Open Wound

OPEN WOUND


"Go, sally forth," the voice said.

I turned to see who had spoken, and there was nobody there, not even my own shadow, because - I laughed - the sun was casting my shadow in front of me, not behind.

I decided to sit for a while in the wild flower meadow that I had luckily found, and to watch the butterflies land and take off like delicate items left over from dreams.

I somehow did not worry about the voice telling me to sally forth, because it was telling me to do something that I had already done. Mysterious voices that are heard during childhood are often behind the times and are also beyond the need to be concerned about in any way.

My dear mother had used the same expression that morning when she saw me moping about the house with a book to which she took a dislike once she saw the ambiguous design of its cover. And, even more so, when she investigated its title which was 'Open Wound'. I think she had failed to draw the connection between the man's fob watch on the cover and the book's title, a watch with its own front cover opened in his hand - and she had made the wrong conclusion

Meanwhile, that phrase 'sally forth' was out of character for her, a phrase even more old-fashioned that she was. I had never heard her use it before.

"Stop swatting over books, and sally forth into the sunshine," she said with a breezy smile.

She looked as if she knew she had fallen into an idiom of speech that was not really her own. Whether it was a fear or an embarrassment that caused the later turning away of her head, I could not judge. Perhaps she thought she had become someone else.

In those days, children like me could indeed 'sally forth' alone into the outside world, even during the hours that bordered upon dusk. And in the long summers that inhabited my childhood, the hours before dusk were longer than they have become during the rest of my life....

That wild flower meadow was a rare phenomenon in England even upon that day, and perhaps it never really existed at all. Wild flower meadows have ceased to exist altogether today. Or almost.

I can't now properly visualise that meadow, so perhaps none of it ever happened. On the other hand, I have since remembered that I did not 'sally forth' on that special day empty-handed; I had put the book called 'Open Wound' in my back pocket, and surreptitiously left the house with it thus hidden about my person.

Was the back pocket of my pair of short trousers large enough for the book, I now ask myself. Good question. It was more like those small I SPY booklets than, say, a storybook or novel. I wonder if many people remember those I SPY booklets: full of drawings of themed items that you needed to go out and collect by seeing them and then ticking them off in the booklet. Say, wild flowers. Or buses, trains, types of building, people doing certain jobs, animate and inanimate things like that.

Eventually, with a bit of contortion, I pulled the book from my pocket and gazed at its black and white cover. The words (now in plural) were OPEN WOUNDS stylised to look like thick dripping liquid. No sign of a man with a watch of any sort, let alone a fob one. The picture, although in black and white, was in a Peter and Jane reading-book style, showing a nurse with a collection of bandages, slings, calipers and plasters. I imagined, as some bloodthirsty children often do, that it was an I SPY booklet to find not only types of scar for a scar museum but also various gashes that were still open before the scabs, then the scars, had actually formed...

I laughed. My daydreaming always took off in such situations. But this had probably been a dream proper. The book was, it seemed, after my waking from a butterfly-on-my-nose doze in the heat of the sunny meadow, not an I SPY one at all but a clever treasure trail in words and pictures, full of fables-with-morals that took you to large open areas of thought and religion where all watches and clocks had wound down and you were somehow free forever not to wind them up again. No sign of a nurse, but it was still entitled (now in the singular) OPEN WOUND. An abstract design (this in colour) as a cover image, reminding me of my mother's carpet back home. I can't explain it better than that. It seemed very meaningful at the time to my younger mind, but now that I am older, it is tantalisingly beyond my grasp.

I opened it at random and read the first fable that I came to.


THE FABLE OF THE FOUR AUNTS

Once upon a time, there were four aunts, the four sisters, out of a total of five sisters with the fifth sister being my dead mother.

They were Aunt Sadie, Aunt Sarah, Aunt Susie, and Aunt Sally. They were offered up to me as role models, but no influence was exerted upon which example of the four sisters that I as a young girl should choose to follow. Each aunt sat one by one upon a single hard kitchen chair, as if in audition.

The first aunt sat down rather awkwardly, having exceeded her years of optimum agility. She had started life, she said, as a prim and proper girl, a proper girl indeed, lover of dresses and pretty things. Home comforts were her thing. She was adored by her husband and children - and she liked nothing better than being pampered. You could tell she was most uncomfortable on the kitchen chair.

The second aunt was more suited to the chair. She had started life as a tomboy, playing Cowboys and Indians with boys. Wildly escaping into the countryside, not to study the minutiae of its wild flower nature, but just to relish in the wide open expanses and to help build childhood's secret dens. She wore trousers instead of skirts and, in older age, fob watches instead of butterfly brooches. She joined the British army, after which she journeyed, they said, to fight in some Christian Crusade in the Middle East.

The third aunt was a mixture of the first two aunts. Simply that. Moderation in all things. She liked her home life, but not enough to become obsessed with it. She liked the wide open expanses of the countryside, playing with other girls and boys at random, but often enjoying just sitting in a wild flower meadow, in solitary meditative peace. Loyal to her husband and children but spending much time singing and sewing with other friends.

The fourth aunt squatted rather awkwardly on the chair, strangely both confident and meek. Scared of her own shadow, but positive with her own conjured reaction to the otherwise alien world. It was as if she sought Salvation by rejecting an old age that comes to all of us - if we last long enough to reach old age. And, seemingly, without her noticing, she started to look younger and younger, even as she sat there. She soon passed through all stages of her previous life, even taking on the image of myself for whom she was meant to be one of four candidate role models. Then she became a toddler squirming childishly upon the hard seat. And finally a babe in arms that threatened toppling off the chair. Eventually, there was a small grey pool of stylised dripping liquid occupying the wooden surface where the four sisters had sat - upon which pool alighted a butterfly before fluttering away again.



I sigh. Not a fable at all, but a parable.

I look at my watch. High time for tea. Mum will be putting the kettle on even as I speak. I return the small book to my back pocket. Time enough to read another of its fables or parables at home before sleep quenches my dreaming. I hope I will understand the book as well as I understood it when I was younger. Today, people seem to be more literal minded than they used to be, including myself.

The baby in the book must have been tangled up in the fourth aunt's adult clothes, a fact that probably saved her from toppling off the chair. Or perhaps she did topple off but with the grown-up clothes softening her fall.



MORAL: Stories often need at least a small plaster on them when they are finished to make them whole. Or a bandage if there are some loose ends around a deep gash or a badly re-opened scab. At worst, like this story, it needs a splint or sling or plastercast or, even, hip replacement (or all four) - till time heals the damage with a scar.