Mid-run, I suddenly stop by the inconspicuous entrance. I have passed it many times, but the thought to revisit never occurred until now. As an adult, with my sense of scale expanded, perhaps it had acquired a sort of invisibility, vivid in the memory but overlooked in the present.
You might refer to it as a ginnel. You might even, depending on where you grew up, know it as a gennel, a guinnel or a jennel; a yard, a 10-foot or a close; a chare, a chure or a chewar; a jitty, a jigger or an ennog.
We called it a snicket. It ran around the back of my family house, connecting it to the footpath and fields nearby via a 200-metre conduit of green shadows. But at the point where I learned the word for it, a point lost somewhere in the fog of pre-sentience, it was a name, not a noun; The Snicket.
I knew of no other snickets. And that was how it remained, one of the key landmarks in the microcosmic universe of my early childhood, like The Lane, The Garages or The Shop.
For the first time in maybe 20 years, I tentatively sneak inside the snicket again.
Other snickets there maybe, but the word seems so apt for this particular one. A right of way predating the estate, it has a furtive feel, tightly hemmed-in by garden fences overgrown with ivy and laurel, giving sly glimpses of the backs of houses. As a kid, I used to hare down it as fast as I could, taking its corners and curves as if I were the Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, revelling in a private space that rarely saw grown-ups.
Today I pass through it in a state of suspense, and when I reach the end I realise why. A child’s sense of space is miniaturised, yet their sense of time is almost boundless. These senses invert as we age, the former expanding, the latter constricting. It is the bittersweet bargain of adulthood. The Snicket is almost exactly as I remembered it; a spacetime wormhole through the infinity of a childhood.
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