My Childhood Short Story

The story of my own childhood is a complicated sentence that I am always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me. It resists finishing, and partly this is because words are not enough; my early world was synaesthesic, and I am haunted by the ghosts of my own sense impressions, which re-emerge when I try to write, and shiver between the lines.
This is the first thing I remember. I am sitting up in my pram. We are outside, in the park called Bankswood. My mother walks backwards. I hold out my arms because I don’t want her to go. She says she’s only going to take my picture. I don’t understand why she goes backwards, back and aslant, tacking to one side. The trees overhead make a noise of urgent conversation, too quick to catch; the leaves

He puts on his checked sports coat and I shout: ‘Grandad is wearing his beer jacket.’ He puts on his suede shoes and I shout: ‘Grandad has put on his beer shoes.’ He takes up the pitcher from the kitchen shelf and I shout: ‘Grandad is taking his beer jug.’ However mild his habits, however temperate, I can’t be stopped from chronicling his deeds.
The likes of a woman wouldn’t go in the Red Lamp.
My grandfather knows about English things such as Robin Hood and Harvest Festival; I sit on his knee as he hums ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child Protestant hymns!’ I dip my finger in his beer to taste it. For high days I have a thimble-sized glass to drink port. My grandmother says: ‘George, teaching that child to drink!’ Slowly, slowly, we are pulling away from hearth and home and into the real world. My grandfather is a railway man and has been to Palestine. The spellings he teaches me include trick far-off towns such as Worcester and Gloucester: I cannot write, but no matter. As a grandfather, he knows the wherefores of cotton production, not just the facts of working in the mill. He knows about the American slaves and the Confederacy; also of a giant, name of Gazonka, who lives on a hill outside Glossop. Grandad has ancestors; unlike Irish people, who don’t know our correct birthdays even. One of his ancestors suppressed a riot by laying low a man called Murphy, a thug at the head

In other houses ghosts bang but here it’s only Annie Connor, banging back.
The household at 56 Bankbottom lives in co-operation with the household at No. 58. Here lives, besides Annie Connor, her daughter Maggie, who is my godmother and a widow, who has a brown raincoat and a checked woollen scarf. She does errands for people and is at their beck and call. Here lives Beryl, Maggie’s daughter, my heroine: a schoolgirl, dimpled and saucy. There is only one doll for which I ever care, and that one, in tribute to her, is called Beryl. She is a doll made of grubby green satin, with satin stumps for hands and feet, features inked onto a round of calico for her face, and her pointed head of grubby green satin also.
My grandfather has to be knight and commander to all these women. His possessions are a billy can, a notebook and pencil, his guard’s hat and his guard’s lamp. It is my ambition to be a railway guard.
In the desert my grandfather rode a camel. He commanded it with certain words in Egyptian, known only to camels, now imparted to