Bedtime Stories

I am Cinderella’s granddaughter.

That was her story, she held it in her bones. My grandmother was illegitimate, born dirt poor. Her mother married a widower who had his own children, and they had more between them, but she was always ‘different’. She didn’t understand why until she was getting married and discovered she had a different surname on her birth certificate.

My grandfather spotted her on a factory holiday. She looked like a film star, and he looked like Errol Flynn. She was awestruck by his family house. I know that house, and its a three bedroomed detached house that held two parents and nine children – but to my Granny it was a palace.

My granddad rescued her, but she rescued herself first. I don’t know if she saw that. She worked in a jelly factory, she dressed as well as she could, she embraced life. She told me once that a friend had asked her if she and her husband should buy a house or a car? A car, my granny said immediately. You’ll have a lot more fun with a car.

That was her. She was always up for a coach trip, a day out, a laugh. She worked hard, but she enjoyed herself. Once lockdown’s over, I will put her diamond ring back on and remember her sparkle.

sarah connor

Scissors slicing hair…

*

It was sitting in the chair of my grandmother’s beauty shoppe that I learned how her world worked and what was expected of me. I was nine years old.

*

At times I still hear the sound of the scissors slicing off my hair; I can see her. I’m watching her in the big square mirror all over again. She starts out slow, snipping away my long, thick, black hair.

*

The pair of scissors are relatively small and slender, but when she begins to snip faster and faster, the sound of metal slicing through hair filling the air, that slender pair of scissors might just as well be shears, one of those silver pairs with blades twice as wide and thick.

*

Snipping turns into shearing so quickly. I cringe every time I hear it, my shoulders hunching up towards my ears. I don’t want her to cut off my hair, and she doesn’t answer me when I ask why. She and my mother made the decision, talking in German as they always do when they don’t want me to know what they are speaking of.

*

I am used to her cutting my hair, but it is how she is cutting this time that makes me uneasy. Scared. She isn’t physically harming me; it’s her detachment, as if she is somewhere else, angry, like she is trying to get rid of something, something very bad. And I sit watching the long black ribbons of my hair fall to the floor, the tie of the vinyl apron wrapped around me scratching my neck.

*

It’s been over 30 years since the day I lost my hair, and I now know why my grandmother did it: it reminded her of my grandfather, the man my mother never knew, whose face she never saw, whose name she did not know up until four years ago. I don’t think my grandmother ever imagined that my mom would find him: my Sinti grandfather Georg, dark hair and sparkling eyes, from a family of musicians.

Amy Millios

As a young child, I wished to be a borrower…

*

a tiny, sentinel-like, brave presence that would pilfer small objects from our family and feast like a Queen on a single gold-wrapped chocolate caramel.

*

I wanted to live with my parents but for them not to know I was still there; I felt that – at full child size – I was often a burden to them, rather than a source of interest and joy.

*

If I were small, I could live cosily in the airing cupboard where I kept my flower press. I could keep a close eye on the big wide world and alert a grown up to trouble, if needs be.

*

I had a route planned out through the house to the kitchen, with a mechanism of pulleys to snaffle food; a path through the rockery in the garden that would make for perfect borrower-sized adventures; a spot next to the robin hole (a hole in the hedge where our resident robin would nip in and out through the day) where I would set up a camp, complete with tiny campfire, where I would lie on my back and watch the stars come out.

*

When I later learned of the hearth faeries – the broonies and ùruisgs of Scotland – I felt instantly drawn to them, as if a fragment of my soul were some kind of hearth spirit, a tiny protector of home and heart.

Larissa Reid

There were prayers before bed...

*

Three of us slept in the small bedroom, little girls. Each evening we knelt down, side by side, at the bed, and gave thanks to God for the day that had passed and our parents, brother and sisters, and the wonders of the world, in words that we didn’t understand. Heaven, hallowed, kingdom, fruit of thy womb, sinners, death all spoken rapidly so we could get to the end, to story time.

*

The lights were turned out and in the blackness D, my father, told us stories about other worlds. Arabian nights, Hannibal crossing the alps, families of donkeys, leprechauns in the mountains, some he read but most he made up. Together we went on adventures that were not possible in real life, to places that only existed in the stories.

*

Sometimes a story took several nights to tell, so the prayers the following night would be even quicker. He rarely talked about the past and, as there were six children in the house and we were so busy living, we didn’t reflect too much on the present. Instead I learned to value each and every moment, be it spent managing the ordinary or absorbing new experiences.

Sheila De Courcy

Strong, eccentric, flawed…

*

On my mother’s side, I was told about my great grandmother, a suffragette and fierce teetotaller who thought nothing of snatching alcoholic drinks out of people’s hands at parties. Her daughter, my grandmother, was the first in her family to go to university.

*

My paternal grandfather was by all accounts a charismatic but difficult character who demanded worship from the rest of the family. My father and his brother were expected to walk with him to the station every morning . They deeply resented this.

*

Quite how these stories formed me I am not sure but they did not cause me to shrink from life. Rather, they were, in an odd way, something to live up to, strong, eccentric, flawed characters who didn’t conform.

Sophie Pierce

Two Dads

*

Two dads. I was different and I liked that, two lots of presents, right? Watchful, shy but with a fire in my belly, I longed for my daddy and remember crying on Sunday nights when he’d have dropped me home. Weekends with him were within the ‘sureness’ of my Nan’s house; bacon and sausages and endless bossing of my dad to play with my dollies and there’d be treats! It was wonderfully predictable and ‘safe’ is the word that springs to mind.

*

Home with mum and daddy number two is more blurry… younger brothers and that growing awareness of the ‘adult world’. What’s really going on? What are you talking about? This from 5/6 years onwards is the dominant feeling I had as a child, a watchfulness that I have carried through my life and has almost certainly contributed to the risk averse part of my core.

*

But what of ‘The Girl Within’? Emily Hancock’s book, read in adulthood, stirred a cloudiness surrounding that child. She never went; she’s absolutely there in the adventure-craving gobby drunken teenager, protesting for animal rights, searching for just cause to shout truth to power, and this survivor’s instinct, the refusal to lie down and be silent, a beautiful inheritance from my mother’s survival. The safety seeking I’ve craved has brought me wonderful gifts, I am able to give and receive love and I am hugely grateful. But to live, I must stir the pot and connect with that girl inside, where will she take me? I wonder…

Faye Davidson

Lasting Impressions

It was a ritual that fired up my young, impressionable imagination. Five maternal aunties; a conspiracy of card-players were about to plunge into another table top drama. A memory etched in my mind.

