The Summer Before The Summer Before

That was the first time it happened, or let’s put it this way – this was the first time I became aware of it happening. 

It was Assembly.  I was 14; that precarious age caught in the headlight’s beam between childhood and adolescence, and not really sure which I was comfortable in; on the one hand wanting to be a grown up but knowing I was completely inadequate; how on earth would I cope – and yet I knew I was no longer a child.  A new world was beckoning, but was that finger calling me on a warning too?  I had had a poor start, burned too many bridges, got myself a reputation as a trouble-maker, a liar, a bit of a joke, and yet I felt a sense of knowingness, an awareness that some aspects of this World I had been dropped into, unasked and uncared for, was a huge game.  I wasn’t certain of the rules, most of which I saw as a challenge, to be broken or bent.  But I felt that it was all a performance.  As if we had all been allotted roles, given our scripts to learn before we were sent out to play our pre-ordained part in the drama which someone else had written.  But enough of me, as everyone would soon find out.

This was the summer before the summer before.  The summer after the summer after was when I truly escaped and became the writer of my own drama – no less dangerous, no less stupid, but at least the words were mine. But ever since this happened in my mind, my own timescale, this was the starting point – the summer before the summer before.

It was Assembly; that morning ritual we were forced – no, went willingly actually, to attend.  Girls at the front in neat rows, a production line of pony-tails as they gazed up to the sunlit stage.  Us boys behind them in serried rows, a bit of joshing, flicking ties or bored shoe-gazeing.  A hum of whispered conversations slowly subsided as Sam Chivers, deputy-head and ex-army, took two paces forward and as if by magic and a slight downward motion of his palms and a stern glance above his bristling moustache and cruel mouth calmed the hordes.  Not until complete silence and all eyes to the front was achieved would Naylor, the head, make his appearance.  Tall and white-haired, his black cloak billowing behind him, he walked briskly and took his allotted place centre stage behind the small wooden altar upon which he placed a single sheet of foolscap paper.  Looking up – not at us, but to his imagined maker and master he said ‘Let Us Pray’.

It was at this precise moment that it happened; that slight pause before the chorus of voices united around the words ‘Our Father’.  Suddenly the World stopped.  I was enveloped, not in those familiar words but in a blanket of silence.  I looked around and yes, everyone was repeating the old mantra, some as if they meant it, others blankly uttering the words, much as they would their times tables, a format of words everyone knew and none questioned.  But here is the strange thing.  Not a sound did I hear.  I was wrapped up, enveloped in silence.  A stillness that I had never experienced, even in those early waking moments when part of your mind can’t quite let go of the dream, there is still a consciousness of the world.  Now there was nothing.  I felt I was alone in the Universe.  I felt that time had stood still.  And for me, it had.

I realised at once that I was on my own, that I had maybe slipped the bounds of human existence, that I had escaped Time itself.  Everyone else was reciting the familiar words but I couldn’t hear them.  I saw their mouths moving, I could lip-read the words and yet I heard nothing.  I felt an immense almost unbearable lightness.  I was soaring above this material world looking down on the assembled school, on a different plane completely. 

And then, just as suddenly it stopped.  Time returned.  My ears were full of the sound as ‘for ever and ever, Amen’ rang out.  And here is the strange thing, I was also aware of my own voice, clear and yet in concert with everyone else, saying those well-trodden words too.

I looked around me wondering of course if it had happened to everyone else as well as me; but I knew with a certainty I had rarely felt that this had only happened to me.  I had stopped time.  Of course, I knew that I hadn’t stopped Time itself; the world kept turning, the whole school had continued as if nothing had happened.  Indeed, one part of me knew that I had continued reciting the words while at the same time for me Time had stood still.  At least the only part of me that mattered – my mind, had stood still, had slipped the bonds of Time itself.

 I was exhilarated and scared in equal measure.  I mean, I always knew I was different.  I had overheard my Grandmother telling a neighbour that I was adopted.  That word, heard at five years old had stuck in my mind, an un-shiftable stone that I used as an excuse for my bad behaviour as a defence against a World I wasn’t really part of.  I was in the wrong play; the wrong script was in my hands.  I lay awake at night dreaming of my ‘real parents’ who for reasons unknown had abandoned me, given me away.  And a distance grew between me and my adoptive parents, who I only learnt at sixteen were not exactly that either.  My mother was my birth mother but my Dad had adopted me when I was four.  But nothing had ever been explained, I was never told – or if I had been I had never understood.  But there it was – I always knew I was different, and this incident, this stopping of Time I had achieved only confirmed it. 

I had stopped Time.  Of that, I was sure.  And it happened again later that same day.  It was maths; algebra – a subject I struggled to comprehend, where I loved the beauty, the symmetry of Geometry.  Norman Phillips, the maths genius but hopeless communicator, was scribbling formulae on the revolving blackboard with one hand while rubbing out earlier meaningless scribbles with the other.  And it happened again.  Time stood still.  I was again wrapped in that silence.  I could see him scribbling but not hearing the scratchy sound it made, I could see my classmates, either bored or trying to concentrate; I could even see a bee outside the classroom window repeatedly flying into the invisible pane of glass – but I knew I was alone again.  I was flying above the class now, looking down on them.  No-one could see me because I had stopped Time.  I flew out of the window and out of the school completely.  Free at last I soared like an eagle over the small town that was at the same time my whole world and my prison.  And I had stopped Time.  The cars still crawled along the roads, people – heads bowed – went in and out of shops and I was flying above them, free as a bird.

This time my Time stoppage lasted for me what seemed an hour or so, but when I returned to my body it may only have been minutes, or seconds even.  But it was so real for me.  It was my secret.  I told nobody.  I knew anyway that no one would believe me – they never believe us children, do they?  But that is a different story for another day perhaps.  It didn’t matter.  This ability was mine and mine alone, I didn’t need to share it with anyone else. 

This phenomenon lasted only a few months.  I seemed to have little control over it.  It came and went of its own accord.  But it excited me, it became my reason for living, my way of escaping the world I was trapped in.  I was capable of stopping Time.  This wasn’t mere daydreaming.  This was realer than real, far more clear and meaningful than mere existence.