I was eight years old, and the year was 1999. It was a simpler time: the sweet spot just before 9/11, but just after the invention of the printing press. The period of blissful ignorance after the release of ‘The Matrix’, but before the release of ‘The Matrix Reloaded’. Post-Postfeminism, but pre-Meninism.
A Goldilocks era.
I was a precocious child, the bracing power of my cognition illustrated by the piles of solved Rubik’s cubes stacked at my bedroom window. I quickly learned that they are manufactured pre-solved, saving me from repeating my mistake of jumbling up the first cube I received, which obviously I tried to flush down the toilet like an embarrassing pair of soiled pants.
I had been led to believe, in the run up to my ninth birthday, that an early adulthood would soon be bearing down on me with the rancid intimidation of a wedding uncle. This was thanks to my older brother, who at the age of ten had been roped into an illegal paper round. Illegal due to his age, as well as his conduct in the job. Every round of deliveries, he would choose a house at random to leave out, and bring the extra paper home for my parents. He would then look up the name of the customer he’d deprived, and my whole family would play act the dramatic moment the be-thieved household realised their despair. In a stomach-turning show of brazen callousness, the pilfered herald itself would be disassembled, shredded, twisted and shaped into props to portray the imagined family, as they realised that on this day, the news would not come.
Reminiscing about this practice always brings to mind one particular instance, where my father, pretend-scrabbling on his knees at the letterbox in disdainful parody, wore a necktie cut from the very newspaper his character would never see. We laughed deeply at the misery my brother had caused, until my father looked down at the tie, noting that it had been excised from the obituaries section, and with closer reading, found that both my mother’s parents had died the day before in a collision with a Royal Mail van. His parodical tears quickly became real, while the rest of us, my mother included, continued chuckling unaware, even more heartily in the wake of this renewed, realistic performance. When all had been explained, days later he insisted on wearing the obitu-tie while delivering my grandparents’ joint eulogy. He has since laminated the tie, and wears it at all family gatherings as a cautionary tale. Of what exactly, I was never sure. He continues however to insist ‘it’s what they would have wanted’, and that if he wears any other tie at family functions then ‘the terrorists win’.
The ritual ended soon after, and as a result my parents demanded my brother discontinue the paper round altogether, as they themselves would no longer be directly benefitting from it. Apparently he enjoyed the small amount of money he earned, and carried on delivering regardless. When he continued to leave the house on his bike early in the morning, and returned with ink smudges on his hands and cheeks, he managed to convince us all that the ink was actually coal dust, and he had taken a part time job in a local mine. Such a working class and labour-intensive job for someone so young threw me into a panic. The thought I would have to follow in his footsteps (figuratively, but also literally in the form of hand-me-down trainers) terrified me.
And so at the age of eight and some high fractions, my ninth birthday approached with the misattributed portent of a defaced Tarot card – where maybe someone’s drawn boobs on the grim reaper or something. I expected to have to be fitted for a gentleman’s haircut, and sent out into the world of job.
I mourned my terminal childhood, and vowed to savour the remaining days like an especially sweet gum, destined to degrade into a flavourless, grey chaw. Worse still, I learned from conversations with relatives, and occasional cemetery visits, that the lives of every Goodings man (excepting those still alive), had ultimately ended in death. My deceased paternal grandfather Godfrey Goodings (not the one who’d been burst by a postal vehicle), had lived his entire life prior to his death, surviving war (probably), racism (his own), and state-enforced unemployment (retirement), only to have his life unceremoniously clipped short, like the tail of a fashionable bulldog, at the age of 98. The cause? The affluent quacks with their big-city degrees could find no explanation other than ‘natural causes’.
An apple a day indeed – Grandpa Godfrey ate apple-sauce by the jar-full, sometimes getting through three or four a day. And yet there he rests, underground and unwanted, like a broken sewer system, or that worn-out dildo I found buried in the school sandpit.
So I decided, If I had scant childhood days remaining, I would relish them. I wanted a birthday party of great decadence, a hurrah for the ages that my peers would discuss for years hence, leaning over water coolers or crouching in mines, my only two visualisations of a working adult. I told this to ‘Mother’, and of course, ‘Dad’, hoping they would recognise the dire straits of a youngster in his last gasp of youth, and send my childhood off with glory and abandon, ablaze in a drifting canoe, something I understood Vikings did based on movies.
They agreed to a big party, their one compromise: pass the parcel would be played with real wrapping paper, and not newspaper. They knew better than to risk an attendee tearing back a layer of paper at the cessation of a ‘Steps’ banger, to find their auntie had plunged to oblivion during a hen-do bungee mishap. Or probably a normal death.
End of part 1
Tim Goodings' Bandwagon 
Leave a comment