England was where my early life was apparently much spent in my perambulator the grand carriage four-wheeler kind the lonely ship in which I was put out to air and left to imbibe the silence of the spheres and learn the lessons of self-reliance there being no loving arms available at the time and the isolation was Good for me and the stories told are that I shouted swearwords from my limited infant vocabulary learned from my father back from the war and possessed of rapidly improving RAF English and that some time earlier in the thick of falling V2 rockets Daisy our devoted servant who had been with my grandmother since she was 15 and fresh from rural poverty and in the 1970's was still paid ten shillings a couple of bucks a week and board had run a panic-blurred mile from the shops to get me home to the big house and the huge cellar our air-raid shelter where we slept twenty or more for much of the war while occasionally the German planes added future playground craters to the vicinity and lent colour to our lives and reminiscences true and untrue for the next hundred years
England was conkers one of the signature crypto-currencies of childhood the golden riches that fell from the sky every autumn that were converted into weapons of competition and I drilled narrow holes carefully and regulated the drying temperature and even used illegal fire and vinegar and hardening mixtures handed down by generations of cheats and misfits and once I had a sixtyfour-er and tried to glue together the beginnings of a split but then in one second it fell to pieces like a knight off his destrier and lay there with all my hopes of fame and glory dashed
Then there were the marbles graced with similar numbers and my thirty-two-er was so battered that you could see the wonderful colours and swirls in it only when it was wet but oh what a glory it was and I do not know what happened to it gone under the floorboards or the mud under the shed maybe with my childhood dreams
England is the ghosts that crowd the paths across this ancient land by night and pop up from behind every tree and hedge and wall not to speak of the ones that live in houses and cottages and if unhappy cause no end of trouble and I met them as a child more times than I care to admit like any open English boy who tries not to cry under pressure but there was an early evening when I was walking home from a friend's house when I felt the telltale chill behind me and I quickened my pace but it stayed right there and I ran not daring to look and England my England kept close and breathed and reached out to touch my neck and I felt the cold centuries gaining on me until they ran past and folded back and wrapped me in death cold around my beating heart and I reached our back door frightened out of my wits diving into the seas of oblivion
