When Nanny Willard asked me and my cousin Luke if we wanted a glass of lemonade, she meant it with such a passionate blend of kindness and sincerity that it was pretty much impossible to say no. She commonly gave us this offering after rising cumbersomely from one of her and Grandad Derek’s old, darkly fuchsia pink leather bound chairs in the living room — plonked stolidly on the fuzzy and musty purple carpet like skin thrones — then, in her rather portly posture, usually wearing a zipped-up crimson fleece, a pair of fair cotton joggers, and comfortable fabric slippers, all cosily enveloping her altogether short and stout frame (now baring a tiny though wholly unvital hunch in her mid-seventies), she would trudge languidly across the broad carpet of the sitting room, enter the kitchen, then outside through the backdoor and down a long step into the corrugated-roofed side passage of the back garden to assess and collect one of the two-litre bottles of Diet Schweppes lemonade, placed on and protected by a low brick wall that held various other cooled and shaded bottles of Diet Coke (caffeine free!), ginger beer, perhaps a couple of smaller bottles of Robinson’s orange and summer fruits squash, and large, cling-filmed batches of bottled of water.
Why Nanny Willard and Grandad Derek put all these large bottles of liquid and soda in this long, designated space in the narrow, heavily covered alleyway in the back garden becomes understandably clear when one finally considered and looked at the size of their fridge in their compact, square kitchen. It was not necessarily tiny, but it was bloody small. A pale white, robotic affair that silently towered above six feet in totality, though when one opened the softly rubbered latch and looked inside, there was only about three rows in the main compartment directly in front of you, all rather tight and narrow, easily filled up with a few vegetables, bags of salad, packets of sliced ham, tubs of butter, jars of jam, and a few other condiments, then a couple of bars of dark chocolate (made from 99% cocoa, due to Grandad’s type-2 diabetes) on the top shelf. In the side shelves there would be the usual crowd of a carton or two of semi-skimmed milk, a large amount of water contained in a filter, a few cans of Diet Coke moved in from outdoors, then a couple of packages of cheeses (again, not particularly strong kinds - red Leicester, edam, mild cheddar etc. with a lower proportion of saturated fat to aid Grandad’s ailment).
Of course, me and Luke, having been her small (although I was now getting quite tall for my eleven years) visiting prince’s for years now — her two disorderly, blonde haired, mischievous grandboys — got a free run of Nanny and Grandad’s (who I will consequently refer to as “Nan and Grandad”) cosy, semi-terraced / semi-detached (I’m not an expert on real estate design) house, located on the north-east perimeter of London in the green, hilly, sparse area of Chingford, on the border of the outer London Boroughs of Waltham Forest and Redbridge. The precise town the neighbourhood is situated is called Chingford Hatch, so named from historical origins that date back hundreds of years as it was the name of one the three hamlets that comprised the old parish of Chingford, before the area was developed considerably in the nineteenth century to keep up with the rapidly increasing modernity and Victorian sensibilities. I was also fond to discover, after informally querying my father in a car journey, as I was wont to do when I had an ignorant pickle I intended to vocalise, and finally having something to offer in escaping the torrid idleness of my mind, that the element of the “hatch” in the name of the area, so he said (and was likely justified as he grew up in the same house and area), refers to a gate, still active nowadays, that is likely used to prevent cattle from straying beyond their pasture on the edge of Epping Forest. I must say I found this revelation from my father to be considerably fascinating, not only because I wondered at the time why humans and cows and animals of the like are so separated and live apart from one another’s amblings and ramblings around the greater swell of the earth, but because the enormous array and range of trees, grassland, soil pathways, bushes, and large twiggy areas of forestland that is Epping Forest, is a truly great expanse of nature and habitation that one can escape to within our homely borough of Waltham Forest.
There are many and various entries one can take to get into the forest proper, although my mind (as well as my parent’s, and various school friend’s) naturally leans to the very local nature reserve of Hollow Ponds, back in our town a couple of miles from Nan and Grandad’s — home to many Ida ducks, mallards, pochards, pigeons (unfortunately!), geese, swans, and a lot of dogs and their ambling owners, which acts as a huge, circling bisection of nature (mainly grass flatlands and tall trees), with a quite large lake curving and jutting out in its centre, and is essentially a large border and piece of the much bigger swarm of nature that is Epping Forest; Epping Forest, my dad also told me, is approximately 2,500-hectares in size; now this, due to the magnitude of the number itself I automatically took to be very large indeed, although because of my novice ability in the field of mathematics, and less-than-great ability to calculate and visualise proportions and sizes in my head, I could not quite put my finger on exactly how big that is in reality, compared with say, the whole city of London. When I think on the whole, though, that my father said that the forest itself runs from Waltham Forest in our patch of Greater London, and reaches and straddles the border of Essex (probably the nearest of English counties to our dotty urban settlements back in the London bubble), I must have thought it to be a ruddy gigantic piece of woodland!
