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DON’T BE SUCH A BABY

When you’re a child everything is stories. Stories and the real world are all the same because you question nothing.

Adults were there to make your decisions. Peter Pan was as real as electricity. God was as real as my cat Tigger and, if you were lucky, as you grew up, you sorted out truth from fiction.

As I grew up I realised that most of what I had been told was fiction.

Tigger was real because he scratched me. God, Father Christmas, Alice in Wonderland, my mother telling me how much she loved me, and even my father were all lies, because that’s what fiction is – a polite word for telling lies. The more I looked, the more lies I found and the more I moved into a solitary world of my own.

And being true didn’t always make things right. Even half the stuff that was true was rubbish, designed to put me in a box with all the other boxes, crammed into the darkness of a railway truck on an endless Möbius strip rattling away for eternity. In the end you have to decide on your own truths, but at eleven the lies just leave a vacuum. To a child, the world is a village. The scale of place means as far as you can see, and all the rest is pictures. There are no connections, just the small horizon of a small person.

My bed was an island in this world, my kingdom of escape and dreams, a bed so wide and me so small that when I lay on my back and stretched my arms out I couldn’t touch both sides. When I stood on the floor, the sheets were level with my waist and I had to pull myself up to climb into bed. But instead of feeling lost in this giant’s bed, I felt safe and secure. It was my world alone, no one else’s, a ship in a sea of darkness. I could sink into the feather pillows, stretch out under the fresh cotton sheets and float away into a silent world of dreams.

The house was always quiet, no radio, no music and almost no television. If a cat coughed two streets away, we all knew about it. For one hour each afternoon the doors of the old television cabinet were opened and I sat cross-legged on the lounge floor, alone in the room, and watched the children’s programmes on the small grey screen. Refined ladies from the best schools talked down to jerky marionettes made out of flowerpots and naughty glove puppets to entertain the few of us rich enough and therefore nice enough to own a television.