Today has been one of those November autumn days that you think you remember from your childhood: flawless blue skies, bright sun, and cold. The world seems sharper, and the air is just a little bit more bracing.
It says something for living in Catalonia, and living by the sea, that yesterday was the first night that we added an eiderdown to the cover sheet under which we sleep!
The eiderdown is thin and stitched and was originally my grandmother’s, and possibly handed down to her too, it’s an antique, and still efficient and not looking anything like its age.
It reminds me of the times that I used to sleep in my grandparents’ house under that eiderdown, in Maesteg, in the small back bedroom in a bed which I only later discovered was an old four-poster with the posts cut off.
My mattress was feather filled, and something into which you sunk, and which I now understand is not very good for your back and posture while sleeping, but I was only a kid and all I thought about was the joy of soft acceptance. I can’t now recall if I felt anything about the difference of my modern bed in Cardiff and the anachronism that I slumbered in in Maesteg. I think that forgetfulness is more to do with the fact that kids are able to compartmentalise experiences, and link places with circumstances and not extrapolate to continuous ‘everyday life’.
An example I always like to cite concerns Easter. Every Easter my parents would buy me an Easter egg and I would be delighted. Easter eggs were Easter eggs to me, they were made by Cadbury’s had silver foil and them and the chocolate tasted different to that in the chocolate bars.
But, one year a friend of my mother gave me an Easter egg that came in its own satin finish box with a thin white ribbon holding the lid, with the egg itself positioned in the centre of the box in its own cardboard cut-out place with the chocolate arranged around it! It was opulence and luxury that I had never experienced. It was overwhelming!
The magnitude of the experience might be gauged by the fact that I managed to get over my initial reluctance to ‘spoil’ anything by actually eating the chocolate and dutifully consumed the lot, but I did keep the box for years. And years.
My parents had never given me anything so splendid for Easter but, and this is the interesting thing for me, I did not expect such a glorious, boxed egg to be repeated the next year when only my parents provided the eggy gifts. I did not take the exception to suddenly become the norm. The present was from an ‘outsider’, it was something different, and I was more than happy with what my parents provided.
Although I stoutly maintain that I was not ‘spoiled’ by my parents, I have come to realize, as I have heard other people’s experiences, that I had a fortunate upbringing. I lacked for nothing important and, while I did not get everything I wanted when I wanted it, I had most reasonable requests granted.
So, with the kid’s ability to say ‘this happens here, but not necessarily there’ you can navigate a complex series of domestic and relationship conundrums. The only sad thing is that degree of intelligent accommodation does not always inform your later adult life – unless you take the ‘that happened then, but not necessarily now’ variation on a childhood acceptance!
