Frozen in place at the end of the board, too scared to jump, too embarrassed to turn back.
In years to come it would feel like this moment encompassed two thirds of Tina’s childhood rather than approximately forty five seconds one Saturday afternoon when she was eight.
___________
Notes:
1. Written on July 7th, 2023
__________Our weeks are pretty regimented. The same stuff on the same days, never any deviation from the plan. Monday to Friday it’s school in the day, homework at night. Saturdays we go to the library in the morning, play boardgames and cards in the afternoon while Dad cooks us fish and chips for dinner.
On Sundays they take us to the woods and leave us there. We can do anything. There’s no one to stop us. Out come the claws, the teeth. Our shrieks and howls scare the pigeons from the trees, scatter the rabbits through the brush. We go wild in there. We lose our minds.
Then back home for bath and bed.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on January 2nd, 2023
__________i remember
when spinning around on the spot
was weirdly exhilarating
there is something wrong with childhood
__________
Notes:
1. Written on 4th April, 2022
____________________
Notes:
1. Written/made on 19th March, 2021
2. The pictures were taken by my parents
3. In the 80s
4. And contain me, my sister, and both my brothers
5. At various different ages
6. The music is Shock Value by Vowl Sounds
7. From their wonderful album Message Recieved
8. Which I really love
9. You should buy it
10. Or at least listen to it
This is the one thing I really, properly, remember from when I was a child. It’s not very interesting, it’s not even really a single memory — more likely it is a set of memories, overlaid on top of each other like the layers of paint built up over the years on our living room walls, on the window frames through which I so often used to look outside — but it’s so clear and total, a visceral genuine thing, in which I can see and feel everything in an incredibly solid way, rather than just in the abstract, rather than just as a story I’ve told over and over again until all I have left are the words of it.
Because of this I often wonder whether it is genuine at all.
When I was about five my bed was put in the living room for a while, at the front of the house where it loomed up near the pavement and looked out over the road. I’d broken my ankle falling off a wall, and my mother didn’t want me to have to hobble up and down the stairs.
Because of the injury I didn’t have to go to school, although as I’d only just started I didn’t really appreciate this fact in the way I would have done had I been older. In the mornings I’d be left in bed while my brothers and sisters would get ready for school (although my mother would still come in and open the curtains like she always did in her sweep of the house), and I’d lay there listening to them all getting ready, listen to the bickering, the radios and tape-players going on and off in their rooms, listen to them leaving, listen to them and all the other kids on the street talking to each other as they walked past my window.
It was sunny. It was always sunny.
(It was – it must have been – October. It was not always sunny.)
It was sunny. My bed was shoved up tight against the radiator by the window, and I’d lay there, bathed in heat from the sun shining in through the window and from the radiator heating its way through the quilt and the sheets. I’d lay there on my back, below the level of the window, looking up at this odd angle at the sky and the birds and the branches of next door’s tree, listening to the disembodied voices of all the other children fading away as they passed through our street, their dying laughter, their ever more distant shouts.
And then the silence. Inside the house and out.
Every day, I had this fifteen or twenty minute gap, this space of my own, before my mother got back from walking my brother to school, before she got me up and got me cleaned and dressed and fed.
These fifteen minutes where I’d be left all alone. Completely alone. Listening to the silence of the house, the silence of the street. Looking up at nothing, at the pale and silent sky.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on 27th April, 2015
__________