Bah, Humbug, New Year!

I'm not really a New Year person.
Despite the In-Charge's cousin talking me through 'the year is a circle, New Year joins seamlessly onto the end of last year' - that still doesn't work for me.
It's always seemed like a straight line, the year - so 31st December appears as some sort of awful cliff that you fall off, willy nilly. Yet another leap of faith.
Sadly, I guess that makes me a member of the flat-earth society.
I'm not proud.

I have tried.
Indeed, I do try.
No doubt my family, at this point, would say 'you're very trying' - but despite all, something isn't working.
It's all a bit like this really, New Year:

Whatever, this circle thing just isn't happening for me.
It's about colour somewhere along the line. (There you go - 'line' - see what I mean?)
Colour, whether I like it or not, is the be-all and end-all.
Christmas teems with colour. It jumps out and socks you one, grabs you round the neck and sucks you in until you drown in it, until colour has replaced the blood in your veins, the air in your lungs, the thoughts in your brain.
New Year isn't about colour. It is clean and cold and brightly, icily blue.

Or - as in today's case - wet and grey and rather down-at-heel.
But whatever the reality, it's a chilling contrast to the warmth of Christmas, and definitely outside my comfort zone. It's all about new beginnings, starting all over again - like Maths homework that you got wrong the first time round. 'Return to Go' and definitely do not collect 200...
It's the point when, were it not for the chocolates, empties and new socks lying around, you'd wonder if Christmas had just been some sort of tantalising dream.

Sorry, all you New Year fans out there.
Please tell me, where am I going wrong?

We went to some lovely parties over Christmas, and even had one here, but last night was a quiet night in.
I didn't go to bed - I couldn't be that Scrooge-ish. We watched a movie (an excellent, if rather distressing one, as it turned out - The Flowers of War, with Christian Bale), but then we had an unexpected treat.
Queen and Adam Lambert live at Central Hall, Westminster.
I've not exactly been switched on this last while, so Adam Lambert and I haven't been personally introduced until now. As with most things, I'm behind the times, but it's never too late to catch up.
Last night's gig was, to quote an old friend, 'bloody-marvellous'.
Freddie Mercury - sleep on, sweet singer, rest in peace. Miss you as we do, your legacy is in safe hands. Adam Lambert is a worthy heir.

And just in case you missed it - here's a little snippet for you

And if you need any more convincing:

Still not sure?

Here's one for the road:

Oh, and London's New Year fireworks were amazing too.
Queen thoughtfully paused to let them take centre stage at midnight.

Happy New Year everyone, from rather a dark, damp, colourless west coast.

Passing

The little bay

I took the dogs to the headland this morning.
The tide was right out, the little bay awash with seaweed, the water thick with seagulls.
The smell of the sea was so intense, it caught me in the back of the throat and sent me spinning through the years, to other days, other beaches, other dogs. Memories of another lifetime, it seemed, way back when time wasn't measured because it didn't matter.
Those days didn't feel like thirty years ago, but they did feel as if they'd slipped beyond reach.

Time changes as you get older. It is no longer a haphazard, generously proportioned patchwork, a kaleidoscope of shifting possibilities, an empty frame in which you are creating the picture.
It becomes mean and sly and penny-pinching. It stands at your side, licking the end of its pencil and noting everything down. Nothing slips by unremarked, and one way or another, everything must be paid for - even though the hours it measures out to you slip through your fingers like water.
But it's only when the past comes swooping back to grab you, that you realise how much everything has changed.

I found myself walking through the rough grass aching for days and people - for eras - that will never be again.

But it was a blue morning, calm and quiet, the sun warm on my back.
The headland horses came to say hello as we passed on our way to the lumpy dunes where the dogs love to race, or lie in the grass and ambush each other.

The headland horses come to say hello

It's probably the miniature hills and dells that make the headland so exciting for them. Whoever is playing the hare can never quite tell if she's about to be caught.
And it was only when I got to the top of the highest lump and looked back, I saw that one of the mares has had her foal. The tiny, dark creature was standing close to her, still wide-eyed at this world of mornings and evenings, of sunlight and starlight - too young to realise that all these things are just marking the passage of time.

