4.Next stop Petts Wood

The train we took to reach our house passed within sight of our back windows, but the station was a mile or so down the line and it seemed a long way back. We must have moved there when the blitz eased off, closer to London so my father could get home at night.

The only thing I remember doing in that house, as distinct from outside, is assembling sten-gun parts. In the light of the bay window, nuts and bolts, rings, brackets and springs spilled out of brown cardboard boxes across our dining room table. This cottage industry must have been organised through my father’s office in London. He brought back the bioxes, we put the bits together and he took them back to work with him. I never saw the finished product, or his office, but heard years later that these little guns could be more dangerous to users than targets.

How did my pacifist mother feel about this? How did they both feel some months later when my father’s call up came round? Before the war they'd both been pacifists. George didnt like standing by while friends and relations joined up, but was kept in London through the blitz, helping organise shelters etc. It must have been 1942 when his call-up come through.

I didnt notice any tension between them at the time, nor any special fear or fury from my mother at the war. Her younger brother was an army engineer, and when I was scared of a tank, or APC, that clanked through the wood behind our house, it was she who took me over to meet the soldiers in it. They lifted me on board, counted me in when they made tea in billicans on a campfire. When my father came back on leave, I was proud of his backwards bib and bell-bottoms.

Gretle, who stayed with us then, was a Jewish refugee. Warm feelings but no clear picture of her. I think she was shorter than my parents, with a sweet voice and dark curly hair. She was also a Steiner-trained infant-teacher and ran a little playgroup from our house. According to my mother, when my balls were late coming down, Gretle set me marching at the head of a little percussion band. Germany’s loss, my gain. It must have worked, but what I remember is Gretle taking us to pick wild strawberries on the railway embankment, and making nests out of newly mown hay in a nearby field, the cosy feeling of sitting in my nest and looking out.

I wasn’t so happy about having to play with Kenjon. He lived a street or two away, had a hare-lip and my mother was sorry for him, or his mother. I didn’t like the look of Kenjon's mouth, the way it made him talk or the pressure to be nice. One day we climbed a concrete tank-block near his house and I fell off, not seriously hurt but shaken and sorry for myself. I had another playmate, a girl about my age – four? - who lived a few doors down from us. Her garden also backed onto the wood and she would slip out through an opening when I went to call for her. Under an elder bush, we found an old enamel saucepan. We took turns weeing in it, but it took more persuasion for her to do a big job. I watched, fascinated, as the turd descended from her bare white bum.

The front of the house was another world, a neat suburban horseshoe of bow windows and front gardens round a turning space. On the pavement we met another(?) little girl, riding in circles on her tricycle, handlebars on lock. When Martin asked her why she did that, she said:
‘Because.’
‘Because what?’
‘Because of because.’
‘Because of because what?’ round and round.

Once my father had joined the navy, there was no need to stay near London, spending scarce money on rent. We went to stay with George’s mother near Glastonbury in Somerset. Lottisham Manor was a stone Tudor house with thick walls, dark beams, small windows and a clutter of inherited furniture, a flotsam of relics, curios and ornaments and a minefield for small children. ‘Priceless’ and ‘invaluable’ were words Granny used to warn us off. Ambiguous-sounding words. 'Priceless’ was also used to describe any joke or antic that caught her fancy. The stuffed head on the tiger skin hearthrug was big and solid enough to sit on. Its shiny reconstituted tongue less convincing than its big glass eyes. Its ears were frayed, but teeth and whiskers intact. The tiger had been shot by my grandfather. 'A maneater,' as Granny might have said, of the tiger not her husband. Hugh, an otherwise gentle man, had died before the war. Before I could remember him, but my mother loved him dearly. In a tall, dark cabinet stood tiers of glasses, some with bubbles and lace in the stems, others scaly from ages underground or sea. Another cabinet was more like a table, with a box for a top, its glass lid occasionally unlocked to give us a closer look: brown crust from the seige of Paris and a rather similar lump of lava from Krakatoa; a mutton-bone finely carved by prisoners, a rattlesnake’s rattle and, in its own little case, a silver teaspoon, relic of a failed attempt on the North West Passage. (The spoon was identified by a family crest. It had been been found in an unmanned rowing boat, but why would our forefather have chosen that to take with him when his ship went down?)

