TERM 2 The birth of the 1980s - Blake’s 7, Blondie and battles in space

Super Jesus A special pin-up of your favourite Nazarene webslinger

< Puzzleman

March/April 1980

Evel Knievel:

Fury Falls

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For many years, this bizarre story made absolutely no sense to me. Evel Knievel with these three random blokes with weird names in a life-or-death struggle by a waterfall. Plenty of vehicles. Lots of exclamation marks! I wasn’t even into Evel Knievel. He wasn’t even really a thing any more in 1980. Where the hell did this weird little tale come from? And then I realised. They’re toys. And all of a sudden, the memory was there. These were Andrew Wall’s toys. And just like the time I turned me playing with Micronauts into a not-so-very-exciting story about the evil villain Supersilver, this story is a recollection of me and Andrew playing with his toys. I didn’t have an Evel Knievel, but he obviously did, complete with a Canyon Sky Cycle, and that’s the one that appears in this story. The other three characters are three more action figures he had, with names he’d given them. I don’t remember what kind of toys Split Sam and Redsleeves were, but Eagle must have been an eagle- eyed Action Man. I know I had some Action Men, eventually, but the first one I got was a brown-haired cyborg called Atomic Man for my previous birthday and, since I didn’t get an Action Man for Christmas, I doubt this one would have been mine. I’ve got a vague memory Andrew had a Talking Commander as well, which I was insanely jealous of, but that intense envy never quite evolved into me actually getting one myself. My memory doesn’t stop there. I clearly remember us playing with these toys in the school playground, which might well have been possible. On the grass next to the bit where the boys played football. We might have snuck in there at the weekend, which occasionally happened, or it could have been one break time, risking being whacked on the head by a passing ball, which also occasionally happened. But that’s when I start to question the memory. It’s a strange thing, memory, and it gets much stranger when you’re recalling things from over forty years ago. I tend to think we don’t remember much about the past unless we remember it often, and sometimes the stories we tell ourselves about the past can get warped in the telling. Some memories are stronger because we access them over and over again, but when we access them, we often either embellish them with new ideas or erase certain parts of them that don’t seem relevant to the story we’re telling ourselves. So often our memories, though genuine, only bear a passing relation to the truth of what happened. A good example of this, for me, is a memory I have of watching an episode of Doctor Who, which I recalled in my Timeline for November 1979. I remember the monster poking its head through a wall at the end of the episode and it looking so ridiculous, we all burst into laughter. It was the first time I’d ever openly laughed at a stupid special effect on Doctor Who, so the memory stayed with me for longer and, when I watched the story again later in life, the memory would be repeated - replayed, if you like, from the memory store in my brain. So there’s continuity there - I never, ever forgot the memory and accessed it several times over the course of my life, so it stayed relatively fresh and uncontaminated. Or so I thought. It wasn’t until I started writing the Timeline for this website that I realised one aspect of it was completely wrong. In my memory, when we watched that episode we were all in a completely different house - the one we used to live in, at 11 Dove Drive in Airedale. Which of course can’t be true, because we’d left it several months before the episode aired. Since then, I’ve become more and more aware that quite a few of my memories are like that. Sometimes I remember the right story but in the wrong location. Sometimes I remember the wrong people being there. Sometimes I’ve left out a key detail, which puts the events in a very different light. But the general gist will at least seem to be correct, because there’s continuity - I remember it because I remember remembering it last time, so it must be true. Then there are memories like these. Ones which I suddenly remember quite clearly, even though I remember not remembering it at all last week. So I’m not sure whether this is a genuine memory, which I wasn’t able to recall until I had the right insight, which allowed me to access the memory from a different memory store (maybe it was filed under ‘toys’ or ‘Andrew Wall’ rather than ‘Evel Knievel’), or whether it’s an embellishment, something my brain has completely fabricated in order to make sense of the available data. And then there’s me telling you this, wondering how much you care about accuracy, whether you really need me to go into such detail about whether or not it’s actually genuinely true. You don’t need me to do that, do you? I could just tell you it’s true and you’d probably believe me, because it’s not really that important. I could try to track down Andrew Wall of course, ask him what he thinks. He might be able to corroborate it. He might tell me he doesn’t even remember who I am. But as I’ve learned from speaking to other old friends, it’s rare your memories ever converge completely. And anyway, it would completely miss the point. The point is, this is what this fragile old man’s brain remembers of some half-forgotten, half- invented thing from long, long ago. And it’s more than enough to make some kind of sense of the rubbish I wrote at the time.

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