Sunflowers

I first saw a field of sunflowers when on holiday - dazzling yellow under a far stretching magical blue sky - a strange and wonderful world raced past the rear window of an antiquated unfamiliar car.

I was eleven years old and journeyed with my sister and two grown up friends of my aunts who were taking us by road on a three day journey across France to the south of the country, close to the Italian border.

This was the first occasion I had enjoyed a long holiday - before this I took day trips to local sights with my aunts. My aunts took care of my sisters and I as children. We would go for picnics, visit a country house, or walk along a river bank. As I was about to move to a new school they thought it would do me good to spend some time away from home. I wasn’t certain I would return, I had never met these people before, and France to a boy, who had never travelled more than 50 miles from his home in southern England before the days of mobile communication, seemed like a world away. It would become my first great adventure.

The boldness and pride of the sunflowers standing tall in their collective splendour somehow gave me solace on that long journey. Their generous seed heads, their flowing golden petals, their strong and succulent limbs. As we travelled towards the Mediterranean a new home beckoned, the rushing road became my friend, and before I knew it, I felt a larger life unfurl before me.