Moves happen all the time when you're a youngster. Or I suppose they don't. We seemed to be constantly on the move. Though rarely very far. The great upheaval happened only once. The idea of going to live in a shop was presented to me with the smoothest of glosses and the wrench was altogether bearable. Living on the coast near the marshes, site of so many great English ghost stories, made the last year at Crablow wraith-like and bizarre to look back on. My news book is full of stories about mining disasters and cycling up alleyways, but I know I was going to ground, practically withdrawing from after-school society. The evidence belies the conviction. There I am at seven, surrounded by friends at my leaving party, the first signs of progressive era hair tickling my collar. Pop still hadn't quite penetrated our pre-junior school nostrils. If a drama teacher put the radio on, boys would still clutch each other and dance round the room an an ironic waltzing style. Still, I'd be up front, shaking it with the young ladies. What hopes that young teacher must have had for me. IRA bomb-scare evacuations were more our forte: or afternoons trapped in corridors by older kids, exciting in the sense that you pretended to be a prisoner of war pitted against the Germans, and escape was permitted by any means necessary. Blood stains on your knees the size of saucers. The wrong colour rosette handed out for a sprint hurdles victory was a travesty to match that of the Guildford Four. Stinging nettles and dock leaves. Daring to burrow under the fence and run and touch the climbing frame of another school. Continual daring, a little further, a little higher, and running away. Running everywhere. Running always, or on bikes. Skinny ones with legs like tree trunks. No long trousers in sight. Electrifying imaginary happenings that never took place, such as your first group practice on the bandstand at the age of six; winning poetry prizes, having your cap nicked. Strange days out on the marshes with the mires, and after you'd left, returning nine months later to find your friends playing up the alley as though time had stood still.
And now, a new town, a new dwelling. Creaky and older. Left alone as your parents worked downstairs in the shop. The terror to turn round bent over the bathroom basin. More so to exit those four square walls of light. Horrifying dreams of your father as a murderer The story of the former proprietor's demise in the passage leading to the shop, just behind the door that was always locked at night. And yet the security that existed within that brown walled chamber, watching Hadleigh or Bouquet of Barbed Wire. Hoping Pops would bring you something in from the shop after closing. Bolting up the stairs to your bedroom at night or jumping down them during the day. Another story of another staircase where he'd sat as a boy with next doors twins, projecting images from his father's cine-camera onto the front door interior. The fear of being caught, and then afterwards going downstairs and finding all the furniture in the living room turned strangely on its end. No explanation. And the cries and signing of hymns the next days as the elder twin was carried from the house, completely mad. The constant cold in the upstairs bedroom. No evidence of psychic activity this time. Merely a hard times disdain for central heating that made for continual movement and the early onset of cracking joints.
But the celebrity of living in the local off-licence, bettered maybe only by being the son of the sweet shop owner. Until a certain age when you overtook even him with your Bensons and Indian Pale Ale. No videos or intruding on each other's territories then. A meeting point which made for perfect eavesdropping on the local gang who's who. A castle's grounds to defend against wrongdoers, with barbed wire and snowballs and yards and yards of crates, wooden or plastic, cracked and cutting or alive with splinters, the leather gloves for heavy lifting jobs. Out of use, the ideal place for building all sorts of dens, hideouts, pit shaft cave-in reconstructions; advice bureaus. You name it. And then, after five years, a transfer to an up in the world 'semi', reachable by skateboard and luxurious for a year. Then, a year later returning to live in the same location. The day of moving back in; the great flood and frozen rivers of Brown Ale, Cherryade and Cider. Cresta botles burst open during the Christmas shutdown. It's a shopkeeper's life.
