Zipping through the asteroid belt, bright splashes of high intensity laser beams flashed past us, drilling holes in the surrounding rock, barely missing our spaceship by mere inches. Giggling quietly as we flashed past the vaporised rock and dodging tumbling mountains of cratered monoliths, we flew our spaceship faster than we had ever flown before. My co-pilot (to him, I was the co-pilot as we never agreed on just who was the co-pilot and who the pilot) gripped his joystick tighter, pressing it even deeper into its wooden socket.
Our angled bow ploughed through the airless void. The asteroids begin to thin, as did the almost too bright stabs of lasers, still trying to skewer our tiny spacecraft as we pulled clear of the asteroid field.
"There!" I mumbled as loudly as I dared. "We head for that planet." I pointed. A bright blue orb no larger than a ten cent coin could just be seen at the bottom left of our forward screen. Ten cents was all it took to buy a nice packet of rice or mee, I thought to myself, smacking my lips as I turned to look at the clock on the wall in front of me where Mr. Peter Siew our class teacher stood, monotonously droning on and on about something. Not long now till I get my packet of mee.
*Bump!
My co-pilot leaned hard against me. "What?!!?" I whispered fiercely to him. "I'm diving the spaceship!" he whispered back louder than he probably intended.
"You two. Keep quiet!" the familiar and hated voice of our nemesis cut across the classroom. "And straighten your desks!"
"Yes teacher." my co-pilot and I chorused together, pushing our desks back together from the "V" shape they formed, and pulling out our two joysticks that were stuck into nicely chipped holes in the surface of our desks, joysticks that looked very much like boringly mundane pencils, now that the fun was obviously over.
My co-pilot nudged me, and I nudged him back. Yeah, yeah I know, I nodded at him. We still had our plasma bombs made out of hollowed out pieces of blackboard chalk, a small pile of that deadly ordinance sitting in our desk drawers, chalk that had been carefully and lovingly chipped and hollowed into very thin rings so that they shattered very satisfyingly when thrown against a wall, a blackboard... or against a hated teacher's back.
But we were spacepilots and no one ever said spacepilots were dumb. No, not us. We could throw our plasma bombs at our nemesis right now for having intruded into our awesome space battle, but that wouldn't be the smart thing to do, not right now at least, not with the whole class staring at us. Besides, recess was next. I didn't exactly want to spend recess in detention. Noooo... I wanted to go to the canteen and spend my ten cents on a packet of mee and then maybe trudge over to the other side of the school field and climb the sheer face of the school mountain until the bell rang for classes to start again.
My co-pilot nudged me again and I nudge him back, hard. "Stop!" I whispered at him. I didn't even particularly like him. We never played together except in class, and only because he was sitting next to me and we both had little other choice if we were to survive the boring class lessons and the even more boring teachers.
I can't remember his name now but I still remember his face, as well as that of my Standard Five class teacher, Mr. Peter Siew. We really should have been studying hard since it was the year of our country-wide Standard Five assessment exams, the results of which would see our placement into secondary schools but, but... those pesky aliens... the world needed someone to stand up to them and fight back! Who else could save the world. Who else would do it but for my co-pilot and I in our slightly beat-up desks angled into a "V" and our pencils struck into carefully chiselled holes in the desk surfaces in order for us to execute those high G turns and fantastical bursts of speed through interstellar space thumbing the pencils' rubber tips to fire our laser beams, zapping aliens as we go.
That was a magical time. Everything was a game, everything was full of possibilities, everything was just as an imagination away. Today, as I sit on my sofa with the TV on, watching as my son tries to overturn my telescope, yank down the curtains or eat the remote control, crawling around picking things up to put into his mouth, poking, twisting, yanking, pulling at anything that strikes his fancy, I can't help but think back to my time, when everything was so wonderfully new, a simple pencil could be a laser gun or a spaceship component, a piece of chalk could be crafted into devastatingly deadly bombs to be used against aliens, both real and imagined, a six feet high yellow earth mound on the other side of the school field could be an almost unscalable sheer mountain cliff (well it probably felt that high to an eleven year old kid)...
What would his future be, I wonder. What are the games he would devise? Where would his imagination take him? There is so much beauty in a child's simple games, their wide-eyed wonder at the world around them as possibilities after possibilities open up and yield to their explorations.
Enjoy your childhood my son, they are the most precious of times.
