Observations placeholder

Rosalind Heywood – The Infinite Hive

There are two degrees of 'out-thereness ' : images, representative or symbolic, inside one's mind, and - yet more 'out there’ - exterior hallucinations. But these can be symbolic too. At the beginning of our post-war family crisis I lay down on our tennis court to force myself to look the fact in the face that my husband and I were dead tired, no longer young and might shortly have no income. As I did so, in the sky beyond the surrounding trees there loomed up a vast ominous black hand.

Then it moved downward towards me, very slow and menacing, in fingers contracted like the claws of a bird of prey. It was about, I knew, to seize and crunch me to pieces. At the last moments just as it was reaching me - I was paralysed with terror- it dissolved very gently into a cloud of harmless smoke, and in a few moments the sky was clear and blue once more.

When I had pulled my shaking self together I tried to work out what it might mean - having learnt by experience that that sort of thing does not happen for nothing - and came to the conclusion that it might be a symbol that we should nearly go under. But not quite.

That was in fact how things turned out.