Pennies, half pennies, thruppences and tanners were smashed down in the middle of the kitchen table so hard the Babysham bottles clinked and clanked, ringing out the start of the game. Voices cracked the air with expectation. I sucked hard on my sherbet lemon and focused on the players.

White sticks were passed round and set on fire, smoke blown across the table which grew into cumulus congestus cloud enveloping the entire table. I gazed across at them through a smoky haze; mystical figures, faces contorted with frowns, smirks and knowing nods. The local cigarette factory did well on Thursday nights (Pay day).

A second sherbet lemon was needed for the next part as cards sliced through the murky air like flying cleavers as shouts of ‘Bust!’ ‘Twist!’ ‘Deuce!’ ‘Flush!’ and ‘Diamond takes all!’ punctured holes through the mist. Glasses were drained, voices clashed, air crackled as cheeks reddened. Cards were slammed down in frustration. Howls and curses marched around the room giving orders.

To a chorus of I’m out! Bugger, chairs were unceremoniously pushed back and toppled over and fingers jabbed into the air like red hot pokers. The winnings provocatively scraped into an eager pocket. The plunder would eventually end up back in the cigarette factory where my aunties earned it the week before.

Through the smoky haze, my crimson-lipped aunties, shining like beacons of hope shuffled the cards to a shout of ‘ Your deal!’ This was unforgettable theatre. They have all now been swallowed up by history, but wait for me in my dreamscapes.

Steve harrison

In the beginning there were people.

Neighbours in the courtyard, family across the street, neighbours queuing at the bakery, family across town, out of town guests staying with neighbours, out of town family the city folk plagued each time we ‘escaped the concrete jungle’. There were games, visits, jokes, parties, funerals, weddings, epic rows, epic meals, kids crawling under tables and running between the legs of giant dancers. Around one year old my parents went to a New Year’s Eve party and left me behind with grandma. Fists hitting freezing panes, tears searing my cheeks, I watched through the condensed window in disbelief as my parents melted into the gooey darkness. The first betrayal. Around two years old, a boy twice my age with sun bleached curls, of a place so far I couldn’t picture it, casually joined my games some torrid afternoons. He asked my hand in marriage soon – that is, he asked my parents! Neither him, so serious, nor them, so amused, cared what I thought. I thought I was, and indeed I was, ignored. Around three years old, I was made to sit under my parents’ gaze, under the arch of the gate, under a cardboard hanging from my neck: ‘I’ve been a bad girl again and my parents would like to swap me for a nice boy.’ I wasn’t sorry, I was fuming: if they didn’t want me, why should I want them?! A chap stopped by eventually, offering his boring son. I took his hand and started walking. The first step. As all the people slipped away, so did all the laughter, all the veil. Betrayals filled the space. I bent and bent and bent and walked a touch farther away most days. I’m still not far enough; my back still aches.

Anonymous

They tried, these three women, my great-grandma, grandma and mom.

They made sure I had pretty dresses for dances. They told me to go to college. They told me they loved their kids but not to have babies early, that it is a sacrifice, kids change everything. They told me there is a stuckness to having children. They told me not to marry the first person I had sex with. They told me to keep men guessing and that if I couldn’t be good then to remember the date. They told me my life could be different. They told me to stay thin, that men liked a flat belly. They told me men were the disease and the cure, necessary and ruinous, men cause whispers and startles and that what they don’t know won’t hurt them, fear is not respect but men don’t know that (would that matter?), men as means to an end, men cause the end, men control the end. Men are the dealers, women the gamblers. Women roll the dice and the house always wins. I learned to tuck and roll, to stop, drop and roll, roll with punches, roll with it, roll away, women as tumbling dice. Birds roll in dirt to clean their feathers. They roll their eggs during incubation. They roll their heads from heavy metal poisoning. It is hard to write of yourself in this way, where I fit into this, knowing they wanted it different for me, but some days I still feel stuck, the bird still sitting on a dead egg. I fear loss. I retreat. I harden. I go outside and walk but every walk is some sort of loop, a migratory return. Site attachment.

Sheila Knell

Children should be seen and not heard, someone said. So I tried to be quiet but sometimes, well sometimes I just couldn’t keep the words inside of me. Especially when nobody else said anything and I knew, I just knew that there was something that had to be said. Those words just had to come out.

Well, there was a price to pay when you dared to be heard. When you dared to release words that once spoken out loud somehow made you feel better. I knew the price, but still words would find their way out time and time again when everything felt wrong and I thought I could make it feel right again. Right again for me, but mostly right again for the others.

It made me feel angry when those others were being quiet and I just knew that they had something to say, something that could explain things and that could maybe prevent them from feeling even worse. They were choosing only to be seen it seemed: I couldn’t bear it and I couldn’t understand why. Then one day someone said that I had too much of what the others didn’t have enough of.

Did I? I remember feeling pleased that I had something even though I didn’t know what the something was. I didn’t think to ask. It felt rather special in a way, and if the others didn’t have it, well, it was extra special then wasn’t it? I wasn’t just a girl, I was a girl with something special, and the others didn’t have it! The special feeling didn’t last very long though, because someone said that a lady was only a lady until she opened her mouth…

tracey mayor

Well, you know, children can’t be trusted. They tell stories.

I understood bedtime stories and stories in books, good enjoyable things to be encouraged; I knew about stories the grown-ups told each other at the dinner table or in the living room after, which were rewarded with guffawed laughter; incomprehensible to us, but evidently a good thing.

What was wrong with children telling their stories? But they didn’t mean stories, they meant lies. How confusing to the child that hears things literally.

That didn’t happen, stop telling stories.

My stories, the ones which earned me an early bed, or a red hand-print, weren’t stories, they were truths. Hadn’t we always been told never to tell lies? But now, even as I took the vow, followed the rules, I was disbelieved. Children telling stories was a bad thing, not to be tolerated. Punishable, even when they were the truth. So I didn’t tell stories, any stories, didn’t tell my stories, didn’t retell those of Bimbo & Tospy, or Marmalade or Pookie. I kept them tight inside the suitcase in my head, until I stopped hearing them at all.

Father Christmas; the Tooth Fairy; God.

Perhaps as you get older, the meaning changes. Perhaps never means sometimes. Now lies fit on to a sliding scale of seriousness depending upon the teller and the lie. White lies and fibs, fairy-stories, untruths, falsehoods and fictions, tall-tales, yarns. Justifications for when a lie might be excused, or expected, or, even, kind. Embroidering; embellishing; exaggerating. So only children must not lie, or face the consequences, and adults must do as they please. The lie of the lie.

