My Boyhood at the turn of the century

urn:iso:std:iso:639:ed-3:eng

20; 23

text excerpt

[Frank Goss reflects at length on his sense-memories—the smells and sounds of very early childhood]

Before I was two [years old], my family moved to a house in St Pauls Road, New Southgate [London, next door to an Infant School] […] 

It’s the children’s playtime. The school doors have been thrown wide open. First the small feet tap on the stone steps then grate on the gravel on the playground proper. Individual sounds first, then quantitatively with a loss of identity in the scrambled sounds [.]

[…]

My silent garden basking in the sun being suddenly saturated with the sounds coming from over the fence becomes like the inside of a drum reverberating with the noises beaten into it from outside. The wood fences are sounding boards that beat the noises about, throw them at [the] house wall that throws them back again at the garden and at me. As suddenly as it came it departs. The bright clear note of a handbell rings out. Like a sharp hose playing on a fire dowsing the flames the noises diminish, spark up in little flickers, die, flicker again, sigh [and] pass away. The doors clang to. The outer world departs leaving my garden in total silence again. 

excerpt from 'My Boyhood at the turn of the century' pp. 20; 23 (206 words)

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1535646629959