A decade ago Pullyman - aka Michael Cowin - was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, a condition that affects people in different ways. Michael discovered writing and Island Life is featuring some of his musings. Sometimes topical, sometimes nostalgic, read about life as seen through the eyes of Pullyman

Have you ever thought about when you were learning how to read and write?

What about spelling, sums and the seven times table?

As time went by you would be introduced to history and geography, and possibly even a foreign language. So much to learn and such a lot to have to memorise.

But remembering your tables is not the same as having memories.

Your baby memories probably don’t start to take shape until you are about three or four.

I can certainly remember falling out of my pram on the Old Castletown Road in the area of the Nunnery mansion.

At the time of the tipping I was being driven by my favourite aunt, Elsie. In fact I think that Elsie would have been well up on my list of all-time favourite people. Which is why I could never hold a little thing such as being tipped on to the pavement against her.

I remember that we were collecting ’bons’ for Grandmother Cowin’s old black cooking range that was always burning away in their kitchen.

Bons were traditionally gorse sticks but we included any old twigs and other debris that we could find on our walks.

Anyway, I don’t exactly remember how it happened, suffice to say remember a few tears and scratched knees and, taking into account some additional time-scale evidence, I can be reasonably certain that at the time of my ’knees’ dive I was three.

Aunt Elsie was one of Grandmother Cowin’s two daughters.

Her sister, Tamar, and their eight brothers had all left home to find their own way in the big wide world. Elsie, as was often the case in those days of large families, had slipped seamlessly into the traditional role of carer and companion for her elderly mother.

This was also an ideal situation to do a spot of child-minding with her young nephew in those early days between being a baby and becoming a schoolboy.

So my memory baseline was firmly established in late 1943.

The memory is a wonderful thing. It is the part of the brain that can fascinate or frustrate and there is no doubt in my mind that if you don’t use it, you will be sure to lose it. But take as an example the distance between the Earth and the sun. What possible use is that fact to anyone? And who cares that the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second? The moon is 240, 000 miles from the Earth. So what?

My mother had arrived in the island from Dublin in 1938. She married my father in March 1940 and I was born in December of the same year.

I was two when my father was invited to help the British kill Hitler, an invitation that he could hardly refuse, and so it was 1946 before we were formally introduced.

I was to spend a great deal of time with Aunt Elsie and Grandmother Cowin and I still have the memories to show for it. They lived in an old house in a lane behind Athol Street which was called Shaw’s Brow.

I learned all about old houses that had no electricity, one cold water tap and a hole-in-the-ground toilet in the back yard.

They had always lived in Douglas and had never left the island.

I saw them skin dog fish and conger eels to dry and salt down for the winter. Prepare and cook sheep’s head, tripe, and cow heel.

There was a wood-fired boiler in the yard for the washing, and (to a young lad) a big wooden roller mangle to squeeze the water out of the washing.

They had never travelled, but they could tell some tales.

As time went on, I would explore the timber yards, the railway station, the gas works the market and around the lanes and shops in old Douglas. School could teach you to remember, but it couldn’t teach you memories.

A decade ago Pullyman - aka Michael Cowin - was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease, a condition that affects people in different ways. Michael discovered writing and Island Life is featuring some of his musings. Sometimes topical, sometimes nostalgic, read about life as seen through the eyes of Pullyman