Their Magic Eyes

We’ve got company. And it’s two too many for me. Both of them are nice people, kind people, generous people. They’ve driven down from Scotland to see us. They’ve been the epitome of perfect guests, trinkets for the children, bought me a David Austin rose for the garden. Sceptered Isle -- a pink rose in that gorgeous loose old English rose shape with a musky scent. It even repeat flowers. So I feel lower than a paving slab admitting my frustration at their being here.

Thing is, they’re people for whom a Saturday at a National Trust house counts as a day in the country. For me this is emphatically not so. Anything involving queues and car parks starts me off on the wrong foot. Walking on a neat gravel path with two families in front of you and three behind wanting to walk at different paces, needing passing places for buggies. This is not, in my book, a country walk. It is not decent family time. It is not freedom or space or wonderment. Much as I love the National Trust (the card in my wallet, if not the sticker on my car), a perfect spring Saturday was meant to be taken somewhere else. But guests must go where guests want to go. Hey ho.

“May we be finding a hungry place?” my two-year old said when the crowded path had opened into space enough for the millions to mill about.
“Sorry? A what?”
“We may be finding a hungry place?” she repeated with the syntax rearranged.
I took this to mean, roughly translated, “I’m peckish”.
I’m hungry too, I thought. Hungry for more of you, my sweet, for more of us. For less of this.
“She’s peckish,” I pulled on my husband’s sleeve a little grumpily. (The friends are his fault).

It is perhaps one of the geniuses of childhood that children just take what they need. On the way to the inevitable café, the eldest spied the gate to Narnia under a bush, ducked in and called. The two year-old naturally followed, dragging me along. What bliss. We hid. We burrowed way back into the undergrowth, found some furniture made from tree stumps the previous occupants, speaking Beavers undoubtedly, had left behind. “Magic!” the eight year-old said, scooping up fallen leaves, rolling them between her palms till they fell to the ground in crumbs. “Magij” the little one replied, doing the same. When we had made ourselves some brown leaf tea, cooked and eaten twig biscuits, and gathered enough nuts and berrystones, green leave salad and pinecones for the winter, we made soft pine-needle beds, slept in them (for all of two minutes). And started the day again. Bliss my babies. I love you.

I bless them for taking me along. And that leggy old laurel for laying its arms at quirky angles along the ground, lying like for fifty years to make itself the open den. The smell from the blossom, the leaf mold and moss. What joy my children bring me. I bless their magic eyes.