Scales

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A story has to start somewhere. When the story is autobiographical, the logical place to start is with birth. Except that to understand the context, the reader may need to learn about parents, even grandparents; was the subject born into wealth or poverty, privilege or obscurity? My case is rather different in that this story starts, in explosion and fire, when I was already past my forty-fifth birthday.

Picture the scene: a flat, fenland landscape typical of East Anglia. The endless farmland stretching to the horizon, dissected by the ruler-straight dykes and smaller drainage ditches planned by the Dutch when this part of England was reclaimed from marshland centuries before. The fields beginning to turn green with the first leaves of the vegetable crops; later, they would be full of potatoes and sugar beet, carrots and cabbage. Overhead, a vast open sky just dimming into dusk, a few wispy clouds high above still glowing in the sun. A straggle of red-brick houses along each side of a straight, narrow road running well above a land sunken by drainage. A white-painted pub, red Bateman’s sign swaying slightly in the breeze. At one end of the small village, a house a little detached from the rest, three stories tall but shallow from front to back, set in a square plot bordered by tall poplars to screen the cold north wind, a few remaining daffodils nodding over the lawn. A late spring scene of rural tranquillity, disturbed only by birdsong.

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