When we were five

(Post 8000)

Happy birthday to me. I am five years old today.

I haven’t a clue how to mark this properly. I seem to lack inspiration for this milestone. But I could not let this anniversary pass and not post! So fate has forced my hand.

What I think I will do is talk about the real five year old me. On the 7th January 1987 I celebrated my real fifth birthday. It was also the first day of school. I don’t have many memories prior to school (unlike my sis I can’t remember things from when I was 9 months old… weird girl) but I distinctly remember small things from my first day like the way I arrived with my mum and the teacher said that my mum could stay or take me away before the day completed but as it happened I slipped into the class quite easily and my mum left without me noticing. As it was my birthday, there was a cake. It was white and had a little name-card in front with my name in bold letters. The class sang Happy Birthday to me. Alas the “cake” was a biscuit tin with white paper covering it so we didn’t get any cake.

The next day the “cake” was there but the name-card had someone else’s name on it. I remember a sense of regret and yet understanding. It seems odd to me now that I felt like that rather than upset.

I was a quiet five year old. So quiet that my teacher took my mother aside and asked her whether I had leaned to speak yet.

But soon I took a shine to my teacher and her to me. She was Christian and I remember many of our classes being about Bible stories. I wrote a song about loving God (and still have it written down somewhere…) and she adored me for it.

We grew cress as a project and made cress sandwiches at the end. I liked them and demanded of my mum that she get the teacher to let us take all the remaining cress home. I was confident in my right to have all the class' cress and got my way as I so often did.

It amazes me to think of how much I leant in two terms of schooling. I learnt to draw with only slightly less skill than I have today. I learnt to read and I learnt to write. Has there been a year since then that I have learnt so much?

I think I probably learnt some multiplication tables too that year but I could not swear to it. It seems quite likely that I entered schooling already knowing my tables up to 12 and yet not knowing a single word. I distinctly remember not being able to recognise my own name when I was 4. I argued with one of the play-school leaders about whether my name had an “n” or not. I learnt my times tables through bathtimes with my mum. We’d take a bath together and my hands would be two child-spiders called Timmy (the naughty one) and Susie (the good one). One of her hands would be the teacher-spider.

So I learnt a lot when I was five at school but I didn’t learn how to make friends with anyone but the teacher. Playtimes were painful. I was alone with my gloves during the winter. They had pigs on them with the middle and ring finger being their legs. The pigs and I played many games quietly in the corner of the playground. I managed to gain one friend: Laura. She was a fan of Black Beauty and would rush at me during playtime crying “let’s play horsie”. I was always the horse. She tugged at the hood of my coat, pushing and pulling me around the playground. Sometimes she’d abandon me mid-“game” and I wouldn’t know what to do with myself.

By the third year at school, and I realise that I am overstepping the remit here by talking about when I was 7 but forgive me please, Laura left the school and I had a new friend called Melanie. She would wear a woolly hat to school with a tail where the bobble would be on a bobble-hat. I would tug the tail of the hat and pull it off and fling it to the floor chanting “Ding dong bell”. I wonder whether I bullied her doing this. I can’t tell.

I have a memory of smashing a kid’s head against a brick wall but I also have a memory of watching another kid smashing a kid’s head against a brick wall and doing nothing. I wonder which memory is true.

I don’t quite know how to finish this off. I guess I will just say that I was not a happy five year old in reality. But Keppet is a happy five year old. She has discovered how to talk and not be used by others crying horsie. She tries not to bully and I hope has been successful recently. It took a long time for the person behind Keppet to work out how to make friends and keep them, how to listen and respond, and Keppet is proud of the network she has found herself in today.