There were different stages of wheat-fuelled fun to be had in my childhood, all just a stone’s throw from my back yard, and each one as thrilling as a page from an adventure book.
A great wall stood between me and my golden kingdom – a towering behemoth in my young eyes, its domed, half-moon coping stones like the rounded backs of slumbering giants. Right at its heart, a jagged hole gaped like the mouth of a yawning beast, an open invitation to step into a world of rustling wheat and boundless summer adventure. Beyond that threshold, time itself seemed to slow, stretching into endless golden afternoons.
To the left of the field, a small burn meandered like a lazy snake, winding its way through the landscape. Halfway along, it widened to where an ancient, twisted tree stood sentinel – a gnarled relic we fondly christened the Lightning Tree. Its skeletal limbs clawed at the sky, frozen mid-strike, as though some vengeful storm had turned it to stone. It wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Addams Family’s garden, a ghostly figure amongst the golden sea of wheat. Beneath its eerie frame, the burn deepened into a gaping trench, steep and shadowy on either side. To my small mind in a world that felt impossibly vast, it might as well have been the Mariana Trench or the cavernous Valles Marineris on Mars.
This chasm came into its own once the wheat had been scythed and bundled into great, golden bales. Without a flicker of concern for the farmer’s hard-earned crop – because, frankly, we didn’t have the foggiest idea about such things – we set to work dismantling the bales, stuffing the trench to the brim with straw. The result? A gloriously soft, golden abyss just begging to be leapt into. With the reckless abandon only children possess, we scaled the Lightning Tree, clambering higher and higher before launching ourselves, limbs flailing, into the golden depths below. We would vanish momentarily, swallowed whole, only to erupt moments later in a tangle of laughter and straw, vowing to perfect our somersaults on the next daring dive.
Of course, this sort of high-octane fun came at a cost. Bloodied noses, sprained ankles, the odd broken wrist – such was the tax we paid for our youthful exuberance. Worth it? Without a doubt. And the silver lining? A plaster cast made for a superb makeshift canvas, the smooth, white surface inviting doodles and signatures like an artist’s first blank page.
Before the wheat was cut, there was another game – one equally thrilling in its own right. We tunnelled. Down on hands and knees, we forged secret pathways through the whispering stalks, burrowing like rabbits through a golden warren. Unlike the perfectly symmetrical, otherworldly crop circles that left ufologists scratching their heads, our labyrinthine trails were gloriously haphazard, an elaborate network of tunnels sprawling in all directions. Once our clandestine passageways were complete, we scattered, disappearing into the wheat, transforming into invisible soldiers in an unseen war. The rustling field became our battlefield, our whispered breaths the only sound as we waited to ambush our imaginary foes. The moment the chase was on, we let loose with our best machine-gun impressions – a sound so guttural and absurd that, if attempted now, it would almost certainly end in a coughing fit.
I can still feel the hush of that wheat field, the warmth of those long, honeyed afternoons at the tail-end of summer. The air hung thick and humid, rich with the scent of soil and sun-warmed grain. My knees, scuffed and dirt-streaked, bore the marks of adventure. And all around me, the towering wheat swayed gently, their feathery tops stroking the sky like a painter’s brush dipped in gold.
As the light faded, I would lie in bed, staring through my window at the amber hues of the dying day. The distant cries of swifts – or perhaps swallows – would carry on the evening breeze, a gentle reminder that the sun would rise again tomorrow, and with it, another day of boundless, golden adventure.
Update, February 2025.
How much of this story is merely a carefully painted veneer, a nostalgic patina concealing something unspeakable, I still cannot say with certainty. But those sunlit memories – golden as the wheat itself – are tainted, blighted by an event that smeared a vision of hell over my childhood happiness like a grotesque and indelible stain.
It was in that very ditch – my playground, my kingdom – where, for the second time that year, I was brutally raped.
It has taken me a lifetime to even form that sentence, to let the words pass my lips without choking on them. Until around 2021, I carried this truth alone, hidden deep within the locked chambers of my mind, as though silence could render it unreal. But another trauma, another cataclysmic rupture in my life, very nearly ended me, and in that breaking point, the secret threatened to consume me whole.
I speak of it now not for pity, nor even for understanding, but in the hope that naming the demon might loosen its grip. The road to exorcising it is long and unsteady, but I am walking it. Step by step, I am seeking help, reaching towards a reckoning, however slow it may be.
Wording 