Into the garden where we played Banana Split, running over the plank bridge and returning by rope singing one banana two banana manically until we were spent with it and someone fell into the shallow, happy stream. Into the garden where the sun always shines unless it is Christmas when it snows and we take our toboggans to the top of the hill and fly the Cresta Run from woods to garden, clinging on at the ridge, flattening at the barbed wire, in one heroic effort once, one of us made it to the sitting room, arriving covered in icicles before the fire. But that was winter and we will get to that because this is summer and the meadow waves long and blonde and the bees hang lazily in dizzy warm air and we play Lions In The Jungle on hands and knees in vast fields, setting off from different corners, crawling and roaring and stopping for a scratch, padding through the Savanna of West Sussex until a rustling produces each other, chance meetings in an ocean of long grass. We’d go fishing with our father, the banks of secret rivers thick with brambles to catch trout that we’d release into the pond at home or eat for supper, he taught me how to slice and gut, I could never do the banging on the head. My sister squeezed a pot of yoghurt at my other sister in a game after lunch when we were supposed to be bringing pudding to the long pine table, covering her in white slosh, my father yelling at my mother, telling her to tell us to behave, my sister said she didn’t know the lid would come off. The excitement of being there, a precious jewel in a cold London crown, these weekends in the country, the smallness and the comfort, the dead mice under the carpet where the cleaner, in love with the gardener, would sweep them. Napoleon Timlick had jug ears and rode a motorbike, a flat cap and capable hands, his was the woodshed where I loved to sit, its dark order and damp and wood chips, the sawhorse and axe, there was always dry wood for the fire. And in the early years, the ones when I still had my cot, our housekeeper from London was there too, who would make shepherd’s pie and chocolate cake with an orange marmalade filling, I see her smiling as I enter from scullery to kitchen, I must be small because she is huge, the bulk of her apron, the curls of her dry set perm, her hands in a bowl, the aga warm, the red tiles, I can feel the cracks beneath my feet.
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"The dead mice under the carpet where the cleaner, in love with the gardener, would sweep them." This made me smile.