My first post-university summer has been subdued. If I imagine my footprints drawn on a large map, they would be mostly concentrated in an inky blot. Uninspiring though they may seem, my small pilgrimages to coffee shops and friends’ houses have left room for new observations. For example, there is a lavender bush on my road that’s been taunting me on my way to and from work. I have taken to giving it a good pull as I walk past, looking left and right as though I’m breaking some sort of law, before stripping one or two unlucky victims of their violet garlands. Jamming my palms together, I crush the scent into my skin and give it a good sniff.

 

 

If I had to guess why I’ve been routinely dismantling my neighbour’s garden I’d say that it’s something to do with my childhood memories of France, my Grandad’s place there, and the violently beautiful stench of lavender that takes me back to those summers with immediacy. Until I was 12, I had only ever gone to France for my holidays. I know, poor me. At that time my parents could not really afford to travel anywhere else, though, so it was fortunate that my mum’s parents had a place in Castillones. Annual family holidays meant a lengthy car journey in a fit-to-burst Citroen C1, an overnight stop in Premiere Classe (or as my Dad called it, ‘Derriere Classe’), and, most importantly, they meant a few weeks with my only present family. Despite this fact, I spent a lot of the time alone. As an only-child with little to do but witter on to my adult companions as they shared wine, I read hungrily and played games with myself. The themes of these games would change regularly, depending on that summer’s latest obsession; snake hunting and lizard trapping one year, loom-band entrepreneurship and Katniss Everdeen impersonation the next. By the time I had reached my teens, both my grandparents had passed away.  My first flight signified my last trip there; we scattered my Grandma’s ashes by the outdoor chair where she would sit chain-smoking and telling various people to “bugger off”. My Grandad, who had spent most of his time looking after her, and was often at the receiving end of such affectionate insults, died a few years later. From what I can remember, he was painfully kind. Beset with Parkinson’s from his early 40s, it really did border on painful to watch him doing his utmost to have harmony with his surroundings: to smile, when the muscles in his face were telling him ‘no’.

 

 

 

Being 13, moody, and altogether ungrateful, I put the thought of t my grandparent’s place to the back of my mind, and neglected to remember much of it since. To be honest, I’ve forgotten a lot of things about my family. ‘Forgotten’ might seem a strange word to use in this case, but it’s hard to put in any other way. I suppose I’ve ‘forgotten’ them either because I only knew them as a child, or because I never knew them in the first place; I live in a house decorated with photographs of people I’ve never met, whose lives are in unwitting competition with my parents’ tilted memories. My Dad often tells me that his sister, Marie, ‘would’ve adored me’. There’s a bleached picture of her in our bathroom, grinning widely, her good health arrested in the little wooden frame next to the soap dish. “It’s a great shame”, he’d say, shaking his head. For a long time I’ll admit I found it difficult to recognise how it was a shame. If I’d never known my Dad’s sister, his mother, or his father, how was I to sense any great cavern where their company should be? I now recognise that my Dad was shaking his head because he wishes he could have witnessed that relationship for himself, not because he feels sorry for me. 

 

 

A few years ago I began to reevaluate my learned apathy towards being an only child in a tiny family. Being raised on your own means people might, albeit jokingly, vocalise their suspicions that you’re selfish, a weirdo, or a selfish weirdo. It also means, rather paradoxically, that people tell you you’re lucky to be that way. This inconsistency has always grated on me a little, but I realised it probably wasn’t productive for me to confirm the assumptions by kicking off about them. All I knew was that setting the Christmas table for three upset my Mum, and I know that because she told me. Eventually, I realised that it upset me too. 

