THE BLOG
First few pages of Levitation For Beginners
Whenever I think of what happened all those decades ago, what comes to mind is something I know for a fact had nothing to do with it. What I picture is the injured,
abraded face of my teacher’s son. A bloodied and bruised twelve- or thirteen- year- old, unfit that day to attend his own school, and installed instead in a chair beside his
father’s desk to stare glumly back at awestruck nine- and ten- year- olds. And even though I know better, even though I know there was no connection with what was
to happen a year or so later, to me it’s as if his accident was the start of it.
As to the circumstances, I don’t recall exactly what we were told, but we did know he had been hit by a car. Or run over as we would have said amongst ourselves,
and certainly a nine- year- old looking at that mess of scabs could persuade herself of tyre tracks. My adult eye, looking back, sees that the damage – shocking though
undoubtedly it was – was superficial. He had glanced off that car and there were no other apparent injuries.
No bandages or splints, and he sat on that chair with no obvious physical discomfort, the chief insult to his tender twelve- or thirteen- year- old pride.
And it’s possible that almost half a century later he bears few if any scars from the incident and – who knows? – might not even remember it, or not as often as,
inexplicably, I do. It’s possible too that he might already have had, or have gone on to have, a lot of scrapes. But me, at nine years old: I had never come across a wounding
so spectacular, and I was astounded that anyone could be so damaged and still standing, or sitting. It looked to me to have been a terrifyingly close- run thing.
If I close my eyes it is as if it were yesterday, but now, thinking about it, I wonder if it wasn’t the spectacle of that poor face – the cuts and scrapes – that made the
impression, but the fury in the eyes of a boy who, I imagine, miscalculated in a moment of high spirits and was brought down to earth with a bump. Then brought
so low as to be stuck in that chair at the side of his dad’s desk, staring down a class of nine- year- olds and daring us to pity him.
The seventies: butterscotch Angel Delight and Raleigh chopper bikes, and Clunk Click, and Crackerjack and Jackanory, ‘Layla’ and the Bee Gees, flares and ponchos, and the long hot summer of ’76. But then again: Vietnam, Pinochet, Watergate, Bloody Sunday, the IRA and ETA and the Baader–Meinhof and Black September and the Red Brigade and the Angry Brigade. And little girl after little girl lifted in broad daylight from lanes and pavements and bundled into a van; bike dropped, wheels still spinning, for friends to find. A thirteen- year- old boy delivering a newspaper to a farmhouse shot in the head at close range.
In 1972, we had almost all the seventies still to come. We were a year shy of the Wombles and Man About the House, to say nothing of MAS*H and For Mash Get
Smash, with several more years before Starsky & Hutch and Charlie’s Angels and The Good Life. In June of that year, we had yet to marvel at the Olympian feats of Olga
Korbut and Mark Spitz. And still training as if their lives depended on it were those athletes who would be massacred in Munich that September.
Forget, too, any long hot summer, because the summer of 1972 in England was one of the worst on record, with the Wimbledon men’s final rained off for the first time in ninety- five years. And this summer that was no summer followed two national states of emergency and the three- day weeks during a winter in which we often spent our evenings in our coats by candlelight.
And – remember – there were no fire alarms in our homes in 1972. And a lot of unguarded hearths for us to gather around in our flammable nightwear. Upstairs on
our mothers’ bedside tables were bottles of barbiturates with no child safety caps; and beneath the beds, plastic bags for pulling playfully over our heads. Outside, in the
garden shed, boxes of fireworks that on Bonfire Night would blow up in our faces. And all this was for those of us lucky enough to have a home because – as we all now know – God help you if you were taken into care.
Our neighbours’ gardens glittered darkly with laburnum seeds, and in the alley behind the fence were abandoned fridges perfect for our games of hide- and- seek. At the
end of the street idled the ice cream van from behind which, brandishing our Mivvis, we could bolt into the path of a driver – un- clunked, un- clicked – who’d had one more for the road. I’m only half joking when I say I’m surprised that any of us lived to tell the tale.