David Charters: Endangered species rarely seen by the eyes of men. Women call it an ironing board

Feb 19 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

SWOLLEN bags of cloud, in every shade of weeping-grey, teased the sky over the village shop, where the bear-like man stood, thinking.

His hands were big, his stance was gentle and a bemused smile rested on a face still dressed with long hair and whiskers, suggesting an admiration of the old guitar groups and moonlit nights.

I was choosing some flowers for a spray.

“In trouble at home, are you?” he said, nodding his head slowly, like a priest who has heard it all before.

“No, I’m not,” I said. “I just thought it would be nice to have some flowers.”

The wind, in dark mood, shook the awning over the vegetables. Feet scurried and a cardboard box scudded along the pavement.

“Do you think it will snow?” I asked.

“Perhaps,” he said, “but we don’t really get snow round here any more.”

“Yes,” I said, “our son has never seen a proper fall of snow, like those we remember from childhood, and he’s nearly 12.”

I carried the flowers through the front-door and across the small hall to the kitchen. But the way was obstructed by my wife, leaning on an object, which featured a plank laid over two pairs of criss-crossed legs.

“What’s that?” I enquired, eagerly. “Ssshh,” said my wife putting a finger to her lips, before whispering, “it’s very shy and hardly ever comes out in daylight. Step softly.

“Here, we have an example of an endangered species rarely seen by the eyes of men. We women call it an ironing board.”

“Gosh!” I exclaimed. “What’s it for?”

“Well, hanging in the wardrobe, you will find shirts for work, all fresh and smooth and wrinkle-free, unlike their owner,” she replied.

“Oh,” I gasped, examining the contraption more closely, with the suspicion you might expect from a Himalayan yak-herder and part-time ascetic being introduced to a battery-charged balloon pump to help him celebrate his 97th birthday with gusto.

“How does it work?”

“I fear you’ll find it beyond your powers of understanding,” my wife said, a hopeless smile playing across the lovely turquoise of her eyes.

From this, you will gather that I have not yet entered the domain of modern man.

In our old- fashioned family, I go to work each day, while my wife is in charge of domestic matters. However, as I contemplated the mysteries of the ironing-board, a voice broke from upstairs.

“Dad,” he called. “Napoleon’s left flank has just broken to attacks from our infantry. The French are in full retreat.”

“A bit like me,” I shouted, backing down the hall, as the ironing-board advanced. I arrived in his room panting. He was playing a war game on the computer – another object of mystery to me.

Then I remembered that night when he first blinked in the naked light of the delivery room and my wife lay, pale, weak, and exhausted.

“You have a boy,” said the doctor.

We still have a boy, but as he approaches his 12th birthday, the boy reaches for the man – as yet unsure of what he will find and how it will change him.

Twelve is the last year of true childhood.

On those brooding mornings, when you fall hard, leaving a sliver of your knee on the concrete and then the pain comes, you don’t quite know whether to cry, or to close your eyes and turn your face away, waiting bravely for it to ease.

But Mum will always see the tremble on your chin.

At 12, you still want to walk with dad in the old field beneath the quarried walls. Now, somehow, the bramble bushes and the fern forests seem smaller than they did when the sun was so high.

But then you hear again the “ping” of a can dented by a pebble from your catapult. You watch the can spin and fall.

Then you are drawn back to that strange place, where, briefly, memory and promise touch as one.

You can run longer and faster on the endless days, and your tackles are harder than Dad’s, but you don’t let on.

You won’t tell him, either, that you had guessed what would happen in his story, long before he had reached the end, misty-eyed.

In the distance, not very far away now, there are girls, dances, held hands, ironed shirts and clean nails.

They can wait a little longer. Their time will come. For the moment, the call of a tent in a wet field is stronger.

“You know, I thought it might snow,” I said to our son, looking from his bedroom window.

“Maybe next year,” he said.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk