Autobiographical Memories

Bored at the weekend, my best friend and I decided to have a look inside the local Methodist Church. We were 10, and it was only the second time I had been to church (the first being my baptism). We did not even get through the door.

We went to the back entrance, round an overgrown, narrow corner of the church. I almost peered through the window before screaming: “God’s in there!” We ran away, terrified of whatever was in the church. My friend said she had seen a ghost that resembled the marshmallow man in Ghostbusters.

Was it God?

My first big experience of God was at the age of 5. Alone in my bedroom at night, I sat up in bed and looked out of the window at my dark back garden and the moon above it. I realised that one day, and probably in only 60 or 70 years, I would die. I believed in God, but as a child feared Him so much that the thought of my future death filled me with utter terror. I sobbed and clasped my hands in prayer, begging the moon (where I though God was) to let me live forever.

We lay in the field. I didn’t care what the crop was, but it rose above our heads. The moon looked down as we looked up. I said I wished people wouldn’t go to space as it ruins the mystery, like a woman applying make-up in public. You, however, like to know things.

The ground began to grow damp and the air was cold. I’m sure alcohol took care of that, and we felt happy, lying together for hours in darkness.

A massive beetle arrived so we left. In six years I would apply my make-up in front of you.

I always dreaded the stench of the car park in the roll-on roll-off ferry we took to Denmark each summer. One year I prepared by pressing my soft polar bear, Nanok, over my nose and mouth, restricting my breathing. All I could smell was the comfort of familiar material; my bear with his arms around my face. As I crossed the car park the lorries rose up to the height of sky scrapers and I dropped Nanok into a puddle of petrol.

Today he is as white as the safety of childhood. My mother must have washed him.