Chris's birthday, Wimbledon and memories of his childhood in The View from the Terrace

It’s Chris’s birthday today, he’s 39. It seems strange that Wimbledon isn’t on. He was born on men’s finals day, the day McEnroe won for the first time. It was a blazing hot day and I was in a hospital with no air conditioning! not many places had it then.

There was a programme on TV this morning about big cat’s. Chris loves cat’s of all kinds. The programme reminded me of when Chris did a school project on them when he was 10. They each had to choose a wild animal to do a project on and, of course, Chris chose big cat’s. I remember helping him with it when we were on holiday that summer. For a few years we had a caravan at Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire, a beautiful village with a wide sandy beach and a caravan park nestled at one end between the village and a wood. We were there for a week in September. Chris had taken his project with him. We did a page for each different big cat. I found him the Tiger poem by Blake and he put that in. His favourite Cat was the snow leopard.

One evening after working on the project Chris and I went for a walk through the wood by the caravan site. It was called Haroldstone Wood. It was an ancient woodland, the name dated from Anglo Saxon times. I didn’t realise how long the walk through the wood was and it started to get dark before we found the way out. Chris was scared that there may be wolves. He had a thing about wolves when he was a child. I was always telling him that there were no wolves in the UK nowadays but he used to insist that he could hear them in the forest opposite our house. That ‘forest’ is a small wood on the top of the hill. Now here he was worrying there would be wolves in this wood next to a caravan park in West Wales. I was still reassuring him when we found the way out which led to a path along the cliffs. I wasn’t sure if walking along a cliff path at dusk was an improvement on being lost in a wood, ‘Fine parent I am,’ I was thinking, but we found our way back and came to no harm. Seeing the snow leopard on the TV this morning brought that memory back to me from 29 years ago.

It’s strange because Louise has the radio on and they were just discussing childhood fears and here was I remembering Chris’s fear of wolves, then they played a song from 1981, the year he was born, synchronicity I think that is called.

The heatwave is over and it has been pouring with rain for several days, at least I don’t have to water the flowers. It always rains a lot during Wimbledon fortnight. Maybe the weather hasn’t heard that it has been cancelled.