New Shoes and the Smell of Tar

 

“New shoes and the smell of tar”, came right out of the blue from the lips of my eight-year old as we buzzed along yesterday afternoon in our well-dented, totally paid for and very cheap to run red Peugeot 106. (Remove legs before entering). We were girls on a mission. Two pairs of feet needed shoes, one mad mother needed to get out. Some might call it retail therapy; yesterday I called it breathing. Maybe that had as much to do with the huge blue sky so intense that I nearly veered off the road looking at it and its fat roosting clouds, white, underbellied grey. Zooming along these untrafficked roads north across the fens towards Norfolk you felt you were entering Spring not as a season but as a place. Behind you was gloomy damp, ahead bright blue, an infinity of sky with planks of black-brown earth and green field beneath. Alongside us amongst hedgerows still twiggy and bare, sporadic willows sported their first flush of bud.
“What colour would you call that willow?” I asked my daughter. “I need it for my blog”
“Yellow,” she said, “a sort of goldy green.”
“Perfect,” I murmured, “Nature’s first green is gold.” The good old Robert Frost poems your teachers made you learn by heart never leave you. (Why aren’t children memorizing poems?)
“Nee-naw trator” shouted the two-year old who loves all things flashing and loud.

A plough was turning up crumbly earth exactly the colour of Green and Blacks 70% chocolate. You could have licked up the crumbs. The earth here is so rich. Black Gold the farmers call it. It gives up hordes of lettuces, beetroot, carrots, celery to the hands of Polish harvesters and the supermarket trolley. We live in the salad bowl of England. I find myself strangely proud of this. What I once saw as the dullest landscape on earth now seems a rich, industrious place busy about the business of feeding the nation. (Roll on Socialist murals of headscarfed workers, sleeves rolled up, pitchforks in hand. Are all the eastern Europeans working here exerting an invisible force on the local psyche?)

But yesterday it was the smell that caught us unawares. Not flowers or grass, not any of the beautiful smells you expect to herald Spring. It was tar. Steam-rolled and steaming, blacker even than the earth. The men are always out working, but for the first time this year we had the window open. It was warm. Everyone was smiling. Three men in earmuffs managed machines. Two young men were propping a van door open. One of them had a glint of gold in his tooth.

In Downham Market where there is never any traffic and plenty of parking, we bailed out into hot sunshine. Smith’s Children’s Shoes, tiny and particular, blessed with baskets of toys with which to occupy one while the other is fitted, equipped us with two new pairs of shoes. One statutory black school Start-Rites (sound of ripping Velcro), the other a bright red pair of brass buckle Mary Janes that gave the wearer so much joy she went out of the shop bouncing. Bounce Bounce to the door. “Bye lady!” Bounce into the street. Living Shirley Hughes, we entered stained-glass Reeds, the family owned department store that, unlike our village which has everything you need and nothing you want, has everything you need and a few corners in which you’d like to snoop one day when you are not negotiating a bouncing red-shoed two-year old through the china department. “Shoes!” she waved them at the lady in the pinny. It looked alarmingly like a kick too near a teapot. “Shoes!” to the café girl.

Good girls get to have fruit shoots and dotty biscuits (and cups of tea and a simple butterfly cake. I had to have one. Where have you even seen one for sale in the last 15 years? Besides the filling was soo utterly creamy). The little one bites every Smartie off the top of the biscuit; the big one has discovered that baked Smarties will crack and peel so that if you are careful you can eat a whole half shell on its own before devouring the rest of the Smartie. It’s one of the well-kept secrets of childhood.

By the time we got back to the car the afternoon had gone. The air was cold again; grey had swallowed up the blue. Overhead an early moon hung in the sky. My moon maidens made me sing. We sang the three note moon song in unison, in solo, laughing the way home. There were new shoes on their feet. We passed the roadworks, diggers asleep. The spot where the young man smiled, a glint of gold in his teeth.