Imagining

In 2000 my friend and I went backpacking. Although we, aged 21, thought we were being intrepid, we actually took a well trodden tourist route taking in India, Vietnam and Thailand.

There's a brilliant scene that makes up the prologue to Jonathan Coe's The Rotter's Club. Patrick and Sophie are talking about their parents' pasts, specifically 1973:

- Was it really that different do you think?
- Completely different. Just think of it! A world without mobiles or videos or Playstations or even faxes. A world that had never heard of Princess Diana or Tony Blair, never thought for a moment of going to war in Kosovo or Afghanistan. There were only three television channels in those days, Patrick. Three! And the unions were so powerful that, if they wanted to, they could close one of them down for a whole night. Sometimes people even had to do without electricity. Imagine!

I think of this scene when I think about backpacking in 2000, albeit with some revisions. We'd not only heard of Princess Diana, we'd started to forget her. People had mobiles, but not everyone. I got my own later that year so I could have it for the beginning of my journalism course. We used email, but I also still wrote letters. I hadn't yet performed a Google search (I learnt about Google on a computer skills module on the journalism course - imagine!) Phones certainly didn't send emails. Instead we stopped every week or so in an internet cafe and touched base with home, sending what we thought we witty group emails to all our friends with pithy observations about life in South East Asia.

In August 2000 we were in Thailand and heard about a cookery school in Chiang Mai in the north of the country. We decided to go for several days and before we left I called my mum and told her where we were heading.

As far as my mum knew Chiang Mai was a small village and we were the only tourists. In fact it is a big tourist hub with lots of hostels and visitors. Consequently when a couple of days later she heard on the radio that a young British female tourist had been found murdered in Chiang Mai, and that the name wouldn't be released until the family had been told, she had no way of contacting me. For a short while, until the name was released, she thought it was me. My grandpa, I am told, who I never saw have an alcoholic drink, had to sit down and have a whisky.

It was a day later I went to an internet cafe. Although we were in the same town we hadn't heard the news - I don't remember the detail but perhaps my friend and I had had an early night or went for dinner the two of us and didn't speak to other tourists. A deluge of emails from my mum was the first I knew of the murder, the last sent after she knew it wasn't me, asking for me to call her anyway. I did, and my poor mum managed not to ask me to return home early. We barricaded ourselves into our hostel room that night, my friend and I, and didn't go out in the dark.

The woman who was murdered was called Kirsty Jones. She was 23 and from Tredomen near Brecon.

I hadn't thought about those few days that much for the ten years after returning home. Then I had a child. And now I think of it almost every day. I think of my parents hearing the news and assuming the worst. I think of the day my kids are going to come home and tell me they've booked a round the world ticket. And most of all I think of Kirsty's parents having the worst confirmed, and of Kirsty herself.

A half remembered monster - The Marrog and me

It's funny the poems and quotes and scraps of information that stick in your head from childhood. I used to joke that I only learned three things in school. Now I try to think of the three however it turns out this past year of sleep deprivation has made me forget two of them, so I am down to just one which is how farts move across the room, also known as Brownian motion. It's actually a useful piece of knowledge, but not perhaps what we would hope to be the sum of our schooling.

But I learned more than that of course. Some of my accumulated knowledge I have already passed on to the baby, whispering facts in her ear as I carried her around the parks this summer. The difference between the leaves of a chestnut tree and an oak tree, and conkers and acorns, for example, and that blossom is a precursor to fruit, and pink skies at night are a shepherd's delight, though thinking about it this information may all come from my mum whispering in my ear rather than my schooling.

But there was a anthology of poetry, two anthologies in fact, that we used to use in infant school. I remember little about them except one had a green cover and one a blue cover. And there was one poem in them that used to tickle me. All I could remember about it was it was about a monster of some sort who sat at the back of the class making mischief and no one would believe it was there, but with this scanty knowledge I failed to find it online or in any of my own anthologies, when I tried to find it a few years ago.

Then a couple of weeks ago a friend was telling me about her son who recently learned to read and who read, the other day, a poem from one of her books, called The Marrog. I kept quiet when she told me but I knew, just knew, this was the monster I had been looking for. A search for the poem confirmed it and you know what, it gives me as much joy now as I know it did then.

I had grand plans when I was pregnant, and before, that I would read my baby a daily poem, not for her benefit - I am not concerned about hothousing her in this way - but for my own, as a means to rediscover poetry. I wanted to remember goblins at markets and people not waving but drowning and highwaymen and corners of fields that are forever England. But as I think all new mums find out soon enough, public lectures at art galleries and writing that novel just do not happen and that having a baby does not fit in around your life, but your life squeezes in around theirs.

Nevertheless I try to share some things with the baby - I tell her when a favourite song comes on the radio, I read her sentences from books that I find particularly beautiful. Who knows which lines she will one day remember. But one day, when she is an adult, a chance conversation may lead to her rediscovering something she too loved in the past and then forgot, and she may take as much joy as I have in my own refinding of The Marrog, and that thought itself fills me with great happiness.

(I have tried to contact the estate of R C Scriven to get permission to reproduce this but have not received any reply, so will keep this here until told I am unable to.)

The Marrog
by R. C. Scriven

My desk’s at the back of the class
And nobody nobody knows
I’m a Marrog from Mars
With a body of brass
And seventeen fingers and toes.
Wouldn’t they shriek if they knew
I’ve three eyes at the back of my head
And my hair is bright purple
My nose is deep blue
And my teeth are half yellow, half red ?
My five arms are silver with knives on them sharper than spears.
I could go back right now if I liked -
And return in a million light years.
I could gobble them all for
I’m seven foot tall
And I’m breathing green flames from my ears.
Wouldn’t they yell if they knew
If they guessed that a Marrog was here?
Ha-ha they haven’t a clue -
Or wouldn’t they tremble with fear!
“Look, look, a Marrog!”
They’d all scrum and shout.
The blackboard would fall and the ceiling would crack
And the teacher would faint, I suppose.
But I grin to myself, sitting right at the back
And Nobody nobody knows.