Another short story. This one is about childhood; not necessarily mine but some people may recognise themselves!  It follows first day at playgroup, nursery and school and ends with the first time you realise childhood is not perfect, not a fairytale. It’s not about loss but about the awkward transition from innocence to experience.

 

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a distant land, not so far from here there lived a girl. A girl who was not a princess but who never gave up hope that one day she may be. It was not the riches, the dubious celebrity, the contempt of Mrs. Jones, Mr. Smith, their kids, step kids, pet hamsters that she desired. It was not even the inevitably insipid looking Prince Charming that drove this dream. The thing she most wanted was to be like the beautiful, happy princesses from the animated films that had punctuated her childhood with their spinning dresses and sweeping hair and sweet songs and happily ever afters. Dancing in a field, friend of the birds, (strangely coloured, fat and charismatic birds, sometimes even clothed), singing like a nightingale (not clothed and possessing the normal levels of charisma for a bird) and utterly enchanting to look at, even though the happily ever after dress and hair hadn’t happened yet.

This was not her. She owned one dress from when she had been a bridesmaid to her aunt. Or it may have been one of those mum’s-best-friend-pretend-aunts. She wasn’t sure. She couldn’t dance, only very vaguely could she sing, her hair was short – not through lack of trying to grow it – and the only birds she ever even approached intimacy with were the caged budgerigars that sat in the corner of the living room. They were not friendly. In fact they were vicious, especially the girl. I suppose you would be too, stuck behind bars with only the frail male and a dangling mirror for company. That is not to say that her childhood was unhappy. She just wasn’t a princess. Which is probably why she never got her happily ever after.

Adults always say your childhood years are the best of your life. When you’re a child, you take no notice because you’re too busy living these seminal years. Too busy believing that behind every wall there may be a secret garden. Secretly hoping that one day you’ll find a hidden doorway behind your wardrobe and be led to a land of fantastic impossibility. You’ll follow the trail of wonder that will unlock a whole new world or at least reveal the next clue in your pursuit of the mystery. Every rabbit hole could be the rabbit hole and with each bend in the road a pristine possibility arises, sending you on the trail of everything you can ever imagine. Later you look back and think, “Yes, they were the best years but I’m glad I didn’t know it.” There is something about the unconscious living done as a child that creates a happy childhood. She was glad in some ways that the stupor of innocence had remained un-fractured for her for such a long time but in other ways she wished she had never had that long time. It’s clichéd but true, you really don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. Snatched.

Her childhood, then, was spent unconsciously, pre-cognitively enjoying herself. She was probably happy. She knew she was not unhappy. At the time it really didn’t matter. It wasn’t until later that the question arose and she couldn’t answer.

First day of playgroup. The loyal teddy bear with a plaster on its paw was lost. She didn’t cry but worriedly searched the dully lit room, floor slippery with spilt playgroup sand, until the bear was found.

“He got put in the packing-away box.” She told her grandmother when she got home.

 “Oh no!” replied the flowery nylon old woman. “Maybe teddy needs another plaster on his other paw? Let grandma fetch one for you. I won’t be a mo’.”

Gazing at the sunny yellow bear and rubbing the slightly spiky, coarse fur on his sawdust stuffed tummy, the fur that, incidentally, made it difficult to love this bear completely, no matter how hard she tried, she replied “Why? He wasn’t hurt in the packing-away box. He was only lost. He’s only got a plaster on this paw because that label fell off.”

Grandma smiled one of her half-smiles and hauled her gargantuan hulk around back to the cake she was decorating. Smoothing the glistening white icing over the crumbly sponge she fought to keep her temper. “She’s only a child. Only a little girl, Betty.” She attempted to calm herself but all the time the rage was screaming in her head. “You can’t give nice things to children. Things always happen. Labels fall off and everything goes to HELL. That was a Merrythought. Now who will know?” Merry thoughts indeed.

