An Awfully Big Adventure

During my pre-school years I hung out a lot with a boy from down the street, John How, who would later become the school's most noted homosexual. We tended to play together with our various soft toys and I recall I had a home-made blue frog stuffed with dried beans whose head would regularly split open, and froggy would ride on my ambulance bicycle to John's house where we would play Doctors and Nurses to get it fixed (i.e. his mum would get out a needle and thread).

There was also at this time a boy called Adam Broughton who lived across the street from John. Adam was less emotionally developed than us and was going through what Freud described as the "anal stage", but which might better be described as the "shitting in improbable places" stage. I recall he had a sand pit which he liked shitting in, and also a small push buggy which had a flap opening up into the boot at the back. He loved shitting into that, and he loved being watched while he did it. God knows why his mum didn't kill him. He would also wee in improbable places, but that was less disgusting. He smelled precisely as one would imagine.

The three of us enjoyed collecting snails. John's parents had an old aquarium which they put in the backyard, and we filled it with leaves and then collected dozens of snails to live in it. The snails often escaped, and there would be countless snails climbing up the walls of the house. I recall that Adam's anal fascination stretched to the snails. He would peer with horror at those snails which had pooed themselves - a sort of black thread leading out of their invertebrate asses - and his solution would be to lick the snails' bottoms clean. Even as a very young child, I sensed this was very wrong.

However - this particular memory relates to the Sunday night before John and I were due to start primary school. We decided that we were clearly grown up boys now, as we were about to start school, and so now was as good a time as any to explore the town. I was strictly forbidden from going further than the cul-de-sacs on either side of the house, but I felt that my new maturity was sufficiently evident that I would not on this occasion need to ask permission.

We thus wandered down into the valley to visit the playpark, where there were a couple of older girls that John knew. They were very surprised we were allowed out on our own, but we explained we were mature now. We played on the swings and slide, and then decided it would be good to visit the Rainbow Play Group one last time before school. This was quite a trek, and I cannot recall if we made it. I do vaguely remember the dark, overgrown passageway one had to walk down to get there, and the harsh stench of the creosote used to protect the fence, but I made this journey so often with so many people I can't recall if I really did manage to go there with John or not.

We were just walking home up the main road leading to the bottom of The Gills when a man on a motorbike stopped next to us. I was a bit concerned with talking to strangers, but it turned out this stranger had been sent out to find us. We were next to a phone booth, so he phoned for my parents and my dad came down immediately to pick us up. It turned out we had been gone much longer than we had realised, and that we certainly did not have their permission to go on walkabout. While we were waiting, the man told us how naughty we had been and how worried everyone was. I couldn't help but dislike him, and a niggling thought in my head suggests that it may have been Mr Stacey from the cub scouts anecdote - the peeping tom in the showers - but I cannot be certain.

My dad dropped John off at his house and I was taken home, and the moment I entered the kitchen I could sense the adults' relief turn almost instantaneously into anger. My grandparents were down, and my grandfather - usually one of the gentlest creatures on the planet - was furious with me. I've since discussed this with my mum, and apparently my granddad had been absolutely frantic with worry while I was missing. She also tells me the whole street had been roused and sent out on the search mission. Even now I feel a bit guilty for causing so much trouble, and when I think how I would feel if one of my nieces did the same thing it is entirely unbearable.

Once we'd joined primary school John and I grew apart and I never really hung out with him as friends again. He became very popular at middle school, adopting the cute-yet-succinct nickname 'Hommo', and then at grammar school he was streamed in the lower classes and he became a distant figure in my life, spotted occasionally having a smoke behind the swimming pool or hanging out with the rougher kids. I have no idea what happened to him after that.

[Time: September 1980]