Anyway, me and Luke (my elder cousin by about half a year) — when not accompanied by my even older first cousin, Georgina, who liked to wander off on her own to inspect the grass and flowerbeds in Nan and Grandad’s back garden, sometimes interrupting Grandad when he was busy in his small shed workshop, likely either reframing or fixing a tyre from a pushbike, screwing and tweaking a loose part of furniture, or using his tools to repair a gruesomely ancient object from their house like an old radio from the 1950s — would often become restless from Nan and Grandad’s downstairs space in the living room or kitchen. We would either get bored from watching what Nan was watching on television, had completely tired ourselves with tedium of testing out and sitting in every possible seat of the settee or leather seats that were available in the dark, curtained, Georgian interior of the living room, had lied and lolloped on the thick fabric carpet enough like we were still five-year-olds pretending to be caterpillars, or had fallen to becoming a bit perturbed and put off by Nan and Grandad’s bitty, grey, and in my mind unattractive shih tzu dog Millie. She was currently six or seven years old, and yapped in this horrible yet frighteningly funny way when the surprising dingdong of the doorbell would sound, by going: “ayyyyymmm ayyyymmmm ayyyymmmm ayyyymm!!! … silence for a second… ayyyyymm ayyyym ayyyyyyymmm ayyyym ayyyyymmm!!!”
On the whole, while finding Millie’s sudden vocal barks and outbursts initially horrid, and then finally entertaining, she looked a terribly lonesome soul a lot of the time; she was often perched and curled up in a dark grey clump, her loopy long ears caressing the sides of her small, beady eyed, moustachioed face, hunched very low right beside Nan and Grandad’s gaslit fireplace. Needless to say, during the very cold months, Nan would turn the nozzle up on the fireplace control panel very high, and Millie would happily saunter over with her stubby legs and fold herself up in a fury, warm heap about a yard away from the brightening, hot system on the fuzzy purple carpet, and contentedly doze off for the evening, while Nan and Grandad settled down on their pink leather furniture to watch television; likely Coronation Street, or Eastenders; if Nan was alone, it would be Emmerdale; if it was Grandad, it would be a football match, if one was being broadcast, or a high-octane action or western movie.
Truthfully, Millie was a very well-loved little canine, even if I did find shih tzus (especially her ugly, grey types) quite ghastly dogs, and Grandad, being the rather unknowledgeable, coarse, yet socially endearing person he was, would have this sweet ritual at about 10pm, to rise from his seat and walk over to Millie (now extremely settled in her flat fury heap by the fire, in some form of zen sleep) and say numerously in a high-pitched, east-end slur: “Come on Millie! Come on darling! Time for your walk. Come on darling!” At the first few strokes on her timid head as he bent down (because I was often present during weekday nights at Nan and Grandad’s, when my parents went out for an occasion and left me in the care of Nan and Grandad before I was to be collected, and because I witnessed him doing this repeatedly), watching curiously across the darkened air and floor of the living room, now veiled by their triad of 40s white-cloth curtains behind the television distorting the orange night lamppost lights from the street, Millie would tiredly blink herself awake, raise and rotate her head a few times, then plonk it back down on on the carpet, as if to say: “god sake, why do we have to go for a walk, now? Can you not see I’m bloody comfortable sleeping here by the fire, Dad?” Thus, Grandad continued with his attempts of cute seducing, if one may call it that, calling down and provoking her to eventually rise sleepily, and saunter along with him to the front door to leave the house for a very brief night-time stroll beneath the tall orange glare of the streetlights and black sky. And when I say “very brief”, I mean it was literally walking with her (with her elastic-clipped lead on) across the wide tarmac road onto a neighbourhood patch of grass at the junction of their road with another, a matter of metres, for her to lift a stubby back leg of hers to have a pee, or a concoction of something larger, if she was ready to empty herself of the day’s supper. Annoyingly, to my mind anyway, Grandad would sometimes be forced to use his chubby hands and pick Millie up himself if she refused to initially get up, carrying her in that fury clump, before he went to the tall wooden hanger in the hallway to put on a trilby hat of his, and one of his dark, puffy jackets, until finally clambering outside with Millie on her lead into the dim cold of the night, and cross the road to let her get a bit of nightly exercise, and of course to micturate.
***
Eventually, during the daylight hours, me and Luke often decided that we didn’t fancy being in the dimmed haze of Nan and Grandad’s living room anymore. It is also important to say that there always pervaded a distinct and quite grotesque smell of damp dog fur mixed with old dust and heavy layers of fabric blankets and cotton coats and covers; ostensibly, one found themselves (certainly myself) quite quickly wanting, perhaps even needing, to manoeuvre out of the living room and head to the next reasonably placed downstairs area, which was the kitchen, primarily to escape the sheer mucid, dank stink of the overly clothed, covered, and carpeted sitting room. It is not that the room itself — easily the largest of Nan and Grandad’s rooms around their comfortably small Chingford home — was outrightly or made to be deliberately off-putting in terms of its feel (the almost overwhelming amount of cloths and blankets, the rarely hovered, purple fabric hair of the carpet, the cold, mildewed touch of Nan’s sickly pink leather chair, as well as the sofa), or indeed its scent (the perdurable smell of Millie’s loose hairs fallen into the gaps and molecules of the carpet, the mysterious, circling swells of dust that were barely perceptible and tunnelled up one’s nostrils like invisible ash, and the huge locked glass doors of their tall cabinets pinned up like wooden monoliths against the old, musty wall baring Grandad’s collection of models of spitfire planes, locomotives, and other archaic triumphs of Great British transport, emanating a cloud of manmade labour and decrepit, statuesque objects), although one would not have had to enter and remain in their living room, standing in the centre on the hairy carpet, for a particularly lengthy period of time to gauge and sense with their eyes and ears that the room appeared grimly starless, tired and withered in numerous stretches and corners, and stank of a living space that bellowed out beneath its floorboards croakily the unremitting need for some far-reaching redecorating, modernising, and more than anything, a good and forceful spray of Febreze.
