In any case, I have only one memory of the three of us being together, and this was when I was about eight years old and they had already decided to call it quits. I was in boarding school in Buckinghamshire, and the two of them visited me and took me on a picnic in the woods near the school. This was a wonderful forest straight out of fairy-tales, at least in my memory. Huge ancient trees with the sunlight slanting through in the afternoon, stretches of lawn dotted with "fairy rings" of darker grass (actually due to the decaying of mushrooms growing in a circle, but to my delighted eye proof that the fairies were real and danced in the moonlight only a few hundred yards away from my school). So my father's presence was connected somehow with the appearance of magickal beings. He was a magickal being to me, which was hardly fair to my mother, who had the burden of raising me, but distance really does lend enchantment. I could mythologize him to my heart's content and dismiss my mother's very broad hints on the subject as the insidious wiles of an evil sorceress. This theme was developed in great detail later on when I became a teenager. Doesn't every girl who wants to be a Real Princess see her mother as the Evil Queen and her father as the Prince who will rescue her and carry her off to a new magickal life? And I had the qualifications to be a Real Princess: blue eyes, naturally curly hair, and prettiness. Not to mention the Evil Queen.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-11-01 07:09 pm (UTC)In any case, I have only one memory of the three of us being together, and this was when I was about eight years old and they had already decided to call it quits. I was in boarding school in Buckinghamshire, and the two of them visited me and took me on a picnic in the woods near the school. This was a wonderful forest straight out of fairy-tales, at least in my memory. Huge ancient trees with the sunlight slanting through in the afternoon, stretches of lawn dotted with "fairy rings" of darker grass (actually due to the decaying of mushrooms growing in a circle, but to my delighted eye proof that the fairies were real and danced in the moonlight only a few hundred yards away from my school). So my father's presence was connected somehow with the appearance of magickal beings. He was a magickal being to me, which was hardly fair to my mother, who had the burden of raising me, but distance really does lend enchantment. I could mythologize him to my heart's content and dismiss my mother's very broad hints on the subject as the insidious wiles of an evil sorceress. This theme was developed in great detail later on when I became a teenager. Doesn't every girl who wants to be a Real Princess see her mother as the Evil Queen and her father as the Prince who will rescue her and carry her off to a new magickal life? And I had the qualifications to be a Real Princess: blue eyes, naturally curly hair, and prettiness. Not to mention the Evil Queen.
But things never work out the way you expect.