Everything will be alright
You can trust me
She’s just a friend
You just need to work harder
I’ll look after you
Just be yourself
It won’t hurt
I love you.

Sally harrop

I mustn’t sit in the smoke. I mustn’t breathe in the smoke. I mustn’t smoke.

I sit in the ground floor room, as it fills with marijuana. It is bigger than the others, with a double bed, a metal clothes rail, and a scratched chest of drawers under a window which looks out onto the hotel car park.

I mustn’t sit in the smoke. But I must.

The shift finishes between 10:00 and 11:30 each night. We stand in groups at the pass, every table cleared, every piece of cutlery polished, lingering in our black and white as the last couple push silver forks into their mouths, oblivious that their dessert is keeping us from our beds.

When we are finally able to leave, I linger too, for the chefs to finish. The room on the ground floor belongs to one of them, and near to him I am safe and I can forget.

I have a baby inside my womb. It is small still, and not a bother. The baby likes the bedtime story and so do I. The chefs call it banter.
Inhales and exhales of smoke pass lungs slowly, intensifying the effect. Laughter and shouted words are exchanged, the lyrics of Oasis filling the gaps. I giggle with my eyes shut, curled in the foetal position. We lie together like this, the baby and me. We don’t smoke, but we do listen.

There is no father to read bedtime stories to my expanding tummy. No house to return to, no discussion about which colour we should paint the nursery or the right pram to buy.

But there is the chef, the spliff between his lips, the smell of the unchanged bed, the voices around my head.

This bedtime story is the best one we can listen to right now.

Jennifer Carter

I can’t think of a full story I was told as a child. Only snippets, like these.

My great-grandfather on my dad’s side was Nicolai Roman. When my Grandma was five years old, something fell on him at the Willy’s Jeep car factory and he died. That was 1938, and companies didn’t give money to families when there was an accident. So my great-grandmother Eva, who spoke Polish and no English, had her eldest daughter translate for her in negotiations with the car factory. Because of the money they were awarded, at Christmas and Easter there were at least three meats on the table.

My mom’s devoutly Catholic mother Anne had to get married because she was pregnant with my Uncle Andy. She sternly warned her four daughters never to mess around with boys. None of the girls knew about the out-of-wedlock conception until they were grown up and did the maths.

At age 13, my mom was chosen to be May Queen at Sacred Heart Catholic School. She wore one of her teacher’s wedding dresses, a blue satin shawl and a tiara in her chestnut hair. She looked 25 years old.

My parents met on a blind date when my mom was 15 and my dad was 19. According to my mom, they messed around.

Six months after my parents got married, my dad threw my mom’s clothes out the window of their first floor flat and went back to live with his mother. My mom got a job and learned to scuba dive while my dad was gone. Eventually he moved back. My dad then also learned to scuba dive. One time the scuba equipment my mom bought for him failed and he ended up in hospital for three weeks with ‘the bends’. They joke that she was trying to get rid of him.

wendy knerr

I was born into the post war world, to a family still grieving and living in austerity. Like so much in our family, war and grief were never spoken about, but hung like an unseen fog seeping into my early childhood and beyond. Only child and only grandchild. I grieved for the unborn children who would never become my cousins and for the uncles I never knew. I was their substitute, created to bring back joy and hope.

I smiled a lot and tried to bring happiness to the many adults who surrounded me. That was my job. A heavy burden for a small child.
My escape from trying to be happy even when I was sad or afraid was to be found in the books, stories and films that fed my imagination.

Sunday mornings, cuddled up to my father, I listened to exciting and magical stories from a new page in our invisible magic book, creating a story together.

I rowed across the landing in an upturned card table complete with kitchen towel flag. Swallows and Amazons.

I hid from the Nazis behind musty clothes in my parents’ wardrobe. The Silver Sword.

Endlessly singing ‘Nick Nack Paddy Wack’, I frequently dived into bushes to escape bullets and bombs. The Inn of The Sixth Happiness.

Left to my own devices I squeezed through the park railings and perched high in my favourite tree daydreaming.

I dragged brown paper carrier bags filled with my mother’s cast-off skirts to a den under the rhododendron bushes, crawled through the hayfield creating pathways and tunnels, and one snowy winter I rolled the largest snowball in the world around the putting green until it became too heavy to push any further.

Occasionally I even stopped smiling.

Rosemary kirkus

Sleeping, crying, dying?

My father died in tragic circumstances when he was forty and I was not quite three. Quite what those circumstances were we will never know. There are plenty of stories though.

I made up my own story about his death – my mother remarried and it was never spoken of. In fact I had two stories. One is of him and I together in our local park being herded off the grass by a gaggle of geese protecting their young. The other is the story of the day he died. He had been fatally injured and lay dying on our settee. We are all keening and crying. I imagine the tableau as an old master painting complete with 1960s wallpaper.

But this story is not true: he didn’t die at home but in the back of his car with a spilled bottle of sleeping tablets and a carton of orange squash. 

Details of my mam’s story of his death leaked out over the years usually in short sobs after a rum and black. He stopped his car on the verge of the coast road to rest. He lay down in the back and – poof! – had a heart attack and died immediately. Wouldn’t have known a thing.

There were other leaks, other stories; my dad’s period in care as a child, his brief stay in an institution, his sister’s death by her own hand. His trouble with sleeping.

In my thirties I learned from my brother that after our father died our mother lay on the settee for two weeks and wouldn’t get up or do anything to look after her four children. We were required to witness her despair – we all cried – there was no school, no playing outside, no parenting.

Wendy bispham

Silent one

Being an observer came naturally to me as the youngest of seven children. I watched and I learned from that. I was not acknowledged as having a valid opinion as a child. The opposite in fact. I was annoying, attention seeking, shy, ‘the baby’. That is the story from family. I had no voice in that hectic space; when I did have the courage to speak, I was talked over or ignored. This lack of voice was reinforced at school. I received corporal punishment at age five (the strap) – sanctioned by my parents – for talking in class. The church taught me that to put myself first was selfish. That I was a sinner at age seven.

My place in the world? To remain silent, to be an observer of others, to sacrifice self over all others. To be ashamed of failings and to try not to make mistakes. That everyone else is better.

