Part One

Early 1960s. I was climbing trees, buying my first records (Del Shannon, Eden Kane, what taste....). As an ironic backdrop to the feelgood element which pervaded a good deal of my childhood personal life, some of the grown-ups were playing another game altogether. Men - it seemed to be mainly men - in suits and ties were apparently hell-bent on total and immediate annihilation of the human race. This tendency reached a crescendo when big-boys Kennedy and Kruschev went head-to-head off the Cuban coast in 1962. The Bay of Pigs, it was called, the Cuban missile crisis. I was nine at the time, with sufficient self-consciousness to take this all as real and serious. On a number of nights I went to bed not knowing whether there would be a world to wake up to the following morning.

My father wasn't into guns and wars and bombs and stuff, so he became an active member of the local branch of CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament). Soon I was helping out at jumble sales and other fundraising activities, and I got to know some of the local ban-the-bomb luminaries.

Pete and Sheila Cornell were familiar faces: she exuberant, ebullient; he, quiet and retiring. They remained good family friends, and were genuinely distraught when they turned up at my father's funeral some thirty years down the line.

Then there was Bo-Bo Blaxter. He had a nickname because he also became my 'religious education' teacher at secondary school. He sported a permanent and slightly scary cheesy grin, his gleaming white-yellow teeth dazzling out of a sun-kissed face. I could not fathom how somebody engaged with such a noble cause as ditching nuclear weapons could simultaneously wax lyrical about twisted Old Testament prophets.

And there was Colin Sherman. He was a fully paid-up member of the Communist Party, quite a thing at the time. So enthusiastic was he about the Marxist cause, that he went on holiday to Yugoslavia, where he was duly arrested for taking photos too close to a military establishment. My father and I found this hilarious. 

One Easter we travelled down to London on the train to join in with the Trafalgar Square rally at the end of the annual CND march from Aldermaston, Berkshire. Though a mere hour away by train, London was still a big and rare adventure. Throngs of ban-the-bombers filled the square; I had never been anywhere like it before. I saw a beatnik for the first time, diligently strumming his acoustic guitar. I would have taken a photo, but I didn't have a camera.

It was all a bit funny, really. Everything was very sincere, earnest, very worthy, and I certainly didn't want to get blown up by a nuclear warhead any more than anybody else. But..... but..... what was it exactly? All these people seemed, deep down, not very different to all the other people, that was it. Decent folk, but.... same kind of world, same kind of perceptions. It didn't do the business. I was looking out for, well, something different. 

Part Two

The weeks passed, the months, the years. In retrospect, it was all inverted. What was supposed to be 'real life' - in particular, school and grown-up jobs - possessed a kind of marginal reality to me. Whereas my inner world, labelled by others as 'make-believe', the world of fantasy, was vivid, true, genuine.

I must have been eleven or twelve years old when I invented the island. Actually, that's not correct. It's merely an interpretation of events from the viewpoint of commonly-held assumptions about how things work. The 'invented' bit has no basis, really. It could just as easily be the surfacing of memory from the ancient collective of Atlantis or another long-gone civilisation. Let's try again:

I must have been eleven or twelve years old when the island first appeared in my mind.

The island was named Wonkeyland. My sister had an island as well, but I'm only concerned with mine here. Wonkeyland was located in the mid-east region of the Atlantic Ocean, maybe just north of the Azores. And I spent many hours working on happenings out there. I produced maps, wrote newspapers reporting on the latest goings-on. It was a major preoccupation of the hours when I was free to do whatever I wanted. 

Life in Wonkeyland was not unrecogniseable compared with life in 1960s UK. But it was better. Wonkeyland was no utopia, but was free of the sicker, more psychopathic elements which seemed to dominate aspects of normal grown-up world. People were generally positive, sympathetic, curious about life, and caring. No nuclear warheads. Nowadays, I might frame it as 5D existence, or at the very least the 3D matrix of human life on Earth with the absence or removal of the 'reptilian hack.' A good place to be.

My father quietly despaired of the way I continued to prefer imaginative pursuits to nuts-and-bolts activities. I would never get on in life like this; I needed to become 'realistic'. And, though he would never admit it, I wonder if he suspected I was gay ('Wrong again, dad'). In a last-ditch effort to bring me round, one Christmas he bought me a big electric board of wires, transistors, and other electronic stuff. I was underwhelmed; it was the worst present ever. But then I discovered that you could make an elementary short-wave radio with it. I immediately set to, and before long all my sister and my puppets were running a pirate radio station, relaying all the latest Beatles songs from one room to another. I thought this was great. And at that point, my father gave up on me.

