“I’m bored”, declared my daughter Elle, as she came striding out into the garden, before flumping into a garden chair. I placed my book, pages down, onto the table.
“What was that?”
“I said I’m bored.”
Well this was a turn up for the books. Elle, at nearly seventeen years old, is the very epitome of self-contentment, as a rule. She’ll often usher her mother and I out of the house on our long walks just to get some peace and quiet to herself, telling us not to come home for many hours, and will happily fill those hours with anything from reading and cross-stitch to music and TV, revelling in the solitude. I’ve always been proud of this aspect of her character. True, we humans are social creatures, but it’s also important to be comfortable in your own company, and to be able to spend time alone, something at which she certainly seems adept at any given time. This, however, wasn’t to be one of those days.
“What would you like to do?” I asked, expecting the usual indecisive response.
“I fancy a walk. Will you come for a walk with me?”
To say I was stunned is an understatement – my teenaged daughter was asking to spend some time with me! It was a no-brainer. Ten minutes later we were strolling along the river path in the shimmering summer heat, chatting about this and that.
Elle glanced over to her right. “Shall we go across?” she asked.
“What, wade across the river?”
“Yep.”
“Again, without much further ado, socks and shoes were peeled off and bundled under our arms as we tottered, giggling like toddlers, across the river, slip-sliding on the rounded pebbles slick with moss, gasping and giggling as the freezing water reached higher up our legs. As my world-weariness and her teenaged cynicism began to wash away with the water’s flow, I had a sudden hazy flashback to times long past, to other stretches of the river and to nearby lakes where I, younger than my daughter is now, would gasp and laugh as I plunged with my friends from disused concrete platforms and overgrown banksides into ice-cold water.
They were lovely reminiscences, and images that are sewn into my memory forever, but I’m always a little wary of such things. Maybe it’s that world-weariness trying to creep back in a little, but I tend to initially approach physically revisiting the places of childhood memories and activities with caution, much in the same way we are advised to never meet our heroes, for fear of them not living up to our rose-tinted recollections. One such time occurred when I revisited a park close to the house where I grew up, a place where I had spent many happy hours playing, building dens and getting into trouble by staying out past curfew.
Upon arrival it looked recognisable enough – the patchwork sections of lawns, tattered seams of flowers holding them together, the path a silvered crease down the middle, but that’s where it ended. Everything else seemed so very different – the park-keeper’s (or Parky, as we used to know him) house no longer held scaresome trepidation to a grown man, the swings and super-fast roundabout where we would test our courage by pushing higher than each other or by spinning as fast as we could then hanging off the side, were rusted now, or gone completely, leaving nothing but empty space. The hidey-holes where we built dens amongst the trees either seemed too miniscule for anyone to squeeze into these days, or had grown over completely in the intervening years.
I walked a loop of the park, past the bowling green which I would previously have avoided as an area for old fuddy-duddies, enjoying the amicable low murmur of conversation emanating from the white heads gathered at the other side of the fence before they ebbed away again on the edges of a dying conversation. On reaching the gate again, I realised that I should not have come back, or at least should not have come back with those same starry, expectant eyes of childhood, as the place could never have lived up to those sun-curled memories I had held onto for so long. Without hesitation I shrugged the park off again, like a garment that no longer fits, leaving it there for someone else to pick up and try for size. I have never returned since.
A freezing splash from a minor slip brought me rocketing back from reminiscence and into the present just as we reached the other, far less manicured side of the river. Maybe, I thought to myself as I stepped from the water, if revisiting the places of one’s past is not always such a good idea, renewing an acquaintance with past activities will suffice instead.
“What are you doing?” Elle asked, perplexed, as she laced up her shoes again, sat on sun-baked stones, watching me clack and bumble through the pebbles around my feet.
“Hang on, I…just a minute…ah! Here we go!” I straightened up stiffly, with a mild groan, opening my fist to reveal the small, flat pebble inside.
“What’s that for?” she asked, confused.
“Watch.” I turned, crouched a little, squinted to get my eye in and then flicked the pebble across the river’s surface where it skimmed away to the other side. “Five skims!” I shouted, raising my arms in the air. “Not bad for an out-of-practice old codger, eh?” Elle’s eyes shot wide and she leapt to her feet.
“Right, that was rubbish! I can do better than that.” We spent the next fifteen minutes laughing, stooping, for which my back didn’t thank me one bit, and playfully shouldering each other aside as we scrabbled around for the good pebbles, cheering or booing accordingly as they skipped across the water’s surface or sank without trace. “Okay, this one’s going to be amaz…what are you doing?!” I turned to just in time to see Elle launch a large river pebble into the water just in front of me. SPLASH! The river plumed up in a watery feather that fell and sprayed all over me. Elle almost doubled up with laughter. “Right then, that’s how it is, is it?!” I grabbed a large pebble of my own.
“Dad! No, no! Elle shrieked, a smile stitched across her lips, as SPLOOSH! A spout of water fell across her, triggering a game of river battleships that left us both soaked, panting and giggling once again.
“Shall we carry on?” I suggested, cambering back up the bank and helping Elle up.
“Which way shall we go?” she asked, looking back and forth.
“Whichever way we fancy”, I replied, starting off into the overgrown summer foliage. We ambled away together, weaving in and out of the cooler clearings, overhung with trees and spicy with the scent of mulch and undergrowth, talking of this and that, swinging like Tarzan from low-hanging branches, building back stories of, and speculating about the history of, old concrete fence posts and random bits of rusted metal at the river’s edge, talking about the trees and plants and how they came to be there.
Eventually, we managed to thread our way through the vegetation until we emerged into a sun-soaked opening next to the bridge that would take us back to the other, more manicured side of the river with its tarmac path. We looked at each other for a second and were silent, if only for that moment, the previous hour seeming like some kind of dream already as we blinked our way back into the bright reality of the world, with its sensible expectations and list of things to be done.
“Well, I suppose we should make our way back home” I suggested. Mum will be wondering where we are.
“Yeah, I suppose so”, she mumbled in reply. We looked at each other again. “Ice cream?” Her growing seriousness unravelled again into a huge grin at my suggestion. Clearly she, like I, wasn’t ready to tie the day into a tidy end yet, preferring a few loose strands.
“Yeah, ice cream sounds good.” It did indeed.