Granny’s mind, like her house, was a jumble of history, legend and myth. With adults her stiff upper lip and dry humour mostly held, but with us children the fantasy spilled out. She must have been glad to see her grandsons. Her happiest years were with her own three boys before she lost them to boarding schools. Stella, Granny’s name, was the daughter of a Boer War general, educated but in Our Island Story, and proud to have her sons in uniform. My father had seen the light, done his duty, but my mother, now standing between her and her grandsons, was unreformed. Traitor in her midst. For Granny, religion, romance and history were rolled in one, a tapestry from King Arthur to King Alfred, Sir Galahad to Sir Walter Raleigh and Bonny Prince Charlie. Nell Gwyn and Pocohontas were co-opted to the female line and she, Stella, was the star that shone in her husband’s family crest, held proudly aloft on a mailed arm.

As for the actual man, my grandfather and his wife had not seen much of each other over the years as he served in India and she stayed in England with the children. ‘When did you last see your father?’ was one of her favourite pictures, with another of a knight kneeling before an altar. That was what she wished for us, while the Puritan inquisitors were somehow tied up with Mary’s Quakerism. My mother bit her lip when Granny let us into her secret, so we could drink ‘to the king over the water’ – no words, but our glasses held over the waterjug. ‘To the little gentleman in brown velvet,’ was another coded toast, to the mole who unseated and killedKing William (my mother's father was an Ulster protestant). As they listened to BBC reports of enemy casualties, Stella smiled and Mary winced.
One of the bushes in Granny’s garden at Lottisham was a cutting from a cutting from a staff St Peters stuck into the ground at Glastonbury Tor. The space that opened off the open fireplace was a priesthole, and one night Granny dreamed that monks had buried treasure in the orchard. X marked the spot, in cubits, and she pegged out a plot between the apple trees and set us digging. With Martin I dug, for days or hours, but the roots of her Beauty of Bath were harder than their soft, pink flesh. Mary preferred hard apples

At the village school, my first proper formal education, I tried to bridge differences in class, clothes and accent, by vying with the naughtiest boys. As the teacher approached, one of us would drop his pencil on the floor, reaching down to pick it up. By turning his head as she passed, he might get a glimpse up her skirt, then whisper out the news: she'd got pink bloomers on today. We sat in wooden double desks, may even have used slates.

Granny was a church warden and I got the part of King Alfred in a school show. I sat like Rodin’s Thinker on a stool until a girl in a long dress came in and told me off for burning cakes. Once or twice I sang in the church choir, to get on the choir outing to Western super Mare. Half a day following the sea out over the mud, half sloshing back as the tide came in. Over the playground wall from school was a field we sometimes climbed into. One day I fell, or got pushed, seat first into a cowpat. Mary was picking me up early that day, for a visit to the doctor, and I felt she was angrier than I deserved: the cowpat was punishment enough.

Sometimes it was Hula, a teenager from the village, who came to meet me after school. My mother had two of us, and a third, Richard, on the way. Granny, though not yet 60, would retired to bed after lunch, in a stable so as not to be disturbed. With Hula I would back across the fields, picking cowslips for my mother. I picked, Hula carried, my hands sweated even then. It must have been a mile or so. Last summer, when Ada and I drove through Lottisham, we couldn’t find the school. It turned out to be in the next village, transformed into a house. Granny had a car, but petrol was rationed. On the road to school, what I remember is not the way we went, precise directions, but looking in under the hedges on the banks, a shadowy world of dark roots and damp weeds at eye-level.

George, my father, came ‘home’ once on leave to Lottisham. Fit and sunburned in light summer kit. I remember standing with him by wide old wooden door’that opened on the garden. On the wall of the hall, a yard or two in, hung a sword, which my father took down to show me. More rapier than sword, with a tricorn blade. ‘Toledo steel,’ he said, flexing the blade crosswise between his hands. It bent, this fine well-tempered steel, then snapped. Priceless indeed, and both of us were shocked, I wondered how he’d break the news to his mother. Later he tried to mend it with wire.: the navy had taught him to knot and splice.

Then he was away, and a month or two later Richard was born. He was born in the house, but Martin and I were taken to stay with Hula’s family. I don’t know what they made of us, but we didn't feel at ease. Different manners, accents, food, and the Hula we knew seemed distant, diminished in her family. Martin and I cried ourselves to sleep in a feather bed. I clung to him, as never before or since. It didnt occur to me then, but I'd also been sent away when he was born, and it was Granny who came to collect me. I didn’t know her then and dont remember it, only the recurring nightmare of a wicked old woman and a train.

