The directions to the hen lady’s house on Red Fen read like a child’s treasure map. Pass 2 lay-by’s, turn right at the sign for the tip, go 500 yards and turn left, count 4 telegraph poles, turn left again. The houses here were proper fen, inhabited by people who steered well clear of councils and planning permission, erecting low lying barns and bungalows and neighbouring them up nicely with a company of caravans and sheds. I was glad to be arriving in our tiny dented car. It didn’t bat an eyelid at the rutted, muddy lane that twisted and turned round potholes to the hen lady’s hastily erected higgledy-piggledy house. It felt perfectly at home parked amongst the scrap metal in the yard. When the huge toothy dogs had been taken into the house our girls fell out of the car all cheery at the thought of mud and a gate to climb by the horse paddock.
The white-legged hen lady, practical in shorts, pulled on her cigarette and smiled. Four long teeth, whiter than the others and looking like they had had something artificial done to them gleamed across at me. Three large turkeys gobbled noisily behind her.
“Got ‘em all penned up for you.” she said, leading the way towards the hen huts. The girls spied a brood of chicks scratching with their mother in the dirt and were off. We followed the hen lady over a concrete slab, past two mud-pits and a horse manure pile to where a clutch of hutches and runs had congregated in the long grass. One had our three bantam Polands in it waiting. Until yesterday they had never been cooped, had spent their whole little three-month lives running wild with their mother, scratching up biodiverse treats and getting lost in the hedges. Now, behind a makeshift door of board and a brick they sat in a legless rabbit hutch waiting to be tamed.
The hen lady stubbed out her cigarette, reached down and shifted the brick. A wild flap of wings as her hand reached in. Fluttering squawks, a scratch of claw, and the first hen emerged. Then, in her capable hands, a hushed bird sat with its extraordinary puff of a head resting on her wrist, its smooth buff breast laced with white, its eyes just visible beneath the feather crest like small dark worlds unblinking.
I had never seen a crested Poland before. We had decided on them purely on the advice of a gardening friend who said that Polands were the best of all bantams at being held by children. I knew that they were friendly, and had been warned about the hairstyle. In a magazine, even strutting in a farmyard, I would have looked at one and said ‘Ridiculous’. But in my fingers the downy crest felt rather marvelous. And they peeped so charmingly, and sat so softly against the breast. They even traveled well in the car.
Oh dear, looks like I’ve gone and bought the poodle of hens, all fluff and feathers. The girls, of course, adore them. Every morning and every evening we go, all four of us, Mummy, Daddy, girl 8, girl 3, on a leggy procession to the bottom of the garden to let them out and put them up, and in between we visit them several times, poor hens, because we like the stroke and peep of them so very much.One is pure white, the other two are chamois laced with white, one a big-breasted ball of butter, the other a sleepy dozer. They should start to lay about Christmastime. Snowball, Buttercup and Snoozer.
Monday, 9 July 2007
Friday, 29 June 2007
One Bite of the Pear
Birds singing after the rain. The breeze is toying with the trees again, reaching between the branches like a devilish cad laying those ladies low. The supple apples arch their backs like women caught in the last high kick of a tango. The rose tips kick the short neat kicks of a can-can girl. The dark-leafed crab shoots, girlfriends in a crowd of screaming fans, wave in unison at the pop idol up on stage. The garden swoons, seduces, swoons. All the while the breeze plies its caddish trade in titillation. It will leave them, when the fun is spent, and who will they tell, the girlfriends silent now in solidarity. The dancers unmade up, putting their glistening costumes to bed.
Dalliance. The elements tease and please and depart each other’s company. The breeze allures by touch, the trees by sound and sight – the red leaves glistening bright, the green leaves blushing pink at the tip, all of them whisper and sush. “All things allured God to make them.” wrote the poet Thomas Traherne. Desire is at the heart of things. No serpent I expect was needed to tempt our mother Eve. The apple’s own plump perfection, the blush on its cheek, its smooth dappled skin, its satisfying crunch, the promise of its scent -- all these would have sufficed. Temptation enough in the nature of the thing to make one want to pluck, and palm and taste.
My three year-old knows this. She cruises the fruit bowl fingering each fruit, weighing apples in her two small palms, feeling the hairy bristles of the kiwi, the thin bruisable skin of the pear. Her touch incarnadines the nectarine’s blush. She samples everything. She takes a bite, then puts it back. Plucks a grape satisfyingly from its stalk and bursts its juice in her happy mouth. When I enter the room she starts, looks guiltily at me for her sentence. Sometimes I banish her from the garden, send her crossly to sit on the stairs, angered by the waste of food. Sometimes I do not. Because there is a real pleasure in the pluck of a grape, because I remember that one bite of the pear is all one ever wanted.
Dalliance. The elements tease and please and depart each other’s company. The breeze allures by touch, the trees by sound and sight – the red leaves glistening bright, the green leaves blushing pink at the tip, all of them whisper and sush. “All things allured God to make them.” wrote the poet Thomas Traherne. Desire is at the heart of things. No serpent I expect was needed to tempt our mother Eve. The apple’s own plump perfection, the blush on its cheek, its smooth dappled skin, its satisfying crunch, the promise of its scent -- all these would have sufficed. Temptation enough in the nature of the thing to make one want to pluck, and palm and taste.
My three year-old knows this. She cruises the fruit bowl fingering each fruit, weighing apples in her two small palms, feeling the hairy bristles of the kiwi, the thin bruisable skin of the pear. Her touch incarnadines the nectarine’s blush. She samples everything. She takes a bite, then puts it back. Plucks a grape satisfyingly from its stalk and bursts its juice in her happy mouth. When I enter the room she starts, looks guiltily at me for her sentence. Sometimes I banish her from the garden, send her crossly to sit on the stairs, angered by the waste of food. Sometimes I do not. Because there is a real pleasure in the pluck of a grape, because I remember that one bite of the pear is all one ever wanted.
Thursday, 7 June 2007
Prunus pruning
The gardening frenzy is on and in our village it’s not just the weather. The announcement of the date for Open Gardens Day (this year in aid of RDA) has plunged the participating gardeners into a whirling dervish of plan and counterplan. The date stares firmly from every diary – threat to the novice, challenge to the keen, promise to the most accomplished—but to all, like laughter lines and baggy eyelids, now unavoidable.
Pippa, whose garden, good sort that she is, is made available year after year, invited me over for a lazy coffee over half term. Her son Hugo, my Houdini and my 8 year-old scrabbled about in the garden getting muddy in the hen coop, chalking a blue and yellow dusty scooter racetrack on the terrace, throwing sticks for the fetching lab. Most of which landed, naturally, in the herbaceous borders, expertly positioned between delicate delphinium leaves and snapping peony shoots so that maximum collateral damage could be achieved by bounding paws.
“HUUGOOO!” Pippa shouted from the kitchen. The spots on the Emma Bridgewater teapot jumped to attention.
“Heigh-ho,” she sighed, rubbing her forehead, “time to make some willow shelters.”
For Pippa, Open Garden Day means not so much exciting new plans and designs or trips to the garden centre or planting up new plants as it means running a protection racket. She spends hours constructing beautiful willow wigwams and tepees around the delicates, her garden sprouting twiggy bunkers till it looks like a dwarf Indian village. And still the balls and dog paws come crashing through. Observing her mounting frustration as the day approaches has probably been the main deterrent from me throwing my lot in with the rest of the brave band and opening mine too (well that, and the fact that my Latin plant names are not entirely up to scratch, oh yes, and that neither is my garden).
Last year I took my darling nearly-deaf mother, who was visiting from America round the village gardens.
