It need only be simple, like finishing a packet of raisons
then blowing on the box to make a whistle sound, to peeling off the layers of a
whole cooked onion from a corned beef roast and eating them one-by-one,
pretending you’re playing a game of pass-the-parcel.
Of course my childhood only feels like yesterday, but to
them it’s ‘in the olden days’. At least their idea of my ‘olden days’ doesn’t
conjure up a black and white world of unsmiling faces as was my interpretation
of my predecessor’s day, based on the pictures I had seen.
Those who are lucky enough to still have parents living in
their own childhood home can witness their children doing the same things they
did back in the day – whether it’s as simple as running races down to the same
lemon tree down the bottom of the backyard, or scrambling under the feijoia
tree and coming up triumphant with the largest fruit.
My childhood home sold in my early 20s, before I had kids,
but one day I decided to take a bit of a trip down memory lane and took us for
a jog back to the scene of my childhood, the sports domain which backed onto
our former house. This was where we played many an evening cricket match in our
summer pjs and, later, where I’d walk across to reach the pony club on the
other side where my horse Sparky was kept.
As we neared my
place, I pointed out dad’s big shed where he kept his car and boat.
“And that’s the shed where my brothers and I would hide from
the neighbour’s grandson and pretend we were ghosts.” (It was pretty funny – he
used to run terrified back to his nana’s!)But the kids weren’t interested in the past and they carried on running. Instead I slowed to a walk and stared. I saw it through their eyes. The bird aviary had long gone but I spotted the tool shed in which my brothers and I spent hours seeing who could drill the biggest hole into the wooden post. The wood shed was still there, as was the flat, which we were told used to house the maid back in the day but, for us, was the scene for playing ‘schools’ and exciting sleep-overs in which we rarely lasted the night.
The fruit trees were still there – lemons, lemonades,
mandarins, plum, peaches, nectarines, feijoia, apple, loquat, as was the big
vege garden.
My backyard had always been a conglomeration of sheds, paths
and fruit trees but now the sheds were rickety, the trees overgrown.
I was still rubber-necking – my pace having slowed to a true
dawdle - when a guy came out and gave me an odd look, clearly wondering what my
problem was.
On a whim, I back-tracked. “Sorry, I wasn’t staring at you,
it’s just this used to be my home,” I explained, to which he seemed instantly
interested.
It turns out he had recently moved in and was renovating the
house and had made a few unexplained discoveries, which I was able to clear up,
like the steps leading up to nowhere where once our back door had been, and the
circular decking which once wrapped around our oval Para pool where us and the
neighbouring kids across the domain spent hours bombing and learning to row the
inflatable dinghy.
“And are our heights still recorded on the back of the
bedroom door?” I asked enthusiastically, to which he seemed puzzled and said he’d
have to go check. He probably didn’t like to tell me they’d long gone.
A part of me was hoping for an invite in but then I’m sure I
would’ve been left disappointed. Some of us tend to glorify our childhoods in
hindsight and, based on the state of the yard, I was keen to keep my memories
of the house intact.
I moved on to catch up with the kids and passed my elderly
neighbour who’d lived there long before we moved in in 1981, walking her dog.
She said a polite ‘hi’, then looked straight through me.
Yes, time had moved on and this was no longer my patch.
But not to worry, thanks to mum being a bit of a hoarder – something
I gave her a lot of grief for growing up, but am thankful for now – I can still
witness my kids delighting in former treasures from my overly-pink bedroom at
that address.
At least in my mind it’s still pink.
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