sestina time

Sestina On Being Made Single. Again.

 With fingers lifted at a cigarette,

your lips part; slow, deliberate. And one

by one the dreams we had are all but spent,

as ash which falls - betrayed - to death, by fire.

The plastic cup, half filled with coffee close

to cold, is nearer to your heart, and set

down with more tender touch than I am: Set

aside. Draw on the butt of cigarette

again, or move to speak if you must close

this door. I’d rather that you’d shout out one

venomous, sulphur- stream of fire,

- and rage until all bitterness is spent –

 

than smother me with silence. We have spent

years arriving at this ending. I set

my heart on you; on stoking up your ‘fire

of passion’. You. A man in cigarette

pants; dirty. Shirt; a Che Guevara one.

Remembering you then, too far to close

the distance, too long ago, to get close

to you now. Reclaiming all the time spent

in snuffing out the spark, splitting the one-

ness into two, is futile. We are set,

now, on this path. And like your cigarette

my hope is all consumed today in fire.

 

You stare at me. And I with rapid-fire

of words unspoken, untumbling, close

my eyes and breathe your smoking cigarette.

In aspiration I am all now spent

out. Resign myself again to being set

up on the shelf; and ready meals for one;

 

or hitching up my skirts for fumbled one-

night-stands; imagining lost cats so fire-

men come - my only company; and set

ups with Toms, Harrys – Dicks all, far too close

for comfort. All too far away. I’ve spent

too long embraced here by your cigarette

 

smoke. That cigarette that takes me back one

lifetime. One spent, dulled, burnt out, lifeless fire

close to its end, and it will not again be set.

 

That's When I'm Happy

There was just the bedroom left upstairs.  I think we had left it till last because it seemed the most personal.  Claire had helped me sort through the clothes in the wardrobe.  Most of it we packed into the various plastic sacks that had collected in the porch.  Mum would have approved of her things being used to try to help others have a better life.  She didn’t have a huge array of clothes, but they were good quality.  Soft fabrics, bright colours, patterns that let slip her joy of life.   There were a few pieces we kept, shared between us.  Some we might wear, some we just couldn’t bear to let go.  Her jewellery, her shoes, her scarfs.  Mostly we sorted in silence, but held up items and smiled and occasionally “Do you remember…”  Sometimes we hugged each other and cried.

The piles grew – charity, keeping, bin.  Mike brought up tea now and then, brushing my hair with the flat of his hand as he set the cups down on the bedside table.  He was wearing his old jeans and at first the thick dark jumper he always wore when he worked in the garage or garden.  As the afternoon wore on and he grew warm in the spring sunshine, I saw it lying on the garden table and one of his old tour t-shirts saw the light of day.

“I’ll start taking these downstairs.” Claire picked up two of the sacks and paused in the doorway.  “You okay finishing off?”

I nodded.   I was sat on the bed now.  “I’ll just go through these drawers and I’ll give you a hand.”

I adopted the method I used at home when I was sorting out.  I emptied the contents onto the bed and rummaged through.  It must have been a while, judging by the dust in the corners, since mum had sorted through the drawer, but there wasn’t a great deal in there.  An open pack of tissues with one or two missing; a couple of biros, one leaking blue ink onto my fingers.  I wiped them with one of the tissues; they had holly leaves printed around the edge and I recognised them as a pack I had put into a Christmas stocking I had made up for her the year before last when she had come to us for the holiday.  There was a paper clip, a used emery board, that sort of thing.  Most of it I threw into the rubbish sack, though I put the tissues to one side.  I was going to keep them in my handbag; they smelt of her perfume.

The little book had caught my eye, but I left it till last.  It was only about six or seven inches high and maybe four or five wide.  It had a pretty cover, ruched fabric, a soft pale lilac.  I couldn’t recall seeing it before, but the pages were yellowed with age.  Thick pages with a scalloped edge.

“That’s when I’m happy!”  Mum’s hand inscribed the inside of the front cover. 

The first entry was dated more than forty years ago.  I would have been four.  I settled back against the pillows, the late afternoon sun warming my legs and feet.

“Watching my little girl on the swing, she’s really pushing her legs backwards and forwards.”

