Bad experience? Just press delete.

How far back can you remember?

I can still feel the sun beating down on me in the garden behind our flats in Ealing, one of a crowd of children spending endless, happy days dreaming up games and shouting ourselves hoarse. My friend Rosalyn taught me how to do a handstand, and,skill mastered, I then spent that entire, sweltering afternoon perfecting the technique before staggering giddy and sunburnt back up the stone steps to our place on the top floor when Mum called us back in for tea.

That November in the same garden, doubtless inspired by those `light up the sky with Standard Fireworks` adverts,all of the families in the flats held their first Guy Fawkes night. The dads, full of beer and bravado, set rockets and bangers firing off at all angles, while mums with pinnies over their coats handed out hotdogs and sparklers to the children, beside the towering inferno that was our shared bonfire. Even though my face was burning from the heat of it, I stayed rooted to the spot. I was slightly fazed by the Guy`s ghoulish leer--right at me--but also too scared to wave the fizzing wand around in the night air like the other kids, in case it set my mittens on fire.It was all terrifyingly wonderful.

You want to remember times like that, don`t you, and have an automatic delete mechanism for the days which leave you feeling lost or lonely: bitter or bereaved.

I started thinking about the power of memory today after being reminded that it`s the 60th anniversary of Britain`s worst peacetime rail disaster today--at Harrow and Wealdstone. One hundred and twelve people died in that three train smash.

Today, survivors and local people have been back to the spot to stand in silence to remember those who got caught up in the horror.

I`ve just turned the house upside down to try and find a newspaper cutting from that day.It was either the London Evening News or the Standard, or maybe the Evening Star. We saved it because there`s a mugshot of dad as a very young PC, looking shattered. He was one of a vast army of people rushed to the scene to help. He`d been crawling through mineshafts at his local pit at 14, and so volunteered to crawl under a mangled train carriage in the tightest, darkest, most desperate of spaces to help those trapped He held their hands, offered words of comfort and in some cases, shots of morphine. He`d then been part of the gang who used their own broad shoulders and brute strength to raise the carriage a few precious inches to try and drag the casualties out.

Horrific memories.Sometimes the darkest of days, like the Harrow crash, have to be remembered and then investigated so that lessons can be learned. Often,thankfully,there`s now help for people whose traumas linger,and blight their later lives.

Dad`s in his eighties now, with a brain dulled by dementia.He`s sleeping so much, and often bewildered by simple tasks. I`ve written before about how we can still share a laugh and a memory sometimes if one flashes back into his mind. That young, heroic PC went on to be a royal bodyguard, travelling the world, Katmandu, Kuala Lumpur, San Francisco,Canada, Italy,Sydney, Canberra, Mustique, staying in glittering palaces and learning how the other half live. It`s those scenes I hope he can remember. And those Ealing bonfires.

But if his patchy,fading memory has been cruel enough to retain the images it logged at Harrow, sixty years ago today,I hope it can also still register the pride his family feel today, looking back. I`ll phone him later, just to be sure he knows.


Comments

Kerry ‏@kerry_pt3
@janemcintyre12 :) your blogs alway bring a warmth with them x

andy richardson ‏@andyrichardson1
@janemcintyre12 @BeBoldPR just don't get her started on chocolate

33m andy richardson ‏@andyrichardson1
@BeBoldPR @janemcintyre12 her blogs are good. almost as good as those by mr w

38m Be Bold PR ‏@BeBoldPR
@janemcintyre12 you're welcome. Always look forward to reading your blogs!

Teach...your children well....

......remember the song? OK, if you`re too young, you might have seen it on the BBC`s `70s series. Appropriate really, as there`s been a fair bit in the press about what makes a good teacher,and about getting more students to become one. Even encouraging more sixth formers to go into schools, and see what it`s like on the other side of the desk.

I guess you`d be more inclined to consider it as a career if you`ve got happy memories about the staff in your school. Happiest days of your life? Well they can be. But a `bad` teacher can knock your confidence for life, too, can`t they?

Years ago Dad used to talk about getting the `strap` across his hand for misdemeanours as a young pupil in Musselburgh. He could still recall the sting of the leather across his outstretched palm. That`s what you did with `unruly` pupils in those days.

In my first term at infants` school in Ealing, I remember being made to stand in a corner for half an hour with my back to the class. The heinous crime that I`d committed was `swishing my hands across the desk`, and then trying to make my best friend Rosalyn do the same. I was four, but even then, I knew it was a fair cop, and served my time with not even a glance over my shoulder.

I might have hated Mrs Jeffries for life after that, but she made me Mary in the school nativity that year, and I got to ride on a push along donkey with a cushion up my dress.

Years later in Kent, I can remember English teachers in my secondary school inspiring me with their encouraging words in the margins of my exercise books. That always felt good. I loved English, and have Miss Rhys-Jones to thank for my pronounced pedantry over punctuation. (And alliteration; clearly.)

But I loathed my art teacher when she kept me back after class one day `for a word`. She studied me, from top to toe (yeah..I was pretty sure she didn`t want to paint me....)...taking in my unruly blonde hair, brightened only that weekend with a hefty application of Sun-In, the thick clumps of black mascara, and the glistening layer of roll on lip gloss (mint flavour). Down went her eyes....to the standard issue green elasticated belt, hiding a waistband rolled over several times until the bottle green box pleats covered my arse but were way, way above my knee...to the chocolate brown platforms, exactly the same as my friend Carol`s (Freeman, Hardy, Willis) and defiantly three inches higher than school rules permitted.

`I suppose you think you`re rather glamorous` she hissed.`But you`re in the fifth year.Not a fashion parade.`

 The thing was... I did feel fairly glamorous. We all did.We were fifteen, and spent at least half an hour plastering that stuff on before school. And it was an all girls`school too.

But another part of being a glamorous fifteen year old then, was smoking. At least we thought so.You couldn`t do it at home. It was tricky on the bus, in case your mum`s friend saw you. You could sometimes get away with it down at the Wimpy. But if you tried it in the school grounds, it meant immediate, non negotiable expulsion.

I hated tennis, so I took the risk, and happily signed up to the practice of `whacking the buggers as hard as you can into the woods`. Only a select few knew about this. And once enough tennis balls had been `whacked into the woods`...someone had to go and retrieve them. And because it was the `woods` and no-one apart from us knew what might be lurking there, we were allowed to take a friend. And she usually dragged a friend along too. (Safety in numbers).

What was lurking there ...stuffed in a Woolworth`s carrier bag, at the end of a large log, deep in the undergrowth, and worth the nettle stings and bramble scratches to reach them, was one glorious packet of More Menthol, and a box of matches. And their presence meant that at least four of us, in the course of double tennis, got to have a smoke. We chose menthol to hide the nicotine smell, of course, but I`m sure Miss P knew what we were up to. If she`d reported us, we`d have been marched off the premises. I always assumed even to this day, that she took pity on us because she smoked like a trooper herself .

But I`ve just realised she probably let us go because we were so completely crap at tennis.

Anyway. No detentions. No expulsions. Thanks, Miss.