JUE POST 1

My first memory…

…is of whitewashed stairs. I am at the bottom and the sun is bright, but the stone is cool under my thighs. I press my hands into the whiteness and then to my forehead.  When I ask Mum about this memory, she says it was the cellar of the German house we rented and that she spent two days painting over the grey concrete.

I learn that Germany was not a happy time for us, mum missed England, and the job dad went out to do was not as advertised. All I remember are the cellar stairs, a nursery school with wooden shutters sat in a clearing in some woods, and a rocking horse with a painted dappled coat and silky grey mane. I spoke German, so Mum says, we both did. I was two and Andrea was four.

Sometimes, the memories tumble through a hole in my head so fast I can’t hold on to any of them.  And then a jolt like a electricity hits me in the chest and stops my breath. What if I forget our memories? I am the custodian; I am the only one of us left.

In our grandmother’s house of rising dough and clocks that ticked and chimed; where cars made shadows across the front bedroom wallpaper turning swirls into hooked nosed men; she cut my hair. I let her, I think. Afterwards, I patted my head and felt a wodge of bristles where a sliver of hair, that fought the lay and turned blond in the sun, used to hang – my bit of summer.  She chopped it off with a pair of black handled scissors, got from where I don’t remember. Maybe we had been given them to make paper dolls. Maybe she snuck into the kitchen of Monday twin-tub steam and slipped them behind her back, whilst our parents talked in low murmurs in the front room of net curtains, sugar sandwiches and musical matinees; about schools and hotels and other things that come from leaving Germany as if we committed a crime, rather than made an honest mistake. I was three and she was five or maybe six – for it might have been in the three weeks of every year when I got left behind.  It was summer I am sure of that, or are all my memories filtered through a sunshine haze?