The artist’s garden was fascinating. Tucked away behind a small cottage on the high street, the artist’s garden is a series of little outdoor rooms made up by hedges and low walls, steps up here, a path down there. Different textures underfoot, sudden changes of colour, scent and light. Around one corner a hidden henhutch suddenly clucks to life, around the next a swirling sculpture on a pole swings towards you in the wind. There are stained glass windows hanging from the trees and phrases of poetry embedded in the terrace. You feel you could spend hours there and never see it all, could approach the same room twice from different angles and think it was a new one. The artist hid under his hat in the shade of his apple tree, with a reticence I like to think more shyness than contempt. No conversation was required.
Proud across the street, the Old Rectory, with its shiny as a new penny family, opened its gates verbosely. Printed notices directed you on a set route. Labelled trees spread their ancient enormous arms. The lady of the house, brunette chatter on heels, swooped to my mother’s side
“Welcome,” she smiled, warm and hostessy, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in the village before,”
“Thank you,” my mum smiled warmly back.
Disconcerted by this non sequitur, Chatter arranged her hair, arranged the large rings on her fingers, proceeded undaunted with the tour.
I do not explain my mother’s deafness to people we meet. What am I supposed to say – hello, this is my mother, she’s deaf– as if her deafness is the single quality by which her rich and varied life should be described? She is my own darling, still standing tall mother, who likes English gardens, and kept a fine garden herself in her day. I let them figure it out for themselves.
But sometimes I do have to laugh.
From hollyhock to cornflower, across more lawn to rose bed we followed our talkative guide. Under the dark foliage of a large cherry my mother looked up admiringly,
“Do you like Prunus?” asked the lady of the house.
“Sometimes,” my mother looked querulous, “at breakfast.”
“I just love them,” Chatter raved, heels sinking suddenly into the lawn, slinging her drunkenly off balance, “perfect answer to the winter blues.”
“I have problems with regularity too,” confided my mother discreetly.
Pippa, whose garden, good sort that she is, is made available year after year, invited me over for a lazy coffee over half term. Her son Hugo, my Houdini and my 8 year-old scrabbled about in the garden getting muddy in the hen coop, chalking a blue and yellow dusty scooter racetrack on the terrace, throwing sticks for the fetching lab. Most of which landed, naturally, in the herbaceous borders, expertly positioned between delicate delphinium leaves and snapping peony shoots so that maximum collateral damage could be achieved by bounding paws.
“HUUGOOO!” Pippa shouted from the kitchen. The spots on the Emma Bridgewater teapot jumped to attention.
“Heigh-ho,” she sighed, rubbing her forehead, “time to make some willow shelters.”
For Pippa, Open Garden Day means not so much exciting new plans and designs or trips to the garden centre or planting up new plants as it means running a protection racket. She spends hours constructing beautiful willow wigwams and tepees around the delicates, her garden sprouting twiggy bunkers till it looks like a dwarf Indian village. And still the balls and dog paws come crashing through. Observing her mounting frustration as the day approaches has probably been the main deterrent from me throwing my lot in with the rest of the brave band and opening mine too (well that, and the fact that my Latin plant names are not entirely up to scratch, oh yes, and that neither is my garden).
Last year I took my darling nearly-deaf mother, who was visiting from America round the village gardens.
The artist’s garden was fascinating. Tucked away behind a small cottage on the high street, the artist’s garden is a series of little outdoor rooms made up by hedges and low walls, steps up here, a path down there. Different textures underfoot, sudden changes of colour, scent and light. Around one corner a hidden henhutch suddenly clucks to life, around the next a swirling sculpture on a pole swings towards you in the wind. There are stained glass windows hanging from the trees and phrases of poetry embedded in the terrace. You feel you could spend hours there and never see it all, could approach the same room twice from different angles and think it was a new one. The artist hid under his hat in the shade of his apple tree, with a reticence I like to think more shyness than contempt. No conversation was required.
Proud across the street, the Old Rectory, with its shiny as a new penny family, opened its gates verbosely. Printed notices directed you on a set route. Labelled trees spread their ancient enormous arms. The lady of the house, brunette chatter on heels, swooped to my mother’s side
“Welcome,” she smiled, warm and hostessy, “I don’t believe I’ve seen you in the village before,”
“Thank you,” my mum smiled warmly back.
Disconcerted by this non sequitur, Chatter arranged her hair, arranged the large rings on her fingers, proceeded undaunted with the tour.
I do not explain my mother’s deafness to people we meet. What am I supposed to say – hello, this is my mother, she’s deaf– as if her deafness is the single quality by which her rich and varied life should be described? She is my own darling, still standing tall mother, who likes English gardens, and kept a fine garden herself in her day. I let them figure it out for themselves.
But sometimes I do have to laugh.
From hollyhock to cornflower, across more lawn to rose bed we followed our talkative guide. Under the dark foliage of a large cherry my mother looked up admiringly,
“Do you like Prunus?” asked the lady of the house.
“Sometimes,” my mother looked querulous, “at breakfast.”
“I just love them,” Chatter raved, heels sinking suddenly into the lawn, slinging her drunkenly off balance, “perfect answer to the winter blues.”
“I have problems with regularity too,” confided my mother discreetly.
Tuesday, 22 May 2007
My catcher's mit
“It’s the best day of my life” said my eight year-old yesterday afternoon as we got home from school. She had just been chosen for tag rugby, the first ever indication (merest hint) in her life that she might, just might, be half-way good at ball games. A ballet natural, a swimming enthusiast, a cycling and skootering fanatic, she has never had much confidence with fast flying balls. I put this down to my own similar inadequacy hence lack of encouragement and practice in ball games. A little slow on the maternal uptake here, I am only just beginning to see that they might matter. Hugely.
Mention ‘balls’ and before I can type the second apostrophe around the word, there are blogs bashing the back of my brain, crying to be let in – the green and white cricket on the green blog, the ridiculous bottoms up fumbling in the hedge for the lost ball blog. None of them I am going to write today because as well as having a splendid game of tag rugby to watch with Baby Houdini scouring the perimeter of the field for hemlock and yew berries to suck, I also have my neighbour’s three children to watch after school into the evening whilst their mother takes their dad to the hospital and back; and then a huge homework project to supervise and cakes to burn for the school cake stall whilst I run upstairs and chip away tediously at the last two bits my patient editor is waiting for; and then when the clocks in America say I may, my lovely deaf mother to ring and shout at slowly. And all those balls in the air this day are enough to catch.
But the thing my palm is itching for, the thing that, if it stuck, I’d tuck to my chest and fold my shoulders over tackling tomorrow to preserve, is that look she tossed my way. Perched on the teetering edge of her seat, her body bursting with buoyancy -- “…the best day of my life.” Oh to be so sure that this one moment you’re living is the one you love, before the game’s begun or won or anybody’s even pinned your tags on. Just the possibility enough. That’s the look she tossed. Thank God I had my catcher’s mit on.
Mention ‘balls’ and before I can type the second apostrophe around the word, there are blogs bashing the back of my brain, crying to be let in – the green and white cricket on the green blog, the ridiculous bottoms up fumbling in the hedge for the lost ball blog. None of them I am going to write today because as well as having a splendid game of tag rugby to watch with Baby Houdini scouring the perimeter of the field for hemlock and yew berries to suck, I also have my neighbour’s three children to watch after school into the evening whilst their mother takes their dad to the hospital and back; and then a huge homework project to supervise and cakes to burn for the school cake stall whilst I run upstairs and chip away tediously at the last two bits my patient editor is waiting for; and then when the clocks in America say I may, my lovely deaf mother to ring and shout at slowly. And all those balls in the air this day are enough to catch.
