The Crossing

CALLING cripple, cripple, cripple. Running away to the south of the park where the river is its boundary. I do not remember what comfort I had at home. For sure there was some. For sure it has not helped. I slip back further.

I am five or six maybe. My hand is cradled in my Father’s palm. We are coming out of our house. The four-storey stone built late Victorian villa, newly built to his own specifications, on the wide road where we live to the north of the park and the city’s madcap mock castle and the grandiose department stores of its commercial centre. It is quite early, around eight thirty in the morning. The avenue is, as yet, only fringed with the encased saplings which will, soon enough, become broad leafed chestnut trees. We do this journey together, on foot, many times in the decade to follow. As the years pass I will let go of his hand and he will stop carrying me on his shoulders at the half-way point of our walk. He tells me that to walk as far as I can is good for me. That it will help with the recovery of my foot. That it will aid the recuperation of the regular adjustments it requires, my left foot, my club foot, encased in its clumpy boot with the corrective iron strapped up my lower leg to, somehow, but how, re-dress its deformity. It never does. I will carry it, as it and I grow together, and its hateful ugliness, throughout my life. I will learn to compensate for it by throwing my weight forward and to the side to propel me on, but it always hurts. I see my father wince if he hears any whimper from me, so I do not, unless I stumble and then he grips me to steady my clomping gait. Good boy, says my father. Good father, is what I will forever think of him, this builder of a city, this begetter and support of a cripple.

All around, as we walk by straight lines and right angles down the grid of the city to its great docks, it is the literal case that year by year, at times month by month, buildings of each and every kind are filling the space of streets and roads and squares.