Dawn Under the Bicycle Shed

I’d just about forgotten all about these notebooks. They’d been at Mum’s house. She kept everything that her children did. Bookmarks from school for being good at something or the other, silly drawings we did, school caps, potato peelers with our camp number on them. I was number 55. She even kept my old football shirts and Bright Eyes, my old teddy bear.

Mum died in 2006 and that’s when my notebooks resurfaced. There was a note attached that said:

Dear Ben, I’m sure you’ll find these, seeing as I’ve taped this note to your old teddy bear. I’ve been keeping these notebooks for you for ages. I know you remember that I used to peek at them, when I could find them, and that I even wrote little bits in them. Well, Ben dearest, I wrote a lot more these last few years … adding stuff that I recalled from those days. I hope you don’t mind. I tried to put them in some sort of order, but….

Anyway, I hope you find these … oops, there’s a knock on the door, I have to go.

XXX your Mum, you know, Doris.

I don’t know where she got some of the information, but knowing Mum she probably made some of it up.

I’d lost track of my notebooks for long periods; misplaced them a few times, and even totally forgot about them. My tendency whenever they were discovered or returned to me was to either throw them away or just put them in a miscellaneous drawer somewhere in a room hardly used. However, I never could quite throw them away and usually ended up reading them (re-reading actually). On those times of re-reading I found these notebook entries to be like an old friend, albeit an old nostalgic friend. I obviously wrote the main stuff in them, starting in 1949 when I could hardly write. If I remember correctly, those first entries were in school notebooks, but I don’t know how those notebooks left the school premises. Anyway, I’m glad Mum saved them, and I’m looking forward to reading them again.

Ben.