Then a few days later

“Charlotte has just picked me a daffodil.  I love to see her playing in the sunshine.”

I turned the pages.   Most were miniature diary entries of trivial, everyday things mum found pleasure in.  Finding a pound note in her purse, a robin in the garden, or funny little things Claire or I had said over the years.

“Christmas isn’t all about vegetables you know mummy!”

Some were lists – the moon in the sky during the day; hedgehogs; a purring cat; the sound of children playing, thrown over from the school playground two streets away; the greenness of trees against a blue, blue sky; washing blowing in the summer breeze – nothing extraordinary, but I found them so.  I knew mum had loved spring flowers and bird song and the smoothness of newly plastered walls, but I never realised they made her soul sing.

I turned another page – “There was a fox in the garden this morning!” It was dated for my sixth birthday.  I remembered the moment of opening the curtains in mum’s room and there, staring up at the window, startled by the movement out of the corner of its eye, was a thin, young fox.  It turned and hurried across the garden, leaping over the low fence made of chicken wire at the bottom, and then disappearing into the undergrowth of Mrs McKenna’s garden next door.

I closed my eyes remembering how mum and I had hugged each other with excitement about The Birthday Fox!  I had forgotten all about him, but the pleasure of that moment with mum had come flooding back reading that entry in her untidy writing.  Not just the memory of the fox, but the special feeling of a lovely shared experience.  I closed my hand around the little book.

I felt someone sit on the bed close to me, but I struggled to open my eyes.  Sleep had been evasive in the last few days, but now I had found it, it didn’t want to let me go.

“In the midst of sadness, happiness is all around.” 

My eyes opened.  “Mum?”

Mike took my hand.  “Charlotte, it’s me, it’s ok.  I’ve brought you a cup of tea.  We should get going soon.”

I nodded, sat up slowly and took the mug from him.  “I’ll come down.”

He took the mug and placed it down on the bedside table beside the two half empty ones from earlier. He wrapped his arms around me and I sank into him, holding him tightly, grateful for him being who he was.

Shall I take this rubbish?”  He gestured to the bag.  I wiped my eyes and nodded again.

“Are these to go?” he picked up the pack of tissues and the book that lay next to me.

“No – I’ll be needing both of those.”  I said.

 

Happiness

Drumming feet of early morning blackbirds on the roof and gas whistle of kettle wake me. The familiar and comforting smell of locked up musty caravan comforts me as I stretch awake in the nylon sleeping bag.

I am ten years old. I sit on the caravan steps; face upturned to the speckled blue sky and I feel the beginning of the day’s warmth on my eyelids. On my lap I nurse a half eaten cereal bowl of sodden cornflakes. Behind me the open door in the darkened interior where my mother folds up blankets and my father asks where my mother has hidden ... Well, take your pick. I place the bowl on the concrete slab and listen to the sounds of the awakening families on field 5. I hear the dull, muffled sound of footsteps walking on tin. Radios sing to excited children who draw back curtains in anticipation of the beach.  

Hens scratch around and strut on the grass in front of me and a far off cock calls them reminding them not to stray too far from home. The metal bars of the steps cut into me now and reluctantly I leave the sun’s rays and go inside.

Later, on Talybont beach, stick thin and berry brown, my brother and I career over the waves of stones left behind by the tides. For once no one looks at my thinness and, instead in passing, I hear an old woman exclaim ‘Ooh isn’t she brown!’ At the ice-cream stall – an old caravan marooned on the beach - we buy a rare treat. 99s for ourselves and other brother and sister. We scuttle our way back over the pebbles, melting ice-cream dripping stickily down wrists onto bare legs.

We have no money and I am envious of those families who eat crisps and drink coke with their packed lunch;  have ‘treats’,  whilst we ravenous from swimming in waves, wolf down the plain cheese and tomato sandwiches and digestive biscuits [ in between moaning] and drink diluted orange squash. My mother explains once that we don’t have the treats other families have, because we don’t just have one week’s holiday and, as this makes sense, I accept this.

