Packing our Toys

Our next-door-neighbour left and went to Poland on Wednesday. After doing a few tip runs, he packed everything he owned into his white van, gave all his neighbours a kiss and drove off at lunchtime. Where the smell of frying bacon poured out of his kitchen window, now there is emptiness.

I wish it were so easy. We are dividing our possessions into four. First, the privileged things that will fly in the hold, in the bosom of the family. Second, those items taking the sea route. Third, things that will wait in family members’ attics and last, those things going to new homes and tips.

I consider which are the first things I want to put into musty cupboards, unpack into new drawers and stick on whitewashed walls. Home will be where the toothbrush is.

We have always stored the children’s playmobil in a little travel case under the sofa. All the tiny families, the emergency service miniature personnel and the single pirate (from someone else’s set) have been waiting to go on a trip for the longest time. Whether or not they would have chosen to go to Lahore, they will fly with us, crowded into their foot-long camper van. In a way I envy them, for, unpacked, they will gather round the same little table under the same plastic tree with miniscule squirrels, birds and flowers and eat the same eggs from their frying pan. The same police service will keep them safe from the same robber and pirate and their nurses will carry their sick on the same stretcher. Life will carry on much the same, albeit under a thicker dust and with the occasional visit of a spider the size of their children.

Coming by sea are books. In their pallets they will be driven to the port and taken through the Mediterranean, the Suez, past Jeddah and Aden and to Karachi. There, through customs and onto a truck through the Sindh and Punjab to our street. There, we will open up our treasure chest and pore over pictures of children paddling in rivers and having sea-side holidays and ponies going to fairs and animals being naughty in farmyards. Just when our eyes will be adjusting to the new colour of twilight, the way traffic moves, the flutter of birds in roof-top cages, these books will pull us back with a jolt.

The tension could be life-long; it has been for me. I read about Jane Eyre on the Moors on a train across the Deccan and about Hardy’s West Country in my house in the Himalayas; I read novels of Lucknow and tea estates on National Express coach trips north, always looking out of another window, often on the wrong page. I only hope the confusion will be happy and that our children will know that Where the Wild Things Are is anywhere, that the food of Pakistan can make a Very Hungry Caterpillar fat and beautiful and that the Owl Babies’ mother will come to them wherever they are.