So you may not have heard of Kathryn Hope, Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret Fort and Deborah Longbottom. As far as I know, none of them has become well known like me. I expect and fervently hope that they are all well and living somewhere in the sun in blissful happiness. My contribution to their lives was short of minimal. Theirs to mine has been a continuing miracle.
I was 7 or 8 when I first realised that Deborah Longbottom was different from the rest of us. Though in my class at school, she towered above us all with a majesty she may never actually have understood. One morning, to show my undying affection for Debs (as I called her in my head - if I had called her that in real life she would have struck me with a javelin), I brought to school a broach that my mother had foolishly left behind on her dressing table and a bunch of dandelions picked on the walk to school and adding what I thought to be the final flourish. I walked up to her. I was eloquent as ever.
"Want these?"
She was dumbstruck. Or embarrassed. Then she started to laugh. Women laughing in my face has been a continual distress for me all my life. I once told a girlfriend that I had a penetrating philosophical mind. She started to laugh so much I thought I would have to remind her body manually of the necessity to breath in!
Debs said that she would keep the broach, but didn't care for the flowers, which was fine until the school bell sounded and I found myself in a line of boys trying to conceal a bunch of dandelions about my person. Debs also said that I could go round to her house after school for a piece of cake. This getting on with girls business, I remember thinking at the time, is ever so easy.
Being the second tallest in my class made us look slightly less the odd couple, but the differences were still marked. She walked slowly, took petite steps and managed not to fall into holes on the sidewalk. She went to elocution lessons but her voice already sounded like she was a royal princess sent among the masses to learn. She carried herself with dignity and poise, smiling graciously at passers by and saying 'good evening' to those who had the pleasure of her acquaintance. I had no idea of the word then, but the word is demur. Yes, Debs was very demur.
I behaved slightly differently. I picked my nose and was taken aback when she was unimpressed by its contents. I fell over a lot. I bruised my knee and it started to bleed. I covered it up magnificently, though. I only cried for about twenty minutes.
Arriving at her house, I was shown immediately into the concealed garden, which was modest, being only about the same size as Chile. We arrived at the gazebo in under an hour, thanks to a lift from her father in his 4 wheel drive. Already on the table were drinks, cakes and cookies. While I unashamedly pigged out, she enticed a grapefruit out of its skin, something I have never witnessed since. I drank most of the fruit juice imaging that a drought were about to start and when I asked Debs why she wasn't drinking anything she just declined politely. Now, of course, I understand that this may have had something to do with the fact that my cake remnants, thumb prints and tooth marks were all over the dispenser. I had never used paper cups before.
After tea we played. Who knows what children play, but it was warm and it was sunny and I was happy. Then I discovered the shed. Debs was off somewhere picking flowers or gathering rosebuds while she may. Known to the host family as the 'teapot' for reasons I was never to discover, this was where one of the gardeners had his lunchbreak (one of the other gardeners had gone to get a cabbage from the rear of the complex, but was never heard of again). Inside it was, by Debs' standards, small and pokey. By my standards it looked like a football ground. It was also a kidnapper's paradise, with coils of rope hanging up on the wall everywhere you looked. There were rags and oily rages, pieces of old carpet piled high against the wall, at least two chairs, a fair sized table and a few old beds.
I called out to Debs, "I could tie you up in here!". The fact that a girl may prefer not to be tied up hadn't yet occurred to me. In fact, when girls on television were locked in cupboards rather than bound and gagged, I boggled at the writer's missed opportunity.
She called back to me and soon joined me in the shed. She asked me is I liked it.
"Yeah, it's great. Can I kidnap you and hold you in here for money off your dad?"
"Okay."
What more encouragement does a boy need? I was in like Flint, tying her hands, mainly, to poles, chairs, tables, timbers and window rails. Then I had the idea of tying her into a chair. I tied her hands behind her then tied a long piece of rope to the back panel of the chair. She sat down, obligingly, and I started to run arounder with the rope, no more than a few hundred times, while simultaneously making the noise of a helicopter. Memories fade and I am not in a position to recall why that particular sound seemed appropriate. But I did it. I seem to remember that I barely looked at her - I certainly have no image of her wound round with rope - before I was telling her to escape so that I could tie her in a new position. I was certainly disappointed when she wriggled free so easily, but it simply made me more determined that it shouldn't happen again. This time I tied her to an old bed frame, spread-eagled. She feined resistance and distress with memorable sighs and moans in all the right places.
"Now I've got to kidnap you," I said after undoing her. She nodded and smiled.
"Shall I go outside?" she said looking beguilingly pretty.
I noticed some bottles filled with various coloured liquids on a shelf. I had seen people on television pour out some-chemicals-that-they-found-on-a-shelf on to a cloth. I found the cloth. Anticipating difficulties in her accepting this (boys were different; they had other shoulds and ought tos to worry about), so I decided not to mention it. I pulled down half a dozen bottles and started to mix them.
Grown up people know that mixing chemicals is not a good idea. Adults have at least the notion of a concept of the possible consequences of mixing chemicals. Those with experience in these matters inform us that putting six randomly selected chemicals on to one small cloth which already stank of chemicals is hardly a wise thing to do. But I was eight years old and I could do what I liked. In this world I was the captor, the giant dragon slayer. In this land, I was a King.
The hole in the ground made by the explosion was not, perhaps as dramatic as I initially thought. Althou at the time that part of the garden did resemble a map of the moon's surface I had once seen. Debs was covered from head to foot in what I can only describe as everything that was ever invented at any time in the history of the planet. The sound of a four wheel drive reassured me that the burning sensation I had on my hands and arms would soon go away. That's what grown up people did - they made you better. They told you that whatever you had done everything would be all right and you shouldn't worry. Debs' dad didn't know the rules about being a grown up and he chased me off the property faster than might have an ambulance. Given the state of my injuries and the size of the property, I suppose I was lucky.
Two months later we had a special assembly to say goodbye to Debs. I have no reason to suppose that her parent's decision to quit the area had anything to do with my raising their home to a pile of sawdust no bigger than an anthill, but maturity gives me another perspective.
I was in tears as she was marched around the class, shaking hands with each pupil in turn and kissing her friends. We weren't friends these days. She did promised to write to some of her classmates, but never did. She will, of course, be my age now and almost certainly not giving any thought at all to how she felt being tied up in a hut. I think the hut turning into atoms was the more memorable feature of the day.
The games carried on for a couple of years, though, with a new cast of guest appearances. That's where Elizabeth Anderson, Margaret For and Kathryn Hope come in.
But I seem to be repeating myself. I think I should go to lie down in a darkened room and thank god that the only scars that remain from that day in the hut are emotional. What the hospital called minor burns vanished soon after.
Michael was born in Sheffield and has recently returned to live there again. He wants everyone to know that he's now fine - a happy, secure and relatively sane Master. Having also been told as a child that he hadn't got a musical bone in his body, he recently went to visit the person who told him that to play her Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto. He believes in lengthy childhoods and there are few signs at the moment that he will ever emerge from his.