The screech and roar of an overhead low-flying pilotless plane from Llanbedr airfield is incongruous with the beach setting, but it’s a familiar sound and an indicator of good weather. It’s a sound that anchors me to Talybont beach. Behind me the patchwork quilt of hills fold downwards to the pebbled dunes and either way stretches to infinity. Snowdonia and the Llyn Peninsula one way and the distant shores of Aberdovy the other.

I am eternally grateful to you Gwynedd for your coastline, your seagulls and your harbours and your wild hills and mountains. Here you have taught me what it is to really love and to feel that I am home. There is no other place where all my pasts and presents are as one. I can track my existence on your timeless trajectory. Days, weeks, years spent here have left me living in a geological, metaphorical, mental no man’s land, hovering somewhere between wherever I am and where I want to be. I am in love with a place that makes me wish I could be with it as I would a ‘beloved’. I am not Welsh yet I understand it when they talk of ‘hiraeth’ the yearning; the sickening longing for home.


Jenny

Snow Piece

Snow Piece, finally...and Midsummer Night's Dream was a hit!  I missed the last meeting but it looks like everyone is writing pieces on happy?

That was her name for me.

It’s what she called me during that time of emergence lived some thirty odd years ago.  Admittedly, I was much, much younger then, more child than woman…but I can still remember feeling oddly flattered by the comforting comparison.  She would, on occasion, laughingly, (and I perceived), lovingly, taunt me by attempting to make me one with that enduring storybook character.   You know her… we all know her…that iconic, pure, raven haired beauty, arms outstretched, surrounded by all of nature …dainty fingers held aloft for songbirds cheerfully flitting about her…

A cultural archetype made accessible to a twenty first century audience drawn from one man’s imagination…made so unforgettable that I still recall the colors of her gown…the soprano voice…the fairness of her skin.  Her entire persona stood for and embodied genuine goodness, fairness and beauty.    And then there was the story...the whole service thing... the taking care of…the making sense of chaos…the finding home and family.  More importantly, there were the men to care for…aah, and music and song, and silliness and laughter, and a forest in which to frolic, and there was temptation even, and the triumph over evil, and well…lest we forget…a “and they all lived happily ever after” fairy tale ending.   The naming allowed me, even encouraged me, for quite a long time, to maintain a hold on the inane belief that I too, had been, and might forever remain, as someone at least partially pure, hopeful, untouchable, an innocent, a believer in goodness and happy endings.

I can still taste those early days…and smell them…and hear them.  I remember yards of white cotton lace against tall mullioned windows…  glowing oak floorboards… lavender fragrance emanating from polished furniture, artful objects, (still meaningful to me at the time), buffed and carefully placed… smooth, cold, grayish veined marble atop a carved walnut hutch…vanilla icing lapping at the sides of velvety chocolate cakes laid upon antique crystal pedestals…a beloved child’s footfall running through the Doctor’s old house.  A belief…a ridiculous holding out in the name of goodness in support of one pure perseverance that there could be no real enemies…not yet…not back then…only those imagined.   All was goodness.  Purity prevailed. 

Ice melted into blue rivers and the waters edged their way cutting deep patterns across the undulating fields.  I recall once standing on that blessed piece of land, face and hands and toes frozen, watching a dancing veil obscure nature’s familiar silhouette.  And then, one day, while none of us were looking, the brooding wind seeped in through the gap of the heavy front door, bringing sickness, and with it hopelessness, and the residue of exhaustion, like a covering of smothering ash, began to blanket our world.

The dimming of the early years dragged on…effervescence and hopefulness replaced by teeth clenching, mind numbing, relentless emptiness, boredom, and an overwhelming sense of loss.  I did what I was supposed to do didn’t I?  I scrubbed the floors.  I prepared the tea.  I kept the schedules.  I loved.  I cared for.  I believed.  I even found a way to wrap my broken entirety around the first gentle unraveling…yet even so, finally they found me…and those wicked weavings began to poke holes in me… and the last remnants of the pretend world I had once taken refuge in, began to melt away.

Now, years later, one can simply Google the word to watch hundreds of icy blue and white images pop up on a screen.   I wonder now, looking back, if she, that woman I had loved, who stood larger than life, my once great giant of a friend, had been meaning to refer to that lovely, soft, innocent, tranquil, healing kind of white…or rather, that painfully bright lose your sight kind of white.   Perhaps in her wisdom she saw both.

