The playground, the plaits, the policeman

There is a playground nestling in the near corner of the woods known as Keskuspuisto, the central park, although it is not really a park at all. It is woodland, and it stretches out and joins other woods and eventually becomes the taiga forest that continues until Lapland, until the latitudes where trees give up, finally leaving behind just ankle-high, twisted, die-hard brothers of the silver birch. The playground is on dry pinewood moorland, the pines are tall and straight and beautiful with their red trunks, all bathed in the faded golden of light of summers long ago.

A is very young, perhaps three years old.

As in all her memories, she is both the rememberer and the remembered, but in this one, very strongly so. She is three years old, let's say, because it is as close as needs to be. Three years old, and it is golden summer.

She is little, she knows this. She is little but as yet somehow invincible, sprung like a bow and arrow, simultaneously arching, aiming, firing, and hitting life. She knows the world was put there for her. She knows her cousin is there to look after her and be with her while her mother works on her studies - her "gradu", graduation piece, so central a word in the daily vocabulary of her world she too works on her own "gladu". Her r's don't roll yet, but as yet, she knows this doesn't matter. Her mother gives her the cardboard backing from one of her graphed notepads, and she folds it in half and writes her gladu on it in yellow crayon. She is still very little, she the rememberer knows this, because at four she began writing stories others could read too, and her gladu is just yellow zig-zag.

Yellow zig-zag across the pages of her gladu, line after line. She the remembered looks at her gladu and feels a dawning understanding of it being just yellow zig-zag. There is an unsettlingness in this understanding, the precursor to the desperation she will learn to experience later.

There is a golden day out in the playground by the woods. The most fascinating of the playground toys is an assortment of wooden blocks, painted in chipped and faded green, or yellow, or red, the size of bricks, stored in a big lockable playground toy box. The big boys stand them up, one after another, making winding, snakey rows of them, finally knocking the last one over and setting them all tumbling down, domino-like. A longs to play this, too, but there is no possibility of ever joining in. It is what the big boys do, and she is three years old, and a girl, with plaits long enough to sit on. A and her big cousin, fourteen years old, play and talk. A worships her cousin. She is not a grown-up, but neither is she a child, yet she plays and talks with A and doesn't laugh at what she says.

How it comes about is lost to she the rememberer, and she the remembered cannot tell. One of A's plaits comes undone - the ribbons of the late sixties come loose easily, especially from sleek, slippery hair on lively heads. There is a policeman at the playground - why, she the remembered doesn't ask, and she the rememberer doesn't know - mere coincidence, no doubt, yet it is this coincidence which creates the memory, ensuring the golden day on the playground doesn't disappear and melt into and become one with other golden days on other playgrounds. A and her cousin approach the policeman and ask him for help. The colours are faded in the beautiful manner of sixties-seventies colour photographs, when the policeman plaits A's hair in the playground by the woods. A sees his blue uniform jacket and bright buttons. She knows the world was put there for her, with policemen to plait her hair at playgrounds.