Jul 9, 2004
Once
Just once.
I was six. We lived in an Edwardian semi on a leafy avenue in North Kensington, two stories at the front, three at the back, with a cherry tree facing the street and a long garden wild with bramble and butterfly bushes to the rear.
Our bedroom was at the back, my sister and I. It was square, with enormous blue seventies flowers on the wallpaper, and although the end of the decade was fast approaching, the flowers remained well into the eighties, after I’d moved to my own room at the front of the house, a room which itself featured a glaring orange and gold intertwining vines print. What was it about the seventies and gigantic, garish nature?
Our bedroom was the scene of plentiful creativity – we were forever dressing up, putting on plays for each other and anyone who would watch, inventing and telling and enacting elaborate sagas involving various rag dolls, “souvenir of…” culturally-attired dolls (brought by well-meaning visitors from overseas) and ancient, homemade wonky-limbed knitted stuffed bears.
Once, in summertime, I made it snow indoors by sending plumes of talcum powder into the air, coating the entire room with a thin layer of scented powder and turning the air thick and misty as my little sister sat in the middle of the room with white eyelashes, alternately laughing and coughing. It took us ages to get the last of the powder from the cracks in the floorboards, and for months afterwards, every time we took the dressing-up clothes out for a play, there’d be a cloud of scented mist hanging over us.
There was a big sash window in the back wall, overlooking the garden, three storeys below, and beyond the peach and crabapple trees that marked the end of the brambles, the seven foot wall over which we used to vault to gain access to the magical, unexpected half-acre meadow which lay beyond. Imagine that: in the middle of London, a meadow, wild with thistles and long grass and flowers, with a family of escaped rabbits running wild and an area of grass just big enough for a decent game of rounders. Imagine how perfect, how magical.
When standing at the window, and looking straight ahead, I could see between the roofs of two houses across the meadow a glimpse of the Westway, in the distance. As I backed away from the window, in the direction of the door, the framed picture of the Westway across the rooftops appeared to increase in size. As I walked towards the window again, it shrank: my first introduction to perspective.
One day, in summer, the family was sitting out in the back garden. My sister was probably splashing in a paddling pool. My brother was probably climbing the peach tree. I was probably alternating between the two, or tunnelling into the prickly brambles to create a hidden, leafy cave. My mum was with someone, I remember – a friend, or one of her sisters – sat on a picnic blanket and watching us play.
For some reason, I decided to go inside – running along the side passage, up the stairs by the back door into the kitchen, through the hall, up the main stairs and into our bedroom. I don’t remember what I was doing, or why, but I hauled open the sash window in the bedroom, and pushed at the windowbox on the ledge, trying to make room enough for me to be able to sit on the windowsill alongside it, so I could dangle my legs over the edge and wave at my family below.
The windowbox went tumbling down three storeys, and crashed in an earthy, pottery, flowery mess in the garden below, mere feet from where my mother was sitting. She looked up, horrified to see me on the second floor, frozen with one leg out of the window and a guilty look on my face.
I have never known how she managed to do it, but within a second she was behind me in the bedroom, hauling me back in through the window and onto her knee, her hand swift and smart on my bum.
Thwack. One. Don’t ever.
Thwack. Two. Do that.
Thwack. Three. Again.
Then I burst into tears. And so did she.
And she never did it again. And neither did I.
