Writing Workshop: Remembering

Welcome back to your Writing Workshop.

At the bottom of this post you’ll find the widget to link up your posts. I hope you found a good prompt to work with and are pleased with what your writing conjured up for you this week. I always think writing is a little like magic, it’s no wonder it was controlled by the priests and holy people of the world for so long. Anyway.

I’ve chosen prompt number four – memories of my childhood.

Now, I’m cheating a little bit as this is actually a post I wrote last September, just before I started the Writing Workshop. It was one of the first creative pieces I shared on here, so I thought I’d reproduce for you today. Reading it back it still encapsulates so many memories for me. Writing it was very, very powerful, transporting me right back…

________________________________________________

I am 6 or 7. Sitting on the top step of the stairs in the dark when I should be in bed asleep. Listening to the murmer of my parents conversations, the hum of the television, the sounds from the kitchen as they boil the kettle or tidy up. Sounds of home, of safety and familiarity. I inch down, silently, one step at a time, wanting to get closer to that feeling.

I am 16. I am lying in bed listening to the rain hammer on the flat roof of my bedroom. I’ve decided I want to be an interior designer and mum and dad have given me free reign to decorate my room however I like. I often dream of a beach-hut hideaway so have crafted my room to make me feel like I’m by the sea. Holiday beach scavenges gift driftwood shelves, twisted sea-smoothed branches and endless stones and shells with which I fill my space. I’ve painted my favourite quotes from books and poems that I love straight onto the walls in meticulous, curving script. Tea lights twinkle – I must remember to blow them out before I fall asleep. I lie under the sail canapy I have hung over my bed, drifting on a sea of dreams. The world feels huge and full of possibility.

I am 9 or 10. The passageway down the side of the house is my own secret hideaway. In the hollowed out centre of the big shrubs that grow against the fence I have made my den. I can smell the damp earth, the peeling paint on the fence panels, and feel the rough prickle of the branches as I push my way through. There is a tin there, hidden under the foliage, full of secret things. In it is a piece of paper with the name of the boy I like at school. I haven’t told a soul, not even my best friend. I hope my brother hasn’t found it.

Christmas morning. Endless Christmas mornings. The rule is not to wake mum and dad before 7am. It is early but I am awake. I stick out a probing foot to prod the sack of presents at the foot of my bed and get that familiar rush of excitement and anticipation. There’s no way I’m going back to sleep now. I sneak into my brother’s room with my duvet wrapped around me and there he waits, equally awake and wide-eyed. We put our sacks of presents by the door and try not to look at them, filling the time till the promised hour playing games and talking in urgent whispers, muffling our giggles through our fingers.

Long summers in the garden. The paddling pool and water-fights with empty washing up bottles. Being given my own little patch of earth to plant seeds and forget-me-nots in. The heat of the greenhouse and the smell of the not-quite-ripe tomatoes and the compost heap. Swirling my fingers in the jelly soup of the frogspawn and watching the tadpoles in the pond grow legs and loose their tails. A plant by the Buddleia which was always, unexpectedly, covered in ladybirds. Writing in chalk on the patio slabs. Worrying that the initials marked in the cement by the previous owners meant that one of them was buried there. My shrine under the apple tree to Tabby, my cat, with the stone I had painted with her name on and jam-jars full of faded flowers and green water.

I am 19. It is September 11th 2001. I have come home from college and fallen asleep in a haze of fatigue. My Fibromyalgia is beginning to worsen although I don’t know this yet or what is wrong with me, only that I am tired and I hurt. My brother wakes me. Something has happened he says. We sit together and watch the TV in silence, shock and horror. I can’t believe what I am seeing. I cry but I can’t look away. Ant comes over after work and the three of sit and watch the same clips repeated over and over. Time stops. Pain and fatigue is forgotten. All I can feel is their pain, their loss. I do not sleep that night.

I am 7. We are sat eating tea. My brother will not eat his food. He is chewing the same mouthful of meat over and over until it is grey, tasteless ball that he cannot swallow. Mum is cross, “Just swallow it!” she says in her best pretend ’I’m not cross’ voice. But she is cross, and we both know it. She tries to get David take sips of water but still he will not swallow his food. He cries and has to spit it out. We have been here many, many times before. I kick my legs under the chair and feel smug that I am not the one being told off. We finish at last andI recite by rote “Thank-you-mummy-for-my-dinner-please-may-I-get-down” in one long drawn-out breath.

It is raining and the water is dripping through the bay window. We spring to action with tea-towels and margarine tubs to catch the drips. Christmas Cacti adorn the window sill. I have an overwhelming urge to twist off the tops, and draw smiley faces in the square panes of the window. Both are expressively forbidden. But thinking about it makes my fingers twitch.

We have been playing out in the snow and have come inside damp and rosy cheeked and smiling. I sit in front of the fire to thaw out. I can’t feel my finger tips and my ears buzz with cold. I rest the edges of my double-socked feet on the marble surround. Getting as close as I can without burning. A black and white ceramic cat shares the fireplace with me. When it’s my turn to dust I am extra careful with it, scared I will break it and get in trouble. It has yellow, glass eyes.

It is Sunday afternoon and I sit and doze on the sofa. Dad has the cricket on and the soft lull of the commentary makes me sleepy. I am full of dinner and memories of Sunday school.

I am 19. The contents of my room are packed into boxes and are being put in the removal van, ready to be unpacked in my new room at my mum’s partner’s huge and beautiful house. I sit and say goodbye. Dad hasn’t lived here for two years and somehow that makes it easier. This house isn’t home anymore – I am ready to say goodbye.  But still the tears come as a thousand memories tumble forward.

________________________________________________

So now it’s your turn. What prompt did you choose?

1. Disaster! Tell us when a a best laid plan went spectacularly wrong…
- Inspired by my lovely friend Rachael over at Tales from the Village and her cake wrecks.

2. “I have a ……….. and I’m not afraid to use it”. Fill in the blank!
- Inspired by Tara over at Sticky Finger’s latest post about cooking with children.

3. What last made you cry?
- Inspired by Annie over at Incessant Ramblings’ emotional experience at her daughter’s school last week.

4. Share a powerful memory, or memories, from your childhood. Close your eyes and try to conjure it up as vividly as you can and share it descriptively with us. If it’s a painful memory, let the remembering be a healing release for you.
- Inspired by Slummy Single Mummy who has been using writing exercises to remember.

And finally, the last prompt is just one word. This should allow you a bit more creative freedom if you feel like taking the safety harness that particular week.

5. Storm
- Inspired by Sandrine’s haunting workshop post last week… Twilight Zone

Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) and leave me a comment to let me know you’ve taken part. If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.

If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.

This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop over in the U.S.

Related posts:

1. Writing Workshop #31 – Disaster, Remembering, and Filling in the Blank Welcome back to your weekly Writing Workshop! For any newbies...
2. Writing Workshop: Remembering a Summer Past Welcome back to our Do-It-Yourself Writing Workshop! If you remember...
3. Writing Workshop: Forgotten Welcome back to the Wednesday Writing Workshop link-up! At the...
4. Writing Workshop: Making Changes Welcome back to the Writing Workshop link-up! At the bottom...
5. Writing Workshop: Sisterhood Welcome back to your Writing Workshop. At the bottom of...