Creating childhood memories

I used to love the snow.  From the promise of it on the snow symbol stuck on by Michael Fish, to staying out playing until we could no longer bear the feeling of burning hands in sodden woollen gloves.

I remember the final assembly before we broke up for Christmas one year at primary school, sitting cross-legged on the cold wooden floors and glancing out to see the first thick flakes come swirling out from the heavy sky.  It was completely unexpected and I remember the thrill inside and the excited anticipation that buzzed around the room.  There was the time (although my sister tells me we did it more than once) when we drove up to Ditchling Beacon on the South Downs, with snow drifts high at the sides of the lanes, to a field usually occupied by sheep – going down on the sledge with my dad and wiping out at the bottom was both thrilling and frightening.  I think this was probably the first time that we used the wooden sledge with metal runners that was under the Christmas tree one year, decorated with a large red bow – it remained unused for three disappointing snowless years.

Whenever it snowed we made the most of it.  It was the only time my sister and I were allowed to play out in the road. Lines of children on sledges being pulled together and  great big snowmen.  There used to be a photograph of us in the back garden on the climbing frame in the snow – only a centimetre or two had fallen – but enough to warrant staying out and having fun.

When we were older, living in a different house, we were allowed to go over to the park on our own with the sledge.  There were two short, but steep banks which went around two sides of the park, with a cricket pitch in the middle.  These made perfect sledge runs.  If the paths in between hadn’t been gritted and you avoided the benches, you could have an impressive double run – although I also recall the pain when the sledge flipped and landed on top of my friend and I, and we lay there like stranded fish, unable to move from the pain and the laughter, tangled up in each other’s scarves. I think it was on the same day that we discovered that spitting out a Fisherman’s Friend created a surprisingly satisfying brown hole in the snow.  In my opinion, the taste of the lozenge wasn’t worth repeating the experiment.

So we reach the nub of the problem – my second daughter, now six, who has an aversion to the cold, the outdoors and specifically snow.  Where once I felt excitement, I now feel nothing but rising anxiety at any forecasts of snow.  The thing which really bothers me is that she won’t even try to like it.   She has proper Gortex gloves lined with fleece, so no chance of getting cold hands.  She has waterproof trousers (a luxury I never enjoyed), decent boots and her clothes are far more practical than the jeans that we had to wear.  And when we do have to venture out, even if she is being pulled along on a sledge, she manages to suck any joy out of the moment and ruin it for everyone else.

So it was just my eldest and I who went sledging last weekend on the field behind our house – on the same wooden sledge from Christmas all those years ago.  Having forgotten how to steer in the interim years, I resorted to girly apologetic screams of “Sorry, I can’t steer!  Sorry!” at the same time as exhorting my daughter to “LEAN BACK” so that we could go faster.  My eldest loved it – her cheeks bright red, her wellies full of snow, her hands freezing in sopping wet hand-knitted gloves.  At the bottom of the slope, all you could hear was squeals of laughter.

Should I place so much emphasis on creating positive childhood memories for my middle child? Is it something which she will grow out of? I don’t want her to miss out on having great memories of snowy days.  Or at least, that is my memory of those days. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight her memories of snow days will be good ones too – baking biscuits together, snuggling up on the sofa to read a book and watching us sledging from the safety of a bedroom window, whilst leaning up against a warm radiator.

For now though, in the words of one sixth former yesterday when I mentioned that snow was forecast again, “I am so over it”.  For this year, anyway.

Not blogging, just updating

No time to blog today as I am marking some wonderful independent coursework essays from my Y13s on the poetry of Wilfred Owen and a modern novel of their choice.  They have chosen 6 different ones.  Today is the kind of day when teaching feels so worthwhile as you see all the efforts of the past year and a half come together into some brilliant succinct, perceptive and insightful essays (and only one disappointing one so far from someone who left it all too late…)

Last night I started typing up the bits of novel that have been on scraps of paper since the summer and I have updated my profile as follows…

I have always written for myself but never thought I had anything worth sharing.  My alter-ego is single, lives in a garden flat in Bloomsbury with lots of cats and has already published several novels.  Her existence is a long way from my actual life (which, I should add, is a very fulfilling and happily married one, revolving around teaching teenagers English in a secondary school and running with/after three young children).  After eight years working part-time (and therefore finding the head-space) I am now brimming over with ideas and I started the blog as a warm up.  The ‘real’ grown-up novel kind of writing is going on privately at the moment.  If I go quiet, I hope it will be because I am getting on with it, rather than that I have run out of ideas.

Treading lightly

Last week we received a phone call from my father-in-law to say that his Auntie Joyce had late stage ovarian cancer and only had a few days left.  The thing which upset me most after this phone call was that we had been told that we shouldn’t go to see her, as she wouldn’t know us.  The part that bothered me was that no one she knew – regardless of whether she recognized them or not – would be with her in her final days.

I reckon most people have known, or still have, an Auntie Joyce in their family.   (Technically speaking, there are several Greats in front of Auntie as she was well into her 80s).  A woman who has never married, never had children and lived a relatively sheltered existence on the periphery of the wider family, without income or a career or known outside her loyal circle of friends. In photos she is often at the back, on the edge, slightly blurred or awkward, looking away from the camera.  But at every family occasion she is there.  I have several photos showing the back of her head.  On our last visit in November, she showed us some pictures of her when she was out and about on various camps and hikes with the Guides (something she did for many years in the time before Health and Safety regulations kicked in) and for the first time I saw pictures of her as a younger woman, still self-conscious in front of the camera, but relaxed, one of the group of leaders and doing something she loved.

