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.

New Shoes and the Smell of Tar

 

“New shoes and the smell of tar”, came right out of the blue from the lips of my eight-year old as we buzzed along yesterday afternoon in our well-dented, totally paid for and very cheap to run red Peugeot 106. (Remove legs before entering). We were girls on a mission. Two pairs of feet needed shoes, one mad mother needed to get out. Some might call it retail therapy; yesterday I called it breathing. Maybe that had as much to do with the huge blue sky so intense that I nearly veered off the road looking at it and its fat roosting clouds, white, underbellied grey. Zooming along these untrafficked roads north across the fens towards Norfolk you felt you were entering Spring not as a season but as a place. Behind you was gloomy damp, ahead bright blue, an infinity of sky with planks of black-brown earth and green field beneath. Alongside us amongst hedgerows still twiggy and bare, sporadic willows sported their first flush of bud.
“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.

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.

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.

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.