ABSTRACT
“I’d better begin nearer the beginning” Alice said. And began the story that went on for many sessions, because she found that she enjoyed telling it and she began to realise that she wanted to hear it herself.
I was born in my grandparents’ house in a small town further north. It was a mining village with streets of small terraced houses with back yards that are familiar now in films like Billy Elliot. My grandparents stayed in their house where Grandad also had his doctor’s surgery and, although my parents moved us to very different surroundings, I remember the smell of coal fires and the cracks in the footpaths in those depressing streets. Yet now I come to think of it the streets were not depressing to me then. I skipped over the cracks as Granny took me to the playground. I must have been about four when I first became aware of the joys of Granny’s playground. There was a huge slide which took all my courage to climb. There were boys there, urchins with torn short trousers and full, rich Geordie accents, or rather dialects. I spoke “posh” and wore skirts as little girls did. They threatened to push me off the top step just as I launched myself onto the terrifying shining path that 26would take me safely back to the ground. I loved it there. Maybe even the sense of danger was part of the attraction.
My main memory is that I was different and I suffered for it. My parents rented a big old house that had belonged to the church commissioners. I don’t know why the Church had acquired it because it was nowhere near a church. Perhaps that was why it ceased to be useful to them. It was in need of care and my parents undertook to care for it. We all cared for it. I and my two little sisters had to help to tame the huge garden. My father worked all the time and my image of him now is of someone wearing old corduroy trousers digging or trundling a heavy old wheelbarrow. He began to grow everything then because money was always a problem. He had a day office job in the local authority. I’m not sure what exactly he did but I know he didn’t enjoy it and he was clearly not very high up the hierarchy. What he loved was to come home and change into his old gardening clothes and get outside. He was a gentle man and animals and birds loved him. We had a dog, a black collie/terrier cross called Perkin who was wild and badly behaved and male, and a sedate female cat called Wink who was clearly outraged by the behaviour that Perkin could get away with.
I remember that things happened to me rather than that I made things happen. After some mysterious conversations between our parents in which there was mention of “where to put them” which worried us a bit in case it related to us, I and my sister were gathered into the back of the old Morris and the whole family drove to a farm where we collected six Light Sussex hens crossed with Rhode Island Reds. They were in a big crate which was loaded into the back of the car because it wouldn’t go into the boot. My little sister and I squeezed onto the seat beside them, awed by their anxious clucking and worried by the smell and the obviously uncontrolled excreting that they were doing. When we got them home we discovered the plan, which was that they would live in the old potting shed. Although I was only about eight, I was proud to be put in charge of feeding them in the mornings with the mixture of grain and mashed up shell in the big sacks in another of the outhouses. I loved the feeling of scattering the grain on the floor of the henhouse and the way the chickens would cluck with delight and patter about looking for the precious grains. I like the 27way it ran through my fingers. I wasn’t so keen on raking out the foul straw and putting the clean straw on the floor which I had to do as well. Yet I found that I didn’t want to give the job to my sister. Perhaps I just enjoyed the cleanness after I swept up. I couldn’t have actually liked the mess, could I? There was a very distinctive smell in the hens’ droppings which is different from that of any other form of manure. I found them disgusting but fascinating and I think I always cared about them because they needed me and because I had witnessed their anguish on being taken away from what I assumed had felt like home to them.
