The Great Escape

I don't know how it happened.  As a teenager, I was determined that I was going to be the one that got away. I thought that they put The Great Escape on the TV each Christmas just to inspire people like me. I was going to grow up to have an important job, live in London and be far too busy to waste so much time, eating, drinking, reminiscing and playing games with my large and odd family. Now, I find myself more than happy to spend all day eating, drinking, reminiscing and playing games with my not so large but still quite odd family.

I have morphed into my mother, hosting the Christmas meal, complete with the occasional cooking disaster, which, this year, was cremated pigs in blankets.  I'm probably just as stressed and snappy as everyone avoids me in the kitchen during the morning but I don't have to contend with a perpetually re-filling glass of sherry.  My mother's sherry inspired cooking disasters have become the stuff of legend and no Christmas dinner would be complete without the following conversation.

"Do you remember the year Mum went to bed before dinner?"
"I don't know how that happened!" Mum insists on protesting every year
"It was the Sherry, mum."
"Oh, yes.  Harvey's Bristol Cream."
"Just imagine what it would have been like if you'd drunk it all yourself?"
We remembered; Mum dancing around the living room with a glass of sherry in her hand saying, "Hello little fishy.  One for me, one for you."  Then the memory turns dark and we can all picture the little fish floating on the top of the water.
"Did you kill my fish?" My little sister accuses.
"No!  I don't think it was the booze.  I think they froze to death.  It was very cold behind that curtain on the windowsill."

So, far from being the one that got away I am the instigator. I sometimes wonder what stories my children will be recounting with their children over their Christmas dinner in the future.  This year's main dinner time story was an argument about the one that did get away. Memory is a funny thing.  Some things are completely clear and others get blurred and confused.  Each person has a different slant on what actually happened.  Before I'd managed to get my first spoonful of soup to my mouth my sister asked, "Hey, Ju.  Do you remember the time when we went to the shop and Toby went running down the road with the R Whites sign dragging behind him?"
It wasn't a story I've told my children but as soon as she said it I could picture it.  Toby, our Westie, running down the road, terrified by the clattering sound of the metal A-frame advertising stand that was chasing him.  No matter how fast he ran he couldn't escape the lemonade nightmare.

"Which shop was it?"

I described the picture in my head.

"See,  I told you so!"  My sister was delighted, "we never took the dog to the High Street."
My parents tried to persuade me of their version of events but the picture in my mind wasn't changing.
"Are you sure it wasn't Shuttleworths then?" my Dad asked.
"No, Shuttleworths had gone long before then," I said.
"I don't remember Shuttleworths.  I do remember the roundabout and the den," confirmed my sister.
I had only been thinking about that a few days earlier.  The little corner shop had been demolished to make way for a new housing estate on the woods behind.  The site of the shop was to become the roundabout and for one whole blissful long hot summer it was a large pile of earth, that we dug out to make an underground den with the Withers boys.  We had candles and picnics under there.
Our parents paled and cringed at our memories. "That sounds so dangerous.  Who were the Withers boys?"
My sister described them and where they lived.
"Didn't one of them get done for something a few years ago?" I asked.
"Yep.  Murder," my sister confirmed, casually.

We all agreed that we hadn't tied the dog up outside Shuttleworths. "If it was that parade of shops then why were we all there?" my mum wondered.  She had a point.  We did walk to the High Street as a family but not often to the parade of shops with the butcher, greengrocer, off licence, newsagents and random plumber's store. We thought, again, about how memory can play tricks with you.  "I remember it later," said my Dad. "I don't think I was there at the time but I remember it later."  Memories can be formed that way; from the stories that other people tell.  If they tell them vividly enough it is possible to believe they actually happened.
"No, I've remembered, " he was excited now, "I was driving past and saw Toby running down the hill, trying to get home with the sign attached to his lead."

After dinner there was traditionally time for a quick snooze for the boring adults to get their second wind before the games started.  Drunk belligerent adults arguing over who was cheating the most at Monopoly and my Nan getting tearful and sniffy about having to act out something rude in Charades, while we all laughed at her, was enough to make my teenage self even more determined not to 'end up like that!' Instead, I am getting out the games, insisting that everyone plays and laughing at my mother as she gets tearful and sniffy over having to choose the most appropriate card when playing Cards Against Humanity.

Would I rather have the life I hoped for when I was a teenager?  Would I rather have been the one that got away?  Reading Grace Dent's column in the Independent this morning  Grace Dent's Christmas Questionnaire and seen Rhodri Marsden's 'Guest Bed Horror' tweets https://storify.com/rhodri/guest-bed-horror-xmas-2014 , I have realised that I'm glad that I'm not like them; glad I'm not the one that got away. I get to sleep in my own bed and can send the rest of my family home when I've had enough because even the very drunk can stagger half an hour down the road.