"We do not remember childhood - we imagine it,” Penelope Lively wrote in her 1987 novel Moon Tiger. “We search for it, in vain, through layers of obscuring dust, and recover some bedraggled shreds of what we think it was." Fair point, but if you enjoy getting dusty, that searching can be so much fun. One of the joys of the book that I’ve recently finished is that, while it’s heavily inspired by my childhood, it was always going to be about creating a new, factually unlived childhood out of that, because it’s fiction. The freedom of the exercise for me was in never banning myself from writing something exactly as I remember it happening when I was seven or eight years-old but similarly never banning myself from writing something totally invented, if it felt right. The book is called 1983, which is also the year in which it’s set, and - while I had previously thought I could recall that part of my childhood fairly clearly - the process of writing it took me back in, further than I’d thought possible, down the warrens of my mind. In the process I realised that the childhood memories that had been gluey enough to survive tended to occupy one of six categories:
Concepts That Scared The Wits Out Of Me (e.g the wolves - or “wolvers” as I preferred to call them at the time - from Ladybird books who marched up my bed in the middle of the night to eat me).
Notable Acts Of Kindness (e.g. my nan buying me some trainers after I almost died from peritonitis then putting them at the end of my hospital bed as a symbol of my recovery and learning to walk again).
Stuff That I Still Feel Guilty About To This Day And Wish I’d Never Done Even Though I Was Little And Didn’t Know Any Better (e.g. pouring bubble bath into the garden pond I’d dug out with my dad, not realising it would kill the water beetles in there, along with pretty much everything else).
Inexplicable And Unique Quirks Of Character (e.g. my cousin Jack getting irrationally angry any time anybody used the phrase “in the distance”).
Timeless Comedy (a classmate coming into school, aged 7, and announcing to a group of us that his mum’s boyfriend was in hospital because his mum had “bit his willy too hard”).
Weird Psychedelic Stuff That Makes You Think, “Did That Actually Exist, Or Was It Just From Dream, Or An Experimental Film I Once Saw?”
It is into the final category - and possibly also the first - that the giant wooden frog falls.
I first remembered the frog when I was taking a walk, in my mind, back through Nottingham city centre with my parents in the early 80s. My dad had parked at the far end of the car park beneath the Victoria Centre, which was unlit and had black walls that looked like they’d been hacked out of pure coal and, after going into Habitat to look at some furniture they couldn’t afford, he and my mum took me down the hill to the Broadmarsh Centre, the Vic Centre’s lowbrow, maverick cousin. Yes, the Vic Centre had better shops, and my dad called the Broadmarsh “a shithole”, but there was always the slight feeling that anything could happen in the Broadmarsh: a feeling that Peter Hand’s wooden frog play sculpture contributed to in no small way. Did I love or hate the frog? It was hard to say but it often appeared in my dreams and, as we approached the Broadmarsh’s entrance, a certain feverishness would consume me. Would it be empty, allowing me to climb up through its throat? If I did, would I emerge darkly altered, or even alive at all? More terrifyingly still, would this be the day when I finally got to explore the interior of the frog’s arguably even more haunting peer, the imposing wooden caterpillar, which - if rumour was to be believed - had once taken a bite out of a dress worn by my schoolfriend Emma Buttons?
If not, I could always pass through the accommodating bumhole of the wooden horse around the corner. Although I had to admit that did not quite hold the same mystery or appeal.
A little research reveals that, during the 60s and 70s, Hand - who, along with the horticultural expert Bob Flowerdew and oral history collector Ruth Tongue, can be counted one of the better examples of nominative determinism - made play sculptures for several other shopping centres, including a cantankerous hippo who lived in Poole’s Arndale Centre, and another even less trustworthy frog which - for much of the 1980s - guarded the branch of Dwellers in Wood Green Shopping City.
