The other day, I asked what this might be a detail from:

The answer? It’s a drum.

Specifically, a Yoruba Oba drum - a talking drum.

My parents brought it (and us) back from Nigeria in the late seventies, and throughout my childhood it lived in the front room, to be squeezed and tapped experimentally once in a while by small hands.

The point of a talking drum is to make noises which sound like words spoken in a tonal language - like Yoruba. The drum is played with a curved stick, while the drum is held under one arm and the drum is squeezed. The leather cords tighten, and the skin on either end of the drum is pulled taught, causing the tone to rise. It does sound eerily like talking, when played properly.

This drum has a past, though. This drum stopped me running away from home.

In the very early eighties, my mum, who was working as a journalist, had to go to Sri Lanka for over a month in the summer for a conference. My dad was busy as ever with work, so the family drafted in a distant cousin to help look after me, my brother and my sister during the summer holidays. Helga was from Switzerland, and had curly hair, which I liked, and a huge mustachioed boyfriend called Georg, which I didn’t.

In the finest fairy tale tradition, H & G were nice as pie when parental units were around, but wicked when they weren’t. Well, I say wicked…they were in London and in love, and not particularly interested in looking after three smallish children during a hot summer when they could have been rowing hired boats in Regents Park or checking out the buskers at Covent Garden.

One afternoon, after a screaming match with Helga (in which, to be fair, I did the majority of the screaming), I resolved to run away. That’d show her.

I packed a small backpack with clothes and books (always a priority) and left through the back door, down the ginnel, through the gate and out onto the road. I struck off in the direction of the shops around the corner. I turned right. I walked past the shops and then turned right again. I walked the whole way along the road and then turned right again. At the corner, I started to worry about the Oba drum. I didn’t want Helga to have it. I didn’t want to leave it behind, because it was precious and it belonged to our family, and I didn’t want Helga and her smelly boyfriend to touch it, steal it, have it.

I walked the length of the street, and turned right again, back onto our tree-lined street. I picked up speed, worried at the thought that H & G would have the drum. Ten houses later, I was home, sliding in through the back gate, up the ginnel and in through the kitchen door.

I hurried into the front room, where it smelled of warm dust from the carpet and overstuffed formal furniture, and wood polish, from the huge table in the middle of the room, never used (except for sliding along on our bottoms when we knew we wouldn’t be caught). By the fireplace stood the drum.

I hauled it up onto one shoulder. It was too heavy, big and awkward to carry along with my bag. I had to choose, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave without it, but I couldn’t take it with me.

So I stayed. I hid the drum behind an armchair, unpacked my bag, put the backpack back in the bottom of the airing cupboard, and stayed.

I’d managed to run away for all of fifteen minutes, never got further away than the other side of the block, and ended up back home because I was worried about the safety of a treasured family posession. Running away seemed like a good idea in theory - it was just a quetion of logistics - but not nearly so simple in practice - when emotions were involved. It seldom is.

Have you ever run away?