We lived in a flat above my parents’ hardware shop for a few years. At the end of the parade was a narrow alley next to the bakery where the vent from the ovens pumped warm air day and night, laden with the intoxicating smell of freshly baked bread. The alley was thick with brambles and I remember standing there in my school uniform under the warm air vent, breathing in hot bread and eating handfuls of sticky, purple blackberries in absolute bliss.
Shiny green apples hung over the high brick walls of the big houses on Sayerland Lane a mile or so from our house. I could reach them if I propped my red Raleigh bike against the wall and stood on the fat saddle, feeling the heat through my clothes as I leant against the warm bricks, stuffing my pockets with apples.
And along a hedge in a field no-one ever used (so it was fine to jump over the gate and go blackberrying), sloes, sloes, sloes and haws and more sloes, and then one tree with giant sloes which had to be tasted to see if they dried your mouth out like sloes, but they were sweet and rich. I picked a bagful and mum made damson jam with my damsons from my secret damson tree every September for years. How did I know they were damsons? In the 1970’s there were damsons in wooden trays outside the greengrocers in September. Perhaps that was it. Maybe they were in my much loved Ladybird book, ‘What to look for in Autumn’ alongside ominous pictures of fly agaric toadstools and deadly nightshade.
Somehow I just knew about the outdoor world from a young age. Indoors was for grownups, places where you had to behave appropriately; be clean, be quiet, be tidy, be good. Outdoors in the fields and woods beyond our estate (that’s a housing estate, not a country estate…) I could do pretty much as I pleased. I loved the outdoors. And I loved September outdoors especially, the month of my birthday, of sweetly scented velvety red roses in neat rectangles around the bungalows, of amber slanting sunlight through the trees by the old railway line and free food for the taking if you knew where to look.
Somehow I managed to spend most of the next thirty years indoors. Isn’t that what being a proper grown up involves? Going to work. Sitting at a desk with a PC monitor, filling in boxes or writing emails, attending meetings, looking smart. Coming home to cook tea and watch TV. Booking a much needed fortnight’s holiday in the sun, getting burnt on the first day and lurking under a sunshade for the rest of it. Perhaps another week away in winter if there’s enough money, but then, there’s always a room needs redecorating.
Now I know for many people that’s the life they really, truly want. You stay dry and warm and winter and comfortably cool in summer. Your income doesn’t fluctuate with the weather. Your hands stay clean and smooth and your skin wrinkle free, spared the ageing effect of a daily dose of sunshine. But I craved the outdoors and always had. I was sent on a residential management course when I was about 25. We were each asked to talk about something that meant something to us. I wandered through the grounds and took in a fallen branch, a leaf and an apple. I talked about nature and what it meant to me. Everyone else talked about their family, their house, their car. I knew I was an outsider even then, in more ways than one.
The outdoor life won the argument 8 years ago this week, at the back of a terraced house in Tamworth. Two months of planning and three days of hard toil in the heat of September’s sultry embrace landed me a little glass trophy, six bright pink t-shirts and a chance to step outdoors for good. I have never once thought of packing it in and heading back indoors.
It’s over forty years since I went damson picking in that field. We have our own damson trees now and a freezer full of damsons, waiting for their date with the jam pan (and the gin). It’s twenty seven years since our newly wed bride Hazel was born, and at her wedding to James in early August her five extended families, those of her mother, father, step-father, stepmother and new husband shared her day in love and friendship.
Later in the same month, at Dave’s 50th birthday amongst so many friends, thinking how improbable it would have seemed at his 30th that he and I, then both married to others, would spend his 50th together after 17 years of marriage to one another.
Then today, confirmation that Holly, our youngest has passed her Occupational Therapy degree with a first. Like so many younger siblings, her light burns more slowly, but no less brightly than her older sister’s.
Between these sparkling days of celebration, the season’s wheels have turned as usual in the nursery and garden. Plants have flowered and faded, show displays have been built and dismantled. I just haven’t really felt like writing about any of it here – my thoughts have been rolling back into the past and thinking about how life can turn on a moment. On a moment of eye contact. On a fleeting touch. On an idea, a vision, a belief in a different future – a future that fits your instincts and passions.
I’ve been thinking also about the slow, inexorable passing of time and the inevitable slipping of events from excited anticipation into memory and photographs. On how vital it is to find a way to be the person you have to be. And how wonderfully lucky I am right now to be living the life I want to live and sharing it every day with the people I want to live it with.
2 Responses to “August, and everything after.”
I love this post. Your memories of your childhood are as vivid as mine and, like you, inside was for grown ups and outside was where I wanted to be. I still find that, when we pause for a cup of tea, my husband sits inside with the tv or the laptop and I sit outside for as long as there is enough warmth for it to be tolerable. I always put my need to be outside down to the years I spent in New Zealand where outside is generally welcoming as opposed to ferocious but maybe it is more deeprooted than that. I too am very aware of the passage of time and of the necessity to live a life that fits. I have just had a big (60) birthday and find that close to incomprehensible. That, and the recent death of my mother and the serious decline of my father, really concentrate the mind though. So much that is in my head is in your post today.
Lovely comment Elizabeth. I'm a little younger at 53, but I share your sense of incomprehension about arriving at late middle age and not feeling in the least bit as if I belong here, despite the very obvious physical evidence that I do. I feel I left it a bit late to 'do my own thing' but I least I got round to it while I still could.