A photograph of yourself you like

Richard
A photograph of yourself you like
Starbucks, May 29, 2007

I’m five. My face is round, and I’m beaming at the camera, one milk tooth missing. It’s 1955, and the picture is a grainy black and white, three inches square, snapped at the infants’ school where each child sits for the camera. You can see my wrinkled shirt with one side of the collar askew. I sport a tie I am too young to do up myself. Mum slips the plaid strip around my upturned collar and with a mysterious swirl brings it up under my chin into a perfect knot. I love her simply.

You see my head and upper body, but I can reconstruct the 1950’s school-child clothing I’ve got on: the woolen jumper, knitted by Auntie Tiz, you can make out, but below are grey shorts, long grey woolen socks, and brown crepe-soled sandals with difficult buckles an adult has to fasten. The day of the photograph I jump up to grab a steel pipe jutting into the playground. Some girls are watching, so I pull myself up and twirl over the top like an acrobat. I fall and hit my head and in the afternoon go home feeling dizzy. I am dizzy for two days with mild concussion, although nobody sends for the doctor.

I go to school and come home, and the world, close to the house, is where I run. We have a typical, 1950’s suburban garden with large tulips whose heads I peer into, sensing that the long, pollen covered stamens relate to things continuing in time. The neighbors have is a monkey-puzzle tree in their front yard with dark, viciously jagged leaves. I picture monkeys scratching their heads. How do I climb it?

Two years earlier, our family has joined a group of neighbors to watch the Queen’s coronation on the only TV on the road. It’s a party. Roy has a metal die-cast model of the coronation coach, and I wonder if it’s real gold. I run after him, toward him, away from him, still. Little sister Lynn is in line after me, and I enter her world with pleasure and a sense of responsibility, an alternative to Roy’s model planes and stamps. I botch up his kits, and in the future I will steal and sell his collection of stamps. I drink tiny cups of tea with Lynn set on tiny saucers.

We’re called Bevin’s babies, post-war children brought up with the helping hand of the welfare state, masterminded by Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labor in the Socialist government that succeeds Churchill after the war. The people long for full employment and an end to rationing. We are weighed by the visiting nurse, who drives up to our house in a little Morris Minor. She checks to see if we’re taking cod liver oil, concentrated orange juice, and rosehip syrup.

The unions are strong, the railways nationalized, and we play in the scrap heaps of the war, still not cleared ten years after its end. Dad remembers being cut off behind enemy lines in the Battle of the Bulge and sharing his last piece of chocolate with his friend Jack. Mum took the train down to see him before he was demobed at Netherwalop on the south coast. The coziness of this time is already draining. Long miner’s strikes, which will mean no coal for the fires that heat our house and many like ours, are just around the corner. We are witnessing the last dismantling of the British Empire. It is perhaps the reason that the adults—far from seats of power and influence—welcome the new Queen, symbol of domestic tranquility and a return to old values. But this world be swept away. And there I am, grinning on that photograph, ready to run.