After Richard was born, Granny asked us to leave. She was jealous, Mary said, and could bear our presence no longer. We may just have become more than she bargained for, with a new baby the last straw.

Granny's stable was empty apart from her day bed. Our new destination was a rectory, with real horses, church and vicar en suite. There were ducks that waddled from garden to graveyard if the door was left open in the wall between. Honor Greenstreet was the vicar's wife. I dont know how she heard we were homeless. She didn’t know my parents well, but said ‘Come and stay with us.’ The rectory was in Bramley, Hampshire, and the vicar, Tip went about his business benignly in the background,. Honour was an unlikely vicar’s wife, a casual, racy in slacks and headscarf, cigarette hanging between wide red lips. Besides horses, she ran a couple of graceful high-wheeled traps and a spotted dog called Plum. Plum was an overgrown puppy, being trained to run between the wheels. One time when we both got excited, he bit my leg. Honour’s daughter, Sue, was in her teens, less vivid, more like Tip. An elder, prettier daughter had died, and Honour may have been glad to have us little boys. We helped groom the horses and were given turns holding the reins when we drove out. ‘Like ribbons, not too tight.’ I have the feeling in my hands, half closed fists, palms down, side by side in front of me; between them the loose ends of the reins, on the outside, under my little fingers the leads to the bit in the horse's mouth. The opposite to what you’d expect. The same goes for mounting, where you start facing backwards, and twiddle the stirrup towards you before putting your foot in (a long way up). Otherwise, when you swung up and over, into the saddle, you’d end up facing backward. And or kick the horse on the nose. The little finger on the rein must serve as cushion to the horse’s lips.

On the ground, we were to move gently, keeping clear of the hind legs and not taking the horses by surprise. Feeding them was fine, but from an open palm. No danger of getting bitten then, just the soft brush of lips, blow of breath, long, stained teeth. ‘Grip with your knees, not your heels,’ Honour said when we rode. The breakthrough for me was getting the rhythm, rising in the saddle when we broke into a trot. Like dancing, or matching the movement of a treadle driven machine.

Once, I made the classic mistake, letting my mount follow its head under a clothes line. It went under, I did not, caught short like a jet on a carrier, but still a long way up from the deck. When the horses were grazing in their field, Martin and I would climb on the wooden fence and entice them over with titbits. Then, sometimes, we could get a leg over and ride bareback, holding on by the main.

Honour was generous, kind but in offhand way that demanded no gratitude. She even made light of it, more so than my mother, when motorists complained that I threw gravel at their cars. Sue and some friends up the road, all girls, embarassed me by asking who my girlfriend was. They taught me a song I couldn’t understand.
‘Mairsy dotes and Dosie dotes
And Little Lambsy Tivy.
Kiddly Tivy Toowood…’

The village school must have been full, and the Greenstreets made room for an overflow class in their house, half a dozen children and a young woman teacher we liked. One day she called me to the front for a slap on the hand. I stood before her, hand outstretched, palm upand she raised her ruler. Then our eyes met, and she laughed. The ruler tapped my palm, but light as a bird’s wing, and that was it.

George, meanwhile, had been at sea in the Mediterranean, on an overloaded old cruiser HMS Adventure. He saw little action but helped look after some German prisoners and managed to send us food-parcels from Oran and/or Alexandria. Oranges and bananas, strange, forgotten fruit, out of the blue to the gate at Lottisham. What shook him on that boat was not the occasional threat of air attack but the dog-eat-dog among the crew. On basic training, he’d enjoyed the sweating, swearing and joking in cross-class company, moments of sympathy, comprehension, a new levelling. At sea, with more hard-bitten crew, the feeling changed: doge-eat-dog, hammock-space up for grabs, trading and betting in rum rations, goodbye to anything left lying. When panic-stations sounded, shipmates fought for a foothold on the ladders to the deck.

Then it was up and out, for my father at least. Someone noticed his Oxford degree, or his accent. Class convection proved its power, if not its worth: George’s degree was in Law, not mathematics (as in code-breaking), or languages, as in the Japanese he was set to learn at Bletchley Park. My father looked very handsome in his new peaked cap and braid, though my mother somehow lost the icon portrait photograph. What I remember when he came to us at the Greenstreets, was not the Cary Grant good looks, but his faraway head at the top of a lime or chestnut tree. As he climber, he disappeared behind the foliage then popped up like a bobble on a teacosy. Hallooed and waved at us.