Impressed - and perhaps intimidated - by the Broadmarsh sculptures, the Victoria Centre also commissioned Hand to make some for its main thoroughfare, not from wood but from tubular steel - including this snake, which was always a totally safe and responsible place to leave your offspring while you went to get lagged up in the adjacent New Vic pub.
Reading about Hand’s sculptures, and thinking about the supremely cool earthenware wall tiles seen behind them in the Broadmarsh photos, got me thinking about shopping centres, the architecturally mysterious places they used to be, and what a shame it is they’ve become so much more bland and uniform. Admire, for example, the atrium of this one in Connecticut, USA, which was sadly destroyed to make way for a giant Walmart in 1994. If you look carefully, you can see the anonymous yet classy entrance to its flagship bookstore and, above that, the inviting wood and glass that trails its extensive haberdashery. It’s all very simple - no big neon signs, no chain stores dominating the space - but oozes style.
Okay, I’m lying. This is actually the house where the jazz musician Dave Brubeck lived from the early 1960s to the end of his life, in 2012.
But look at this 1971 photo of the cosy cafe on the top floor of a forgotten “mini mall” built on the verge of California’s Topanga Canyon, which, by 1986, was totally abandoned and inhabited exclusively by owls and bears.
I’m sorry. I’m kidding again. It’s actually a photo of the kitchen of my rented bungalow here in Devon, UK, this morning. You can’t see him, but under the table is my giant ginger cat Jim. He likes the way the tablecloth keeps out the cold on winter mornings and he appears to view the spot as his own special peace teepee: a place he can go for some quiet time, after he’s oversocialised as a result of his generous and amenable personality.
However, below is an authentic photo of The Commons mall in Columbus, Indiana, destroyed in 2008, which featured a communal playground and a 1974 kinetic sculpture by Jean Tinguely titled ‘Chaos’.
When the Broadmarsh Centre was being built, before its official opening in the year of my birth, 1975, it was part of an urban regeneration project branded as “slum clearance” which, on a larger scale, also involved the destruction of some of Nottingham’s most important historic streets, and came close to wrecking some of the caves beneath them. On the plus side, it did have an extremely fancy modernist water wheel.
I think my dad was wrong about the Broadmarsh Centre. I don’t think it was a “shithole” at all. I think it was a palace of watery light: a state-of-the-art projection of a future that sadly never was. A place where, after you’d bought a knock-off British Home Stores copy of a Guzzini mushroom lamp, you could go next-door and buy some electricity for it from a shop called Electricity, this being in the days before electricity was convolutedly fed into your home through wires when you simply transported it there yourself in a polythene bag, usually via the bus, or, if you were rich, a car.
Below is a photo what the Broadmarsh Centre looks like now. It’s been in the same state for years because of a massive labyrinthine cock up involving Nottingham City Council and shopping centre investors Intu going into administration during the pandemic.
The current plan is to redevelop the site into a green space, full of trees and plants, which sounds terrific, if it genuinely comes to fruition. But the crucial question remains: “Will it also feature a colossal wooden caterpillar being stared at balefully from the rear by a squat wooden horse?”
(That’s me in the driver’s seat, by the way. I still wear the coat sometimes. Gill, to my rear, has unfortunately changed a lot over the years and is now in prison.)
You get a good sense here of the wooden frog’s commanding position at the head of the main plaza in the Broadmarsh, watching the action of many of the main shops including, under the balcony, just out of shot, a somewhat directionless budget store whose name now escapes me, where I used my pocket money to buy both of my uncles, my dad and my granddad each a bottle of the same half price Hai Karate aftershave for Christmas, 1985, and the ladies clothing retailer Richard Shops. I am disappointed to discover there was never a person named Richard Shops. The shop was founded by someone called John. There was never anyone called Shops, or Richard, involved. Capitalism is full of these idealism-shattering moments, I find. Another example is that Peter Storm isn’t a real person who thought “Hey, with this name, I might as well make protective rainwear!” Peter Storm is in fact merely an idea. But then so, perhaps, are our childhoods, in the end, so who are we to say that Peter Storm is wrong by not taking corporeal form as a man you can touch, see and feel and possibly interrogate about the evolution of anorak technology?
