Songs My Mother Taught Me; A Collection Of Short Stories

Lily

"What can you tell me about her?"

"You must understand that it's rather difficult..."

"Of course. Perhaps if we started with the basics-"

"I am 86 years old. You're asking me to cast my mind back more than 60 years."

"I understand, but this is really going to help me build a picture-"

"Show me the photograph again. Let us start there. Ah... Look at that! I was 19 years old here. So beautiful, although, of course, you never see it yourself when you are young. Youth and beauty are wasted on the young."

"And next to you in this picture?"

"My sister, Daisy. She was a year younger than me. As you can see, we didn't look much alike, apart from the black hair and fair skin. We got that from Mama. Mama often told people that her great-grandmother was a gypsy, although how true that was I don't know. I doubt it, but one has to admit that we had the right colouring for it."

"And when was this taken?"

"Summer, 1949. It was an early summer that year, I remember it like it were yesterday. That's something you will find as you grow older, remembering what you had for breakfast yesterday is impossible, but memories from decades passed are so clear that they could almost be a film."

"Was that summer special for any other reason?"

"Oh, you already know it was... But I suppose you want me to tell it in my own words."

"That would be very helpful."

"It was the most marvellous summer. Glorious in fact. I've always said that there is something about beautiful weather that changes everything, brings you right out of yourself.

It did for Mama, anyway. She'd spent 4 years in mourning after the war, trying to learn to shoulder the awful grief Papa's death left her with. It wasn't just her, of course. The war shattered so very many lives and the mourning was nationwide. Both Daisy and I grew up in the shadow of grief and it shaped us in many ways.

But the summer of 1949 felt like something new altogether. The war was over, we were entering a new decade and that summer. It felt as though the long, hazy days would never end. It felt as though that summer held promise, something new was on the horizon and all we had to do was be brave enough to reach out and take it.

At the start of that summer Daisy and I were on the cusp of adulthood. There's something wonderful about that stage of life, isn't there? Your whole future stretches out ahead of you, years and years of blank pages, waiting to be written. Nothing is sullied or jaded.

We were nothing alike, of course. In personality or looks. She had a much more voluptuous figure, which was about to become highly fashionable thanks to Marilyn Monroe and others like her. The 1950s was the decade for appreciation of the female form and I just didn't make the grade. Mama often told me that I had the perfect figure for her youth and if I'd been alive in the 20s, every girl alive would have stared at me with envy. In many ways I was born in the wrong era and I just had to accept that.

It didn't matter too much to me because of the ballet. My thinness gave me an elegance when I danced. I remember my mentor- a brooding Russian ex-dancer called Andrei- telling me that there is something undeniably perfect about the slenderness of the dancer as she weaves her story on the stage. The fragility adds a layer of vulnerably and beauty, he said.

Daisy danced too, of course. Both of us had been trained in ballet since we were tiny. In her own youth Mama had nurtured dreams of being a dancer but it all fell at her feet when she snapped her ankle after a heavy landing during an audition. Very tragic, really. You could tell that Mama had been a ballerina, there's something in the movement that you never quite lose. A unconscious gracefulness that manifests itself in even the most mundane movement.