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How much do you really know about your own family – about anyone, really? No matter how close we are to another person, there are always the secrets locked away that we know nothing about – the dreams and the fears, the passions and the resentments. The memories that are taken out and pored over only when we are quite alone, the dark thoughts that haunt us in the dead of night, the fears of inadequacies we never admit to out loud, the moments of despair for the future. We see only what others allow us to see, judge their actions and attitudes against our own experiences and values. And hug to ourselves secrets of our own. Heaven knows, I’ve got enough of them – and I’m not noted for being the world’s most discreet. When I was small I was known for a chatterbox. ‘Little Big Mouth’ my father used to call me – much to my chagrin – after a character in a comic I used to get from the newsagent’s every Saturday morning, along with a chocolate bar or a packet of sweets. ‘You are not to repeat this outside these four walls,’ he would say, expressly to me, after my sister, Belinda, and I had been party to some discussion over Sunday lunch between him and my mother. As if I would! Mostly it was boring stuff like could they afford to have a makeover in the kitchen, or who’d brought what in to the charity shop where my mother worked as a volunteer. I’d roll my eyes at Belinda, who was, of course, prim and perfect as ever, and give my father a hurt look. The financing of a kitchen was the last thing I’d be likely to chatter to my friends about, and I can’t imagine they’d be interested in the state of the bag of clothes donated by Councillor Mrs Waite to the hospice shop either – jumpers with coffee stains and inadequately washed underwear according to my mother. But there it was – I had a reputation for talking too much and not being able to keep secrets. Perhaps that’s why I became so good at it later… |
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