Having said that, Nan — who I even now can recall definitely contributed to the stink of their living room by the mere solitary nature of her days spent sitting in her chair in her warm fleeces, cuddling and stroking Millie on her lap, eating bowls of microwaved noodles, watching reruns of Emmerdale, and doing hundreds if not thousands of crosswords and wordsearches that she constantly bought in their thick, coloured collections of books from their local newsagent in the Hatch; finally leaving behind a thickly warm, invisible bloat of air of her clothed backside on her leather chair when she finally got up from her portly sittings — for all her overly long spells sitting in her cosy chair, trudging slowly along the thick purple carpet, in and out of the kitchen to wash her hands, cutting apples and pears, making cups of tea, and cooking an array of homely English meals that went from sausages, mash, and gravy, to fish pie with cheese sauce, and steamed carrots and parsnips, and peas, was a master of carrying and displaying multiple charms, facades, and general tasks on her back every which way she went about her days in their home. This is also how Nan and Grandad complemented each other so well in their snug and dusty, yet somehow constantly fluid house of theirs. While Nan was slicing apples in the kitchen over the sink, she could be absolutely sure that Grandad would either be concentrating firmly on some building, plying, or twisting in his tiny workshop in the small pine greed shed across the square bed of grass in their garden (that she could peer at at with a long or fleeting glance through their sharp kitchen windows, draped delicately with the same pattern of white-cotton curtains they had at the perimeter of their living room), or be upstairs doing some other DIY work in his indoor workshop, around the corner from the master bedroom, or if he was feeling really creative, lodged up in the attic working on something distinctly more colourful and versatile.
The charms and facades of Nan that I mention are the very things that made her buzz and shine joyously by way of her character; when seated happily in her leather chair, while she wasn’t paying attention to Emmerdale, she would turn to me and Luke entering the living room, and want to be with us, truly and presently in the moment. In her eyes, any infinitesimal moment perilously missed and wasted with her grandchildren was tantamount to a golden eagle not coming back to its nest full of chicks with dinner, or the sustenance to keep her young alive. She valued the time with her family unabashedly, intending and wanting to have fun and share the fun of being cognizant to the world, carrying a quietly light sense of stoicism and practicality. And while Nan and Grandad were both not what I would call “awake” to the whole world, in terms of being politically engaged, or having much of an influence or even opinion with matters pertaining to the economy, social crises, and events happening at home and abroad, the homely inner space of their lavender-like living room, the people that would pass outside on the path and street of the peripheries of Chingford, the neighbours they had a form of social bond or tie with, and the unwavering love and connection they had for their local area, particularly the natural spots like Epping Forest and the nearby Marshes, made them dear, sweet, and true in the most familial and virtuous way. This was reflected best when she turned in her chair and feasted her beautiful eyes on her grandkids, a broad and unanticipated smile arcing across her face, finally beaming out to us: “Hello Luke! Hello Oliver! Where have you come from, then?” Both me and Luke being too shy in the moment to reply and give any answer of substance, or overcome with incredibly joyful goosebumps at the pleasure of Nan’s boisterous and lively words, then quickly running around her chair to jump at her waist, enveloping our stiff blonde hair in her fleecy embrace, to which she would then gleam: “Aww! Come ‘ere you two. Lovely boys!” It was this impassive persistence of being glad and enraptured to see us bursting through the door, putting aside her menial tasks and worries for the time being, so that she could spread her eternal sense of happiness to her immediate family in the room.
***
As I said, me and Luke were an easily bored pair; we often thrived when we were playing active and physical games or sports, moving and running between white doors, big and small rooms, lower and upper floors, attics, bannisters, lofts, and sharp corners of tables, cabinets, and chairs. Truthfully, it is a testament to our agility and balance at crucial junctures, even for a tall, above average boy like me, that we did well to avoid hitting our heads, hips, or legs on all the wooden beams, hinges, and ledges around the house, which would no doubt have caused us some very significant injuries. In attributing to the respective day in my mind, Luke would perhaps have said to me on this quiet spring afternoons during our school holidays — after we had become apathetic to lolling and twisting about in the living room — “let’s go upstairs! We can play soldiers on the stairs!” to which I would eminently reply: “Soldiers? What on earth is that?” He would be somewhat evasive to my queries after this point, having determinedly decided on his own volition that we should resume our action-like, physical pursuits by upping the ante, so to speak; manoeuvring ourselves to a far more dangerous indoor terrain and vantage; outside from the living room and back into the boxy hallway, where Nan and Grandad’s even darker purple carpeted set of stairs tottered up in long rectangular blocks, perhaps about twelve of them in total climbing up twelve feet and curving round to the first floor of their Georgian terraced home. The staircase was shielded at its side by a wide set of diagonal, slanted, stark white beams, so brimming in their nondescript paleness that you could almost make out the thick, overlapping brushstrokes of paint by looking at the beams of wood from the living room. It almost resembled a small fence more than anything (of course with the prime job of a banister being to prevent the climber from falling). These perhaps 10cm width beams were somehow more striking, though, more pungent in their alabaster coating, more conspicuously protective as one glanced at their firm fitting along the side of the staircase, more sharp, yet somehow more safe as one caressed the thin, sharp edge as an anchor when climbing the carpeted steps.
