Friday 12th September – Mummy, do you remember the olden days?

Why is it that my plans so aft gang agley as that annoying Scottish bloke Robbie Burns used to say?  It’s not even like I have mice.

Yesterday afternoon I was feeling very chuffed with myself. Oscar had slept for most of the afternoon after a taxing morning at nursery.  I had finished the Amazon Vine book about necrotic demons, which turned out to be rather brilliant after all (The Painted Man by Peter V. Brett).  I had cleaned one of the bathrooms in a fit of Kim and Aggieness and life was good.  I got to school, picked up the kids and collared Tallulah’s teacher.  It turns out that the other teacher who shares the class with the one I had lassooed, is off sick at the moment, and the children have been rather unsettled because they have been enduring a stream of supply teachers.  Lots of the kids are behaving in the same way and the teacher had picked up on it and spent part of the afternoon talking it through with the class.  This made me feel better because a) she had noticed it, b) she was trying to do something about it and c) there was a logical explanation.  Also, if it turns out to be something else, they already know I’m on the ball about it.  So it was all very splendid.

On the way home we were discussing how we would get home and have a snack, they would help prepare dinner, we would do a little light homework and then watch a film we had picked together (the new St. Trinians, for my sins).  They were very pleased.  They like a good plan.  They like routine.  They like to help, AND more importantly, they like watching telly.  Tallulah skipped on ahead singing some kind of song about St. Trinians and potatoes when she went sprawling forward and smashed her knees and elbows right on the asphalt.  She went down hard bless her.

I picked her up and surveyed the damage.  One knee was welling up bloody, one knee had a small cut and the elbow was scraped in a lovely stripey, gravel burny type of way.  Tallulah does not take injury well and she was screaming like a tiny banshee.  Tilly had to push the buggy home while I carried Tallulah, who screamed and screamed all the way down the road in a manner that would have made Violet Elizabeth green with envy.

I tried everything.  We did cuddles.  We did distraction (look at your brother dancing about with a handbag on his head), we did bribes (polly pops), we did Rescue Remedy (x2), we did arnica (x3), we did firmness (pull yourself together man).  She just sat on the chair with blood dribbling down her leg, thrashing and wailing and doing huge snot bubbles, burbling on in a hiccupy shout about the fact that it wasn’t fair because it hurt too much.  It was exhausting.

I abandoned her, put the television on for the others and went upstairs to run a bath liberally laced with lavender oil.  I could tell she was still alive due to the howls emanating from the kitchen which were now rising in concentric rings up the stair well.  It took me ten minutes to get her to unclench her fists so that I could undress her.  I insisted she walk up the stairs to the bath.  She tried to convince me that she couldn’t. because her leg hurt too much.  I lost patience and reminded myself of my own mother, i.e. ‘If you don’t get up those stairs in the next thirty seconds I’ll give you something to cry about young lady!’  It worked.

The shriek as she immersed herself in the bath water could probably be heard in Essex it was so powerful. She sat shaking, with sweat dripping through her hair line, arms and legs rigid.  Every time I pushed her limbs under the water they bobbed up again like pooh sticks.  More threats ensued, along the lines of, if you don’t relax your legs I’ll relax them for you.  Quite how I was going to do this I’m not sure, but it worked.

After five minutes she calmed down and began to take a scientific interest in her injuries.  We discussed the nature of blood cells, platelets, fibrin and scabbing.  We discussed how the skin grows in layers.  We were biologists, taking notes for a particularly grisly experiment.  She started taking huge pride in her scabby knee.  The battle was finally won.  After drying she hardly squeaked at all when I poured half a ton of tea tree oil and a bucket of Savlon over it.  She limped proudly into the lounge to show the others and apart from the fact that Oscar had to be restrained from poking it with a pink, plastic hairdryer, it all went well.

Of course, it took so long to get to this stage that tea and homework went right out of the window.  Jason came home to find me slumped in a bloody heap over the kitchen table.  The words ‘Chinese takeaway’ passed his lips and I remembered quite why I love him so much.  He is a good man in a crisis.

Out of all of this the thing that struck me the most was how very old I am.  I find it very, very hard to be sympathetic to your regular, run of the mill bruises and scrapes.  As a child I was smothered in them, all the time.  Hardly a week went by without me doing something ghastly.  My knees were permanently scabby.  I was always covered in stinging nettle rash or insect bites or spectacular gravel rash.  We used to have competitions to see who had the most colourful bruises at school on a daily basis.  We relished our injuries.

It’s not to say that I didn’t wail and scream, but I had to do it really quickly before my mother poured half a ton of TCP over it and threw me back out the door with instructions on how not to be so bloody stupid next time.  Being injured was a way of life.  It was how you knew you were a kid.

