The Buddhas of Henshaw Street
Movement-stopping
sweat-dripping
breath stealing
pavement-shimmering
air-deadening
heat.
Slow down.
Stop.
When every single minor movement has the power to induce the pores to break out into spontaneous torrents of perspiration, it’s difficult to motivate the body into action anyway, and so I take my Nordic complexion and sit in the shade, doing my best to stay cool even though I fail dismally.
I recall watching my daughter Elle when she was much younger, racing up and down, “green and carefree” as Dylan Thomas called it, with some of the other children in the street, helter-skeltering through endless blue days and devouring each second as it came their way. They never seemed to stop to draw breath, never even seemed to slow down, and after only a minute or two I would be forced to give up and admit that I was no match for their boundless energy.
Such as it is to be a grown-up! The playwright George Bernard Shaw believed youth to be wasted on the young, but that always sounded to me to be the bitter griping of a grumpy old man. Youth belongs to the young, so let them run! There will be time enough later in their lives to be slow and thoughtful, mature and responsible, so best to allow such things to arrive in their own time after the children have wrung every last drop out of their sun-tinted summer lives.
We all take our turns at youth, all have our days such as this. These meanderings bring to mind one such day, decades gone, when my brother and sister and I had been galloping around like wild leverets, burning our energy wantonly and exhausting our mother in the process until she delivered us up at the terraced house of our grandparents in Henshaw Street, rosy-cheeked, wild-haired and with eyes full of mischief.
What could there possibly be to entertain an eight-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old in a tiny suntrap of a back yard? Without missing a beat, my grandfather went into his shed and retrieved a blue plastic barrel, its top sawn off, intended for use a rainwater butt on his allotment. After dumping it next to the deckchairs in which the grown-ups sat, he used a hose to part-fill it with water before lowering us down into it one by one, a blacksmith quenching metal.
The shock of the cold water hit us immediately, lapping against our hot skin and raising high, bright shrieks that echoed tinnily around the dark, blown interior of the barrel. We splashed and slumped, dipped and slid until finally, somehow, we twisted ourselves into a slightly more comfortable position, an interlocking octopus-tangle of stilled limbs moulded to the shape of the vessel that contained us.
Then, finally, we just sat, all hunched slightly inward, our little pot bellies making us look like three little Buddhas, quietly gazing up at the one disc of light pouring into us from above, contemplating the day, the summer, the world, one passing cloud at a time.