But the thing my palm is itching for, the thing that, if it stuck, I’d tuck to my chest and fold my shoulders over tackling tomorrow to preserve, is that look she tossed my way. Perched on the teetering edge of her seat, her body bursting with buoyancy -- “…the best day of my life.” Oh to be so sure that this one moment you’re living is the one you love, before the game’s begun or won or anybody’s even pinned your tags on. Just the possibility enough. That’s the look she tossed. Thank God I had my catcher’s mit on.
Monday, 14 May 2007
The Postman's Pants
Never lend your husband’s clothing to another man. I did that last month. Leant a pair of gloves to the village postman whose fingers were perishing. It was the least I could do for a man who is my main connection with non-edible consumer goods of every kind. I confess, I am a catalogue queen. Whenever I feel guilty about this I remind myself how much money I am saving in petrol and parking (not to mention how vastly I am shrinking my carbon footprint – practically the size of a geisha’s). Garden supplies, children’s toys, soft furnishings, clothing, gadgets, everything, it seems, that we do not immediately consume (and even a fair bit that we do – Inverawe smoked trout and salmon— fight over the last morsel) can come to me at the click of a mouse.
When the phone rings I suffer from a sudden attack of familial deafness. When the postman or DHL man knocks, I thrill. A parcel. For me? How perfectly lovely. I like signing the little bits of paper they produce. It almost makes me feel as if I have a secretary. Print here sign there. Madam. Vanish flour dusted apron and cords, and yanked back hair; enter alternative me in a neat suit and bob. For that one moment I hold the pen.
And then there is the delicious menu of choices the catalogues afford. The Garden menu – David Austin’s Shropshire Lass or The Countryman on the terrace trellis? Those deep dark tulips from Parkers this year? Or the crimson? Followed by the clothing menu – Boden again – reliable with a light seasoning of playful -- or the slightly more exclusive if less about town Brora? Yummy skirts that make tweed flirt, cashmere to die for. (Or at least give up your monthly membership at the not quite local health club for). And the secret side benefit of shopping by catalogue -- you avoid looking at your thighs in a badly lit (by that I mean unflatteringly – shall I say brutally, lit) dressing room.
Which brings me back to the postman. Gloves were one thing. A simple act of charity. He returned them a few days later, silently, posting them through the letter box so that when I returned from wherever I was they could be run over conveniently by the pushchair, immediately at home again in their rightful chaotic mileu of childmud and floordust. But last week in our brief unseasonable pretence of summer it was shorts. Poor postman on laden bike rings, then in the shuffle of envelopes and packets, drops small parcel onto floor. Instead of getting off the bike, which is heavy and difficult to balance, he leans forward to pick up parcel still astride the bike. Either he has eaten too much curry last night or his shorts (that have not seen the light of day since last year) catch on part of the bike, because there is an audible rip from somewhere near his seat. Am just beginning to be grateful again for onset of familial deafness when I see his hand instinctively check out the seat of his shorts.
“Oh god, torn um haven’t I” he says.
Do I let this denizen of postal provision cycle off home in tatters, his smalls on show to the entire village? Perhaps I should have, but I do not. I glance at his girth, make a quick calculation about the size of my husband’s old cut off cycling shorts (not of the Lycra Rob variety) and invite him in to change.
I thunder up the stairs, have a quick rummage in chest of drawers and descend already wondering if I have done the wrong thing with a capital WR.
“Look, try this pair,” I say sliding my hand round the door of the downstairs loo as if he were my self-conscious ten year-old son in a high street changing room. Half chagrined and half relieved, he re-emerges, hops on his bike and speeds off, absentmindedly leaving his torn shorts behind him (more ten year-old there than I thought).
These same shorts I folded, left ready in the porch where they hung around waiting for the opportune moment. When out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a red bike go past the window this morning I hurried to the porch, grabbed the shorts and, wanting to catch him this time before he had gone, shouted, not very loudly, but loud enough.
“Here. The shorts. You left them the other day.”
There she was. Old Lady Marlow. All ears and eyes, all techni-colour memory and mouth of her. Right there across the road from me, stick, cardigan and sensible tie-up shoes included. With a cat that got the cream look written on her face. The rotten luck of it.
When the phone rings I suffer from a sudden attack of familial deafness. When the postman or DHL man knocks, I thrill. A parcel. For me? How perfectly lovely. I like signing the little bits of paper they produce. It almost makes me feel as if I have a secretary. Print here sign there. Madam. Vanish flour dusted apron and cords, and yanked back hair; enter alternative me in a neat suit and bob. For that one moment I hold the pen.
And then there is the delicious menu of choices the catalogues afford. The Garden menu – David Austin’s Shropshire Lass or The Countryman on the terrace trellis? Those deep dark tulips from Parkers this year? Or the crimson? Followed by the clothing menu – Boden again – reliable with a light seasoning of playful -- or the slightly more exclusive if less about town Brora? Yummy skirts that make tweed flirt, cashmere to die for. (Or at least give up your monthly membership at the not quite local health club for). And the secret side benefit of shopping by catalogue -- you avoid looking at your thighs in a badly lit (by that I mean unflatteringly – shall I say brutally, lit) dressing room.
Which brings me back to the postman. Gloves were one thing. A simple act of charity. He returned them a few days later, silently, posting them through the letter box so that when I returned from wherever I was they could be run over conveniently by the pushchair, immediately at home again in their rightful chaotic mileu of childmud and floordust. But last week in our brief unseasonable pretence of summer it was shorts. Poor postman on laden bike rings, then in the shuffle of envelopes and packets, drops small parcel onto floor. Instead of getting off the bike, which is heavy and difficult to balance, he leans forward to pick up parcel still astride the bike. Either he has eaten too much curry last night or his shorts (that have not seen the light of day since last year) catch on part of the bike, because there is an audible rip from somewhere near his seat. Am just beginning to be grateful again for onset of familial deafness when I see his hand instinctively check out the seat of his shorts.
“Oh god, torn um haven’t I” he says.
Do I let this denizen of postal provision cycle off home in tatters, his smalls on show to the entire village? Perhaps I should have, but I do not. I glance at his girth, make a quick calculation about the size of my husband’s old cut off cycling shorts (not of the Lycra Rob variety) and invite him in to change.
I thunder up the stairs, have a quick rummage in chest of drawers and descend already wondering if I have done the wrong thing with a capital WR.
“Look, try this pair,” I say sliding my hand round the door of the downstairs loo as if he were my self-conscious ten year-old son in a high street changing room. Half chagrined and half relieved, he re-emerges, hops on his bike and speeds off, absentmindedly leaving his torn shorts behind him (more ten year-old there than I thought).
These same shorts I folded, left ready in the porch where they hung around waiting for the opportune moment. When out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of a red bike go past the window this morning I hurried to the porch, grabbed the shorts and, wanting to catch him this time before he had gone, shouted, not very loudly, but loud enough.
“Here. The shorts. You left them the other day.”
There she was. Old Lady Marlow. All ears and eyes, all techni-colour memory and mouth of her. Right there across the road from me, stick, cardigan and sensible tie-up shoes included. With a cat that got the cream look written on her face. The rotten luck of it.
Wednesday, 9 May 2007
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.
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.
Tuesday, 8 May 2007
Elixir of Youth
How is it that some people just don’t age? Where did they find that hidden bottle of elixir?
I took the girls for tea yesterday to Mary’s, the large Georgian house on the green, with wrought iron railings and long windows, shutters folded back. ‘Took them to tea’. It sounds so formal and stuffy, starched tablecloths and scratchy petticoats. What I mean is I took them around unannounced, they pounded the door, knocked the knocker, rang the bell, then the eldest charged round to the back garden whilst the younger one lifted the letter flap and called in her most insistent tone “Maaa-weee” (she hasn’t got the hang of r’s yet). You never make appointments with Mary. You call round when you can. If she’s in she’s glad to see you; if she’s out she’s having a nice time somewhere else. She treats each day like an empty beach with its own tide washing up what it will. She says she likes every day full of surprises. I admire this arrangement with life; it is how I too would like to live when the season of school runs and ballet lessons and swimming lessons and piano lessons and flute lessons and playgroups and pony for a week, and netball and governor’s meetings and (you get my drift) is over. And so we roll up and bang on the door curious and hopeful, is Mary in? Is she upstairs, in the garden? Is she out? Harrumph.
