Other Characters

There have been many other great characters, not just the ones I've named before, like:
R.T., who beat me up aged five on my neighbour's lawn but made everything okay again ten years later when he asked me in all seriousness, "Was the Second World War before the Fifties or after it?" ;
J.T., (no relation), who looked like Declan Donnelly with an Elvis quiff and told me that when you waved Mr. Sprinkly up and down after going to the toilet it was known as an Alabama Handshake;
M.P., unreconstructed posh kid, who when I found him standing alone behind the swimming baths one day, mysteriously ejaculated the phrase, "Elephants might fly," but refused to elaborate;
a teacher whose name I've genuinely forgotten who once told an unruly pupil in front of the whole class," If you smirk at me again like that I'll put your head through the wall" (you could say things like that in those days);
G.M., who was studiously camp, described himself as "very pro-bleach" and was thrown into spasms of revulsion by the mention of breast milk.
When you open your mind out to the places you've been and the people you've known, so much of it comes rushing back, and in such detail it's impossible to feel a nostalgia for it all as Holden Caulfield says you will: it seems so close.