Caboose

An interesting breakfast conversation with my father. I was talking about the fact that poisoned gas had not been used in World War Two, and the distribution of gas masks to civilians in Britain and Ireland had proved unnecessary.

I reminded my father (born 1939) that he'd told me how himself and my uncle Johnny, as boys, had played with these gas masks. (Quite hazardous, as they contained asbestos.)

"That's right", he said. "They were kept in this little cupboard built into the kitchen wall called a caboose." Pause. "You know, I can't have thought about that word in about seventy years. It didn't even impinge on the outer fringes of my memory."

I find that kind of thing utterly fascinating. I find all the twists and turns of memory fascinating, but especially that a memory can lie submerged for decades.