The Lost Child by Caryl Phillips

Author:Caryl Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374712303
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

VI

CHILDHOOD

“Leaning on a Lamp-post”—George Formby

It’s years since I’ve seen one of those tellys. They look like a brown ice cube, and all the edges are rounded, and the screen’s a bit like a goldfish bowl. These days you never see them in people’s houses, and I bet they don’t even have them in museums. The old-fashioned tellys are so strange that most people coming across one might well be inclined to think, bloody hell, what’s that? That said, were I ever to clap my eyes on one of them, I’d be fascinated because of the memories it would bring up. I remember watching our set with Mam. Just the two of us on a Sunday afternoon, sitting in the living room of the new flat in Leeds and our Tommy asleep in the bedroom. I don’t know why, but I like to imagine a scene where I’m standing up tall in a cot and clinging to the top rail and peering in fascination at the flickering black-and-white images, but I know that, being six years old, I was sitting bolt upright next to her on the settee, my little legs sticking out, and I had both hands threaded neatly together in my lap as though I was trying to please her.

I remember the Arnhem Croft flat really well, but it sometimes makes me sad that I can’t remember that much about where we used to live in London. I know that it was small, and I’m sure that it had an inside toilet because in those days having a toilet in the house was still something of a big deal. Mind you, I can’t see Mam ever putting up with sharing a privy with other people. She seemed to take a lot of pride in insisting that we might not have had much, but at least we had standards, repeating it like it was a piece of scripture. What I do remember is that in the London living room there was a cupboard with a wooden train set that was stashed away, and I had to reach up and open a door and grab it from a shelf if I wanted to play with it. I wasn’t supposed to do this, but if nobody was looking, I knew that I could just about reach it. I don’t remember ever playing with the train set in Leeds, for after all, we had a telly now. Come Sunday afternoons it was just me and Mam, and sleeping Tommy, and the telly and the sharp smell of the gas fire if it was really cold out. I remember us once laughing together at a film that starred George Formby, who was gormlessly dashing about all over the place on a motorbike. He was funny, and we both loved the fact that he was behaving like a clot, but when the film was over, I’ve not got a clue what we did. Truth be told, I’ve no idea what we’d have done before the

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