Bay flowers, Gene Wilder, 3p and an Airfix aeroplane
Abundance: Wednesday 27 March 2024
Three days after the old man went toes up, I took a stiff cardboard box to the house where I’d spent my first 18 years and he his last 34. It was like he’d gone to the shops. If I’d put the kettle on, he’d be back before it boiled.
I sat in his chair for a minute, scrunched a piece of paper from his pad and threw it at the bin at the far end of the sofa: as a kid, he never seemed to miss - the crushed fag packet hitting the inside with a clang.
Before filling the box with a few old pictures, an Airfix plane we’d done together when I was a kid, and other oddments, I stood in my old bedroom for the last time. On the door frame, wrinkled gloss that looked to 6 year old me like Jesus’ face, still there. On the landing, a window that looked over the back garden; still attached to the curtain, a quarter of a century after it had been pinned there, a badge that had been hand coloured with two letters - A and R - by a primary school me in impossibly smaller packaging.
AR stood for Advanced Reader. I may be the world’s slowest, most easily distractible reader, but for a few short days when the sun was shining and the teacher was looking, I chewed through Charlie and the Chocolate Factory quicker than I could see off a Cadbury’s Curly Wurly1. I was awarded a plain badge to colour with the two letters that broadcast my new status. I saw the film soon after and fell even deeper under the story’s spell. If you haven’t seen it (or, worse, have only seen later versions) all you need see is Wonka’s entrance2 to know what’s ahead.
I think it is Wilder’s Wonka that left me with the childhood urge to play with ingredients. That first half term I was left alone at home, I was sure I’d found my fortune - a drink called cofftea that needs neither explanation nor repetition. Soon after, at a friend’s house, it seemed a good idea to pour a centimetre from every bottle of spirits into a glass in the search for the until-then undiscovered finest drink in the universe. That day didn’t end well.
