Open Writing

The way moss just springs out of the cracks in a wall: green and lush, good enough to feast upon as it glistens in the sun after rain. Why aren’t all the little crevices bursting with moss? They never are - like memories, every fold and crease in our brain tissue must hold the spores of every thought, every dream, every disaster we’ve ever known, yet how many of them take root and come to the surface to be recognised? Those rare beings who say they have total recall - would that be a blessing or a curse, I wonder?

When I was five, I used to walk by myself to a little kindergarten two miles away. There was a smallholding next to our house, and I used to look hard at the farmer because I knew he had six fried eggs for breakfast every day. I heard my mother say, and somehow I expected him to have a different look about him.

Walking alone was natural, even at that early age, but sometimes I would pause by Donald Smith’s house to see if he was well enough to go to school that day. His mother often said he wasn’t, but even then I can remember thinking that perhaps she was lonely and wanted him for company. She didn’t have a happy face. There was very little traffic in those days, and I would march along between more smallholdings and farmyards full of cows, a few pairs of houses and clumps of trees, until I reached the crossroads, with the “Fox and Goose” on the corner. Over the cross, and there were the tall dark cypresses that encircled the cemetery, and the elaborate iron railings that kept the dead people safe. So I thought.

A little further on, my school was right opposite the cemetery gates. It was just a sturdy private house with steps up to the front door, and Miss Moss would be waiting at the kerb every morning to receive us, a dozen little figures trotting stoutly along to learn spellings and writing, sums and reading. The lovely simplicity of it all. We used to save our cardboard milk bottle tops and wash them after we’d drunk our bottle of milk every day. With silver raffia and blanket stitch we used to transform them into precious gifts for our mothers, shining and magical: belts and shopping bags, tea-pot cosies and little pouches for anything at all.

Nobody bothered with Mother’s Day cards in those days, but when Christmas came, we had all made a present to take home for Mum. It was the same at Easter; if it wasn’t an afternoon of raffia, it would have been “Sew-a-chicken” time, with a plump chick hopping gaily out of a newly cracked shell, its orange beak wide open in a happy smile. And the shell - I always thought eggshells were meant to crack like that, into two clean halves with two exactly matching zig-zags. Strange, they never did in real life.

Because I loved it all, the memories are bright and clear, yet that isn’t always the way. You don’t automatically find the good memories on the top shelf They can be totally submerged by others that you wish with all your heart would melt away for ever.

At the end of the day Miss Moss would once again take us to the kerb and send us on our way, shepherding three or four across the road. One day, I was either not listening or I misunderstood, for I stepped into the road and was knocked down by a man on a motorbike: not your Suzuki 750 of today, which would surely have killed me. The man did brake hard, and I was knocked out for no longer than a few minutes. When I came to and was being lifted up from the road, I knew that I had disgraced myself, completely. My bladder had failed me, and as I wobbled to my feet I tried to hide the puddle with my smart brown shoes. Miss Moss looked me over for any damage, but my sense of shame, my humiliation in front of the little frieze of onlookers was beyond measure: one memory to over-ride all others.

By the time I was eight my little sister was four, and one day my mother told us that she would take us both to see “Cinderella” at the small cinema in the town. This was a first. I had never been to a cinema, and with no babysitter to call on, any excursion like that would have to be planned for a matinee. I had taken a note to school to say that I was to turn left on that particular afternoon, because I was to walk to the cinema and wait there for my mother. I had been told where to go and where to stand and wait, and that the bus would bring my mother and sister, but the time scale was something else. The sharp outlines of that particular memory are all too clear: a little girl is standing on the pavement. She has a fringe and glasses, and she turns and hops about as if she’s looking for something, someone. Whatever it is, it doesn’t materialise, and suddenly the little girl walks across the road to the bus-stop. She doesn’t run, there is no screech of brakes, she just walks straight across. In seconds a bus trundles up, the girl gets on, and is gone.

I didn’t know where the bus was going, but it was taking me in the right direction, away from a place where I had been afraid, and thought I had been deserted. How could I have known that the two people I was waiting for would disembark on the other side almost as soon as I had left? I had no money, but the kindly bus conductor perhaps saw my distress, for he let me stay until we reached the “Fox and Goose”, and from there I ran and ran until I was home.

There was no-one there, of course. I wonder how I got in? Some inner logic told me to go upstairs and get into bed: if I feigned sleep when retribution came, as it surely would, perhaps it would lessen my sense of guilt at having ruined the whole exercise. I do remember taking off my shoes, though why getting between the sheets with all my clothes on would protect me, I don’t know. If only I could find the next piece of the jigsaw: conjure up another cameo - what happened the next day, what did my Mum say when she found me? What did you say, Mum?

Why, oh why, do the little clumps of moss grow with such abandon on the wall?