Summer Holidays As Child

Six weeks. Six weeks. And each one, at the beginning, seemed infinite.

Time worked differently then. Summer was not a season. It was a country. A place you entered in July and emerged from, somehow, in September, having lived there an entirety. A whole other life lived in the gap between school years.

The mornings were slow. No alarm. The light would change on your curtains, going from dark to pale to bright, and you would know, without looking at a clock, that it was somewhere between eight and ten and that nothing was required of you for hours.

Breakfast in your own time. The kitchen warm already by nine. The back door open to let in the garden air. The smell of cut grass from somewhere nearby. A blackbird in the hedge turning over leaves with the systematic dedication of something that lives only in this half-hour of morning activity before the heat comes.

Then the day. The long day. The day with no bottom. Something would happen and then something else and time moved differently with nothing to structure it. An hour outside could be fifteen minutes or three hours and it did not matter. The day would arrange itself.

A bicycle. The same route, probably, ridden so many times you could have ridden it with eyes closed. But today it was different because you were looking for things. A detour down a lane you had ignored before. Over a stile into a field. Along the edge of a stream until the ground got too soft.

The particular pleasure of being outside in the heat and coming back inside into cool shade. The house dark and cool after the bright garden. Drinking water standing at the sink, ice cold, more satisfying than any drink has been since. Sitting on the kitchen floor because the floor tiles were cool. Reading a book in the quality of light that only comes through curtains drawn against afternoon sun.

Evening arriving slowly. The day giving way with reluctance. The particular slant of summer evening light across the garden, making everything long and golden. Eating outside if the weather allowed. The sounds of the neighbourhood settling into its evening, other families, other gardens, the sounds carrying easily in the warm air.

The boredom of it. Real boredom was possible then. The blankness of a Wednesday afternoon when everything had been done and nothing called. A boredom that was not uncomfortable. That was secretly productive, though you would not have used the word. The mind, with nothing to do, began to make things. Stories. Plans. Games. The slow creative work of an unoccupied imagination.

It was not perfect. Childhood is never perfect. But that specific quality of time, that depth of day, that feeling of wholeness that comes with weeks that are not yet a problem to solve, belongs to those summers.

Something is still there. When August comes and the light gets that particular angle. The body remembers. The feeling, just briefly, of infinite afternoon.

Carry it.

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