The smell of fusty dog hair and carpet was still present when moving back into the hallway, clinging on and diffusing itself around Grandad’s many long and thick hanging coats from the tall wooden stick with curved, drooping hooks at its summit, as well as the aubergine shaded carpet — separate from the lighter purple and more saturated matting of the living room — and across the short and narrow corridor and along the samey pink plastered, aged patterning of the wall that led to the downstairs bathroom (in its very hoary heyday the paint of this bathroom’s walls eerily mirrored the horrid pink shade of the walls of the rest of the house, holding a nauseatingly green bathtub to the right of the toilet, which had a shower curtain connected to a long curving metallic beam at the ceiling, though I cannot recall the precise colour and design on the curtain). The final noticeably intriguing feature of the downstairs hallway was situated just before and to the right of the bathroom, which was in fact the tiny slanted-roofed area beneath the floorboards of the staircase; a little cubby slot that had a short cabinet of draws placed at the wall, carrying more assortments of Grandad’s DIY tools, bits of cheap furniture and tat, and perhaps a few electrical items and devices (Grandad was a retired electrician), as well as a few photographs and posters pinned up on the golden oak wall that descended down from the underside of the steps. My mind is a little foggy regarding what specific depictions and images were on these photos, although I can just about make out a decaying image of an old train on a track in motion, sketched out meticulously with a thin black ink pen; the image of the train was perhaps an old locomotive from the early twentieth century, active and forward moving at an angle so it looked like the train was almost venturing out of the paper itself in 3-D. The paper was now the shade of wilted beige, which showed its age, and it was maybe framed, though once more my exact memory of this is not distinctly clear. Regardless of the nebulous nature of these recollections, I do vividly recall passing the little cubby hole beneath the staircase innumerable times in my youth, often when I was making my way to the toilet, and I would always be smartly lured to the area to scan my young and curious head around (maybe a childish detectorist’s sort of inspection), before finally looking at the pictures on the wooden wall, of which I would always look at that old train, as it was a tidy sort of symbol of my Grandad’s interest for machinery, engines, modernising technology, and his general love for aircrafts, trains, and vehicles of all kinds. This rarely ever waned, and perhaps reached some comforting, radical kind of peak when harking back to the fact that he watched a lot of films and programmes of large vehicles flying, speeding about, and blowing up, along with all those action and western movies with constant fight scenes and guns and weapons of all kinds.
***
Fortunately, the grimly pervading stink of dog hair and carpet seemed to gradually abate when venturing further up the staircase, and then eventually onto the first floor. Perhaps Nan and Grandad’s most seminal feature and possession in their entire home, certainly in terms of amusement, was pinned up on the pink wall at the summit of the staircase, slap-bang in the centre like a grand opaque window, with two large heads protruding up and posing for a photograph. It was primarily for and owned by Grandad, as he happened to be the person in the house who was most fond of the two men positioning themselves and pulling humorous faces for the camera. It happened to be an enormous, flat, framed photograph of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the English-American comedy duo during the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema, being known as simply: (and whose most famous show went by the same name) Laurel & Hardy. The absolute grandness and sheer weight of the picture of the pair of them — seemingly seated, though the viewer could only see from their upper torso and their heads (both in suits of various kinds, and both wearing their iconic trilby hats) — right beside each other, with Stan Laurel squinting one of his eyes shut and contorting his mouth funnily, and Oliver Hardy turning his head slightly to his comic partner and looking at him with droll incredulity, all shot in black-and-white with a blank background behind, acted as a large cultural staple in Nan and Grandad’s house, showcasing their brazen love and appreciation for mid-twentieth-century comedy and entertainment. It ascetically provided a huge visual aspect to family, friends, and visitors, and more than anything an effective cue for either Nan or Grandad to begin talking endlessly about the silent, slapstick epoch of comedy they were privy to when they were growing up, created and displayed on the screen and on stage, eventually leading to the advent of serials and programmes being curated and televised to the masses in the West when television took off and began to boom during the 1950s and beyond. The carefully framed picture had a still life of its own in many ways, the black-and-white figures of Stan and Oliver, one gaunt and wacky, the other extremely chubby and cheeky, caught in an indiscernible moment of unexpected humour, away from the running cameras and screens; their clumsy, energetic, and truly memorable souls remaining unrepentantly fervent and whimsical as they peered out with their torsos, large heads, and hats on the first floor of Nan and Grandad’s house. How long the framed picture of Laurel and Hardy had been planted at the top of the staircase — at the crevice where the last two carpeted steps bent left and up onto the landing of the first floor hallway — I was not exactly sure; I perhaps asked Grandad this question on a separate occasion, as it would have informed me specifically when and more pertinently why he and Nan felt it a good and important thing to buy the gigantic, magnified picture initially, and eventually frame it and drill it into the wall of their home; but for the most part it felt straightforwardly unnecessary to do so, as the enormousness and nature of the picture itself carried the multiply magnificent weight of character, history, humour, sociality, and friendship, elegantly enduring in the home of my paternal grandparents.