Part Three

In Wonkeyland they played a lot of cricket. I know, because I created the players, wrote the articles, came up with the scorecards. The Wonkeyland team was a world beater, and I recall some of its biggest stars. There was Tolley Pushkin, opening bat and astute captain; Len Unwin, dashing young batsman, so elegant that he would make David Gower seem like Mr Bean; Acker Aylsham, tenacious middle-order batsman and niggling medium-pace bowler. I made pictures of their faces, and decorated the bedroom walls with them. They played against all-comers, and usually won. They scored victories against the English team particularly frequently. 

In my early teens I played a lot of cricket. Apparently I claimed that the world would be a better place if more people played cricket. At that time, cricket still passed as a civilised sport, and this view warranted some credibility.

Summer evenings would see me playing in the park with friends, or practicing in the garden. I would bounce a ball against the back wall of the house and hit it for hours on end; why this drove my dad crazy I never understood.

I was fairly good at the sport, and my passion enabled me to surpass my purely natural abilities. I was chiefly a batsman: technically correct, patient, but ultimately too timid to truly excel. I was proud to be house captain at school for two years, and I led the team to the league title on both occasions. But then, when I was fifteen, something happened. Boys metamorphose into young men. Fast bowlers become viciously quick: that small, hard, red cricket ball turns into a lethal weapon. Are you up for the challenge or not?

I recall the final competitive over of cricket I ever faced while at school. One of my supposed friends, Peter Floyd, came in to bowl at me. He had become fast, dangerous. For the first five balls of the over, I failed to get my bat onto that lightning-fast ball. The final ball, and the off-stump went flying halfway to the boundary. I walked quietly away. It was the end of the road, I knew. I no longer had the will for this. Cricket, and sport in general, was fading anyway. It was part of the old world, the one which I was inexorably leaving behind. With a shrug of the shoulders I bailed out of cricket, and of serious participation in sport altogether. 

Part Four

One Saturday afternoon in early September the following year I was sitting at the summit of a mountain at the entrance to Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands, named Buachaille Etive Mor. I had travelled up from England by myself for a mountain holiday, and this was the first day out on the hills.  

It was what I did now: solitary hillwalking and mountain climbing. The previous year I had walked most of the newly-founded Pennine Way, a 250-mile trek along the backbone of northern England, camping all the way. Eventually, it all got a bit much, and I bailed out two days before the end. Officially this was because the weather turned, and my tent sprang a hole. Privately, I knew that the aloneness had got to even me, and the bleakness of those moorlands can appear relentless.

All the same, this was my love, to be out in wild places, just me and the vastness of nature's great spaces. To be a fifteen or sixteen year old alone in the mountains, incognito, did not feel particularly adventurous or flirting with danger. It was just me being me, in my element.

The mountain thing had begun when my father tired of summer holidays spent sheltering from the elements in a cramped caravan beside some wind-blasted beach in southern England. We all started off walking in the mountains together, but after a few years my own thirst, drive, and abilities outstripped the rest of the family. And here I was, on top of one of the great mountains of Scotland. Just me and the world stretching to infinity.

It was just that. In one direction the rocky peaks of Glencoe and the great wall of Aonach Eagach. While to the east stretched the vast empty spaces of lonely Rannoch Moor. The early autumn air was limpid cool, though the afternoon sun retained a warmth which radiated into my bones. The atmosphere was clear, transparent, and the horizons extended to infinity where, paradoxically, they reached out to kiss the cloud-flecked sky.

I sat still, silent, permitting this magical world to absorb me. My consciousness stretched out, expanded, until distinction between 'me' and 'landscape' seemed to dissolve. There emerged a unity, a oneness, such as I had never felt before. For a while - I don't remember how long, a few minutes maybe - time stood still (another paradox).Today I might call it a mystical experience.

Buachaille Etive Mor was a signpost pointing the way; though, ironically, not into the mountains. For now, they played no further part in the theatre which was beginning to unfold as 'my life'. Following the Glencoe treks, I barely set foot on a mountain for thirty years. Hills, rocks, and peaks took their place in the old world rather than the new. Mind you, what that brave new world might consist of was all a bit vague at the time.               

 Buachaille Etive Mor (image: David Taylor)

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