I don’t know when or how we left the Greenstreets, only that Martin and I were sent to a curious boarding school called Sherwood. For a term or two, with only four memories: one, happy, with other children, sliding down a muddy slope on trays; two, unhappy, lagging behind the others on walks with a pain in my leg; three, disappointing, a visit to Epson Downs, short worn grass, matchsticks and fag ends; four, relief, when Mary came. Now my lagging and grumbling was no longer laziness; the pain in my leg ‘like a bruise inside’ was x-rayed and treated with a drug with a name like MNB.

Mary was also shocked to find vomit stains round Martin’s bed. To be near us, she got a job at the school. Later Mary said she’d been torn between her husband and children. When George was away at sea she’d feared for his life, now what she feared at Bletchley Park it was losing him to other women. I remember one, a lovely, big bright Mary Rose, but she was Oliver’s girlfriend and sometimes stayed over at their digs. When I was taken to stay there one weekend, Mary Rose found me ice-cream, Oliver laughed and joked, and George took me on the back of his bike to see Lancaster bombers at a nearby airfield. That evening,I was put to sleep in George’s bed. Now it was my turn to be sick, but when my father came up he didn’t seem angry, more sorry for me. Comforted, with fresh bedding, I went back to sleep.



5. Next stop…so what?

What, if anything, has all that to do with my declared subject, Work? I don’t know, yet, but these disjointed memories of disjointed times may serve as evidence. If not of my own work, then of who and what was working in and on me.

First, I recognise that memory may not record the facts that matter most. What struck at the time, and what stayed with me, was not a representative cross section of what happened. For instance, I don’t remember learning to read and write, any more than a few years earlier I remembered learning learned to walk and talk, eat and excrete in accordance with prevailing norms

As I write, I am proving that I learned my lessons, whether in class or at my mother’s knee. What I don’t remember is the actual lesson and the work that entailed for me or my teachers. The things I do remember were often the exceptions, not the rule. What does that tell us about the value of oral history and folk tradition?

Removal is a recurring theme in my account of those war years, but not what actually happened from day to day. If I remember our moves, and being sent away, it’s because they came as a, mostly unwelcome, surprise. Of course, wars and childbirth keep happening, we were lucky to come out more or less together and alive, but those events must leave their mark, character-forming for better or worse, and those who are will bear the marks.

Through that second world war, my parents were not untypical, just doing their jobs in slightly more comfortable circumstances than most of their peers. My father served king and country, as civilian then as serviceman, while my mother kept the homefires burning and looked after us. Both did the best they could in the light, or shadow, of their upbringing and education. My father, though rarely with us, may have been better equipped than my mother for relating to children. Granny had been a devoted mother to her sons until they went away to school. My mother and her siblings were left to paid hands in the nursery. As they grew up, the balance changed. George and his brothers learned to fob their mother off – their school motto was ‘Manners makyth man.’ Mary read a lot and became able to share her mother’s Quaker concern with ‘higher things’ - reason, morality and social progress.

For both my parents, removal was almost the norm, as professional parents considered it normal to put their children in care, saving themselves for service to empire, commerce and society. While my paternal grandfather served in India and Nepal, my mother’s father served as judge in far flung colonies. The first world war overhung their childhoods as the second did mine and Martin’s.

With the institution of prep and public schools, removal and separation became systematic. As in tree nurseries, where taproots are cut to ease transplanting and encourage quick new growth. With children, what’s lost is a certain depth, but what they lose in old familiarity and constancy, they gain – those that survive and thrive - in quickness and adaptability. By intuition, calculation or a mixture of both, they learn to live from hand to mouth, seize opportunities, find allies if not friends. What’s lost is simpler trust in things and people as they are, because they’re there in the present as in the past. In myself, I feel that I can rise to most occasions, but without much to fall back on.

It took me most of my life to discover – rediscover? - any great warmth of feeling towards my mother. Between projects and preoccupations, my default mode is a bored emptiness. I know what I should feel, but don’t. Or else the feeling’s there, but locked away until it’s too late. I take for granted the presence I should delight in, only to register and feel it in its absence, when it’s lost. The well-spring of romantic love? Perhaps, but less than satisfactory between lovers, would-be lovers, in the flesh. A standard image in classical Arabic poetry, has the camel nomad coming upon the ash of a fire gone cold, the fire where only last night, or last week, his beloved cooked or looked into the embers, warmed her hands.

