My eldest promised to ring last week. Still no call.
Bloody kids.
When they are babies they tread on your lap, and then, when
they grow older, they tread on your heart. Don’t know who said that, but,
whoever it was must have had children of their own.
Here I am, sitting in my garden, in the first bit of winter
sun, contemplating my olive tree, slightly battered by the winds. Next door’s
cat’s mother was run over by a car. Now he keeps following me around like some
lost soul, jumps on my lap and kneads my ample stomach when he gets the
chance.
A month ago I was behind the Leylandii hedge, chopping down
a rotten one. We’ve already paid a fortune for some of them to be removed, so I
was determined to transform this sub- standard housewife into a heroic
lumberjack and hacked and sawed away until I thought I’d have a heart attack.
I was not glowing, I was pouring sweat.
It occurred to me, puffing
away, that if I drooped dead behind the hedge, who would notice I was gone?
Husband away, again, and youngest would probably just come home, talk to his
friends through the bloody X box and relish the chance to prepare his own
dinner rather than suffer his mother’s offering.
At least the cat would miss me and sniff out my rigor-mortised
cadaver.
Boys, don’t you love your mother?
Ah, well, at least there’s no fear of either of them developing an
Oedipus complex.
Raising children is like planting olive trees.
You nurture them, protect them from frost, feed and water
them and then they grow up and leave, without as much as a thank you. Eldest
climbed down from my lap years ago, leaving me to sort out the fluff and debris
is his bedroom nest.
At least my trees are well staked in the ground and can’t wander
off.
Perhaps old Voltaire was right when he said that the best
thing to do in life was to cultivate one’s garden.
Hm.., thinking back, between you and me, I was a frightful
child.
I remember the time when my mother, foolishly, left the old
barrel- shaped Electrolux Hoover in the lounge, by the fireplace. It had,
miraculously, both a suck and blow switch. What idiot devised that?
‘Why don’t you try the blow switch and aim the hose into the
ashes of the fireplace?’ I innocently suggested to my gullible younger brother.
He did. Oh God! The mess! The laughs! My mother’s rage!
She cornered my brother half way up the stairs. My last
vision of him was being thwacked, like some upturned spider, with flailing legs
and arms, on the landing. I locked myself in the bathroom and stayed there
until she’d calmed down.
And then I remembered the Terrible, The Awful Thing I’d
done, like that maid in Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help.
We lived with my grandfather, who was getting on a bit and
whose trips to the bathroom, now, how shall I put this, did not always have the
desired felicitous outcome.
Do you remember those Beano comics where they used to give
away strips of coloured plasticine? Well, one day, when I felt particularly
bored, I devised a cunning plan. I carefully moulded the brown plasticise
into a suitable croissant shape, planted it at the foot of the lavatory (I love
that old-fashioned word) and waited.
Sure enough, my mother’s screams were followed by my father
gathering said deposit up in a roll of newspaper (why didn’t he just flush it
away?). My poor old grandfather was valiantly pleading his innocence to my
incandescent mother whilst my father threw the mess into the fire.
Whoosh! The instant blue-ish flames alerted Sherlock that
something didn’t quite add up here. During the time he was investigating with
the poker, I’d hot-footed it to the next field, climbed up the old oak tree and
stayed there for hours and hours...
Ah yes, we never quite escape from those dear enveloping tentacles of family. It reminds me of Larkin’s poem, This be the verse :-,
They fuck you up, your mum and
dad.
They may not mean to, but they
do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Oh, it’s beginning to rain – no doubt youngest will ring me
for a lift from the station and sit silently texting his friends in the car.
Feel like taking a cap and asking for tips.
What’s the time? Oh damn, I still need to do my daily phone
call to my 97 year old father. He
expects one every day.
I’d better get on with or he won’t stop moaning....
