************************************************************** * * * Early Loves * * * ************************************************************** G.C.Wraith 26/06/2007 My earliest inspiration from the Muse Erato came at kindergarten, in the form: "Whistle while you work, Miss Gorley is a twerp." It was also my latest. Dear Miss Gorley, if you still live and read these words, know that I was in love with you. I am sorry that you fell off your bicycle when I leaped out of the bushes at you. That I was rather backward in the art of communicating affection you may gather from another fiasco, that took place on the bus. It carried many of the children in Fairfield kindergarten from Loughborough to Quorn, Old Woodhouse and Woodhouse Eaves, where I lived. I recall a little girl with a pudgy chin, sitting in the row behind me. I think she was called Judith. On one occasion I gave way to the temptation to ping the elastic under her chin, that held her little porkpie hat on; just to introduce myself. She boxed my ears. In those days all buses had a conductor as well as a driver. The conductor carried a marvellous engine about his person that clipped tickets. The tickets were coloured according to price. I recall that 4 pence was a bright green, my favourite colour. The conductor was often a lady whose trousers did not flatter her figure. As she handed an old person down off the step she would sing out "Bombs away!" to let the driver know that it was safe to proceed. At one point the headmistress of the kindergarten complained of my behaviour to my mother. She said that I was uncontrollable, threatened to burn the school down and pulled hideous faces. My mother said that if she could not control a child of five it was time she looked for another career. I had no sisters, so girls were creatures of mystery. The doggerel about snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails had persuaded me that girls were in some way superior to boys. I am still persuaded. My mother was a member of a baby-sitting club, some of whose members had girls my own age. Also, there were girls at the children's parties I went to. I went to a fancy-dress party once as the Mad Hatter. There was a girl there dressed in armour, called Tessa. A game of spin-the-platter had to be stopped by the grown-ups because whenever it was my turn to spin I always called out Tessa's name, and when it was hers she would call out mine. I think she was pretty, with long hair; but it was the cardboard armour which did it for me. One of the ladies in the baby-sitting club was a special friend of my mother's; she had an only daughter, G, my own age and lived not far away. Her husband was away during the war, so that G and her mother lived as a household of two, whereas I was in a household of four (I had a younger brother) or five when my grandmother came to stay. G was very pretty and slightly sullen. She was a lot more advanced than me: she could tie her shoelaces long before I could. For that reason, when we played together she took the lead. I recall a curious incident when I was playing with her at her house, that still puzzles me. We were under the table playing some game of make-believe with her dolls, quite happily. G reproved one of the dolls, and her mother, whose legs I could see nearby, suddenly exploded with wrath. I cannot remember what G had said to provoke this. G was seized from beneath the table and given a deliberate and humiliating chastisement, and sent howling up to her bedroom. I was left non-plussed beneath the table. I remember distinctly the feeling that I had been used as a spectator to G's humiliation; that it was an exhibition put on because I was there. I was not alarmed; I knew there was no question of me getting similar treatment. I had never experienced such a scene at home, and I had never seen G's mother angry before. Many years afterwards G told me of an incident that took place when she and her parents were on holiday on a beach in Cyprus. The war being not long past, her father had warned her about the dangers of mines. She had wandered along the beach and cut herself slightly on a stone. She smeared blood on herself and lay down pretending to be dead. The wrath this trick provoked in her father, and its outcome, can be imagined. Of course, she may have been punishing her parents for her father's absence during her childhood; the little incident to which I was witness could have been an earlier act in the same drama, with myself as one of the weapons to her mother's hand. Or it may be that my glib psychology is way off the mark. My own dramas were rather different. I had a fierce temper. I threw a milk-bottle at poor Mrs Bodicott because I thought she had come to steal away my baby brother. My mother's method of dealing with my temper was to send me to my bedroom with the instruction to stay there until I could see in the mirror that my face was no longer angry. I spent hours pulling faces at the mirror. I hated being angry, and eventually I learned that it was possible to wash anger away by making my face right. I was blessed with a very wise mother.