Elizabethd came up with the idea of writing about five special childhood memories. This was supposed to be on purplecoo but I got so carried away that I thought I had better move it here.
Being picked up from school by my grandmother on a Monday. In winter she would wear her fur coat which I thought was the most beautiful thing I had ever felt. I used to sit next to her on the bus and rub my cheek against the sleeve. Sometimes we would go into town to the toy shop. It was unutterably exciting to know that she would buy me something, unlike the occasions when we passed by with my mother who was always saying "We'll see". I used to hug the excitment to me as we walked up the street. I never asked for anything because it was best to just look longingly and wait for the glorious moment when she would say "Do you like that, love? Shall I buy it for you for a treat?" Looking back they would be little things. I don't imagine a lot of money was ever spent because there wasn't a lot but it was the precious sense of knowing that I would walk away with a tiny doll, a little wooden horse or best of all a kaleidoscope that made me all warm and glowy with excitement. And all without asking.
Making a den under the scrubby bush on the common land opposite our house with my brother and my friend Carol. We would gather long grass to make a bed and stones to define the doorway. We would make a pretend fire with sticks and crumpled cigarette packets and sit inside the bush convinced no one could see us. For days we would bring out sandwiches and watery orange cordial and eat every meal we could hidden under the leaves. When I first saw the place again having been away between the ages of eleven and nineteen I was astonished at how close the bush was to the road and at how small it was, even ten years on. I have a scar on my knee from falling out of it but it was hard to see how I could have got high enough up to fall for more than about two feet.
Tending my little plot of garden at my Nana's house, decorating the edge with shells brought back from a cold and windy holiday in Scarborough. She planted some lily of the valley for me and let me have marigolds and love in a mist to put in a neat row behind the shells. She loved to garden. When I remember her I see her on her knees on her foam kneeler, pushing her hair back from her eyes. "How do you know which are weeds Nana?" I asked her once. "I don't know" she said, "I have just learnt from watching I suppose. Shall I teach you?" And she taught me to identify chickweed and dandelions and many that I still don't know the names of, after twenty years of gardening my own garden. I think my love of gardening started there wielding my own little trowel.
The utter excitement of going along to join the library by myself after school. I must have been about nine or ten. The library was a grand stone building and I had carefully brought along with me everything I needed to join. I spent ages ecstatic at the shelves, taking out books, making a pile, putting something back and adding to it and then carefully balanced the four books which the sign said you could take out at a time and carried them to the desk. The librarian slowly filled in my details and looked over her glasses at me. "You will have to come back for your cards." I couldn't understand. "You can't take any books out now," she said sharply. "You will have to come back next week to pick up your cards." I managed to get out of the big heavy wooden door before the tears came.
Poached eggs, perfectly cooked, on buttery toast, my favourite tea at Nana's, surpassed only by being allowed to stay up and watch The Black and White Minstrels.
Wednesday, 26 November 2008
Saturday, 22 November 2008
This was the light on the hill last week but now it has gone dark with all the suddenness of winter. Ten minutes ago I went out to lock up the hens and could still see in the gloom. Now it is truly dark and the shape of the pigsties and the bakehouse has disappeared into blackness. Across the valley a single light shines and the line of the hill is still just visible, deeply black against the nearly black sky.We have been collecting leaves today, not all the leaves, that would be as impossible up here as heating the world with a patio heater (hate them, such a stupid idea, why not go inside if you want to be warm, rant) but the leaves from by the bottom gate and in front of the pigsties and the bakehouse and those from the path in front of the house. Twelve bin bags full are stacked in one of our many out of the way corners, holes poked in the bags with a handy ash stick, and will slowly moulder into a lovely leaf mould for the hellebores and cyclamen. If only I knew where the cyclamen had gone to.
Ian has had to go back to work for a dinner tonight and has fitted that in with a trip to see ailing relatives. I think I have the better day today. I have been potting up bare rooted perennials; Rudbeckia Goldsturm, Knifophia Bees Lemon and Eremurus, the Foxtail Lily. I have been moving perennial wallflowers and watering the cold frames, filling bird feeders and sorting laundry, and checking the holiday cottage for some visitors who arrived as the light began to fade.
