:: The Wendy House ::

My14th birthday present (1977) from my brother was a studded dog-collar and a ticket to see The Stranglers play on their ‘No More Heros’ tour at the now defunct warehouse called the Bristol Exhibition Centre.  2000 tickets were sold for the concert.  The warehouse was licensed to hold 1000 people.  There was a bit of a squish as people rushed to be in the 1000 that got in and police tried to manage the chaos.  We squished ourselves to about 3 foot from the stage  where we became soaked in sweat, beer and de rigeur spital.  It was wonderful.  Brothers are fabulous,  I can whole-heatedly recommend them.  

The Stranglers played ‘Peaches’

This brother also gave me the NME christmas centrefold spread of the Strangles bass player, Jean Jacques Burnel, tastefully  nude.  I hung the centrefold on my bedroom wall.  My brother gasped, then told mum.  Mum summoned her wisdom with the phrase ‘Gwendolyn can put whatever rubbish she wants to put on her bedroom wall’  Mothers are fabulous,  I can whole-heatedly recommend them.

Bros:  he was alright except for the lists

Wendy:  the lists?

Bros:  Yes,  the lists,  you remember how he would make lists all the time for even trivial things?

Wendy:  errr,  yes,  of course,  the lists

It appears that my brother has not yet noticed my pocket-size book of lists that has travelled all over the world (and Reading) with me. Nor has he recognised the intrinsic Wendy-appeal of someone that blazenly employs lists in public.

climbs trees with a nylon sleeping bag for a sleep-out party with his friend

puts his bum against the open window of the car so that his silent but deadly fart doesn’t disturb the other car occupants then giggles incessantly for 20 miles

chops off his fingertip with an axe then runs around shaking his hand to increase the polkadot patterning on mums walls

makes a multi-level gerbil cage out of an old sideboard

sings into a microphone strapped to a standard lamp,  without removing the lampshade

writes the name of the girl that he loves on the inside flap of his school canvas haversack in different pens,  fonts and colours

ramps up the volume on the house stereo and arranges an echo, closes the window blinds,  peeks through then whispers in high volume ‘this is the voice of god’ when he sees a schoolchild in uniform walking by outside

earnestly says ‘you’ve failed?  how did that happen,  you’re the clever one’

Takes me into a record shop and says,  you can have any record you want,  its on me.  I pick the first Album he ever bought ‘Ride a White Swan’ by T.Rex

Persuades a friend to drive him to the warehouse 2hrs away where I’m holding my 21st birthday shindig,  Gives me 6 marbles and waits for me to be disappointed,  then gives me a hipflask full of Napoleon Brandy saying ‘I was going to have it engraved with to my wonderful sister,  but I didn’t’,  stays at the warehouse when his friend decides to drive back before midnight

Says of his visits to me at university ‘I wish my time at University had been as good as this’

Calls his first cat ‘f*ck-off’ because the cat followed him back from a superstore and he didn’t want it to,  then takes the cat everywhere in his Trenchcoat pocket and renames her Hoagie after Hoagie Carmichael

Drives a soft-top MG Midget despite his head creating a big upward dent in the roof because he’s 6ft4

 corrects my pronunciation

During a conversation about films that are substantially at variance with the books that provided their original title and approximate plot and characters: 

Wendy:  W’thering Heights

Bros:  WUH,  Wuh-thering Heights

Wendy: yes,  that’s what I said W’thering Heights

Bros:  Wendy,  Wuh-thering has a U in it

niece & her friend: (snigger,  sniggger,  snigger,  hiding mouths behind hands and flashing smiles at each other and checking to see if we ‘adults’ notice)

Bros:  (shakes his head and tuts)

 Wendy:  (decides not to mention that Bros appears to have failed to count the double-u)

Mumsie packed older brother (9yrs) and I (5yrs) on a public bus for a 40min bus ride to the Marlborough St. City centre bus terminal. 

Exciting.  Adventure.  Upstairs on a double-decker bus without any adults.  Going to the big city.  Bother held my hand as we left the bus.  We walked up the hill towards the  Bristol Royal Infirmary.  I knew the way because I came on the Bus with Mumsie every Thursday when she came to the city to shop. 

Crossing the road,  very scary.  Mumzie always held my hand, checked for traffic.  I didn’t know how to cross the road.  I still find it particularly tricky.  I held my brothers hand tightly, walked fast and close to him as we crossed the road.  Once in the hospital I had no idea where to go.  My brother read the signs and found my other brother (6yrs) in the childrens ward,  who promptly started crying. 

What a wuss.  Here in this interesting big hospital with lots of fabulous toys and other children to play with and all he does is sit in bed crying!  I wandered off to play with the other children and big toys.   One of the children was bald.  Some wacky children in here.  Then dad turned up and we left crying brother in the hospital,  crying even more now.  We rode home in Dads pale blue Ford Corsair car.  I was allowed to sit in the front seat because Mumzie wasn’t there. 

All in all  a fabulous adventure.

Niece (teenage):  “I HATE YOU”

Bros: “do you know how to say that in French?”

Niece: “Je tu déteste”

Bros: “shouldn’t that be Je vous déteste?”

Neice: “NO, you are tu and I hate you”

By this stage I’ve fallen off my chair giggling and started dribbling tea on my woolly jumper (It was cold in England).  During my 4 day stay I managed to avoid my niece’s wrath without ducking or walking into any nearby walls.

A poetry book, like a dictionary, is a book I never finish reading.  Unlike dictionaries I will voraciously read all the words in a poetry book cover-to-cover upon first discovering them.  Obviously this is after having removed my stickly little digits from the tea mug.  Both are reference books,  pulled from the shelf again and again. 

The dictionary gets pulled when I’m unsure of a word’s meaning,  range of meanings,  origins,  relationship to other words.  Assured of discovery, my question promptly answered. Inevitably a rewarding experience,  how can anyone fail to fall in love with dictionaries?  I’m very loyal to my one paper dictionary, it cannot be replaced.  The Collin’s Concise (1983) was a present from an elder brother.  When I look at its faded binding I see my 21 year old brother standing at the top of Park Street outside Georges with a white plastic bag in his hand held out towards me saying

“you’re leaving home?  You’ll need your own dictionary“. 

A very different experience from pulling one of the several poetry books from the shelf, floor, table, chair, cooker, mantle, washing-machine.   The favoured books are scattered around the Wendy House where they afford the opportunity of unpremeditated rediscovery in a moment of undirected reading.  Picking up a book,  flicking through the pages to a title that catches some thought and reading that poem.   One book purchased in a tizzy in 1989 insists on falling open to specific pages,  poems I found powerful in the early 1990s. I have to fight against its insistence on taking me to specific emotional places. 

Poetry book use is not all so sporadic. There are specific places I’ll go when I’m happy,  because I’m sad,  or I want to find the words that describe what it is that I’m feeling because I just don’t know.  They are often there,  wrapped in the ambiguities and soothing rythms, but one can never be sure of Dictionary-like success. 

With that thought I’ll return to the vacuuming