My favourite games were Scullery Maid, Queen, and Ferryman. All of them in service. For Scullery Maid I polished for hours the silver, gathered from about the house in my small arms and taken to the basement on a tray along with my copper coin collection, a huge jar tipped out on the big chest freezer in the ticking laundry room, the wooden rack heavy with drying clothes, the rope holding it fast out of reach. I drew the ironing stool up to the white wall, my small legs put aside to get close, the chest lid spread with copies of The Guardian to keep it clean of Brasso. How I worked. Under threat of an unnamed mistress - they were in charge, they were mean, I was the lowest of the low - I bent over my chore, my fingers sticky as the silver and copper shone. I would feel the duress of it. I would wipe my brow and wonder at my fate. The silver shining and arranged on a tray, the coppers left behind, I carried it to the dining room where The Queen lay asleep on the back of the brown sofa. She was oblivious to the servants who kept me down, none of this was her fault. Woken but not cross, her head raised to watch, I laid the silver about her, covering the sofa, balancing a jug, a tankard, a small oddly shaped platter around her tabby body. Her tail was curled neatly. She approved and blinked slowly. She smiled her tabby smile. These were my acts of my devotion, My Queen who deserved daily worship, whose beauty the stars bowed down to. And the blue walls made her regal and the windows smeared London grime against trees and the Duke of Argyll glared with stony eyes from beneath his wig and she closed her eyes and rested. I took my skateboard from its lean beside the umbrellas in the hall. Outside, a different tempo altogether. The heavy front door I closed quietly, my jeans already old, I held the railings at one end of the street and announced, in a cap I wasn’t wearing, that the ferry was leaving. The sound of the docklands loud in a silent leafy street. Horns of ships blaring and at my feet the queues of harried ant families. Fathers in bowler hats, mothers holding children, older ones linking to younger, suitcases held four a piece. They crowded aboard, they were going on holiday among the regular work crowd who did this journey daily. And we were off, my hands grabbing black iron railings, the skateboard clattering over paving stones, the sound of it as my palms turned black, I kept my feet still in case to crush them. Rattle rattle hard plastic wheels across uneven slabs, a father grabbed by a mother, her face a panic, the father stoic weighed down by the weight to be calm. The suitcases under his arms almost falling, children clinging on and screaming as the waves crashed, half excitement half fear. My fingers around the moulded black spears that kept the garden away from the street, reaching for the next and the next, the evergreen hedge of tiny leaves poking through, brushing my body, I kept close in to let the nannies pulling children home from kindergarten pass. By the end of the day I had ferried those ants, the ant families and workers from one end to the other fifty times, such hard work, no boats had sunk, no one fallen overboard, everyone delivered safely. And my hands were black with London dirt and I stained the walls coming in, dragging my fingers across paintwork.
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Gleaming silver prose.
Oh the games we played as we were told. Get outside and play and don’t come in until it’s getting dark. It was a fabulous thing for our imaginations and we got up to all sorts ! My brother didn’t mind trying the mud pies 🥧