Peter Hand, who made the play sculptures that featured in the Broadmarsh Centre and Victoria Centre, is, however, a real person. He looks - or looked - like this, is 95, and lives in Dorset. At least, that’s what Google tells me. I do hope he’s still alive, and sculpting.
In the 1960s, before he started making play sculptures, Peter carved some animals for the Chapter House at Southwell Minster, about 45 mins’ drive from Nottingham. My favourite is his sarcastically yawning ram.
But the carving of Donald Trump inside the Minster isn’t Peter’s. That was done by a mystic from the 14th Century who was able to predict a distant future where many people redefined and accepted the concept of “success” as the process of repeatedly, speaking blatant blaring untruths with a vast amount of arrogant self-belief.
As I move from the novel I just finished, whose main theme is arguably childhood, into my next, whose main theme is arguably the magic that time bestows on objects crafted with love by human hands, I wonder what happened to Hand’s play sculptures after they were retired in the late 90s for health and safety reasons. Nobody seems to know where most of them ended up, but the metal grasshopper from the Vic Centre was donated to Douglas Primary School, which closed 15 years ago. The wooden caterpillar from the Broadmarsh, meanwhile, was “put to sleep” after Mellers School, in the Radford region of the city, was unable to find anybody to renovate and care for it. Perhaps it’s my idealism showing, but I find some hope in that phrase “put to sleep”. “Put to sleep”, after all, isn’t “torched”, “hacked up with an axe” or even “defaced with drawings of cocks, tits and balls”. Maybe the caterpillar is still out there, in a large garage or lock-up. Maybe somebody who owns that garage is looking to free up some space. Maybe that same somebody just happens to be about to be sent a Substack article by a friend which eulogises the role of caterpillar and its contemporaries in 20th Century East Midlands life. I suppose what I’m saying is that I’ve got a long thin space in my kitchen which I’m not quite sure what to do with. You wouldn’t exactly call it massive, but it’s just crying out for a certain something, and I think, while it would undoubtedly be a tight squeeze, the right midcentury insect could really tie the room together.
If you’d like to contribute to the funding of 1983 you can do so by pre-ordering a signed hardback here, for next summer.
Not only did your depiction of childhood warm my proverbial cockles, I can add a little extra colour as the deliverer of news.
The wooden animals of Poole's Arndale Centre (now renamed) currently reside in a museum, having been donated by the shopping centre this year.
I think it's fair to say that the local residents of Poole, who most likely also grew up climbing through various wooden orifices, are obsessed with the animals almost to the point of unhealthiness. (I know this from my day job in PR for aforementioned shopping destination).
Apologies, no intel on current status of the remarkable Mr Hand.
This was beyond brilliant. Last week, a facebook page I follow about historic buildings in Chicago - despite it being mostly populated with racists and closed-minded twats that hate anything built after 1472 - posted a photo of the fountain ‘grottos’ made of glazed brick that coursed through Woodfield Mall. When I was a kid, we all felt special because it was close by to our random little town and yet it was the biggest mall in the world, and busses of Japanese tourists would go straight there from the airport. But when I saw the photo of the grottos, the overpowering jolt of memories - the smell of the chlorine, the logos on the bags from Marshall Fields, the concept of this stylish, tactile, indoor playland - hit hard. Sharing it prompted a flood of comments from childhood friends that all had the same reaction to the photos, similar memories, especially the smells. I hate malls now and all the grottos were long since ripped out of Woodfield, the only thing of value there now is maybe LUSH. Mostly i wish the whole place could get returned to prairie again🤷🏽♀️. Side note, I feel like a hidden agenda of this post was to show off how fabulous your kitchen is. I was also nearly crushed into a pile of emotional mush by the thoughts evoked when I read the concept of your next book.