Mum taught me to walk on solid ground, to read the play of light on surfaces, and to develop a sixth sense for deceptive depths. This was, after all, the ’60s, and the threat of quicksand was everywhere, the second most common cause of death in young males, after theatrical shoot-outs in clapperboard towns or amid unconvincing rocks. Snakebites came a distant third. Black-clad strangers could be avoided, and a snake is a snake and, try as it may, will never convince you otherwise, but quicksand could be that patch of shadow beneath the tree, or that muddy puddle on the way to school. So Mum, like all our mothers and their mothers before them, taught me the signs and the texture, the subtle undulations that could drag me down to the centre of the Earth. Of course, boys will be boys, and some tumble from trees, or into rivers, or are swept away on motorcycles into the clichés of teen movie tragedy: and some of us are uncertain, wearing our boyhood like an ill-fitting school uniform, and, whatever our loving mothers tell us before we wander into the big bad world, sooner or later the ground will swallow us whole.

Bio: Oz Hardwick