Moments Past

When I was a little girl, I used to sit under the table as all the family women - in sensible shoes and stockings with Kleenexes stuffed up the cuffs of their cardigans or sometimes into the strap of their bras, tipped n tailed beans from the garden.


They'd natter on about whichever current family scandal was abrew, they'd talk about aches n pains, they'd whitter about which child would be best served by a good swat upside the head, what the tea was like, the price of bread and the state of the world.


I'd listen, giggling to myself when I heard damn or bugger. I'd reach my small hand slyly up from under the table to pinch some of the already pared beans to crunch on. Sometimes I'd do this without notice, sometimes a mysterious hand would provide a handful to my smaller one, and sometimes, it'd get it smacked. If the first reaction was a smack, I'd try another area of the round table. I just couldn't always tell by the shoes or stockings, which of the women was which.


If I forgot to bring something to play with, I'd use rocks, only they wouldn't be rocks in my mind, they'd be shape shifters or magic jumping rocks or rock creatures and I'd play with them like I would Barbies.

If I was quiet enough, and they forgot I was under there, sometimes I'd get to hear the really good gossip -whose husband was caught shamefully with the trollop from town, or how the girl up the road has come up pregnant. Such things would never be talked about 'in front' of me, but in my imaginary magical world under that table, I got to be part of the grown up world, shielded by the table cloth but still in the know and feeling like I was one of the women in some way.

There was an innocence then - not just because of my youth, the WORLD was more innocent then. What is common place now was shocking then - shocking like stop you in your tracks and make you shudder shocking.

Families were extended - Grandparents, wrinkly Great Aunts who squeezed pudgy cheeks and left sloppy trails on your face from wet kisses, old men who smelled funny, and cousins gallore.

There was a bread winner and a home maker. Roles were clear and life was simpler. Well.. from here, looking back it certainly seems that way. We have a way of romanticizing that which feels out of reach, but I think at the very least, the pace was slower, even if life wasn't easier.