Stuart Millard
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Bonus Post: On Brand
🕑 Added 2019-03-02 20:00:25 +0000 UTC
There's a tweet that rolls around Twitter about once a month for people to quote-tweet replies to. It goes “what's the most on-brand story from your childhood?” For me, the first thing that came to mind was of being five, and my school announcing our first class outing, a day at a local amusement park. My tiny ears pricked up at the small print that, though we'd all be going, it wasn't compulsory, and any child not taking part would have to stay home. I vividly remember another teacher talking to us in the corridor the day before, all “are you excited?” Cheerily, I told them I wasn't going.
“Why not?” they asked.
“Because I'm turning my house into a haunted house!”
So, as my classmates enjoyed ice creams and rides, fresh air and companionship, I was happily making cobwebs out of cotton wool, and cutting beaker-shapes out of paper, to glue to the wall of a dark, under-stairs closet, transforming it into a mad scientist's lab. Please note that I was an only child.
While there are other examples of my early goth tendencies, such as running in the junior school fancy dress pancake race on Good Friday while dressed as the Devil, another thing I liked, as with most little boys, was dinosaurs. Again, around the age of five, I was frequently caked in mud from digging up the garden of my grandparents' council house, on the hunt for fossils. Obviously, nobody expected me to find anything half-a-foot below the surface of a Sussex potato patch, and it was one of those 'keep 'em occupied' tasks that made me feel like a big boy; like summer days spent 'painting' the back fence with a brush and a bucket of water. Looking back, maybe I was just fucking thick.
But then, one day, I actually found them; bones! They were small, sure, but there were baby dinosaurs, weren't there? Or maybe they were part of a spine or a claw. There was mild surprise from my family, who concluded they must be discarded chicken bones, fallen out of a bin years before from an old Sunday roast. Over the days, I uncovered more, adding to a growing collection of bones, with the most treasured pieces, a trio of skulls, about four inches long.
Enamoured with my prehistoric find, I took to carrying the bones with me everywhere I went, like Vlad the Impaler, lugging them round the house in a little plastic bucket; popping one in a trouser pocket when we went out. This, it should be said, was very much to the consternation of my mum. By now, the bucket of gross old dinosaur bones had started to smell; the broken ones showed the inner-meat of exposed and rotten marrow, and as I'm told years later, had even accrued some maggots. Of course, I was told to get rid, and on more than one occasion, had to rescue them from the bin. These were historical artifacts! If anything, the only reason to let them go would be to donate them to a museum, so everyone could enjoy them.
Eventually, a realisation hit the grown-ups, and my mum broke the news. Sadly, those bones hadn't thundered across the Earth 65 million years ago, but rather were the remains of her childhood rabbits, tearfully given funerals at the end of the garden by the gooseberry bushes, some two decades before. And now, in the mid-80s, young me, decidedly on-brand, had been walking around with the crudely exhumed remains of my mother's beloved pets; skipping to the corner shop with Flopsy's skull in my pocket.
Comments
Chris Mall
Kind of sweet that both you and your mum got to enjoy playing with her childhood pets. Though in very different ways I would imagine, your mum loving the cute, soft innocence, and you fiddling around with the remains like a proto Dahmer.
Stuart Millard
It's the Hexham Heads all over again :(
Martin Worthington
This explains why Horatio Knibbles has been sighted in your 'hood.
