We met at 9, we met at 8

I was on time, No you were late

Ah yes,   I remember it well,

We dined with friends, we dined alone

A tenor sang, a baritone

Ah yes, I remember it well

A dazzling April moon, there was rain that night

(Hermoine Gingold and Maurice Chevalier from ‘Gigi’)

Doing my maths, being 90 this year means I was 10 in 1945. I am writing this in a beautiful place on the 80th anniversary of one of the greatest horrors of all time, the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Having a captive audience, we are four generations, and addicted to work on memory I am going to make them all tell me about ‘When  we were ten’. For me, end of war in Europe and Japan. More personal, and possibly more important, was the fact that I had won the ‘scholarship’ (later the 11+) to Grammar school. Once V1 and V2 rockets finished, war did not touch me much, we were never in danger, dad was still in the army, but never in danger. I lived in a village, my parents had come out from London, we did not  ‘fit’ and I remember being teased by other children in the school in pretend ‘posh’ voices.

A son was 10 in 1967. He was at the local prep school, education good, we paid, of course, not outrageous then. The uniform was rather an odd ginger coloured blazer and cap, almost impossible to match for winter pullovers. He remembers well the arrival of the newest addition to our family, a five week old scrap, mixed race who we would adopt. His year was notable for the first heart transplant, the first black judge in the USA and the first BIG MAC. That year was memorable for lasting pop music.

A grand-son here, being terrorised by HIS sons, 5 and 3, was 10 in 1999, we saw in the new millennium with his family and friends in their lovely house in Kent. That year, other than being the end of the millennium, was quite mundane. No new albums, the odd president deposed.

I am currently addicted to finding out why people  claim ‘bad’ memories – a medical problem, beginning of dementia, lazy? No ‘hooks’. No ‘prompts’ (photos, diaries, old letters), and to me, the greatest, it is all there, retrieval is the problem.

So, find the year when you were 10. Google what was important, who were the pop stars if you don’t remember. Did you have a best friend, hated teacher. Did you hate your school uniform? Support a football team? Dream of being a football star, Wimbledon champion, ballet dancer? Were born abroad? Favourite holiday places? Fussy about food? Forced to practice a musical instrument? Lastly, did anybody at ten years old, have any idea of what they would be when they grew up, and achieved it? A grand-son was always tops at maths and physics, and that has become his life. There was no ‘Jack of all Trades’ career, I invented it! And you? 

The Gardener

A Moodscope member