Part two. As an observer, I am also an introvert. I like my own company. I reflect that my childhood was solitary in that huge family. So my imagination took a hold and kept me company. It held my hand and came along with me everywhere. We climbed the trees together and imagined we were invincible. We rode on our horse in the suburban back yard. We invented games and we were happy and free. Today, I climbed a tree in my friend’s yard. We are both now elders. In that tree, I recalled the wonder of that childhood that I created for myself in a family that did not see me; I wondered when I became fearful of climbing trees. My imagination is with me still – her and I are having so much fun. We write, we travel, we wander and wonder. I am fierce with her by my side and I see myself – worthy, intelligent, bold and adventurous. The stories shape us, but they go on to have plot twists and turns that can take us in any direction. And I control what happens in my story now. That is my wisdom – in words unspoken.

maurni o’beirne

Gifted

First day of public school. Tears, crying, hysterical in the familiar way of a child in the face of forced separation. My experience in a Montessori preschool – gentle, quiet and slow – had given way to a public school 1st Grade classroom of twenty-five children, a teacher who yelled and constant stomach aches.

‘She’s gifted,’ they said. ‘We’ve moved her into Second Grade.’ My mother could only pretend to give approval of a decision already made, a change already executed. And with those first days in the new classroom began my new life labeled ‘gifted.’

Life was a conveyor belt, moved forward by the engine of school. Elementary gave way to middle gave way to high school. The grades became important, the label became a burden. ‘You’re supposed to be gifted, but I got a higher score?!?’ The girl with long black hair exclaimed. Her name is lost to my memory, but the emotion of being compared and coming up short has not. Teachers always encouraging harder classes, more involvement when really all I wanted was to curl up and read.

High school graduation led to college, led to ‘You’re too smart not to go to grad school.’ All the while feeling that the conveyor belt of schooling was about to end, and I didn’t know what came after. There had been no time to develop passion, to develop me. Always another assignment, another class, another thing to check off someone else’s list of what makes an education.

And now I’ve been declared educated. I have the diplomas to prove it. But this story ended on a cliffhanger. The plot unresolved, our heroine left adrift. Because there’s one more thing to study, one research question left. The one thing I have yet to learn: WHO AM I?

Finally a subject worth pursuing.

Michelle reich

‘Daddy, my Daddy!’

Oh, how I’d wanted to be Roberta in The Railway Children with all my being. To be on a station platform as the steam cleared to reveal my Father, wrongly imprisoned for espionage, returned to me. I’d run to him, he’d engulf me in his arms and tell me he’d never leave again. 

When I was two, my Father was killed by a drunk lorry driver. It was never discussed and it was assumed that, given I didn’t remember the day, I couldn’t possibly be affected by it. I was, in fact, consumed by the absence. Until I was ten, I thought Dad was a spy, unable to come home, or that he’d gone travelling but would eventually show up and not wanting to upset my Mother, I never sought clarification. As I grew and learned about death, the hope I had for his return was replaced with anger at his departure.

His absence solidified me as ‘peculiar’; fodder for bullies. It’s certainly character-building to be laughed at on Father’s Day for not knowing who to address the card to. My peers, blessed with their fortunate circumstances and repulsed by my single-parent household, didn’t understand my messy essence. I couldn’t share the dreams where I’d wake feeling his presence or the imagined conversations where I’d scream at him for leaving me. Alone, with the weight of it all. The imprint of grief. The scar.

Now I know it’s a gift to feel that deeply.

I walked along the beach last week, in the eye of a storm, and asked for a sign from him. The grey, moody clouds began to pull apart revealing a slither of yellow that flourished in to the most remarkable sunset. I laughed as I realised a full rainbow had appeared over me. 
‘Daddy, my Daddy!’

Jessica Carroll

Everything That Attracts Men

I was putting my Bible and notebook in a carrier bag, downhearted that yet again I had not been able to receive the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I longed to talk in tongues. I had gone forward for prayer and the laying on of hands; I tried to loosen my tongue by starting with a string of nonsense, ‘baa, ne, ba, la, mmm’ but nothing came. The man next to me had his hands raised and a string of exotic words were coming from his mouth. When the music died down, the minister in the pulpit received a word from the Lord, a translation. It involved a young girl who was seeped in sin of a carnal nature. I swear he looked straight at me, so I bowed my head and fiddled with the hem of my skirt. I was just about to join my father, one of whose tasks as a church deacon was to clear up the hymn books and copies of Praise Be! when Joyce, a friend of my mother’s from the flower arranging group, who was wearing her Sunday best in a shade of pale lilac with matching hat, rushed over.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself!’

I looked up, terrified about what was to come next.

‘Bringing THAT into the house of the Lord!’ she shrieked, pointing at my carrier bag which was pale grey with the word ‘ETAM’ across it in yellow font.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I stammered.

‘It stands for Everything That Attracts Men!’ she shouted.

The place went quiet, and I looked across to where a man was making a swift exit. It took me half a century to unpack my shame and a Jungian therapist to tell me that it was not my fault.

sue reed

Reading under the bedclothes after Mum said ‘Lights out!’, I consumed more books by torchlight than most children consume sweets. My first stories were the age-old Enid Blyton mysteries, quickly followed by Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons and Malcolm Saville’s The Lone Pine Five. Each epitomised adventure, the pre-requisite group of friends, definitely no adults and romanticised danger resolved in safety.

Did they shape my values? They certainly shaped my imagination. I longed for adventures and a like-minded tribe with which to share them. I was nineteen when I bought my first pair of walking boots, second-hand from a work colleague. The golf course near my home was a pretty tame start but I progressed to walking the eight miles to Leigh-on-Sea. Armed with an OS map, I followed known paths, got lost, trespassed inadvertently but reached my destination without serious injury. The ridge along the Thames Estuary passes abandoned homes, farms, rusting machinery but always in sight of the ICI works, which lit up at dusk like fairyland. It wasn’t Shropshire but it was adventure.

Later, I would acquire a new pair of boots, and begin to explore the NE coast, the Lake District and Northumberland with a walking tribe, Sheperds Walks. Finally, I would set off to walk back to the place of my childhood, Kirkcaldy, inspired by Simon Armitage’s book Walking Home. At first I returned to base each night, then, as distance became impractical, I wild camped through the Cheviots and beyond. One hundred and seventy miles later, I crossed the Firth of Forth Bridge to be joined by my sisters. Home.

Now on my third pair of walking boots, I have crossed more of England and walked a little of the Mont Blanc trail. Hopefully my foot will heal well enough for more adventures to come.

jean wilson

Stig of the Dump by Clive King is the story of a boy who discovers a cave-boy in a chalkpit. Despite their different homes, clothes and language, Barney and Stig become best friends enjoy thrilling and dangerous adventures. Published the year before I learned to read, it became my favourite book, influencing games, beliefs and fantasies well into adolescence. I craved a friend who was more interesting than the doll-loving girls who lived locally. I loved constructing dens, hiding from grown-ups and cooking on open fires. I wanted to be called Billy. 

