Kaleidoscope: Reflections from a 1950s Childhood

By Graham Pryor

The accuracy of recalled childhood memories in adulthood is the subject of extensive research and debate, and controversies exist surrounding the authenticity of recovered memories. This recollection of episodes from a childhood spent in 1950s England is enhanced by the author’s ADHD syndrome; it supplies a rare clarity to counteract the errors commonly found with authentic memories, when the adult has to infer missing details. The vignettes of an early life that comprise this book represent a world of freedom and adventure now sadly lost to history, but they paint a picture that is as vivid today as when they were first experienced.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Nov 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9780244651145

Graham Pryor

Graham Pryor studied American Studies and English at the University of Hull. Subsequently, he pursued a career in information management, leaving his childhood home in Hythe, Kent, for the north-east of Scotland, where he has lived and worked for the past forty years. Cerberus is his fifteenth novel and, he says, his favourite.

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Kaleidoscope: Reflections from a 1950s Childhood

Kaleidoscope

Reflections from a 1950s childhood

Kaleidoscope

Graham Pryor

This is not quite a work of fiction. Whilst names, characters, organisations, places, events and incidents are historically correct they may be used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2017 by Graham Pryor

ISBN 978-0-244-65114-5

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review or scholarly journal.

Revised edition, November 2017

1 – Cauldron

I don’t let on too much in case they decide I have dementia. Well, for some time now I’ve travelled far enough into that particular state of late maturity for them to start suspecting. Time was when older folk were left alone to age without being diagnosed and medicalised, when ‘senior moments’ were a defining characteristic of the elderly, to be accepted without alarm, and the slightly eccentric behaviour that comes with advancing years was looked upon more fondly. It was still like that in the 1950s.

Providentially, I’ve long been recognised as one of those souls who are fortunate (or unlucky – it depends on how sympathetically you understand it) to be blessed with ADHD, the condition that medics call ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’. So, my family and acquaintances are used to me zoning out, coming out with statements that are apparently non-sequitur and, in an HD phase, burning through tasks with the energy and dedication of Superman. Indeed, my own sons used to refer to me as Captain Vague and reckoned they could successfully ask for anything from me when I was in one of my more reflective AD moods. But all along, I was just being the generous guy that I am, who simply wanted them to have what they desired. So says I.

As for me letting on, you would have thought by now they’d be used to the way my mind works, the way it’s like a pot that’s constantly on the boil, with thoughts and memories churning like lava, distinct and well-formed scraps occasionally surfacing with apparent random. That’s all I can expect, though, that they are used to it; I don’t need them to understand how it works, just accept that it’s that way because it is and it’s not a signal that I am descending into senility.

Trouble is, all that churning in the mysterious depths of my brain has become more visible in recent months, since I – rejoice! rejoice! – gave up work. Without the usual nonsense to report from the workplace – you know what I’m talking about, the petty rule of corporate process, worrying about deadlines and deference, the posturing of deeply inadequate senior managers, the pointless and unworkable IT initiatives and those deceitful staff welfare programmes. Oh, I could go on. But without all that crap from the daily grind to weave into an evening’s weary narrative it is guaranteed to be the case that, instead, what has been going on in my head all day is bound to out. So I’m having to be more guarded, keep myself to myself, without seeming taciturn and anti-social.

Like I said, time was when no-one would remark an old feller amusing his grand-kids with extraordinary tales from his own childhood, or shocking his adult off-spring and their peers with his non-PC view of the world. Time was when he’d be regarded with great affection for his foibles, valued for a store of wisdom garnered over several decades and sought out for an opinion when the shifting sands of today and tomorrow present no clear path forward. But times change, and the zeitgeist has become a very foreign place, a place in which folk would flounder in the tide of life without the support of myriad state agencies, where privacy has been offered up willingly in exchange for an illusion of community, and where critical thought is shunned as subversive and illiberal.

Which is why I don’t let on too much. Can’t give them the old Big-D as an excuse for shutting me away somewhere safe (for them).

The thing about that old pot, if I may blether on for a bit more, constantly bubbling away like it does, is I don’t understand it myself. At least, not the way it works. Listening to it, hearing unsolicited phrases of music, snatches of conversations and with the unceasing roil of images, I sometimes feel I’m standing in a hallway – that’s the external world – whilst an open door gives way to a room where all the experiences of my life have been gathered and set in motion, swirling like motes of dust in a beam of sunlight, raucous and boisterous. I can push the door open a little further and look around without fear of being pulled inside, recognise something and, having reflected upon it, step away again. But then, at any time and without any deliberate selection on my part, something will emerge unbidden into the hall: maybe the melody of a song I’d listened to, possibly many years ago, an encounter with someone no longer a part of my life, or an opinion expressed by myself or some other that has secured an indelible hold in my memory. For it is all memory of one sort or another. Yet the thing is, for me, once out into the hall I can’t shake it off.

For it lives almost a life of its own, the stuff in that room; not like the contents of a safe deposit box where everything is quietly warehoused and sleeping but a Pandora’s box, with the top off and the manic contents scrambling to escape. That is why it is so dangerous. Whether a bubbling cauldron, a frantic room in a calm house or Pandora’s box, it is all very muscular memory, and to speak powerfully of memories is to court danger when you are in the elder zone, with the attendant risk of being labelled as dottled.

I should be master of it by now, but I never shall. I will remain suspended in the state of journeyman until the end, a modern journeyman moving through a succession of experiences, with a wide portfolio of life’s lessons already tucked away inside my head but always adding more. Too much experience to be an apprentice, too little to be a master, when there are still so many experiences to absorb.

But back to that hectic room. What is it that occasions a particular scrap of memory to gain its freedom, what calls it forth when it is not provoked by my conscious self or a stimulus from the outside world? You can see just how some watchful party might seize upon that independence of