With the Laurel and Hardy photograph pinned up like an advertising hoarding on the wall, it was pretty much impossible to not acknowledge it as one ascended the stairs. Though for Nan and Grandad’s grandchildren, and indeed their sons and daughters-in-law (i.e. my, Luke and Georgina’s parents) who would see it every single time we visited their home, it took on the realm of a tomb-like pairing of kings that one may find at the high destination of a long and arduous journey up a mountain. Thus, I always felt I had to pay them my due, give them a quiet commendation in some way for having existed and entertained so many Western families and folks over the years, their twin set of heads now caught in time forever thanks to this camera shot. On every following occasion I visited Nan and Grandad’s, Laurel and Hardy’s picture at the top of the staircase would implant its funny, solid image further and further into the back swell of my brain; first in an amusingly lightminded sort of way, reminding me of the large audience and fanbase the pair of them generated in a bygone era of comedy and entertainment, and then eventually more forcefully as an outrightly tedious piece of memorabilia that had stood stuck onto their sickly pink wall for approximately my entire life so far, so I could not even begin to imagine what the pink wall would have looked like if it was taken down and went back to its original benign emptiness, lest for the rumpled and undulating lining of the old Georgian plastering of the wall. Having said this, I knew it was Grandad’s superbly loud, cherished object in the home; even as I got older, particularly into my adolescent years, when the huge portrait photograph of the ceaselessly funny pair had begun to feel like the inanimate black-and-white apparitions they were, and I didn’t get any kick from seeing them anymore, in the same way I couldn’t possibly be getting kicks from watching an episode of Teletubbies on YouTube, I still paid them long and praising glances as I ascended the aubergine matted stairs, knowing deep in my heart of hearts that they were waiting at any moment to come back to life and reach an eager suited arm of theirs out from their still position of the photo (true 3-D style) and tap me on the shoulder to pull some faces at me and exchange a dialogue of great humour and wisdom, to bring some good cheer and joviality to my soul.
For the most, though, the great comedic comedy double act were still very much departed from this world, and the ever-present portrait picture would hang there as stoic and motionless as a statue, which I would pass again and again as I sauntered to-and-fro, up and down the staircase, up the ladder and into the loft, or sometimes into Grandad’s workshop room at the back of the hallway on the first floor. What was very useful, of course, which also happened to be a staple feature of my parent’s house, was that the upstairs loo was situated right at the summit of the dark purple staircase itself, as one took the final two steps to the left of the back wall where the photo hung, coming out onto the soft aubergine carpet landing, and facing a usually slightly opened, thin white door (painted plain white like the beam of the staircase), with a curiously bulbous, dark oak wooden handle at hip level to pull or push as one would please to enter the toilet. It was so curious to me because I always imagined doors, especially bathroom doors, to have the usual silver-grey light metal handles fitted into the middle, that I had seen throughout my young life; on the huge school classroom doors, toilet doors at school, side-doors, cabinets, closets, and various other passages into other corridors. It was a scrupulously minor detail of Nan and Grandad’s house, I do grant it, but even so, the loo door’s handle upstairs was just so far off and weirdly different to almost every other door handle I had seen and used in my so far young and unspectacular life. Even though I saw it every time I went round, and inevitably ventured upstairs to urinate when the downstairs bathroom was in use, or I just happened to be nearer to the first floor toilet, I always gave a very long and stern stare at the handle before I eventually clasped my hand around its circular wooden perimeter — in a mild state of bewilderment as to why Grandad left this particularly outlandish handle on the door, for he could have easily fitted on a more modern bathroom lever on by this point; even pushing the boat out and buying those shiny, gold-coated handles with the screwed-on rectangular base and those stylishly curved handles from a bathroom furniture store.
To describe it itself would push the precious borders of my mental units to a pathetic perplexity, but purely because it is worth describing its appearance for the sheer exceptionality of the thing, I would say it resembled something like a large portobello mushroom flipped upside-down, so its broad, curved base is showing (the side protruding from the white loo door), and it had turned a very dark, ill-shaded brown, with a few circular bruises and scars adorning themselves across the surface; basically, it was like a large wooden tabletop plonked onto the door like a big round button, therefore to grip the object one would have to crane their fingers and palm around it as if they were turning a large valve or wheel. Except, of course, it was not for turning, it was a pushing and pulling appliance to open and close the toilet door.
