Tag: 1958

2. Quaggy

‘Mum, can I go play on the Quaggy?’

It’s early evening and the light is dying. My mother, who is pushing me home for tea, pauses at the gates of the park at the end of our road to have this conversation with my older sister.

It’s the first time I’ve heard the word quaggy. It feels nice in my mouth.

Maybe the quaggy is an abandoned mattress, like the ones I’ve seen bigger children playing on. That’s the noise the springs make as they bounce up and down: quaggy-quaggy-quaggy. Except that Mum is now saying Teresa shouldn’t go because it’s dangerous—and how dangerous could a mattress be?

I suppose you could bounce yourself off and break a limb. Or the metal in the springs might pop out and spear you in the leg … But still its seems unlikely that Teresa could be so careless as to get her leg speared by a mattress: she’s not a careless girl.

The quaggy take on a more sinister character, and I think of the quicksand that dragged a cowboy to his death in a programme on TV. But then Mum relents and lets Teresa go play on the quaggy after all, so surely the quaggy can’t be something really dangerous or Mum wouldn’t do that? As we leave the park, I continue to worry away at possible meanings of the word.  Is it some kind of animal? I imagine a huge woolly dog-like thing the size of a Shetland pony, with half a dozen children on its back.  Again, not much of a threat.

I think about the word so much that eventually it floats free of all meaning and with time becomes nothing more than a sound. Quaggy: just one more inexplicable thing from childhood: two notes from a half-remembered music.

Much later, half a century later, I will be idly googling around when I come across the word written down for the first time, and in an instant all its possible meanings—mattress, quicksand, shaggy dog-horse—will be displaced and bald reality asserted. The Quaggy will become nothing more nor less than what it is, a solid object in the real world. Later still I will catch a train to Grove Park station and walk round the corner to Chinbrook Meadows, which I will have discovered was the name of the park at the end of our road, and there will see the actual Quaggy. In the 1960s it will have been chanellized into a concrete culvert and hidden behind fences; but a 2002 restoration will have restored it to plain view. So when I visit in 2003, I will see it straight away as I pass through the park gates; there right in front of me: the echt, the actual River Quaggy.

I will fill with emotion. The joy in the discovery will be like fishing the last piece of a complicated jigsaw puzzle you were never able to complete out from down the back of the sofa. But in the backwash of feeling will come also a sense of sadness, that in the process the word has lost the thing that made it magical and solely mine.

1. Shellac

There were always records in our house. One of my earliest memories is of a heavy old 78 of Hound Dog by Elvis Presley. I remember destroying it with a hammer. I suppose I must have assumed everyone would be OK with this because we never played these old shellac discs, the family legend being that they had been ruined by sand from the desert that got into the grooves when we were in Iraq.

This seems fanciful, but it is certainly true that we were in Iraq. My father was sent to Baghdad by BOAC, his employer, on secondment to Iraqi Airways, and the family went with him. I was too young to remember much but my sister, who is five years older than me, has proper organized memories of that time—organized, but not particularly pleasant.

Ten days before my second birthday a group of Iraqi officers mounted a coup d’etat and slaughtered the ruling family. The body of the reigning monarch (Harrow-educated Faisal II) was strung from a lamppost outside the Defence Ministry. Abd al-Ilah,the Crown Prince, had his mutilated corpse trailed through the streets and cut into pieces. Mass rioting followed. Baghdad wasn’t safe for westerners. Guns pounded at night (a sound that haunts my sister’s nightmares to this day). During all this my father, a taciturn and withdrawn man, would apparently go out for walks just to see what was going on, disappearing for hours at a time. While he was out one day the servants took all our furniture and drove off with it in a truck. After that we were corralled in a compound with other British families until a flight out could be arranged. When we left my father stayed on, and we didn’t see him again for six months.

The flight home was in an unpressurised plane. As we climbed to get over the mountains I apparently turned blue, and my mother, who was heavily pregnant, almost gave birth to my younger brother Paul over Cyprus. We landed in Britain at Southend Airport. As we hit Arrivals, the horror of what she had been through welled up in my sister and she started sobbing. ‘What’s that little brat got to bawl about?’ remarked a passing Southender.

The records we had at home when I was growing up betrayed some influence from our time in the Middle East, but in truth it was a pretty watered-down one. We had an Eartha Kit record or two, a soundtrack recording of the film musical Kismet set in a Hollywoodised Baghdad but using the music of the Russian composer, Borodin. And there was a seven-inch of an instrumental by the Italian-American band leader Ralph Marterie and His Orchestra called Shish-Kebab, all snake-charmer melody and twangy, pre-surf guitar, which years later I covered with my street busking band Pookiesnackenburger. Otherwise, it seems, the sands of the desert hadn’t penetrated very far into the Helmer grooves – which is not to say the experience didn’t mark us.