Memory is a rare ghost-raiser...
barbara ender
Like a haunted house, its walls are ever echoing to unseen feet. Jerome K Jerome.
For utata iron photographer 303, which requires:
1. Something pink
2. Something from your youth
3. Titled from one of those uplifting slogan posters
My very tatty copy of AA Milne's poems When we were very young has an inscription on the flyleaf dated 1943, so it is four years older than me. It's one of the rare things I've kept from my childhood, even though the pages are detached from the binding, some are missing, some are cut, torn, stuck together with ancient yellowed sellotape; I coloured in the drawings with one of those crayons that had three our four colours in the lead, yellow, blue, red, green depending which way you turned it. They have faded to almost nothing. I knew all the poems by heart. When my parents were on their honeymoon, they made friends with a couple from Whitby, Joyce and Ernie, who ran a boarding house on The Crescent. Every year, we would spend a week with Aunty Joyce and Uncle Ernie, I felt privileged because we were allowed behind the door marked Private and into the back kitchen. I see myself very clearly in the guests' sitting room: Uncle Ernie made me climb on the table and recite to the guests this poem, Missing. I must have been four. Another memory of that house is that I locked myself into the toilet (shared bathrooms and toilets on all floors, no en-suites in those days) and my dad had to find a ladder and climb up to the small window from outside to rescue me. One year I had a garret bedroom with a dormer window where the sqawking seagulls woke me up at the crack of dawn.
I'm not a fan of uplifting slogan posters but did find that JKJ quote on one of them... And my sunhat is pink.
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