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Tags: Childhood

In my perverse mind it’s summertime: that hot summer of 1976. Which it could not have been, since Lukey was born in January. Even so, I persist in seeing it this way. Seeing my mother, in bikini and tie-dyed sarong, drifting from shaded bedroom to sun-scorched balcony, a whiff of coconut suntan lo

Angela stood at the window, watching her daughter watching the chickens. She carefully rubbed a china plate clean. The girl had always been more like her father, not like Angela at all. And it was possibly her own doing, because from the first moment she’d clutched that delicate and infinitely pre

Where do we come from - What are we - Whither are we bound?1   * My name is Big-Head, and this is my Tale. The World is Flat. This is what I was told when I was little, and I knew it to be a truth once I had been taken to see it with my own eyes. There were some, very few, who held that the

I don’t even remember what the fight was about, but what stayed with me was her scratching my arm and screaming that I was a jerk. Succumbing to an immature fit of pique, I broke her vintage Neil Young LP by snapping the vinyl into two jagged pieces. I watched Cheryl rush out of the apartment.

In the days before Christmas the weather turned very cold and people said it would surely snow. Demand for coal, turf and blocks placed considerable pressure on my uncle’s yard. He ran the undertaking on the labour of his three sons, all big strong young fellows who were learning the rudiments of

LUNCH   ‘She’ll grow up to kill you, you know.’ That was what I wanted to say, but how can you say that? Every time I see them, and smile at that poor little girl, and she tries to smile back at me, I want to seize her mother and shake her, slap her, shout at her, do all the violen

Here I sit, thirty-one years old in a car I’d never be able to buy. Outside a house three storeys high. Impeccable gardens wrapped around it. Hugging it. With an army of gardeners tending to them day and night. I drove a taxi for ten years in the city. But out here it’s different. In a car li

It's always afterwards people tell you they were worried or they thought that something wasn't quite right. They couldn't put their finger on it but felt something might be wrong. Virtue-signallers, one and all. I know, that makes it sound as if I'm lacking gratitude. But I didn't know anyone wanted