And now there is the question of what to do with an evening to myself. I have a DVD of "Lost in Austen" from the lovely bodran to watch and an uncharacteristic urge to paint my toenails. This last is as a result of my favourite new activity, yoga. This has to be done with bare feet and I am hoping to comfort myself for the inflexibility of my hamstrings with pretty toes. Both watching DVDs and painting toenails are not part of my normal routine. Then there is the looming of Christmas. I am never going to be the sort of person who has done all their Christmas shopping by the end of September but I am starting to get a bit oppressed by the sense that I have done nothing whatsoever.
And so a plan is emerging: an hour or so's shopping on the internet for Christmas presents which will save me from the horrors of real sweaty shopping, followed by a bath and a sit by the stove with "Lost in Austen" whilst I paint my toes. Then if I am really lucky Ian will not stay away overnight but will drive home in the middle of the night so we will be here together in the morning.
Oh, and fish pie for tea. Small things but good ones.
Monday, 10 November 2008
Giving something back
A strange week this one. It began in London. I had stayed as usual in my daughter's flat and was going down to a meeting in the City. It was a busy time, the pavements crowded with people, queues waiting for buses, people on the way to work and school. I had that slight claustrophobia I get now in cities when I come in from my slower, greener and emptier part of the country. For the first day or so the city feels too full, too frantic. I was pleased to be looking out at it from the protective privacy of a taxi.
The taxi stopped for traffic lights by a bus stop. There were three young teenagers waiting, a boy and two girls of about thirteen. The boy looked Chinese and was standing a little apart from the two girls, one black, one white, who were drinking Coca Cola and kicking at their school bags. The black girl walked up to the boy and began saying something. He shrugged and moved away a little. She followed him and backed him up against the wall, talking into his face. Her friend shouted something and they both laughed. The boy refused to meet her eyes, staring away silently up the road into the middle distance.
There was a tension to him that made me watch and wonder if he was ok. The black girl turned away and walked back laughing to the other girl. The taxi's engine idled, we moved forward a couple of feet, the lights changed and we waited again. I watched him, his face pale and closed. The white girl came across, pony tail swinging, her pretty, little face set and hard. She stood next to him and began, ever so slowly, ever so carefully, to pour her drink onto the pavement just by his feet. It splashed up onto his trousers and shoes and he shifted away. She moved with him, still pouring, her face jammed up into his, saying nothing. He was, I think, trying for impassivity but his face was a mask of mute misery. I wanted to jump out the taxi and slap her (yes, I know, I know). When the can was empty she dropped it in front of him and returned laughing to her friend. The lights changed and we drove away.
Why has this stayed with me all week? Something and nothing, no doubt repeated up and and down the country in one form or another. No one was physically hurt. It was not a knifing. And yet the casual, calculated unkindness has got under my skin. The delighted aggression of the girls, the silent misery of the boy is vivid behind my eyelids if I wake in the night and can't sleep. It is of a piece with the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand episode: something designed to humiliate, a petty laughing cruelty. I have no idea whether others would think I am overreacting and I don't much care. To me there is a horror in the idea of a society which takes pleasure in the humiliation of others. Perhaps it was ever thus but I do not want a society in which kindness and a sense of what it is like to be in someone else's sticky coke-splashed shoes are signs of weakness, as strange and oldfashioned as doffing a hat.
And at the other extreme of my week we spent a couple of days in the company of two people who have given quite a lot of money to help to create an outdoor pursuits centre, not a grand one but a place which will introduce city children to the great green spaces of the Northern Lakes. It was quietly and unshowily done. They could help so they did, believing in the power of the outdoors to improve lives at any age. They were interested to see the progress of the place but they were not looking for thanks.
Is it just the years between thirteen and fifty three that make you interested in giving something back?