I lived by a chalk pit which looked exactly like Stig’s, as drawn by illustrator Edward Ardizzone. It was stuffed with rubbish, nettles and hollowed-out caves. If I looked hard enough I would find a Stig and we would have so much fun. My parents let me wear canvas trousers and army hats. They gave me matches, frying pans, sausages and didn’t seem to mind that I was out all day, alone. My search for Stig was logical (and cost nothing!) When I finally admitted that the chalk pit was only inhabited by cigarette-smoking youths, Dad built a red canvas hut in the garden, with a stone fire pit and oven. Not a Wendy House, but a tough, damp, smelly Den. Hidden, private and all mine. 

Stig and Barney were pioneers: recycling rubbish, fighting bullies, communicating non-verbally, expressing unashamedly same-sex love. Boys, but not annoying ones like William Brown, Jennings or the embryonic mansplainers in Blyton. They loved being messy, resourceful and outdoors. They connected to the past. They had morals. They never let each other down. I identified strongly. I loved them and I hope I still would if I read it again but I can’t take the risk.

rosalyn huxley

I had been the new girl at seven different schools by the time I was nine years old. Moving from house to house, country to country and even hemisphere to hemisphere felt like no big deal. One day I was at home in England; the next, I was welcomed into a new land – Australia. As a white-skinned, blonde-haired child, I was readily accepted amongst children who had also emigrated with their families, mixing with the so-called ‘true blue’ Aussie kids. I’d heard stories about how my grandfather, a Ukrainian refugee, had found a home in England after World War II. My Dad talked of visits to his grandparents’ farm in the West of Ireland before they moved overseas. I learned that home was where you found it and could be as quickly made as unmade.

As time passed, I realised there were other stories to be uncovered and half-truths I wanted to make whole. Our history teachers told us tales of how the British explorer Captain Cook ‘discovered’ Australia, claiming it for Britain, and how he was celebrated as a hero in both countries. In class, we drew colourful pictures of him on his ‘all-conquering’ ship. Year later I learned that the tales were twisted; that the histories and culture of the indigenous peoples of my adopted home were obscured and suppressed. And I began to understand the reasons why. 

This year, on Australia Day, a commemorative holiday marking the anniversary of the establishment of the first European settlement and the planting of the British flag in the ground near Sydney, I read the news that Cook’s statue in Melbourne had been vandalised – its legs sawn off. 

I learned to seek out the stories behind the stories and to keep asking questions.

jo regan

My father was not someone, on the face of it, you’d pin as a storyteller. A physicist and engineer who loved maths and preciseness. Study science, he said, you stand more chance of good marks because the answers are usually right or wrong. My sister and I took no notice, preferring arty subjects. He sighed, as he continued to scribe notebooks with strings of equations, not a word in sight. I still have some of those, treasured memories in which his looping symbols spell mysterious, unfathomable tales across the page.

He was, though, undeniably a storyteller, and not just in numerators and denominators. Poetry, legend, tales of fantasy and courage were as wondrous to him as the discovery of black holes. He was in charge of our bedtime stories. There’d be the ‘What happened next?’ sagas. Dad would start a tale, and we’d then take it in turns to continue. I can’t remember the content of our shared efforts, but do remember the delight of shared creation, our father’s laughter and approval, of stumbling with wonder into our inventiveness.

Famously in the annals of our family legends, Dad decided, when my sister and I were still very young (maybe four and six?), that a suitable book for reading aloud at bedtime would be Dracula; not any children’s version, but the original work by Bram Stoker. I’m not sure our mother knew. We should have been terrified, but instead we were thrilled. Secure beneath the blankets, I learned that the world contained not only many frightening things – vampires, forbidding castles, galloping coach journeys through stormy nights – but also stories and adventures to amaze and startle, and to help us be brave.

amanda scott

I Know I Can, I’m Sure I Can.

I would suspect most of my generation – you know the cool one, “X” – would put some of their individual personality traits down to the writing of Wilbert Audry in some way or another. Because it would have been nigh on impossible not to have consumed his work as a child growing up in the years that defined us.

Our perseverance against impossible odds was learnt via a little engine who could. Our adult management styles, based on a cunning train pulling his unruly carriages and bringing them into order. Our ambition, established by the lead character’s aspiration to pull the express to Vicarstown.

The generation that followed us of course consumed these same stories through the medium of television and the voice of Ringo Starr, he of the legendary 1960s band, The Beatles. It was not via the written page and I often wonder if the power of the words were lost in that translation to visual imagery?

But it is unquestionable that the Thomas The Tank Engine series of books that I grew up with were the best starting point for any child in the last half of the 20th Century. Every lesson you ever needed to learn to be a decent human in a civilised society is contained between those covers. They taught you about hierarchy and when to challenge it, instilled a sense of community and responsibility, inspired kindness and proved things are better when we all work together.

There was no greater memory for me than being wrapped up in my mother’s arms, secure and loved, listening to her recite the words of the Reverend and his own son. But most importantly discovering that the best way to be great in this world is to break all the rules. Which is something I’ve been doing ever since.

paul atherton

Birth/Thread

In a hospital in Kendal, I am cut from my panicking mother. Scar tissue rings the birth canal, tight and ungiving around my skull. I am close to dying.

Six months before, as a small, translucent fish creature, curled tight inside, I am stitched into my mother. For there have been others here before me, who, without a stitch looped taut beneath them, grew too heavy and dropped out. And there was one, a long time ago, fully grown, but the wrong way up. She took three days, arriving blue and still, nearly taking my mother with her.

My mother, who has waited fourteen years for this day, feels the scar tissue – residuary of the one that was still and blue – constricting, gripping me tight inside her, my heartbeat fluttering and swooping.

‘It’s happening again. It’s happening again…’ she shouts into the hot, blood panic of the birthing room, into the doctor’s ashen face.

She is sedated; I am cut from her. I survive.

I am tethered to her by this slender thread, a single stitch, that is also a story. Of blood, and loss, and miraculous birth. Of the baby girl, born still and blue; of the glancing fishtail of existence, felt only by my mother, of those others before me that didn’t stay. Of the panic in the birthing room. Of her fear and grief and joy. Of all the many reasons that I lived.
 
