The father was broad shouldered, and tall enough that the small child he carried with her legs around his neck could reach up and pluck green hazelnuts from the trees as they walked. His beard and hair were still thick and dark, although he was beginning to thin on top. The mother was short and pleasantly rounded at the edges with quick eyes that darted around, keeping tabs on the boy who was “into everything” and could not be trusted not to wander off into the woods.
A woodpecker’s industrious drilling reverberated over the heads of the family as they walked on, trying to keep pace with the father’s long stride. “Not far now,” he said, as the path took them onwards and upwards towards a clearing at the top of an incline.
He had been a boy here, had hunted sticklebacks and minnows in the streams, built dens and treehouses to hide in, and run laughing and calling through the trees. This had been his fiefdom. As the eldest of three boys he could have been Rameses or Genghis Khan, but instead he had led his brothers on expeditions up the mighty Amazon River to discover lost civilisations, buried treasures and the mysterious knowledge of the ancients.
The boy had run on ahead to the top of the hill: his arms stretched out wide and face tilted to the sun. Here the trees thinned out and the sky opened up above them so that the wind could race in and sweep their branches aside. “If you flap your wings, you can fly!” called the father, and the boy ran in circles flapping his arms as hard as he could.
From her high vantage point, the girl child could see down the other side of the hill into the valley bottom where the river lay like a silver ribbon sewn into the landscape. She clasped one arm around her father’s forehead and held on tight as she pointed into the distance, “I can see the sea!” she called out, laughing at her own joke and at the impossibility of seeing that longed for blue expanse beyond the fields and hedges and drystone walls of the Cotswolds.
The father reached up and swung his daughter to the ground, then reached out to embrace his wife. He had to bend down, and she to stand on tip toes for their lips to touch gently. The children ran to join them and wrapped themselves around their parents so that the family stood like the trunk of some ancient oak.
Back at the car, the mother opened the boot and pulled out a picnic basket. A rug was laid on the ground, Tupperware plates were distributed, greaseproof paper parcels were opened and thermos flasks emptied into cups. Home-made scotch eggs nestled in fresh green lettuce leaves; the father took out a knife, and their crisp outer shells cracked open to reveal pink, juicy sausage meat, perfect white ovals and golden yolks oozing. The boy’s eyes widened when they were produced, and he set to demolishing the one proffered to him.
When the picnic was done, and the family replete, they climbed once more into the brown Vauxhall Cavalier and headed homewards down the lanes, onto the main road, and into the suburbs. The children were asleep by the time they drew up in the driveway.
This was the dream she had several nights a month. It varied slightly – sometimes there were bluebells in the wood, sometimes they stopped to pick sloes or to listen to a lark – but in essence the dream was always the same. Each time, the sensation she had on waking was the same also: profound and resounding grief.
***
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