MORNING SERIAL

WHEN my friends and I had sat on the lip of the quarry we had looked down on the whole village as if we were kings of the mountain. We stayed there all day, for days on end, until each evening hunger drove us home for our tea.

James and Sam began firing questions at me, about the den, about my childhood, about how old I had been when this had happened (about ten, I think). For a brief moment I thought I’d finally managed to impress my own children with a story from my past. It turned out, though, that what had impressed them was not the effort in building such an ambitious den, half way up a mountainside, or even the childhood firelighting. It was the freedom. The freedom my generation had to wander as far from home as we liked, or at least as far as we could manage; to stay out all day long without adult supervision, to simply mess about in the open air with no plans, no club that need be joined, no organisation or any particular aim and no obligation to report home until darkness fell. They thought it anarchic. And so it was.

My sons and I struck out uphill again and eventually the ground levelled out and there we were on the mountain top. We took a ‘selfie’ on the way. It was the wrong time of year for skylarks to be singing. We took in the view and I bored the boys with talk about glaciers.

As we began to descend the mountain there was a sudden, torrential cloudburst. I struggled to help Sam put on his waterproof over-trousers, and I panicked slightly, because he was shivering with cold and already wet through.

Perhaps this had been a mistake, I thought, he was still so young, and perhaps this walk was too much for him. He saw the worry in my face, and I felt a little pang of shame. I was flapping and panicking in front of my little boy. I was worrying him when he should be confident and happy.