Safety

Safety! It's an illusion, isn't it? And of all illusions, what's safe about a French safe? Apparently he always carried them, and 50 years ago that was not something everyone did, certainly not anyone I had ever met up with. Why did he do 'what he did' , I asked? It was my overwhelming irresistibility and instant love on his part, so he claimed. Now if that wasn't straight out of a storybook. Ah! But storybooks are not real life.

Real life was something I had had very little exposure to. (There we go, ending a sentence with a preposition. But as Churchill said upon being reprimanded for doing the same, "Up with this I will not put." So, there!) My mother chose to retreat from life, it not being to her liking, and built a sheltered life for herself in a Grade Two classroom where she was always very much in control and she could feel safe. At home, she continued to be the authority, distant and not to be questioned and if "It says so in the book." it was not to be questioned. The book might be the Holy Book or a textbook, or some other book? It was in the book, wasn't it?

But what we long for in our dreams and what life is really like - now that was not in the book, or at least not any book I was permitted access to. The facts of life were limited to "What every young woman should know", a curiosity provided to my mother by my grandmother and passed on to me by my mother. Inadequate and misleading, later reinforced by well meaning teachers who assured us that every word of the Bible is true and meant to be taken literally. A woman who has "slept with" a man, albeit unwillingly, must marry him or be stoned as stands in Leviticus. No decent man will "have" a woman who is no longer "pure".

Rules intended to keep us safe, not ever to be questioned, protecting us from real life, from "the English" surrounding us, who were not to be trusted, who were not like "us". God was on our side, protecting us, keeping us safe, if we didn't question the rules (and kept away from the English).

If I had ignored him when he said "Hello" to me that first day. Then I would have been safe - or would I?