annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Light my doors I wrote this in writing group today. We were doing stuff to do with light and dark, including at one point being shown a list of songs with those words in the titles, to choose and do whatever we liked with. One of the songs was The Doors 'Light my Fire' and as soon as I saw it I remembered this moment. I don't exactly feel ashamed about it - it's over fifty years ago, that girl was hardly me, hardly the same person I am now. Anyway, here it is: I met Geraldine the summer I left school, 1972, School’s Out and all that. My parents had moved to the coast but I stayed behind to finish my A Levels, and when they were done I fell into a wild summer of warm nights, long dresses, platform soles, cheap hash, Joni Mitchell… and a bunch of us drifting from house to house as parents went on holiday (the fools). Geraldine appeared while we were at Claire and Celia’s, a big stone house with a walled garden, and we hit it off at once. We whispered at night, lying on mattresses we’d dragged off every bed in the house into a big empty room upstairs, giggling as we passed the joint to and fro. When summer ended I found a room to rent and Gerry mostly stayed there too. She was a shocking liar, though she’d have said fantasist if the word had been around then. Once she told a man who’d picked us up when we were hitch-hiking that she was a ballerina, currently living in a tent on Box Hill, having been thrown out of the Royal Ballet for punching one of the male dancers on the nose during a performance of Swan Lake. Really she was a thirteen year old girl whose father had scarpered and whose mother had hit the bottle to a catastrophic degree, but I didn’t work any of that out till years later. When the weather turned chilly, she announced that she needed to go home to get some winter clothes. I had to come with her and we’d need a lift. We talked Colin into driving us up to Reigate and Glen said he’d come too, and Silly Dave, cos why not? Geraldine’s family home was a square, red brick, detached house with a visible air of neglect, from the overgrown garden to the curtain rail hanging broken across an upstairs window, unlike the very smart, expensive-looking buildings all around, sitting proud in their manicured lawns. As she opened the front door, Gerry stood tall and issued instructions. “Right. You’re not to say anything, any of you, OK? You, Dave, you can skin up, several please and you can all come in here…” She led us into a gloomy room at the back of the house, curtains closed, lumpy furniture oddly placed, air stale as fuck. She opened the radiogram, flicked a switch and moved the stylus onto the album already on the deck. There was the sound of driving rain, a bass, a tinkling piano. Gerry turned up the volume. Goose-bump-inducingly wonderful. “Riders on the storm, riders on the storm, into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown.” “Stay in here,” she said as she left the room. We hadn’t seen this side of her before, but thought we’d do as we were told. Dave rolled lots of joints which we smoked while The Doors blew our minds. Above the music came odd scraps of raised voices, mostly Geraldine, icily angry, coldly resolute. We gathered that the other person had forfeited any right to Say A Single Word about Any Thing At All and exchanged looks, feeling glad she’d never spoken to any of us like that. Soon she was ready and off we went, piled into Colin’s Ford Cortina, not a worry in the world, not a thought in our heads for anything other than – no, nothing. Not a thought in our heads 12:15 a.m. - 31.10.23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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