CHASING THE SMALL SWELLS…

All my life I’ve been after the swells, more the glassy blue combers that rise and curl. I was never after the massive waves, like those intrepid surfers who scan the horizon for them and jump into the water with their boards and ride them fearlessly. What I’m really alluding to is…dreams…the wishes and goals we set for ourselves. A life without dreams is indeed a barren one. Some of our dreams are attainable and achievable…the delightful little swells in a vast ocean, scintillating in the sun and holding out such promise. They’re none of those mountainous waves roaring and rolling in and… ride them if you dare and attain great heights and touch the heavens or…be crushed by them and be sucked down to a watery grave.

I come from a family of four girls and one boy and I am the youngest of the girls. One would think I was protected by them, but it was always quite the contrary…they threw me to the sharks…in a manner of speaking of course. I had to look out for myself and yet I always stood in their shadow and worst of all…in their clothes. I stood at the end of the pecking order and was the last recipient of the hand-me-downs…their dresses and shoes, especially those…`fat shoes and stump along like that shoes and wipe them on the mat shoes’…{ Choosing Shoes A Poem by Frida Wolfe, late 1800’s } So as a little girl I would challenge the reality of my predicament by reaching out for dreams…riding the swells…and one of them was to have my own dresses. But the only time I got my own little frock was at Christmas, when mum would buy yards and yards of pretty material and whirr out on her sewing machine, four identical dresses of diminishing sizes…and we trotted off to the midnight Christmas service and sat in a row in a pew like four babushka dolls of descending heights and nodded off to long Latin litany. It is a wonder we were never scarred for life dressed up like this.

The fact is… I found it difficult to shake off this conditioning…of being a pea in a pod with three other peas. I was a captive of this upbringing, which mum initiated quite unwittingly. It’s akin to the Stockholm syndrome, where the hostages identify with their captors and can’t break free. The captors in this case were my sisters who themselves were hostages…in a manner of speaking. When I grew into a teenager and could have my own clothes and fulfill my childhood dream, I still accepted the castaways and paraded in school functions in borrowed clothes. The thing about borrowing stuff from other people, especially your siblings, was that you were forced to grovel at their feet and beg for them. I found an easier way… I waited for them to leave before I slipped into their garments, oversized and loose and walked out confidently, hoping that I could sneak back in before they returned. It didn’t always work out that way and I was willing to accept the consequences of my deeds. When interrogated and threatened, I developed a thick hide and walked away in stony silence with a bit of an attitude.

This reminds me of the apron we had to sew in Form One in needlework class. My sisters had sailed through this stage, sewn their own aprons and cast them aside for healthier pursuits…boys and parties… in upper secondary school. And I wasn’t interested in chasing that swell… of perfecting blanket stitches and cross stitches and back stitches, let alone sewing an apron. But nevertheless, I did try. Needlework class was on Friday and… every Thursday I would pull out the unstitched apron from the cupboard, rolled up and shoved in a corner, examine it and start sewing frantically, the bits that the teacher would inspect the next day. This went on till the end of term when the teacher was going to grade us on the finished apron with our initials sewn on it. Once again, the day before, I groped around in the cupboard for my apron…it wasn’t there…I pulled out all my clothes which lay in a heap at my feet and…the apron wasn’t there. I panicked and asked if anyone had seen it. Sister number 2 responded casually…`You mean this one? I thought it was a piece of rag.’…She was holding the ripped skirt of the apron…the top was nowhere in sight…and she, appearing unrepentant, proceeded to tie it on her head of curlers to secure them in place. I think I wept copiously…I was distraught…WHAT WAS I TO DO????

The next day was Friday. The needlework teacher sat at her desk and called our names one by one. I sat upright and waited my turn with little beads of sweat popping out in a row on my upper lip and my forehead. She bellowed out my name which didn’t sound like my name…she could never pronounce it and neither could anyone else. I always wondered why my parents named me so. I pulled out…an apron from my bag…nicely folded and pressed and handed it to the teacher. The initial V was sewn in big loopy untidy chain stitches and the surname D and C in small neat chains. She looked up at me…shook out the apron and spread it on her desk…looked at it and then bored her fiery eyes into my face…` I NEVER TAUGHT YOU ANY OF THESE STITCHES!!!!’…I was afraid she’d interrogate me and force a stuttering confession out of me…I had found sister number 3’s old apron and unpicked the first initial and sewn mine…Then I would be sent marching off to Sister Edna, the headmistress, who would mete out some terrible punishment, fitting for such devious deception…But she threw the apron back at me and gave me a D+. I was relieved but some little voice nagged at me… I was back to square one… back to the past…tethered to the brood and this time… to some sister’s apron strings. Would I ever be able to set myself free????

Another of my elusive childhood dreams was to have a new set of school books with pages crisp and smelling of new paper and print. But on the first day of school… I toted a bag full of old books, hand-me-downs with pages missing and pages dog-eared and torn and doodles in the margins. In Standard One, whenever Sister Jane asked me to read a page from the reading book, I would sometimes hesitate and then look up at her and utter with excruciating embarrassment…` I don’t have the page.’ She would then come round, look over my shoulder and point to another page I could read and save me further shame and mortification.

But over the years as I moved away from the family… somehow the experiences of my formative years have left indelible marks…ingrained in my brain. What I mean is that I don’t walk around in castaways…not yet at least…but I’ve got this penchant for old books…thumbed and yellowed with somebody’s name written in them…in ink preferably and in cursive…telling a tale of the people who held them so many years ago. The one that gives me chills of delight is an old grammar book given to me by our neighbour in Leeds, an industrial cleaner who cleaned out old buildings and amassed all sorts of collectibles. On the inside cover of the book, written in ink and cursive is the name of the owner and the date… Daisy James. 111 Term 1898…and it has doodles. All my Han Suyin books came from second hand bookstores in New York and London. There’s one that has a little note written in it…` My darling I love you. J x ‘

 Well I still chase the swells and reach out for dreams…of a different nature from that of my youth and yet…some things never change.

Cheers!