A Child, as Seen Through the Eyes of an Adult Child

The Child, as Seen Through the Eyes of an Adult Child

By John Hartery

It could have been another lifetime, I could have been someone else. Am I really now the emergence of that child of the fifties? How exactly did I reach this place today? My long ago past is blurring in a haze. It is over now. It was over long ago. It was like a series of moments of the atmosphere of the age. The moments of the child seem clearer, more real somehow as I look on them now, though retrospect is a liar. Elongated moments lost in the life around me, when the life around me was lost in me. The atmosphere was potent and pure and simple, the belief of the child breathed with a greater force and single-mindedness than I know now.

In the great winter of ’63 I felt the cold like an enemy in battle. We were sent from school, back to our homes, to our parents, to my one parent. People came around, the fire breathed warmth and spoke of comfort and wealth, the poker amid the embers, and the toasting fork and the tea, and the malt extract and Vitamin C capsules arming us against the cruel weather.
Then the winter was ended and we played our games in victory, in league with the sun of the summer. There was the Football, that special code that we played with only the one lad in each team. We placed two tin cans some ten or twelve feet apart. The goal was a can, and the penalty area was a circle drawn in chalk around each can. No goalkeepers now, or we were the ten outfield players and the goalkeeper too, each one of us, under the gaze of the tenements, long since demolished.

I imagined that the people in the buildings were the spectators of our game, just like the people in the main stand up the road at Celtic Park, where I often went. These games seemed to last for hours until it was time for tea, we knew this only because brothers and sisters had come looking for us on the orders of the family hierarchy and they were less than charming with being taken away from the things that they themselves were doing. The tea was always I remember a very rushed job, because after all, we had a very important date to get back to, of sport and friendship.

I remember the park. It was nore than a park, it was almost a lake with sixty or seventy swans swimming around, and working model ships keeping well away from them. Sometimes we would race around the beautifully shaped perimeter path absolute perfect for a cycle race until the ‘Parky’ would tell us to stop. The ‘Parky‘ was ‘The Man.’ He was in charge of the park. We knew he wouldn’t let us do what what we knew we shouldn’t do but couldn’t resist the urge of doing, so I don’t suppose we held too much of a grudge against him on account of this suppressed guilt complex. At times when we were sat around and planning strategies he would come and be with us and advise us to where we could play on our bikes and play football without scaring the swans too much, those places were never quite the same somehow.

I remember that I got to know a man just like a ‘Parky,’ he was a Lamplighter. He used to come around each evening with his magical rod and light up the gas lamps on each of the floors of the tenement that we lived in, and I imagine many others beside.

Glasgow is translated as ‘dear green place’ from the Gaelic ‘Glascu’ and has an abundance of parkland. It was always exciting to find a new one and often there would be different entertainments at different parks. One of these, which was special to me was known for its boat rides. I remember Russian Tea in a tearoom, and the Trolley Bus. I loved the Trolley Bus. It was electrically driven with two long rods on top affixed to overhead cable. I always wanted to drive one when I got older, but as I got older, alas, they were gone.

I don’t know if childhood is a fixed period of time, but I do believe that it will always live inside, and when it is gone, it will never be gone. Childhood gave me my life and through its experiments and learnings, taught me what beauty was, and simplicity and purity. It taught me to aim for the purity in thought, to aim to achieve in adulthood what was natural in me as a child. It makes me question maturity………