One red VW

If I ever do write the memoir of my time in Durham, which I want to call 'Driving in England', the story of Anna's ascent of a neighbor's car will have to find its way in. She has always been a climber, and is pretty skilled, actually. If I hadn't seen her standing on top of our car a number of times already, I might have freaked out and not just told her to get down. Might have been better all around if I had. Because of course she didn't get down, as she could see I was in a conversation with a different neighbor. As I turned back to check, the owner of the car and his parents (?) emerged from the house shouting, first at Anna, and then at me.

 

I am pretty sure nobody has ever shouted quite so abusively at me before. The man yelled about his car, worried that Anna had damaged it (with her crocs?), while the other two people shouted rhetorical questions about the quality of my parenting. Shocked, I took Anna by the hand and walked away, utterly speechless. He demanded an apology and threatened to call the police. Nothing I said made any difference, though; he just kept getting angrier and eventually swore at me in front of the children. By the time I got Anna back to our house she was crying. The man and the two older people with him spent the next 45 minutes wandering around the car musing loudly over the damage Anna caused. So when I had to walk past a few minutes later to collect Iain from another neighbor's, they started in on me again. Thankfully the other neighbor offered to keep Iain a little while longer and walk him back, thus sparing him the ordeal. Eventually the owner of the car called me a moron, and demanded to speak to my husband, since I was useless.

 

Obviously Anna shouldn't have been there. But I was (and am) completely flabbergasted by the response. Really? This is the procedure for dealing with an 11-year-old girl climbing on your car? I apologised; I offered to pay for the damages. He didn't seem even to hear that. He followed me home and returned later to speak to Lewis.

 

Tonight as Anna was getting ready to go to bed, she clung to me in the way she does in a scary scene in a movie. I asked her what she was afraid of. 'Him', she said.

 

I didn't have to ask her who 'he' was.