Later, the tanker-man came to deliver heating oil. We stood in the sunshine and exchanged news. He always knows far more of what is going on than I do.
He was looking pensive as well, despite the spring weather.
'Someone up the road killed himself, this morning,' he told me.
I'd seen an ambulance, going past our gate - a rare sight in this quiet place.
Shocked, silenced, I didn't know what to say.
Tragically - in this quiet place - it seems to happen more and more these days.
'You never know how it is with people,' he said, eventually.

You never do.

Tuesdays and Thursdays

The In-Charge takes a packed lunch to college every day, and being the perfect wife, of course I rise before dawn and make his sandwiches. This morning, only half awake, I pulled the lid off his lunchbox to find yesterday's banana still in residence.
I barely saw the banana, because the smell I had released in removing the lid had instantly transported me back through more years than I care to count. I was once again a young child, opening the lunch at school that my mother had prepared for me early, early in the mornings of long ago. 
She often put a banana in, and its pervasive aroma would mix inextricably with everything else the box contained. Smelling it this morning, I could almost taste the freshly-squeezed, frozen lime juice she also included, juice that by lunchtime would have defrosted to a sweet, delicious slush - more refreshing than water in the heat of a tropical noon.


I was no longer at my  kitchen counter, but back in the Barbados of my childhood. I was six years old again, with memories unrolling around me like film clips.

St Josephs, Barbados

On Tuesdays and Thursdays, my mother picked me up after school and took me home. I presume we had tea, did reading practice, played with my brothers and younger sister. All the things that families do. Who knows?
I have no memories of Tuesdays and Thursdays.
What I remember are the other days, the days when my father had the car in town so I couldn't be collected when the school bell went. I remember the Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Of those three special days, Friday was my least favourite.
On Fridays I went home with another small boy whose glossy mother was a friend of my parents. We would sit at the kitchen table, he and I, and I would stare at the big, red checks on the gingham table cloth, and at the fly paper, obscenely blackening in the middle. I remember feeling a curious distaste for that fly paper, even though I wouldn't have known the word 'obscene'. Perhaps it was because my mother never had a fly paper on an old blue saucer on the kitchen table. Or a gingham cloth.
And all the while, the maid would make us peanut butter sandwiches, the glistening, sweaty butter heaped thick on white, cotton-woolly bread that was a world away from the bread my mother made at home.

All of us with my mother - although I was more than six in this picture

I suppose it all fascinated me, as did the boy's mother who floated around the edge of this scene - a doll who has no substance in my head, whose mouth moved around magazine words. She wasn't the sort of mother who slapped you for biting your fingernails, as mine did. She didn't notice fingernails. But deep down, I knew she wasn't the sort of mother who would sit all night turning a cool flannel on my head through the endless bouts of tropical sickness that plagued me. Without conscious reasoning, I knew this even then, as I also knew that at home we would not have been left alone to play the afternoon away down beside the walls of the house, without anyone coming to see what we were up to. To my young conscience, the games of doctors and nurses - innocent as they were - would not have stood my mother's scrutiny. But she just lay - my classmate's mother - on the cool verandah hour after hour and we did as we pleased.


On Mondays, there was freedom of different kind, because I would stay on at school after everyone had left, and the place was mine then. It was a big, two storey house. The school occupied the ground floor, while the headmistress and her family lived above. No one ever went upstairs - except on Mondays, when I did.

When all the children had gone, a vast silence would fall over the garden that was our playground. Hordes of small feet had reduced what might once have been grass to hard, bare earth interspersed with feathery tamarind trees, and - in season - these hung heavy with pods of tangy, acid fruit. Unable to resist, I would collect them, my mouth salivating spontaneously as it salivates now, just at the memory. Chipping off the crisp brown shell, I would eat them until my tongue was raw, even though for days afterwards I would barely be able to eat at all. But I never learned, either with those or the small green fruit we called Chinese gooseberries which caused tummy ache like early apples.

