‘Mum, can I go play on the Quaggy?’
It’s early evening and the light is dying. My mother, who is pushing me home for tea, pauses at the gates of the park at the end of our road to have this conversation with my older sister.
It’s the first time I’ve heard the word quaggy. It feels nice in my mouth.
Maybe the quaggy is an abandoned mattress, like the ones I’ve seen bigger children playing on. That’s the noise the springs make as they bounce up and down: quaggy-quaggy-quaggy. Except that Mum is now saying Teresa shouldn’t go because it’s dangerous—and how dangerous could a mattress be?
I suppose you could bounce yourself off and break a limb. Or the metal in the springs might pop out and spear you in the leg … But still its seems unlikely that Teresa could be so careless as to get her leg speared by a mattress: she’s not a careless girl.
The quaggy take on a more sinister character, and I think of the quicksand that dragged a cowboy to his death in a programme on TV. But then Mum relents and lets Teresa go play on the quaggy after all, so surely the quaggy can’t be something really dangerous or Mum wouldn’t do that? As we leave the park, I continue to worry away at possible meanings of the word. Is it some kind of animal? I imagine a huge woolly dog-like thing the size of a Shetland pony, with half a dozen children on its back. Again, not much of a threat.
I think about the word so much that eventually it floats free of all meaning and with time becomes nothing more than a sound. Quaggy: just one more inexplicable thing from childhood: two notes from a half-remembered music.
Much later, half a century later, I will be idly googling around when I come across the word written down for the first time, and in an instant all its possible meanings—mattress, quicksand, shaggy dog-horse—will be displaced and bald reality asserted. The Quaggy will become nothing more nor less than what it is, a solid object in the real world. Later still I will catch a train to Grove Park station and walk round the corner to Chinbrook Meadows, which I will have discovered was the name of the park at the end of our road, and there will see the actual Quaggy. In the 1960s it will have been chanellized into a concrete culvert and hidden behind fences; but a 2002 restoration will have restored it to plain view. So when I visit in 2003, I will see it straight away as I pass through the park gates; there right in front of me: the echt, the actual River Quaggy.
I will fill with emotion. The joy in the discovery will be like fishing the last piece of a complicated jigsaw puzzle you were never able to complete out from down the back of the sofa. But in the backwash of feeling will come also a sense of sadness, that in the process the word has lost the thing that made it magical and solely mine.