Karen

Growing Away From Me

It was Kathy who gave me the idea.  We’d met as we always do on a Wednesday morning at The Merrie England Coffee shop.  She’d ordered something frothy which possibly only became liquid two millimetres before the bottom of the cup, a muffin and a slice of cake.  I’d stared behind the teenager serving me at the confusion of abuses of the English or Italian language on the chalkboard which were used to describe their drinks and opted as always for a “A pot of English tea”.  Instead of the usual chatter about husbands, jobs and kids she’d announced as we sat down that she had something important to tell me but it was in the strictest secrecy.  I can’t imagine why she felt the need to add that. Who was I going to tell? Richard? As sweet as he is and as much as I love him he has no interest in anything Kathy says.  Nor anything I say if I’m honest but when I’m telling him something about me he’ll utter an occasional grunt, stray fart or harrumph to indicate interest or surprise.  I’m not sure when I moved from lead actress to background artist in the story of his life.  He views Kathy as a shallow and trivial person and can’t understand why I give her any more than the time of day.  He’s partly right.  She is a shallow and trivial person and for me that has always been what attracts her to me. 

 

Her big news turned out to be that she was having an affair.  I was a little disappointed and almost completely unsurprised.  It’s not that she’s some sort of strumpet but she is, thanks to a diet largely of muffins and cake, unsubtly curvaceous in a way most men would love and is very pretty and witty.  More importantly, her husband, Pete, is a deeply unattractive man in both looks and personality.  Their marriage and first child were the result of a prophylactic malfunction in the third week of a relationship which Kathy regularly assures me otherwise wouldn’t have reached its one month anniversary.  She was particularly pleased that at thirty eight the man she had become involved with was only twenty one.  That did surprise me.  There are older things in my closet.  She described him as shy and reserved and somewhat inexperienced with women.  At first she joked about his body in comparison to Pete’s and how she saw it as her responsibility to teach him about sex and what she called “the ways of manhood”.  She said that they’d had sex in her car, against a tree in Bailey Woods, done things in the back of a taxi and in a wardrobe with her hanging from the clothes rail. 

 

She then spoke more seriously about how special and attractive he made her feel, the softness and firmness of his skin, his indifference to her stretch marks, his gentle exploration of her body and then, importantly, how free she felt when they lay and held each other post-coitus.  She told me that “When we lie there.....sometimes talking....sometimes not.....sometimes getting ready to go at it again there is a quiet, a slowing of the clocks, a timelessness.  It seems that since I was seventeen I’ve been rushing from one thing to another, constantly with a million things going on in my head.  And none of them have really been invited. Not by me.  I don’t really want to be worrying about what to cook for tea, making different meals for fussy kids, getting the clutch on the car looked at, getting texts from Pete saying he told his sister she could borrow the hedge trimmer and that I’d drop it off or any of that stuff.  I didn’t realise this until the first time Alex and I had sex and collapsed onto each other and I felt that all of those stolen bits of my brain had been returned to me.  You and Richard always seem so settled and connected to each other you won’t understand but this is more like having an affair with the real me than with a man who isn’t my husband”.  There appeared to be no end to the ways in which she could describe this new lease of life. 

 

I didn’t say much in response to Kathy and her clear love for Alex and a version of herself she’d rediscovered.  She wanted to tell me something not get advice or an opinion.  I did ask if she was happy.  She answered “No. Happiness always seems to be something brief and elusive.  This feels like home.  I’m, I’m....................content”.                      

 

Later, that day I’d thought of the peace Kathy described as I peeled vegetables and watched Rob and Simon kicking a ball around the garden and the girls playing with their dolls on the patio.  Richard was complaining about having to discipline a new teacher in his department who’d made an unfortunate attempt at humour about the surname of a girl called Lucy Swallow.  The girl’s father had claimed she was traumatised and that the teacher should be on the Sex Offender Register.  Richard was very pleased with his retelling of this story.  I knew very well he’d develop it and shoehorn it into every dinner party conversation for years to come.  I thought of Kathy’s head resting on Alex’s chest and the sense of silence and stillness and contentment.    

