March - a short story by by Aileen Cleave

 March

I think I was something of an odd child, wrapped up in my  own imaginary world made wonderfully colourful by the books I read.  Not for me the cold, grey streets of fifties England, not when I was able to inhabit the seemingly idyllic setting of a genteelly shabby country house in Massachusetts, where all things masculine had been despatched to fight a distant war.

This was the home of the March family, of Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, of Marmee and Aunt March.  There were, after all, many parallels between the March family and my family, the Connollys, or at least as I saw it.  We too, were a family of 4 children, albeit one was a boy, we too had a father overseas in the Royal Navy and we too had difficulties finding enough money for the new clothes we all thought we needed.  If I had a less than vague awareness that we did not wholly share the March family’s gentility, I chose to ignore it and attribute the difference to the disparity in time.

I was Jo, of course.  Jo who scribbled away at lurid (for that time) romantic stories in the attic of Orchard House, now a protected historic building, having also been the family  home of the author, Louisa M Alcott.  My decidedly more humble family home didn’t have an attic, and with the advent of television, a quiet, private space was very hard to find.  There was the dining room, but there was no  central heating, so to heat this largely unused room , i would carry a shovel filled with glowing coals from the grate in the sitting room to the grate in the dining room.  Incredible to think I did this (and at times to the bedrooms upstairs) from the age of about 12.  But, oh¡ it did make the room cosy, and I loved to be there on my own and scribble stuff just as awful as Jo March’s early endeavours.   

Little Women wasn’t the only book to have a lasting impact on me.  How lucky was I to have a reasonably stocked library on my route to and from school, both parents who were avid readers and encouraged me - unless there were dishes to be washed or errands to be run,!  I knew where every book was on the library shelves.  I remember vividly my first sojourn into the adult section and stumbling upon Colette, a risque French author some light years away from those grey northern  streets I mentioned earlier.

There is a reason these books withstand the passage of time.  They burrow deep into one’s psyche , they express at a time when we have neither the eloquence nor the courage to do so ourselves,  all the hopes and fears and ambitions of our young lives.  Most importantly for many of an introspective slant, they show that the world is full of people like ourselves, people with creative ambitions and obstacles to overcome.

I wasn’t lucky enough to meet a Professor Bhaer who put me right about emulating cheap romantic fiction.  And in truth, I was much more enamoured of Laurie next door at The Larches, than i was of the rather dull German professor.  I remember being incensed when Laurie married the feather-brained Amy.    But I am lucky enough to have met, here in Spain at a time in my life when u expected less, like minded people who feel the need to express themselves through the written word.