You get to an age when the best things you have to offer are your stories. When my son pestered me to write down some memories of my Welsh childhood, I thought what’s so special about that? Lots of people grow up in Wales. But he said he wanted to read them as bedtime stories to his three young boys. That was enough for me to put fingers to keys.
So here’s the first episode of Tales from Wales:
Memory is a funny thing.
I mean funny as in peculiar, not funny ha-ha.
Although some memories can be funny ha-ha like when my Dad Walt washed his car in the front yard every Sunday, then every Monday it rained and made the car all dirty again.
So, he spent his whole life driving around in a dirty car, which was a shame because it was actually a really nice shiny car when it wasn’t dirty.
Anyway, back to memories.
I think memories are made up of little pictures and your mind is like a butterfly net full of these pictures fluttering about with feelings stuck to them like sticky notes in different colours.
Yellow could be happy like bananas, purple maybe sad like grapes, red could be angry or exciting like a face or a strawberry, orange and brown warm like a blanket and blue-green cold and beautiful like ice — that sort of thing.
Sometimes the picture can have more than one sticky note attached. The picture of my Dad washing his car on Sunday has a funny yellow note because he spent two hours on his day off doing something that was a bit pointless. But it also has a sad purple note because he never had a shiny car.
My earliest memory is of our big black dog called Old Pete who used to lie under the kitchen table next to the stove while my Mum cooked dinner.
Old Pete liked that spot because it was warm and somewhere to get away from the sting of my Mum’s wooden spoon when he got under her feet. It was also a good place for me to hide after I had stuck my finger in the cake mix. I used to crawl under the table and snuggle up with Old Pete to feel his wet nose and smell his doggy smell and to avoid my Mum’s wooden spoon.
Sometimes I fell asleep under the table and my parents would go searching for me before bedtime.
“Where’s Johnny?” they would say.
And my brothers would say “He’s under the table with Pete”.
Pete was a labrador retriever, which meant it was his job to go out with hunters and sniff out things like ducks or rabbits after they had been shot.
But nobody we knew went out hunting, so Pete used to retrieve things like socks and underpants from the floor and take them back to his spot under the table.
Old Pete had a very good nose for smelling things and he was a pretty clever dog too because he knew when it was Sunday.
On Sundays lots of people in our neighbourhood had a roast for lunch and about 3pm Pete would disappear. My Dad would find him later chewing on a leg bone of beef, pork or lamb in the garden.
One day my Dad walked up our street to knock on our neighbours’ doors and say sorry for his greedy dog’s bad behaviour. But the neighbours laughed and said “Walt — don’t you know? Pete’s been coming around our place for years. We always save him our Sunday roast leftovers”.
Pete was already eight years old when I was born so when I was eight, he was twice my age.
One day I came home from school and saw my big brother Jim digging a hole at the top of our garden near the rhubarb patch. My Mum called out to me to wait and not go up there but I ignored her and ran up the garden path past the potato patch and the daffodils. When I reached Jim I saw a tartan blanket on the ground with a soft black ear sticking out.
“It’s time to say goodbye to our good old friend,” Jim said as he spaded another heap of black dirt out of the ground. I watched as the hole got bigger. Eventually, it was big enough for Pete and me. But I ran away down the garden path, into the house and up the stairs to my bedroom.
I stayed there until the light faded to dark blue and pink and I only came down when my sister Sheila said she was putting some daffodils on Pete’s grave.
So I walked back up the garden path with Sheila in the moonlight to watch her. The daffodils were bright yellow and looked very happy lying on the black dirt.
I checked them every day for a week after school until they faded to a dull brown.
Today, inside my butterfly memory net, Pete’s picture is blurry and a bit faded because it was so long ago. But it still has three bright sticky notes — yellow, orange and purple.