 

It was Kathy who gave me the idea but I’m not like her.  Richard is pompous and rigid and increasingly indifferent to me but I chose him then and would still make that decision now.  The children fill the house with love and laughter and chaos and they are all that I could wish for them to be but....what Kathy described I recognised.  Or rather I recognised a need to find parts of myself that don’t seem to be required by anyone in my life other than me.  I didn’t take a lover though. I’ve no idea where I’d find one and I’m not sure that sex against a tree would be good for my back or the fabric of any of my clothes and I don’t think I’d be able to keep a straight face if I was being penetrated whilst hanging between some combat trousers and a hoody.  At my age I’d just look like a garment in need of ironing.  Instead I’m having an affair with myself, with silence, solitude and I’m experimenting with contentment.  Twice a week for the past two months when Richard thinks I’m volunteering at a local care home I’m actually not.  I’m actually in one of the study rooms at the town library.  They have big comfy chairs and acres and acres of silence.  At first I didn’t know what to do with myself and I left soon after arriving.  Then I took a book but couldn’t switch off the noise in my head.  I took some knitting but felt guilty that Richard would be ruining fish fingers at home and the children might have lost something only I could locate but with time and practice I’ve come to enjoy the silence.  I embrace it now.  It was Kathy who gave me the idea but I really think I’ve improved on it.




Patrick

 Happy

It was one of those bright blue summer days in August with the clean dry heat that made our Marches valley shimmer.

Mikey and Jess were staying with us – me, and Jamie, my brother - for the holidays. They were our cousins, children of our (hushed tone) unmarried aunt. She worked as a secretary in a factory at Barry, and she struggled in the long breaks - so they came to us every summer. We collected them at the end of term, making the round trip in two days in our old mint green Austin Cambridge. We’d get taken to the fun fair at Butlins, and one of us would always be sick after the toffee apples candy floss and whirling rides. On our way back, the four of us would sit in the boot, with all the luggage and our I-Spy books, spotting birds and trees, fighting over the pencil.

Mikey and Jess were younger than us, but lived in the city, and their street-smarts made them feel older. They brought cigarettes - that none of us actually smoked - and they swore, and told us where babies came from. We didn’t care, and they joined in with what we did easily enough.

Most days then, we would bike from village to village; fetching up at different houses to see our schoolmates; coming in for dinner and tea, and begging pop.

Most summers were stages for our Olympic tournaments, we didn’t wait for four years of training. We had the down- hill marathon – which was probably about a mile down a steep bank, through 5 ft ferns. Jamie told them there were adders in the undergrowth, and as the leaves were way over all our heads it was a battle of nerves as much as stamina to take the plunge.

Then there was the triathlon. I don’t know if we called it that then, but we ran and biked and swam the river. We did it in that order, because the river was nearer home and we would leave our cycles on the swingbridge, and not have too far to get back for tea if we got cold.

Jamie was taller than the rest of us, and he always won. If we were in teams, me and Jamie would always be England (or Brazil, because he had the football shirt). Mikey and Jess would always be Wales or Australia. Mikey’s dad was Australian he’d been told. Our Mam said he was a criminal, but we never met him and we weren’t allowed to speak of him. In these teams Jamie would cheat to make sure I’d come second, and rig the games to my strengths – balance and flair rather than power, so we’d have the ‘stunt bike balance’, the log walking and the mudpie beauty parade. So England (or Brazil) and Jamie always took all the golds. We had a winners ceremony too, where we made up a national anthem which we played by making farting noises with our hands under our armpits whilst Jamie stood on a tree stump conducting us.

That day, that bright blue day, we’d finished our sporting heroics, the brook was dry and the river too shallow to swim in.

