The Birth of Arthur Pendry – and no, it wasn’t a cold and windswept Cornwall; it was a sunny and warm Sussex.
People are magpies by nature; we all collect something. Some collect toy cars, others dollhouses and miniature furniture. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, you might have all the books, and perhaps even a wand or two. Whatever your passion, most of us have a collection of photographs and videos. Some photographic prints are old and yellowed with time, while others live entirely in digital libraries. Yet every single one of them holds meaning: a birthday party, a car you longed for but couldn’t afford, or a snapshot of a holiday sunset.
But what are they really, all those photographs and videos we collect and sometimes treasure?
They are memories, a physical link back in time. Every one of us, regardless of age, knows what it’s like to look at an old picture or video and feel time collapse, to be right back there in the moment.
And so it is with me. I probably have more photographs than most, tens of thousands of them, and none would make a ‘good photograph’ in the artistic sense. Along with the pictures, I have writing, probably many millions of words by now and none of them very legible: a note here, a comment there, some digital, some in notebooks, some quite literally on restaurant napkins. Story snippets, unfinished stories, finished stories, all there, a great library of one single thing: memory.
And that is how eleven-year-old Arthur Pendry, the hero of Bert the Bat was born, from one single memory.
My parents have always been early risers, arriving at destinations long before anyone else and, more often than not, an hour or so before anything opened. And so it was on a trip to the seaside on the Sussex coast.
I remember it very distinctly: midsummer, a cool, clear June morning. I must have been around six or seven years old. The day began with a chill and a car journey just as it was getting light. I slept most of the way, curled up in the back seat under a blanket, only to wake with a start as we reached our destination, Worthing, a seaside town on the Sussex coast. It was still very early. Our car was the first in a large car park, and as I opened my sleepy eyes, the first thing I saw was a castle, a great white castle with four towers, one at each corner. It stood within Peter Pan’s Playground – A Land of Fun and Adventure for the Under Tens. I jumped out of the car and ran over to the castle while my mum made breakfast. These were the days long before early morning cafés or Costa Coffee, and breakfast was quite literally a picnic: cornflakes and tea that was always too hot and carried the faint taste of the plastic thermos cup.
Peter Pan’s Playground had a miniature train, small cars you could drive, trampolines, a helter-skelter, and a castle.
A castle!
That was what caught my eye. I ran over, but the playground was still closed and wouldn’t open for another hour. There were no gates, just a ticket booth and a simple turnstile, hardly a barrier at all. A small child could easily have slipped beneath it, and before I knew it, that’s exactly what I’d done. I was alone, the place was mine, and I ran straight into the castle.
Inside, the ground was covered in thick white sand, and the first thing I did, as I always did, was kick off my sandals. I can still remember the cool, slightly damp sand between my toes. The castle was only made of wood and painted plaster, and the towers smelled faintly of pee from one too many child accidents, but I didn’t mind. I didn’t see wood and plaster; I saw something far grander, bigger, older. I had no interest in the rest of the playground; it fell away, replaced by a kingdom of my own. I was a knight and a king all at once, defending my stronghold from imaginary dragons or rescuing damsels imprisoned in towers. The faint scent of paint and timber became, in my mind, the warm, sun-baked smell of ancient stone, and for me it was completely real. I had stepped into the world of King Arthur.
Beyond the walls, the world was ordinary, but in my imagination the stacked deckchairs became loyal guards, the shuttered kiosks were the cottages of my sleeping kingdom, and the slow, silver tide was a moat of glimmering light that kept my tiny realm safe from the waking world.
Within ten minutes, I heard frantic calling from my parents and could see them looking around the car for me, but I didn’t wave to get their attention. I had an overwhelming desire to hide; I didn’t want to break the spell. But too late: my dad spotted me and called me out.
I visited Peter Pan’s Playground and “my castle” every time we spent a day in Worthing, but it was never quite the same as that first illicit morning when, all alone, the castle was mine and I was King.