The playroom of lost toys

My childhood is lost to me

but somewhere there is a room

filled with the toys I played with long ago,

its door locked, its key gone astray.

In this room on some long corridor

in a derelict wing of a condemned house

I left my childhood

because I forgot what it was for.

The toys that helped make me what I am,

what are they to me today?

How do my playthings feel about me now?

They once had embryonic personalities,

did they also have souls?

Who knows if they still exist and where;

I abandoned them all,

but they never quite abandoned me.

Because when I send my mind back,

and connect it to that room,

my toys are still what they always were:

gifts presented for being a good boy

in flower-power days before the break up of the Beatles.

No longer to be coveted, held, or broken,

the toys now gathered in that playroom are not dead,

but now I know they will never come to life.

I loved a die-cut pelican with coloured ink features

printed on paper and glued onto wood.

Its right-angled edges were unnaturally sharp

and its eyes were not those of a bird but had a woman’s eyelashes.

I dragged it along the carpet by a string,

turning back in sheer delight to watch its plastic, webbed feet

appearing to pedal the coloured wooden wheels

and as they turned, the brightly coloured bill

(large enough for Lego bricks or toy soldiers, too small for fish)

opening and closing with a hollow clap.

Then there was a tin helicopter that spun its rotors

when you wheeled it along by its string.

The benign and somehow stupid face

of its red-headed pilot was printed twice onto the tin.

How it fascinated me to see it

once full-face on the front of the cockpit

and again, in profile, in the side window—

two discrete views of the same man—

I would position myself for a cubist’s view

of that gormless face from both sides at once.

My talking Action Man Commander

spoke eight commands without moving his lips.

Each phrase was positioned at a different point

on a piece of coloured string tied to his dog tag necklace.

String-pulling was still cutting-edge in those days,

and when you pulled it, he spoke.

Command eight, “Action Man patrol, fall in”,

was at the end of the string and heard most often.

“Mortar attack—dig in!” was command seven,

and he hardly ever said it—perhaps a dozen times in all.

For my tenth birthday, during the summer holidays,

my parents ordered a portable cassette recorder

from the Daily Mail, no strings attached.

I coveted the advertisement’s crude line-drawing,

each day maintaining a vigil for the postman,

but he passed empty-handed while I grew sick from anticipation.

The cassette recorder arrived in time for the start of term.

On Sunday evenings, with homework completed or abandoned,

I recorded ‘Fluff’ Freeman’s top forty in low-fidelity mono

and sometimes the machine chewed up the tape and spat it out like tinned

                                                                                                                                    spaghetti.

Long-abandoned toys,

where are you now?

Who knows if you still exist and where.

Have you been buried in a landfill under wheeling gulls,

the forgotten dust of some mystery attic,

or consigned to a string of church jumble sales?

You never abandoned me,

and for that I keep these memories warm for you.

—0O0—