Write here, write now.

I can remember the times when my sister was four.
"Leave me alone, I'm only four" was her catchphrase, whenever we told her she couldnt join in with our amateur productions, put on in the garage for our cringing parents' entertainment.
This, by definition, I was seven.
Can I remember nothng before I was seven?
My great uncle Fred, my nan's brother on my dad's side, used to come for lunch with us on occasional Sundays. He drove one of those blue 'invalid; carriages. I have no idea how mum and dad managed to get him from the back door (by the driveway) into the dining room, so I can only assume he had a wheelchair. I know he had a dog. Nipper. The dog bit me once, but without asking my parents I can't remember how old I was at the time.
This would have been at Uncle Fred's house in Norton Road, Kingsthorpe - one or two streets along from Bective Road where I went to school.
Lower School, as it was then. I don't even know if it's still there, but it exists forever in a song I wrote called "An Earlier Man" and here in Southampton, in Bitterne Junior, a similar aged red brick building with those beautiful tall narrow windows.
he bought me a football shirt once.
I can't remember whether it was Everton of Nottingham Forest.

Don't read back, don't edit this stuff. It could be intensely personal.
A biography is emerging, starting by itself from an idea I've had for years.
Impulse, no direction.
Press and play.

So I have memories of being at Bective School. The playground.
Mr Beint. Baint? I got knocked unconscious once, playing football with a tennis ball and banging heads with someone challenging for the same ball. Lorna Williams.
She wasn't the person involved, but perhaps I have just brought up the name of my first love. She was taller than me - it goes back a long way.
So how old was I at 'Lower School', when education was a three-tiered affair. I suspect it was 'Juniors', so that is now Key Stage 2, between the ages of about 7 and 10. Then we moved up to 'Middle' School.
No, I'm confused.
The 'Middle School' I'm thinking of was in fact Kingsthorpe 'Upper' School, where I would have started in the third year aged what - 13?
My playground memories are not as early as I thought, because Bective Middle School had that playground, that teacher, and that girl.
Which also suggests that I haven't much recollection of myself much younger than seven.
The facts inform me that I started school at Whitehills when we lived in Barley Lane, but other than my three cousins living nearby in Clover Lane I remember little of that time. One name comes to mind - that of 'Nolly' Osborne who features later in the story for altogether different reasons, but I know we were at Primary School together.
Even with visual triggers I can't imagine being there. Biscuit and Kink now live within two minutes of the school that sadly means nothing to me.
We moved from Barley Lane before I was old enought o remember living there.
Childhood will always be Liddington Way, Trudi B, games of "Stony", and those weird but ridiculous shows we put on a handful of times in the gararge.
This is the garage that was joined to the side of our house, about eight feet behind the back door. The garage that once had double wooden doors, painted green, that my dad forgot to open once and drove his Beetle into.
Was that the white Beetle? I need to ask.
He came home in so many different cars from work I have forgotten which one we actually owned

This is fabulously disjointed.
I have no idea where Iim going.

For a period, it was a white K70 (and Wikipedia informs me they were produced by Volkswagen between 1969 and 1974) and then his pride and joy was a classic "Jeans" Beetle, a limited edition also from 1974.
But again, by 1974 I was eight years old.
Does this suggest that my children will have no recollection of this contemporary period of their own lives? Alice, at eight, might now be experiencing her 'earlist memories'? Scary thought.
I am struggling to relate any pre-school experiences.
It was to Bective Middle we were walking, up that alleyway off Chalcombe Avenue, when Mum slipped on the ice and broke her wrist.
we had ice in those days.
Proper slippy stuff. Not the kind that comes in boxes with interlocking parts that you can take up and drive off with when the sponsorship deal ends.
At the back of the school was a great slope for sledging and pushin gyour mates down.

Mum will tell affectionately of the incident involving the 'twin tub' that my sister fell into and scalded herself so severely we had to take her into hospital.
Angie was proabbly two then? I 'm getting earlier, but this is a second-hand memory, relived through my mum.
That' s not what I'm trying to do here - I want to look back with my own eyes into my own memory.
It was all just so spectacularly ordinary.
Which is why I will never be famous. It's my destiny.
Read any biography of any musician/artist etc and they will relate tales of hardship, of life experiences, of abuse, of broken marriages, of hostility or tragedy.
I have no unhappiness.
Perhaps that's why there is no indellible imprint on the back of my eyelids?

My parents were neither poor nor wealthy. Neither clever nor ignorant. They didn't experience success or failure to any great extreme.
It is a little alarming to think that, when I was seven - which seems to be where I'm starting from - my parents would not have quite been in their 30s.
I was 18 when my dad celebrated his 40th birthday, for instance, and to my eternal shame I know nothing about it.
My excuse, which now seems sad and selfish, will become clear. The blanket of 'self' was impenetretable at the time.
I can remember all manner of cars sitting on our driveway. Apart from the various beetles, there were often 'Mercs' (my dad's delusions of grandeur) which were customers cars he was test-driving at the weekend or home for lunch, or occasionally showroom models of the latest models.
He loved (and still loves) cars, far, far more than I don't understand them. My interest and passion for automobiles is the very antithesis of my dad's - which again I think is to my eternal shame and must have caused him more than some frustration and grief over the years.
We have never talked about it.

He's Old School, my dad. Just like everyone else's, of course.
Again, the 'nothing unusual' programme.
Took a job as an apprentice mechanic at a small privately owned garage when he was 14. Worked his way up, slowly and insignificantly, through reception and into parts. Cars cars cars. How many hours did I spend out there with him, on his back, lovingly explaining how to line all the bits up so you put them back in order; the best way to bleed the brake system and change the pads??
And yet it means nothing to me. Which must be disappointing for him.
I'm assuming. I wish I knew.