I am reading this on behalf of my wife, Paula.
I would be over at Hurworth Grange if I could. I’d go to the cafe with my mum who also wishes that I could be there. As a child I used to play there, on the swings, up trees, in the backwoods where we weren’t allowed to stray.
I lived on the Grange estate and the community centre grounds were like an extended back garden. The sense of unfettered freedom and space I had as a child here is everything I don’t have now as a person bedridden with ME.
It’s wildflowers, birdwatching, running, climbing, swinging, skating, see-sawing, sliding, rolling, playing hide and seek and collecting too many conkers. A visit back to my parents in adulthood would include a visit back to the Grange which felt like a recalibrating with a few lungfuls of garlic-scented air in the spring.
It was home, yet a place I’ll be unlikely to visit again due to the severity of my currently untreatable disease. It’s often in my thoughts as I lie in bed, unable even to bear weight on the legs that once climbed oak trees and clambered over the model railway.
The legs that were stung by nettles soothed with dock leaves and scratched by brambles that grew wild there. It’s where myself and my best friend counted hundreds upon hundreds of ladybirds in the swarms of 1976.
I’d do anything to have my legs scratched by brambles growing at the Grange again. In the meantime, I go there in dreams and wander the desired paths back home via the replanted orchard that was once overgrown.
That’s where I thought Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox lived, who were characters in the books I borrowed from the village library there. More than anything, I’d just like to be able to go to the cafรฉ with my mum for lunch.
