Notes from the wrong end of Life… “Cry havoc and let loose the darling buds of May”.
I remember this Summer…
Something I’ve learnt from being at the wrong end of life is that summer is more of a promise than a reality. The memories of summers past are more significant than the prospect of summer’s present. I suppose, at this point in my life I have more summers to look back on than I have summers to anticipate and it’s only natural the summers lost are things to be wistful over.
When I was at the other end of life summers were longer, hotter, more filled with life, and they stretched on and on for what seemed like forever. Always surprising me when it slipped into winter (to me Autumn and spring are just winter lite).
When my parents were behaving like parents should, which, to be frank, wasn’t as often as they ought to have done. Then the break from school put me to spending long warm days scuttling about in the woods and fields behind my house doing child things, building dens, writing down the different sorts of birds I saw in my notebook, watching the trains shoot past on the railway track the end of our road, falling off my bike all too frequently — only having one working arm made riding a bike a precarious activity. I would often crash and usually, this meant my disabled arm would break, it would snap like a twig. I would hear it before the pain came.
Likewise, I would fall out of trees and tumble down into ditches. Summer was a patchwork of precarity and pleasure. Interspersed with dreadful organised outings which my father would insist on arranging and then make us take, against everyone’s better judgment but his. There would be trips to the Norfolk seaside, barren, and grey I can’t recall any of those trips to the seaside being sunny. But nonetheless, we would set out in the car. My father cheerfully blustering.
“Don’t worry It’ll clear up later”.
It never did. We would sit on a windswept beach eating sandwiches with sand in them and wait for the sun to appear, even then as I recall, I managed to enjoy myself as children will. But largely I remember long, long summer days exploring and whatnot.
Then suddenly my father decided on a different kind of organised outing. He moved us all to Africa, ignoring the trauma of the experience, for that is another tale entirely. Summer then took on a completely different meaning, forever eclipsing the notion of a gentle British summer. The days were scorching and the sun relentless in its attempts to cook me to a crisp. The wildlife was altogether more hostile and bad-tempered, not to mention potentially deadly. We all lived in isolated puddles of air conditioning.
There was a swimming pool from which each morning we would have to scoop huge bullfrogs and the occasional snake before entering. Most summer days would end with a thunderstorm; huge drops of rain drumming along the dirt road as they marched past the house. I would run along in front of them trying not to get wet. I always failed. Nonetheless, for the very few years we were there the summers were still fun, just a different kind of fun.
After two years my mother tired of my father and of life in Africa and dragged us back to the UK. From then on summers shortened and life became far less pleasant. But still, the pleasures of youthful summer outweigh the pleasure of summers these days. Perhaps that is the way things are meant to be.
There are many things about being at my end of life that are perplexing. Foremost is the speeding up of time. Second is the increasing invisibility that attaches to one’s presence like an unwelcome cloud in a blue sky. One literally becomes unseen. People walk past and do not see you. To the young, the old are a foreign land. One they will never visit or so they think.
Nowadays, summer's lease has all too short a date. I seem to wait for those few hot sunny days that comprise our summer; only to be disappointed by the brevity of the season and its complexion.
This particular year I find myself waiting for summer with something like my old childish anticipation. Why? Because this last winter has been particularly onerous and it has raised some of my childish memories. I’ve was cold in those winters because we had no heating. This year, I along with many other people could not afford to turn the heating in my house up to a level of warm and enduring comfort due to the phenomenal increase in fuel prices brought about by foolish energy policies combined with greedy fuel companies. At no point in this last winter did I put my heating above 16° which meant I wasn’t freezing cold but I was no longer warm and this reminded me of childhood winters with my mother shouting when I complained about the chill.
“Put on another sweater.”
This last winter has been a long and very uncomfortable one, obviously not just for me but for many people at least in this country. Food prices have rocketed skyward and we’re given a variety of reasons for this, but I can’t help thinking, judging by their hugely increased profits, there’s a degree of gouging and profiteering going on by the big corporations who in all but name, control our lives.
Governments seem helpless or unwilling to step in and moderate these increases (or just not allow them at all). All this has meant a very uncomfortable winter, reminiscent of winters of my childhood and I suppose it’s this, at least in part, which started me thinking about summers past, and in this one instance, I will welcome what short respite from our travails this summer can provide.
And inside me a child still burbles, still finding joy in exploring an unknown wood or poking about on an unfamiliar beach collecting sticks and stones although these days no longer breaking my bones.
