AS TIME GOES BY

I crashed the car today. I was on the way to a children’s party, half and hour late and lost into the bargain. The journey was all the more peculiar as it was only a mile down the road from where my Dad used to live and I haven’t been there for the best part of 20 years. So, whilst craning my neck for road signs, I kept being struck by landmarks special only to a child’s perspective, a particular bent tree, a house with a foreboding front, a chicane in the road. It made me feel excited and sad all at once as I remembered how much we enjoyed the journey when going to Nanny and Grandad’s house, and how they were both dead now and all those times gone forever. I remembered the funny box of toys that were kept by the tv for us; the long tapers used to light the fire; the smell of lamb stew in the kitchen; the extra heavy satin bedspread that kept all of us except our noses warm; standing at the gate of Nanny’s garden and seeing Mum and Dad come back after having had Emma, my sister. 

My reverie was broken when I realised that I was completely lost. So I tried to do a quick three-point turn and drove straight into a metal post. As I sat stunned and crying in the car I thought again about time, how the back of my car was shiny and new five minutes ago and now was doing a passable impression of a stock car, how life as a little girl seemed all shiny and new too, and now… well let’s say some parts of it have lost their sheen. I thought too about how then I had all the time in the world and these days I don’t seem to have five minutes in which to get myself together.

After the party I drove to my dad’s old house and we sat outside and looked at it. Olly wanted to go in but I felt that whoever lived there now might not welcome a deputation from the Principality of Chaos. So I showed them the window that was my dad’s old room and I reflected sadly how much it had changed. The little green fence and gate gone, the white façade replaced now with crumbling pebbledash and the side alley full of rubbish. My Nanny and Grandad dearly loved their Metroland home and always kept it shiny and pretty. My love of gardening springs directly from memories of time spent there - the smell of the greenhouse as it creaked, weighed down by ripening tomatoes; the apple tree heavy with apples far too sharp tasting to enjoy; carefully treading the paths between Grandad’s chrysanthemums and dahlias that he tended till they bloomed all blousy in oranges and pinks and the dark and creepy end of the garden that housed the forbidden portals of the shed and compost heap.

I wondered if my kids would have such vivid memories of their grandparents, both sets of whom play such a strong part in their lives. Full of sentiment and still slightly shaky from the prang I made my way home to mum and dad’s. “I’ve just visited your old road Dad,” I trilled as I came through their front door “What number 20?” he replied. Oops… I was outside number 26. Still it’s the thought that counts.

Juliet Jones lives in domestic chaos with husband Steve, son Oliver (aged 3) and daughter Billie (aged 2) in Hertfordshire.