JUE POST 5

1977. The longest, hottest summer in dusty, chalky Dunstable and a bedroom that looked over the Downs. I woke and jumped onto her bed to tell her how, in the night, I had flown around our bedroom and seen the top of the fairground teddies, shoved on top of the wardrobe, and skimmed the ceiling with my fingers. She, all blonde, blue-eyed beauty, whispered that she had also flown, and she could prove it; I didn’t ask her too. We shook our heads and giggled.

A shared dream or magic? We believed the latter.

We told our mother in breakfast chatter, my hair a nest of bracken, my legs swinging under the chair; her toes touching the floor.

She was long and lithe; I had to run to keep up when we climbed the chalk head (always playing catch-up). Stood at the top, arms wide, we whooped into the wind of possibility. She was always there, or was it me who never left her side? 

Mum, clearing out our room days later, found a smiley face drawn with black felt tip, on the back of the fairground panda’s head.

“When I flew,” she whispered to me, and then stood in the corner to do her punishment.