Retrospective

When I was about eleven years old, a nice family moved in across the road. They had a girl of 5 and a boy of 2 (and later a new baby), and very soon they began grooming me as a potential babysitter. Or perhaps I began grooming them as potential employers. One or the other.

Either way, I had little in the way of social life or friends right there on our road, and enjoyed hanging out with the little kids. I basically functioned as an unpaid "mother's helper" for a while, without even realising it - but I kept them occupied, kept an eye on them, played with them in the back garden, and generally could be relied on to keep things ticking over safely while their mum got on with making dinner or whatever it was she was doing. They used to take me swimming sometimes, and while I thought they were doing me a big favour by paying my entrance fee to the local swimming pool, in fact my presence meant that their dad could take both kids swimming and leave the mum at home with the new baby only because I was there to lend a hand. It was pretty much a win/win situation.

When I was fourteen I started babysitting them officially, with payment and everything. The kids were very good, went to bed easily, and then I'd watch shows I never saw at home (because they clashed with the holy of holies, the Nine O'Clock News) like Twin Peaks or Thirtysomething, make myself a cup of tea and steal an extra biscuit, and possibly sneak The Joy of Sex off the bookshelf for a surreptitious ten-minute gawp, before putting it back as silently as possible. Sometimes I played Tetris on the Gameboy. Sometimes I even brought my homework. The older kids never woke up, and if the baby did I was instructed to just pat her on the back until she went back to sleep.

They were an interesting family - Dutch mother, Irish father, first two kids born in the Bahamas before they moved back to our neck of the woods. I remember seeing her breastfeed the baby once, and being surprised because the baby was walking by then, perhaps - I really don't know if she was one or two or some other age, but it was one of only two times I ever saw a mother nursing a baby in my growing up years, so perhaps it was surprising by virtue of happening at all.

Back then, babies went down to sleep on their tummies, and the nifty new baby carrier was secured by the seatbelt in the front passenger seat (well, there were probably no airbags), and of course I never questioned my directions to just pat her back to sleep. (I honestly don't remember whether I ached to pick her up or not. I suspect not. I do remember droning over and over "Go back to sleep; Mama be back soon," and wishing for her to calm down; she always did eventually, but I think I downplayed the events to the returning parents.) I never gave her a bottle, but I never changed her nappy either.

Last year, when we were re-doing the kitchen in our new house, I had a brief but intense flirtation with the notion of cork flooring. It would be warm and cushiony underfoot and pleasingly retro to the eye, but was pretty pricey compared to other options. Finally, I realised that the reason I really wanted it, the reason it seemed like the ideal family kitchen flooring to me, was that the family across the road had cork floors. The memory brought back the comforting feeling of sitting on the bench in the sunlight from their big back window, helping the kids eat their fish fingers and peas, or tasting lentil soup for the first time, not one of the littles and not a grownup, but somewhere in the middle, finding my own space.