Ted...

There are nights that I still miss my old Teddy Bear and I haven't seen him for over 45 years. I expect he was cheap, maybe somebody had owned him before me. But he was my only friend for a while when I was very young. Yes, I don’t know where he came from, but for years he really was my best friend. On dark, cold, nights I’d lay upstairs listening to the television and the shouting below, hanging on tight and clutching the softness of his cotton stuffing in my hands.

Ted (I had no other name for him) was always around when I needed him - which was often and more than I could say for some.

But then one day he was gone. I’ve never been completely sure just where he went. But there’s a good chance he got caught up in one of the pogroms that sometimes happened on Saturday mornings to satisfy my father’s need for control. The doors and windows would be flung open even on the coldest of days, draws and cupboards gone through, emptied, and all unnecessary and useless things (at least to him) thrown into the ash-covered metal dustbin or piled into a heap in the large back garden to be burnt that afternoon.

Sometimes it was just the sideboard; other times a complete room, and a couple of times a year (usually spring and just before Christmas) it was the turn of the whole house to be ‘cleansed’. Top to bottom he went, removing anything that offended his easy to offend eye. He never asked; never once cared that his ‘worthless’ might have been another’s ‘treasure’.

“It has to be done. I can’t stand all this clutter!” He’d shout - and all for no other reason than he could and it made him (if nobody else) feel better.

My bedroom seemed to be ‘turned over’ more often than the rest of the house. Eventually I gave up asking where my fossil collection had gone or why my paintings, carefully taped to my cupboard so as not to mark the wallpaper, had been removed. Instead I simply gave up. Books, toys, marbles, my mallard’s egg, all vanished over the years after one or another of his manic ‘cleans’.

Well, “it had to be done” didn’t it?

These days I don’t allow myself to hang on to things. Ultimately everything goes one way or another eventually. Of course I keep them close for a while. But when they go I just shrug my shoulders, move on, and tell myself that they were nothing; just rubbish really, unnecessary, a clutter, no loss.

Sometimes though, late at night when I’m worried or tired, I still wish I had my Ted to cling to.