But on Mondays, I wasn't interested in tamarinds or Chinese gooseberries because I had a very special job. I used to stay and help Miss Boyce make buns for Tuesday's school tuckshop. Miss Boyce was stolid, uninspiring and very plain, but she was enormously kind. She was also very careful with her small charges, enforcing on us behaviour she envisaged our parents would want, yet untouched by many of those rules herself. At midday we would sit neatly at our small desks and open our lunch boxes - those same lunch boxes that have winged me down this chute of memory, and the intermingled smell of bananas and sandwiches would waft around us, locking us - had we but known it - into a time warp for evermore.

But while we ate our sandwiches and peeled our bananas, our eyes feasted on something altogether different and infinitely more fascinating. Miss Boyce, facing us from the teacher's desk, would lunch on hoops of baloney, slabs of bread and butter and whole lettuce leaves and we watched mesmerised as her hand passed seamlessly from her box to the gaping concrete mixer of her mouth.

But on Mondays, even Miss Boyce's table manners were forgotten in the excitement of bun-making. My reward for the laborious greasing of endless tins was the icing. We made oceans of icing in a shade of pink that only small girls love, and then spread it thickly over the buns until finally, my small sticky fingers could press pieces of bright, glace cherry into each one. Oh, how happily we would sit at the table in that quiet kitchen and sample our produce. The concrete mixer didn't appal me in that intimate setting - I was too busy luxuriating in having no other greedy little fingers competing to lick out the bowl.

In those days, there was no edible glitter, no sugar butterflies or fancy dragees to add the glitz that these days liberally sprinkle the cupcakes I make for the market, but the rows of cherry-topped, savagely pink buns gave me far more satisfaction than their modern counterparts ever could. I remember, years later my baby brother drew a picture of a woman on whose bosoms he gravely coloured in 'the cherries'. Those pointed, red-tipped breasts looked like nothing so much as my tuck shop buns which he had never seen.

My baby brother. I seem to remember making him pose for my photo in this ridiculous way!

But it was Wednesdays that I loved most of all.
After school, I was delivered to some old family friends who lived along the coast, a couple whom I called Aunt and Uncle, but who stood in lieu of grandparents to me then. They lived in a wonderful house that was only feet from the sea, something that never ceased to thrill me, even on that tiny, ocean-ringed island. From the courtyard beside the house I would climb up the stone staircase that led to the kitchen on the first floor, and there the elderly maid would laugh and fuss over me while in the background I would hear my Aunt's voice calling, and the sea calling, and the smells of hot food calling.

The ritual was always the same. My satchel was taken into custody by the maid, my hands were washed and then I was sent down the few steps into the dining room to await my 'lunch'. It was a remote and formal room, always cool and somehow disconnected from the rest of the house, but I loved it. A great, polished table stood in the middle, at which a solitary place was always set for me - the rest of the household having eating hours before. Through the slatted blinds and the railings beyond, the street beat hot and vibrant in the afternoon sun, but inside, the family silver gleamed dimly on the sideboard, flowers stood in a vase, and I would sit with my back to the window and drink in the room's gracious elegance as I ate the flying fish and potato pie, or whatever had been saved for me. Subconsciously, I felt my mother would somehow know if I misbehaved in that room, so I never did.

My mother and surrogate Grandmother, Aunt Ercell

But afterwards I would run up the stairs to the most magical place of all - the upstairs drawing room. And there I would chatter to my Aunt and Uncle, and play and 'rest', bouncing in the rocking chair that stood in the wide bay window overlooking that translucent, aquamarine sea. Down beneath the window was a small paved yard with a table and some chairs, and then just pale, dry sand, a few palm trees and the sea. And the sound of the sea, and the smell of it and the endless lure of it have drawn me back helplessly my whole life since, tinting the marrow in my bones and the unsung dreams in my head to aquamarine.

I couldn't wait to get out into it, but I would have to bide my time until 'lunch went down' but then, at last, it would be time to go and change into my bathing suit and walk with my Aunt down the beach. We rarely swam just there, in front of the house, we would walk a short distance and then go in.

