Chapter 159
Disclaimer: All memories subject to massive distortion by time, fantasy, shared conversations and downright daftness.
From Leadenhall Aircraft Museum (fictitious) to Iran (not fictitious). From dark dales to sand-hot dunes. So many firsts; first burger at Wimpy’s in Shiraz. First pizza – mushroom – in Tehran. First ice-skating experience on a rink with a central light-encrusted fir tree, also Tehran. First rides on skinny arabian horses in the southern desert near Ahwaz. First recognitions of humans other than myself really, that hyper-development stage when the world expands beyond Mother and self, zooming in and out of view, infinite possibilities, adventures, thrills and spills. It’s not really, it’s just such a dramatic change from early 70s Lancashire to pre-revolution Iran.
Pre-Iran memories slide in with vague ease; sitting on bare floorboards in a cold house in Lancashire, climbing whitewashed slats of the school my older brother is about to attend. New house in a developing area, luxuriating in open acres out back. At the end of our cul-de-sac, still under construction, my ‘friends’ dared me to take a drink of the rainbow-coloured puddle the workmen left behind.
A stomach-pumping hospital visit later I’m sure my parents’ blood pressure was being significantly exercised.
In this place, I dreamed of running out to the perpendicular Roman Road framed by soot-blackened stone walls topped by alluring arched capstones and flying away. My dreamstate lifted me up just before the road, swooping weightlessly over the wall and out over the hidden adventureland beyond.
In this place, our house offered a sweet circular racetrack for small children, kitchen-dining-living-hall-kitchen-dining- living-hall, ad infinitum I’m sure. I’m not sure which door it was, but one swung with a slight excess by my bro’, neatly snapped thumbtip from digit – all but a tiny thread of tissue held me together.
Mum holding thumb together under blood-soaked wraps in back of car on another hospital journey. She practices calming breathing techniques.
Also in this place, a Victorian school house of red brick and once gold stone with gothic peaks, twists and turns darkened by decades of coal fires. Not yet reaping the full benefits of the clean air acts, most buildings are still soot-blackened. I ride my first horse. He is glorious, dark dappled grey. His mane and tail flow dark grey to black, his nostrils flare, his eyes roll. He is draped in brass-studded red leather harness, his saddle fits me perfectly. I canter on as often as I am permitted… in an alcove of the school room in the – to me – huge old building. It is dark and cold, there are gloomy corners, endless draughts, and wicked chilly spaces.
Mum walks me to school and back. Or maybe someone else.
In this place, a little earlier, I touch my first skeleton. It’s pre-school, somewhere close by, near the blackened railway bridge. A sweet shop is here somewhere with shelves laden with glass jars, hosts to magical sugary colour; gob-stoppers, humbugs, barleysugar twists, raw licorice-root sticks. There’s brass trimmings and burled wooden railings. The glass is thicker then than now, there’s a haze on things… leftover soot- stains in the corners everywhere. The other side of the bridge an old Doctor/Dentist’s office (old doc or old office, mebbe both)… with a narrow, gloomy waiting room. The seats are dark wooden benches with high curving backs, something I slither and climb on when forced to wait there for something I know not what now. Yet the skeleton has naught to do with this place of healing and feeling.
Outside, back up the hill, land bulges. Beyond ubiquitous stone walls I recall dying grass scattered with leaf corpses from oak, sycamore, beech that stand in scattered groups as though chatting about the price of fish. I am taken there with other small folk, picking skeleton beings from the clutches of the damp earth and their decaying cousins. We bring them back to a room to paste them into workbooks, make rubbings of leaf skeletons by laying fragile paper across their fragile limbs and sweeping the sides of crayons across their suggestive ridges. It’s magical.
OK, so what set me off? Aircraft Museum… a book I’m reading referenced WW II Wellington Bombers known as Wimpeys after the hamburger-eating character in the Popeye cartoons. That triggered the Wimpy memory from Iran and when Iran memories get their foot in the door, I generally have to sit back and let them roll in and party for a while.
They get tired and move on. Then I come back around to the here and now. Not much has changed after all. Still experiencing firsts I had no expectations of.
It’s a first for me. Nearly every day. Thanks for being part of the ongoing adventure!
Blissings,
Kat Dancer
bodymudra@gmail.com
403-931-3866 (h)
+1 415 525 2630 (c)
