Something like an autobiography

Noodling with some thoughts on my past. I don't know how far it will go, but here's a bit of a first draft. Any comments?

1.

I was a first-born child, so I had a year or two to grow into my character as a bit of a loner. I don’t know if you have time at that age to really develop much of a personality, but it is true that in later family photos I’m often off to one side, isolated or peering mournfully into the distance as if grieving for my solitude (or as other family members would comment later, being a misery-guts). I feel in retrospect that I was simply content to live more in the interior than others.
My dad would often marvel at how it was possible that I became a teacher. How could I mix with and talk to so many people for a living, with me being so morose?
This love of solitude might explain why my first memory - or rather the first act I am reminded of by family lore - is my attempt to kill my younger brother.
I don’t remember much about the time we spent living in Bermuda as I was too young. Dad had been posted there at the start of the 1960s by his company to develop the business (he worked in printing inks), and once he had settled in he sent for us to join him. Myself, Mum and younger brother were flown out on a BOAC Comet, with me apparently clutching my enormous stuffed toy Sylvester the cat, from the Tweety-Pie cartoons (another thing I don’t recall). I do remember having that cat well into my childhood until I eventually gave it away to Jane, my best friend in junior school.
One day, the story goes, we were all relaxing at the beach in Bermuda, spread out on the dazzling, sugar-white sands beside a turquoise and royal blue sea. My brother and I were sitting at the edge of the gently lapping waves, when I (allegedly) grabbed the back of his held and pushed him face down under the water. It was only a couple of inches of water, and I didn’t hold him for long. When I eventually let him back up he was laughing hysterically.
It wasn’t really attempted murder. And I’ve never seen myself as a loner either - more a noble, Byronic hero. I may also have developed a superiority complex on the side.
I say attempted murder, but a three year old is the most unreliable of narrators. As is the author of any memoir, I would imagine, so you should take everything that follows with a pinch of salt.
* * *
Throughout my childhood years I was always closest to the brother who narrowly escaped fratricide, Rich.
We were lucky enough to live in the countryside and the house had a big garden so Rich and I would often play football on the lawn until dad told us to get off it, at which point we’d head off on our bikes over the fields until sunset.
I remember how, one day, we ended up getting lost and I had a growing sense of panic as I tried to find a way home, becoming more and more frantic as we crashed through hawthorn hedges and over unfamiliar fields, until at last we saw the familiar spire of the village church in the distance.
The indoor game of choice, alongside fighting, was Subbuteo, the greatest game ever invented. This was a football game with a large green baize pitch, small figures on a semi-circular base that you would flick to hit an outsized ball. We used to commentate, improvise stands with banked Scalextric track. Later we invented our own game using football cards to flick the ball (imagine the modern graphics on Match of the Day etc where they show the team line up faces).
But really later childhood was all about music. Listening to it. Playing it. I had some latent talent as a drummer, and one birthday Dad - a frustrated jazz trombonist who couldn’t play any instruments - bought me a second-hand red Olympic drum kit. I practised every evening (I marvel now that mum and dad could stand it downstairs, with the living room directly below my bedroom).
One Sunday afternoon a passerby heard me practising through the open window and called in to ask my parents if I would be interested in joining his band. So it was that I ended up in a covers band playing the local miners welfare clubs in the mid 70s. Nowadays I imagine that would be a child safeguarding issue, a 13 year old out till all hours in a beery, smoke-filled dive surrounded by overweight ex-miners and playing smoke on the water at full volume. Three sets a night, broken up by tombola and “the meat pies have arrived”.
This gave me a taste for my own band though. My band, with me as the star. As far as I was concerned, this meant being at the front of the stage rather than at the back, and so I took up the guitar. Rich became the lead vocalist and a couple of school friends signed up on drums and bass. We started a band at school, though we could barely play, doing rough covers of Alice Cooper, Sabbath, Slade. We are convinced to this day that with this lack of musical talent and our attitude we actually invented punk, years before the Pistols came on the scene.
The lifespan of the band made it to the end of our school days, but really the need to earn a living killed it off.