A loud hurrah from the back garden where, of course, Mary would be on a gloriously sunny day like today. I grabbed Baby Houdini’s hand and we hare round to find Mary, not rising from her weeding or brushing down the paths, but caught in the middle of a hopscotch game, hastily chalked squares in front of her, a pebble in her hand.
Mary will be 80 today. She’s had MS for years and years and lately she’s started having a fluttery heart they can’t figure out. I’ve seen her on the carpet with my girls teaching them her leg exercises. I’ve seen her spraying them with water in the garden, playing limbo, throwing and catching balls, but I have to admit hopscotch is a first.
“Look at you,” I hug her, laughing.
“Cup of tea?” she asks, tossing the pebble into the rose bed.
Inside the kitchen I notice a birthday card with a photo on it of a lady almost exactly Mary’s age and size, shape and agility, feet astride a hopscotch square on a municipal park path. Two ancient friends on the bench in cardigans and sunglasses applaud. The caption reads: ‘Getting Old is Inevitable. Growing Up is Optional’. I wave it at Mary who is busy with the kettle.
“I was trying it out.” she says.
I remember the time a few years ago when I reminded my eight year-old, then about four, to be careful when she was playing in the garden with Mary. “You can’t run at her so hard, honey, you might knock her down. She’s old, you know.”
She stopped in her tracks, perplexed. “She’s not old, she’s new,” she insisted.
When I told Mary she roared and then reassured me, “I won’t break.”
So I learned not to wrap her up. Sometimes, when she falls with the MS, she stays inside for a week or so till the bruises on her face go away.
Mary’s biscuit barrel is legendary, a galaxy of dark and white and milk chocolate biscuits that only come in a giant tin. Homemade buns, a slice of Victoria sponge. She rattles up a platter of treats while the girls sniff about the larder “Mummy, why don’t we have nice labels on everything like this?”. (What do you mean? A tin of beans already has a label). I warm the teapot. Mary treats them like wine connoisseurs in her store of fresh pressed apple juices – Discovery? Cox? Golden Delicious? Jonogold? So many things to taste in Mary’s house, though in truth, despite the dignity of the architecture, restrained taste is not her thing. She likes her colours bright, and lots of them. Especially all together in one room. Her late husband painted murals on the walls. Above the Georgian fireplace in the green panelled drawing room one panel depicts Mary in clouds with pastel angels all around her looking like the Queen of Heaven.
A lot of things have gone wrong for Mary. Her parents didn’t bother to educate her much. True, the farm she bought with the cash instead did end up a better investment, she says, than 12 years of school fees. But in the things that matter she has suffered. Wanting nothing more than children she married young to a man who, when babies did not appear promptly exchanged her for a more fecund model. When she did find love again, he was married to someone else, and a priest, and the end of that marriage gave him guilt he could never shake, much as he adored the queen of his new heaven. She nursed him through his stroke, and watched him die, got MS. You know the rest.
Today she will be 80. Since her heart started doing its little bird routine I have started to worry, though doing so contravenes every law of her house. In her drawing room this afternoon, under the guardian eyes of Mary of the mural, unstarched, we took our tea. The little one, perched too high for the coffee table on a teetering piano stool swirled her pointing finger over the plate of heavenly biscuits like a game spinner, trying to choose. “Mmmmm… this one!” her finger leapt to decision. I caught Mary’s eye and she caught mine, we caught the eye of the elder one. Delighted, we made her do it again. Just to see the finger of fate play with chocolate. And then I spied it. On the tapestry cushion of the chair behind hers was written in lilting letters
“Live Well,
Laugh Often,
Love Much”.
Mary’s elixir.
I took the girls for tea yesterday to Mary’s, the large Georgian house on the green, with wrought iron railings and long windows, shutters folded back. ‘Took them to tea’. It sounds so formal and stuffy, starched tablecloths and scratchy petticoats. What I mean is I took them around unannounced, they pounded the door, knocked the knocker, rang the bell, then the eldest charged round to the back garden whilst the younger one lifted the letter flap and called in her most insistent tone “Maaa-weee” (she hasn’t got the hang of r’s yet). You never make appointments with Mary. You call round when you can. If she’s in she’s glad to see you; if she’s out she’s having a nice time somewhere else. She treats each day like an empty beach with its own tide washing up what it will. She says she likes every day full of surprises. I admire this arrangement with life; it is how I too would like to live when the season of school runs and ballet lessons and swimming lessons and piano lessons and flute lessons and playgroups and pony for a week, and netball and governor’s meetings and (you get my drift) is over. And so we roll up and bang on the door curious and hopeful, is Mary in? Is she upstairs, in the garden? Is she out? Harrumph.
A loud hurrah from the back garden where, of course, Mary would be on a gloriously sunny day like today. I grabbed Baby Houdini’s hand and we hare round to find Mary, not rising from her weeding or brushing down the paths, but caught in the middle of a hopscotch game, hastily chalked squares in front of her, a pebble in her hand.
Mary will be 80 today. She’s had MS for years and years and lately she’s started having a fluttery heart they can’t figure out. I’ve seen her on the carpet with my girls teaching them her leg exercises. I’ve seen her spraying them with water in the garden, playing limbo, throwing and catching balls, but I have to admit hopscotch is a first.
“Look at you,” I hug her, laughing.
“Cup of tea?” she asks, tossing the pebble into the rose bed.
Inside the kitchen I notice a birthday card with a photo on it of a lady almost exactly Mary’s age and size, shape and agility, feet astride a hopscotch square on a municipal park path. Two ancient friends on the bench in cardigans and sunglasses applaud. The caption reads: ‘Getting Old is Inevitable. Growing Up is Optional’. I wave it at Mary who is busy with the kettle.
“I was trying it out.” she says.
I remember the time a few years ago when I reminded my eight year-old, then about four, to be careful when she was playing in the garden with Mary. “You can’t run at her so hard, honey, you might knock her down. She’s old, you know.”
She stopped in her tracks, perplexed. “She’s not old, she’s new,” she insisted.
When I told Mary she roared and then reassured me, “I won’t break.”
So I learned not to wrap her up. Sometimes, when she falls with the MS, she stays inside for a week or so till the bruises on her face go away.
Mary’s biscuit barrel is legendary, a galaxy of dark and white and milk chocolate biscuits that only come in a giant tin. Homemade buns, a slice of Victoria sponge. She rattles up a platter of treats while the girls sniff about the larder “Mummy, why don’t we have nice labels on everything like this?”. (What do you mean? A tin of beans already has a label). I warm the teapot. Mary treats them like wine connoisseurs in her store of fresh pressed apple juices – Discovery? Cox? Golden Delicious? Jonogold? So many things to taste in Mary’s house, though in truth, despite the dignity of the architecture, restrained taste is not her thing. She likes her colours bright, and lots of them. Especially all together in one room. Her late husband painted murals on the walls. Above the Georgian fireplace in the green panelled drawing room one panel depicts Mary in clouds with pastel angels all around her looking like the Queen of Heaven.
A lot of things have gone wrong for Mary. Her parents didn’t bother to educate her much. True, the farm she bought with the cash instead did end up a better investment, she says, than 12 years of school fees. But in the things that matter she has suffered. Wanting nothing more than children she married young to a man who, when babies did not appear promptly exchanged her for a more fecund model. When she did find love again, he was married to someone else, and a priest, and the end of that marriage gave him guilt he could never shake, much as he adored the queen of his new heaven. She nursed him through his stroke, and watched him die, got MS. You know the rest.
