Watch With Mother

My earliest world was a hearth and a glowing coal fire behind a metal mesh guard. In front of the fire was a clippy rug made from cut up rags, carefully stitched by hand in to a woven backing. The linoleum was frayed where it met the hearth and there in cracks I could find silver fish that left a powdery deposit in their trail.

To the left was my toy cupboard where I stored my teddies, the big brown one (daddy), the grayish one (mummy) and the small sandy one (teddy) which, I guess, was me. It was difficult to open the cupboard door because of dad’s chair that sat in the same corner.

I liked Tuesday because Tuesday was ironing day after Monday (wash day) and my mother would be in the one place, by the side of dad's chair with her ironing board. On the other side of the hearth was the black and white television and I really did “Watch with Mother.”

The only problem with the Tuesday programme was Andy Pandy. I couldn’t abide Andy Pandy in his striped pyjamas. This was the period in the years before infants’ school but even at that early age I must have been aware on some subliminal level of homosexual potential and Andy Pandy had that in spades. I only watched because I liked Teddy, Andy Pandy's sidekick. I recall some discomfort about the idea of Teddy and Andy sharing the same box, a picnic hamper. It didn't seem healthy. My interest would have waned had it not been for Looby Loo, the rag doll; not that she was my type either.

The Thursday programme was Rag, Tag and Bobtail a show that featured three animal glove puppets. Maybe I knew they were glove puppets, maybe not. I just knew that I never saw their legs. When, one day, one of them took a tumble revealing a pair of waving legs the surprise was enough to imprint itself indelibly in to my memory. I couldn't have been more shocked had the Queen broken off her Christmas Day address to perform the Hokey Cokey.

The high spot every week was the Flower Pot men on a Wednesday. Their gibberish, unintelligible to parents, was perfectly understandable to me. Little Weed, their friend, the all-knowing flower, was an object of unreserved admiration and respect as she teased us with her “Was it Bill or was it Ben?” question relating to some minor misdemeanour or misjudged assumption from one of the boys. “It was Ben, it was Ben," I would scream, then clap my hands in delight if I got it right.

It was never less than astonishing to be told: "And I think the little house knew something about it! Don't You?" What the hell did the little house have to do with anything?

It seems odd that at the same time that I was attending my first Sunday school classes I put far more store in the teachings of Little Weed than I did in Jesus Christ. But that was the truth of it. I could not relate to an all-knowing supreme being. My god was an artificial dandylion.