Looking at the Sky

 

Spring’s moving in. Then summer. What I want is to be lying on my back in the long grass, looking at the sky.

 

It’s a small pleasure that reminds me intensely of my childhood, one of the sum of small, intense pleasures which, looking back, define my childhood. Like climbing trees, or the tang of home-made ginger beer, or cricket in the street, with a lamppost for the wicket. I’d forgotten how much I loved it—and why—until an incident several years ago, during my second summer in Virginia, when Virginia had just begun to feel like home. I was hiking in the Blue Ridge with my parents, who were visiting from London. I’d picked out a quiet woodland trail, without waterfalls or gorgeous views, but with a couple of creeks and an abundance of satisfying dips and climbs. It was not much traveled, generally, and that day we ran into no one else at all. About four miles into the hike, with my mom a few paces farther up the cliff and my dad a few ahead of her, I stepped back to take a photograph and toppled off the edge. My arms windmilled, my camera sailed into the ravine, my shoulders struck the slope. Clawing out for help, I found it: my left hand, amazingly, seized a one-inch stump and held there; my heels hooked onto a ledge just below the path. I could still see my parents, rounding a bend, between to the right higher cliff and an overhang of trees, and to the left a vista of treetops, horizons of hills, blue sky, small, scudding clouds. I called out to my mother, who called to my father, who came charging back to haul me to safety; I was actually so comfortable, felt so strangely at home, that his fearful urgency made me giggle. I may have been hanging upside down over a thirty foot slide, but the earth felt solid under my back, gritty and tufted with grass, and I was looking at the lovely sky…

 

I grew up at the edge of the Green Belt, on the outskirts of London. The gates to half a dozen parks swung open within a mile’s radius of us, and at the bottom of our street, alongside the highway from the city to the coast, was a strip of wilderness we called the Dump—so named because it was here, back of a clump of oak-apple trees, that the neighborhood wheeled and tipped its barrowloads of mown grass and hedge-clippings. By the time I was eight or nine one corner of it had become a gas station, but the rest stayed wilderness into my teens. It was big enough and unattractive enough to adults for a horde of pre-teenagers to romp half-naked in, hidden from sight by the dip in terrain, the oak-apples and the scrub brush, the immense elm trees. There, stretched out among the blazing poppies—or else wrestling with my red-haired Irish friend in the nearer parks—or climbing at sunset in a more distant park, large and thickly forested, to watch the town lights come on—I lived from one idle summer to another, learning the map of the sky.

 

As a schoolboy I had a number of quick-tempered friends who liked to wrestle with me, because I was competent, good-natured, and less interested than they in winning. I spent a lot of time on my back, gazing over their shoulders. We’d moved here when I was six, from barefoot South African December into English January. I’d never attended school before, never seen fog or snow, nor lodged in someone else's house, nor felt so lost. When winter relaxed into July I was run over by a tricycle and broke my leg. But by September, which that year was warm and fine, we were settled at last in a house of our own, and I was at a new school, with teachers and schoolmates I liked. Turning right at the bottom of our street (left took you by the dump, right led to the elementary school) I walked in every morning with three brothers, the sons of a professional wrestler. The youngest was my age. When we reached the grass verge beside the highway, he liked to throw me to the ground, and pin me neat as a moth. If ever I managed to turn him, his brothers without fuss corrected me. The earth stuck to my clothes, and I felt the long grass gather up round me like hands. Released, I would lie there still, minutely charting the wheeling sky, tile roofs and the tops of elms.

              

Compass and dimension of my new sweet home.

 

One of two creative non-fiction essays I put in Mutt Spirituals. It was originally published as a "back page" piece in the Richmond free paper STYLE WEEKLY, to whom I also contributed two or three book columns.