All Down Darkness Wide by Seán Hewitt

Author:Seán Hewitt [Hewitt, Seán]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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Not long ago I was on a long drive with my mother, heading north along the west coast to the Lake District and, through stretches of easy silence and the candour that comes through hours of simple conversation, the road providing the odd distraction from any tension, she asked me if I’d been happy as a child. Immediately, I answered yes. And it was true – I was happy, for the most part, very happy. But that happiness was never absolute, because I knew it would be finite. I knew, from the earliest age I can remember, that one day I would have to tell my parents and my friends a secret about myself, a secret I could not escape, and they would leave me, or I would have to leave them, and then my happiness would be over. And so I savoured the happiness, cradled it, saw my childhood (even as I was living it) through a lens of nostalgia. Soon, I knew, it would be over. Soon I would have to end it. There was happiness, yes, but there was always the relentless knowledge of time running out. Love, comfort, safety, all of them ran like sand through an hourglass.

And I wondered, as we drove north and the foothills rose unevenly into mountains, how I had known that, or what had made me think it. How did that fear install itself in me? I was only a child, but still, lodged in my mind was the shrapnel of overheard conversations, innumerable quiet warnings. I was warned about who to play with, who to like, what to like. The television told me. Children at school told me. I remember being shouted at by a friend’s mother after I kissed her son. I could only have been seven or eight years old.

‘That’s dirty,’ she said. I can still hear her accent, the way she said dirrrty.

What I knew then, instinctively, was that I was dirty, that I was perverse. The more I tried to explain to my mother, the more memories seemed to unearth themselves, like gunmetal from an old field.

Growing up, I veered one way, then the other. I leant, as a child would, into the arms of its protectors. I tried to hide myself, to not give myself away. I wanted to show that I was good, that I was kind, that I followed the rules. My brothers could break them, had the freedom in themselves to not care about disapproval, but I had a secret to keep, and guarded it by shoring up my personality against any reprimand. It was a sort of displacement of shame. While I boxed off the part of myself I knew I couldn’t let show, I magnified others, over-identifying with anything I might use as protection. Education, religion, middle-class privilege, anything I could get hold of. They were my suit of armour, the uniform of my cohesion. That early sense of shame went underground: in protecting myself, in choosing which parts of myself to hide and which to magnify, I fragmented myself.

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