We scrambled up to the Devil’s Pikestaff. The ascent was steep, rising up through a pine wood. The ground was rock and moss, and carpeted with needles, softened with moisture and decay. At the top we were always captivated by the dizzying views over the river basin, edged with forest. The Pikestaff was a tower of hard red sandstone boulders, a perfect climbing frame, but which held too much respect to be treated as a place for sport. Not twenty feet from the Pikestaff, the ground dropped almost sheer away - 200 feet at least Jamie told us. Before the most precipitous descent the cliff also yielded a series of narrow terraced ledges, with a wider outcropping below. There was space enough for all of us to lie on our bellies and peek over the rim. We hunted for old peregrine nests. We found some desiccated shells - mottled brown, and in pieces. We found strips of rabbit skins and small fragments of bones along the ledges, and we knew that they’d been here this year. We never came in spring, we knew better

Lying on the exposed stone we dropped sticks and pebbles down, and watched as they skipped and rebounded, clicking and cracking into the empty air. Then Mikey got up and stood back against the rock face.

“I’m bored.” he said “What’s over there?”.

We all turned over looked at him. He was shielding his eyes from the sun with his left hand and his right pointed down and east along the valley, where a tributary gushed out into the main river.

Jamie jumped up and slapped him on the shoulder,

“Brilliant!” he was almost laughing as he said it. “C’mon, I’ll show you”

Jamie scuttled up the ledges to the top and leaned back over stretching out his arm to haul us up.

We all followed Jamie as he ran across the woodland, jumping over roots and dead branches, trying to focus on him, to see where he went, and to watch our own steps. Once in a while he’d stop and look back to see his troops were falling in behind him, but he was always off again as soon as we caught up, so we couldn’t still our breath.

We stayed on the level at first, so the sun was dappling through the trees, blinding us with its glare in one stride, and in the next plunging us to darkness before our eyes could adjust. We were hot. It felt almost tropical now. Jamie had some pop in his bike bag, but that was left down at the stile. I was thirsty, and starting to wonder where Jamie was taking us.

Up ahead of us Jamie had stopped. We could hear a rushing sound, we recognised it as a water fall. We reached him, me next – I was used to running after Jamie – then Mikey holding Jess’s hand. It was like a postcard; the water started somewhere above us, and fell in three steps to level out in front of us. Jamie hadn’t brought me here before. He told me later he came with his friends when I stayed home. We stood looking in wonder and the chandelier of crystals flooding across the dingle, and making the rocks glisten.

Jess was the first. She ran straight across the stream and squealed and slithered to the far bank. Then she came back. Her hair was plastered against her face and her daps were sodden, but she was giggling and yelping and she dragged Mikey into the middle of the generous chute. After an age of kicking and spraying each other with the water we sank onto the fern pillows which bordered the far side of the brook. One after the other we shouted out words, engaging in naming rites to harness our feelings and the things around us. “yellow!” “’cited!” “wet!” “wetter!” – each one more hilarious to us than the last. We exhausted ourselves with laughter and hollering, and then quieted ourselves again, as slowly, one by one we got up and explored the bank. We picked up beech nuts and pine cones and threw them into the water. We skipped stones through the arcing water, and poked twigs into the rock pools forming at the limits of the stream.

Jamie was the first to get restless. Then, Jess complained she was hungry, so we picked our way back across the paths and returned to our bikes.

Mam had given us sandwiches, so we wouldn’t have to break off and go home half day. There were two types; meat paste with lettuce, and cheese and pickle. The boys undid the saddle bags and started eating almost before they’d unwrapped them from the greaseproof paper. We had Corona Dandelion and Burdock, and lemon barley water in big glass bottles with bubbles on the neck. They were warm, but revived us.

We had two sandwiches each, and we tucked in sitting on the grass in a cow field, elbow deep in buttercups. The pollen dusted us with a golden halo all over our legs and the bottoms of our shorts.

Jess left her crusts and Jamie and Mikey ate them.

The sun was still high in the sky, and we knew we could be out until it started to go down if we wanted to. Thing was, we always needed our tea before then, and it was sausages that night so Jamie wouldn’t have wanted to miss it.

“Lets go to the farm” Mikey said.

“No we can’t, anyway I want to go swimming” Jamie replied

“there’s not enough water to swim in” Jess said.

“Not in the river, somewhere much better” Jamie smiled as he said this.

