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Dazzling Darkness
Prologue
A Tonka Toy Christmas
6
I don’t usually remember individual childhood Christmases. Like overused plasticine, all the distinctive colours blend into one mud brown. And in most respects Christmas day 1975 was not, by my family’s 1970s’ experience, a particularly unusual one. We were still very poor, a largish family cramped into a three bedroom semi-detached house, huddling around one coal fire for warmth during the day, we children getting lost in the deep polyester caverns of our sleeping bags at night. And yet this ‘Tonka toy Christmas’ glows yellow and black, roars like a 50-ton truck. It defines my childhood. Its importance lies in the iconic nature of the indestructible Tonka truck that I was given and adored. It was moulded plastic, but hard as nails. Its unbreakable shiny newness revealed, to a five-year-old, one of the faces of God. I straddled its black driver’s cab and trundled off down the hall to the soundtrack of my own satisfyingly throaty chug. This was, for me, the ultimate boy toy – more macho than Action Man’s scar, bolder than Evel Knievel, better able to come back for more punishment than the Six Million Dollar Man. And the fact that I had one at five has rebounded, like a ball in a pinball machine, through my Christmases and my life ever since. For although one might argue that nothing could be more appropriate 6
A version of this chapter can also be found in Slee & Miles, ed, Doing December Differently (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications 2006).
