Creative writing course: childhood memories
The second of my creative writing class homework assignments was to write about a childhood memory.
Childhood memories are normally very vivid; although they may be twisted a bit by the passage of time, if anything this enhances the way they can be described. Rose-tinted spectacles bring more colour to your memories. In fiction, of course, your recall doesn’t have to be perfect – just evocative.
The pipes
It’s a cliche – or perhaps a truism – to say that they’d not be allowed today. The pipes.
Once more with the hushed reverence they deserve – the pipes.
Vastly superior to any other climbing frame, playground equipment or landscaping feature, the pipes were nothing more sophisticated than the name implies: five or so large, unused – well, hopefully unused – sewage pipes. Perhaps coated with something protective to make them slightly glossed, but adapted no more than that. Fixed in place with hidden cement or half buried, they formed a climbing frame like no other.
It’s something of a surprise that no-one ever lost teeth falling off them, or into them, or slamming into them after a pell-mell rush across the playground. They provided hours of fun just climbing in and out, clambering on top of the largest rather than just crawling through it, the soft curves radiating second-hand heat from a sun which seems to have lost some of its power over the last 20 years and providing the perfect point to bask, if you could avoid being pulled off them. It was easy to relax just a little too much and slide down into the gap between two of them. They were the perfect summer holiday forbidden pleasure. For six weeks every year they were free of competition for their affections, for the caress of their concrete against the backs of your legs.
Looking back, they were undoubtedly dirty. I’m pretty sure we’d sometimes find cigarette butts scattered around them, and I certainly remember strangely congealed masses, perhaps half-chewed sweets that seemed to us – back then – like alien embryos or the burst remains of vivid, poisonous puffballs. I’m pretty sure I ripped trousers on them several times. But I still remember fondly conforming to the warm curves at the bottom of the largest, avoiding the worst of the sun but enjoying, alone, the best of it too.
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