Today she will be 80. Since her heart started doing its little bird routine I have started to worry, though doing so contravenes every law of her house. In her drawing room this afternoon, under the guardian eyes of Mary of the mural, unstarched, we took our tea. The little one, perched too high for the coffee table on a teetering piano stool swirled her pointing finger over the plate of heavenly biscuits like a game spinner, trying to choose. “Mmmmm… this one!” her finger leapt to decision. I caught Mary’s eye and she caught mine, we caught the eye of the elder one. Delighted, we made her do it again. Just to see the finger of fate play with chocolate. And then I spied it. On the tapestry cushion of the chair behind hers was written in lilting letters
“Live Well,
Laugh Often,
Love Much”.
Mary’s elixir.
Monday, 7 May 2007
Petting the Hamburger
I love watching hens. The pretentious strut of them, the downhome cluck and scratch. The way they seem to ever only look at you one eye at a time – eclipse you in a quick blink – flinch, surprised when you’re still there at the blink’s end, large on the horizon of that beedy stare. Then twitch away from deep imponderables to scratch.
They’re on my wish list now. Eight years ago I started hankering. Five years ago I started looking through catalogues of coops and feeders. (The mobile ark or the walk-in pen? A nesting box? roosting ridge?) Four years ago I promised myself some. But babies and a house move, redoing the new garden, tinkering with the house. There has never been the time. Then we took that trip to a tiny village in Eastern Slovakia last May and the girls fell in love with hens too. Spent the whole holiday chasing, feeding, catching and stroking them, much to the bewilderment of locals who see them entirely as a food source. Like watching two children petting a hamburger.
But I view hens through rosy spectacles lent me, no doubt, by some distant episode of the Waltons. Oh think, Mary Ellen, we will collect our own eggs for tea. Fresh, yellow-yolked, wholesome. I can see them now warm and nestled in a bed of straw. Little hands cradling them in to the kitchen. Easter everyday. Oops, splat. Never mind. (Bird flu. Mites. I can hear cyberspace humming with doses of realism). It’s no use; I’m a lost cause. You can only resist for so long. I want them, the girls want them. And I have a friend who will not let it rest.
They’re on my wish list now. Eight years ago I started hankering. Five years ago I started looking through catalogues of coops and feeders. (The mobile ark or the walk-in pen? A nesting box? roosting ridge?) Four years ago I promised myself some. But babies and a house move, redoing the new garden, tinkering with the house. There has never been the time. Then we took that trip to a tiny village in Eastern Slovakia last May and the girls fell in love with hens too. Spent the whole holiday chasing, feeding, catching and stroking them, much to the bewilderment of locals who see them entirely as a food source. Like watching two children petting a hamburger.
But I view hens through rosy spectacles lent me, no doubt, by some distant episode of the Waltons. Oh think, Mary Ellen, we will collect our own eggs for tea. Fresh, yellow-yolked, wholesome. I can see them now warm and nestled in a bed of straw. Little hands cradling them in to the kitchen. Easter everyday. Oops, splat. Never mind. (Bird flu. Mites. I can hear cyberspace humming with doses of realism). It’s no use; I’m a lost cause. You can only resist for so long. I want them, the girls want them. And I have a friend who will not let it rest.
Wednesday, 2 May 2007
New Shoes and the Smell of Tar
“What colour would you call that willow?” I asked my daughter. “I need it for my blog”
“Yellow,” she said, “a sort of goldy green.”
“Perfect,” I murmured, “Nature’s first green is gold.” The good old Robert Frost poems your teachers made you learn by heart never leave you. (Why aren’t children memorizing poems?)
“Nee-naw trator” shouted the two-year old who loves all things flashing and loud.
A plough was turning up crumbly earth exactly the colour of Green and Blacks 70% chocolate. You could have licked up the crumbs. The earth here is so rich. Black Gold the farmers call it. It gives up hordes of lettuces, beetroot, carrots, celery to the hands of Polish harvesters and the supermarket trolley. We live in the salad bowl of England. I find myself strangely proud of this. What I once saw as the dullest landscape on earth now seems a rich, industrious place busy about the business of feeding the nation. (Roll on Socialist murals of headscarfed workers, sleeves rolled up, pitchforks in hand. Are all the eastern Europeans working here exerting an invisible force on the local psyche?)
But yesterday it was the smell that caught us unawares. Not flowers or grass, not any of the beautiful smells you expect to herald Spring. It was tar. Steam-rolled and steaming, blacker even than the earth. The men are always out working, but for the first time this year we had the window open. It was warm. Everyone was smiling. Three men in earmuffs managed machines. Two young men were propping a van door open. One of them had a glint of gold in his tooth.
In Downham Market where there is never any traffic and plenty of parking, we bailed out into hot sunshine. Smith’s Children’s Shoes, tiny and particular, blessed with baskets of toys with which to occupy one while the other is fitted, equipped us with two new pairs of shoes. One statutory black school Start-Rites (sound of ripping Velcro), the other a bright red pair of brass buckle Mary Janes that gave the wearer so much joy she went out of the shop bouncing. Bounce Bounce to the door. “Bye lady!” Bounce into the street. Living Shirley Hughes, we entered stained-glass Reeds, the family owned department store that, unlike our village which has everything you need and nothing you want, has everything you need and a few corners in which you’d like to snoop one day when you are not negotiating a bouncing red-shoed two-year old through the china department. “Shoes!” she waved them at the lady in the pinny. It looked alarmingly like a kick too near a teapot. “Shoes!” to the café girl.
Good girls get to have fruit shoots and dotty biscuits (and cups of tea and a simple butterfly cake. I had to have one. Where have you even seen one for sale in the last 15 years? Besides the filling was soo utterly creamy). The little one bites every Smartie off the top of the biscuit; the big one has discovered that baked Smarties will crack and peel so that if you are careful you can eat a whole half shell on its own before devouring the rest of the Smartie. It’s one of the well-kept secrets of childhood.
By the time we got back to the car the afternoon had gone. The air was cold again; grey had swallowed up the blue. Overhead an early moon hung in the sky. My moon maidens made me sing. We sang the three note moon song in unison, in solo, laughing the way home. There were new shoes on their feet. We passed the roadworks, diggers asleep. The spot where the young man smiled, a glint of gold in his teeth.
The Princess
My bike is a beauty. A Pashley Princess bought on ebay from a woman in Leicester selling up and going to Spain. She kept it in her bedroom and never rode it in case life happened to it. Then life happened to her in the shape of Rodrigo and she didn’t need a bike with a hint of passion in its name. Or princess; I’m sure he made her feel like a queen. So the Pashley, more state of the nation than state of the art with rod brakes, retro chrome and leather saddle, came to me and has never looked back. It doesn’t mind the rain, the puddles I splash it through (on purpose sometimes just for the juvenile thrill), never groans under the weight of Spar bags and butcher’s bags, hasn’t even complained about the recent addition of a small toddler seat just behind the handlebars. A loyal friend.
Like all good friends though, it isn’t what she does for me but how she makes me feel that matters. With her I am weightless, I am winged. It’s how my daughter feels on her scooter. I see it in the gleam of her eyes, freedom snapping in the tips of her flown back hair. We travel like this to her music lessons. Her on the scooter, me on the bike.
“I’ll wait for you at the corner” I shout when we get to the traffic lights, even though she knows the routine perfectly well. I signal and turn, wait for her with one foot balanced like a ballerina in toe shoes. She hunches down watching for the pedestrian signal then flies like a greyhound let loose. No idea how amazing she looks, or that it has taken her brain twenty-three thousand signals to her body to get her from one side of the road to the other. No idea at all that at the speed she is going one bit of brick in the path could catapult her headfirst into tomorrow.
