Ian McMillan: After all these years, I’ve still got stars in my eyes

My dad is driving, slowly as ever, and my mother is sitting next to him in the front. My brother and I are in the back and we’re driving across a lonely road over some moors or by some wide fields, and I’m looking at the stars.

Memory twists reality, of course, and ties it in knots and fancy bows but I’ve never seen so many stars as I saw that night; clusters and constellations, shooting stars and comets, the Milky Way and something that could have been a galaxy whirling in space.

“Have you seen all the stars, Dad?” I asked. And Dad said: “Yes, and, do you know what? All those stars could have gone out years and years ago because it takes the light so long to reach us.”

I was amazed, and he proceeded to try and explain the concept of light years to me, but I must have nodded off because the next thing I can recall is waking up in my bed at home on Barnsley Road and opening the curtains to look at the stars but of course they weren’t there; or in fact they were there, but I couldn’t see them because it was light. They hadn’t gone out: I checked with my mother. She knew everything, like mothers do.

Since then, I’ve always been fascinated by the simple act of looking up on a clear night and staring at the stars.

This time of year is great for sky-gazing, too. A clear November evening when you can see your breath is perfect for the most amazing show you’ll ever witness for free. I remember standing in our back garden with my dad once when I was little, and in my head it’s sometime after the gazing-through-the-car-window recollection.

I’m holding his hand and he’s pointing out constellations like The Plough, and the three stars that make up Orion’s Belt, and the bright object that could be Venus, and the reddish object that could be Mars. I was small but I felt smaller, and I was young but I felt really young.

He tried to explain to me again about how light travels, and how long ago it was that the light had left the star and that it had taken millions of years to get to us and the star might be out now, but I couldn’t bend my brain around that idea.

Then, on a kids’ TV programme that could well have been Blue Peter, one of the presenters got talking about the solar system. I sort of understood what the solar system was and I could name the planets and I even knew how many moons Jupiter had got, and they were demonstrating how to make a model of the Solar System in your own back garden. I know: they assumed that all their viewers had back gardens.

In the centre of the Blue Peter Garden they put a big beach ball to represent the Sun. They then put a series of smaller balls at specific distances away from the beach ball/Sun. A tennis ball was the Earth, a ping-pong ball was Mars, a few feet away; a football was Neptune, and so on. Right on the edge of the garden, where you could hear the sound of traffic, a marble represented poor old Pluto, still a planet in those days, downgraded since to being a lump of rock.

I was amazed by this simple experiment, so I determined to try and recreate it in our own back garden, trying to space my “planets” out accurately according to a map I found in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia.

The trouble was, because we weren’t a particularly sporty family, we didn’t have that many balls in the house, so I improvised. The wheelbarrow we’d just got with our Co-op Dividend money represented the Sun.

One of our John’s old Kit Carson annuals was Mercury, even though he pointed out that there were no rectangular planets. Or planets with one wheel at the front, for that matter. One of my mother’s balls of knitting wool was the Earth, and Mars was a banana. Neptune was a model of Frankenstein’s Monster that I’d made but never bothered to paint and Uranus was my dad’s trilby. Pluto was a marble, of course, at the top end of the front garden near the main road.

To be honest, it looked less like a representation of the solar system and more like a surrealist art installation called Untitled VIII.

So now I can’t wait to go into the garden with my grandson, Thomas, and look up into the sky. Those stars have been there longer than the debt crisis, that’s for sure. And they’re more awe-inspiring to look at…