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       Owl at Home

      The first book I ever remember reading is Owl At Home, by Arnold Lobel. I’m not sure whether I ever actually read it as a child, or whether it was read to me so much that I memorised the words, but I did used to sit and turn the pages and recite the stories from it. I don’t know where the copy came from, but it is full of library stamps, which means that my Mum or possibly my Grandma probably got it from a library sale to read to me. I’ve still got my copy of the book. It currently sits on my bookcase nestled in amongst the rest. But Owl At Home is more special than the others, because it is my oldest book and because it features in my earliest memory.

      I must have been about three years old. I used to sit in the garden, reading Owl At Home out to myself. We had a pretty big garden, and I was sitting in the middle of the lawn. Mum was in the kitchen preparing dinner, Dad was at work, and my younger brother was zipping about all over the patio in his walker.

      I wasn’t particularly fond of him at the time. He was always in the way, he smelt, and in that walker he could come at you out of nowhere pretty fast. When I was on the lawn he couldn’t get to me. At the end of the patio was a path. The path led down to where the big bin was – one of those metal jobbies with a lid with a handle, like they had in Stomp. You couldn’t see the path from the kitchen window. I looked up from my book just in time to see my brother, in his walker, zooming down the path.

      It was Thursday. Bin day. Instead of the bin at the end of the path there was an empty space, an empty space where the path abruptly ended leaving a little step and a small hole. I watched him get to the end of the path, watched the front wheel of the walker drop down into the hole and all of a sudden my brother was horizontal and screaming his fucking head off. I glanced to the kitchen window. I could see Mum chopping vegetables. I could hear music, she was listening to a tape, the one that I called Coca Cola (Peanut Man by Tim Buckley). She couldn’t hear my brother crying in the hole. I put my book down and walked over to him to have a look. He looked like a twat. Red-faced and crumpled eyes from all the tears. One of his shoes had fallen off. I picked up the shoe and headed for the kitchen. Mum was dancing around. I handed her the shoe. She shouted at me ‘Why have you taken your brother’s shoe? For God’s sake, Jesus …’ and headed outside to replace the shoe. I followed her.

      She saw my brother, screaming in the hole. She gasped, ‘Fuck’, but instead of going to help him dashed back inside. I waited outside. She came back moments later with a camera, walked towards the hole, took a picture, and then lifted my brother out of the walker, pulled the walker out of the hole and popped him back in it, giving him a little shove towards the safety of the patio. He promptly shut his fat face and started wandering around the patio, as if nothing had happened. Mum went back to chopping the vegetables and dancing to Tim Buckley, and I went back on to the lawn to finish reading Owl At Home.