I couldn't swim, to begin with, I would just play, revelling in the warm, clear water, the afternoon sun dancing in bright skitters across the undulating surface. We would take an orange with us, or a mango and she would peel it and dip it in the sea and we would eat it, warm and salty, the juice running down our faces. But soon the day came when I had to learn to swim, and she picked me up and carried me, screaming, to the depths of the ocean where the water must have lapped at her waist, and she dropped me, terror-bound into that sweet blue void and behold - like a dog, I swam, coughing and spluttering and totally unaware of her hands hovering around me.
 
And afterwards, walking back to the house, my face and the back of my neck where my bathing suit tied all tingling with sun and salt, I would be totally happy. Until, that is, the day when my happiness turned to cold, six-year-old despair as half-way down the beach I suddenly remembered that I had left my knickers on underneath my bathing suit, and now they were wringing wet. I would have nothing to wear home under my dress. My silent feast in the dining room, the bay window, the sea - everything was lost; and when my father's car finally turned into the yard, my misery was further compounded when I saw another man, a business man, a stranger, sitting beside him. My ally was gone, the chance of any confidences banished, my father in one instant changed from saviour to foe. My world ended in tears and I couldn't believe that he and his companion didn't know in one glance what had befallen me. In that moment I longed miserably for my mother, the only one who could set things right.

My father's desk photo - posing for it was an annual nightmare, but in hindsight, I'm glad we did

I never swam in my knickers again, but once, on my honeymoon, I went to the beach in a bikini with a sundress thrown over the top, and at the end of the day, with the bikini soaked and nothing else to put on, the sea and my childhood tangled in aquamarine around me all over again, and we laughed all the way back on the bus, my lover's arms around me, and me with nothing on but my dress, and I was a child again, who didn't go home after school except on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

_____________________________

COMING SOON: 

In celebration of Writing from the Edge's first birthday, 
I will be having a wonderful Giveaway! 

Don't miss it!

Best of Days

I have just been gardening in the sunshine, cutting back the over-exuberant but lovely purple geranium phaeum which is now at its last prayers. In a week or two the massive gaps will be filled with fresh new leaf, but for the time being the bed looks as if it has been savaged by giant moths. Fortunately Sarah Bernhardt is there to distract my eye from the ravaged sections.

My Sarah Bernhardt paeony is determined to win 'The Most Beautiful Plant in the Garden' Award. She might well do it.

Model Dog helped.
She is a very patient gardener.
Top Dog only helped because there was nothing else to do, and the In-Charge had been thoughtless enough to go out without him. Under Dog snoozed in his bed in the kitchen.He doesn't really like gardening anymore.

Sunday is quite my favourite day.
It stems from when the boys were young, I think, and we would have them home from school and the day started with a long lazy brunch.

The best moment of the week..
I wrote a poem about it long ago

Morning Prayer

Later I will remember breakfast on winter Sundays:

the taste of the day, the way the low sun splashes

diamonds around the blue kitchen. Fire deep-rooted

in the belly of the stove, contentment creaking the

dog’s baskets, cats heaped in the chair like cushions,

and - best of days - my three most well-loved faces.

Softly the radio bares its soul, spills out the Omnibus,

someone’s choice of tunes and favourite book, word

games and goons… Warm as winter sunshine, they hook

the small spaces we leave, but we do not care. Too many

smells weave through the air: bacon frying, thick scarlet

moons of tomatoes and fat gold eggs lying spluttering

beside; the scent of coffee vying for place.  We are

greedy and satisfied.  And passing to and fro, filling

as slabs of hot toast buttery with marmalade, tingling

on tongues dark with oranges, are the exchanges of

the week, the hide and seek of words, the small

inconsequential chatter bright as the litter of stars on

the table top. Blissful to be unaware, drifting amidst the

clutter of blue glass and snowdrops, plates and paintings

and paperwork piled in corners, that little will ever

compare with these blessed ways, these best of days.