“Where?” Jess eyed him with a frown

“You’ll see”

The boys packed the bottles and the paper back into their bags and we pushed our bikes back to the road. Jamie was getting excited, but then looked at us all seriously.

“If I show you this you can’t tell”

“Why not Jamie?” I asked him

“Mam wouldn’t let us come if she knew, so you better not tell, or you can’t go.”

“I won’t - promise I won’t”

We were all a bit scared because he looked so stern, but we all promised not to tell, and he softened.

“Ok, it’s a long way, so we better go now” he relented.

We all got on our bikes and started off over the lanes. There were potholes on every corner, and Jamie’s bike didn’t have very good brakes, but he’d still take them at full speed, and we didn’t want to get left behind. I’d seen him fall a lot. The first time, he’d had deep grazes all up his right side and caught his leg in a barbed wire fence, so he was bleeding and limping when he got home. He was proud of his scars, but Mam used to scold him and threaten to take his bike away unless he was more careful. She might as well have threatened to take his legs away. He took to hiding his wounds, washing off the red and purple with the sparkling river water, and threatening me with frogs and snails if I told.

We rode up slowly past Rock Farm, and the Folly with the grain silos and the smell of slurry, past Archer’s Pond and then freewheeled down Caple Tump.

Then, we started to climb again.

Jess and I had to get off after 5 minutes and push our bikes up. Mikey and Jamie had a race to see who could stay on the longest. They agreed to call it a draw when they collided. Jamie was quite impressed that Mikey had matched him.

It felt like the hill went on forever. We hadn’t reached the top or even half way when Jamie told us we’d have to leave the bikes and walk now.

“There’s nowhere to swim up here Jamie” I said. “This is where the badgers are”

Jamie smiled at me, then turned away, “all right then, go home if you don’t want to come”. I shook my head quickly and followed him.

We ditched the bikes at a gate, and broke through the bramble hedge into the bottom of a field.

To our left was a track; overgrown, full of nettles and briars. We saw Jamie looking at it. We looked at each other and down at our bare legs and daps. He searched along the hedgerow and drew out a long, thick branch fallen from one of the oaks. He snapped off some of the side shoots, put one end on the ground and placed his foot against the middle. It took some pressure but he broke it in two, and threw away the shorter half.

Wielding his scythe, he hacked and trampled a path for us to follow. It was rocky uneven and difficult ground to cover. Despite his efforts all of us got stung and scratched, but we all wanted to keep on going, driven by a desire to keep up with Jamie, and to find out what this secret was.

It was still burning hot, and there were bees and butterflies breezing up with every step. We reached the margins of a beech wood, and turned round to look where we’d come. We had climbed much further than we realised, and could just see the road where we’d left our bikes, snaking down sharply past the farms.

Jamie kept the pole with him, but he didn’t need to beat a path now. The wood was thick and dark. It was cooler, and refreshed us. We were still going up, and we were getting tired for the first time that day.

Gradually, more light was reaching us and we knew we were coming to a clearing. We’d come right though the wood and as high as we were, we’d not reached the peak. Once clear of the trees, Jamie began to run.

“it’s just over the top” he shouted back at us.

His fervour was infectious and inspired our tired limbs to move. He was ahead of us again, right at the top. Then he let out a huge whoop, and jumped high. We couldn’t see what had happened, or where he landed - but we heard it. We sped on, throwing off our lethargy.

Spread out before us, underneath the eternal indigo sky, was the lough. It was so clear, so dazzling, - a brand new colour, one I’d never seen before. We could hear only our hearts beating, the cry of a buzzard up in the heavens, and Jamie. Jamie exploded from the surface of the lough, as he shot up and threw himself back into the water. That broke all our stillness. We took hands and leapt as one. The chill took our breath, and pressed our chests to bursting, until - after thrashing and spinning, righting ourselves - we floated calm, on our backs, staring at the sky.

*

And now, I’m sitting looking out of my window, watching the clouds gather and streak the pane with angel-hair raindrops refracting the light. Even now the scents of wet hair and warm pop take me back to that day; that wild hot day. That first baptism coloured us as brilliantly as the pasture coloured Bryn Lough. Now as night, and winter, creeps to the door, that burnished memory glistens; even now.