Little Betrayals # 2

    My mother would often take me and my two younger sisters to the Heathfield market. Here we would see sheep, cows, geese and chickens, in pens and cages, or on the backs of trucks. Ruddy-faced farmers from all around the area would be jostling for the best prices. The noise of their shouts and the smell of animal dung filled the fresh Sussex air. Whenever we encountered a recently-born calf my mother would encourage me to offer it my pudgy, six-year-old hand, whereupon the hungry animal would scoop my fist into its mouth with its hot, strong tongue, and begin powerfully sucking it. This always filled me with a mixture of pleasure and horror. I later learned that this trick, although transposed to a more urgent body part, is a time-honoured tradition amongst randy young farm lads the world over.

    Sometimes on our walks into the village we would walk down a steep, narrow path which cut through a bank of wild flowers and stinging nettles. At the bottom of this path was a wooden gate, and immediately beyond that, the railway line. One summer morning, my mother lifted my youngest sister out of her stroller and folded it flat, so that it now formed a compact ‘tray’ close to the ground, with a wheel at each corner. She enjoined me to sit on this ‘tray’, with my legs stretched out before me. This I did, noticing that I was now alarmingly level with the host of bees that swarmed around the flowers. Positioning the flattened pram at the top of the steep path, my mother gave a gentle push, and off I went. The vehicle jolted into action and careered at breakneck speed. Terrified at the thought of crashing through the gate at the bottom, perhaps into a passing train, I attempted to slow the pram down by scuffling my feet on the paving, which rushed beneath me. But I was now travelling so fast that my legs were swept under; and, as I was wearing shorts, these limbs were comprehensively skinned by the concrete. Finally, the hell-ride came to an end and the pram careened wildly and dumped me on my back in a thicket of nettles. I looked up into the sky and heard my mother’s helpless laughter as she made her way slowly down the track with my two sisters.

    I was seven when I took my revenge. The memory of it fills me with shame. It was high summer. One afternoon, close to the end of the school day, I walked around the playground and invited six or seven boys back to my house. I told them it was my birthday and that I was having a party. This was untrue. When the boys’ mothers came later to pick them up from school there were hasty rearrangements to schedules and perturbed announcements from each parent that “I wish you had told us earlier, so we could arrange things properly”. Nevertheless, the seven boys were all given permission to accompany me home. Properly, only one of these boys could be classed as an actual friend. (Throughout my childhood I never made friends readily,  having found most children to be tedious bores)

    We all trooped up Mutton Hall Lane to my house. My mother was very surprised to see us.'

    "We are here for my birthday party,” I announced. To her very great credit my mother, although totally flummoxed, went along with the ruse, as best she was able. Unsurprisingly, there was no party fare in the house, so my mother left us playing in the garden while she took my two sisters and walked down to the shop to buy some festive provisions with her meagre housekeeping money. When she returned she managed to bake a sponge cake, which she filled with jam and cream. She put out some chocolate biscuits (an unheard of luxury!) onto a plate. We boys sat around the table with glasses of lemonade and I showed off monstrously.

    “Mum”, I said, as my mother bustled around the crowded room, searching for any old birthday candles that might lie, half-forgotten, in the kitchen drawers, and could be pressed into re-use.

    “Yes?” she replied, in a daze of confusion.

    “You are a fat slob.” I pronounced this statement with all the gravitas of an actor on stage, emphasising the final word as if it was worthy of Olivier. There was an immediate shocked silence around the table. The boys all turned to me, and then to my mortified mother. I have no idea what possessed me to deliver this mortal wound. I had recently seen an American cartoon featuring a plump woman in an art gallery, looking at a piece of blobby Modernist sculpture, whose title, ‘Fat Slob’, was causing her great anguish. This cartoon had made me laugh at the time. There was no laughter now.
    When the mothers arrived later to collect their sons, some of them presented me with small birthday gifts, which they had rushed around town to purchase, just as all the shops were shutting. My mother had the embarrassing task of telling these women that it actually wasn't my birthday, after all.