A memory

It's an autumn day, cold enough for us children to be wrapped up in duffel coats. The year is perhaps 1980 or 1981, and I'm five or six years old. We're walking home down the hill from school, my brother and sister and mother and me, swishing our way through the autumn leaves swept onto the grass beside the path, though my sister is pushed in a buggy. The autumn has just started to touch the air; it's perhaps cold enough for hot Ribena when we get home. At any rate we'll be going over to play at my grandmama's house later.

We reach the bottom of the hill, and turn into the drive of the house there. My mother rummages through the bag her uncle made for her to find the key to the door. The children cluster around, waiting, anxious to get inside. She finds the key, and turns the it in the lock.

At that moment, suddenly, something happens, outside of the children's experience-- something they have no word or name or idea for.

How shall I describe it? It's a howling, like the wailing of a demon with a thousand tongues, a noise like the noise of nothing I'd seen on earth or imagined in my mind. My mother's hand stays frozen, the key half-turned, and a look of fear in her eyes I'd never seen.

Perhaps ten or twenty seconds pass, while the howling runs its course.

The sound ends. The universe returns to normal operation. My mother switches back into everyday mode, and opens the door, as she does every day. But the children won't switch back that easily, and remain full of questions:

"What was it, Mummy?"
"Oh. Nothing."
"What...?"
"Never mind."

She lets us in, and goes about the everyday business of making Ribena and telling children to hang up their coats. The question is firmly closed. The single drop of fear and uncertainty remains in the minds of the children.

Later, I ask her about the noise. Perhaps it's that time had made the question less potent, perhaps being the eldest has its benefits-- who knows?

"It's the four minute warning."
"What's that?"
"Well, if anyone was going to fire a nuclear missile at us, they'd know about it four minutes before it hit. Then they'd make that alarm sound. I suppose it was only a test; I thought the best thing to do for us was to carry on as though I hadn't heard it."
"But what good would it do if you only knew you had four minutes before the missile hit us?"
"Well, I don't know. People might want to say goodbye to the cat, or something."

The phrase is as fresh in my mind twenty years later.

I've been reminded of this by all the talk about how children have reacted to hearing about the September 11th attacks. Suddenly the vague fear of things you didn't understand was replaced by the threat of death with four minutes' warning. It was a lot to carry for a five-year-old, but then, that was what the world was like back then.