This story that is mine, but really hers, stitched into my memory; told to a child too young to bear such a weight of revelation and confidence. Her miracle baby, her golden child. Her love a thread binding me tightly to her, while I, straining at its tethers, feel its pull, taut between us.

sally wetherall

I am Daisy Chain, Dandelion Wee and Buttercup Chin

I start at an edge, where a town thins to barn and farm in 1970s England. I am of bike wheel and dust, the trodden flank of farm and canal. I am the sandy edge of Brook, of imagination denned by Hawthorn, of left-alone-long Grass and Nettle. The escape of Bills Wood, backs to oak hide-and-seek and Hedgerow safari. I am of back garden, blankets and clothing peg tents, of Snail, Slug and Earthworm, digging and mud-making in borders, Brother eating them all to know. I am Flying Ants swarming from crazy-pathing, of Wasp and Bee chasing Sister screams. I am fear that tethers me taut when Vixen screams across railway bank, the haunt as felines find wild in the corners of night. I am Donkey under me at the Derby, Praying Mantis tickling young arm, excited white Rat in hand. I am joy jumping the Wave, the stained smile of blackberry mouth, the freedom of unseen in tall Fields. Mom never camped, Dad one night, didn’t like, no walking boots under our stairs. A working class wild in the lands of Park and country Estates with picnics on the weekend compulsion to get out. Of holiday sand and dunes, rock pool Crustacean and Jellyfish army beached. I am everyone’s Rose, the Daffodil lines of Her, the Dahlia show of Him. This is the soil I grew in.

Joanna hall

Class

I often joke that the family I was born into was not even working class, if we must really think about ourselves like that. My parents were displaced individuals who had left their own families behind for whatever work they could find in the capital. The first thing I remember being really ashamed of at school was that neither my father nor my mother had a profession, a trade, a ‘job title’. And a narrative had begun to emerge about me too. My godmother was very protective of my hands, she would not let me do the washing up because she thought my hands were beautiful and she wanted me to look after them. My father, however, disagreed: ‘What is the point?’, I swear I can still hear him say, since I would inevitably have to do a lot of manual work and make them ugly. I must have been in my very early teens, but I can still feel the shock, hurt, doubt, the creeping feeling of being trapped – so low were the expectations my father had for me. My confidence still shivers whenever I think about it. I have never shied away from manual work, by the way, but I still look after my hands in memory of the one person who believed I could be and do whatever I wanted. I suspected even then that my father was wrong, but how could I be certain? That was the story I was told – I was working class and my choices were limited: no ballet classes, no travels abroad. The constant pushing back of my dreams that to this day still comes so naturally to my mother. But even in my middle-age, I persist in trying to create a life for myself well beyond my parents’ education and imagination.

maria simoes

She appears in a whirlwind of screeching brakes, wheels and pedals. ‘If the park keeper saw me, I’m a gonna,’ she says. There’s no cycling in the park, but this knee-high-to-a-grasshopper child doesn’t care. I feign disapproval but inwardly laugh.

Getting banned from the park would have been the least of my worries at her age. ‘Men rode penny-farthings through the park on Sundays when I was a nipper,’ I tell her, choosing not to mention the poverty, hunger and cold of the thirties.

She gives me an old-fashioned look, eyebrows raised as we pull identical paper bags from our pockets and shake monkey-nut cocoons onto our palms. I don’t know her name. She’s never asked mine. But this shared ritual seems to bring comfort to both of us.

I’ve known this park all of my life. I ran from the park keeper, fished the ponds, courted Diane, and pushed Christine on the swings. Simple pleasures. And though the manicured lawns, squirrels, and orderly lines of bedding plants still look the same, the people, my people, are no longer here.

The scrunch of the paper has attracted two greys. They hang from a nearby trunk, their back legs unnaturally long, bodies stretched like elastic bands, feather duster tails twitching. One descends to the ground and sits on its haunches before us, nose twitching, choosing.

When it jumps, its crampon-claws prick their way up her yellow-check trousers, up her jumper to the ledge of her shoulder. Her head tilts, unperceivably. She wants to feel the squirrel’s fur on her cheek. Experience the electricity of touching the wild. She studies each hair, whisker and claw as if for the first time – though I know she’s done this a thousand times – she’s lost in the moment.

Eventually she looks up. No words, just a look.

I nod.

jane adams

My mother and I have a new game that has us rushing gleefully upstairs to see a little bird fluttering mid-air, asking for food. We are flattered and delighted, over and over again. I’m fourteen. My sister has left home at seventeen; I’ve inherited her ID style-mag subscription. My brother’s a weekly boarder; I have to wash up after Sunday roast, and I’ve never done my homework beforehand.

Half my lifetime earlier, my mother returned from work with a story. ‘I was standing at the bus stop and a bird on top of the lamppost dropped dead at my feet. A chaffinch. So beautiful!’ Thinking of brown sparrows, I’m unconvinced. A bit boring. Then she describes the pink, slate blue, chestnut and green feathers of the tiny bird in her palm, and maybe this is what sparks my love of wildlife.

It’s a chaffinch that draws us into the game that we know is wrong, unnatural. For a while we can’t resist the gratification, then we pull ourselves together and just stop. Hidden in the hedge is the secret nest. Last time we peeped there were five warm eggs in its perfect mossy cup. Now there are five horrifying, pathetic corpses. We feel guilty. Is it our fault?

In my twenties, I lived in the West End of London. Dismayed at the sirens my end, my mother held the telephone out for me to hear birdsong. The large pond my parents excavated attracted kingfishers. They planted lots of trees. My mother regaled me with a story of how a cock chaffinch had been tap tap tapping at the windowpane. Loud as a hammer, waking her EVERY dawn. Annoyed her so much she blasted it out of the yew tree with an air rifle.

J Sinclair

There is no story here. I’m not to tell it. If death visits your door, don’t open it. This tale goes blank, trails off, becomes obsolete. It’s a story I’m not to participate in. I am too young and I must be kept from the truth. I must suffer in silence as my elders do. I can’t tell the story because I only know fragments hidden inside myself. That death came to the door and someone let him in. An early morning phone call, a hushed grief filled conversation behind the kitchen door. Bad news is in the air and I sit motionless on the living room floor staring at the skirted end table, willing it to help me disappear. It’s my once upon a time of family tragedy and no one’s reading it to me. I must skip to the end and find they didn’t all live happily ever after. Suffer in silence is the narrative, freeze in place is the plot. Be seen not heard. Don’t tell the story, even to yourself. The story theme is crystal clear. Life is dangerous and death and loss is the provided bookmark. I keep trying to turn the pages but somehow I’m still stuck on page one. The little girl staring at the table cloth, hoping for a place to hide from the inevitable. The ending of the story.

suzanne brewer

Strawberry Blond and Freckles

My school bus rattled. They rattled very effectively in 1977. Metal parts and chrome clattered to a stop at the bottom of a farm drive where it didn’t usually. Eventually I loved that short sweeping lane, it was bumpy as hell but it said ‘Hi, you’re back’ as warmly as my own lane. Real heart love. Love that felt like home.

