I had no idea how important blogging would become to me. I had no idea that I had such a compulsion to write. I had no idea that I would need to write, regardless of whether anyone has a desire to read the outcome.
As a child I used to narrate to myself the story that was my world. I now know that this was a coping strategy. A child’s way of coping with her fear; with feeling not just that she didn’t belong in her family, but that maybe she didn’t really belong in the world. Maybe she had arrived in the world at the wrong time for everyone? My mother’s violence was unpredictable and disproportionate. If she had fallen out with my father eventually one of us would be beaten for something small and childlike: laughing too loudly, teasing a sibling, an accidental breakage because we were playing too boisterously. The beatings were fast and furious, involving whatever implement she could grab at arm’s length. She would stop as quickly as she started, perhaps realising that she was taking it out on the wrong child or that the punishment barely fitted the crime. But she never apologised. She never showed remorse. She would tell us that we deserved such brutality, because we made her life so difficult. Looking back through an adult’s eyes I can see that her life was harsh. My father was distant and ineffective and the pain of her disillusionment was palpable. She had wanted a strong man and a garden full of flowers and children. What she had was a husband whose silence she had mistaken for strength, and a tiny house crammed with lively children who didn’t see fit to make her feel like the mother she had imagined herself to be. She had no garden. She worked 60 hours a week in the family business and had no quiet place at all. Deeply unhappy, the only way to manage this was to inflict it harshly upon those who couldn’t fight back. We bore the brunt of her anger and the weight of her disappointment.
I would escape from the house as soon as I was old enough. Perhaps seven or eight, I would wander the local streets alone narrating to myself the story of my journey. I was always the hero of my stories: a poor, misunderstood young thing who had so much to offer a world that didn’t care to listen. One day, someone would hear my story and weep. One day, someone would hear my story and see how much I could shine. I would speak my story out loud to myself, creating and re-creating meaning for myself with every new telling. Although it was more common in the 70s to see young children out alone on the streets, I imagine I brought attention to myself by talking aloud as I scuffed my way along the cobbles. Ten years older and I would have been mistaken for someone with a schizophrenic disorder. And yet this world was my saviour. In this world I was understood, loved, recognised.
When I was 11 my parents – although I really ought to say my mother, as my father played little more than a walk-on part in any aspect of our lives – gave me a bike for my birthday. I adored my bike. I loved it like I would a person. He was called Blue and he accompanied me on my daily wanderings around the neighbourhood. I called myself Scout, after the young tomboy character in To Kill A Mockingbird. (I was a precocious reader, and borrowed my older sister’s book when she studied it for ‘o’ level. I was ten, and it touched me beyond words. From then on I was called Scout, in all of my imaginary wanderings.)
Perhaps this blog is the logical extension of this private world of mine. Here I can continue to narrate my world to myself, to make sense of the insensible and find knowing out of unknowing.
