CH³CH²OH - part 2

So, where was I? Ah yes, listening to the near-silence at the end of that King Crimson album in that early 70s bedroom, one afternoon after school. The lisp of the dust-muffled needle is slurring across the album run-out, the tone arm veering in towards the LP's centre and the shiny chrome - what's it called? the spindle? Christ, how can I have forgotten that? Bloody digital age. Anyway, the record's finishing, and we'll probably go downstairs for some tea and sandwiches; the Holmes household is very hospitable (though it smells different to ours - more perfumey and foody, I think). Later, we might look dubiously and naively at a specialist magazine that we've procured from somewhere.

Later still, as dusk comes down, I'll walk the mile home, breathing in the lead from the A312's copious car exhaust supplies, while the orange street lamps come on and the sky above the housing estate darkens down to a mustardy-grey, dusty colour - all light pollution and urban haze. (In later years I'll hanker after being an astronomer, and sit in the back garden with blankets pegged up on the washing lines to shield me from the constant haze of light that climbs sixty degrees up the sky all around. It's hopeless, though - all I can see, most of the time, are the brightest stars of the most obvious and prominent constellations; even these, though, are exciting - the Plough, Cassiopeia and, best of all, the magnificent structure of Orion. Sometimes there are power cuts around this period (the miners are on strike, there's a three-day working week, and papers and magazines are severely truncated to save energy and materials). When all the streetlights and house lights are off, and there are just the car headlamps at low level, blocked off by the brick wall at the at the side of the last garden in our row of houses, I might see some more stars, especially on blue-black winter nights, things that I think might be Auriga and Taurus or, in the summer, Cygnus, Pegasus and Draco; these constellations are vaguer and only momentarily glimpsed, assembled in my mind from a series of mental snapshots taken through the wobbling object lens (?) of my cheap (but much prized) telescope, and I'm never entirely sure how much of the constellation was reality and how much of it was my imagination and invention. Quite often I'll persuade myself into being excited by the blurry object that's been swinging around in the telescope's eyepiece - a nebula, a galaxy, Jupiter (or maybe it was just a fragment of cloud...).

I don't remember watching much television in these times. In the evenings, I'd lay on the floor in the lounge (we called it 'the front room') and look at my war books - I remember my particular fondness for my 'Purnell History of the Second World War' binder, which contained the first twenty or so issues of that part-work; I loved picking each weekly issue up from the newsagent - every issue was a mixture of colour and b/w photographs, quite dense text and three-view coloured paintings of aircraft, tanks and ships - all in all, a rich and concentrated confection for a pre-adolescent boy who loved military hardware and who was fascinated by war - especially the Second World War. I'd lay the binder on the floor and just page through the issues, as if I was just soaking up the images and the ambience of the photographic world, and I'd create little stories and vignettes in my head as I looked at a particular soldier's face, or the way that a wrecked truck was angled into a ditch, or the smeared face of a town that was half-hidden behind a curtain of smoke. I'd draw on my reading of Commando, War Picture Library and Victor comics, and upon my limited knowledge of national cultures and stereotypes - French, German, Polish, Russian, Finnish, British, Italian - to build up a sensory and narrative picture of what might be occurring in each image, and threading together (I now realise) a vividly-imagined chronology and 'mood picture' of the war; or, at least, of the 1939-40 period - at some stage, I broke the sequence of buying the weekly magazines (or maybe they stopped printing them because of the austerity measures? That would be a better story for me...the aching, nostalgic loss of an unfulfilled and idealised dream...). Anyway, i never completed the set (I think there were going to be six or nine volumes or something). [Compare the 'History of the Railways' part-work that we did complete...]

Upstairs, in my big bedroom high up on the second floor, which looked out over the gardens and box houses and the main road to the blocks of flats beyond, I'd play with my plastic soldiers or my miniature cars under the yellowy light, or re-read favourite books that I'd read tens of times before, or glue together model fighter planes or bombers, innocently breathing in noxious paint and adhesive fumes while I pursued the perfect rendering of three-dimensional versions of the military machines that fired my imagination in photographs and war stories. When each model was in a state of relative completion (wings, tailplane, propellor and landing gear all attached, for example), I'd pick them up and swoop and climb them in the space above my workbench (the top of my chest of drawers, covered in newspaper), imagining extended dogfights and daring, semi-suicidal bombing missions, voicing all of the participants and imitating the sound of intercom static and the clipped, stoical debriefing reports of comrades lost fighting bravely and uncomplainingly for their country and its noble cause. Then there'd be bed, and my precious new transistor radio (a 'Buccaneer', made in Korea or Taiwan, with the first incomprehensibly translated instruction sheet that I'd ever seen - this was the first piece of electronics that I'd ever owned)...my radio under the covers, and me tuning the clumsy and unresponsive dial to try and find a medium wave station - any station - that I could listen to; there were only a few UK radio stations on the air in those days - probably Radio 1 and 2, and maybe Caroline and Luxembourg; anyway, i remember hearing a lot of static and a few distant foreign voices that swept in and out of focus amid whistling and the slow scrawl of interference like the wind heard inside a seashell held up to you ear. But I remember fondly that darkness and sense of exploration, and the slowly warming plastic held against my ear and cheek, and the way that the plastic grill covering the speaker would become damp with the sweat drawn out of my skin.

(I'm sure I'll get to that CH³CH²OH thing at some stage in all this nostalgic rambling...)