Painting my Wagon

George: Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, Emporium! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building and Loan!

Can you begin to smell Christmas in the air, that special Christmas smell? You can? So what is that Christmas smell, your special Christmas smell? Tangerines? Christmas Pudding? Rum Butter? Pine needles?

For me the special smell of Christmas is Hardy’s Enamel Paint, actually any strong paint does it for me.

Back it 1962 when I was five every other programme on the two-channel, black-and-white, sixteen-inch Grundig television set was a western. Gunsmoke, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, Maverick, and Bonanza (my Mum was in love with Adam, I liked Hoss). It was a five-year-old boy heaven. Everybody on our estate was a cowboy, we all used to meet up in the evenings and on holidays and play Cowboys and Indians. We had all the gear, hats, chaps, guns, holsters, spurs, boots, bullet belts, neckerchiefs, faux-rawhide waistcoats, sheriff’s stars; we must have looked like a young Village People’s playgroup. There were never any Indians; well there was one, my cousin Ian, who wore a feather headdress and a brightly coloured bead necklace. Ian went on to become a dancer in a German bar; he died last year of Aids. I found out after the funeral, but enough about that.

The Christmas of ’62 was magical. The snow began to fall steadily on Boxing Day and it seemed to fall solidly for three weeks. The drifts were huge. On the other side of the estate by the cottages the snowplough had banked up the snow until it was almost as high as the cottage’s tiny upstairs widows. Great for tobogganing and snowmen, but not so great for playing Cowboys (and Indian). We exchanged our black felt Stetson’s for grey woollen, full-face, Gran hand-knitted balaclavas and forget all about the Cavalry for a while, or at least my friends did, they were complete in snowball fights and ice slides. But for me it wasn't that easy because that was the Christmas that my parents gave me the most incredible present; a pedal-powered stagecoach complete with four black horses and real red leather reins. God knows where they got it from, or how they afforded it; it was pretty tough for us back then. I don’t know if it was new, but it didn’t matter, it was fantastic!

I seem to remember that it was at least seven feet long from the pink tip of the lead horse’s nose to the railed shotgun seat at the rear, and apart from on Christmas Day when it was brought into the house to almost fill our living room, it resided in the outhouse at the back of our brick box semi waiting for the snow to disappear so that the wagons could roll. Wagon Train, wagggonnns rooooool! Wagon Train; Charlie Wooster, Bill Hawks, and pork and beans for supper; that was my favourite.

Each day I'd go look at the Stagecoach, impatiently waiting for the snow to be gone so that I could pedal it along the dusty path outside the row of exactly-the-same houses that was our street. I couldn’t wait to crack the whip and drive it across the dry concrete desert, past the Mesa and Cactus plant rose bushes, all the way down to Dodge City by the Paper Shop. But it kept on snowing.

One day, and I really don’t know why, I went into the outhouse and for some forgotten (probably at the time) entirely rational (five year old rational) reason, I got down the big can of bright yellow Hardy’s Enamel Paint and my Father’s three- and- a - half-inch paintbrush and painted big yellow spots all over the jet-black horses and thick yellow stripes on the stagecoach.

I like to think of it as me recognising my Surrealist inner being at a very early age, but I think I was just bored and tired of not being able to play with it , either way I got a good-hiding from my Father and I was never (and I mean never) allowed to play with the Stagecoach again. It was moved to the shed for a while and then three months later it was gone.

Childhood – such a magical time.

Twenty-two years later on another Christmas in another world I watched ‘The Snowman’ animation for the first time. A lot of people don’t remember the original TV broadcast. David Bowie introduced it, but when I mention this to people they usually don’t believe me. Here it is to prove it really did happen.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2067664373050394413&ei=-AlKSYz1JY62iAKf77XKCw&q=the+snowman+david+bowie

To this day I’ve never spoken to my parents about what happened to my Stagecoach. This part of my life is a little like "The Snowman", a magical episode that happened a long time ago that runs in my head every Christmas or when I smell strong paint. I still don’t know where it came from or where it went to. Almost fifty years on I suppose I could easily ask my parents about it, but what if they have no recollection of it?

It seemed and seems very real to me then and now, but it is so long ago and I was so young that I begin to doubt that it truly happened. What if I dreamt it and it’s all a false memory? What if my Stagecoach never existed? What would that mean to the existence of the boy I once was and the man I am now?

I think I’ll let it be.

Ian was a great Indian, I wish I’d been an Indian sometimes.