When your world wobbles ..

For some reason I've been thinking back today on my life when I was a small child (this is early 1960's), and how big a part certainty played in it.  All the assumptions I made which I never questioned, based on a wildly vivid imagination rather than fact, which I absolutely believed in. They were a great comfort to me, although I wouldn't have thought of them in those terms at the time. 

And how scary and confusing life could become when it turned out these assumptions were wrong.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For example, words. An adult says a word, and a small child hears the closest word it knows :

So we were Human Beans. That was fine, I knew what beans were. They came in all shapes and sizes and colours.  Little round orange ones which came in tins. Creamy haricot beans in bulgy pods in the green grocer' shop.  Long green runner beans which Nana grew in her garden and salted down in big earthenware jars.  So I had no trouble believing that you could get human shaped beans too.

Then I was told Nana had bought me some Premium Bombs for my birthday. This was very exciting ! Although a small child, I knew what bombs were because I was brought up in Southampton in the 1960's when the city still had many bombed buildings and bomb sites from the war. As I understood it, there was a chance every single month that one of my bombs might go off ! I used to ask my mum, but I suppose in a corresponding reversal of 'you hear what you expect to hear' she thought I was asking about my 'bonds'.  Sadly (or luckily for Southampton) they never did go off.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Then there are the 'facts' which are so obvious to a small child they just don't question them :

We used to go on the train to Bournemouth to visit my great-uncle.  Me, my mum, my sister, with Trotty the daschund in a shopping bag.  (No dog carriers in those days. But I'd like to say that his head did stick out of the bag, in case you were worried).

When we got there, my sister and I would go to a playground round the corner, which we called 'Uncle Tom's Playground'.  There were other children there of course, but I just thought that Uncle Tom had let them in.

I remember being so – disillusioned is the word - when at some point I found out Uncle Tom didn't actually own the playground at all. My sister and I had no more right to be there than anybody else.  My sense of superiority had been punctured. And worst of all, nobody could tell me who did own it. 

We were brought up Catholics (even after all these years I feel compelled to use a capital letter) and at some point I must have found out I was going to die.  I knew what happened to people after they died.  They became angels, and everyone knows what angels look like.  Long white nightie, wings and a harp.  I had a very clear picture in my mind, and I was fine about being dead, and being an angel. Then my mother told me I wasn't going to be an angel.  Even worse, a million times worse, she couldn't tell me what I was going to be. Something vague called 'a soul'.  And a million times worse than that, she couldn't tell me what I was going to look like. I had, and still have, an imagination which works very much off images, and now I no longer had a nice clear, cheery Christmas card type picture in my mind.  Just some fuzzy sort of 'soul' thing.  How could nobody know what I was going to look like after I was dead ? 

So the playground and the angels - certainty had been replaced by a very wobbly uncertainty.  Shock, horror – adults don't know everything ! Quite a rite of passage when you first find that out. 

Kat

/)__(\
(='.'=)
(")_(")