Early Blooms - My First Love

How to be ridiculously over-dramatic when you’re five.

Every now and again I like to step away from my niche of interiors and gardens and tell a story from my life. I have no children to recall my tales to and perhaps impart a little life-learned wisdom, so my Substack sometimes becomes a way for me to leave a little legacy. I hope you don’t mind.

---

I was always a helplessly sentimental boy. I would find a way to romanticise almost everything, including our somewhat nomadic existence as children, moving from one home to the next with alarming regularity. The loss of friends and the comfort of familiarity would be tragically played out in my mind as if I were a character in a Brontë novel.

When I was very young, my parents upended us once more to the other side of the world. It was some godforsaken place on the outskirts of New Norfolk, Tasmania, which hugged the banks of the wild River Derwent. It sounds like it had the potential to be idyllic, but actually, back in the ‘70s at least, it was a bit of a dead end Nomansland. At any rate, our home was way out of town on a dusty dirt track in the middle of nowhere. A row of seven single storey shacks on stilts in a desert full of nothing but grit, scrubland and sky. I have a very strong recollection of tumbleweed.

The house itself was adorned from top to toe in horizontal wooden bevel cladding. Each board was lovingly fitted slightly on a gradient, allowing each one to rest on top of the other. The technique allowed for rain water to be expelled easily and also created a pleasing under shadow when the sun was shining. It’s where I first fell in love with weatherboard homes, an obsession that shows no sign of waning. It’s also where I fell in love with a boy for the first time.

The weather worn matte white paint of our home was cracked and blistered in places, revealing rusty nails and patches of husky dry rot. Sun—bleached grey wooden steps led up to a small, but amiable verandah. The third deck board past the top step always creaked as you walked over it as if to remind us that we were home. At least for a while. There was a white-washed timber frame porch door with well-used fly screens that had lost their stretch. It had a spring attached on the inside, so that it slammed shut behind you when you walked through. It always made me jump.

I was five, I think. My mother took me aside on the verandah one scorchingly hot day, so hot that the heat haze was causing Lady, our sweet pet dog, distracted and bad tempered, to appear as if she were amongst a pack of squiggly blurred hounds, all scratchy and irritated at the back of our yard.

I was watching her transfixed imagining how wonderful it would be to have more than one dog. I adored her because of her airs and graces. She wasn’t cut out for bush life and neither was I.

My mother clasped hold of my jaw and turned my head, demanding I pay attention. She warned me in no uncertain terms that I must not, under any circumstances, visit the boy next door, the love of my life Jimmy Marnie. He was terribly sick in bed with some form of contagion you see. My eyes widened as visions of him lying there, gradually withering away without me by his side to nurse him filled my tiny head. I tried to protest, but she was having none of it.

“Not until he’s fully recovered, you hear me? The last thing I need is you off school with the pox!”

I had no idea what the pox was, but I was truly horrified, inconsolable and beside myself with grief at the prospect of him dying without having said goodbye or given one last sweet kiss. I imagined him, lying there like Beth March, beset with scarlet fever. If only I could be there to wipe his brow and perhaps provide soup.

Absenting myself without my mother noticing was incredibly easy to do. We, my elder brother Steven and I, were generally not to be seen until tea time on the weekends. She had way too many chores to do and with a young toddler in her arms half the time, she had more than enough to contend with. No one cared back then about child safety or strangers, certainly not in our world anyway. To be fair, you’d have been hard pushed to have found any intriguing, mysterious strangers where we lived. The best you could hope for was a local hop farmer passing by and unless they were pretty, which was never the case, then I wouldn’t have been interested anyway.

I set about hatching an escape route. The hard part would be to not be seen by my elder brother scurrying across to where Jimmy lay, most probably writhing in agony all alone on his deathbed. Steven would be sure to tell on me if he saw. He was playing frisbee with himself. He had asked me to join, but he knew damn well I wouldn’t. No harm in asking, he’d say with a squint in his eye, wiping the sweat from his brow with his dirty forearm.

I’ve never ever seen the point of flinging things at one another. I know others find it immensely pleasurable, but whether it be a flying saucer frisbee or a leather-bound ball of air, they all just leave me stone cold. The constant back and forth and endless, torturous boredom of it all is exactly why I have never been and never will be good at sports. Well, other than the egg and spoon race, I’m brilliant at that, steady hand you see.

Anyway, so I had to squirrel myself away and somehow reach the back of the Marnie household, where Jimmy’s bedroom was, but without mum seeing me from the verandah, my brother Steven noticing in between frisbee self-tossery or the dog barking mid-escape.

The house in question could best be described as a humble bungalow on stilts, which looked almost identical to ours, other than the addition of a faded ultramarine trim on the raised terrace. The house was built on a steep slope and Jimmy’s bedroom sat at the top of that slope, effectively making it ground floor and easily accessible.

There was another world underneath that house, a world in which Jimmy and I would often escape to after school. We called it The Cave of Wonder. In reality it was a makeshift basement shed for his father Tom, which was screened off from the outside world by silver-grey wooden trellis walls and a squat single sun-baked argent door that had a crack in the bottom half. It was the perfect place for hiding, setting up imaginary sweet shops, or playing mummies and daddies as we often did.

His father had cleared it and fitted it out with shelves that had jars hanging from underneath them full of screws and bolts. I remember being mesmerised by those floating jars; how did they stay up? Did he glue the lids to the shelves and if so, how did he get the screws out when he needed them? Fascinating!