 

Christmas has always been a small-scale affair in my household. Every year we pay a visit to a nearby Christmas-tree farm, where my Dad willfully misjudges the height of our living room ceiling, and my Mum merrily tells him she’s “never going to spend that much on a fucking tree again”. But, while I appreciated my parents’ commitment to buying real trees, and cooking meals that could’ve easily fed the 5000, it became increasingly difficult to hear about and envision the family festivities of others. In a way, my summer and winter holidays had this envy in common. I was hyper-aware of and sensitive to other families and their traditions. Of course, my being an only-child would seem a minor part of this; if we were a small household amidst a wider family things might be different. Perhaps I would’ve attended a wedding by now, or been able to go to the pub with cousins. Perhaps I would’ve been offered a cigarette by a drunk Auntie, or shared coffee with her the next day, when she was hungover. Nevertheless, the fact remains that my sibling-less status went hand in hand with these what-ifs; I started to wish for nieces in my future, if I couldn’t properly be one myself. In ‘typical’ only-child fashion I also started to butt heads with my parents more as my departure for University approached: impatient for my freedom and nervous for its imminent arrival.

 

 

Over the course of my first year at Oxford my world expanded in all the ways you might expect. I turned up to room 13, frightened to even unpack my bags. Eight weeks and eight-too-many Bridge nights later, I was packing the same bags with reluctance, having made fast friends from rooms 12 and 14. Moving to Oxford I had temporarily left a small town and my childhood home behind: swapping family for fresher-inherited furniture, sick-smelling Wetherspoons for a posher sick-smelling Wetherspoons. I realise now that this relatively minor shift was something I had desperately needed. Returning home to see tinsel-adorned bannisters and holly branches wedged behind picture frames inspired in me a festive cheer so intense it felt cloying. It gnawed at me, just how fortunate I was. A couple of weeks later I was setting the table for Christmas dinner, experiencing the familiar subdued sadness I’d felt in recent years, but this time it didn’t cloud reality. Seeing my home friends again felt refreshing, as did going back to work at my old pub job. My university friends, although new, followed through on their promises to meet me; I went ice-skating, Christmas shopping, and (of course) drinking.

 

 

In those years leading up to Oxford I had felt profoundly unlucky. I didn’t ever look closely at the pictures around my house because they never felt like mine to cherish; I wanted a family, but not my family. Running around Castillones pretending to be the protagonist of a YA novel was my own personal heaven, regardless of my not having a brother, sister, or cousins to join in. Attending multiple funerals and zero weddings, though, did cause me to become frustrated and upset with my situation. Now that I’m 20, I know that I have to learn to live with the what-ifs and, as I write this, I realise ‘forgetting’ was in fact the right word because it leaves room to be reminded and to remember. My family, here or not, is at least mine; their pictures are my pictures. To quote millionaire Molly Mae: “Everyone has the same 24 hours in a day”, and the cliche, misused as it so awkwardly was in her case, is bang-on in mine. The hours of my life have just been divided differently: between my parents, my school and work friends, and, crucially, the few influential adults in my life outside of my household. A few months ago, I asked an old friend of my Grandad’s to meet me in London for a drink. Instead of glazing over when he told me that “Colin would have been proud”, I was genuinely moved. He fucking would have been, I thought, immodestly and a little inebriated. 

 

 

This summer I’ve been inelegantly inhaling lavender because I want to be reminded. I want to be connected to, and proud of, my family. Going to Oxford provoked challenging insecurities. Attending guest nights with lawyers, hedge-fund managers, and academics was an extreme schooling in others’ families and, after the initial panic that my parents didn’t ‘fit in’ with that, came the relief that they didn’t. I was fortunate enough to bring people to Oxford who hadn’t been there before, with whom I’d spent countless hours of my life talking crap and arguing over the size of an overpriced Christmas tree. My Dad was a cycling top amidst a sea of suits, and that’s a small thing I can’t afford to not be proud of.  

 

 

Whilst I’m absolutely against the idea that you ‘can’t miss what you never had’, (because I did, for a very long time) and while I intuitively still prickle slightly when people comment on my family situation, the one thing they are right about is that I am very “lucky”. Not because I don’t have an annoying brother, but because I’m the product of a richly interesting group of people who have, through the albeit ‘tilted’ memories of my parents, contributed to the better aspects of who I am now. Apologies in advance to my neighbour, but I plan on stealing your lavender for a long time. ∎

 

 

Words by Alice Robey-Cave. Images courtesy of Alice Robey-Cave.