Free My Animal Life by Maggie Gee

had gone. The thing I had felt on the beach as a toddler, when my stubby little feet and my chubby child legs sped up until they passed the vital line between walking and running,when both feet are off the ground at once. That precious thing, pure movement. Gravity defeated, the lift into flight. The thing that comes to anyone running full-tilt, without pain or pressure, the real joy of the sprint, the all-subsuming sense that you and your body are one, and the unity is weightless, sheer speed, pure flow. You are not lifting or moving anything; nothing is moving or lifting you. You are the movement. You are in flight. Pure animal alchemised into spirit.
    One other time I felt the same joy, something atavistic that pre-dates modern humans, their vegetable state briefly interrupted by panting, sweating sessions down the gym. Now activity is seen as a self-limiting episode, whereas, once, surely, life was motion.
    When John and I were teenagers, and my little brother was ten years younger, our parents took us on camping trips so we could afford to go abroad. We didn’t have a car, which might have stymied some people, but we loaded our camping gear into prams and push-chairs, which somehow or other we heaved on to trains (consider the terror at European stations, as the huge foreign expresses roared in beside the platform and we had to get two prams and a pushchair on board, from the hoods of which the round bottoms of duffel-bags looked out, the small brass studs like a pair of piggy eyes, the body of the prams full of tents, billy-cans, cooking-stoves, wind-breaks, sleeping-bags, provisions. Imagine my father, marshalling his troops! Three prams, his three children, a friend each for John and me, his wife, his precious camera-bag, his briefcase, rucksacks for my father and the two elder boys. Three vehicles, five children, a pile of bags and baggages.Looking back on it all, I salute you, Dad. I forgive the bawlings-out as we panicked on to trains.)
    One fine July day we had gone for a day-trip up high in the Swiss mountains on a crawling funicular train, with slatted wooden seats. Despite my fear, it did not hesitate, groan, and plummet with terrible speed back down the mountain. When we got to the top, Dad set off boldly in the opposite direction from all the other passengers. This stratagem was not always successful, but this time it brought us to a paradisal place, ringed by snow-topped peaks but curiously temperate, a lightly-wooded, green-turfed valley with a river and a grassy path meandering beside it, little patches of silver river-sand and stones.
    My friend Janet and I were perhaps thirteen. We were just beginning to be adolescents, but as childhood friends, we could be children together, which is one definition of happiness. Sometimes Nick and I are children together. Janet was one of the non-bullyers at junior school, one of the people who have shown me that hope is worthwhile, for some people’s hearts are immune to peer pressure, some children have been treated with enough kindness to be kind to others when they’re very young. Janet had decided to be my friend, and she even withstood my astonished lack of trust: ‘Are you REALLY my friend? Promise?’ How many times did I interrogate her? ‘I am your friend. Why do you keep asking?’ And my answer, from the voice of pure misery in my chest — ‘Because no one likes me, since my parents left Bromsgrove and they put me up a class, no one’s ever liked me’ — was stilled in the end. Janet liked me. And so did Anne Simmers. And so did Linda Tucker. Janet also loved running, as I did.
    My parents let the children off the leash, that day, for a few hours. Freedom! We were walking fast, then we started to run. Janet and I were running, easily. We ran by the mountain river in the clear, snow-cooled early afternoon sunlight, passing young silver birches and slender conifers, down the easy path through tasselled grasses, with