annanotbob2's Diaryland
Diary
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Round the Corner
4/1/24 Choir this morning, new set of songs, including Eleanor Rigby, fab, love The Beatles, Living on a Prayer, great but also the Eva Cassidy version of Songbird https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWBsRnl7KWE which made me cry and cry and cry, but that’s the way music is sometimes, isn’t it? We meet in a Baptist church, a modern building – do all the variations of Christianity meet in modern buildings? It seems so, based on fuck all. Anyway, it’s an OK building, plenty of room for about 100 of us, mostly grey haired women, but not all, my friend D comes and she’s 27. Some blokes, all old, all tenors. I’m a tenor, which is a great relief to me – I’d never let myself sing so low, always trying and failing to hit higher notes, so this is cool.
We sit on the right hand side, altos in the middle, sopranos on the left. That may be the way it always is, but it’s my first choir so I don’t know. The worst bit of it is the tea break, when we all queue up at a hatch through to the kitchen for a free cup of tea or instant coffee, no thanks, then move on to the table where there’s a selection of cakes made by choir members.
The noise is unbearable. It sets me right on edge, like there’s a thousand squawking birds swirling round my head, about to start pecking at me. I can always feel panic starting to rise up, a fluttering in my belly that I have to breathe through to avoid just screaming. I try to stick it out long enough to get a mug of mint tea, but I don’t always make it and rush out to sit on the wall outside. It’s in the centre of the town, down the road from where my kids were born. We used to walk past it every day on the way to school and home again, year after year.
One day, we’d been to collect Sam, me pushing Daughter (3) and Son (18months) in the double buggy, Sam a bit ahead with some of her friends, who were all a bit older, about eight. Daughter wanted to walk, she always wanted to walk not sit in the buggy and sometimes would grab and bite Son, who’s eighteen months younger. She did this, bit her brother, so I had to let her walk, holding onto her hand while trying to push the double buggy, pacify the wailing toddler and balance my big bag full of books – I was a mature student at Uni at the time.
Suddenly Daughter wrenched herself free and ran off down the road. We were just by the church at the time. The bigger girls had reached the junction and were crossing the road – a narrow road with shops and parked cars – there was traffic but it only moved slowly. Daughter ran as fast as she could to catch up with them, straight into the path of a car that hit her, throwing her up into the air and out of sight round the corner. For ages after I relived that mad dash to the end of the road – Son, buggy and books abandoned – every night as I started to drift into sleep – heart pounding with absolute terror as I ran, not knowing what I’d find, whether she was dead or alive or broken. Time stood still, that run lasted forever. When I did turn the corner she was sat on the pavement, looking surprised, not even crying. I picked her up and immediately a crowd gathered. The consensus was that she needed to be checked out in A&E – a woman who’d stopped in her car said she’d take us, one of the other mothers said she’d take Son and Sammie back to hers, we got into the car and set off up the road. She headed for the local hospital. There’s no A&E there, I told her, only in Worthing. I can’t take you there, she said, coming to a halt and chucking me and Daughter out into the street. Honestly. My brother took me in the end – he lived a few doors down from me and I knew he was home. I didn’t have a car in those days. Daughter was fine, a few bruises, nothing broken. We went to the chippie for dinner after all that excitement.
Well, I didn’t know I was going to write about that – I was going to boast about the nightie I made in sewing group. Too late now.
12:32 a.m. - 05.01.24
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