Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
I was six, maybe seven, watching from the guest bedroom.
The room sat under the eaves, with a long, low window at knee height. You could kneel there, elbows on the sill, and see the whole front of the house—the drive, the front door, and the glass-walled hallway that ran like a spine through the extension. A very particular kind of 1960s house: open, modern, all visibility and reflection.
My mother stood inside, just back from the glass.
My father sat in his car on the drive.
They were both watching the same door, but not each other. Or if they were, it was through layers of reflection—ghosted images in the glass, never quite direct. They had been at odds for months. We knew it not through explanations, but through atmosphere: raised voices, slammed doors, the occasional object thrown—once, memorably, a china teacup still half full.
We children—six, eight, ten, twelve—had learned the art of observation. I had my hiding places: under their bed, in the wardrobe, once even wedged above the hot water tank in the airing cupboard, listening.
That evening, neither of them moved.
My mother took a step back.
My father shifted the car into neutral and released the handbrake.
A pause.
Then, with only the bonnet still visible from my angle, he started the engine, reversed, and drove away down the lane.
On nights like that, he stayed at the Gosforth Park Hotel.
Inside, my mother put the kettle on.
The moment passed.
I went back to my room and slept.
Months later, we were called into the playroom. My father stood there and said, “Your mother and I are separating.” One of us cried, then all of us. He reacted badly to that—whether it was the noise, the emotion, or us, I never fully understood. He left soon after, first to a cottage in Northumberland, then to London. Divorce followed, almost as an administrative detail.
Years later, my mother came back to that evening. She believed that if either of them had flinched—had crossed the threshold, gone to the other—they might have reconciled.
That idea lodged in me.
Could I have intervened?
At six or seven, it’s unlikely. Children don’t step into those moments; they read them, absorb them, and carry them forward. But I have returned to that scene many times in imagination. In those versions, I act. I run downstairs. I close the gates at the end of the drive. I take my father’s car keys. I open the front door and lead my mother out to him. I force a meeting. I put the kettle on myself, as if ritual might hold them together.
None of these versions hold.
Sooner or later, they separate anyway.
What I would do differently—if such a thing were possible—is not so much intervene as refuse the role of silent witness. I would break the stillness. I would insist, in whatever language a child has, that something is happening that matters. Not to fix it—that was never within my control—but to make it visible, undeniable.
But even that may be a fiction.
Because the deeper truth is this: some decisions are made long before the moment presents itself. That evening on the drive was not a crossroads—it was the visible edge of something already decided.
My father later told me, on his deathbed, that he had liked the idea of children, but not the reality. He married four times. Patterns repeated.
So the question shifts. Not why didn’t I act? but what did I learn from not acting?
Perhaps this: that silence has a cost. That waiting for the other person to move can become a lifelong habit. And that, in my own life, if there is a moment to step forward—to cross the threshold rather than watch it—I should take it.
Because unlike that child at the window, I am no longer confined to observation
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