The Fail of the Wild's

a memo(i)ry fragment

While working out how (if?) I’m going to develop this Substack, and deciding which of the several I’ve-started-so-I’ll-finish (but haven’t yet) new pieces I should prioritise, I thought I might fill the interregnum with already written fragments, whether stand alone pieces that have never found a home elsewhere, or that might be shaped into parts of the larger memoir/psychogeography that is my main work-in-progress.

Here is one such:

Memory separates the eyes from the body. I am holding mum’s hand, but what I see is a little boy and his mother at a distance of imaginary immeasurable units, probably from about the park gates to a point on the pavement on the opposite side of the road to the bus shelter. We stand, looking towards the bend in the road at Sough Bridge, waiting.

We have been waiting, like this for several minutes. To me those minutes seem like little aeons. Perhaps I am fidgeting, perhaps asking the pointless, unanswerable questions that small children do. “Is it nearly here yet?”

I can’t remember.

Or haven’t conjured the memory.

What I do remember, with a certainty out of proportion to its significance, is a word. The word is ‘ample’. I remember it so keenly that I am bound to endow it with significance beyond its denotation. I don’t think I knew what it meant before mum used it. “We have ample time,” she says.

The sun is a white hole, hanging high in featureless blue. And we have ample time. We are here, waiting for a coach to crest into view. I can almost see it: beige, with deeper reddish brown trim, bobbing on its soft suspension. Mum will see it before I do. She’s a grown up. She’s my mum.

Trees bracket the A56, thickly green like dappling watercolours. It will be another three years or so until, playing around with mum’s glasses, I will look at those same trees and individual leaves will pop astonishingly into view. She will be mortified that she hadn’t spotted that I was so short-sighted, and I would feel bad for her then the way I will feel in half-an-hour’s time when, having waited twenty minutes beyond its scheduled arrival and walked another twenty minutes down to the station crossroads in the vain hope of catching it coming back from Earby bus station, she will finally have to admit, to herself and to me, that the Wild’s coach to Knowsley Safari Park isn’t coming.

“But we were there in ample time,” she repeats.  She must have misunderstood the pickup instructions. Walter Hogg at the newsagent’s telephones Wild’s office for us, and confirms the news. The coach picked-up earlier at the bus-stop. They’d notified the change of arrangements when the tickets were posted.

We will not be going to Knowsley Safari Park.

I’m disappointed that I won’t see monkeys pulling windscreen wipers off cars, but that’s not my main concern. Just me and mum were going somewhere for once. We had ample time; but it was the wrong time, in the wrong place.

She feels she’s let me down. What upsets me is not missing out on the trip, it’s that mum made a mistake, and it’s made her feel bad. I don’t want to cry because that will make her feel worse, but I want to cry because I know how much we were both looking forward to this. We had been to Knowsley Safari park before; indeed we went somewhere nearly every weekend: trips to the coast at Blackpool, Southport or Morecambe; to the hills of the Lake District or the fells of the Yorkshire Dales, but always in the car, dad driving —  but this was to have been special. Just me and mum.

The feeling this memory evokes is difficult to name. It has some of the aura of embarrassment. Some of the savour of shame. It follows and haunts me, whether vicarious (as here on behalf of my mum) or personal. When facing out, it comes with a desire for empathy that can be more debilitating than motivating. When turned inward, I hide it jealously until, exposed, it strikes with a petulance born of fear. Or an anger, born of injustice.