There was a wooden workbench below the levitating jars and if we pulled up a stool, both of us could climb on top of it to do things that would make a passing wallaby blush. Things that you wouldn’t imagine two little boys doing together just for fun. Most often we would take off all our clothes once we knew no one was around and pretend to be in bed together. Nothing sexual happened, we were way too young, of course, but lying next to each other and pecking each other on the lips seemed perfectly normal behaviour. We never questioned it and it was very much our favourite pastime.

Jimmy Marnie was a very handsome sporty boy, all six dashing years of him, with his floppy hazel brown hair and jade green eyes. He would smile at me from across the playground as the end of school bell rang out, a slightly crooked smile, but one that held such warmth and affection. He had comforting eyes that sought to always make me feel secure. I loved him and he loved me. It was simple.

The thought of him in pain was more than I could bear. I had successfully made my way down to the far edge of our sloped yard where there was a wire gate with a heavy latch that I could just about reach. All I had to do was open it and then run as far as my little legs would carry me to The Cave of Wonder’s cracked silver door and I would be home and dry.

We had the exact same cavernous space beneath our wooden shack, but there was nothing wondrous about ours. It hadn’t been used in years and was a mass of cobwebs, dust-smothered mystery objects and rusty pans. We were warned never to play there for fear of copperhead snakes and redback spiders. For me that fear was palpable, but my elder brother didn’t give two hoots and often ventured there to hide away from the midday sun. Luckily for me, on this very afternoon, he had decided that lone frisbee was a tad on the dull side and had ventured inside. The time was now. Escape while his back was turned.

Lady the dog had fallen asleep underneath a Eucalyptus tree. My mother was nowhere to be seen. It was deathly quiet. Somehow I managed to pull down the heavy metal latch and hold onto it, whilst manoeuvring my body around to the other side of the gate, twisting my arm so that I could, ever so gently, ever so quietly, lower the latch back into position, but with me free to run.

I bolted towards the cave door, I was nearly there, so close, but I didn’t see the protruding tree root below my feet and tripped into a cloud of dust.

Silence. I daren’t move. Lady raised her head and cocked her ears, squinting in the baking heat. I held my breath.

Gradually, she lowered her head and ignored the commotion. Phew! Resume J.P, resume!

I slowly pushed myself up with my grazed hands. As I wiped my mouth with the back of one of them I noticed blood. No matter, I just had to get to the door. Once inside all I had to do was get to the back where the sloped ground rose to meet the underneath of The Marnie household. There, the wooden trellis that surrounded our hideout diminished to only about a foot high. There was a gap which we had both used once before when Jimmy’s father had locked the cave door. I knew that once clear of that Jimmy’s bedroom window was literally just above.

I wriggled and squirmed my way out, by this point covered in dirt and grime, but there it was, the sweet boy’s bedroom window. A rickety air conditioning unit sat below it, which I hastily climbed onto. Please god, don’t let Jimmy’s mum be in there, I thought to myself as I hesitantly tapped on the pane.

Nothing.

I tapped again, harder this time.

Slowly, a little hand parted a single curtain and there he was, covered in angry crusty red welts. Thank goodness he was still alive!

“You can’t come in. I can’t see you.” He muffled as his palms pressed against the window pane to meet mine. “It’s so itchy. I’ve missed you.” He said.

“I’ve missed you too, I came to help. Open the window.”

“I can’t, you’ll get it and then I would never forgive myself. You need to go J.P, you’ll be in so much trouble if you’re caught. Mum’s only in the kitchen.”

“I don’t care. We can suffer together.” I pleaded. But it was no use. He ushered me away with his hands and drew the curtain.

Never had I ever felt so helpless, so at a loss as I crawled on my hands and knees around the outside of his prison. My heart ached so much as the feelings surged upward through my chest. My throat tightening as tears bubbled up from the corners of my eyes, rolling down my cheeks to hit the dust beneath me.

No one ever found out. I did get into trouble, but only because I was so dirty. Fortunately, my mother’s wrath was curtailed when she saw my cut lip and dried up tears. I told her I fell. I think my brother Steven got into more trouble than I did for not looking after me. It was always his fault.

That shack, that street of houses on stilts, The Cave of Wonder and the boy that made everything in my world okay, was my home for just over a year and a half. My parents were homesick and we would soon be on that never-ending journey again to find a place to belong.

In late autumn we moved back to England. My parents told us that Lady had gone to live on a small farm run by an elderly couple with rosy cheeks and a plentiful waste line. She was going to spend her days reluctantly bounding around chasing sheep, with a face on her like a slapped arse, no doubt.

I only found out a few years ago that actually, no one would take her. A dog over there had to work for a living, they weren’t pets, or part of the family. Lady was never going to cut it. She was sent to that eternal luxury doggie daycare in the sky. Champagne on ice. Yummy treats dangled into her chops like juicy ripe grapes. It broke my parent’s hearts.

As for Jimmy, we never saw each other again. I cried incessantly on the day we left Tasmania and afterward, back in England, I would often burst into tears. No one knew why and I never told them. Till now that is.

Thanks so much for reading. As always, I am so very appreciative of this community — if you have enjoyed this post then please hit like button ♥️, a restack (that’s the recycle symbol below), leave a comment or share this post. If you do them all I’ll love you forever. It takes a second, but has a huge impact.