Blurred Vision
It’s occurred to me that as a child, you exist in an entirely Rumsfeldian world: you don’t know what you don’t know.
Looking back, I’m aghast at how much I misunderstood the world around me, yet I don’t remember any specific moments of enlightenment as I grew up.
Adult relationships were a source of particular puzzlement – and angst. I didn’t realise, for example, that people had any acquaintance with each other before getting married. Why would I? In the Ladybird fairy stories that I read, love at first sight was the order of the day. The prince came and saw – and they wed. As I didn’t live in those magical times, I didn’t have a castle or an ancestral wood, or even glittering soirées that a suitor could rock up to, so any encounter was clearly going to have to happen as I was walking down the street.
But there was a problem. No marriageable female ever had red hair and freckles. The Ladybird books were quite categorical on this point. Yes, even in those distant pre-Instagram days, the ubiquitous blonde and blue-eyed princess set unattainable standards that could lead to despair. How fortunate I was that in Mr Verity happened along in his VW Beetle and saw beyond the ginge-ness and many other faults too, no doubt.
In fact, I was so fully signed up to the concept of matrimony as an honourable estate that I even had a go at a spot of match-making.
My maternal grandmother died when I was five or six. She lived some distance away and we only saw her on high days and holidays, so I didn’t know her very well and wasn’t that upset. But poor Grandpa! What was he going to do now?
Luckily, the perfect solution was staring everyone in the face – but nobody mentioned it! My paternal grandmother had been on her own for many years, ever since her husband had skipped off somewhere, leaving her with three small children and being now presumed dead. What could be neater than getting these two together and joining them in nuptial bliss? Yet when I suggested this to my parents, not only did they fail to see the pleasing symmetry in this arrangement, they laughed in my face…
And then there are the things you half-know, a.k.a. getting hold of the wrong end of the stick – which I did big-time as a result of eavesdropping on conversations between my mother and our German au-pair Ingie. They were the same age and often talked about their very different experiences during the war. Certain words and names came up again and again: bombing, Blitz, rationing, Hitler, Churchill.
Ingie’s account of the death of her grandmother in an air-raid impressed me deeply, not least because it was as she briefly left the cellar to retrieve her little dog that her house took a direct hit. But I completely misunderstood Hitler’s part in all this and revealed to the adults that I thought he had been Ingie’s family’s gardener. Cue more immoderate laughter.
I ‘put away childish things’ a long time ago, but the world has been a decidedly more prosaic place since then.