Four
Bliss in Kent. Too young still for school, only child, run of the house and my mother. Our beautiful, long garden, all grass and apples as it should be in Kent. Walking round to the shops with Mum, a little parade of late fifties shops, butcher, barber, the Co-op, all with men in white coats who seemed very cheerful, sane and friendly. They were really like that then, you didn’t need Camberwick Green or Postman Pat. Walking home again through the bluebell woods with real bluebells and feeding the ducks in the stream. Tea, jam and bread and Listen with Mother, falling gently asleep to the sounds of my Dad coming home from work.
Things were changing. Mum got a job. They put me in nursery school - horrific. Other children! The toys all grubby from their sticky hands, a pathetic junk-filled tiny garden, crawling with brattish other people’s children. The most disgusting lunch I’d ever had, greasy mince slopping into anaemic mash. I stood by the front window waiting desperately to be collected. The stupid nursery woman told my mother that I’d have to learn how to mix. No way! I refused to speak, wouldn’t eat, threw a tantrum in my bed. Next morning my mother phoned her new job and gave it up.
Early that summer one of the Gods sent a message. I was in my perfect garden, late afternoon, bees buzzing round mellifluous flowers, when nature very suddenly turned on me. The deep blue sky turned almost black in half a minute and in the distance I heard an explosion. I ran to the back door. It was locked. Another half minute and it was now almost completely dark. Then everything flashed for a second followed swiftly by the loudest, most earth shaking noise I’d ever heard. I bashed furiously on the back door as large blobs of water began to strike me from all angles. Finally my mother came running to the door and let me in. She looked pale. It was a Kent storm. For the next hour or so we cowered together in the living room, no electricity except the uncontrollable lightning. This deluge signalled the end of my early childhood and the beginning of the contrariness of life.
Within two months we had moved to Hertfordshire, I’d turned five, started school and might just have well been on another planet. At least I got it all over with at once. I didn’t know which thing to be most traumatised by, so I didn’t really have a trauma, just complete bewilderment. I didn’t know that I’d never see my beautiful garden again, that for the rest of my life I’d often try to return there in my head and my dreams and that I’d never, ever sleep quite as peacefully again as I used to before the storm.
Copyright Bare Nibs 2004