CHERRY BLOSSOM MEMORIES

I don’t know whether it’s because this year, for the first time in quite a few, I’ve been having to actually travel to get to work during this time particular season, but this year, for the first time in ages, I’ve been very aware of the blossom growing on the trees, the flower-like transformation of all those unremarkable bare branches into something that looks rather beautiful. Whether it’s the white apple or the pink cherry, I just seem to have been really aware of it recently, almost as if I’ve been noticing it for the first time.

I tried to snap a picture of some of it as I was heading to work the other morning, but trying to manipulate a teffalone and a car is never a wise thing, so I think it rather surprised the car behind me, irritated as he already was at me rigorously sticking to the speed limit, when I decided to pull over to the kerb side and try to work out quite how the camera on my telephone actually worked.

Ah yes, the wonders of new technology; When a device you use primarily for one thing is capable of being used for something quite different and you know that it is, even if you’re not all that sure how to go about it. Still, I now know how the “zoom” works. I didn’t on that morning, but I do now… Although I’m just as likely to have forgotten it again come the next time that I think I need it…

Anyway, I took a quick snapshot and went on my way and you know, it’s just as well that I did because, that very same evening, a storm came and all of that beautiful blossom was suddenly pretty much all on the ground instead of in the trees, and already being transformed by the tyres of the traffic into something resembling a brown mush. Such is the essential cruelty of the natural world that a thing of beauty can be transformed so quickly into something decaying by the roadside, but it’s a useful one of life’s lessons to remember.

But there is always an upside. Well, from my point of view there is, anyway. You long-suffering readers who visit these pages might not agree that anything that gives me an excuse to drone on about something else is necessarily a good thing, but there you have it. Anyway, that falling blossom sparked a memory so very vivid and about which I hadn’t thought about in decades, a memory of the garden of the house next door-but-one to us when I was growing up.

It was owned by a couple called Dot and Tom, although I remember that Tom died long before we moved away when I was fourteen, but he can’t have been all that old even though I probably thought they both were ancient back in those days. Tom used to wear the classic “Frank Spencer” beret and trench-coat combination and, I seem to remember, was a Ham Radio enthusiast.

I remember there being a garage-sized shed at the end of their garden with what seemed, to my eight-year-old self, to be a huge radio mast attached to the roof, which spoke of communication with faraway and unknowable places and probably seemed terribly exciting to me back then if ever I got a glimpse through that magical doorway to see all of the switches and dials contained within that room. Occasionally strange electronic sounds would emerge from inside it which would trigger my imagination as much as they interfered with every television set for streets around.

I don’t think old Tom was all that popular around the area, to be totally honest…

Dot was one of the many local ladies who used to get drafted in to “look after” me and feed me some lunch during the school holidays, for whatever reasons, because, despite the fact that it never really did me any harm, I was, essentially a “latch-key kid” from the age of eight, and used to proudly wear my front door key on a chain around my neck when I went to school. Sadly, I don’t recall all that much about Dot these days other than the fact that she was a very slight woman who I once found spark out in a dead faint on her kitchen floor when I turned up for my designated lunch date, which was an “interesting” thing for an eight-year-old to have to deal with.

All of this came flooding back when I saw that blossom on the floor because I remembered that their garden had a huge cherry tree slap-bang in the middle of it and, at a certain time of the year, the pink blossom would fall like a blanket of snow and pretty much cover the green of their lawn with a thick deep layer of petals which somehow seemed to be a rather magical thing back in those days.

I remember that you could stand in it ankle-deep and kick the blossom around in a playful way, and that the tree seemed so wide and huge that when you stood under its canopy it used to deaden the sound. The only other time that I remember experiencing that special type of silence when the snow was falling in Yosemite Park and, especially when there was that deep carpet of blossom on the ground, even though I was only in a neighbour’s garden, I could convince myself that I was in the deep depths of a snowy wood, standing in some distant dell and no doubt hoping to meet some mysterious Mr Tumnus-like creature who might whisk me away on some magical adventure.

Hmm… That has suddenly triggered another long-lost snapshot memory of the huge wardrobe I used to hide in that was in the corner my bedroom full of fur coats that tickled the skin on my face in the darkness but which, sadly, never led to my own personal Narnia…

Kids and their books, eh? Who knows what journeys into their own imaginations they might lead to…?