Golden Memories: Sundries

No real theme to these recollections, but then that's often how memory seems to work, with strange tangential connections and unexpected associations. There probably is an underlying scheme or pattern, but it remains opaque.

I recall a brutally simple toy, a six inch plastic rocket which compressed a massively powerful spring onto a base. The two parts were 'secured' by tiny interlocking lugs and when these were released the projectile hurtled about thirty feet into the air, landing invariably into someone else's garden.

One day the catch was only tenuously locked and an accidental knock exploded the rocket past my head, missing my right eye by two or three inches. It landed two gardens away.

And I left it there.

Memory number two, involves a cross-country run while I was at secondary school. A few of us went exploring as soon as we were out of sight, soon coming across an old toilet block, half hidden in the undergrowth, rancid, subsiding and grim. It was the least sensual environment imaginable, yet it was strewn with pages torn from soft porn magazines. An odd sight indeed, which seemed somehow to open a door from regulated, sheltered childhood to a world of sinister possibilities, risks and mysteries.

Then there was the elderly lady across the road, who had apparently asked to see me. She hadn't left her flat for years, and was reputed to be approaching a hundred years old. Her face was so wrinkled and drooping it looked like a cave full of stalactites and stalagmites.

The image burned into my brain.

But now a rope has been dropped into the past, and I will haul myself back.