Last summer my husband and I tried out our deeply low-tech bikes on a new cycle path along the river. River to the right of us, miles and miles of fertile farmland on the left in large rectangular blankets of green and brown stretched out to dry. Purple stripes of lettuces, limy green romaine. At the market gardener’s plot you could have mistaken the farmer for his scarecrow, but he moved. We took a sudden turning that looked like the main one, dipped steeply down a rutted bank and found ourselves on dirt track to somewhere. Side by side now we talked. Effortless, the whole thing. There is no cost to cycling here in this flattest part of England, other than the bike on ebay. No pay for it tomorrow in your legs, no huffing up the hill. The dirt track discovered a road that seemed to say left, the next one right. By accident we passed the enormous new hostel built for migrant workers where huge signs delineated private land, ingress and egress in the kind of Gestapo speak that put a burst of power in your pedal. Then open roads, two cars wide with not a car in sight. The sheer delight of it. For the best of five miles we saw only swallows and hedges, trees and sky. The cage of my heart flung wide.
There were rooflines then. A road sign. Two suburban planters like an obscenity scrawled at the drive of a mean faced bungalow. A distant windmill dark brown above the tall grasses its white sails welcoming us beyond. Hot and thirsty, we started to dream of drinking. A long thirst quenching glass first, then stout slow pints of rich brown ale under the umbrellas at the Maid’s Head.
We entered the village abruptly at the side of the village green. It is the village’s best side I think. All timber frame and thatch,a pond with ducks. We always wonder which house we would live in, though we both know we prefer our slightly less postcard perfect village that still has its shops, its school, its vicar, and an old-fashioned garage with overhead petrol pumps – a particular delight to my husband (must be a boy thing). Like my husband’s Saturday morning cycle ride with Lycra Rob. A boy thing if ever there was one. Rob rolls up at quarter to eight clad in go faster skin tight black, and shoes whose heels do not touch the ground. My husband, in cut off trousers and chewed old trainers gives him a friendly run for his money. (Lycra Rob and his Italian/American wife Corrine deserve a blog in their own right. Generous and hospitable, they know cocktails betteren Pa Larkin and share their parties with a whole host of darling buds of May.)
Men dressed like Lycra Rob had colonised the last table in the garden of the Maid’s Head. They were folding up their maps as we clattered in on our boneshakers, screeched the brakes and flung our bikes against the stone wall, eager for a drink. They had the good grace to offer us their outgoing table and not to laugh when we said we had cycled all the way ‘on those’. (the bikes they meant, but my legs would have aroused as much incredulity I am sure). A few raised eyebrows, a nod towards the Pash with its basket the size of Scotland. My husband went in to order and I sat down and tried to figure out on their map exactly how it was we had got there. These men plan their routes in advance. Months by the look of it.
“Short run today” one of them said “only twenty miles”.
One by one they boarded their bikes like chargers. “Two and a half thousand” one of them confided in me against his chum with a swagger in his voice and pound signs for eyes. My husband returned with the glorious drinks as the last of them was wobbling, his ballerina shoes not clicking in properly to the pedals. He did this jiggly little dance with the handlebars, struggling to keep the bike upright till his foot could find its place. Then there, right on the lush green grass he fell, in slow motion, like an eight-year old. Unhurt, but deflated. I had the good grace not to laugh. But I couldn’t resist shouting, with a friendly wave, “My bike never does that to me”. My bike is a beauty. It’s the way she makes me feel, the cage flung wide.
Like all good friends though, it isn’t what she does for me but how she makes me feel that matters. With her I am weightless, I am winged. It’s how my daughter feels on her scooter. I see it in the gleam of her eyes, freedom snapping in the tips of her flown back hair. We travel like this to her music lessons. Her on the scooter, me on the bike.
“I’ll wait for you at the corner” I shout when we get to the traffic lights, even though she knows the routine perfectly well. I signal and turn, wait for her with one foot balanced like a ballerina in toe shoes. She hunches down watching for the pedestrian signal then flies like a greyhound let loose. No idea how amazing she looks, or that it has taken her brain twenty-three thousand signals to her body to get her from one side of the road to the other. No idea at all that at the speed she is going one bit of brick in the path could catapult her headfirst into tomorrow.
Last summer my husband and I tried out our deeply low-tech bikes on a new cycle path along the river. River to the right of us, miles and miles of fertile farmland on the left in large rectangular blankets of green and brown stretched out to dry. Purple stripes of lettuces, limy green romaine. At the market gardener’s plot you could have mistaken the farmer for his scarecrow, but he moved. We took a sudden turning that looked like the main one, dipped steeply down a rutted bank and found ourselves on dirt track to somewhere. Side by side now we talked. Effortless, the whole thing. There is no cost to cycling here in this flattest part of England, other than the bike on ebay. No pay for it tomorrow in your legs, no huffing up the hill. The dirt track discovered a road that seemed to say left, the next one right. By accident we passed the enormous new hostel built for migrant workers where huge signs delineated private land, ingress and egress in the kind of Gestapo speak that put a burst of power in your pedal. Then open roads, two cars wide with not a car in sight. The sheer delight of it. For the best of five miles we saw only swallows and hedges, trees and sky. The cage of my heart flung wide.
There were rooflines then. A road sign. Two suburban planters like an obscenity scrawled at the drive of a mean faced bungalow. A distant windmill dark brown above the tall grasses its white sails welcoming us beyond. Hot and thirsty, we started to dream of drinking. A long thirst quenching glass first, then stout slow pints of rich brown ale under the umbrellas at the Maid’s Head.
We entered the village abruptly at the side of the village green. It is the village’s best side I think. All timber frame and thatch,a pond with ducks. We always wonder which house we would live in, though we both know we prefer our slightly less postcard perfect village that still has its shops, its school, its vicar, and an old-fashioned garage with overhead petrol pumps – a particular delight to my husband (must be a boy thing). Like my husband’s Saturday morning cycle ride with Lycra Rob. A boy thing if ever there was one. Rob rolls up at quarter to eight clad in go faster skin tight black, and shoes whose heels do not touch the ground. My husband, in cut off trousers and chewed old trainers gives him a friendly run for his money. (Lycra Rob and his Italian/American wife Corrine deserve a blog in their own right. Generous and hospitable, they know cocktails betteren Pa Larkin and share their parties with a whole host of darling buds of May.)
Men dressed like Lycra Rob had colonised the last table in the garden of the Maid’s Head. They were folding up their maps as we clattered in on our boneshakers, screeched the brakes and flung our bikes against the stone wall, eager for a drink. They had the good grace to offer us their outgoing table and not to laugh when we said we had cycled all the way ‘on those’. (the bikes they meant, but my legs would have aroused as much incredulity I am sure). A few raised eyebrows, a nod towards the Pash with its basket the size of Scotland. My husband went in to order and I sat down and tried to figure out on their map exactly how it was we had got there. These men plan their routes in advance. Months by the look of it.
“Short run today” one of them said “only twenty miles”.
One by one they boarded their bikes like chargers. “Two and a half thousand” one of them confided in me against his chum with a swagger in his voice and pound signs for eyes. My husband returned with the glorious drinks as the last of them was wobbling, his ballerina shoes not clicking in properly to the pedals. He did this jiggly little dance with the handlebars, struggling to keep the bike upright till his foot could find its place. Then there, right on the lush green grass he fell, in slow motion, like an eight-year old. Unhurt, but deflated. I had the good grace not to laugh. But I couldn’t resist shouting, with a friendly wave, “My bike never does that to me”. My bike is a beauty. It’s the way she makes me feel, the cage flung wide.
What is it about the Moon?
