apprenticeship. They are inert, until you call them into life, and then they are yours absolutely, striding through your head with their strange stiff legs, flowing through your brain until your head swells with the stories growing through it, branching like the tendrils of new trees.

As I sit in my child's chair between my parents, thrilling to the stirring tune of Thunderbirds, Panda is still there, forgotten for now, on a shelf in my bedroom. If he could talk, he might remind me that pandas have black circles round their eyes, not eyebrows. But I have forgotten, if I ever knew, what Panda's eyebrows looked like, I have no recollection of his anger. And he can only talk if I let him, if I make him a character in one of the stories I am starting to tell. But my characters are all human now.