My parents, now comfortably ensconced in retirement, are gradually acquiring new hobbies. One admirable pastime is decluttering. The sheer volume of possessions inside the walls of the family home where they’ve spent their entire married life suggests that this will be a long term quest. A by-product of this decluttering is that every time I drop over for a visit, I leave with a mandatory bag or box stuffed with paraphernalia. This began boldly with the request that I re-house my childhood piano, which had been left forlornly unused since that moment in the 80s where it became very obvious that I had no natural musical talent and that all the private tutoring available would be useless in exposing even a glimmer of skill. There were bags of childhood dolls, photo albums, school reports and ribbons – awarded back in the days where there was some element of victory rather than simply participation. Given the lack of spare room in a modest suburban home that is already at capacity given a rampant obsession with shoes, books and clothes, many of these keepsakes are now permanent residents of the boot of my car and ride aimlessly around with me year upon year.
A recent find in what I have begun to refer to as the surbuban showbag pressed upon me in the driveway upon departure is an early attempt on my part at expressing literary creativity. A faded cardboard cover, bound by string and self-illustrated with worn-out markers, it was titled ‘The Family’. The children appear front and centre. Tom and Harry are dark-haired scamps, clad in high-neck skivvies some thirty years before the Wiggles made it a thing. Jane and Suzanne sport lush blonde hair, matching pink dresses and stick legs of a kind only found on a current era catwalk.
The production quality is a little sketchy despite what appears to have been tremendous effort devoted to illustrations that are a whimsical mix of cut-and-pasted coloured paper and marker drawings. It likely now remains one of the few artifacts typed up on a manual typewriter in some ancestor of Courier and for that reason alone appeared worthy of the transition from my car to a bedside drawer. Without the re-drafting capability of modern day word processing, typing errors have been simply corrected in pen. The writing style is flagrant Enid Blyton mimicry with phrases such as ‘Mother was very angry’, ‘they got an awful fright.’ The text carbon dates itself as something only slightly post-Jurassic with its description of ‘spilt ink’.
Tom and Harry bear all the textbook hallmarks of serial-killers in the making. Their casual vandalism, injury of household pets and dismembering of their siblings’ dolls would make it straight into episode one of any modern-day true crime podcast. In the face of ongoing damage and wilful violence and pre the days of widespread administration of Ritalin or availability of self-help literature, the parents resorted to grounding the twins, experiencing repeat behaviour and grounding them again. A shockingly taboo use of smacking also failed the tame the twins. At this point, although a scant missive at a mere seven pages, the plot becomes bogged down and could do with a savage structural edit. Eventually, previously conspicuously absent grandparents write to the family, offering to house and rehabilitate the twins for an undefined period ‘to make them good again’. The tome ends on a cliffhanger hope of rehabilitation and screams out for a sequel.
We wait to see if volume two appears in a future suburban showbag.