Ten Scenes from the Life of Knoxxy Eugenia.

Number 1 - September 1982

In the heat of late summer, the children cycle up the hill to their home; blind to the wonders of the farm and woodland around them, they race each other to be the first into the house. It is an old house, big enough to be known as The Manor to everyone about, but in reality it is just a large, old farmhouse built by the owner of the land before the time of technological comforts. School makes children excitable here and these children slow as the hill gets steeper and the road to the village fades into little more than a farm track. At the rickety gate, they dismount and throw their cycles into the equally rickety old shed laughing over some probably rude joke and run, pushing each other with no real enmity, into the echoing and cool heart of the brick built pile. Knoxxy Eugenia falls, still laughing, into a faded sofa in a room full of - well just things - lots and lots of things of every size, colour and property. Her brother who knows his name but would not like me revealing it until after seven o'clock (local story time), is rummaging through the cupboards in the Kitchen to locate the traditional after-school snack, again blind as he was before, to the wonders outside the window. Below the house, stretching into the far and hazy distance, lie fields and woods almost totally unpunctuated by the developments of man. It is as if the world has lost all of man's constructions save for this happy house and its occupants.

Knoxxy Eugenia reaches for a book from the nearest pile of things; it is an old book with no dust-jacket, dark green and with the title "A Life of Paracelsus". This is to be distinguished from the book next to it in the pile - "The life of Paracelsus". Knoxxy Eugenia blows the dust from it and opens it to what she guesses is the page she was last at, checks the text and backs up, checks again and turns over one page until she locates where she fell asleep last night. Her brother wanders in with a large slice of bread at his mouth and mumbles something which Knoxxy cannot understand but guesses is probably a request about what she would like to eat. And so the tiny details of life in this empty corner of England continue.

Knoxxy Eugenia is 12 years old and her Father says "she pushes the envelope". Her brother says something similar though less euphemistic but loves her just the same. She is of a type you probably know if you are reading this but if you do not then do not worry as you will do one day. Her name is not that important to this story and she could have been Knoxxy Euphonious but that would have been too much self reference for a first draft and so she is Knoxxy Eugenia and will stay so until I say otherwise. She lives with her brother and a few people who look after her, though not her parents as they live and work on the other side of the world; something to do with the Government, though which Government, both she and I are not sure. It does allow for some very wonderful holidays, though these are becoming less frequent as exams, SATS and various other nastily ubiquitous intrusions intrude and often reduces Knoxxy's reading time to under three hours a day. Knoxxy cannot play Chess and is annoyed by the other children at school who do. She likes to think that her flounces out of the indoor break time room make an impression of those she calls "The Sweats" (having misheard the word "swot" some years ago and maintaining the mistake as she will throughout her life). The Sweats like chess and play it obsessively every break time. Knoxxy is not in the gang and likes it that way. Knoxxy has red hair and plays up to the image of "Copper tops" as fiery characters. Knoxxy swears as much as she can but knows nothing worse than "Damn" at the moment. I like Knoxxy Eugenia because I have to. She is the heroine, protagonist and every other Yin side descriptor you can think of. I like her as much as I have to dislike "The Sweats" because they are the enemy (antagonists, Yangs etc). I know no more than this chapter because I do not know what happens to Knoxxy Eugenia later in her life. I have not made it up yet.

"What shall we do this evening?" asks Knoxxy's brother as he finishes his bread.

"You mean when we have finished two hours of homework?". Knoxxy looks downcast as this is the first time she has remembered that homework has been set for this evening.

"Yeah! We can stay up late." Despite the happy attitude it is still a school day tomorrow. Knoxxy searches for a reply. In her head there is battle between doing right for her teachers and following her brother who she calls delinquent.

"What for? Some late night Apple Scrumping? They won't be any more than crabs at the moment. How about jumping out on the lushes coming out of the pub? Is that fun enough for you?" Sarcasm is of course, Knoxxy's strong point at this age. Her brother knows that all Knoxxy wants to do is read her dusty books. Every night it seems he has to close some old volume for her when he returns from his excursions and carry her up to bed. He does not know to bend his knees and not his back as he does this and in later years will suffer for it. Long nights of study which come to him when Knoxxy's own enthusiasm for knowledge makes a late appearance in his mind, mean he will slump across high desks in low chairs and render him invalid before the Millennium is out. Or should that be AN Invalid?

"Suit yourself!" he says. "Don't say I didn't ask."

"I won't" and he knows that is true. Though he is her friend - no! Her best friend - their respective ages are, to me, the ones where there is most difference. Work out for yourself how old he is. And of course he is a boy and she is a girl, which, in this country, is always grounds for misunderstanding. Forget literacy hour. Teach girls about boys and boys about girls.

