Snuggling down in the long grass, on the sloping ground behind the coal shed, close to where I had planted a conker, my own horse chestnut tree, ten inches of investment in the future which was to be sacrificed to grand plans of politicians and for us a new house four miles away.
Was it in a camp I had made–a sheet of some sort, a rope strung between two points–it’s possible. I can see the sunlight through brocaded, faded curtaining, and the intense greenness of the grass inside the tent. I was always making camps somewhere or other; in the garden or across the road in the woods or even crawling into small spaces like the airing cupboard, warm and secret.
In this memory, though it’s in the garden, and I’m snuggling down with a girl, a year or two younger than me, her head thick with blonde curls. Perhaps snuggling gives the wrong impression. Rather a lying next to each other; a quiet, perhaps not touching, savouring of an indistinct excitement. I have no memory of an exchange of words but my senses must have been super alert, a stirring passion that curled and snuggled down into my belly.
A girl from across the road, a neighbour, a girl who was neither implicated in my sister’s account of girlishness, nor my mother’s account of femininity. Instead I could allow my own smouldering erotic mystery to flame gently.
What I now might call sexuality was some haziness in the scheme of things; an erotic version of the cloud that accompanied and surrounded God as he chatted to Moses. My silent worship of the feminine, hidden from the prying eyes, the intrusive banalities of instruction and meaningless activity.
I was a captive, a slave, in a private and willing subjection to the feminine; the laughing muse who might at any moment turn with flashing devastation to shame me.
What was it I had made up?
Shhhhh Kerbang!
At the dawn of time
Mind set about constructing shapes
Hammered into ‘that’ll do’
Unchecked unchanged for centuries
Millennia even
Set to last forever
Until one day
The unwished unrecognised
Stranger steps off the train
And with the merest suggestion of a breeze
The whole edifice collapses like a house of cards.