SNAPS

•    I’m at Uni in Wales.  Joan puts rollers in her hair and lies on the rug in front of the one bar fire to dry it. It takes forever and there’s a scorching smell.  Elizabeth’s mother has sent her homemade Cornish pasties but they’re all broken up in the box. She’s in tears but we still eat them.

•    We go camping. My baby is 6 weeks old. I change her nappy in the dark and tread on it. Yuk squeezes up through my toes.

•    I catch my mother reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover in a brown paper wrapper.

•    In Hall we talk about heavy petting. We know which couples go all the way. There are rumours about bromide in the coffee.

•    My daughter’s friend comes to stay. We are told it’s either that or she’ll be taken into care. A few weeks later I get a phone call from the school saying the girl is truanting – and my daughter with her.

•    I collect for Amnesty and hand out leaflets. One man shouts at me ‘I was in the war. I’ve done my bit!’

•    My mother’s father, aged 19, goes home to find his own mother has had a baby during the day.  He leaves home in disgust and never goes back.

•    I play ‘I don’t like Mondays’ with the volume full up.

•    A newspaper cutting of my mother’s mother shows her driving a tram during World War 1.

•    My second baby cries all night. It goes on for months. He tells me to put her in another room and shut the door. I go in with her.

•    In one week I read The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Land of Far Beyond and my mother’s copy of Forever Amber.

•    I go to lots of parties. They all have the Bee Gees belting out More than a Woman. Floorboards shake with the stomping.

•    My daughter kidnaps a cat that eats from bins outside the Chinese Take Away and smuggles him into my house. I love him lots but he won’t eat cat food, only rice and peanuts.

•    Aged 10, I sit on the beach at Dymchurch and think I shall remember this moment for the rest of my life.


* Mandy Pannett is a regular contributor to IS&T. She teaches creative writing in West Sussex, helps to run an arts cafe and supports local writing groups. She has two poetry collections from Oversteps Books – Bee Purple and Frost Hollow – and a recent one – Allotments in the Orbital – from Searle Publishing.