She came to live on the Isle of Wight with her mother, when her brother married into a family who owned a property there – my husband’s grandmother.  I don’t know the full history, but Joyce nursed her own mother until she died and by the time I met my husband over twenty years ago,  she was living in an upstairs flat with black metal outside stairs, part of the converted bakehouse behind the main house, with a small walled garden within the larger garden in which she grew flowers.  The grandparents died and Auntie Joyce stayed on, with summer visitors and family visiting when they could, but increasingly isolated as it became harder for her to get out to the places she loved.  When concerns were first raised about her mental health several years ago, a carer was arranged, but this stopped as it was interfering with Auntie Joyce, who wanted to be out, not stuck at home waiting for someone to warm up some soup!

It says a lot that my nieces were in the middle of a game of ‘Auntie Joyce’ when the phone call came to my brother-in-law.  Auntie Joyce was an essential ingredient in annual visits to the Isle of Wight .  Summer holidays were Auntie Joyce turning up with a bowl of freshly picked blackberries or some runner beans from her garden, or a flower arrangement in a jam jar, picked for the children.   Until her final years she was very active, down on the beach with us, the first into the sea and initiating games.  She was swimming all through the warmer months until advised by her doctor not to, as she was getting dizzy spells and she could only go when someone could be with her.

The adults, of course, will always remember her for the runner’s up prize she received in the local village hall festival for her treacle tart.  Hers was the only entry.  And her Robin Reliant which one day spontaneously combusted and melted onto the driveway, much to the relief of her family who were afraid for anyone else on the road when she went out .  But the children (and the children that those adults were) will also remember a very kind and generous heart, who sent unusual parcels at Christmas (the chintzy handkerchiefs she sent one year are a common source of argument amongst my girls, who use them as covers for their teddies), had photographs of all her nieces and nephews through childhood, marriage, their own children and their children’s children all around her living room in between hundreds of nick-knacks picked up at jumble sales and clippings from newspapers.  Her walls were covered with her own paintings and drawings – she had an exhibition at the local library last year which she was so proud of.  We bought one of her paintings there – a view from our favourite  beach – its bold use of pastels, child-like perspective and simple shapes recall another more innocent time,  the kind of joy to be found in books like Swallows and Amazons – there is a red boat just waiting for children (and Auntie Joyce) to swim out to and clamber in.

When we go to the Isle of Wight next week for her funeral we are taking a frying pan.  And dry firewood (I can hear Auntie Joyce telling me I should collect some today so that it will be dry by next week).  We will buy sausages from the butcher next to her flat, a loaf of cheap white bread from the small co-op where she worked for many years and walk down the lane to the beach, past the remains of her little woodpile from last summer and the beach will be deserted.  We will make a fire ready, next to the groin, out of the wind and attempt with one match to light the fire.  We will cook our sausages in a little oil, wrap them in the bread and eat them – just like that.  There will be marshmallows on sticks, if we can get some and then one of us will have something else sweet in our pockets for the children, probably chocolate buttons – as dessert.  There will, of course, be a proper wake with cut sandwiches and slices of cake, but a hotel isn’t right for Auntie Joyce who always looked most awkward in that kind of setting.

We will eat our funeral feast on the beach, probably in the drizzle and racing to finish before the tide comes in, and remember Auntie Joyce, who trod lightly on this earth, but left an impression on us.  A youthful, life-giving and above all, a joyful one.

Permit me a moment to cry.

Permit me a moment to cry.  My baby has stepped out on her own.  I have left her at pre-school: she is at the beginning of the conveyor belt of education and will be spat out at the other end at the age of 21, hopefully literate, numerate, clutching qualifications and surrounded by friends.

I didn’t feel quite the same sense of gloomy inevitability when my older two started pre-school. Perhaps it’s because it is January – dark anyway – and exacerbated by storms last night which kept us all awake.  The others began in September, a time of year that I have always found exciting and hopeful – fresh exercise books, colour on our faces and new stationery in plastic packets.  This was in stark contrast to leaving this morning in wet gear, avoiding debris being blown about and not fully recovered from colds.

It could simply be that she is my last.  As she starts on this journey alone, there is a clear sense of her no longer needing me in the way that she did when she was a baby.  My time as a ‘mother of young children’ is coming to an end and although I recognize that the challenges of having children becomes more difficult with greater risks, the all-consuming time where, literally, no time is your own, has come to an end.  For the first time in eight years I am able to sit down and write with no distraction.  The part of me which wants to be me again is crying out with joy– it feels like being ejected from a very long plane journey (often monotonous with little chance of proper sleep, nutrition or privacy) and seeing that there is a world to be explored.  I want to  jump, to take that leap, but I also see, with some sadness, the person left behind who, despite no experience of babies, embraced motherhood and spent eight very happy years in that apparently limited, but most fulfilling place.

As I left and asked her for a kiss and a cuddle for Mummy she said “no” and carried on cycling on the toy exercise machine.  Looking back as I walked out of the door, she was still cycling and smiling and entirely captivated by her own world.  I hope her journey takes her somewhere exciting.