2006-09-11
I wonder what it is that makes things stick in your mind. When I was down south last weekend, talking with my brother about his depression and the experience he’s been going through of re-living childhood and the episodes his therapists think shaped his personality, I brought back to he surface my earliest memory. I didn’t share it with him because..well it might well have served to confirm or influence some of the thought process he’s been going through lately.Bizarrely I think the incident – which doesn’t really amount to much – has stuck with me because I think it was an early case of déjà vu. As I’ve said here before there’s a rival to ‘my earliest memory’ and I can’t really resolve which wins on chronology – that was the event which I’m sure fomented my emetophobia when I was out walking with my father (age three?) and a drunk emerged from a pub and vomited at my feet.
Anyway – here goes. I’m lying in my bed and it is, I guess now, sometime in the late evening, maybe a couple of hours after I went to bed. As I see it now I think I’m still in the rickety old wooden cot but with the side down so that I can get out if I need to (and this means I probably haven’t reached my third birthday). Beside me lies my small teddy bear - not much hair on him and a large blue cross on his tummy where my sister (over medically aware for her age) was recently stopped at the last moment from carrying out a surgical operation on him. I’m scared in the semi-darkness.
I grew up in an old Victorian house in the garden of England. The house had originally been built for the coachman of a country estate, with stables below. The bedroom I occupied was part of a converted hayloft and up he attic there was still straw from seventy years ago. The hayloft stretched wide across the back of the house and where I was sleeping was about as far away from it could be from everyone else, away down a long corridor with four rooms opening off.
I get up out of bed, afraid and lonely and, taking Small bear, start to pad down the corridor towards where the light burns outside the bathroom. The staircase to the lower floor is at the end of the corridor and when I get there I bump myself down it on my bottom until I’m standing outside the living room. I can hear my parents inside so it isn’t too late.
And then as I stand there I realise that this has happened before, that I’ve stood here in exactly the same spot, clutching Small, wanting not to be alone. But then I hear something that makes me think someone is coming out of the room and instead of staying there waiting to be found, waiting to be comforted, I take fright that I'll be discovered and in the same way as I know I did before I scamper away up the stairs and run to my bed and pull the covers up over my head and go back to sleep.
There are no tears. Nothing actually happens. But the over-riding memory is of being more scared of being discovered being afraid, than of being afraid of the dark. I wonder now what had happened in my short life before that to so suppress the right to express emotion that I couldn’t turn the handle of the door and go in and find my parents and tell them how I felt. And I wonder now at how I have also, in a way, enjoyed the thought that I could keep my presence secret, that I existed without anyone knowing.