First day of nursery school. To begin with, she hadn’t wanted her mum to leave but the kind teacher showed her a red plastic easel with a vast sheet of paper clipped to it and a special holder for the paint pots so she barely noticed her mum slip away. Every morning from then on, after hanging her coat on her peg with the picture of a ball, segments of red, green, blue, yellow, she would paint a picture at the red plastic easel with the lumpy powder paint. Red, green, blue, yellow. Green, red, yellow, blue. The paint smelt like nothing else. She liked it and remembered it for a long time. The kind teacher, not so kind now, had carefully measured out the powder and mixed it with water from the white porcelain school sink. Blue, yellow, green, red. She was often mesmerised by the way the paint would foam into tiny clumps of bubbles on the thin, huge paper and then fizzle away. They were too small to pop. When the painting was dry, you could tell where the bubbles had been and the colour would slowly flake off. Yellow, blue, red, green. Touching the dried paint felt like nails down a blackboard. Maybe that’s why the kind teacher told her to stop painting the tops of the paint pots.

She made a friend called Jenny. Jenny had yellow hair, a short blue denim skirt, white socks with frills and luminous white patent leather sandals. Jenny was a completely different type of girl to anyone else in the nursery. She was fascinated by Jenny. Often in awe that Jenny was her friend. Years later, Jenny was seventeen, had a council flat and a pushchair.

One day, Jenny wore a necklace. It was a string of hundreds of different pastel coloured beads. Yellow, blue, pink, white. All tiny and perfectly formed. Sparkling and hanging around Jenny’s neck it made her look utterly grown-up. In the book corner, learning to read, she looked up as Jenny entered that cosy nook. It contained all the wisdom a four year old could possibly desire: Burglar Bill was there, and Betty. Biff, Chip and Kipper were teasing a Very Hungry Caterpillar and Winnie the Witch tutted at them from her rainbow house. Jenny sat down in a chair, shaped like a racing car, grinned, pulled the magnificent necklace to her mouth and began to eat it. Open mouthed she stared as this blonde haired demon bit into each bead in turn and happily crunched the small spheres of plastic. A shy child and always acutely aware of authority, she asked Jenny, “Are you allowed to do that?”

Jenny nodded and offered her a blue bead. She shook her head, placed her book back on the shelf and left the necklace munching necromancer to her sinister black art.

First day of primary school. It was playtime in the playground. This playground was enormous. A concrete football pitch or maybe more like two or three. The walls seemed to claw at the clouds. It was an impenetrable fortress, an exercise yard for the inmates. Huge and grey and red-brick and filled with the hilarity of children at play, most of whom would pass by her life unnoticed. Some of whom would pass through her life; briefly friends, briefly not friends, forever after indifferent.

In this inner-city outside world, a teacher with the same haughty appearance as a camel approached her.

“Are you an Archer?” asked the camel-teacher.

Puzzled, she did not immediately answer this peculiar woman. Images of a cartoon Robin Hood flashed through her head, Disney’s friendly fox, clad in oak-leaf green. Sherwood Forest. Maid Marion and her Merry Men. A bow and arrow. Am I an archer? She told the camel-teacher that she was not an archer.

“That’s funny” said the teacher, adding even more dark twists to the enigma “you look just like an Archer. It must be the hair colour. Never mind. What is your name?”

“I’m Amy Palmbec” she said.

The teacher’s camel-head swivelled away to the side, the long-lashed eyes flashed as she bared a set of uneven teeth as large as dinner plates and stained yellow, and darker yellow, by nicotine or perhaps by whatever the Dromedary amongst us eat. She brayed, “Danielle Carny! What are you doing, girl?!” She broke into a surprisingly speedy gallop, considering she was grasping a brim-full cup of coffee and with that she was gone. Remembering this lady hurrying away, watching the dimples of cellulite through the cheap, thin linen and her enormous buttocks struggle to stay within the undersized trousers, Amy thought, she must have been a Bactrian, what with the two humps.

This is how her childhood went. Much time was spent mystified but then much more time gave rise to salient discoveries: Mrs. Bactrian had been myopic enough to instantly relate the most recent ginger-haired intake of the school to another family, (inflicted with the same unfortunate gene), which had passed through the school previously. Amy was relieved to discover she did not look like an archer but mortified to find that she had the hair of an Archer. She also realised that the friend she had abandoned because she was seen to be performing the impossible, “The Greedy Bead Guzzler”, was no more of an abhorrence against nature than any other four year old child. The necklace had been made of sweets. And her grandma’s suggestion that teddy have another plaster was simply a loveless old lady trying to be loving.

