The Depth of the Oceans

The first time he walked away from me, I felt dizzy with pride and fear. With his buckled, podgy baby legs and crowing with delight, he managed four steps before landing with a bump on his bottom. I felt a seismic shift in my world, the first losing of my child. His sweet smell, wide blue eyes and total dependence on me had spun its spell and I could hardly bear to know that he would always walk away from me from this day.

He was all I had, and all I wanted. He seemed to recognise my needs as profoundly as I understood his. We would lie together, watching the clouds and giggling madly. Or, when I curled up on my side, sobs from the depths of the earth, he would stare patiently then reach out with a chubby finger to touch the tears rolling down my face.

Those years when he was a toddler were precious beyond measure. His first faltering steps became more confident and he found his own self, but he always came back to me, usually with that big smile that brought sunshine to my world. His rare tantrums were short and violently intense, tears like fat summer raindrops and screams that seemed to bring the whole world to a shuddering halt.

He walked away from me again when he started at nursery school, hand-in-hand with Mrs Hopkins. They turned to wave as she led him firmly through the doors that shut with a heart-thudding finality. And then I was free, and I had no idea how to kill those hours until he would be back with me again. I wandered aimlessly down the road and past the church to the hillside cemetery on Blandford Road, where tombstones defied the laws of gravity like so many dominoes frozen in the act of falling. A robin watched with bright eyes from a toppled vase. With my eyes constantly on the time I turned back to the school with churning stomach.

He told me little about this gargantuan step in his life although I asked about what he had done, who he had played with, whether he had liked it. The school told me there had been a few tears, but he had soon settled down to play with a boy called David. A gulp of jealousy shot into my mouth and I had to swallow hard to keep the wail of my own distress in check.

And that was that. Through nursery and into primary school, he was always spare with his words, seeming to stop and judge me before starting to speak. I don’t mean he was secretive. He told me about Philip Lazenby trying to get him to kick a football at one of the girls, and how Julia Thurber had threatened to report him for harassment. He worried desperately when the headmaster told them all they had to be careful on the roads after another child had a close shave outside the school. At other times, no words were needed. Our eyes met and we would understand completely. In those moments, I would feel my guts lurch with a desperate need to hold on to my dizzying love.

When he walked away to the bus stop for his first day in seniors, I was braced again for that aching separation. I’d seen the school, of course, when we went for their open day and watched the school choir perform Gilbert and Sullivan. He continued humming and singing those songs for weeks afterwards, but always stopped when I tried to join in. We bought his new uniform – a grey blazer with red trim, grey trousers and black shoes. He seemed fine about it, but wouldn’t put the new clothes back on for me to take a photo. He told me that little boys posed for photos and he needed to be grown up now, so the other boys would be his friend. He looked me straight in the eye, and told me with such firmness that I could only back down, heart fluttering with panic that I might be losing him.

The distance between me and the school was more than the few miles in the bus. It was a lifetime of dislocation between the daily rituals of walking with him down the hill then back again, of reading his face when he came out at the end of the day. I felt the loss of control gnawing at me. Sometimes I exhausted myself in my desperation to ensure his safety and welfare, countered with the fear of driving him away.

We measured his growth by the shelves he could reach in the kitchen when he arrived home hungry. If he was in a good mood, he would boil the kettle and offer me a cup of tea. I hung on those moments, dithering over whether I could ask him how his day had gone. If I did ask, I usually got no more than a grunt but, just occasionally, there would be some anecdote, told with the minimum of words. I counted on those moments and held them hostage as treasured fragments of his other world.

As he hung to me less, I wanted him more. The hours when he was at school felt unbearable. The reaching out to find him again at the end of the day was nearly always met with stinging indifference. If he had friends, they were locked away in a place that wasn’t for sharing. If he had enemies, he didn’t tell me. Aside from the occasional letter from school and perfectly adequate reports at parents’ evening, his world was no longer mine.

I took him to Leeds, carrying a lifetime of luggage up three flights of stairs to his halls of residence. I was bursting with pride and anxiety, trying too hard not to fuss as he stuck a poster over the sign telling him not to damage the walls with Blu-Tac. He looked furiously at me when he unpacked a bowl to find it had knocked against something else in its box and had a large chip missing from one side. As he took the last bag from the car, he told me I needn’t stay, that he’d be fine now. And with all the depth of the ocean in his eyes, he looked directly at me, then turned and walked away across the car park.

He’d never seemed interested in politics but within weeks he joined the Socialist Students’ Society and was soon broadcasting through the university’s radio station. I could only assume that his studies were going well. When he came home for holidays, he talked mostly about politics, of climate change, and the importance of social equity in education. I tried hard to keep up, bought The Guardian, did my best to understand about economics and national debt. He looked at me patiently and I felt a tide of blood hit my cheeks.

And then, last year, as the grimy days of winter slipped into spring, he walked away from me for the last time. He lied to me, then walked away, his eyes dancing as he turned and waved. He told me he was going on holiday, meeting friends for a week in the sun. He said he was travelling light to avoid long queues at the airport. But there were no friends. There was no sun-bathing. There was no late-night partying.

And now my heart is broken because he went east to the battle zone, into combat in a war that was not his to fight. He went in secret, and he lied to me, and I can’t bear the thought of my boy, my very own beautiful boy, walking away for his last time into the ambush that killed him.

He was all I had. Now there is nothing.