Dotard: One whose mind is impaired by age

Overprize: To prize excessively to overvalue

Dugway: A way or road dug through a hill or sunk below the surface of the land

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Let me tell you about my strangest memory.

I keep it hidden away under lock and key somewhere in the back of my mind. Sometimes I close my eyes and watch it play on the curtain of my eyelids, hazy and noir, flickering like an old fashioned movie. I’ve only ever shared it with a handful of people…and now you.

***

The playground of my childhood school was a tarmac savannah, wrinkly like skin that’s been in the bath for too long and scribbled with the sun-bleached Nazca lines that denoted symbolic football pitches. Down the far end, under a large tree whose awning provided respite from the sun, were the badlands – a small scrubby patch of grass and dirt bordered by a wooden fence. Etched into this boundary was a permanently locked gate that led to our sports fields, but as we were a small, poor school, these fields were just public parks that we invaded once a year for sports day, tiny legs pumping whilst carrying eggs on spoons. A humpty-dumpy dystopia.

Anyway, somewhere between the ages of seven and ten my friends and I became fascinated with digging. Not just digging for the sake of slinging dirt, but real open cast excavations – our hands carving out deep holes and dugways amongst the tiny patch of dirt tacked onto our playground. Myself, Will, Tom and probably others who I can’t quite remember now, presided over our feats of engineering like Pharaohs watching the assembly of pyramids.

Looking back, perhaps we overprized our accomplishments. One time the council came and filled in a crater we had carved under some public stairs, as though it were a crème egg with a concrete center. We wore this like a badge of honor. But I digress…

Eventually, we decided to move on and excavate a new area, somewhere different in the myriad of playgrounds we had at our disposal. To test ourselves we chose a hedgerow in the middle playground. The thick, tangled roots seemed a suitable challenge for experienced diggers such as ourselves, finger nails crusty with dirt, rocks scraping as though we had discovered the very first tools.

One afternoon however something strange happened. Among the roots we unearthed a small black box. Then another. And another. And so on, until we had a stack of these small black boxes, each the shape and size of something a necklace may be displayed in. We couldn’t open them. Then our teacher appeared and she was angry with us. Then the men dressed in black came and took all our boxes away.

***

The memory fades toward the end, tapering off like a stuttering candle. I’ve managed to cling to the key points, to treasure them, as I know what happened to us was very significant, but I don’t know why. All I know is, we never dug another hole again.

Like I said, I’ve only ever told this to a handful of people…and I’m too scared to ask whether those involved remember or not, for fear of what it means for me if they don’t. I’m scared that I will begin to question my memories, fearing that I’m just another adult dotard, imagining things just to seem more interesting.

So, I think I’ll just keep it under lock and key for now.