Both my girls treat it like a person, running to meet the moon like granny at the airport. It happened first when our eight year-old was nearly two. She saw it one late afternoon making a premature appearance in an autumn sky hours before the stars, sat right down in the middle of the path, stretched her toddler arms out to it and pleaded “Come”. Where have I been for so long, I thought, that I have should have forgotten the moon’s face?
Our younger one, now not yet three, with perhaps less poetry in her soul but a greater love of motion, spies the moon in the sky and insists that Mummy run along with the pushchair singing a falling three note tune “Hello, moon, moon, moon, Hello moon, moon, moon, Hello Moon.” Knowing the second time around that two-years old doesn’t last long, I forget about what the neighbours will think and oblige her, chugging up Black Bank a little breathless. I think she hopes we will catch it up, or believes that it is having a race with us.
The eight year-old doesn’t sit in the path anymore waiting for the moon to come. She wants to know about waxing and waning. Realising that along with the Kings and Queens of England and the 52 States of America here is another tranche of information I have once been taught and forgotten, I look up the moon’s details in a tatty old book in my husband’s study and discover that if you put your right hand up to the moon and it fits the ‘C’ shape of your hand it is waxing and if it fits the ‘C’ shape of your left hand it is waning. That’s ok I can remember that – my mother taught me to beeswax the dining room table when I was a girl --waxing is forever right handed for me.
As for my mother, she is waning. Far off in the delightful climate of the Southern United States she is getting smaller and smaller. Her ears hear less on the telephone. Her letters are fewer and shorter. Not yet a sliver of herself, she is, I have to face it, in decline. I wish she weren’t. I wish I could stop it. (If I lived closer I would build a high wall around her like they talk of building round Venice. A kind of sea defense against time.) I love the seasons, their changes and chances, but this is where my being in harmony with the natural flow of life ceases. I want to go backwards, hear her tell me to polish that spot again, show me how to put my eye at the edge and look sideways for smudges and gleam. I would happily take the ache back into my skinny schoolgirl arms, rub the rag round and round forever if it could take the wane away.
Wild and inquisitive, my own girls are all wax. Me? I go on hoping I am not yet quite full, and don’t really want to know in case I am wrong.
Whaddya think? Maybe my two year-old is right. Maybe the moon is having a race with us after all.
Our younger one, now not yet three, with perhaps less poetry in her soul but a greater love of motion, spies the moon in the sky and insists that Mummy run along with the pushchair singing a falling three note tune “Hello, moon, moon, moon, Hello moon, moon, moon, Hello Moon.” Knowing the second time around that two-years old doesn’t last long, I forget about what the neighbours will think and oblige her, chugging up Black Bank a little breathless. I think she hopes we will catch it up, or believes that it is having a race with us.
The eight year-old doesn’t sit in the path anymore waiting for the moon to come. She wants to know about waxing and waning. Realising that along with the Kings and Queens of England and the 52 States of America here is another tranche of information I have once been taught and forgotten, I look up the moon’s details in a tatty old book in my husband’s study and discover that if you put your right hand up to the moon and it fits the ‘C’ shape of your hand it is waxing and if it fits the ‘C’ shape of your left hand it is waning. That’s ok I can remember that – my mother taught me to beeswax the dining room table when I was a girl --waxing is forever right handed for me.
As for my mother, she is waning. Far off in the delightful climate of the Southern United States she is getting smaller and smaller. Her ears hear less on the telephone. Her letters are fewer and shorter. Not yet a sliver of herself, she is, I have to face it, in decline. I wish she weren’t. I wish I could stop it. (If I lived closer I would build a high wall around her like they talk of building round Venice. A kind of sea defense against time.) I love the seasons, their changes and chances, but this is where my being in harmony with the natural flow of life ceases. I want to go backwards, hear her tell me to polish that spot again, show me how to put my eye at the edge and look sideways for smudges and gleam. I would happily take the ache back into my skinny schoolgirl arms, rub the rag round and round forever if it could take the wane away.
Wild and inquisitive, my own girls are all wax. Me? I go on hoping I am not yet quite full, and don’t really want to know in case I am wrong.
Whaddya think? Maybe my two year-old is right. Maybe the moon is having a race with us after all.
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
About Me
Hmm... not great at disclosure really. Better just read the blog. I'll be there somewhere between the lines,like a memory, half hiding, half waving.
Old Lady Marlow
Her other name remains a mystery. Old lady Marlow, with thin white hair and a face like a very pale prune. She has a small cottage three doors down with a still attractive though slightly going to seed cottage garden hopeful with snowdrops and a few budding tete-a-tete daffodils. She has, as I have observed, at least three pairs of sensible tie-up shoes and a series of hand-knitted cardigans. Always a cardigan, even in summer. And although I cannot observe this, she must also have a name. A proper name I mean, not the ‘old lady’ sobriquet leant her by Father Time, or the ‘Marlow’ given her by the late Mr Marlow when he married her long ago. There must have been a name he loved better than any other, a name he wanted to carve in the bark of a tree, something he whispered…. OK. Don’t go there. The intimate life of your near neighbour is never a good thing to let yourself imagine. And musty old pillow talk is perhaps better left undusted. Besides which I can’t quite imagine how it would have been. This is a woman whose main occupation seems to be curtain twitching, and the keeping of newspaper cuttings.
OK. Her snowdrops are a benefit to the village. I grant you that. At least they are a benefit to me. But on the way to school (almost late) with one child too far ahead on her scooter and the other one recalcitrant in the pushchair I could do without being accosted as I was this morning.
“That young chappie …” Leaning on her fence she sticks out her cane, actually sticks it out in front of you so you have to stop. How rude is that? At this moment I don’t care about the goings on in the property across the road. (What else can you call the round remains of a windmill, the poured foundations of an extension and an unsightly caravan? an opportunity?). In my tiny world of school bells and hastily packed lunches he is a total irrelevance.
“…he’s got another one you know.”
“Umhumm” I murmur, one eye on the child ahead who is growing more distant by the second, my hand gripping the pushchair hard.
“A disgrace.”
“Yes,” I say, “Um, my daughter?” I point to the speck on a scooter.
Old Lady Marlow is clearly from a generation when it was acceptable to let your only just turned eight year-old vanish out of sight.
“She’ll be needing this” I pat the blue canvas book bag that is hanging on the handles of the pushchair at the same time swiftly manoevring the front wheels of the pushchair into take-off position. “I’m so sorry but I really need to go”.
She lowers the stick. Slightly. Enough so that my departure doesn’t unbalance her.
I rush off feeling guilty.
Cross.
Guilty.
The two year-old thinks it is fun to run along the pavement. “fahter fahter” she shouts, not very good with ‘s’s’ yet.
One or two early mothers who have already dropped their children are coming back out now the other way. “Morning,” I call through clenched teeth, knowing that no matter what morning resolutions I make I will never be an early mother.
I could avoid the Marlow house, I reflect in the cool light of evening. But it never seems convenient getting both girls across the street and crossing back again just at the peak traffic time when all the outsiders come in from the market town to drop their children at the village school. Their parade of cars, large and little, transforming us, for about a quarter of an hour, into a spectacle of pulling out and parking arrangements that boggle the beholder. I am flattered, of course, to think that our little village school is the preferred option amongst non fee-paying parents for miles around. But is it really worth jostling for the absolutely nearest parking space?
