Falling

I grew up in the New Zealand countryside, in a place by the name of Waitawheta. It doesn’t really count as growing up, just the very beginning, because we moved to the ‘city’ before I turned three.

Some people tell me they have strong memories of being young, things that they describe in vivid detail as if they see them in bright colours and solid lines.

I have two things which come to me now and then from those years and neither is very specific or defined.

One is a nightmare I had of a huge bird, something like a chicken with the face of an owl, attacking me in bed at night.

The other is of sitting on the fence at the top of the race leading away towards the cowshed, up on top of the big round strainer post. I looked up into the sun until it began to pulse and come closer, and I fell off.

I took mum and dad back to that farm recently, it is not far from where they live now. We stood in the same gateway with the rough gravel of the race still stretching away across the paddock even though the cowshed has gone.

We looked across the narrow road to the house we had lived in then, still largely as it had been, light coloured brick, iron roof, citrus trees on the front lawn.

I told mum about the memory of the nightmare. She looked bereft and held my hand, really held on as she does, running her hand over yours and back again, as if she can draw the pain down to your fingertips and away into the air, into her hands instead.

She remembered struggling to get my brother to sleep as a baby and a young boy, and when I came along two and half years later and sleep was easy it was such a relief.

They were sharemilkers, and didn’t have a lot of money. There was a tall single bed in the room I went to when I was too old for the basinet, so tall I couldn’t get in and out myself. It didn’t seem to matter when I slept so easily and so they would just put me down there each night, and I’d be there when dad got up to go to the cowshed, and mum sorted out breakfast soon afterwards.

She remembered me crying out that night, so unexpectedly, talking through sobs about a huge bird. I could feel in her hands how she had stored that hurt somewhere, never forgotten, how much she never stopped being my mum when she could still feel guilt about such a thing forty years later.

The memory of falling off fence sums up my parents for me. Mum would have had to help me to get up there in the first place and she would have known exactly what she was doing leaving me there as she slowly headed off towards the cowshed with my brother yakking his head off at her heels. The ground was always soft there, turned over by the cows as they milled around in the gateway dreaming of whatever cows dream of. I don’t really remember hitting the ground, but I know that she would have been there in an instant, patting the dust off my corduroy pants and saying ‘you’re alright, aren’t you?’. It is such a hard thing to let go, she always found a way to do it just enough, so that when you came up out of that long grass you were just that little bit different, just that little bit more ready.