THE BEGINNING

Let me tell you a story:

There was once a little girl who enjoyed nothing more than spending her hundred English pennies of pocket money on Kiwi fruit and bananas at the tiny greengrocers across the street. During her visits to this olde worlde emporium, she was often accompanied by the Bagpuss, the family cat. Bagpuss loved the child dearly, despite the fact that she picked her up by her neck. Bagpuss started vomiting blood and died of leukaemia. Let’s not talk about Bagpuss.

The girl had a mum and a dad and a sister and a brother and a half brother and another half brother. One of the half-brothers was always getting into trouble, but the child didn’t know much about it because whenever this happened there would be whispering and she would be told to play outside. In the summer the garden was overgrown and overpoweringly aromatic. The lemon balm plant was her favourite. She used to pluck a leaf from the shrub whenever she passed. It was always rather threadbare and looked pathetic next to the rosemary, which was thriving. She didn’t like the smell of rosemary.

Sometimes the soil would reveal exciting things for the girl to store away in her box of treasures. By the time she was six, she had collected forty-seven fragments of clay pipe, eighteen shards of glass, fifty-five bits of blue-and-white porcelain and four old glass medicine bottles. She wondered if her garden had been a rubbish tip in the olden days.

Once a year the girl and her family would stuff themselves into a little panda and drive to north Wales. The panda had a name (Gilbert) even though it was actually a car and not a panda at all. During the journey, the girl’s father would recount the tale of how, while in a field on the Welsh border, he had once caught a meteorite in his bare hands. She didn’t believe this story.

The family holiday was always based in a hut hidden away in the mountains of Snowdonia. It was only accessible by a single-track road littered with follies and waterfalls. The hut was basic in the purest sense of the word. The sleeping quarters were reached by climbing up a metal ladder and opening a heavy wooden trapdoor. They consisted of a few mattresses and a single lightbulb hanging forlornly from a beam. The little girl didn’t care much for the shower room; it was full of spiders and smelled like dead people.

TO BE CONTINUED...