She climbed the steps. Without a bus pass, after fumbled coins for the driver, she walked the aisle, blue eyes searching for blank spaces to focus, anywhere but the myriad curious eyes of thirty others dissecting her every move, her personal coating of strange.

She tried to be inconspicuous, small…impossible when you wore hair that was anything but! And those freckles! I felt her discomfort almost as much as the itchiness of the scratchy carpet seat that made the bare backs of my legs red raw (they were like that in 1977). 

I want to be her friend; an immediate thought in my village-wild, unworldly mind, a simple want in collision with the rare and exotic creature I believed her to be.

Three weeks of shy smiles pass; she sits alone left or right, school bag occupying the seat beside her, negating possibility.

Just before clattering metal and itchy seats end for holidays, blue eyes search through strawberry-lit freckles, one seat remains with my bag. A beseeching smile with my own hazel eyes and she sits with her freckled lips (I see this now she’s close). She turns, whispers hello. I sit on my hands to stop myself touching her hair, blush as I ask her name. She whispers a heavenly concoction of letters I’ve never heard of in a refined voice; I mumble my own, ashamed of its common blandness.

Though voice and name never mattered…

susi mawhinney

Scrubbing toilets earned me extra mushrooms and earned me the honour of being known as ‘a good helper.’

Brownie Guide camp, 1987. The positive reward program at this camp were small paper mushrooms which would ultimately earn you rewards and the good favour of your pack leader. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be helpful. I coveted those mushrooms.
 
And so I diligently fulfilled all my assigned duties, quietly and without a fuss. But I also diligently sought out additional opportunities to ‘help.’ When I noticed a task not yet completed, I completed it. When a fellow brownie turned her nose up at cleaning the toilets, I took on the whole task. My pouch grew fat with mushrooms. 

But even then I knew I was being false. I was fulfilling the role I felt I had been assigned. The middle of three daughters, I was the quiet one, the studious one, the one who didn’t cause any trouble and this seemed to make people happy and proud and so I felt happy and proud doing it. Yet, I wondered – would I still be good if I wasn’t always good?

Helpfulness seemed to be synonymous with worthiness. Helpfulness seemed to allow me to fly under the radar. Helpfulness allowed me to hide. But it also became a habit. And habits are hard to break.

LAH was the motto of the brownie guides – lend a hand. Why do I feel I lent more of myself than that?

emily tamas

Not stories. Rather one throw away comment and a pile of bad behaviour that lit a small pilot light in the middle of my chest and constricted my throat in a squeal of delight.

‘…live every day to the full’. The teacher is nameless, faceless to me now so many years on, but her words played tic-tac-toe with the dust motes on that sunny day and in my tiny world, starting a small engine of urgency that pressed against the seams of each day with enough energy to make time itself burst.

And then…at 18, with the dam full, came Uncle Lenny. Presumed dead, tattooed, small and wizened. Coughed up from the oceans, on our shores some forty years since the last, with a kilo of prawns, two mud crabs and wild tales of travel. Shaped and garbed by his turbulent age, he had darted through the cracks in guises for the time: a soldier in the desert, a dealer of contraband in a shattered Europe, a merchant seaman who jumped ship and then disappeared. A maverick, selfish, unfettered soul who glowed as bright to me as whole nations.

I am not blind to the broken hearts and betrayals in his wake; nor the knowledge that had my youthful face been born in his year I may have counted myself amongst their number too. But his raging energy for life and freedom pressed against those seams of life until they burst!

I am of my time and for all our modern tricks, the seams of our lives seem narrower. But I have kept my knapsack packed, my needs light and trod with wild joy and awe across the globe. My many faces, passions and dreams are the beat of my soul and his – adventurers of our age.

louise ratcliffe

So Many Crows

Dad’s sudden death the day before my 16th birthday was cataclysmic. There was no illness, no accident, just a massive heart attack on a bitter cold January day.

While I sat one of my mock O Level English papers in the school gym to the hammering of relentless rain on the steel roof, I felt a chill when I heard an ambulance clamouring at speed not too far away, but thought little more of it, lost as I was in Portia’s quality of mercy. Dad’s heart must have exploded into silence just as my ink started flowing with the joy of there being questions I could answer confidently rather than with scraping uncertainty.

How transient and superficial that small pleasure would soon seem in the new reality of my teenage life. Childhood ended there. My world was thrown into a new ice age, catastrophic climate change. The days that followed remain frozen in my memory. Icicles hung like lances on the eaves as if left there by some maleficent snow giant. Great drifts blanketed the neighbourhood and my uncomprehending self sank waist-deep in an overwhelming white glut of grief and fear. Never had I seen snow like it, luxuriously billowing, a linen cloth on a grand piano waiting for the long-lost maestro to return. He would, soon. Flicking his coat tails as he took up his seat, cracking his fingers before he set them on the bone-cold keys.

The sunsets were exquisite, more blood than flame, and I remember crows, so many crows, like the stuttering blots of words that I couldn’t articulate, their feet pricking the vast expanse of my new fatherless life.

Claire everett

Lemon

One of the first stories I heard was that I was different from everyone else. My classmates, said my mum, were thick and – worse – common. I, however, was clever and destined for better things.
 
Different I certainly was. But not in the way my mum hoped.
 
Morning break, a grey day on the Juniors playground in 1980. We were playing Kiss Me Catch Me, and a huddle of us girls who’d been dobbed, kissed and dumped in ‘den’ were being pressed closer together as more girls got caught and joined us. I found myself close up to Luisa, a quiet girl in my class with brown eyes and brown hair cut in a prim pageboy. We weren’t friends particularly, but that day something about her caught my eye. She had, I noticed, the smoothest, creamiest, most beautiful forehead I’d ever seen. Her skin looked like a baby’s — my baby sister’s, in fact, newly arrived at home. It was irresistable. Without thinking, I leaned forward and planted a kiss right in the centre of it.

It was as if a bomb had gone off.

The huddle of girls gasped and recoiled in a half-second of shock, before spilling out across the playground, screeching with revolted delight at what I’d done to the boys, who hurled names at me I didn’t understand: 

‘LEMON!’
‘LES-LEY!’
‘LEMONNNN!’

I don’t know what made me do it. I don’t remember Luisa’s reaction or whether an adult intervened or what the hell I did for the rest of that playtime.

I do remember lying in the dark in my top bunk that night, knowing that the stories were true. I was different from everyone else. But I wasn’t better, I was the worst thing a girl could be. I was disgusting. I was a Lemon.

