Just before my sixth birthday, my little sister was born. Months and then weeks preceding, doctors warned my mother that it was increasingly likely that Lucy would be born with Downs Syndrome and that my mother would die. She almost did. I barely knew this at the time, I just knew that everyone around me was stressed. I thought Lucy might have been kicking too much. Shortly after Lucy’s birth, my step-father had a nervous breakdown. Barely recovered from a dangerous c-section, my mum came home to a man who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, a newborn baby and me. With no financial stability, we moved to a much smaller council home in a small town, my step-dad living separately, first due to a new job as a pub landlord. Years after that he just was. Close, but separate.
He still came round every day, had dinner most nights or helped mum fix up the house. They’d laugh, argue, make up, argue some more and then my dad would agree to come round the next day to mow the lawn. His journey to recovery was long and painful and their relationship suffered. It could never go back to how it was and it took a long time for them to accept that. But they’re still my parents. They still bend over backwards to provide for me and my family. They love each other and they will grow old together. They bicker about the minutiae of that fact every day.
When we first arrived at the new house, there was an overflowing skip left in the front garden. In the back, bricks and glass protruded from the malnourished grass. Nearby, groups of teenagers with nothing to do would kick footballs at my mums car. An outsider who wasn’t afraid to tell them off, my mum became a villain in the eyes of boys pretending to be men. I think my mum felt like a villain in many respects. Like any good mother, she wanted the best for us. She wanted a strong husband who spent time and money on his children. Every monetary struggle, every luxury denied felt like a personal failure to my mum.
I struggled with bullying at my school for a while until my mother found out the extent of my sadness. Within weeks, I started at a new school that helped make me who I am. From that day to my high school prom, my mum drove thousands of miles, hundreds of hours to get me to a place where I felt safe. At home, the bricks and glass, the refuse, the trodden down carpet with burn holes, all started to disappear. Not by magic, not overnight but gradually my mum built a home with her bare hands. There came a time when I could play football in the back garden without worrying about cutting my legs open. Some time after that, I couldn’t play football anymore because there were vegetables and trees baring fruit in every corner of the small garden. In the summer I’d climb up a ladder and pull down the biggest apples you’d ever seen. My mum would turn our kitchen into a sugary bathhouse, steaming up the windows as she made big jars of jam from apples, strawberries, plums, rhubarb. I’d apply a thick spread on a knife and paste it on my mums homemade bread or a ‘doorstep’ slice as she calls it.
We didn’t know a single other household on our estate that did this. At Christmas, mum would send Lucy and I to the few neighbours who were friendly to us with jars of jam, mince pies and other homemade goods. She expected nothing back. My childhood was filled with scents. Cut grass, compost, sugary fruit simmering down to jam and wine, fresh paint, cut wood, the smells and sounds of a house constantly changing, surviving.
Within a couple of years, we adopted a rescue dog. Toby. A young German Shepherd/Border Collie cross, Toby had run away from an abusive household in Wales. Toby arrived at a dark time in our lives. One night, when a man attempted to break into our house, Toby barked the house down. They didn’t come back. When Lucy got older and ventured out of the house alone, Toby walked alongside her. At a time when my confidence was at an all time low, Toby made me feel strong. People would stop me to pet him, I had conversations and became sociable after a long period of being beaten down. He kept us all fit as he eagerly pulled with all his strength at the lead, unsure of where he was going but excited to find out. He’d run for hours, constantly turning his head back to check we were still following.
There were times for my mother when everything seemed to be crashing down on her. There still are. For ten years Toby was an excuse. To get out, to go to a park, a canal, a high street, it didn’t matter. A personal favourite for Toby, Downs Banks is a National Trust location near to where we lived. A huge valley with forests of trees on either side, cow pastures and a running river, Toby would bark frantically as soon as he figured out where the car was going. As a child — and presumably as a dog — it felt endless. When my mum pulled me out of school, we’d go most weeks to forget how we were feeling. We’d watch wildlife run effortlessly through trees. We’d sketch and make up stories for the animals we saw. We lived vicariously through them.
I’m twenty-one now. A university graduate living in Brighton, I moved down here to take a breather from education and enjoy my youth while I figured out the next move. I didn’t anticipate a pandemic. For the past few months, I’d been working full time at a restaurant. The staff there are amazing and it wasn’t as demanding as other jobs I’ve had. When they were forced to lay us off due to the virus, they told us in person as a group and took steps to protect us from economic fallout. So I’m very privileged and grateful in that regard. But like many I’m now stuck indoors, anxious about my friends and family, about the most vulnerable in our communities and about myself. How long will I be apart from things I long took for granted? How long can I maintain my own safety and the safety of those around me?
Just over two weeks into lock down and I’ve been going on walks again. When you’re a child you don’t realise how much of a privilege a walk is, for many reasons. I have use of my legs, I’m healthy, I’m not suffering as much as others from the loss of employment. It’s productive to acknowledge these things when people are being affected by the same thing in a thousand different ways. Today I took my hour of exercise and walked to the top of Whitehawk Hill in Brighton. From the top you can see far down the coast, out to sea and some distance inland. When it’s sunny and clear, the sea and the sky connect together and the world seems to bend in on itself, like it’s folded in half. As I walked alone, I thought of how at home Toby would’ve been. I tried to imagine how my mum would call after him as he disappeared into another hedge. I thought back on how I once followed my first dog Wilf into a bush and immediately met a bees nest.
For a moment I sat under a tree to catch my breath and the serenity overwhelmed me. As children and parents passed me I envied them. One of the greatest privileges of childhood is being blissfully unaware of how painstakingly constructed your happiness is. My eyes welled up as I realised — not for the first time — that for most of my childhood, I had been unaware that we were poor. Six years since my mum last drove me to school, four years since I left home, I’ve barely paused to remember how I got here. Like most people, I’m still adjusting to what could be a fairly long term lifestyle change, full of anxiety and instability. It took a global pandemic for me to look back. It took silence, trees and sunshine. It took me being the most vulnerable I’ve been for years to remember what had been, and where we went. Now all I long for is another excuse to leave the house with my family. I long for an almost impossible ‘all-clear’. I long for the day that humanity can blossom again, our spring.
Until then, I’ll just keep walking.
