The Happy Place

There was so much her mother hadn’t shared – was Gwen truly ready to delve into her past?

- Kathleen Conlon

Some memories are pin-sharp, crystalclear – the pony I had when we were evacuated to the country during the war; Tommy, I called him, and I loved him most in all the world, more than I loved my mother or my father. He’d once belonged to the local coal merchant, my Tommy, and when I learned to harness him up to the trap, he’d take me anywhere I chose to go in the vicinity of the village, except for the lane that led to the coal yard. He’d dig in his heels, once even reared back in the traces. I could only conclude that he’d been ill-treated and it didn’t surprise me. The coal man, I thought, looked like a nasty piece of work.

Cruelty, they say, can, in turn, make the recipient cruel, but this hadn’t happened in Tommy’s case. He was gentle through and through, and affectionate: pricking up his ears when he sensed my approach, whinnying and snuffling and thrusting his head forward to be stroked whenever he saw me.

The love, I believe, was unconditional, on both sides. Sometimes I wonder if I’d ever loved so wholeheartedly, so unreservedly, since then…

Though I gather that this must have been expected of me because the woman who comes to see me, a woman in late middle age who sometimes looks upset, as though she wants something from me that I haven’t quite understood, often says, ‘Do you remember my father?’

I had to think a bit before I answered. There was a glimpse of a face somewhere at the edge of my mind, the faint strains of a song, played on a mouth organ, one of those songs you hear on Remembrance Sunday when all those old soldiers obey the order, ‘Eyes right!’ as they pass the Cenotaph, attempting to march with the sort of precision that once satisfied their drill sergeants.

‘Well,’ said this woman, ‘do you? Remember him?’

‘Vaguely,’ I said at length, hoping that would pacify her.