After You, I Will Be A Shadow – A Childhood Memoir of Eurovision by Bloomsbury

After you, I will be a shadow

If you were to ask me if I’d had a happy childhood, I’d have to say “No”. And if you were to ask if I had a happy life, I would need to answer “Sometimes”. But if you were to ask me if I had experienced happy times in my life, then I would have to say “Yes!” What ratio of happy to unhappy would there need to be? Should I count each joyful time one by one like an abacus of bright beads? Or would one dark traumatic episode, or one malevolent figure trump several lesser indignities to skew the balance between happy and sad, good and bad forever in the fickle reality of memory? Could one amazing, fabulous moment of connection, of unity, wrap up all the bad times in one great blanket of love and harmony?

On the side of pain was Doddy’s garage, with its rough wooden operating table, greasy with motor oil, and its sadistic horrors, masquerading as a childhood game of  Doctors and Nurses. Doddy, cute curly blond hair atop a square head like Desperate Dan’s, the strange boy who, even then, didn’t quite fit. Too large a head, big hands, curt conversation, but unlimited imagination. Being Nurse, having to pick out the spelks with a needle after each juvenile surgical procedure, dabbing the wounds with surgical spirit, soothing the tears of the newly initiated, while Doddy cleared away all evidence of his wrongdoing before tea.

Being pushed around in a toy pram too small for my eight years, gangly legs hanging out, blindfolded with a back to front boys’ balaclava, my captors fearful of me seeing out because that would just spoil the fun. “Hold your hand out!” I was commanded. Wincing against the itchy wool across my face, I obeyed for fear of social death, of being excluded, of having to play at the poor end of the street with the “dirty Catholics”, where unimaginable other horrors awaited, because they were known to be cruel and uncivilised. Even though I secretly was one, or at least half a one, or maybe some smaller portion still, seeing as my mother stopped taking me to Mass when I was seven. What did that make me?

I missed the angel choir in the church balcony singing in glorious melody. I thought they stayed up there singing, because it was as far down as they could come to earth; they had to stay close to heaven or God would worry about them.  All I knew is that Mam fell out with the priest, around the same time that my Dad started getting some “funny ideas” though no one ever told me what was funny about the television talking to you, warning you that religion was evil. My good Protestant friends didn’t know that though, because I went undercover every Sunday, scuffing my soles along the tarmac with them to St. Aidan’s C of E Sunday School. I went mostly for the biscuits. Jesus fed the hungry with loaves and fishes, but we got malted milk, or digestives. Catholics weren’t allowed biscuits, they had to sit for hours on hard pews, and when they weren’t kneeling and praying to the Blessed Virgin at St Teresa’s, they were out inflicting violence on each other because they all drank and smoked and stole. Eight year old holy delinquents. They were allowed to, because they confessed their sins. We had to be pure all the time at St Aidan’s. Catholics just cheated or so my friends said. But they can’t be unholy I thought, because they always ate fish on Fridays; the queue in the chip shop was crazily long, zigzagging out the door, the Loynes twins’ skinny leg braces clanking against the metal of the Walls ice cream sign of the newsagent next door.So there I am, in my pram ambulance trying to be brave and definitely not to cry, having my fingers poked into squishy objects, “Ugh you just poked a dog’s eyeball!”, having slime dripped on my bare legs, then  interrogated “What is it, do you know?” I could feel the sneers even if I couldn’t see them.  If I guessed right, the torture stopped and it was someone else’s turn as the victim. I learned to eat tomato eyeballs, stand in wet clay poo, and be tickled by caterpillar tarantulas long before more exotic abuses were legitimised for ridiculed celebrities in the Australian jungle. Kangaroo balls and Witchety grubs.