Stuck behind bars! my first trauma

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My first memory was of being stuck. I had been stored away in my wooden cot one Saturday afternoon, and was whiling away the time with some basic experiments. One was to see whether I could get my arm through the bars of the cot: I could. The next, to discover whether I could get the arm back through the bars, was less successful. I could not. So I started to cry.  

     My predicament caused some consternation in the Albert household, since my father’s practical skills were as basic as the half-dozen tools in the cellar. He sent out to Messrs Gibberd and Sons, builders and decorators, less than a hundred yards away on Wimbledon High Street, and they despatched a carpenter who managed to saw me out. I stopped wailing; the cot was repaired.

     The incident, one of the two unhappy childhood memories I still recall, took place in the early centre of my operations – the ‘nursery’. It had brown linoleum on the floor and a broad ledge crossing the whole length of the rooms underneath the windows. I would sit on the ledge and stare at the formal garden and grand house behind, or crouch underneath in games of make-believe.

     This is where I stored my toys, which I loved and abused. Teddy lost hair when I tested my hairdressing skills; the bendy green-jacketed golliwog lost bits of rubber at the extremities, exposing his wire skeleton; Muffin the Mule lost a leg; and the Pelham puppet – a strange androgynous figure with orange hair, green trousers and red checked shirt – was never knowingly untangled.

The outside world intruded via a brown Bakelite radio, mounted high on a shelf. My favourite programme was Listen with Mother, a 15-minute programme of songs, stories and nursery rhymes at a quarter to two every weekday. This was the source of my first recorded quip.

‘Are you sitting comfortably,’ we were asked.

‘No I am on my potty’, I replied.

I don’t remember this, but the story was often repeated. 

In the next room was what my father called, in his briefing letter to the decorators, the ‘night nursery’. The Victorian nomenclature was soon droppedand it became ‘the boys’ bedroom’. Across a little hall were another two bedrooms, one for my parents and one for guests. Between the two sets of bedrooms was a bathroom and a separate lavatory. It was definitely not a toilet, which I soon learnt was a word used by those who lived down the hill.

This room played a pivotal part in my second unpleasant early memory. The key to the lavatory door went missing, and a story emerged that it had been flushed down the pan. I was questioned by the great interrogator (though not tortured), and in a fit of hyper-honesty said I couldn’t be sure whether I had taken the key, or not. This was taken as a plea of guilty, and I was slapped, on the leg, once. The key was later found. I am still unsure what lessons I derived from the experience.

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