Isla McKenna jumping in puddles

jumping in puddles

when I was about six and my dad about forty he would sit down beside my bed clear his throat yet again and begin to read Alan Marshall’s children’s classic I Can Jump Puddles.

I learned the first few pages very well: it’s western Victoria in the early 1900s and young Alan has polio –legs twisted, misshapen trunk, hobbling along on crutches over dead dreams of riding horses. my dad’s soft, mellifluous voice paving its path through the night like a heartbeat until at the same point every night he’d stop. and at the same point every night I’d turn my six-year-old head watch him stare at a spot on the page shoulders shaking fat, wet tears clearing tracks on his cheeks throat closed up as he tried and failed to read how little Alan’s mother, on the advice of a doctor, would lay him out on a table and try to press his twisted legs straight:

ISLA MCKENNA SHE/HER

‘My mother would place her two hands upon my raised knees then, with her eyes tightly closed so that her tears were held back by her clenched lids, she would lean her weight upon my legs … When the sinews beneath my knees began to drag and stretch I would scream loudly, my eyes wide open, my gaze on the horses above the mantelpiece… “Oh! horses, horses, horses …” ’

I Can Jump Puddles, Alan Marshall

wet, sorrowful gasps from my father as night after night tear after tear went south. my pokey pink bedroom the hallowed ground on which his composure died.

occasionally, he’d laugh at himself a sniffly, self-deprecating chuckle as he closed the book stumped by chapter two again. I don’t think he was ever embarrassed perhaps surprised at himself at all this emotion sitting so ready beneath the surface.

I never learned what happened to Alan; we never got that far. instead, I learned to sit with my father in the sorrow to love his tears and my own and be not afraid of a man so moved by the world.