Mermaid Singing & Peel Me a Lotus by Charmian Clift

Author:Charmian Clift
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Angus & Robertson
Published: 2015-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

19

Summer holidays! The school reports, rather thumbed now by all the neighbours, have been carefully put away. The great earthenware bowl on the table is piled with melons and grapes and figs and pears — and tomatoes as well, because the colours are nice. The children have been given five drachmae each as an end-of-school treat. For five drachmae they can buy twenty-five of the tiny twenty-lepta cones, and they are pelting along the plateia after the ice-cream cart with a dozen of their friends. The ice-cream is horrid stuff, rather like a frozen, lumpy custard in which the cornflour wasn’t cooked long enough, and it’s made by teenage boys who sit in the gutters twirling the long cylindrical cans around in tubs of ice. But the ice-cream is worthwhile for the spectacle of the carts that carry it — gorgeous wooden chariots painted blue and yellow and scarlet and white, with bands of little flowers on the plywood panels, and each spoke of the thick wheels painted in a different colour. Martin and Shane obviously get more pleasure from the purchase of one of these tiny cones, no larger than a child’s finger, than they ever did from the rainbow bricks with chocolate sauce of London. Perhaps they have just forgotten . . .

London, and the summer holidays of London, seem so much more than two or three thousand miles away. This was the time when I would have been putting away all my own work and plans to concentrate on the least desperate measures for keeping the children amused and healthy in the three months of summer holidays — the time of tension and nightmare and tight controls.

Sitting here on the balcony above the harbour I found myself recalling ridiculous and terrifying things: the lumps of dough I would give them to play with in the kitchen while I scurried and scamped through the housework to try to gain an hour or two when I could walk them through the park before it was time to do the marketing and prepare their luncheon. And those asphalted playing areas and the sooty leaves that drifted sadly over them, and the concrete pits of dirty grey sand . . . the fretful hours of manoeuvring through snarling city traffic to get to the tamed green spaces of Richmond Park, where for an hour or so they might paddle and run and climb the trees, and even feed the deer if the park keepers were not looking. And through it all I would be miserably conscious that beds were unmade and shopping undone and saucepans probably burned dry. And there was the two weeks’ planned holiday by the sea, by the cold, grey opacity of that sea that sighed against the damp, dark shingle — the two weeks that always stretched to four weeks, or six, or eight, while bills mounted higher and higher and George somehow managed alone in London because he wouldn’t allow the children to be cooped up for the summer in a flat on the Bayswater Road.

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