Dear boys. I suppose Sunday is the day of the week I miss them most, but today started, as all the best Sundays do, with a long chat with No 2 son in New Zealand, and hopefully it will end, as all the best Sundays do, with a chat with No 1 son in England.
Today there will also be a call to wish my Papa a Happy Father's Day.


I wish I could send him a bunch of roses from my garden.
They fill me with delight.

The Pink Jug

Even though the recent rain has tried to batter them into submission, they are undefeated.
Some of them are resting between outbursts, and some haven't even started to flower yet.
But I picked two lovely bunches today. The Pink Jug and the Purple Posy.

The Purple Posy

I can see why little posies of flowers were called nosegays.
When I bury my face in these roses, I almost pass out.with the scent.

Which bunch would you prefer?
Let me know so that I can rush it to you, the tooter-the-sweeter, as the In-Charge always says.



If the Jug or the Posy seem a little too much, you can always opt for the heart-breaker.

The Heartbreaker

Unless Sarah Bernhardt has already captured your heart?

Half Blue, Half Violet

 

When I was very young, my grandfather took me on an outing.
It is one of the prized memories of my childhood.
I didn't see a great deal of my grandfather, because he lived in England and we lived in a variety of other places - all far away - but on this particular occasion we were in Cornwall, which was not his home, but was where his wife, my grandmother had been born and brought up. I suppose we were visiting relatives when my 'outing' took place.

Together we walked up through the small, typically Cornish village to the railway station, and took the train over the viaduct. Then we walked down through the woods on the far side of the valley and someone rowed us back across the river in their boat. At least, that's what I recall.

I suppose every part of the trip was intrinsically memorable, because there weren't trains, or viaducts or rowing boats in my other life, and I was a very impressionable child. But those aren't the bits I remember.
It was the woods that transformed that outing into something so magical, they still call me back today.

We didn't have woods where I lived either, we had tropical rain forests.
We certainly didn't have bluebells.
And I'm sure that while the whole trip was beyond exciting, it was for the bluebells my grandfather took me there.

To a small child, a sea of bluebells is a life-changing experience. They are astonishing, and other-worldly, and intoxicating. It's not just the intensity of colour, or the waist-deep sea that immerses you as surely as water closing over your head, it's also the scent.

An English bluebell

You can tell an English bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta) quite easily from the Spanish variety which is, apparently taking over in some areas of Britain and Ireland. Apart from the occasional white one, they are always blue, they have slender stems that arch, they have creamy-white stamens and they are scented. The Spanish ones are blue or pink or white, are sturdier, with thicker stems that don't arch; they don't have white stamens and they don't smell.

There is nothing to compare with the scent of bluebells. It is a delicate perfume that is never overpowering, as the delightful but much stronger lily-of-the-valley can be. It teases rather than flaunts itself, and it is very hard to emulate. The only bluebell soap I have ever had that actually smelt of bluebells was a box my mother once gave me, which came from Harrods. I don't know if they still make it, but it would be worth being on their mailing list if they do, as I can think of no nicer present. I put the three, heart-shaped bars in my linen cupboard to scent my pillowcases, and rationed them so they would last as long as possible. Fortunately the In-Charge didn't mind using the Imperial Leather instead.

They say it is smell that lodges so deeply in the memory that you can never prise it out.
I believe them.
One whiff of bluebells and I am a child again, waist high in magic, my soul back on the potter's wheel being shaped - again - around that day so long ago.
But colour does funny things to me as well. My mother used to quote a line about the colour of bluebells -  '...no man has ever named it yet, that shade half blue, half violet...'
It is probably my favourite colour, and everything about it is encapsulated in another line I once read: - 'blue that is a lovely hurting in the eyes'.

Yesterday, on a sudden impulse, I dropped everything I was supposed to be doing, threw the divine duo into the back of the faithful little green car (the silver beast being still an in-patient) and drove to a bluebell wood that I have known of for years, but never visited. It's a long way away, and after ten minutes or so there was muttering on the back seat.
'We usually walk to our woods,' Under Dog said.
'Don't worry,' Top Dog soothed. 'This is the way to our favourite beach.'
Fifteen minutes later, it started again.
'She's missed the turn off. She's lost,' Under Dog said miserably.
'They're always getting lost. Look at the Master - he doesn't find his way home 'til supper time most days. At least we're here to find the way back.' Top Dog reassured him.

