Bluebell Woods: A Note to My Parents

It is my first book—I look at the pictures there are horses, pigs, and ducks. I understand the pictures but can not read the words. She reads as we go to bed and talks and tells us stories. It has been a bright sunny October Day, with blue flowers, food and happy voices. No clouds, or raised voices nor tears, not today. A remarkable day. Father was here. He was sober!

As I write, I hear the voice and the Story of a child whose reality and understanding beyond her years are standing at the side of her like Guardian Angels. In one so small, much sensing and using of experiences to survive the dramas of how things are in her own world. “Who’s in control?” I hear the echoes of grief and sound of tears stretching down the years. So much fear. These situations appear repeatedly and she learns to gain control helped by people closest to her. Well mainly her parents those who life took them in to a place not made for her. Who had forgot she is only four years old. She panics and frets, these parents are her world, finding them on some days proved very hard. Good at disappearing and reappearing worst for wear as she walks the country lanes to get out of the way. She experiences the outdated map, the cultural trap. Anyone with any problem solving skills could see the thing was never going to work without some kind of stability. “It’s the road less traveled” I think and sees it spanning for the next millennium. A sneaky idea of some thing else came into view, another way of thinking so handy for four-year-olds.

Find a love object, and transfer a “little love” and has these things come naturally, it is easy and there he is youngest son a golden child, small and vulnerable and loveable she pours her attention on to him and some thing is saved. A soul. Memories of this remarkable time play in her mind for she knows they will stay forever, when those few short hours were hers. Of the walks in the Forest, dew, spiders’ webs, the mists and silences of tense wood haunted her dreams. The sounds of laughing voices, excitement and exultance. She remembered the smell of wood smoke hot red-hot fires burning to keep warm, and was central to the camp. And later ached to be there again.