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SOMETHING
BEGINNING WITH
SARAH SALWAY
To Scott Pack
CONTENTS
Ambition
My best friend’s nine-year-old cousin can’t decide whether she wants to be an astronaut or Prime Minister. When I was young, I used to want to be either beautiful or a farmer’s wife. I couldn’t be both because if I was beautiful, then there was no way I would settle for just a farmer. I would be good enough for my very own sugar daddy. I knew what a sugar daddy was before I had heard of an engineer or a chartered surveyor.
See Attitude, Bosses, Colin, Firefighting, Promotion, Ultimatum
Ants
I was sitting in a park during my lunch hour when an ant crawled over my leg. I squashed it with my thumb and flicked its body with my fingers. Then carried on eating my sandwiches. Ants have not always left me so cold. I must have been about eleven when I found an ant colony in our garden. You have never seen anything so marvellous. It was like watching algebra in action. The worker ants were walking in straight lines everywhere and seemed to know exactly where they were going.
But then I remembered something I’d learnt at school and drew a line with my black felt tip right across their path. It threw them into confusion. They wouldn’t cross it even though it was just a drawing.
I told my father this at lunchtime. He said that we should respect ants for their innate civilisation. They even milked aphids, he said, in the same way we milk cows. He went on and on about how clever ants were in a way he never talked about me. After lunch, I boiled a kettle and poured the hot water over the colony. I sat there and watch the ants die. My eyes hurt from where I squeezed them together to make the tears come. At supper, neither my father nor I said anything to each other. I was worried he might ask me why.
See Dogs, Engagement Ring, Jealousy, Outcast, Revenge, Tornados
Attitude
I work as a secretary in the media. The company I work for specialises in writing and producing technical newsletters for small to medium-sized industrial businesses. Working in the media is something I don’t always talk about because some people seem to think I’m showing off. This is something I would never do, but it’s hard when all everybody wants to know is what it’s like to have such an exciting job. Maybe this is why people in the media tend to stick together. But then again the strange thing I have noticed is when they’re together, the only thing they talk about is what they are GOING to do – and not what they DO do. It seems they are all just filling in time before they become writers, or film directors, or actors, or painters. It makes me feel dull for enjoying my job because there is absolutely nothing else I can imagine myself doing.
See Dreams, Impostor Syndrome, Wobbling
Baked Beans
My grandmother on my mother’s side was a young girl in Liverpool during the war. She can still remember the night the Heinz factory was bombed and how for days afterwards the city smelt of cooked baked beans. It made them even hungrier than they were already.
Her mother – my great-grandmother – once spotted an unexploded bomb caught in a tree near their house. For hours she ran around getting people out of their houses and down to the shelter where my grandmother was hiding. My great-grandmother wheeled the sick down, helped mothers with little children