Home life
In and out of the cage
Alice Thomas Ellis
The house is haunted by the echo of your last goodbye.
The place is cluttered up wi' roses that refuse to die Di dah dah di dah dandi dah as it brings intimate glimpses of intimate thi- things . . .
Fortunately that is all I can remember of that song. Gracie Fields used to sing it but I don't think it ever really caught on. You have to do it in a- sort of mournful warbling monotone and people don't like it much. It has been on my mind because our younger children have whipped off to the ends of the earth and we all feel rather odd. The older children have been quite old for ages now but the younger two were mere infants until about five minutes ago when one went to Los Angeles for his hols (fingers crossed that the San Andreas Fault hangs together), and the baby went to Africa for hers (fingers crossed for Lord knows what). I say 'baby' but she is actually now slightly bigger than me and I have pinched a pair of her jeans to take on my hols. She is also more sophisticated than me and much luckier, ringing up to Cont. on P. 34 say goodbye from the VIP lounge at Gatwick before boarding a plane owned, I believe, by her hosts. I am writing this on the train to Glasgow, a nice enough place I am sure but lacking the je ne sail quoi which I feel Benin must possess. Never mind. I am free. It took me some time to fully realise this. Caged animals suffer from the same problem. Should somebody open the door they carry on sitting there listlessly, not understanding — in their dumb, brutish fashion — that they can take off into the world. Me too. For a few days Janet and I drifted around the Welsh house wondering what had happened. No screams of 'I'm bored', no sorties to the shop for choc ices, no need to prepare huge teas, no mess, no piles of washing, no fun really. I have been hung around with kiddies like a tree with monkeys since my early twenties and Janet has had more than ten years of it. We have looked forward to this moment and now we don't like it. The doll's house and the air rifle and the little abandoned wellies all bring lumps to our throats and we can't remember quite what we're for. After a while of mooching glumly round in the rain (Janet says we don't have summer any more — just the rainy season) it slowly dawned on us that we could get up and go; whereupon we got up and went. Starting at 4.30 this morning.
I am wondering whether I shall now begin to be able to concentrate for more than ten minutes at a time, since for the larger part of my life I have felt that whatever I was doing I should really be doing something else. Washing nappies I should have been painting pictures. Paint- ing pictures I should have been mincing liver. Pushing the pram round the park I should have been hoovering the house, and hoovering the house I should have been doing it with a greater degree of thorough- ness. I detested going out in the evenings, not only because I detest going out in the evenings, but because I was afraid I would return to find that the house had burned down and the children were gone. I was always quite surprised not to find the garden garnished with fire-fighting equip- ment and even now when I get home I still have to creep into the bedrooms to check that the occupants are present and brea- thing.
Not at the moment. The only helpless dependants at the moment are two cats and a boa constrictor, and Someone is coping beautifully with those, except that once he left the snake's door open; but the snake, whose thought processess are more slug- gish than my own, simply lay in her cage until it banged shut again. Thinking about this I have realised that there is a peculiar quality to my sense of liberty. It isn't so much that I feel free. I feel feral. This makes me sad, but as we can never return to a state of simple savagery I suppose I shall have to make the best of it. Anyway when the hols are over I shall be back inside.
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