Turning back the clock puts my identity in doubt

Roy Colbert's primary school photo box. Photo by Roy Colbert.
Roy Colbert's primary school photo box. Photo by Roy Colbert.
In last week's column I described digging out a 1961 class photo in the basement, but this search unearthed something even scarier, a box filled to overflowing of all thing primary school.

What a terrifying thing this was.

While I must admire my mother for keeping evidence of my every move back then - predicating my own later predilection for the past and psychologically imprisonable tendency to hoard - there are some items that should never have been placed in this box.

Most significantly, as I revealed last week, my memory for those times 50 years ago is quite simply false, exaggerated beyond belief over the years to the point where I now even question my own name.

Perhaps I am Fred Presley or even Bramsbury Brocklebrunk?

Let us consider most damagingly my memory of Roy In Class.

I would often mention at prestigious dinner parties when the conversation ran low that I was brilliant at mental arithmetic, always first finished, never a single error.

Wrong.

Very Good was the best I ever managed in that subject, always accompanied by a pedantic remark about more haste and less speed.

I have also often nonchalantly mentioned I was smart at primary school, but I realise now, looking at the school reports, I was much less than that.

Good grief, I was rated only very fair in some subjects.

Wearing glasses, in 1960 usually a sign of brains, can seriously delude.

Worst of all was Essay Writing, which I have claimed to have learned in 1961 when relief teacher Miss Konrad made us write one every day for six weeks.

I found it easy , I would inform the dinner parties, and I have never looked back.

Bollocks.

The box revealed a raft of essays, clearly the result of a febrile and damaged mind.

Nearly all of them began with the phrase ''**** burst into the room.''

Why my teachers did not set fire to these essays the minute they landed on their table will remain a mystery to anthropologists for centuries to come.

I will excruciate you today with just one of these essays, a rare one with no bursting into the room.

It is called My Story by An Alarm Clock.

''My name is Ding and I am a alarm clock. My story begins in a clock factory in England. My best friend was Ping, a Chinese clock.''

I could say this showed an early interest in table tennis, but I was not a table tennis player then. This is merely infantile racism.

''One day Ping said to me let's run away. I agreed wholeheartedly and so that night both of us escaped.''

Escaped. Not left. Psychiatry fodder here. I was clearly unhappy at home.

''The first owners to have us were two crooks namely Bill and Boyd.''

I already loved music and Bill and Boyd were New Zealand's Everly Brothers.

''They were rough with us and it wasn't long before we had to be fixed so Bill took us to a clock fixer. The next day Bill and Boyd were picked up for robbery so I changed hands.''

Even at 10 I relished the wretched pun.

''Ping and I had been separated by then so I felt pretty lonely.''

Hadn't kissed a girl yet.

''My third owner was a lady called Amelia Jones who was a very fat lady and knocked me around a bit.''

Misogyny already a warm bedfellow for racism.

''By the time I was 5 I was a dishevelled-looking specimen.''

Still am.

The Jones house then gets burned down and Ding is auctioned.

''The man who bought me was a nice man who would never get up to go to work.''

Nice is never getting out of bed. Telling evidence of a waster's life to come.

''I had to scream my hardest to wake him up, but anyway, he is quite a nice man and I am satisfied with him. Cheerio!''

Cheerio?

Dear old Ding.

Ping?

Who knows, though I did have a Chinese girlfriend for two years in the early 1970s.

Dare I go into this box again?

Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.

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