The taxi stopped for traffic lights by a bus stop. There were three young teenagers waiting, a boy and two girls of about thirteen. The boy looked Chinese and was standing a little apart from the two girls, one black, one white, who were drinking Coca Cola and kicking at their school bags. The black girl walked up to the boy and began saying something. He shrugged and moved away a little. She followed him and backed him up against the wall, talking into his face. Her friend shouted something and they both laughed. The boy refused to meet her eyes, staring away silently up the road into the middle distance.
There was a tension to him that made me watch and wonder if he was ok. The black girl turned away and walked back laughing to the other girl. The taxi's engine idled, we moved forward a couple of feet, the lights changed and we waited again. I watched him, his face pale and closed. The white girl came across, pony tail swinging, her pretty, little face set and hard. She stood next to him and began, ever so slowly, ever so carefully, to pour her drink onto the pavement just by his feet. It splashed up onto his trousers and shoes and he shifted away. She moved with him, still pouring, her face jammed up into his, saying nothing. He was, I think, trying for impassivity but his face was a mask of mute misery. I wanted to jump out the taxi and slap her (yes, I know, I know). When the can was empty she dropped it in front of him and returned laughing to her friend. The lights changed and we drove away.
Why has this stayed with me all week? Something and nothing, no doubt repeated up and and down the country in one form or another. No one was physically hurt. It was not a knifing. And yet the casual, calculated unkindness has got under my skin. The delighted aggression of the girls, the silent misery of the boy is vivid behind my eyelids if I wake in the night and can't sleep. It is of a piece with the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand episode: something designed to humiliate, a petty laughing cruelty. I have no idea whether others would think I am overreacting and I don't much care. To me there is a horror in the idea of a society which takes pleasure in the humiliation of others. Perhaps it was ever thus but I do not want a society in which kindness and a sense of what it is like to be in someone else's sticky coke-splashed shoes are signs of weakness, as strange and oldfashioned as doffing a hat.
And at the other extreme of my week we spent a couple of days in the company of two people who have given quite a lot of money to help to create an outdoor pursuits centre, not a grand one but a place which will introduce city children to the great green spaces of the Northern Lakes. It was quietly and unshowily done. They could help so they did, believing in the power of the outdoors to improve lives at any age. They were interested to see the progress of the place but they were not looking for thanks.
Is it just the years between thirteen and fifty three that make you interested in giving something back?
Sunday, 2 November 2008
Seasonality
It is November. How can you like one month above another? Months just are and without autumn there would be no spring. Each has its charms. All are necessary to the cycle of the seasons which I love. I tell myself this but I am aware that of all the months of the year there are two which lower my spirits: November and February.
This was always the case and it is odd that, living out here where the seasons hit you in the face, I have not noticed any increase in my dislike of November, in fact perhaps the reverse. Here there is more to look at, more to notice and this is a distraction from the main cause of my dislike: the shortening days.
November is the month when we turn to winter. October has been full of hedgerow harvest and turning leaves, gold and burnished when the sun shines. There are October days warm enough to take your cup of tea outside, even to eat lunch on the bench. Sheltered spots in the garden - the bank below the little quince tree, the herb bed by the wooden greenhouse - hang on to summer and to warmth. Sometimes planting bulbs and working outside I will have to take my jumper off.
But November will be grey. By the end of the month all the trees will be bare. Looking out now across the valley the clumps of trees run into each other, green and gold and russet. Soon they will be distinct, black and grey against the green of the fields. We have no curtains or blind at our bathroom window. You can watch the bird feeders while sitting on the loo and when you lie in the bath you see the branches of the yew tree dipping gently towards the house. No one can see in for the curve of trees up behind the house. In a few weeks the leaves will be gone. It will be lighter and looking through the bare branches you will be able to see the field beyond the fence where our neighbours sometimes put their ponies. You can't take your privacy for granted in the winter. Every now and then someone will trudge beyond the fence and I will have to grab for my towel.