Writing is a sort of lifeline. Time disappears, not only the time between now and then, but the time that passes between breakfast and lunch, or at night as phrases and images circle in my head. I know, as I try to recall and define, that I’ll never be able to recall or invent the intimate detail of everyday movements and feelings – the detail I disregarded at the time, on the qui vive for something more or different. And yet, just often enough to keep me going, I find that there is something down there. My line, or net, is not quite empty when I reel it in. Not the whole truth, or the best of it, but better than nothing.

I think my mother longed to write, her closest friend from schooldays on was a poet, Anne Ridler. She consented to be my godmother and gave me the Shorter Oxford Dictionary for my 21st birthday. My godfather, Peter Burra, was a precocious young critic, there at my christening but dead, killed in an aircrash, before I could get to know him. Overawed perhaps, Mary kept reading, but hardly wrote. It was George, with a lighter touch and no literary pretension, who began to write for the fun of it in later life..

Lying awake the other night, the same few words going round in my head, I wrote them down on the back of a hospital appointment slip. To be free of them, get to sleep and come back to them later. In grey pencil:
example+shared experience = empathy+learning
Apartheid not an option
Nothing new there, even to me. People talk of role models, and learning-by-doing, but what’s important is to link the two. Playing games with my father, him chasing me and me chasing him, we swapped roles. That’s one difference between most games and most work. In this exchange, I learned to do, and to feel from the inside, what I had seen him do. When I ran away from him, or chased him, I was not just copying him, but trying to escape or catch something. Chase in its own right, and what I learned wasn’t just something from him or something in me, but a pattern in the world between us.

My mother read to me, must have listened when I read to her, often at bedtime when for once we were comfortable together, not arguing. Her voice was clear, almost formal, but clearly hers. My grand-daughter is 10 years old next Saturday, her birthday Mayday, 2000. About five years ago, I was called or sent upstairs to read her a bedtime story. She chose a book, got into bed and sat me down beside her. Then she took the book from my hands and read it, with hardly a he-sit-ation, from start to finish. Feeling redundant, I said ‘You’ve read it before,’ but she said no. A couple of days ago, I read to Luka my five-year-old step-grandson, rather pleased that he consented to join me. The book was The Story of Horace, which my parents read with me when I was about that age. Horace was a yellow bear who ate his way through an extended family from Great Grandpa to Paul and little Lulu. Everyday, while Pa was out hunting, another family member went missing. When he got home, ‘Pa was just WILD, and he said, I will KILL Horace.’ When this had happened two or three times, Luka was saying the words, was partly from memory, partly by reading the words. When it came to ‘Horace has eaten little Lulu,’ – a girl about his own age – Luka asked why the little was smaller than the rest. ‘Because it IS little,’ I said unhelpfully. But his eyes lit up. He’d noticed the smaller print, asked the question and created an opening in his mind for my answer to fit into, once turned around.

And apartheid? Separate-but-equal was the mantra of Afrikaaner nationalists in South Africa, enabling them to segregate blacks. With all due respect, except that you cant respect someone you don’t understand and you cant understand someone you’ve never got close enough to share with. To begin to understand the Other, we have to be able to touch each other, relate each others moves and responses, see ourselves through each other’s eyes. With or without sex, we need proximity, to see and feel through what pleases, hurts, offends each other. We need to be able to step into each other’s shoes, swap tasks and roles, adjust our currencies: a coin, beer or cigarette can mean such different things; bread and water stand for life, but in quite opposite ways: freedom from want or systematic deprivation, dependence for the prisoner, power for the guard.

As with races, so with class, gender, income and divisions of labour: however we care to classify and generalise, freedom and equality depend on openings and crossovers between them: some sorts of people may be statistically more inclined to this or that, but nobody should be barred or discouraged from venturing out, crossing the lines. Without that interchange, we cannot properly understand each other or ourselves.
Maybe some such instinct was behind our little adventure in the wood, the piss and poo in a pan. We were not like some infant Adam and Eve discovering our nakedness, and with it the difference between us. We’d already lost that innocence, if we ever had it, as we were taught to cover and hide what went on between our legs, to keep ourselves clean and clear of whatever came out of them. Nothing much went in as yet, but the general message was clear, particularly as between boys and girls. I had no sisters then, and don’t remember seeing my mother naked until she was an old woman, needing me to clean her up.

