FLYING A KITE

FLYING A KITE   Certainly it was a perfect kite-flying day – a strong and slightly fitful breeze to tease the tree tops and the thermal up-draughts holding the hovering kestrels steady in the air. This obviously made it much worse for my grandson James who was complaining to me that his kite was broken.   Naturally, as all good granddads would, I consoled him with the offer to help him mend it. His face was a picture of blank non-comprehension. Not easily discouraged, I persisted: “How did you make it then? What kind of kite did you make?” The blank look became bleak. “Make? You don’t make kites! You can,” he continued hopefully, “buy them from Billy’s” [his local corner shop].   The conversation continued in this way with him insisting that you could not possibly make kites, and with me insisting equally if not more forcefully that I would never waste my money when I could make something myself which was at least as good as a shop-bought item. Me and my big mouth! There followed a whole day of kite making [two kinds, the standard shaped kite, for aerobatics, and the box kite for height and endurance]. James learned a lot and was both impressed and grateful and also – much more important – he was proud of his own achievements. For me, the episode raised a lot of questions about the kind of value systems we have instilled into children.   Oh I’m quite sure we did what we did for the very best of motives: we wanted to make sure that our children, and through them, our grandchildren did not suffer the frugalities and deprivations of our own post-war childhood. Be sure about it … we were certainly deprived in the years following World War II. At a time when women painted their legs with gravy browning and drew a pencil line up the back to imitate nylon stockings children could hardly expect to be swamped with expensive toys. James was most amused by this especially when I told him about the ‘giggle line’ – that line which is the delicious boundary between the stocking top and the soft flesh of the inner thigh. Get past there and you’re laughing. I’m a wicked granddad, as you may have guessed.   I told James about the rationing of food and just what culinary miracles his great grandma could perform with powdered egg, about sweets on ration and making ‘Spanish water’ by shaking [for hours] a stick of liquorice in a bottle of water. I told him of meatless meals for non-vegetarians and ‘things to do with potatoes’ and tins of sardines kept ‘under the counter’ for regular customers. He learned about ‘make do and mend’ with clothes on the ration and laughed at the thought of my poor sisters wearing recycled and re-sewn lace curtains as knickers, and even louder at his mental picture of my newly knitted swimming trunks sagging, bagging and sliding down my legs after my first dip in the sea. How dreadfully embarrassing!   So it wasn’t a shock for James to hear of toys but twice a year, one only at Birthdays and at Christmas, and never the toy on your Christmas List from our sorry short-change Santa. I told instead of the toys we made: kites [of course] and pigs and sticks [a piece of wood, 6”, tapered at both ends – the pig – hit on the tip with a stick, to tumble in the air and get whacked as far as we could] and whips and tops [hand-made] and weapons of every kind. We made spears and bows and arrows – all metal tipped with nails flattened by passing trains and collected later – and gat guns firing rivets. We developed deadly accuracy in our aim at cans, bottles and back doors but never, ever at living things. Costumes we made, and masks too for impromptu dramas and, if you were lucky, an obliging girl might show you the dance of the seven veils or a saucy impression of Mata Hari. It surprised James to hear that there was never an adult to teach us these skills, no helpful dad, no well-meaning protective mum to keep us from danger. There were just children learning from each other.   The lesson we learned best was to wait, and while we were waiting to plan and prepare well to make our bow or spear or arrow better than any arrow we’d made before. James questioned the how of fletching [the word was as new to him as the concept] and I explained how we chose and cut the arrow haft from sturdy straight streamside willows and flattened our nails thanks to the Great Western Railway and mounted them in the split end. We then, I continued, bound the arrowhead to the haft with twine filched from anywhere we could, and secured in with road tar melted down in tins cans on the crofts – as we called the flattened areas which once were houses before the bombs fell. These were the same fires, I rambled on, that we melted lead from derelict houses to make new soldiers cast into clay moulds impressed with the old ones. None of us got lead poisoning, none of us were badly burned. Oh and we decorated everything: we cut rings, triangles, zigzags in the bark to leave the bare wood as contrast. And none of us cut ourselves too badly nor even thought of using our knives to injure anybody or any thing. This would be out of the question, against the rules –our rules, not grown-up rules – but that’s a telling for another tale. We added feathers, some dyed, some not and made patterns with the heads of tacks. We knew the value of time and learned patience and that not everything could be had immediately.    “It must have been fun,” concluded James, musing aloud. And I thought, with a frisson of shock, “Yes, it was. It really was.” I wish I’d have realised that before I tried to compensate for my deprivations by buying my children loads of solitary toys and protecting them from the dangers of the streets. I wish I’d remembered with equal force the value of independent make do and mend, the sense of achievement in the making and – James got it right – the sheer fun of it all. I wish I’d been a better dad, and I wish my friends had too.   I feel such guilt in my old age: in bequeathing my children the gifts of tomorrow, I buried the treasures of yesterday.