We did have gruesome injuries as well as the run of the mill ones.  You were allowed to make a bit more fuss about these ones.  Some of mine included:

• A hideously septic thumbnail.  My gran had given me a manicure set to play with at her house. I was about four, my brother was two.  My brother decided to help me.  He picked up one of the nail files and jabbed it down my thumbnail. Half my nail came off and it all went poisonous.  My gran had to put it in a bowl of hot water and lance it.  I screamed a lot.  I was not allowed to kill my brother.  This seemed rather unfair.
• Taking all the skin off my shin almost to the bone.  I had been riding my bike.  My brother wanted to play with my bike for some reason.  I wouldn’t let him.  He tried to wrestle it off me.  He pulled, I pulled.  He let go.  It fell on me and the mud guard took my shin with it.  It went green.  It hurt a lot.  I was not allowed to kill my brother. This seemed very unfair.
• Cutting my knee open to the bone.  One of the kids in our village had one of those water slides, called a Slideaway.  We went over to play on it one afternoon in the summer holidays.  It was freezing but we didn’t care.  We were all blue and shivering.  I went on, slid all the way down, got off and everyone screamed.  I looked down, my knee was wide open and blood was pooling on my toes.  Lucky for me I was so numb with cold I couldn’t feel anything.  My mum nearly fainted.
• Cutting my forehead open.  I was very small.  I don’t remember it too clearly.  I ran into my gran’s coffee table head first and split my head open.  Nice one.  Explains a lot.
• Smashing my head.  Two girls at school picked me up and dropped me head first onto the playground.  I got half a playground embedded in my forehead.  I looked like a total tit for two weeks and had a nasty headache.
• Learning to ride my bike I was doing brilliantly.  We had a circular drive. I cycled round and round it until I got tired.  Then I realised I didn’t know how to stop.  I stopped by ploughing into one of the Christmas trees that grew in the border by the drive.  I slid down the length of the Christmas tree and ended up with about a hundred pine needles embedded in my skin and with a bike on top of me.  My mum laughed a lot.
• I decided to be an archaeologist. I discovered an earthenware pot on a walk with my mum and gran.  I was very proud of it.  I put it in a carrier bag.  I swung the carrier bag round.  It came back and hit me on the head.  I fell over.  My gran fell in a ditch she was laughing so much.
• I decided to iron my new PE kit.  I melted my PE knickers and ironed a V shape into the crook of my arm all in one go.  I was not popular.
• Getting a belt buckle stuck in my forehead.  We were playing, ’swing people round by a belt’.  What a great game.  The person swinging me let go, the belt ricocheted back and the pin bit embedded itself in my head.  The dinner lady had to pull it out.  It went plop.  Everyone at school was wildly impressed.  I dined out on that for about a month.  It didn’t hurt much but it sure looked good.

To be fair to my brother, who may seem rather the villain of the piece here, he was much more accident prone than me, and some of the things he suffered from were my fault rather. 

• I didn’t like opening our front door with the handle when I was very small.  It was a glass front door.  I used to put my weight against it and thump it till it opened.  One time I went straight through it in a Fall Guy type of shattering glass sort of way.  Amazingly I was fine.  My brother was a baby.  He crawled up and grabbed a piece of glass which then got embedded in his hand.  He screamed a lot at the hospital.
• I once stuck a stick through the spokes of his bike as he was riding around the lawn, just to see what would happen.  What happened was that he went straight over the handle bars and fell into the gravel driveway head first.
• I once trapped him in a cardboard tube we had to do crafts with and pelted the top of his head with metal matchbox cars until my mother found me and wrestled me off him.  He had provoked me rather a lot.  I thought this was very unfair.
• I once kicked him out of a tree we were climbing.  We had a disagreement.  I lost my temper.  He lost his footing.  Luckily it wasn’t a very high tree.  Luckily it was too high for my mother to climb when she found out what I had done.  I sat in that tree for two hours until my gran negotiated an amnesty with my mother about not killing me.
• He once tried to juggle with coal and split his eyebrow open.  That had nothing to do with me.  He was just being a tit.
• He once stood on a rusty nail and drove it through the bottom of his foot.  This was on the same day he got a dart embedded in his hand.  I wasn’t anywhere near at the time.  Not my fault.
• We used to be pyromaniacs and were allowed to light fires in the garden.  My friend and I made an outside kitchen and used to boil up mouldy vegetables in knackered old pans, using water out of the old belfast sink we kept tadpoles in.  We were boiling mouldy beetroot and tadpole surprise.  We put a metal spoon by the fire to warm. I realised it would be too hot.  I made my brother pick it up.  He got a fantastic spoon shaped scar on his palm.  That was entirely my fault. Hands up.  I got into a lot of trouble for that one.

I tried to explain these things to my children last night albeit in a shorter version.  They had no idea what I was talking about.  I might as well have been talking in Swahili.  I could see them filing it away as: ‘Things that happened in the olden days.’ How very depressing.  As Tallulah said when she had finished wailing: ‘Don’t worry Tilly.  We don’t have to think about that, because those things happened in the olden days and they’re all finished now.’