Mandela on a tricycle in the park of my childhood

The market in my local park was heaving. Young thirtysomething couples, wrapped up in woolly scarves and cute earmuffs and the terribly important business of choreographing their leisure time, were queuing to purchase weekend treats, jars of organic pesto and delicate sheaves of wind-dried pasta.

At the flower stall they passed on the daffodils and daisies, carefully choosing instead long-stemmed sprays of pussy willow and billowing eucalyptus. Moving from stall to stall, they leafed through handmade cards on biodegradable paper, sniffed at cosmetics made from glycerine and goat’s milk and three kisses from the honeybee. They purchased pomegranate and passion fruit and bunches of aromatic mint. At the wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly butcher’s stand, they mulled over delicate cuts of four-leaf-clover-fed lambs and parcels of organic pork hewn from little pink piggies that once had a Jesuit education and a wardrobe full of silk kimonos.

Glossy-haired and well-moisturised, gloved and booted, they looked satisfied, happy even; they looked rewarded. They looked like they were full of adzuki bean salads and blueberry smoothies and pots of green tea and great lashings of self-assurance and portion-controlled tenacity and vials of slow-release poise.

Demanding careers

I suppose they must have demanding careers, a lot of them; a pound of organic onions doesn’t come cheap in this neck of the manicured woods. Where do they get the time to tend their facial hair, I wondered, or waterproof their knee-high mukluks, if they are working all the hours of the day navigating new technologies and turning water into wine, and swine into pearl, in an effort to find new ways of making a living?

There was such a wide variety of mathematically perfect beardwork gathered around the bread stand in the park, perusing the olive-studded ciabatta and the chunky walnut loaves, that I had to back away, fearing that the crisp spring light might draw unwanted attention to my own sprinkling of untended facial fluff.

I remember this park before it was this park, before the market stalls, before the abundant floristry and the linseed-sprinkled loaves and the tofu burgers and the falafels and the chickpea paste and the sweet potato chips and the skinny decaf lattes and the blackberry teas and the hand-crafted jewellery and the potted buds and saplings and the endless parade of small doggies in macs rushing around on their clickety-clack thoroughbred paws, making dinner party arrangements.

‘You’ll get polio’

“Stay away from that stream,” our mothers used to chide us, when, as local children, we shimmied down the banks to pick dock leaves, in preparation for a nettle assault. “Stay away from the stream, you’ll get polio.”

There was a collection tin chained to the counter in the morgue-cold butcher’s shop at the top of the road I grew up on. The tin had a picture of an unhappy-looking boy on it; a boy with calipers and long, wooden crutches that pushed his shoulders up to his ears. We would walk up to the butcher’s, my mother and I, to buy liver and mincemeat, and I’d make patterns with the tips of my sandals on the blood-splattered, sawdust-covered floor, while she pondered the streaky rashers.

Finally managing to decipher the words on the tin one day, I read the crooked boy’s command. “Fight polio,” he was saying.

So that was polio: scratchily drawn boys with sinuous limbs. And there was I in my ankle-socked innocence, thinking polio was a snappy old river fish the size of a cat.

One cheesecloth evening in spring, decades ago, when the leaves on these ancient trees looked twilight blue, my sister and I saw a man beat his son with a stick in this park. We ran, shouting at him to stop. The man dropped his stick, but the boy’s eyes didn’t drop their fear. I think of that boy, all these crowded years later. He would never have envisaged the carnival of park life here now. I wonder has he ever seen it.

Leaving the market, the pretty parents herded pretty toddlers in fleece-lined boots and bunny-face bonnets towards the playground. Pushing tricycles by big rudder-like handles, navigating aeronautical-looking buggies through the kaleidoscope of Ray-Bans, a cappuccino in their free, gloved hands, they called out to ambulant children who skated off between legs to be the first to the zip wire.

“Mandela, slow down. Mandela, I’m serious.”

A tiny little Mandela rushed past me on a tricycle, free as a bird, making my day, making his own history, scattering old ghosts.