My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress by Christina McKenna Page A

and its bench served as shelter for Carlo our collie. He could just about raise his head and gaze with bored weariness when we invaded the yard, then lay his chin back down again and continue his doze in the sawdust. This was the domain of the farmyard animal and we were the intruders, frequently scattering the hens with our exuberant horseplay. They let us know we weren’t welcome, giving us fierce, sudden looks as they high-stepped away.
    When I recollect those distant days it’s the silence that I remember most: the potent absence of noise out of doors; utter quiet, save for the mooing of a hungry cow or the stammering notes of a bird.
    We broke that silence with our shouts and songs. We busied ourselves with the activity of play, climbing trees to pluck plums and pears, playing games of hide-and-seek in the cool, cavernous barns and having tea parties on tea-chests covered with flour bags.
    Sometimes we’d be sent to a nearby spring to fill a pail of drinking water. This was arduous work for small people, for O’Neill’s well lay at the far end of a distant field. The journey there was easy enough, but coming back was fraught with difficulty. When we got to the well we’d spend ages on our hunkers, gazing down into that circle of shimmering sky reflected in the water. I was annoyed by the midges that skimmed and pocked its surface, aware also that this was heaven’s reflection and that I might be as close to it as mere mortals could get.Then suddenly the midges would rise and heaven break as we plunged the bucket in. The hard part was drawing it up again: we would struggle with the weight of its gurgling rebellion, and heft it onto the grassy rim.
    We’d break our return trip with many stops, all out of breath. The handle of the bucket was knitting-needle thin and would dig into our soft hands. We’d alter our grip, thereby slopping the water into our wellies. Usually we’d arrive home with a much-depleted bucket; mother would give us a good telling off and send us right back to do it all over again.
    Through the shifting days of summer we roamed the fields and lanes around the house, busying ourselves out of doors so that our mother could find peace within. We lassoed jam jars with baler twine and set off to the nearby Moyola river.
    Unwary sticklebacks trapped themselves in our glass prisons, wriggling and struggling for the freedom they would never know again. Sometimes we were very lucky and would capture two in one jar. Cupping hands carefully around our trophies, we’d carry them proudly home to show mother. She wouldn’t allow them in the house, though, so we’d line the jars up on an outside windowsill, studying their captive occupants until we tired of them. But more often than not the poor fish tired first and would already have turned belly up in defeat before darkness closed in.
    I delighted in the river. That active, surging mass of water moved me more than the fixed hedges and meadows that hemmed it. I loved to sit on the rocks that jutted from the bank and plunge my legs in up to the knee, marvelling at the refracting pull of the water’s gravity. The sun would glitter madly, stunning my eyes, and my ears took the swell and sway of the water’s release. I was alive to nature then, alert to the tender violation of all of my senses.
    The river was a metaphor for fearlessness and risk-taking as it plunged along its path to freedom; being near it made me believe I could touch those same qualities in myself. My mother always warned me not to go in but, away from her watchful eyes, I invariably did. However fleetingly, I wanted to be part of that clamour that had the power to cleanse and quench and sometimes take life.
    These were the idle wanderings of my childhood; with no television or books to distract me, my love affair with nature was guaranteed.
    We trudged to and from school with the seasons; in winter capped, gloved and belted against the cruel