Into the lobster pot of memories, sometimes with the feeling of being boiled alive after being caught ; to scream out.
But sometimes taken on a tide, a boat floating out to sea.
Last week, sitting in the dentist's chair ; too regular a visitor there of late.
'It's like Groundhog Day!' I declare, wishing I could dictate events.
'What shall we do with it?' he asks.
'How about reinforced concrete?'
It's too late! The word 'extraction' is enough to bring prickly sweat to my brow and ,despite trusting my dentist, the process brings back all those childhood memories on the flow of the tide like sticky, tarry wood clinging to palms.
And despite the injections (I counted at least three) I could still feel the pull at the roots, as my whole body - every single nerve - resisted it.
Before the novocaine takes hold I tell him of childhood visits and how they gave us gas and we'd come round bent over a sink and spewing blood.
'Is it the smell of rubber brings it back?' he asks.
It might be. Or the taste of blood. Or that forceful wrench, like a clamp on my heart!
Such experiences can take you straight back...... to a six year-old self in a converted hotel by the front in Aberystwyth.
That lift-shaft with its echoes of drills screeching and whining. The many different dentists with their weapons of torture lined up ; some who gave up when I refused to open my mouth and one who just yelled at me.
Smells, sights and sounds conspire to yank me into a past I want to avoid : a mazy trap no claws or cunning can escape.
Some of the most vivid memories I possess probably aren't memories at all , but stories my mother told so often they became engrained into my consciousness : the stuff of family myth.
My mother would narrate these with relish, no matter how badly I had behaved.
Biting the girl next door's finger when she poked it through the fence was one. Trying to hold up a cinema manager with a toy gun after we'd been to see a Western together.
Best of all, was the time I picked our neighbour's flowers and proceeded to knock their door, asking if they'd like to buy a bunch.
Or the day when she was away in Swansea on one of her regular 'shopping trips' (I found out were euphemisms) and I got out all my best toys and put them on a small table outside our house. I managed to sell the lot for a pittance : a five year-old who would never end up as an Alan Sugar, for sure.
There was one which really troubled me and which no-one ever talked about, but I convinced myself had happened. I even felt the scar along my skull.
I dreamt about it often, so it must have occurred. I was certain I'd had a plate of glass dropped on my head and that it had been badly cut. My parents denied this had ever happened, when I asked them years later.
Tales and dreams jostle and merge and become connected even when they are separated by years.
My dream of journeying away from Aber on a boat definitely comes from walking by the harbour and seeing the small boats moored there, yet the islands which myself and my mother drew as a fugitive dream came much later, at a time when she was no doubt planning her own escape from the impossible relationship with my father.
Those drawings stand out for me now because they were so rare.
Despite all his many problems and psychotic tendencies, I was far more likely to go to the cinema with my father than share anything with my mother (even though I lived with her when she left him).
In truth , I wasn't on that island of hers, thousands of miles away in another ocean.
THERE WAS AN ISLAND
In the harbour
I discovered
a string orchestra
of masts and ropes,
those high notes
played by the wind's
supple fingers.
By the harbour
a stacked pyramid
of lobster pots,
I could be caught
and not get out
of memory's subtle trap.
There was a boat
I never travelled on
called The Dolphin
and there was an island
I drew as a child,
a cottage uninhabited
and fire-wood unlit.
But sometimes taken on a tide, a boat floating out to sea.
Last week, sitting in the dentist's chair ; too regular a visitor there of late.
'It's like Groundhog Day!' I declare, wishing I could dictate events.
'What shall we do with it?' he asks.
'How about reinforced concrete?'
It's too late! The word 'extraction' is enough to bring prickly sweat to my brow and ,despite trusting my dentist, the process brings back all those childhood memories on the flow of the tide like sticky, tarry wood clinging to palms.
And despite the injections (I counted at least three) I could still feel the pull at the roots, as my whole body - every single nerve - resisted it.
Before the novocaine takes hold I tell him of childhood visits and how they gave us gas and we'd come round bent over a sink and spewing blood.
'Is it the smell of rubber brings it back?' he asks.
It might be. Or the taste of blood. Or that forceful wrench, like a clamp on my heart!
Such experiences can take you straight back...... to a six year-old self in a converted hotel by the front in Aberystwyth.
That lift-shaft with its echoes of drills screeching and whining. The many different dentists with their weapons of torture lined up ; some who gave up when I refused to open my mouth and one who just yelled at me.
Smells, sights and sounds conspire to yank me into a past I want to avoid : a mazy trap no claws or cunning can escape.
Some of the most vivid memories I possess probably aren't memories at all , but stories my mother told so often they became engrained into my consciousness : the stuff of family myth.
My mother would narrate these with relish, no matter how badly I had behaved.
Biting the girl next door's finger when she poked it through the fence was one. Trying to hold up a cinema manager with a toy gun after we'd been to see a Western together.
Best of all, was the time I picked our neighbour's flowers and proceeded to knock their door, asking if they'd like to buy a bunch.
Or the day when she was away in Swansea on one of her regular 'shopping trips' (I found out were euphemisms) and I got out all my best toys and put them on a small table outside our house. I managed to sell the lot for a pittance : a five year-old who would never end up as an Alan Sugar, for sure.
There was one which really troubled me and which no-one ever talked about, but I convinced myself had happened. I even felt the scar along my skull.
I dreamt about it often, so it must have occurred. I was certain I'd had a plate of glass dropped on my head and that it had been badly cut. My parents denied this had ever happened, when I asked them years later.
Tales and dreams jostle and merge and become connected even when they are separated by years.
My dream of journeying away from Aber on a boat definitely comes from walking by the harbour and seeing the small boats moored there, yet the islands which myself and my mother drew as a fugitive dream came much later, at a time when she was no doubt planning her own escape from the impossible relationship with my father.
Those drawings stand out for me now because they were so rare.
Despite all his many problems and psychotic tendencies, I was far more likely to go to the cinema with my father than share anything with my mother (even though I lived with her when she left him).
In truth , I wasn't on that island of hers, thousands of miles away in another ocean.
THERE WAS AN ISLAND
In the harbour
I discovered
a string orchestra
of masts and ropes,
those high notes
played by the wind's
supple fingers.
By the harbour
a stacked pyramid
of lobster pots,
I could be caught
and not get out
of memory's subtle trap.
There was a boat
I never travelled on
called The Dolphin
and there was an island
I drew as a child,
a cottage uninhabited
and fire-wood unlit.
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