November is the month when life turns inward. There is a sort of relief in the pause of relentless activity in the garden, although I shall be sitting by the woodburner with my notebook, reorganising the vegetable garden, reading Beth Chatto and Val Bourne, making plant lists and sketching plans. But we will often be unable to see across the valley for mist hanging solidly behind the pigsties where the ground falls away steeply to the stream. Sheets of rain will drift across the view. Under foot it will be slippy and muddy. Putting the chickens to bed or bringing in logs will involve waterproofs and fleeces and rigger boots, torches and a dash through the dark and rain. Ian will be spending his weekday time here in darkness, leaving before daylight and coming back every night to the intense dark of our hillside. It is not as bad for me as I have a couple of days here when I am not away for work but I miss the evenings when we could walk up the hill. We won't see our neighbours at the farm, or only rarely. Everyone is inside, battened down against the wind and the rain.
By December I will have adjusted. Christmas will be on its way and making Christmas cake and pudding will be happening. We may start to get the cold crisp days which make everything vivid again. The tulips will all be in and there will be no more sessions of frozen fingers from bulb planting in the raw cold. The house will be warm and I might even have started some of my winter sewing projects. I still have an oilcloth bag cut out and some more cushions to make. In summer I just want to be outside.
I remind myself that there are lots of good things happening in November: visits from friends, a trip to my parents, the enjoyable weekly round of yoga and Welsh classes. Time to be ready for winter. Now I am going to take my stinking cold back to the fireside!
This was always the case and it is odd that, living out here where the seasons hit you in the face, I have not noticed any increase in my dislike of November, in fact perhaps the reverse. Here there is more to look at, more to notice and this is a distraction from the main cause of my dislike: the shortening days.
November is the month when we turn to winter. October has been full of hedgerow harvest and turning leaves, gold and burnished when the sun shines. There are October days warm enough to take your cup of tea outside, even to eat lunch on the bench. Sheltered spots in the garden - the bank below the little quince tree, the herb bed by the wooden greenhouse - hang on to summer and to warmth. Sometimes planting bulbs and working outside I will have to take my jumper off.
But November will be grey. By the end of the month all the trees will be bare. Looking out now across the valley the clumps of trees run into each other, green and gold and russet. Soon they will be distinct, black and grey against the green of the fields. We have no curtains or blind at our bathroom window. You can watch the bird feeders while sitting on the loo and when you lie in the bath you see the branches of the yew tree dipping gently towards the house. No one can see in for the curve of trees up behind the house. In a few weeks the leaves will be gone. It will be lighter and looking through the bare branches you will be able to see the field beyond the fence where our neighbours sometimes put their ponies. You can't take your privacy for granted in the winter. Every now and then someone will trudge beyond the fence and I will have to grab for my towel.
November is the month when life turns inward. There is a sort of relief in the pause of relentless activity in the garden, although I shall be sitting by the woodburner with my notebook, reorganising the vegetable garden, reading Beth Chatto and Val Bourne, making plant lists and sketching plans. But we will often be unable to see across the valley for mist hanging solidly behind the pigsties where the ground falls away steeply to the stream. Sheets of rain will drift across the view. Under foot it will be slippy and muddy. Putting the chickens to bed or bringing in logs will involve waterproofs and fleeces and rigger boots, torches and a dash through the dark and rain. Ian will be spending his weekday time here in darkness, leaving before daylight and coming back every night to the intense dark of our hillside. It is not as bad for me as I have a couple of days here when I am not away for work but I miss the evenings when we could walk up the hill. We won't see our neighbours at the farm, or only rarely. Everyone is inside, battened down against the wind and the rain.
By December I will have adjusted. Christmas will be on its way and making Christmas cake and pudding will be happening. We may start to get the cold crisp days which make everything vivid again. The tulips will all be in and there will be no more sessions of frozen fingers from bulb planting in the raw cold. The house will be warm and I might even have started some of my winter sewing projects. I still have an oilcloth bag cut out and some more cushions to make. In summer I just want to be outside.
I remind myself that there are lots of good things happening in November: visits from friends, a trip to my parents, the enjoyable weekly round of yoga and Welsh classes. Time to be ready for winter. Now I am going to take my stinking cold back to the fireside!
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