Friday, April 02, 2004

Trilobite Of The Month

When I was about eight and my brother was around six, we used to go into the Suckley Hills to look for fossils. The banks around the whole area are sandstone, great lumps of it cracking up and flowing down onto the dry tracks. There were orchids there as well, and tiny, wild strawberries with a minute rush of tart and sugar. We used to find bits of trilobites though never a whole one as we hoped to. There were bits of leaves in the rock as well, preserved veins and the darker stain of the main leaf.

Suckley is in the heart of Hop country and every collection of farm buildings seemed to have its own Oast House or maybe two. It was always hot and we should have taken more water with us. Sometimes I could just go back, with a wish to click my fingers and be sat in the grass over one of those flaky fossil banks, drinking some sugary drink and listening to nothing but the sounds that were always here. How well do you have to be able to write in order to convey these images? This is not some faded pastel blue of a seventies photograph but the deep, burning azure of the clear sky of memory. There is my brother in his shorts and with the bamboo stick he took everywhere then. He is as cool as some explorer and that is what he thinks he is. We are spies and heroes, African hunters. Here is me slight and bookish, with some collection of special equipment held about me. We believe these things are true; that we are the people we pretend to be.

At home genuine drama happens. We are only here as some form of running away. We all ran away at some point. Of course us children never left for long enough to cause our parents to worry but we were taken away our mother or our father at various times. We once got as far as Wales though we never knew we running away; it was just a holiday with Doctor friends of my mother, a holiday in some other cushiony summer place. This time, the sky is dark and the summer present like some wiry, grey woollen blanket, scratchy and annoying, making you want to be washing all the time. There were kites in the sky there like miniature vultures waiting for the end, waiting to pick over the carcass that would be left behind. We had the run of this house, a bungalow with long corridors and lots of weird things to play with and things for us to be told not to touch. They had a Grand Piano squeezed into the drawing room. We just about had room to sit at it and play all the black notes from end to end and back again so as not to be discordant for that would get us shooed off into the secret rooms and passages that led up to the attic. In that room there was a Victorian rocking horse; it was too small for us but we tried it anyway and I think it survived.

And while our mother cried in the front room, we played at being bomber crews in the caravan parked on the gravel drive. We were engines of destruction for whole countries, for unending waves of Luftwaffe fighters coming at us out of the Welsh sun. The kites wheeled away in that watery sky and we were happy. The garden seemed to grow around us, cutting off the rest of the world, even shielding us from the madness that caused our flight. We had squash and biscuits and lectures from people who would seem two centuries old were they still around today.

What tales are there in the history of those few days? My mother did so many things in her life; Just recently I found out that she worked on the Pipeline Under The Ocean (PLUTO) project which supplied oil across the channel after D day. After that she went to study medicine at Trinity College Dublin. Some day we will find her photo there. There is so much in the background, things I will never know. Tomorrow is already here.

No comments: