Memory Lane

Reading the first of Leo Tolstoy's trilogy Childhood has led me once again down my own memory lane.
It started with games: rowing on a summer lawn, with oars, in an inflatable dingy; making with chairs, cushions and blankets, outside or in, tents, even a car, with a circular tea tray as a steering wheel; playing schools on the wooden staircase – one stair a seat, another a desk; building on the school playing fields a plan of a house – rooms, doors, windows – in mown grass and pretending to be grown-ups, like those on Eastenders, with fake cigarettes hanging from lips which gave out talcum powder smoke.
The praying of the Holy Fool Grisha brought to the fore my holiday attendance of Latin Mass, with its repetitious kneel, sit, stand to the united utterance of the congregation; as well as that of my own bedside prayers, kneeling on a sheepskin rug in what used to be my uncle's room in a house near the sea.
And the selfless love of Natalya Savishna made me think of Nan, my mother's mother, the inventor of games, the teacher of imagination.
His sketch Parting the hardest to read for here I relived too all that I felt in such instances: the goodbye hugs, two figures standing on the drive waving, or one with a handkerchief window-framed, the lump pressing 'so hard in my throat' as we pull, then speed away, turn the corner, gone.

Picture credit: A lane near Arles, 1881, Vincent van Gogh.

See Childhood, Boyhood, Youth by Leo Tolstoy (Penguin Classics 2012, translated by Judson Rosengrant). 

Written February 2022