Cake or Death

I was reading Mrs Jones' blog earlier tonight, and enjoying it very much. The lady can write, she has excellent taste in music, and she knows her Molesworth. I often want to slip into Molesworth mode on this blog, because I often do so in my head, but I always fear no one will get it, eheu.

Mrs Jones wrote this rather amazing post about the day she nearly died.

She asked if other people had had brushes with death. I've had a near miss, and as I started writing about it, it quickly got too long to leave as a comment. So here we are. Again.

I was 17 years old. Friends of the family were throwing their annual weekend-long garden-party, affectionately known as "Sports Day," that we'd gone to since I was about six. These friends had, and presumably still own, the most beautiful country house I've ever seen, a proper rambling old English manor with acres of land, herb garden, croquet lawn, stone-flagged kitchen, Aga stove, intricate Victorian cornicing and panelling, rugs, deep fireplaces, a stained-glass conservatory, grapevine growing above the indoor pool, a maze of stone buildings, archways, courtyards, secret staircases and passageways, everything, all hidden deep, deep in the Somerset countryside. Oh my God, that house. I've seen lots of old rambling country houses, and none can hold a candle to that one.

The year I was 17, I can't remember what the fancy-dress theme was. (There was always fancy dress, and a cabaret on the Saturday night at which guests got up and did turns, and my mother played the piano, and a quiet, genteel, tweedy, elegant man called John who was a Notting Hill antiques dealer with grown-up children and legs that went on for ever always did a glamorous and exuberant drag act.) I was dressed as Pierrot that year, in a costume I'd made from white bedsheets and black pompons, my face whited out. I remember there was a girl about my age who played endless Irish reels on the fiddle. She was brilliant at the violin, and really cool and composed while she played, and I wished I were her as I watched her. John's act involved fishnet stockings, a black Cleo wig, some feather boas and a lot of high kicks. I don't remember anything else about the cabaret that year.

There was a boy of my age who'd also been coming to Sports Days since childhood: we'd known each other, although only seeing each other at these yearly mad weekends in the country, since we were six. At that age, he knew his way from home for a mile in every direction in the countryside where he lived. I complained to my mother that this was unfair, how could he possess such knowledge, of the vast, unfathomable countryside, with just plant life for landmarks. My mother replied that I knew my way for a mile in every direction from my home in London, which would be terribly confusing to a country person. I thought about this for a moment and felt better.

We hadn't both been to Sports Day every year, and I don't think we'd seen each other for a few years, not since our friendship was one between children. Now we were 17, we caught a glint in each others' eyes. We sloped off at every opportunity over the weekend, got in trouble because he was found in my tent after lights-out, and on the Sunday afternoon, while the children at the party were doing the annual Treasure Hunt and the adults were sleeping off hangovers, we took some ancient, heavy, black, wicker-basketed bicycles from an old stone stable and went for a ride.

It was a glorious July day, and we disappeared into the surrounding maze of lanes. We stopped in a sunny cornfield, huge and wide under a thick blue sky, far away from tutting adults, and I remember thinking Yes, this is exactly the kind of thing one should do when one is young. It was a lazy, golden, buzzing afternoon in cider country. As Spike Milligan once wrote of English summer: 'Everywhere was saying bethankit.' Apples were ripe. Corn was fat. London was a hundred and forty miles away.

On the way back to the house, we were whizzing downhill along one of those narrow, high-hedged, West Country lanes, maybe six feet wide and flanked by deep green hedges at least ten feet tall: a steep, narrow tunnel of hedgerow, closed in with just the sound of ticking bicycle wheels and burbling birdsong. We were tearing along at breakneck speed, me in front, an ear-to-ear smile of exhilaration on my face.

A crossroads appeared ahead (if one single-track lane crossing another can be called a crossroads). I couldn't hear or see anything coming, of course, because the hedges were ten feet high. But what were the chances? We were in the middle of nowhere.

It was split-second timing. Whack-whack. Within the space of one second, I crossed the junction from north to south, bombing downhill at the speed of a car, and the small white car crossed from west to east. If the moment had been frozen in time I could have reached out and touched the bonnet from my saddle. I looked sideways in surprise at the white car that had appeared, right beside me, in the break in the hedge. I had an image on my retina of a woman passenger, her eyes wide behind enormous glasses, putting her hands up to her open mouth.

We missed each other by a whisker. Nobody stopped. I went over the crossroads: the car went over the crossroads: the boy behind me went over the crossroads. No one got hit: everyone carried on: everyone had the absolute living shit scared out of them. The boy said the driver's face was as white as his car. My heart was turning cartwheels, my senses on fire.

"I nearly died!" I whooped. "That was amazing! Let's do it again!"

But we went back to the house, and had cake for tea instead.