Another birthday gallops towards me next month, and I'm coming to understand that early memory becomes clearer as I go into the store and forget what I've gone for. After seven decades I can look back with experienced eye, and understand why my dear mother told me that she acquired her first grey hairs at the age of 34, a week after the cobra incident described shortly. I invite you to accompany us as we rejoin my father at RAF Poona in 1946, where five-year-old Geriaviator is finding his way around this strange new world.
ALREADY obsessed with aircraft and mechanical things, I've learned that Sgt James next door acquired his motorcycle from the Pongos, though I have not yet discovered who these mysterious Pongos might be. I hope they can find a spare motorbike for me too as I'm getting taller every day as Mummy tells me when we go to the Indian tailor for another pair of khaki shorts, I'm engrossed as he sits cross-legged using his toes to sew as well as his hands.
I have yet to learn Olde Anglo-Saxon so I assume the Hindi word for naughty motorcycle is “yoo ********* ****”. I know this because that's what Sgt James called his machine when it would not start and kicked it onto its side. Mummy says this is very naughty and I agree that the motorcycle very naughty because it would not start. She rolls her eyes in despair. Of course this makes my new phrase all the more attractive, and I repeat its rhythmic cadence like a mantra. Indeed it will remain useful many years later, when I remove my knuckles along a row of razor-sharp cylinder fins, or the scalpel-sharp end of locking wire goes under my fingernail, even 70 years on when some youngster in a call centre screws up the most simple transaction.
Sgt James and I have become good friends since he fell off his motorcycle and broke his leg, so he has to wear a big white boot. We sit together on his verandah most afternoons while he puts his leg on a box and takes his special walking medicine, which comes in a big bottle labelled with a picture of a man with a stick. Sgt James spells out the name Johnny Walker for me, and he says Mr. Walker's medicine makes his sore leg feel better.
Daddy is very cross today because he has to go to church parade on Sunday. Sgt James does not go because of his sore leg, but he says he will give Daddy a glass of his medicine to help him walk up and down the church. Daddy cheers up as he takes the golden medicine but says it's the third time he's been caught this year and he's brassed off with damn parades. Mummy says mustn't say damn, I remark, but Daddy pays no attention.
Yoo ********* ****, I say sympathetically. Out of the mouth of babes … says Sgt James and they both start laughing, but I've no idea what they are talking about.
TOMORROW: Geriaviator (5) meets the Padre. What could possibly go wrong?