Two younger sisters were born at remarkably regular intervals. Although Amy could not remember either being born, she always assumed it must have happened at some point because, all of a sudden, there they were. And she loved them and they played together and they fought together and laughed together and they were silly together and Amy’s sisters grew into two of the most beautiful people she had even known.

In amongst the muddled mysteries of this childhood, there lies a mute secret, shrouded in obscurity and of which Amy could never fully know the truth.

She lay awake one night in the bottom bunk, listening to her sisters’ sleep, hoping that she could soon join them but too many thoughts whirred in her head. They buzzed like a cloud of blue bottles trapped in a warm room. No, worse than that; the thoughts tumbled and jerked and writhed and whirled like dying flies as a poison attacks the nervous system. She climbed out of bed and went to stand at the top of the stairs. This plethora of worries swarmed from her mouth in a single sentence, “Mum? Dad? I don’t want to live in two houses.”

Earlier that day things had changed. It had started as a brilliantly normal day. They had walked to the local shops with mum. They bought vegetables, milk, sellotape, a newspaper and various other things required by a normal, happy family. Mum had even bought them all a cake. Each girl was pleased with her choice and keenly anticipated the moment they would be permitted to open the cake box and life out their own carefully selected, shimmering treasure. It was on the short walk home that mum suddenly said, “I’ve got something to show you.”

The house was decrepit, desolate, deserted, derelict, desperate. The floors were made of wood and holes and rot. The ancient, patterned wallpaper created a lattice work across the walls and look almost like an ornamental cage, designed to keep some restless being out, or maybe in. There were stains of every colour of the rainbow glistening on the ceilings, catching shreds of sunlight through the gloom of the newspaper that covered the rattling windows. And there was a bedroom. It was the only room that looked habitable and inhabited but who the habitué was still could not be fathomed. Mum sat down on the double bed, the navy blue covers were crinkled and unmade. Both pillows were indented, like two people had shared the bed the night before. Mum glanced down to a box, upturned and placed at the foot of the bed. Two bowls sat, staring at Amy. The half finished cereal in one of them seemed to move. It surged and gurgled as mum began to talk.

“This is my house. This is where I will live now.”

A sister began to cry and mum encircled her with a tentative cuddle.

“It’s nothing to be upset about,” she whispered. “Nothing has really changed. I’ll still see you everyday and really, well, I’ll just come here to sleep. Your dad and me… well, we’re still friends but…” she faltered, “… well, I’ve just got my own house now. And when we… erm, I’ve got your bedroom sorted out, you can come and stay whenever you want. And your dad and me we both love you all three so, so much and I promise this will be ok.”

The young mum looked at each of her girls in turn as she attempted to form a reassuring smile and fend off the rising well of salt water behind her beautiful scared brown eyes. Amy was still glaring at the leering cereal bowls and all she could think of to say was, “Why are there two breakfast bowls left out?”

Mum smiled and lied, “Oh, Goldilocks! I was hungry this morning!”

Amy’s mum was right. It wasn’t too different from before and the childhood continued. A little more consciously but still, it wasn’t sad or tragic or anything different from millions of other childhoods around the world. A nice man appeared and began to live with mum. His children became regular playmates of Amy and her sisters. There was a mean girl at school. She had tangled greasy hair and always smelt like stale bread and wee. She tried to tease Amy about her mum. She would prance around Amy in the toilets at play time like a wicked imp and sing, “Your mum’s having an affair with Nick Morton’s dad.” Amy never said anything to this girl. She wasn’t ashamed and she knew it wasn’t true because her dad knew. She didn’t speak because the girl was awful. She was mean and putrid and filthy and she did not deserve a response. Amy suffered the taunting until the urine-soaked halfwit got bored and went to tease the child whose mum had just died.

Nothing against time’s scythe can make defence and as he said a hundred times over, time moves on. The purity of child’s beauty departed from the faces of Amy and her sisters. It was usurped by the awkward mask of puberty and all its ravages. It transforms all but the most confident into ugly spectres of former selves, not wanting to be seen but hoping they’ll be noticed. And once upon a time…

 

 

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