Forty minutes into the journey, they curled up on the back seat in silence, which was quite a statement, as they usually like to drive.At least, Top Dog drives, head thrust forward, gimlet-eyed, his attention only wavering if we pass another dog.
Under Dog, it has to be confessed, drives by looking out of the back window to check where we've been.

The dogs cheered up

They cheered up when we arrived.
It had been a long drive, but we all thought it was worth it. The flowers weren't fully out, but it didn't matter.
They raced off between the trees and I raced back in time on a helter-skelter rollercoaster through all the bluebell woods that are part of who I am.

I was a small child in Cornwall again; an adolescent in the beech woods near our eventual English home; a lover with her swain; a young mother taking her small son to be bewitched. It is always the same.That blue against the acid green of young leaves and I can scarcely breathe. When something pierces you through and through, you always catch your breath - our deepest memories, they say, are held in our breath.

My son, aged 2, encountering bewitchment

As we meandered along the paths through the wood, I thought again of my grandfather, and the gift he had given me. A gift from his own experience, a gift he would have received again in the giving.

Now I realize what a two-edged sword it must have been, because now I understand the perpetual cycle of memory. That happiness and grief are inseparable.
I can only imagine what was in my grandfather's heart the day he took me on that outing. He must have been looking back, just as I was doing now, at the endlessly turning circle that somehow weaves an individual picture for each of us. He had walked those woods with his lover, the wife she came to be, and then with his small twin daughters, long before he bequeathed bluebells to me.

I suppose he felt happiness for my joy and grief for his own sorrow.
For the love of his life, the woman who had first taken him to those woods, died when my mother was only twelve.

My grandparents, young and happy

There are no better words than those of Kahlil Gibran: 'When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy. And when you are sorrowful, look again in  your heart, and  you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.'

If a bluebell wood can make you smile and make you cry, then truly it is the sum of all things.

Christmas Magic

I love Christmas.
I love the start of Christmas, which for me is the carol service from King's College on Christmas Eve - as the sky is turning to the blues of night and those pure, light voices reach out to ignite the deepest recesses of my heart.

And I love getting up early on Christmas morning - before it's light, before anyone's awake. The quiet hour or two in the kitchen with that same music and my animals for company as I prepare food and watch the day creep in. It is never just about this Christmas, is it? It is always about all Christmases, so the day is rich with the presence of all those we love, have loved, still love... is imbued with the memories and traditions and rituals that are sacred to us and ours.

For me, all that intensity is held in the moment, early in the morning, when the sky is washed from cyan to duck-egg blue, and the last few stars hang low on the horizon, diamond bright. It's a moment that could happen every morning, I suppose, but somehow it is inextricably tied into Christmas.


When I was a child I lived in the West Indies and on Christmas morning we rose before dawn to go to church, as was the custom there. My mother would wake us in the dark, and we'd sit by the Christmas tree drinking hot chocolate and bursting with sleepy excitement. There was only time to open one present from our stockings before setting out, but that made it even more thrilling.

I'll never forget those early mornings, the room in darkness, lit only by the warm glow of old-fashioned Christmas tree lights that you don't see much anymore - the ones in the shapes of snowmen, and little houses, and Father Christmases; the deep glimmer of decorations catching the light in rich, royal shades of purple and blue, pink and gold; the spiky scented pine needles; the pile of presents like promises beneath the tree - alluring, mysterious and all still to come - still to come.

It was magical.

And then the journey in the car. I'm sure it was then that I learned to love the early morning sky, the pale wash of colour, the stars hanging like decorations. And finally, when we got to church, the Christmas carols that wrapped the whole, perfect, mystical moment in music and sealed it in memory like a fragile butterfly caught in amber forever.
Forever.

 
Painting by Viggo Johansen 1891