Proper epic

Woken by an echoing conversation concerning a clothes prop I lay and contemplated the bareness of the new room whose strangeness – no curtains, no carpets - had delayed my getting to sleep the night before.

While Mum and Dad continued to talk in the shade beneath my window I climbed out of bed for my very first morning view, limited by the chest high windowsill. The high sky – much more of it than I had been used to - hummed with an immaculate blueness which failed to enhance the bare earth of the garden, rough with bricks and lumps of cement, a long rectangle meagrely delineated by three strands of wire threaded through stumpy, still-white concrete posts.

The voices stopped and I looked down and sideways as Dad came into view, monochrome in the black of hair and trousers and billowing white shirt, becoming vivid as he stepped from the shadow of the house across the sandy scrape of unmade road and into the flickering, swishing long grass, the green intensity of which was chalked by sunlight catching the ridged roughnesses. The trees where he was heading were a mass of dark slender trunks and I regretted that I had slept so late, wished that I was striding through the meadow with him, to find a strong branch of the right length, with a fork at the right height for propping up the newly-strung washing line.

Now, whenever I recall this, the memory is accompanied by a cliché soundtrack of big orchestra, silhouetted-man-walking-into-sunset film music – the ‘Good the Bad and the Ugly’ perhaps or ‘The Magnificent Seven’.