Free Little Fingers! by Tim Roux Page B

me.
I spend my time writing a book about my life in England. I am not
their keeper. Except that I have blatantly not been writing
anything over the last few weeks, and I was intimately involved in
the events leading up to their disappearance.
    Well, Madame
Quelque Chose de Quelque Part, you really have something to click
your teeth over now.
     
    * *
*
     
    My stuff has
arrived. The removal van did not fit into the driveway, so they had
to park it in the street at the bottom of the garden, and carry
everything fifty yards up a narrow, slippery path to the
house.
    The removal
people were furious, and moaned and sulked. I was the inconsiderate
enemy. I had bought a house that had no easy access, a sin
compounded by the weight of some of the furniture I had bought over
the years. I am sure that the older, stocky guy is still
muttering.
    They took the
furniture and the boxes directly to the allotted rooms, and snorted
whenever I was unsure as to where they should go. Oh to be a man at
times like this.
    Two days later
I received a customer satisfaction survey. I filled it out with
some venom. I haven't heard back from the company.
    It will take
weeks, months, even years to get everything sorted out. It is not
that I have so much, more that I am physically lazy and cannot be
bothered to work at it for any length of time.
    I was
inspecting the photo albums earlier, and decided to sit down and
leaf through them. I suddenly realised that these photos of my
mother's childhood took place in this village. I know that I
deliberately came to live in Hanburgh because my mother was brought
up here, but I had not emotionally connected this village with her
until then.
    I desperately
wanted her to walk into the room, to stand there, and to talk to
me, without her habitual sorrow and pain. I would like to hug her,
to welcome her back, to hear the stories of her childhood recounted
with awe not hatred and anger. At least I would like to find
something of hers in this house. Why would I? Her family was poor.
There is no relationship between the Hanburgh she knew and the
house I have bought.
    She must have
walked past this house, though, climbing up the hill, reflecting on
the luck of the upper echelons of the village. Did she know anyone
from this house? Were there children? Maybe she played here. I want
to feel something of her here, and I can feel nothing except her
absence.
    The time in
this house speeds by. There is everything to do. The carpets
arrived yesterday. I panicked when I suddenly realised that the
carpet people might have to haul several enormous, heavy,
struggling carpets up the garden. However they were able to drive
straight up to the front door.
    The previous
owners covered all the floors with cheap plastic laminate. I should
tear it all up, but I cannot face the inevitable necessity of
having to replace all the floors. I shall not be in Hanburgh for
long. I cannot spend my entire stay leaping from joist to
joist.
    The garden is
my domain. I stand there and I look around, and I tell myself that
all this is mine, all this is me. It is surrounded by walls, trees
and hedges. They are my natural curtains from behind which I peer
into the village. In fact, I see very few people pass by on foot.
There is always some activity around the beck, but they are usually
strangers.
    When I march
down the path the removal men struggled up, and let myself through
the gate into the street, time changes down to a careful pace.
No-one hurries around the village, not even the children. People
enter and leave the shops one at a time. You would think that there
is nothing going on here at all, that nothing has ever happened,
that everyone is dormant here year-in year-out.
    And you would
mostly be right. Even the rivalries and the squabbling are small
things, marginally significant to anyone other than the central
players. And yet babies are born here to spend most of their lives
in this village, at least they were. Mobility has reached even this
part