A childhood memoir of life before polio, and immediately after, and my magical childhood adventures in and out of a wheelchair
Preface
The Downs where Melly, Kev and I overtook a car on my big tricycle
Paul Bura is a character – as those who remember his Herne Bay days will know. Though struck down with polio at the age of seven, and spending time in hospitals and special schools, the adventure spirit of his earliest days was never extinguished. No sense of self-pity comes through in this book about his childhood.
Though at school he thought poetry boring, while getting over the immediate effects of his illness, he found he had the urge to write his own, but only published his first ‘slim volume’ at the age of 21.
Poems, plays and scripts have come from his pen, and his fine voice has been used for poetry readings and recordings, BBC Radio.4 and TV commercials – but this side of his life came well after the period of this book.
Half a century on, he recalls some of his earliest memories – his precarious family life in a small, sea-front fish restaurant (hence the title) – doing all the things small boys get up to when fully active, and any and every kind of mischief; and the carrying on regardless when, in theory, handicapped, disabled, crippled – all those none-PC terms now thought so unspeakable. The essence of Paul’s writing is that he just does not care about these unfashionable labels – a wheelchair is just a means of getting from A to B when legs wont help, in order to get as much out of life as anybody else. “Suddenly you don’t walk anymore, but you accept it and cope, he once said. Before contracting polio he could climb the East Cliffs’ Hundred Steps in a minute or two, afterwards it was a ‘twenty minute’ battle, his sister and brother dragging the wheelchair up after him. They would also share rides on his large tricycle – to overtake a startled motorist on Beacon Hill!
His memories of his childhood contemporaries of all ages are vivid, from other children to elderly fisherman, and their language is clearly reproduced, as is his own.
Take or leave it, like it or lump it, Paul is saying: that’s how it was!
This is not a straight chronology, it is a reminiscence; rambling through his memory as they surface, interspersed with a poem or two, of course. An endearing, funny and sometimes moving document of a lad that was one day running on two legs and the next screeching around corners in a wheelchair! Those that remember Paul Bura will recognize him in this little book; even those who don’t will thoroughly enjoy it, though he has deserted the shores of Herne Bay for the distant shores of Anglesey in North Wales.
HAROLD GOUGH. Writer & Honorary Curator of the Herne Bay Records Society
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