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| My Mother:Leila Blackler. |
My mother was a delightful creature who belonged totally to me. I don't think we had much money for she took a bucket onto the street and followed the horses for their manure to feed our tomato plants in the back yard. We would go occasionally to my grandparent's house, they longed for my mother to abandon her poverty and live in “Rosia” with them. It was large, with plenty of nocks and crannies and wardrobes and places to hide, but my mother would have none of it.
I was often hungry and would find my way to the garden shed to a packet of magic delight sweet fairy dust icing sugar which mother would put on cakes hidden there.Gran begged my mother to stay with them at “Rosia.” As we walked to the gate she would hold on to me and more than anything I wanted to stay in the warmth, the polished wood banisters, the deep armchairs, the mirrors that showed the world twice over, the fire that dance into eternity with spirits and the kitchen always full of food that was shuffled back and forth into the dinning room. It always seemed to be tea time or egg time or porridge is good for you time or eat the crust time because of the starving poor in Africa.
We starved at home yet here in this land of plenty where we belonged my mother was always running away from. Though I wanted to stay, my mother would say “come here” and I knew I had to go and I didn’t want to. I just wanted to follow my granddad round the kitchen looking at his legs as he washed up the dishes. Where ever he went I followed him, to the park, to the post, to the church. There was a large red letter box opposite the park” That’s where the little people live” I puzzled endlessly with this, assuming them all to be tiny old men always too quick for me to spot. “Are they really there?” I would ask.”Ofcourse, they dodge the letters that’s why they wear hats and they dress in red so they are hard to spot.” I knew this to be true and hugged the secret to me as it rustled in the wind whispering it only among the leaves as it threw them about the air into the wide open sky. It might be a mystery but it was too precious to share with my mother.
There wasn’t even a letter box near our house, just the cat trying to steal my sugar in the shed, the empty kitchen drawer, the gas light and the feeling of home and of being absolutely the apple of my mother’s eye. She was forever painting on the walls giving a space to our universe. There would appear the most splendid of roses, the grandest of mice in the finest of clothes always with whiskers alert, always ready to go into battle with anyone who came to hand. There wasn’t much food, but the coal we got by following the coalman’s cart .You had a fair chance of either the coal being jolted out of the cart or the horse delivering food for the tomato plants. These were prizes that were like fools gold to us, so sweet was their promise. In the heart of either was a warm ember for our fire or the promise of plumped, rich fruit .Yet how much easier to stay at gran’s, where you didn’t have to run after your treasures and carry them home in a bucket.
