The forest opposite my childhood home
I'm reading my favourite book for the third time. It is a buoy in an unsettled and uncertain moment in my life. The story so captures me I forget about this day, and am transported to an age before cars, before World War 1, when a passing bicycle would create such a stir that folk would run to their gates to gawp and wonder. The book is Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson.
A memory was sparked as I read of a village woman catching birds for the sport of it. Hidden, patient, holding the end of a length of string in her hand, the string tied to a stick, which had a sieve propped upon it and a sprinkling of crumbs beneath as bait. When I was small my father taught me how to catch a bird using such a method, just once, crouched behind our honeysuckle hedge, capturing a robin red breast and letting it go. Now I understand, from the vantage point of passing years what he was teaching me. My father didn't give me much in the conventional sense of what fathers are meant to be for daughters but he taught me something beyond words that day, a childhood in rural Scotland, a childhood where he hunted to eat, a childhood of ingenuity, responsibility and patience, of soil, and rain, and cold.
My dad drew a circle on our dust path once, explaining that the Earth was hot at its core, together we uprooted a dead tree for our fire, we caught a robin and then let it go and all these things cause this 47 year old woman's heart to ache. I was born a month before his 55th birthday. Sieve, stick, string, crumbs. My Dad was odd in Essex, always mistaken for my Granddad, rake thin, venturing into the forest to drag home trees to burn.
At school, I excitedly shared capturing a bird with my father, writing about it or telling the teacher. I remember my confusion and shame as the teacher told me it was a horrible story and cruel, with classmates pulling faces. As is the way of small children I wasn't able to ask why she said that and became withdrawn and quiet, realising something of otherness, oddness and unbelonging.
