Memory Bank

The Jungle

I am surrounded on all sides by dense green undergrowth. The tall, tall grass rises high around me, nodding sagely as a faint breeze pushes around the hot, stale air. I can hear the buzzing of horseflies or bumblebees above me, and the chirping of grasshoppers, and the mocking songs of carefree birds.

I am lost in this wild and untamed jungle, and too trepidatious to take a step in any direction. For I know that there are terrible weeds lurking here: huge spiky thistles bristling with needles, or jaggy nettles that sting, and leave your bare white skin red raw and itching. And there are horrible spiders scuttling across their webs, and daddy longlegs twitching and spasming in the air with insect palsy.

And, even worse, there are a hundred and one huge, slobbering, hungry wild beasts desperate to tear me to shreds and gobble me up. Lions and tigers. Bears. Panthers and wolves. And stranger creatures, too horrible to describe, dwelling in dank caves and stagnant swamps. Squabblybobblers and Gizzarocks and Droglars and worse besides lurk here, in the jungles of far-off India.

Of course, I’m not really in India. I’m not trekking any wilderness. I’m in the back garden of my parents’ house. It only seems like a jungle because the lawn hasn’t been cut in a good long while, and I’m so titchy that the grass can easily tower over me like so many rows of Nebraskan corn. And it only feels like India because India is the most distant place I can imagine: so far and foreign and frightening that it barely seems to belong in the here and now. India is the setting of most of my imaginary excursions, with my back garden usually setting the stage — although the shrubbery of the Kaim Park has also sufficed.

Our garden is a mess because mum and dad are working too much to tidy it, and because I’m a bratty enough three-year-old that I require a lot of their attention, and because we’re not out in the garden much, what with living in damp and frigid Scotland. But there are no overcast afternoons in one’s early childhood; only warm sunshine and clear skies.

Oh, and I wasn’t lying about the weeds by the way. Rest assured, there are thistles here that could cheerfully stab you to death if you walked into one, or at the very least pierce your bare foot. It’s a pretty large space, nearly the size of a tennis court. But because our house rests upon a slope, the whole thing slants downwards in three tiers like a Saxon hill fort. It won’t be landscaped for another few years, so there are all sorts of bumps and dips hidden in the grass to trip up an unwary boy.

Anyway, this is another case where I’m not sure whether this is a single memory of an amalgam of many similar days, but I can recall picking my way through weed and all grass in the bright yellow sunshine, terrified of what I might find in the forbidding wilds of my Bandhavgarh, West Lothian.