Halloween

I am writing this (though I won’t be able to post it until another day) from my mothers house, the house where I lived from when I was 16 till about 21, and then again from about 23 to about 25.

My mum has had an operation, and in order for her not to stay in hospital, she has to have someone at home with her.

We’ve had a really nice evening – she isn’t suffering any ill effects from the operation or the anaesthetic and we’ve had dinner and talked all evening.
My old bedroom is very different now. It’s still blue, but now plain walls, where they were once ragrolled. Only the bed is the same, and it’s very soft and past it now. Outside in the hall is a bookshelf that contains two of my old books – Little Richard and Prickles (which was one of my early childhood favorites) and The Big Book of Stories for Girls which I was given when I left Primary School as Head Girl.

So this house isn’t filled with childhood memories, because I didn’t live here till I was 16, and I suppose it must have felt a bit temporary even then. I do have memories of this room though, the first that sprang to mind was the time when I borrowed a copy of 1984 from a friend on a night out. I came home late and began to read. I read the book right through and when I looked up after I’d finished, I wondered what the strange light was coming through the thin white curtains. I opened them and realised it was the sun coming up.
My (very unhappy) time at college has been much on my mind recently, for various reasons, and I have some very uncomfortable memories of that time in this room, which came to mind as I looked out of the window at the unchanged view over the railway.

And of course, this was the bed I was in when my mum came in, early one morning when I was 18 and told me my father had died. The day before I had sat on the floor in the hallway just outside, on the phone to my brother, talking about what we thought was going happen next. One of us was right, one of us was wrong.
My brother brought over to me today an old phone, which he had managed revive enough to get to the 900-odd photos that were on it. It made me sad looking at old pictures of the children, they’ve grown so fast, time is passing so quickly.
Betsy and Al both went to Halloween parties tonight – as I was here I couldn’t take them but was able to help Betsy with her makeup. After starring in a play version of Alice in Wonderland recently, looking most uncharacteristically girly and sweet, she decided to obliterate all memories of that by going as Evil Alice. She wore all black, with black DM-type boots, a blood splattered white apron on which she had attached torn up playing cards. She wore black fingerless gloves, a studded belt, black nail polish and a hairband with the Queen of Hearts on it, with the words ‘Alice Rocks’ scrawled on it. I did her makeup as a sort of mixure between Emily the Strange and Nightmare Before Christmas. She looked very grown up indeed.

Al went as a zombie, ripped t-shirt and knife through head. He was going to a friends before the party and so his mum did the face paints for him. I felt sad to miss them going off but I needed to be here. And I’m glad I could be.