âNight-soil is such a sanitising term, as if done by owls. As if when then day comes, the soil disappears.â My mother was making stew dumplings. Balls of light dough were spooned into boiling water, the pot covered with a lid.
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My mum had a huge chest freezer in the kitchen for over fifty-five years full of things she had cooked and frozen. A few years ago it finally broke and, when she defrosted it, I asked if sheâd found a leg of dodo at the bottom! They donât make appliances like they used to, thatâs foâ sure. She eats Jamaican food most days. Even when she comes to my house she brings her own food, not because I canât cook but because she knows I like her cooking better.
One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think thatâs the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain â we had to pay the whole termâs rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.
One child said he slept outside because the house was filled with the cries of nightmares. The doctor had the impression that no conversation took place in houses anymore, only vicious discipline, orders and brutal teasing.
You know, we all came out of the war aged, dearest Anna, with a sense of life and death that does not exist in normal lives. So, how does one look forward if all that exists as soft-weeping wounds? You cannot imagine any future . . . You just lie. And wait.
Went for a walk this eveningâ it is bone-white outside with snowflakes falling gently, and everywhere in the houses are Christmas lights. My feet scuff the snow like when you scoop flour with a cup.
Listen. Donât try building a metaphysical German underground for what was nothing more than schoolgirl mice-nests. Would that I rather did my schoolwork properly! Fortunately, the everyday chaff of inappropriate yearnings cleared up like a fog at university.
Donât know if I am getting better or dying. The children say that I keep saying the same things over and over. Thatâs true. But my days are so barren that I sometimes think: How in Godâs name can this be regarded as a life? Is there not a way to bypass it? I drill all around me, but my life is as small and bare as a penny.