I don’t know what was in it for my little partner in PettsWood, and can only guess what motivated me. There must have been some need, impulse to get over the given barriers, between boy and girl, and between us children and our mess. I didn’t look closely between her legs and had no thought of getting into her. But now I saw what I half knew already, that her shape and position as she pissed in the pot was different from mine. And what was missing in her as she squatted was clearly visible in front of me, visible and manageable. I was used to directing, targetting my piss. But what came out at the back was always more of a mystery, and more hit and miss. For me as for her. When I saw her bum and what came out of it, our differences disappeared – except that I’d never seen, could not see, myself in the same position. Did that make for a bond between us, or enable me to dissociate myself, despise ma soeur, semblable (myself objectified in her)?

When Richard, my youngest brother then aged six or seven,, first heard the story of Cain and Able, he said Cain’s punishment wasn’t fair: the elder brother had killed the younger, but couldn’t have known what he was doing, because nobody had died before. By the time I realised how unfairly Eve had been treated I was old enough to focus on the teller as well as the tale: who, if not God or the Devil, invoked the snake to the apple in her hand, and why? It didn’t immediately dawn on me that the snake was neither savage reptile nor devil-incarnate, but a projection of male authority, or authorship. The snake was part of the Man, the bit that takes on a life of its own, disobeys, intrudes and leads astray. In the tale of Adam and Eve, male authors disconnect and disown their own sex organ in the guise of a snake, so the temptation of Eve had nothing to do with them. Eve took the apple, fell for the snake and dragged Adam down on top of her. Man was the victim of her sex, not his own

In the wood with the little girl, I don’t know what if anything she wanted, or how much persuasion it took from me (though I hope that if we had been caught I wouldn’t have blamed it all on her).

Vicious reptile, disgusting worm? Last year I came across a reference to ‘reptilian brain’ the primitive bit at the back that we share with our pre-mammalian ancestors. The image I picked up was of three brains rolled into one. One inside the other like a Russian doll, with the frontal cortex being the most specific to ourselves and other primates. Mates indeed. That set me thinking what other old animal forms live on in us. Most mammalian organs and limbs are obvious enough, but what about older less respectable forms? Earthworms, maggots? For seventy years, I was able to take my own digestion for granted. If it aint broke, don’t fix it, leave be. I was not concerned with what happened downstream from my throat or upstream from my bum. But I did come across the word ‘peristalsis,’ to describe a process common to our own innards and earthworms. Only when the wear and tear of aging drew my attention, did it occur to me that the gut my life revolved around was itself a big pink worm, primeval invertebrate internalised. Earthworms are animate tubes that move through the earth as they move the earth they feed on through themselves. But worms have only themselves to feed as they expand and contract, and are free to move where the process takes them. My digestive tract is trapped in me, depends on me to feed it, as it feeds me. Now that my guts are more prone to make themselves felt, I must treat this business, in worm and me, with new respect. If not exactly gratitude.

Fact or fantasy, image or hypothesis? Am I reinventing reinventions of the wheel? I don’t know, and never will, but luckily the process doesn’t begin or end with me. ‘Yes, but… No, but…’ you may say, and put me right where I go wrong.

Looking back at what I’ve written so far, Aeroplanes keep popping up: the big, balsa glider my father made for me one Christmas, the Lancasters we watched warming up, and now – as images fresh images beget - several more that I forgot to mention. One was the light plane which crashed, killing my godfather in it; he was not the pilot but eager to learn; after Guernica, the republicans badly needed air support. A the Greenstreets, in the wide sky above garden, horses’ field and tree my father climbed, we saw small Dakotas pulling gliders bigger than themselves. Just practicing, or already on their way to France? Could I have seen two or three gliders behind one plane? We could just about see the strings, as we could when we went to Peter Pan in London soon after the war. How did these aircraft avoid bumping into each other or getting tangled up?

I don’t think these aircraft memories linked directly to my dreams of flying, mechanics to miracles. Nor do I remember specially wanting to go up in one. But I do remember the hum of a plane engine, faint and far above me as I lay on my bed. Not in the dark at night, but sent to rest in the afternoon, with daylight coming through thin curtains. I imagined the plane above me, like others I’d seen, silver, barely visible, my longing spun out to it from where I lay.

PS Round and round: I don’t think Martin could have been old enough, at two years old, to ask the little girl why she rode her tricycle in circles. So why do I attribute the questioning to him? The answer, I think, may be that I questioned her while Martin watched and listened. He then remembered the incident while I forgot it, until I heard the story back from him. Now he’s probably forgotten again, leaving this narrator with the last word.