Pages

Friday 21 November 2008

Bananas

I went on a quick nostalgia trip during breakfast today. Dynamo and Sausage love flavoured milk and they’d been pestering me for banana flavouring. Mean mother that I am, I insisted that they finish the strawberry first. But today was the day of the great Banana-Flavouring Opening. As I lifted the lid I was suddenly six-years-old again.

As I’ve mentioned before, I went to a small village school in the north of England until I was nine. Each year the whole school, all except the ‘Infants’, went on a trip. It was a huge affair; coach trip, new clothes, spending money, seaside fairs and ruined castles. At 3 am on the morning of my first trip I stood by my parents’ bed whispering a plaintive ‘I don’t feel well.’

Mum sent me back to bed, telling me I was ‘just excited’. By 6am ‘excited’ had become a jittery mess. I couldn’t eat breakfast, I felt awful and just the thought of going on the coach made me want to be sick. Nothing Mum did would calm me down, so I watched as my two older sisters headed off. Of course, two minutes after they’d gone I felt perfectly well again, but it was too late. I was home for the day, regretting what might have been. I spent the day looking for fairies in the ‘fairy rings’ in the garden.

When my sisters returned, they brought with them a present from my teacher – a banana. Or, at least, a banana-flavoured sweet (candy) the size of a banana. It smelled exactly like the milk-mix I opened this morning, hence the nostalgia trip.

I should add here, that this may also be the earliest I remember being asked to write something. One of the activities after a school trip was to write an account of the day. The pages were then laid out end to end in the school hall and the person with the longest report won a prize. Despite the fact I hadn’t even been on the trip, I managed sixteen pages! Sixteen pages about my day at home. It must have been absolutely riveting! What a shame I don’t still have it for posterity.

5 comments:

C.R. Evers said...

Wow! I can't imagine how much you couldn've written if you had been able to go! It would've beeen a novel! :0)

Christy

Rena Jones said...

How funny about the banana sweet. I used to get jitterish when it came to doing stuff in school too. If I was asked to read aloud, I was a wreck.

Brenda said...

What a great story...I love when things make us remember our childhood...

Maybe I have lived a sheltered life, but I have never heard of 'fairy rings'...What are they?

Kate said...

HiChristy, yes, I could have written something of War and Peace proportions. Thank goodness I didn't go!

Rena, me too. I remember having to read a story I'd written out loud to the class when I was 11. I wrote boring stuff for ages after that, just so I wouldn't be asked again.

Brenda, 'fairy rings' are circular patches in the grass, with no grass in the middle and longer grass at the edge. I'm not sure, but I think the scientific (ie boring) explanation for them is some sort of fungal infection. But Mum always told us that they were made by the fairies in the garden, dancing round and round at night while we were asleep. I just hoped that one day I might find one who'd danced themselves to sleep in the circle and not gone off to hide for the day.

Brenda said...

Thanks for the info...I love that explanation and can't wait to find some 'fairy rings' around here...grin...