In the current situation, when so many of us are discouraged or unable to leave our houses, I’ve been reminded of other times in my life when I’ve had to stay at home. As in the current crisis, the reasons were often unexpected or even traumatic in nature; linked to particular circumstances, such as bad weather, or having an illness.
At the age of six or seven, I remember having a bad case of mumps, forced to stay in bed by high fever after telling my mother than there was a gorilla sitting by my bed. The proof the world still existed was limited to what I could see through the top of the window, the roofs of the houses on the nearby hill, the clear sky slanting towards the sun, which gave the promise of eventual freedom. Today, the views from the windows have taken on a special significance as we gauge how much the world has changed; little traffic, few pedestrians, but the sky is a vibrant, clear blue and the woods in the distance look much clearer than before.
I must have been eleven or twelve when I had four back teeth removed, which meant a short general anaesthetic and having to stay off school for a day. After the fear and panic of being strapped to the dentist’s chair and experiencing a very unpleasant, brief dream which has never left me, I was taken home and made to sit in the garden. It was a fine day in early summer; still under the effects of the anaesthetic, I studied the rectangular lawn, worn in places, with sparse bedding plants round the edge and a harsh concrete path down the middle, alongside the clothes line.
On that day, having realised all its imperfections for the first time, I decided I would take it upon myself to redesign and remake the garden, replacing the hard lawn edges with curves, create a grassy bank, and dig a sunken dell. And in the next year, these were all changes which I manged to make, much to the bemusement and initial opposition of my parents.
There were other days I still remember when it was bad weather which prevented me from going outside. I remember a Sunday afternoon in spring, when I was about eight or nine and it was raining heavily outside. My sister had a new jigsaw, completely round, which seemed impossibly difficult, but she somehow agreed to let me help her. I crouched down on the carpet, which I can still remember with its 60s geometric design, and we worked quietly and efficiently to complete it together, cooperating as a team, the sound of the heavy rain pelting on the large window at the front. But on that day, protected from the weather outside, I remember a feeling of calm, happiness and well-being which has remained with me ever since.
I did finally return to my childhood home, carrying all the memories I have of the house, overlaid and merged with all the other memories. In the garden, I could recognise a few surviving relics of the changes I’d made when I was a child, the remains of the grassy bank, the curving lawn, and remembered with a pang of strange and unexpected disquiet, the day when I’d had my teeth out and had been forced to sit in the garden and, under the effects of anaesthetic, dreamed of a different garden and a different future.