Picking apples in the orchard, being sent to the fruit cage, I still can’t eat red currants. My mother baking bread, aways the hole in it, she couldn’t figure it out. Warm from the Aga, still on the cooling rack, butter, and strawberry jam. Jars and jars of her pickle and jelly in the larder. I think she was different here to the architect in London, head in hands, exhausted. Here she baked and gardened, we got her riding again. Jerry and Siri, son, and mother, he enormous and grey, she tiny and Siamese, always meowing. My marble run in the upstairs hallway. Playing tiddlywinks on the sitting-room carpet, scrambling in the hanger where the Gremlins lived. Those woods that dripped in August, the steep rise of them, the cavernous drop to the stream that sprang from a spring we would trace, splashing our way up river, climbing over fallen trees, inching along logs that had become moss covered slippery bridges. The sand of the riverbed, the clarity of the water, the stone chalk and grey, pheasants squawking, rabbits hurrying, badger dens, and deer in sudden light. The cuckoo calling in summer. And desperate to pee, my siblings older, faster, I sat down in the current of water to hide that I’d done it already and ran home to pretend that I’d fallen. My mother washing my jeans in the sink and saying again and again, what happened? until my shame was properly explained, I wished she’d stop asking. Supper in the kitchen at the square Formica tables that wobbled on the uneven floor, the chair with horseshoe shape in its seat, the curtains drawn along the long window of many little windows, a tiny sill for each. Lighting the fire, cleaning the candle sticks, turning napkins into bishop’s hats for the dinner parties I would miss. My father’s margarine decanted into tiny round white pot and put beside his place at one end, my mother would be at the other. Shared friends except if they were Tories like my father, she sat them under the low beam in the dining room so that on rising after lump fish and venison and wise cracks about war and how Thatcher was the best, they’d smack their stupid heads and leave bleeding. I’d listen from my bed, sometimes the stairs, peering through wooden railings, pyjamas, feet bare, politics exchanged with the gravy and burnt carrots, how he laughed, and she raged, the guests drunk, the candles low, you can always give up your horse, a jibe that got her, his money, her fire.
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Wow, so much happening here, more that you'd imagine there'd be space for. Reading it is a bit like entering the Tardis and finding that it stretches for ever. Wonderful.
Catching up on these marvelous posts: Yes, I see you.