The Daily Dormouse. (aka Bike) Part 1863 by Angharad Copyright © 2012 Angharad All Rights Reserved.

I won’t tell you what we did after the pillow fight, but as we neither smoke, we didn’t have a fag afterwards. I did sleep quite well and woke up ready for anything, except getting up and sorting out ten thousand children–okay, I exaggerate, there’s only nine thousand on Fridays.

Danny must feel well and truly outnumbered but he does have the benefit of drooling over several very pretty young women who tease him mercilessly, and he loves it. It seemed life was trying to change me into an archetypal earth mother, except for that I should be twenty stone and have hips as wide as my Jaguar. Perhaps there’s a new archetype. I staggered out of bed chuckling to myself as went to the bathroom that I must be the Bridget Jones of the earth mother archetypes.

In the shower the joke still had me smiling, and would Renée Zellweger play me in a film of my life? That had me really laughing and prompted a bang on the shower door to ask me what was so funny? The query came from superbrains so I felt I had no need to explain, so I improvised–though you might call it lying.

“I was thinking of a joke your daddy told me,” I started the tangled web.

“Which one is that?” she fired back.

Oops, now I have to think of a joke that is suitable for an eight year old genius which Simon might plausibly tell–and it had to be quick. “Um, which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

“The egg, dinosaurs laid them before evolving into birds and finally into domesticated chickens.”

“Where did you get that?” I gasped turning off the water.

“You told me yonks ago.”

I suppose it did sound pretentious enough to be one of mine. “I don’t remember that,” I said playing for time.

“Knock knock,” she said starting one of her own jokes.

“Who’s there?” I gave the required response.

“Isaac.”

“Isa-acoming,” I ventured.”

“No, Isaac Newton, who else?”

“There have been loads of Isaacs since the one in the Old Testament,” I suggested though I couldn’t think of one.

“Like who?” she asked almost impatiently.

“Um, Isaac Watts,” I managed to get out.

“You’re joking, we don’t have any relations called Isaac, do we, Mummy?”

“Not him any way, he died back in seventeen something, but he wrote loads of hymns.”

“How d’you know that, Mummy, you don’t even sing hymns.”

“Something I must have absorbed along the way, he wrote, ‘O God our help in ages past’ amongst many others, and I’ve got a feeling he came from Southampton originally.”

“Wow, any more Isaacs?”

“Um, Isaac Hayes, an American composer–did the music for several films.”

“Who else, Mummy?”

“Isaac Asimov.”

“Who? Isaac gerremoff?” she laughed as I dried myself.

“Isaac Asimov, he wrote science fiction stories, apparently rather good ones.”

“Have you read them then?”

“No, I don’t like science fiction, I prefer whodunits.”

“Any more Isaacs?”

“Oh goodness, Isaac Luria.”

“Who’s he?”

“A Hebrew rabbi, years ago who founded a school of the Hebrew mystical system of Kabbalah, or something like that.” I almost said, ‘Ask the nuns, it’s about religion,' then thought better of it.”

“Doesn’t Madonna do that Abrakabra stuff?”

“Kabbalah, I believe so, and as far as I know she’s quite sincere about it, though not quite sure how wearing a bit of red string round your wrist keeps away the evil eye.”

“Would it keep Sister Bernice away? She’s got evil eyes, they look in opposite directions.”

“Seeing as there’s no such thing as the evil eye, I doubt it.”

“Have you got any red string?”

“Why?”

“So I can try it.”

“If you go into school with some red string on your wrist what are you going to say if they ask you why you’re wearing it?”

“I’ll tell ’em you told me to wear it.”

“That would be a lie, Trish.”

“So, you told me one about the joke Daddy told you.”

“Okay, Daddy asked me why the chicken crossed the road.”

“To get to the other side, or to take his box of Paxo back, return his library book.” She trotted out all these answers like she’d learned them by heart.

“Let’s go with to get to the other side.”

“Okay, Mummy,” she said as I emerged from the shower cubicle with a towel wrapped round me.

“Okay, so why did the hedgehog cross the road?”

“To get to the other side, I s’pose,” she shrugged then added, “It’s hardly quantum, is it?”

“To see his flat mate.” I delivered the rather sick punchline, especially sick given the numbers of hedgehogs who are killed on the road each year.

“They don’t live in flats, Mummy, even I know that.”

“Where do they live then?” she’d completely missed the point of the joke so I attempted to distract her.

“In hedges, that’s why they’re called Hedgehogs, Mummy.”

“Well, you learn something new every day.” I said hoping she didn’t see in the book Mr Whitehead had left, that I’d done a study on hedgehogs while I was in school. It was hardly earth shattering stuff, but it did give me an enthusiasm for watching mammals as well as birds and insects. In those days we had a lot more of the prickly critters, so their corpses on roads were much more frequent than today, even so it was quite a creepy study, I walked round the same roads every week during the summer and counted up the numbers of dead hedgehogs and put forward a population guess based on it.

The figures were probably way out but I got a very good mark for my innovation and scientific method, and for a moment my parents approved, that was until the local paper took a photo of me and called me ‘Charlotte Watts, hedgehog counter extraordinary.’ That was Siá¢n’s fault. When she knew they were coming to take my picture, she put my long hair in plaits, like two pigtails, because she knew it would annoy my dad. It did. I don’t have a photo except the one in Whitehead’s book which has faded somewhat, my dad went round destroying them wherever he saw them.

They took the picture on a Friday evening after school and I was dressed casually in a pair of Siá¢n’s dungarees and a tee shirt. Old Murray played hell with me for that, he called my father who’d already beaten the skin off my backside and suggested that if I liked playing a girl so much, I should wear a skirt to school until I got fed up with the other boys laughing at me.

So they laughed at me, what’s new? I wore an old uniform of Siá¢n’s plus a bra with bits of foam shoved in it, knickers and tights with light makeup as well. I did it for a month before one of the boys threatened to hurt me if I didn’t stop acting like a poof. To make his point he picked me up by my pigtails, did that bloody hurt? I stopped the next day, my scalp was still on fire.

I’d forgotten all about that, crazy isn’t it? So perhaps I did have bits of a girlhood, albeit about as disjointed as someone growing up in a war zone.