Feet up in the Old Farmhouse: A Memory

I was resting in the farmhouse after a hard day’s work on the wall. I had just finished baking a chocolate cake for the group. I was tired but my head was buried in a book: in Carson’s book. Suddenly a line ‘like peacocks stepping into the kitchen of God’, sparked-off a memory that was so luminous that I quickly went to write it down. The memory concerns an evening in Suffolk, where I had been on summer holiday with a school friend. We were returning by foot to her cottage after an evening of good company, by a long, old track by the sea. The night was delicious, spiked with gorse and stars, wild and fragrant. It was cold but we had plenty of layers on. It felt like life had never been so good. 

A Memory: The walk back from Southwold to Walberswick at night.

It was a hard cold winter night. The stars were hard as flint, the air was smoke-fired, full of burnt wood and drifting fog. Because of the darkness and the brightness of the stars, the sky felt like a magnificent tent above our heads.

In was a fen landscape, a water world sliced through by river estuaries, bogs and shallow lakes; filled with glossy moraines. River and canal boats lilted in the tidal waters. I could smell the sea, and hear the silence that sleepy night-filled birds leave behind them.

It was the end of the summer – the promise of autumn awaited. We were at the tremulous edge of something. The hip-flask passed between pinking cold fingertips.

We carried on walking along the flat salt-marsh, past silhouettes of low scrubby trees cowed against hedgerows and dry stone walls. Fields without cattle. I remember the sensation of feeling at that moment that apart from us, no one else existed in the entire universe. I remember the fuzzy orange tips of cigarettes and the sound of three pairs of feet grinding lightly into the night. Go softly, tread softly.

Adolescence. Alcohol fumes, whisky sluicing down the throat and warming the stomach. Good friends. Sex: pale lambent as a bonfire. That summer was a beginning and an ending. The end of innocence and a leap towards adulthood or a new kind of life. But still the sensation of invincibility and security of knowing that nothing could touch the utterly beautiful pact of faith that existed between her and I, was a kind of bridge vaulting me towards the sky and the glittering stars themselves.