“The flies crawled up the window,
They says ‘we love to roam;
once more up the window
and then we’ll all go home’.”

They were obviously very genteel flies, thought the child, because her father made a snooty face and took pains to enunciate the “-OH” of window, a word he would normally pronounce “windee”. Beyond that the child could glean no sense from the rhyme other than it would end with a huge belch of laughter from the big, hearty man and she would find herself giggling uncontrollably, a bizarre staccato descant to his deep bellow.

If anything, she found the tale of the roaming flies vaguely sad; all that effort and then they all go home. From where she surveyed them she could see nothing of interest on either the window or the frame. Dust motes danced in the pale beams of daylight that fell through, but on the shiny, vinegar-polished glass itself, nothing. No interesting smudges or smears to investigate, no sticky fingerprints, nothing but the dried tracks of long gone rain on the other side.

It was true enough though, her father’s ditty. She had witnessed it time after time. Two or three flies - more than that and her mother, protesting the cleanliness of her housekeeping and armed with a rolled up newspaper, felt obliged to intervene - would make the upward journey from the bottom of the lowest pane, negotiate the central crossbar where the sash latched and continue to the upper edge, only to pause briefly and then launch themselves into a high-speed flight back down to where they had started. Thence would begin the vertical trudge all over again.

Ten minutes up and two seconds down. What really confused the child was the fact that an upwards trudge must surely be much more laborious than a downwards stroll. When her father walked her, as he sometimes did, to the top of Canal Street, her little legs would ache with the effort of the climb, whereas on the return downhill, it would seem her ankles had grown wings, so small was the effort required. Maybe though, she mused, that was due to the big, family tub her father bought from Timoni’s ice-cream shop on the hilltop, that had to be rushed home before it melted.

Since, for the flies, there was neither an ice-cream shop incentive to make the climb at least attractive, nor a place where they were eagerly awaited to fly hastily back to with their spoils, the child saw only the logic that it would make more sense for them to use their purpose-built, rainbowed, gossamer transportation on the arduous ascent and reserve their twitchy, alien legs for the less taxing downward path.

It was a mystery. That, and the fact that they made the round trip over and over again. One day she watched, unmoving for more than an hour, whilst the same fly repeated the journey ten times over before suddenly, on a whim it seemed, or perhaps in an instantaneous response to a signal only it could hear, breaking off mid-climb and flying purposefully to the inch of open air above the top pane. It was too much for her. Legs tingling with pins and needles from having knelt motionless for so long on the hard, wooden chair next to the window, she tottered off to ask the one man who must surely have the explanation.

Her father bellowed his familiar laugh: “Each to his own,” came the less than satisfactory reply. The child knew enough of her father to realize it was the only one she would get.

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