As a consequence of this, I recall a couple of occasions where I happened to climb the main staircase in their house, in something of a frenetic burst of energy, or rushing huff, for I was perhaps either following my cousin Luke up the stairs whilst we were playing a tag game or speeding onto our next activity, or simply making my own way up to the first floor to enter another area of the home. Upon scrambling up the purply carpeted steps in a buzzing burst and reaching the summit of the stairs just before the hallway landing, I would see the white loo door only very slightly ajar — the faintest gap or line running down the sharp edge of the door so I could make out a new shining patch of light emanating from inside — and being the peculiarly foolhardy boy that I was around the age of nine or ten, and not hearing a feather’s brush coming from the other side of the door, I would ergo put my hand out, clasp the upside-down mushroom handle and push it wide open. The white loo door happened to be of an oakwood that was so light and tender in its saturation and weight, that it merely took the arm strength of a meerkat to faintly push the large brown handle, or even just the wide, pale surface of the door itself, and it would fling open like a large cat-flap. As a result of this, during a few very embarrassing moments, I would find Grandad seated on the gold oak lid of the toilet with his joggers pulled down by his ankles, with a copy of the Daily Star firmly open on its back-pages, held up in front of his bald-topped head like an enormous book (likely reading football news at the back), at which point the light reels of paper would come tumbling down from the level of his head, and he would find me arcing my neck in toward the opening and staring at him emptying his bladder, or perhaps even his colon. Truthfully, it was likely the latter, because, well, why would one take up a whole newspaper to the toilet in the first place? I do recall one of these occasions quite clearly, where Grandad proceeded to say boisterously to me after I had flung the loo door wide open: “Oh! Helloooo Oliveeerrr!! What you doing ‘ere, ehhh?!” First off, the hitch-pitched exclamation and sheer glee of his greeting along with the large grin that had automatically formed on his small, wrinkly face was enough to make me scream out in horror that I was about to be swarmed by a very elder child sex predator (although this very much was not the case). Secondly, I could barely speak and utter any sort of reply due to the swell of embarrassment and shock that had surged through my being since erratically opening the door; I must have appeared the colour of a radish, with my eyes enlarging forcefully, and two bulging spheres expanding around my mouth as if I had swallowed a tonne of grapes. I must have eventually let my swimming head relax in some minor way, eventually saying in a tremendously timid toddler voice: “Err, I just opened the toilet door… sorry Grandad.” Then he would reply in his harsh east-end cadence: “Ahh, thas’alright, mate. Can you close the door now, please? I’m gonna be anover ten minutes!” So, I was compelled to simply say finally, in a frightening whisper: “Er, yeah, okay.” During the duration of this all, I can graphically recall my cousin Luke standing back innocently on the landing of the aubergine carpet (having safely climbed away from the summit of the stairs and onto the high-ground, both physically and metaphorically), laughing away to himself relentlessly, wallowing in the absolute absurdity and funniness of this personally ignominious situation. But I shall not explicate on the matter of the loo door and its handle any longer, for fear of it becoming a more trivially dispensable topic than it already is.
***
Anyway, fresh from a supremely and mentally scarring encounter as the one just described (although more than likely not coming off the back of one of those rare findings of my Grandfather on the upstairs loo), me and Luke happily trundled up the stairs, ready to begin our next active game of “Soldiers”. Luke was always an expert, for all his seeming and overall slow-wittedness — his family, being his older sister and parents i.e. my auntie and uncle, were of a more east-end, unsophisticated naivety; while we had been on holiday with them for a long, extended summer vacation when I five-years-old, driving all the way through France, Switzerland, Italy, across boats and ferries to the island of Kefalonia in Greece, and all the way back, me and my parents were admittedly quite different people to my cousins, and auntie and uncle, although this did not detract from the palpable truth that they were our very close family, who had their own lives, living a lot closer to Nan and Grandad’s, on a road just shy of Chingford Mount (before they went through a couple of housing moves), and I was always more than excited and deep down really loved to get to spend time with them away from my usual crowd of friends at school — at plotting and mapping out games that entailed to combat and warfare (he was a particularly avid video-gamer, owning a PlayStation2 and eventually 3, and played games like Call of Duty, along with other FPS’s (First-Person Shooters) like Counter Strike: Global Offensive and Apex Legends, as well as having a copy of a video game iteration of the James Bond novel and film From Russia, with Love, that had a multiplayer mode that I found very enjoyable; while I mainly occupied my lengthy hours on my own PlayStation2 playing the two main, globally-reaching football simulations, FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer, thus I simply opened my ears and let him talk in his inarticulate gabble and stutter (this was not a joking matter, for Luke held this speech impediment until he entered probably his early teenage years, and it caused distinctly irritating gaps in between his sentences) as he would tell me where we would situate ourselves around the house and what were our respective missions and tasks for the combative game we were about to undertake.