Joy llewellyn-beardsley

In primary school I knew I was different to the other children. I felt different and I didn’t belong in this institution. Story books were not for me. I struggled to read and most I found boring and not relevant. Good did not always win over evil and Cinderella did not go the ball. Wicked stepmothers stayed wicked. I sat on the edges watching the other children and – whilst wanting friendship – found their games trivial and uninspiring.

My stories were a tale of loss, of sadness. The innocence of childhood gone far too young. I was neither a child nor an adult. I sat between those spaces. I was ten when my birth mother died. Her illness hung in the air of adult whispers, conversations behind closed doors and a place where children did not belong. My favourite book The Matchstick Girl was one I remember my mother reading to me many times. Never truly understanding her tears as the Matchstick Girl struck her last and final match.

I had my own stories. I wrote poems and stories from my own imagination. I wandered the rural countryside where I lived. I listened to the ancient tales of trees. Observed the morning dew on blades of grass and sang with the daffodils. I spoke to mother moon and she whispered in my ear, I am safety I will look after you from here. My stories were narratives that nature had to teach. This was my library, these were my childhood stories.

nicola veal

A small, dark room, with wood panelling the colour of damp sand in the harbour when the tide is out. A sideboard with a jar of pale primroses. Grandmother’s housecoat a pink bloom in the shadowy corner where she and I sit.

Now their ghosts – mother, my two aunts – their lilting voices are the cry of gulls that soar over the blue river Dart, rising and falling like the hillsides and rooftops: they are a Hardy poem, a Dutch painting, hymns sung in an English church.

There exists a guarded intimacy between them, yet they are profuse with the stories of this place and its people that rain from their lips with the ritual of lunchtime sherry. Church bells ring, the tide laps, mint grows green in the flower bed as death and romance are traced in an incantation of nods, nicknames, sidelong glances, the air thickened with make-believe and rumour of the everyday.

There was no malice in these women. Looking back, I believe their stories were self-expression, a way of measuring their own life against that of others, curiosities and dilemmas to be prised apart, examined. In many instances, they would be the first to deliver a private kindness.

I was a keen-eyed child, captivated, transported, sometimes frightened, by their hand-me-down tales seeping into the room like fog or sudden sunshine: A woman crossed in love, never again leaving her home; the man kneeling dead in the snow; a house collapsed; the shy girl sent away to have her secret baby returning bowed, childless.

And now, a listener, not much of a talker, still alert to the cadence of voice, many of my good friends are older women: I am a lifetime and miles away, the sisters long dead, the outlines of their faces written in mine.

Donna Maynard

I remember scraping my knee on the aroused roots of my father’s fir trees, the three trees grown in a straight line to border our property, the house I grew up in. I was being chased after by my cousin because I had refused to speak to her after she had stolen my food. I was crying, angry that I had lost this game I didn’t even want to play, and she was laughing, because life was always easy for her.

I remember her pulling my top when she finally caught up with me, and me, pulling away, trying to escape, and she’d let go, or maybe she didn’t mean to and her sweaty palms released my thin t-shirt from its fist unintentionally, I fell, and the skin on my knee split open as if someone had lined a sharp knife on the yolk of an egg bursting it and the yellow liquid trickled and dripped all over.

I saw the fear in her eyes, like a flash of lightning flickered in the irises as she tried to say sorry, tried to do something, anything, to reverse time, to not have grabbed me like she did, to let me chase her instead, to put the food she had stolen back on to my plate, but life doesn’t work like that. I think the thing I saw in her eyes was a kind of revelation, and we sat in silence, each on our own bump of aroused root of my father’s fir tree, as the birds kept flying and chirping, and the wind kept blowing, and the sun kept shining, on and on and on.

lisha zulkepli

The line between before and after in my childhood was a surprisingly quiet one, unfurling slowly but inexorably as I turned the pages in Lois Lowry’s The Giver.

Before: an unquestioning belief that adults did the right thing, for the right reasons, always. That authority figures went unchecked. That rules were to be followed.
 
And then I watched through Jonas’s eyes as he witnesses his father gently insert a needle into the soft spot of an infant, killing the child, all in the service of a rigid and ruthless society. I watched as it brought Jonas’s world crashing down around him, and I watched as Jonas found the courage to stand against what he knew was wrong. From the first chapters, Lowry’s words sparked an ember in my heart that’s never gone out.
 
I grew up in a tumultuous home, replete with yelling, multiple separations, a long line of schools and houses. For so many of my days, I felt powerless and small, but reading The Giver showed me for the first time—though certainly not the last—that someone my size could stand up against something they knew was wrong, even if it meant going against an entire system, even if it meant doing it quietly. Even if it felt futile.

In the After, I saw my world differently. I still didn’t have much power, but that flame grew as I grew, and the tentative courage of a child turned into a willingness to stand up for my friends against inappropriate teachers, to call people out on hateful comments, to live my life in a way that let my authentic self breathe. To face fear and move forward regardless. I still have a long road to go, but I’ll never stop burning.

angela M Cowan

Tears silently dribble down my five-year-old cheeks. Alone in bed I am looking at a picture book of Bible stories. I cannot tear myself away from the picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. This night, like other nights, I clutch the book weeping for a loss I do not understand. Dying is unknown to me, yet I am swimming in deep heartfelt sorrow.

I had drifted off to sleep, to awaken awhile later to a glowing light in the hallway. I climbed out of my bed, careful to skirt around the closet as (on my older brother’s authority) criminals hid there overnight.

Standing in the hallway, surrounded in radiant golden light, was Jesus. Soft and tender, billowing waves of love enfolding me. I was frozen to the spot, not with fear, but with the overwhelming aching beauty.

I am not sure how long I stood there, bathed in the light of love, for the next thing it was morning and I awoke in my bed.

With great excitement I ran to tell my mother that I had seen Jesus in the hallway. She laughed and told me it could not be so. I never saw Jesus in the hallway again.

We were not a particularly church-going family, the fact I had a book on Bible stories remains a bit of a mystery to me. Not long after my vision however, I was sent to Sunday school Bible studies.

The teacher was frightening to my tender soul, all bristly edges, scowling face and disapproving air. There was nothing kind or loving about her teachings. It was so far from my encounter with Jesus in the hallway, I felt confused, I didn’t like it. I refused to go again, crying and pleading until my mother agreed. My strong will was legendary as a child.

That Sunday, my fear and distrust of the Church was set alight. It has taken me nearly a lifetime of seeking to return to the Beauty.

carole mahood