The year before we left Blighty, Mum knitted me a scarf like the one Tom Baker wore when he was on the telly of a Saturday night pretending to be a Time Lord. He was called Doctor Who, which is a pretty silly name but a jolly good program, especially for boys with crap hair cuts and silly accents and big front teeth. Mum was responsible for my crap haircuts, as well as the scarf, but not for my front teeth as far as I know , leastways not in any sort of way I had any right to get uppity about.
Mum spent a long time knitting it when she probably had lots of other things to be doing, some of which were probably important.
Her knitting that scarf proved how much she loved me, though I knew that anyway, though probably not as much as I should have. Less affection in the younger years than you get from girls. I wore the scarf quite a lot, though not to school. It was made of all the leftover bits of wool Mum and Grandma who lived next door had after they finished jumpers for all the men and boys in the family. There were two sections of that scarf that were knitted with wool that was a lot thicker than the wool in the rest of it.
I shamefully admit that I took a bit of umbrage at those two big lumps in the middle. The colours were too bright and too numerous. Knitting a Doctor Who scarf is an Undertaking. A good few feet from the bulls face in fact. The dart fell dead in the grass and the bull carried on staring, free to charge if and when it felt like it.
A job and a house and a car and stuff. Before he left he bought us a book about all the scary monsters that live in Australia. We were trepid for a good while. Years even. Scared of toilet seats and terrified to set foot in the surf. I was never afraid of snakes. I remember vividly parts of the last couple of days in England before the emigration.