I seem to think back on this game of “Soldiers” as being a situation, although my mind is a little vague on this and what the outcome of the activity would be, where one of us would remain at the summit of the staircase behind another set of those wide white wooden beams on the landing of the first floor, and the other would go back down to the bottom and into the front hallway again where all of Grandad’s coats were along with a couple of dark wooden cabinets standing beside the pink wall and radiators. The player at the top of the stairs would use the white painted beams as some sort of territorial shield, being able to poke their arms through the gaps of the beams and look through them like they were viewing points at the edge of a shooting hut, or consequently emerge from around the corner and briefly use the landing beneath the Laurel and Hardy picture as a platform to fire from, while the player at the bottom veiled themselves in some sort of way around the bend of the first stair at the foot of the other large white beamed banister, only emerging at rare moments to look up toward the top of the stairs to locate their respective target. Both players would accordingly hunch down on the floor of their level, as if they were crawling through dirt or mud in a spot of country, and clasp their fingers and hands together in a gun shape with their two thumbs and index and middle fingers touching symmetrically, and use the middle lining as a sniper aim, pointing up or down toward the opposing player, or “soldier”. In this sense, it was a considerably high-octane and tense match of positioning and tactics, with both players needing to use the movement of their chest fronts and legs, bending around their “safe zones” and aiming and firing at their opponent when the ideal opportunity arose. Although, of course, either player would be risking opening themselves up as a target, so one had to crawl around and look up or down with immense delicacy and focus, sneaking in little movements and decoys to catch their opponent out so they finally had a clear aim to fire and eventually “kill” their opponent.
For some uncanny reason, although I would come to realise this all too late after a few rounds of the game, Luke would always dictate and declare before we began to play that he would be taking the position at the top of the stairs. Perhaps I protested a couple of times with a probing: “but why do you get to take the top?”, to which he would respond that he had thought of playing the game initially and explained all its rules, therefore he had the right to decide which soldier he would be. I could hardly argue against his reasoning, so I would turn round from the first floor landing and plod my way back down the aubergine carpet steps, and take up my position at the foot of the staircase. I assessed the appearance and visuality of objects and things in the front hallway to gauge the “lie of the land”, or in other words, where I should place myself initially pertaining to what things I could use as barriers and shields in the lower area, and indeed what things may hamper my movement and vision. I soon realised, putting two-and-two-together, after some while battling each other at our respectively altered levels, and through not much challenging cognition, that the decision of Luke to adamantly take the upper landing was not for mathematical reasons (for many would be able to consider the height, length, width of objects and precisely how much space they had to work with etc.), for he was quite useless when it came to calculations of a mathematical nature and academically he dreaded maths, but was based on his pronounced knowledge and logic he had gained in all his solitary hours playing Call of Duty, and all of his other FPS’s on his PlayStation, encompassing himself in a plethora of video simulations of maps of various kinds and natures; snow hills at altitude, tall grass and rock trails, towering forests and jungles, huge warehouses and iron shelters, and in multistorey buildings in highly dizzying cityscapes; only now was the puzzle beginning to piece itself together in my dissimilarly uncombative head; now I understood why he could outsmart me so expeditiously at the two-player-mode in From Russia, with Love — set within a chic and modern mechanical hideout of sorts that had multiple storeys, with each player being able to ascend and descend the levels in a voguishly wide metal elevator, by locating a jetpack sneakily hidden and placed at small spots in the hideout, or resorting to simply use a loading cart with an ambulance light and driving around the carpark-styled road that spiralled around the height of the advanced sanctum - because he had played it so often in his spare time, while consistently and simultaneously strengthening his skillset of using the PlayStation controller and its inputs to sturdy his aim when using guns and firearms in these combat games; these cat-and-mouse pretences of real-life action and conflict between ruling bureaucratic forces such as the MI5, and daunting espionage / counter-intelligence / terror organisations. I had only known the aptly named terror organisation “S.P.E.C.T.R.E” (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion) from the books and films — of which I was a very big fan of since my early days, as my parents had bought me a collection of many of the James Bond movies on VHS — but playing my cousin at Call of Duty, or From Russia, with Love, against each other on multiplayer, was like facing a genuine Ernst Stavro Blofeld, significantly scaled back to Luke’s age, with added telepathic and teleporting abilities so he knew exactly where to place himself in the strategic arena, and at exactly what moment he should do so, so he could pounce and spook on me for a luxuriously hidden eternity.
