From A Life in Short Pieces: Piece Five.
White Silk Tassels.
I met my first proper friend, Iris in the year before my
father died. I was eight and she was fourteen. For some reason we made friends.
At the time I didn’t think this was strange. Iris has been much in my mind in
recent decades when - wearing my writer’s cloak - I have been interrogating my
own past.
I realise only now - a
generation later – that in my encounter with her I somehow witnessed a kind of
hidden incest. I think I only really recognise this as I was writing the
following piece, White Silk Tassels, sixty years later. I realise now that it
must have stuck in my child’s mind because, having been my friend for many
months, my friend Iris vanished and was never seen again.
 |
| War damage in Coventry |
Assembling all these feelings and ideas and thinking about
my own life at the time as a child in Coventry the implication of this disappearance dawned on me. In
recent years there has been a certain amount of discussion about the phenomenon
of recovered memory. I suppose as writers we dip into recovered memory and
respond with various kinds of truth and fiction. Perhaps all writing involves both
recovered and false memory
.
But writing this short piece called White Silk Tassels my recovered memory was suddenly moulded into an
idea – a final explanation as to why my friend vanished.
I think as well that this memory dug deeper because of the
contiguous events of my father’s death.
Men open their mouths wide
 |
| Reconciliation by
Josefina de Vasconcellos at Coventry Cathedral, first conceived in the aftermath of the war. Image: Ben Sutherland, |
their
teeth bite, bite like lions
their nails
are sharp as pussy cat claws.
They go
for the cream, lapping it up
with
their sandpaper tongues.
In her
auntie’s house my friend sits
on her bedspread;
it’s white silk tassels
sweep the
linoleum, red as a cat’s tongue.
Her aunt
and uncle have red faces too –
his more
bulbous, hers pale and sharp as razors.
Weeks go
by and the white tassels vanish,
one by
one – bitten off by naughty pussycats,
according
to her uncle. Our houses - Jerry-built –
are fenced
in with chicken wire
but, unlike me, Iris has no chickens.
My father
- prone to mild mistakes -
bought a
dozen chicks for breakfast eggs.
He swings,
his golden ring above their fluffy heads.
It swings
to the left, so he was wrong.
These
fluffy chicks are cocks, every one.
So, no morning
chucky eggs for us, love!
Still, we
feed these boys, clean their cage,
cluck
over them like mother hens.
Come
Christmas time we have to wring their necks
Not Daddy
– all soft heart – but my uncle does the job,
smiling
as his fingers squeeze out their little chicken lives.
Come
Christmas too, my good friend Iris
has stolen
her own savings - they say -
and run
away. Her red-faced auntie calls her
a sly cat, bad to the core and so ungrateful,
as she burns
the white bed-spread in the garden
fenced
all round with chicken wire.
