Once, for my birthday, my mother gave me a book of poetry. It was a book of poems that she had written, because she was a poet, and she had written a whole cycle of poems about me. The first ones she had written before I was born, when she was pregnant with me, and the others when I was small. ‘This is your gift,’ she said to me. ‘Your gift from me. It’s better than chocolate, or a toy, because no one else has these poems, and they will last forever.’ I was eight years old. I remember that I nodded solemnly. ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you are a genius; you are a poet just like Shakespeare. Like him, you have suns, planets, ants, frightening skeletons. I prefer things which are frightening.’ I was eight years old when I said that. Mother smiled but even as she did I could see sadder things in her eyes behind her smile. Tuesday 20th July The weekend drags by for Rebecca as she realises just how little there is to do in Winterfold.