When the two year-old wakes from her nap we set off down Black Bank towards the village nature reserve. There is a restored barn there with an old wagon in it and an educational display with a map of the reserve behind Perspex. She loves climbing on the wagon, which is high enough to be risky and solid enough, I reckon, to be safe, and fascinatingly full of angles, curves and edges. Much more interesting than the small paint-peeling village playground. I like to look at the map, read about the wildlife and plants I may expect to see. I am trying to learn the names of wildflowers. I feel slightly embarrassed about this. First of all, I feel as if I should already know them. Secondly, having to learn them reminds me that though I have been living here for years, there are still parts of me that don’t know the country like the back of my hand. Third, it seems such a small pursuit in the face of all the world’s urgencies. Is there anyone out there but me who considers this a worthwhile pastime? Why does it matter? A wood anemone will blush whether you call it by name or not. What’s in a name after all? The secret of things, maybe, I wonder. Although she is so old that no one in the village dare use hers, I hope one day I will find out old lady Marlow’s.
OK. Her snowdrops are a benefit to the village. I grant you that. At least they are a benefit to me. But on the way to school (almost late) with one child too far ahead on her scooter and the other one recalcitrant in the pushchair I could do without being accosted as I was this morning.
“That young chappie …” Leaning on her fence she sticks out her cane, actually sticks it out in front of you so you have to stop. How rude is that? At this moment I don’t care about the goings on in the property across the road. (What else can you call the round remains of a windmill, the poured foundations of an extension and an unsightly caravan? an opportunity?). In my tiny world of school bells and hastily packed lunches he is a total irrelevance.
“…he’s got another one you know.”
“Umhumm” I murmur, one eye on the child ahead who is growing more distant by the second, my hand gripping the pushchair hard.
“A disgrace.”
“Yes,” I say, “Um, my daughter?” I point to the speck on a scooter.
Old Lady Marlow is clearly from a generation when it was acceptable to let your only just turned eight year-old vanish out of sight.
“She’ll be needing this” I pat the blue canvas book bag that is hanging on the handles of the pushchair at the same time swiftly manoevring the front wheels of the pushchair into take-off position. “I’m so sorry but I really need to go”.
She lowers the stick. Slightly. Enough so that my departure doesn’t unbalance her.
I rush off feeling guilty.
Cross.
Guilty.
The two year-old thinks it is fun to run along the pavement. “fahter fahter” she shouts, not very good with ‘s’s’ yet.
One or two early mothers who have already dropped their children are coming back out now the other way. “Morning,” I call through clenched teeth, knowing that no matter what morning resolutions I make I will never be an early mother.
I could avoid the Marlow house, I reflect in the cool light of evening. But it never seems convenient getting both girls across the street and crossing back again just at the peak traffic time when all the outsiders come in from the market town to drop their children at the village school. Their parade of cars, large and little, transforming us, for about a quarter of an hour, into a spectacle of pulling out and parking arrangements that boggle the beholder. I am flattered, of course, to think that our little village school is the preferred option amongst non fee-paying parents for miles around. But is it really worth jostling for the absolutely nearest parking space?
When the two year-old wakes from her nap we set off down Black Bank towards the village nature reserve. There is a restored barn there with an old wagon in it and an educational display with a map of the reserve behind Perspex. She loves climbing on the wagon, which is high enough to be risky and solid enough, I reckon, to be safe, and fascinatingly full of angles, curves and edges. Much more interesting than the small paint-peeling village playground. I like to look at the map, read about the wildlife and plants I may expect to see. I am trying to learn the names of wildflowers. I feel slightly embarrassed about this. First of all, I feel as if I should already know them. Secondly, having to learn them reminds me that though I have been living here for years, there are still parts of me that don’t know the country like the back of my hand. Third, it seems such a small pursuit in the face of all the world’s urgencies. Is there anyone out there but me who considers this a worthwhile pastime? Why does it matter? A wood anemone will blush whether you call it by name or not. What’s in a name after all? The secret of things, maybe, I wonder. Although she is so old that no one in the village dare use hers, I hope one day I will find out old lady Marlow’s.
A country convert
I am a country convert. When my husband and I moved to our house in a village near a small market town in Cambridgeshire 11 years ago from the throbbing city life of Newcastle it seemed like we had arrived at the end of the world. Nothing happened here. Accustomed as we were to two incomes, two hectic diaries and no children, we were in the habit of dining out, up to date with the latest films, knew our favourite seats in the theatre and even caught the odd night out at the opera. We enjoyed the delicious titbits of knowledge that are the mark of the urban insider -- how to find those prime parking spaces in the city centre, the rat runs that avoided rush hour traffic, where the best coffee is to be had. Here, the only rat run was a game played at the village fete with an old drain pipe, a stuffed sock and a cricket bat. It wasn’t just the speed we missed, it was the lack of event itself. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do, and every free evening we got in the car and raced off to Cambridge to find something approximating to life as we knew it.
The nearest market town really was a one-horse town. A black and white mare belonging to a gypsy, she lived in the meadow next to the cathedral, lazing under looming chestnuts and hornbeams, swishing her tail in the summer sun. One spring she produced a gorgeous piebald foal whose birth and growth became the subject of daily conversation amongst pram pushing mothers and idling shoppers on the path along the meadow. See what I mean? Nothing happened here. The birth of piebald foal was news. We saved our carrot ends for her. When we walked we had a destination now. We hoped she would deign to approach, nibble from our palms. The gangliness of her delicate legs was heart-stopping.
Looking back on it, that was when the country got its hooks in me. Those walks past the market town meadow now with cows, now with sheep. The horse in her corner, a jay on the water trough. We started going for walks in the evening by the river listening for the honk and splash of geese landing, thrilled by the skill of their v-formation, their feet extended like the undercarriage of a very small plane.
Living here has taught me again what I had in my childhood and lost – the ability to observe and the capacity to enjoy the simplest things. I do not just wait for spring, I watch for specific clumps of snowdrops that mark my daily route. Two at the churchyard lichgate, one in old lady Marlow’s cottage garden, three up Black Bank, a scattered handful in the hedgerow. My life is local now and I love it.
The nearest market town really was a one-horse town. A black and white mare belonging to a gypsy, she lived in the meadow next to the cathedral, lazing under looming chestnuts and hornbeams, swishing her tail in the summer sun. One spring she produced a gorgeous piebald foal whose birth and growth became the subject of daily conversation amongst pram pushing mothers and idling shoppers on the path along the meadow. See what I mean? Nothing happened here. The birth of piebald foal was news. We saved our carrot ends for her. When we walked we had a destination now. We hoped she would deign to approach, nibble from our palms. The gangliness of her delicate legs was heart-stopping.
Looking back on it, that was when the country got its hooks in me. Those walks past the market town meadow now with cows, now with sheep. The horse in her corner, a jay on the water trough. We started going for walks in the evening by the river listening for the honk and splash of geese landing, thrilled by the skill of their v-formation, their feet extended like the undercarriage of a very small plane.
Living here has taught me again what I had in my childhood and lost – the ability to observe and the capacity to enjoy the simplest things. I do not just wait for spring, I watch for specific clumps of snowdrops that mark my daily route. Two at the churchyard lichgate, one in old lady Marlow’s cottage garden, three up Black Bank, a scattered handful in the hedgerow. My life is local now and I love it.
Saturday, 21 April 2007
Moving house
The boxes have been arriving non stop since 7 this morning. Men with big feet and a pittance of patience all wanting different permutations on the tea theme -- one sugar, two, coffee, white no sugar. Feel could after all get a job at Costa down the road which is a good thing to fall back on since my last job-finding attempt failed spectacularly. Something about eye contact, no doubt, and misinformation and contracts not being properly drawn up. That kind of thing every happen to any of you? My good friend urbanchick is just down the road. And my new neighbours here at Purplecoo seem a jolly bunch. All wine and chocolates as far as I can tell. Which suits me just fine. As long as it Green and Blacks, and dry and chilled. When you've got your own boxes unpacked come on over and see the house all white and waiting, before I get any pictures up, before I've cluttered the place up with my bits and bobs and tags and counters and links. We'll have a drink. You choose -- the kettle or the corkscrew.
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