Sometimes it sounded like ‘Móndou-asíss’. Some sounds were fuzzy and others were clear. Some were said so quickly I missed them all together. There was almost certainly a little ‘k’ before the soothing, pleading phrase, but I have no memory of it. Dou-asíss was familiar and friendly, and sometimes Mum stretched out the final ‘s’ for onomatopœic ages. Siss was Mum’s word for doing a wee. We were playing a game, Mum and I. She wanted me to have a wee so I would drop off to sleep right away, and I didn’t want to, for exactly the same reason.
The next memory after Mum saying ‘Dou-asíss’ is of Dad saying, ‘You should blow on it, m’dear!’ That was his stock form of address to his wife, a phrase so stylised that it hardly counted as an endearment.
Under the hood of my big black pram it was almost as dark as the womb. It was wonderful to be wrapped up in swaddling clothes with my face breathing in the cool air. I would wait for the blissful warmth to creep up all around me. It was impossible to maintain this bliss for more than a second or two without falling into sleep, but I wanted to enjoy sleep as a conscious condition. I was a precocious investigator of states of mind. I wanted to stand on the shore, on the very edge of the tide of sleep, and feel myself being washed away. I was drawn to examine the moment that consciousness gave way to one of its opposites. I wanted to freeze that moment, to savour my awareness as it slipped from me, and my secret weapon in the quest was a full bladder. That focus of discomfort kept me on the edge of nothingness, preventing me from dropping off. Then when I could hold it in no longer I would relax and let it all flood out. It was bliss to feel the gentle warmth seeping into my swaddling clothes, before I fell properly asleep, for the few moments before Mum woke me with an exasperated sigh.
It must have been very frustrating for Mum, who had to keep changing my clothes. ‘He’s being impossible today — I’m at the end of my tether. I’ve only just put him into fresh clean clothes and now look! He’s soaked them again!’ That was why she was so keen on making me ‘go’ before putting me down to sleep, and why Dad came up with his crucial suggestion: ‘Blow on it, m’dear!’ I didn’t actually hear Mum say, ‘Dennis, I’ll do no such thing!’ but with my later experience of her I can absolutely guarantee that she would have used that form of words. In the end she didn’t have to do it. Dad would do it for her. I remember the feeling of the cool air flowing over my body, and seeing Dad with his cheeks puffed out, as he blew cool air over the clenched bud of my infant equipment.
His tactic was sound. I let go immediately, and on this first occasion I hit him right in the face, while Mum shrieked with horrified laughter. After that he managed to dodge the jet. Mum and Dad made gratified noises.
I was happy to be the cause of such sounds, even though it meant I was being cheated out of a few precious seconds of nirvana. From now on, when I was wrapped up I had no way of indulging in this delicious game, playing Grandmother’s Footsteps with oblivion. I just drifted off. It wasn’t long, though, before I began to enjoy Dad’s blowing technique in its own right. I remember seeing the jet of water rising high into the air, and being very proud that I’d managed to achieve this. How they managed to catch the proud stream I don’t know.
I soon discovered that any source of fresh air could act as a trigger, so when I came to toddle I started to experiment. Even opening the little flap of my dungarees was enough to start the tingle of release.
I have a separate memory of sitting in a shaft of sunlight and realising that everything around me happened by my say-so. Everything was conditional on me. Logically, of course, this is a memory of successful potty-training. The potty has been pushed out of the picture, but I know it’s there. I’m a little king, and I’m sitting on a foreshortened throne. My gross happiness is the immediate radiant aftermath of being told I was Mummy’s clever boy for doing my siss or my ‘tuppenny’ (the family word for defæcation) so beautifully in the right place. That’s something that disappeared early on — excretion as one of the pleasures of life, expressive as a smile, not some dark duty that dominates the days.
My fascination with my personal squirting device didn’t stop in the cradle. As soon as I was fully mobile, I wanted to aim, to stand and point. I came to think that potties were dreadful silly things, useful only if you needed to do a tuppenny in them, and I would head straight for the garden instead. Whatever Raff station we were at, West Raynham, Waterbeach or Hayling Island, as the family moved home in my early days, I would soon be toddling around in the garden seeing how far I could make my siss go. The desire soon spread to the road. The attraction here was there were other houses and those other houses contained little boys. I’d practised my sissing skills in private, so by the time I was ready for the road I was quite advanced, and it wasn’t long before I was taking part in tournaments. None of the other little boys was quite as good as me. I was the champion of siss. Mum and Dad told me I wasn’t allowed to go into the road, but there was no rule to say I couldn’t do my best to project a stream of urine from one side of it to the other. After I ate beetroot once my siss turned red, which was thrilling and gave an extra flair to my display.
I was a good little boy, always meaning well, so it follows that a lot of my memories are about doing wrong. There’s no contradiction there. My iniquities were striking enough to be remembered. When I was naughty Mum called me ‘Bad King John’, and if I grizzled Dad would say, ‘Pipe down, Johannes R.’ Both of those were from a poem. But it was understood between us that I was a good boy.
Once when I was staying with Granny, though, I saw her changing the bulb on a bedside lamp. After that, I had an idea about how I too might shine. I wanted more than anything to glow like that.
Granny had given me an idea about the electric light and how I could make it work in a different way. I knew the switch had to be on to make the light work, and I unscrewed the bulb and put my finger in its place, switched it on and duly got a burn. I knew I’d been naughty, and I tried to hide the place for as long as I could, till it had quite a blister. There’s probably not a necessary link between being scolded and the smell of vaseline, but there is for me.
I don’t know where Mum was when I went to stay with Granny in her old house in the country. Perhaps she was there too. Mothers are so constant, so irreplaceable in early life that they tend to disappear from the picture somehow — just as Mum, as well as the potty, disappeared from my memory of seated happiness, though her approval was what created the memory in the first place.
Granny’s house had thatch on it, which hung very low. She had to stoop to get in her own front door. There was a painting of a cat in Granny’s house, hanging over the fireplace. She lifted me up so I could see it properly. I tried to stroke it. It was funny that Granny had a painting of a cat, when the animal she kept was a dog, her lovely boxer Gibson. I don’t know who or what he was named after. There’s a make of guitar by that name, but I think we can rule that out. There were ‘Gibson girls’ who danced, but I don’t think Granny would name a male dog after females. It certainly wasn’t Guy Gibson the raider of the Ruhr. I plump for the Gibson cocktail, a dry martini garnished with a pearl onion instead of an olive.
Looming angel
Gibson’s colouring was so pale he looked spectral, other-worldly, with one eye a warm and cloudy brown, the other stony blue. Boxers aren’t clever dogs. They’re famous for it, the not being clever. I don’t mean that any dog is exactly brilliant — they’re never going to show up on Mastermind — but it’s a fair bet that by the time poodles are being made heads of university departments, boxers will still be nosing their alphabet blocks around with big frowns on their foreheads. All the same, Gibson was a very thoughtful dog. His great pastime was to pick up his ball in his jaws and carry it upstairs. Then he’d sit at the top of the stairs, nose his ball forward, and watch as it bounced all the way down. Then he’d repeat the performance, without limit. He’d do it until the ball was taken away from him. As I say, he was a very thoughtful dog. It took just the one thought to fill him.