Moving Finger - Issue 3 - Brunel University

2. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROSE
RESCUED FRAGMENTS
'To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing
phase of life, is only the beginning of the task' (Joseph Conrad 1897)
I was born at teatime on November 19th, 1958 in the flat above the Gaumont cinema,
Regent Circus in Swindon. For astrologers this makes me a Scorpio with Gemini rising
and Moon in Pisces or, in other words, a talkative dreamer with a nasty streak - well,
something like that; everything is approximate. About Swindon I have little to say.
Nobody has come up with anything very interesting on my birth or that town as anecdotal
evidence for me to use. Steam trains still chuffed through on their way to Bristol on the
Great Western Railway, probably - I haven't researched. I read somewhere that war
rationing finally ended in 1958. It seems a drab year in which obscurely famous people
died and someone invented something that has since proven useful (but was it really the
year of the silicon chip?). Disappointingly average things happened like Elvis joining the
army. Like the year itself, the place, Swindon, strikes me as remarkably ordinary.
There is a newspaper clip around about me entering the world at the same time as
Jerry Lewis' film 'Rock-a-bye-baby' happened to be playing downstairs. My father, the
manager of the cinema, was 'very much the bewildered expectant father'. Hilariously, he
didn't know whether the baby's cries were mine or merely the film's soundtrack!
In the early 1960s dad transferred to Redhill cinema and for a while we lived at 69
Pound street, Carshalton, with my Grandmother, Marie Hodson (given the South London
pronunciation, with the accent on the 'Ma-' rather than the '-rie'). I remember that fusty,
creepy Victorian house from later on in 1965 when, on her big old telly with its grey,
watery picture, I watched Winston Churchill's funeral procession; why I remember that
I've no idea - Churchill, the great, baby-faced war leader. It seemed the war was still with
us in those days. Such a catastrophe echoed into the 60s and into my tiny imagination. I
was permeated with a sense of the memorious solemnity and cataclysmic history of it all.
Soldiers, flags and mossy statues abounded and Hitler was the monster, the
personification of evil. Germans (just like germ) were ready to invade and infect us with
their nasty 'Nazi' disease....
I must have been left, sat in front of that telly a lot, as I have these gloomy memories
of tedious hours staring at afternoon wrestling, which went on forever. Then it was the
football results typed out on the screen by this funny little thing that bobbed up and down
at the bottom; it hypnotised me, I was sent into a kind of torpid trance. I would be waiting
for Dr Who to come on and if it rained, the remorseless traffic would swish and splash
past out in the harsh black street and the lights would come on, a sickly sodium yellow
catching the drops on the window behind the nets. I heave a deep melancholic sigh at the
atmosphere it conjures up.
Grandmother and I never communicated much. I was informed at some point that she
didn't like me, for reasons I will never fathom and don't care about much. I remember
being like an only child, left to my own devices, drawing or flicking through books,
spending most of the time alone, wondering in a kind of void. I have this strange story in
my head, more than likely something made up or a fragment of a dream. It regards Dr
Who: Dad is friendly with the man from the BBC who, it turns out, is working on the
series; before this, he visits our house and steals the design for the Daleks from some of
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