What seemed to consume my mind during our extended game of Soldiers, of which I had apparently been fired at and hit by Luke’s pretend sniper no less than a dozen times, so had consistently needed to respawn (as they do in Call of Duty), as I laid there on the hard floor of the aubergine carpet in the front hallway (the layer of the dark purple carpet itself was remarkably thin so I could more or less feel the backing of the carpet and the firm wooden floorboard beneath my belly and legs), I remembered that Luke, Georgina, and my auntie and uncle had ended up failing to accompany and come away with me and my parents back in that hot and heady summer of 2003. Me and my parents ended up flying across the Atlantic via Richard Branson’s conglomerate Virgin Atlantic airline and landed in Orlando, Florida, to eventually be driven by coach to a hotel resort within the larger hive of the Disneyland Florida park. Me, mum, and dad plumped our queer British asses in the scorching southern American heat in colourful cartoon bedsheets, golf caddie carts, and circular dingy boats in Typhoon Lagoon, for a summertime like no other for a whole twenty-one days. As much as I completely thrust myself into the glorious swell of adventure and thrill at Epcot, MGM Studios, Magic Kingdom, and of course Sea World — where I ended up crying on the first of our multiple visits because I was still a couple of inches short (yes, even as a six-year-old) of the mark of being tall enough to ride the Kraken rollercoaster, thus on our next visit we stuffed the heel of the inside of my trainers with a few layers of paper tissues from our hotel toilet, which still didn’t suffice — and for the most part had left the drabness and sameness of the British summer heat behind, I did think a few times about how much more fun it would have been if Luke, Georgina, and my auntie and uncle had been able to fly and holiday there with us, for that was the original plan when our parents had set out the prospect of going there a couple of years prior. Only now, with that wonderful word “hindsight”, do I see and understand that we had to save and put aside a great deal of money and resources to make the journey and camp out in Florida for three whole three weeks. I am still very young, and I still do not quite know or understand what all this “money” business and talk is about, although because I sometimes hear my auntie and uncle arguing very loudly about the fact that “we haven’t go enough!”, and even my own parents quarrelling on similar matters on various occasions in the car, I seem to think that the ownership and handling of it is especially important as an adult. This introspective recall to that lovely holiday a few years ago in Disneyland Florida, which Luke was denied the same dreamy experience as I, seems in my mind to be somehow linked in some strange and underlying way to me and Luke locking sniper hands at this moment across the height of Nan and Grandad’s staircase. As if it is not only a battle of purely excitable combat between us as boyish cousins, but a battle of our familial minds and history. Could it really be that my cousin is now actually thinking about the disparity of opportunity and wealth between his family and mine? These personal attributes of our respective families that remain tightly clutched and unspoken of out of purely good manners, continuously unsaid, yet somehow being broached by Luke himself in this weirdly ingenious method of play and games? It is as if I had in some way forgotten that I had forgotten this crucially trivial detail about our families which holds the pivotal discrepancy of our personal classes, opinions, and wealth; unflagrant yet strained, baring the cogs and components of our real lives; balanced by our mother’s and father’s purses, perhaps even Nan and Grandad’s, too; subsumed in familial qualities and quantities that may define more than I can ever know. But we are only eleven, going on twelve; I am sure it is a mere matter of my flimsy mind running away with itself and concentrating unnecessarily hard on a redundantly minute detail.
I catch myself dwelling on the topic for a noticeably long period; my gun-shaped hands resting lazily on the carpeted floor; my thin, spiked wad of blonde hair, and my small oval aquamarine eyes (my pupils dilated wide, and the colour of my irises barely visible as I’ve been staring at deep purple darkness for over twenty-five minutes) and the rest of my unformed head and babylike features slanted diagonally down towards the silky softness and dim indigo of Nanny Willard and Grandad Derek’s carpet. Locked in this deep, lonesome well of thought, I hear only very faint calls in the background of the vast, grainy, lustreless expanse of the hallway and stairs; somewhere separate from the hippocampus or temporal lobe of my brain that can focus on nothing else but this large memory of my time spent in Disneyland Florida without Luke; the calls only very slowly begin to grow in auditory size and noticeability — I realise I could just say “sound” but that is the erratic way my brain tends to work — as my short-haired head and pointy jaw and nave are still angled downward toward the velvety carpet, staring markedly blankly and nonchalantly, almost past my gun-shaped pale white hands, so I realise I am — how does one say it? — “staring into space”. Essentially daydreaming. The calls rise in volume evermore. They are no longer faint. The fact cannot be reconciled that it is a call of importance, demanding something over and over again. It becomes distinctly loud to the point where I finally bring myself out of my daydreaming ogling spout of looking down at the carpet, and I realise it is Luke belting out something vigorously at the top of the stairs. “Olubgudqwqerf… Olugoihjgtrtj… !!” This is how it sounds initially to my hearing organs still adjusting themselves as they twitch out of their hallucinatory and numbed state. I finally shake my head ardently and rapidly a few times from side to side, like a Labrador Retriever running out from a lake and jiggling its head and hair wildly to begin drying itself. I finally make out properly and well exactly what Luke is shouting down at me from the landing on the stairs beneath the Laurel and Hardy poster. I glance up quickly and see him sitting cross-legged on the purple platform like the Buddha, although he is not meditating, he is really bellowing out at the top of his lungs and his arms and neck and face have turned a very hot pink (his skin is prone to rashes and redness; he and Georgina and their mother suffer from severe eczema): “Oliver! Oliver! Oi! Ooiiiii!! Oliver! Oliver!! Oooiiiiiiiiiiii!!!” I at last stare up at my cousin with my own bland white head (although I already have some very unwanted acne proliferating around the bottom corners of my nose and nostrils) and am filled with a small surge of appreciation and love; I cannot possibly feel it but I know that my pupils have contracted and my aquamarine irises are flashing out; my mouth finally opens like a ventriloquist’s dummy in that sharp-dropping-sort-of-way-like-the-jaw-has-broken; I feel terrible that I didn’t respond to his pleading calls for all this time. I finally manage to say loudly and clearly in an uncharacteristically sonorous voice, the sound funnelling and undulating up the carpet stairs: “You won, Luke. You won, mate.” He smiles back at me. Then Nan calls out from the kitchen, reaching us across and between the wide wooden beams and door hinges of their cosy and stinky Georgian home: “Luke! Oliver! Ya Lemonade!!”