“Once Pip is older, he’ll want it.”
Ah, a fresh horror. We are now keeping stuff on the off chance the grandchildren might want it. Pip, perhaps, is a mere decade off setting up his own home aquarium. In 12 years, he’ll be a master brewer.
My childhood was – I believe – the same length as that of my children but has produced fewer artefacts. There’s my “Good Camper’s Certificate” from the National Fitness Camp at Narrabeen Lakes, helpfully framed for display, and some paperwork indicating I came second in the school wading competition. Oh, and there are three novels by Arthur Ransome: Swallows and Amazons, Coot Club and We Didn’t Mean to Go to Sea.
Richard Glover’s prestigious Good Camper’s Certificate.
That’s the Museum of Me: five display items, not one of them impressive. The rest of my childhood was thrown out the minute my back was turned.
I mentioned this on the radio the other day and now realise I was not alone. The great clean-out was standard among the parents of the time. You’d finish school, wave goodbye to your folks, and by the time you’d reached the end of the street, your father would be loading up the ute.
It was like you’d been placed on the witness protection program, and your parents were required to remove all signs of your existence. Two days after your departure, and your bedroom would have transformed into a sewing room, home office, maybe a ping-pong centre of excellence. Forensic police could have checked every surface for your DNA and come up with nothing.
The long-forgotten hobbies of my offspring live on in cardboard boxes - teetering towers of them, stored in the garage, shed or attic.
People, I discovered, were still quite teary about the stuff their parents had thrown out. “A complete set of Phantom comics, these days worth thousands of dollars,” reported one caller. “My collection of football cards, with all the great players of the 1980s,” wept another. “All my LP records,” lamented a third, “including 20 Dynamic Hits, Scorcher, and Ripper ’76, which is the one where the tracks were all written on someone’s naked bottom.”
Well, I knew what that last person was talking about, and not just the revealing cover of Ripper ’76. Around the same time, I went to Queensland for a job that lasted a year. By the time I returned, my father had thrown out all my Elvis records. Well, nearly all. Speedway had somehow avoided capture.
“But the four-LP box set of all his 50 Gold Records...” I wailed.
“The garage was full,” Dad said.
“But the set of EPs, some of them from the Sun sessions?” I blubbered.
“Well, sorry, I needed the room.”
Perhaps, with each generation, we do the opposite of what was done to us. Because our parents threw out all our stuff, we’re reluctant to follow suit. The childhood of our children must be preserved, just to make up for the “burn the barns and salt the fields” attitude to our youthful years.
And so Jocasta and I creep around, hemmed in on all sides, unwilling to open any high cupboard lest we are caught in a shower of soccer trophies. Every bed has mysterious boxes under it; every bookcase is full of tatty children’s books from the past.
Loading
Is there any space left? Well, there will have to be. The grandchildren are growing a little older. They no longer need the cot or the highchair or that colourful mat with the toys that dangle down.
“Our house is full,” says one son, mystified about how this might happen. “But I don’t want to throw out all the baby stuff. You know, just in case...”
He appears to be offered the tantalising possibility of another grandchild, and who would want to say no to that?
“Sure,” I find myself saying. “Bring them over. I can make space here.”
If nothing else, I could throw out the Arthur Ransome.