He has left the house - probably for the pub, as he seems to be able to convince the landlord to sell him alcohol. Knoxxy is on her own and sitting at the Kitchen table concentrating on the books in front of her. This time they are school books though for this subject, she enjoys then as much as her own private library. Every so often she is distracted by the silence of the world outside the window. While she looks down, birds fly between the patches of woodland; occasionally an Owl will join them silently but Knoxxy does not see them. Sometimes she can appreciate the beauty of this land and never more so than when she is on her own. She works for an hour on-and-off not the three hours she claimed; exaggeration has not yet totally yielded to teenage sarcasm. Knoxxy is not yet a teenager but she is working on it. Knoxxy decides to "Push the Envelope" by not reading for a while.

Knoxxy and her brother are lucky to have a large garden nestled in the woods against a mysterious hill. They always lose the Sun before official sunset and the garden gets cool on the hottest of days. The garden is not kept immaculate though the lawns are mown sometimes by Knoxxy's brother though Knoxxy used to fight him for the job when they first moved here. Koxxy's mind fills with thoughts of every type. She sits down right in the centre of the lawn, feeling lost for a reason she cannot pin down (though I know that it is because she has no book to read). She thinks first of her parents who she has learnt not to miss and still love. It is difficult for her to be without them but they are away so that I do not have to write about them; after all this is about the life Of Knoxxy and not her parents. I could have removed everyone from this and we would have ended up with a story like Ten thoughts from the mind of Knoxxy Eugenia. Maybe this is what this really is. I have to split the paragraphs because you would not read them if I didn't but this one should have no breaks; like an innocent Molly Bloom. Knoxxy thinks of her parents who are at this moment getting up and going to work in their paradise. She thinks of them in terms of people she sees going to work every day, so in her mind they are sitting in the kitchen of this house. But Knoxxy knows that it is late winter where they are so she sees a dark morning and hears rain on the window. They commute through wintry roads to an office building where they push paper and drink foul coffee. She knows of course that really they wake to the sound of the sea and work in their breezy, papery house living happily with no phone and no television. She loves them for a few minutes more, trying to hear the sounds of their voices and then is distracted by the wind. She wonders where the wind comes from. Her first memories, when she and her brother were with their parents, was of wind lifting gauzy curtains over her cot. She wonders if she wondered then what this was or if she just slept and ate. Wind comes from somewhere and though she knows all about isobars and cyclones, she still thinks that it must have some divine source.

The world has a divine source as well. We know all about the very large and the very small; we know about how far back in time, the very large and the very small meet at a single point and the Universe was created. Fred Hoyle would argue with me if he was still alive but as he invented the phrase "Big Bang" he has argued himself out of the picture. He would however, be happy to know that it is now likely that there is stuff beyond this Big Bang, that the Big Bang is just the result of interaction between things in other dimensions. Knoxxy does not know this but at this time no-one knows this. It is thought that there is nothing beyond the Big Bang; the Universe is, in the words of some anonymous cosmologist who I cannot be bothered to look up, The ultimate Free Lunch. God created it if you are religious and it came from nothing if you are not. The worlds of the very large and the very small retreat as you define them until as God hides the smallest workings behind our own minds. Knoxxy does not know this though she has read about the Big Bang. The equations behind it are beyond her as they are beyond me but she again recognises the beauty in the concept.

Why does the world look as it does? Knoxxy has read somewhere that the world only appears to us as it does because we are here to see it like this. If the world were any different then we would not have evolved to see it in this state. We created the Universe within our heads. It expands in complexity as our minds reach into it. The wind gets stronger and this train of thought is turned around by the breezes. Knoxxy wants to go inside and read but she is in one of those states where thought seems to be the only option. Standing up would be an effort not worth anything at present. It is a sort of mental crick, one that sticks you to the ground following ideas and visions. Some people would call it a property of those they call adepts but this is just an elitist illusion. We are all like this; it is just that the real world gets in the way of just sitting and thinking. Do you have visions of Knoxxy's house in your head? How much of this world have I created for you? There is of course nothing outside the text and I think I may have mistaken the philosophy on that but for these people to become real and for their thoughts to seem real, you have to create this world inside your head. I cannot see what you see when you read what I have written but Knoxxy is real to me. I have written just a fraction of her thoughts here and I have done no more than describe sketchily, Knoxxy's house and garden. But you see enough to have an idea of whether you like this enough to carry on and find out who Knoxxy becomes. It looks likely that she will be a Cosmologist, though remember the title of the book she is reading. Or will you give up and read something else?

She thinks of everything and nothing. It is difficult to think of either in real terms but you can think of the idea of everything and the idea of nothing. She switches between the two and it seems that her mind is turning into treacle. If you read about the Universe then these thoughts are common and Knoxxy often goes to sleep thinking of the whole universe.