The Tree of Tremendousness: Recent Episodes
Thomas Jackson
A fictionalized account of my childhood. I've had to make up most of my earliest memories: my delight in the new world I found myself in, my unrestricted love for my mother (not to last alas) and hers for me. But I'm remembering them as they must have been somewhere in my subconscious I guess. They feel more like facts than fantasies. Only fiction can catch the truth of what we feel. Photo of tree by aad courtesy of Flickr creative commons
My fears that I would be turned into a pig by Mrs Cribbs and tethered in a sty in her pub. My encounters with the spirits in the church.
Some of the characters in our village of Fenington. My wedding with June and its disastrous consequences.
My father returns from the war to great rejoicing. But the next day my parents had a huge row when he announced he wanted to take us all to London. In the end my father and i went on our own. It was stupendous, a beacon that stands out from my childhood. My Dad and I have been to London, I sneered to the girl on the toadstool when I woke up in my bedroom the next day. We defied you and all the other women and went to London. The next day he returned to the war.
My heroic journey beyond the u bend with Peter. How my mother saved me from Hitler and his bag. The idyll with Pam Hardy, the first of all my loves.
The garden was a riot of colours and forms and shapes. At the heart of it was my secret jungle house. Peter and i journeyed to The Land of the Other Side. But as to whether we got there my chronicle of memory does not extend. Perhaps i was overtaken by one of my fits of rage when, my belly a pit of hissing serpents and my head illumined into dreadful clarity of purpose, amidst the flashing lightning and crashing thunder I would throw the world and all its disgusting, revolting inhabitants into the depths of the sea, before falling asleep and waking as though nothing had happened. Peter was our scotch terrier and I loved him without reservation. Dost thou take this scottie to be thy dearly wedded dog? Oh I do I do. In 'the orchard' was a mighty ancient pear tree. The Tree and I and Peter were one in a mysterious trinitarian union. It is not easy to explain this. The Tree required worship, cult, and on our return from our expeditions to foreign lands we would offer it first fruits, sacrifices.
A fictionalized account of my childhood: the intense imaginative life of my early experiences, my delight in the new world I found around me, my unrestricted love for my mother (not to last alas) and hers for me. My memories of these first lights are very hazy so I have had to imagine them. But it doesn't feel like that, they feel real. Are the prototypes of what I have imagined in my subconscious somewhere? Perhaps they are. It is only through fiction that we can reach deeply into ourselves and report feeling truths.