The little school girl

Autumn has brought with it the inimitable heavy leaden skies the pre-empt wet cold winters. Their density is almost insufferable, their grey mass almost tangible over head. There is, as a result, a claustrophobic feeling to these cool early mornings. The sun barely makes an appearance and usually spends the brightest part of the morning veiled behind the greyness, issuing forth little more than a milky white circular silhouette assuming that we are lucky enough to see her at all. On one such morning, as I drove the regular morning commute, I was arrested by the vision of a small girl walking by herself at the side of the road. Her school uniform was well presented and more or less complete to a standard the school rarely had the pleasure of from the majority of its students. Her hair, nut brown and tied in a neat ponytail, looked shiny but modestly kept. She wore an expression of something between serenity and studious concentration as she unscrewed the cap from a small pink plastic milk bottle. Her satchel, strap across one shoulder, matched not only her hair colour but her eye colour too. I remember being struck by their roundness and their vulnerability- as if they had never been troubled by even the slightest unsavoury vision nor the blandest tedium of mass communication- their was an undeniable innocence to their gaze. Indeed her whole aspect issued a wholesome glow of just-rightness that somehow didn't seem Goldilocks-sickly or affected. Her being seemed impossibly wedged between the heaviness of the sky and the burdens of modern society, able to support both immense pressures of both without visibly bending or stressing at all. My gaze followed her as she walked in her simple way a few yards- I felt like I had been watching her for hours yet it could only have been a few short seconds as my car passed her stretch of pavement. She uncapped the milkshake and took the delicate swig of a mystic princess, with a deliberate yet gentle action that was the essence of economy. I was transfixed. As soon as her image had left my peripheral vision my eyes immediately leapt to the rear view mirror to confirm that she was not some small mirage. My focus readjusted to the small reversed image in the mirror just in time to see her tilt her head slightly away from the cap of the little bottle, and spew an enormous jet of pink liquid all over the pavement, where it formed an unnaturally large puddle of pinkness that persisted for a long time in my rear view mirror.