Thief’s journal
I don’t know how to categorise this, but in my world it’s very specific: ghostly evacuee child. I also can’t tell if it’s in poor taste. You have to understand, I guess, that in my neck of the woods we were taught to empathise with evacuees before we even knew what the war was about or anything really – we had to play at being them in classes, and try on gas masks, and listen to grandfathers with whistling breath (not mine; he was of the opinion that anyone too Irish to work in a munitions factory is also too Irish to fight) as they told us stories of powdered egg and Lord Wootton pie and things. This is, I think, a generalised British experience. Perhaps it is the reason that so many people found it hard to understand, until v v recently, with the discovery of a whole room that escaped the cleansing fire of the auto-da-fé (silly me, talking stew with parents, wanted to write pot au feu there), that the British also did very wicked things. And they did them even after they had seen other wicked things done by other people, and then they lied for years about it, and a pensioner from Putney was still lying about it in the letters page of the Guardian every time the subject came up, for years, until he died. Sorry – that got away from me, sort of. It’s been on my mind.
I guess my point is, I’m never going to shake that initial feeling of identifying with those particular kids. I played at being them so often that their memories are mixed up with mine – memories of scratchy woollens, vests in winter, frost on the inside of windows – simultaneously artificial and real. Have you eaten Lord Wootton pie? My dear – degueulasse!
Then more childhood stuff.
Bonus from private collection – was early adopter:
A certain boyishness – a particular boy. I like the idea of being a raffish smirky naive Communist schoolboy so much that when a tweed Beau Brummel blazer with leather buttons (assuming it was old; certainly was battered) floated down the belt towards me, I jammed myself into it and when I finally eased it off and rubbed the feeling back into my tingling arms and read the 9 YEARS on the label, I did think I was a teeny bit creepy.
It’s OK, I found a similarly cool blazer from a slightly older and larger child.
Did you ever read The Woven Path and the other Wyrd Museum books? That shit was the shit. Haunted teddybear Satan cockroach ftw.
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