Thrownaway Lines from a Lifetime Ago

In an instant, the faintest liquorice whiff of hot tar carries me back more than forty years to a half-completed housing estate outside York. It’s a summer sunshine smell of long days, short trousers and an inflatable paddling pool next to coils of hosepipe on the drive, because the house was new-built and the garden was still a muddy no-man’s-land. It’s a happy smell; friendly and safe.

Just as everyone has these kinds of associations with smells and sounds, there are some words and phrases we seem to have mislaid long ago and which have the same effect when we stumble across them decades later.

There’s something funny and at the same time comfortingly familiar about the childhood slang peculiar to your own generation. Music or fashion can be of their place and time too but they’re officially recorded, easily accessible and tend to get recycled every couple of decades. Words just get pushed to the back of the cupboard and forgotten. There’s no commercial value in dragging them out, blowing the dust off them and tossing them back into circulation, so it doesn’t happen often. But it’s nice when, every now and again, a grey-pelted contemporary makes me smile by springing a “bam” or a “gadgie” on me.

The words put you and the speaker in the same exclusive club and don’t bother trying to explain them to non-members because they won’t really get it. For the uninitiated, the words don’t conjure up skinned knees, blowing up dog turds with those bangers you brought back from France, getting your dad to tie a piece of plastic to the rear wheel of your Raleigh Grifter so it sounded like a motorbike or showing yours to the girl at number 17 if she’ll show you hers. No; for them, they’re just words.

Some vocabulary comes around again, adopted by our children for a dash of vintage chic. My son assures me that his friends go radge occasionally, but even when they’re short of time, I don’t think they ever have to nash and no matter how good something is, it never seems to be barry.

Even as I write this, my alarmed spellcheck has highlighted all these well-known words in red. But then it wasn’t a kid in the 70s, so it wouldn’t understand.