by Dinah Latham
* * *
I remember how, such a short time ago, I was part of that morning hustle, when there just never felt as though there was time to catch my breath, let alone relax over a coffee. I decide to move on, taking my mug of frothy coffee with me. As we walk on, I become anxious to get away from the beginnings of the morning rush – it feels almost contagious and I certainly don’t want to catch it.
This feels a precious time in my life; a special, almost carefree time that I find myself wanting to savour. I never expected that, after leaving work, life would be full of good things and yet be so devoid of the rush exhibited here. I don’t think I gave much thought to what retirement might be like. It was as though it was a non-place at the end of something, but almost as though it was something you passed through on your way to somewhere else. I never looked on it as a destination in itself, with something of its own to discover.
We head for home and I begin to think that while I never really considered where the ‘somewhere else’ was after passing through retirement village, the signpost would surely have to say ‘Growing old – this way’.
These thoughts throw an image in front of me, as if on a cinema screen. The picture is of a long line drawn from one side of the display to the other with the title ‘Lifeline’ above it. It has the years of my life marked on it from left to right. Peaks are being drawn like mountains above the line, indicating good times, with some less impressive, smaller peaks dipping below the line, indicating unhappy times: it’s demonstrating a sort of graph design of my life.
2
ALL THE WAY BACK
A really wonderful walk today: not particularly good weather, a bit drizzly and dreary, although Harriet doesn’t seem to register the dismal landscape. She’s still rushing to and fro, sniffing at everything, running up the bank and then appearing between the bushes farther up the lane. The cloud cover seems dense and low and it feels as though the dimmer switch needs turning up.
Suddenly, in the dim light, I catch sight of a pair of beautiful woodpeckers at the bottom of the meadow, pecking away at the ground, busily unearthing breakfast. I can’t hear them but their head movements seem to indicate that they’re chatting. First one listening to his partner and then she taking her turn, heads bobbing and tipping, both watching the other, while constantly looking around for signs of danger.
Harriet is way ahead down the lane so there’s no chance she’ll disturb them and I’m able to stand by the gap in the hedge and watch them discussing their plans for the day. I fancy she’s the busy-looking one, forever foraging, while he, with his vivid red head and bright green plumage, stands tall and proud on a mossy stone just above her. It seems she then turns her back on him, dismissing him, indicating it’s time for him to get out from under her feet and be off to work. As he lifts from the ground in flight, she casts a backward glance, as if reminding him to return in time for tea: a magic moment in this quite ordinary day, watching as a secret spectator these lovely creatures going about their daily lives.
* * *
I’m not quite sure why but my mind runs back to my childhood home and something about the scene I’m witnessing reminds me of my mother who was constantly on the go, always, it seemed, able to do several things at the same time and, as a result, always saying something over her shoulder while her hands were busy.
My mum, Eleanor Latham, was four feet ten inches tall and wore a size four shoe. Her footsteps hold strong memories for me. She always wore very high-heeled shoes, even around the house, and I would lay in bed at night tracing the sound and guessing where she was and what she was doing by the click of those heels – the sound I went to sleep to and the sound I woke up to – my comforter; the function satisfied by a bit of blanket or scruffy teddy bear for my own children in later years.
Even as you looked at her it was evident to all that there was more to my mother than was suggested by her size. Her own mother had died when my mother was just nine years old: my grandfather came home after the First World War to find my grandmother, his thirty-eight-year-old wife, dying with tuberculosis. In quiet moments, perhaps when she was darning socks or clearing out the hearth, if encouraged, Mum would sometimes talk to me in bits and pieces about her life at home.
I think this is where I got the beginnings of what became a deep-rooted fascination for how ordinary folks lived their lives – something that stayed with me as a district nurse – who was at the end of every garden path or at the top of every staircase in the block of flats?
I remember Mum describing how she peered through the brass bedstead rails of her mother’s bed on the morning she died. She heard her mother saying she could hear the birds singing. My mum sat on the edge of the bed to hook up her black button boots for school and wondered why she herself couldn’t hear the birds that her mother was listening to. Those very same words were spoken by my father in his last moments of consciousness before he died. Mum talked of the shock of returning from school to find her mother had died, of how she wished she had known she was dying so that she could have said goodbye to her. We sat together, for many hours and days, by my father’s bed while he was dying, with Mum refusing to leave, even to sleep. She had to be there; she had to say goodbye. As the tears rolled down her face, I felt sure there were tears there for her mother too.
I seldom saw my mother cry but, as I grew up, I had the strong impression that she cried alone. When I was a toddler she would cuddle me on her lap in times of distress and I grew up remembering one of her sayings: ‘Don’t cry today. Wait till tomorrow.’; the implication being that you needed to save the tears because things might be worse tomorrow. Or maybe, ‘Don’t let the tears start. Once the floodgates are open, you may never stop.’
Although she always spoke lovingly of her father, he married again, and Mum spoke with coldness about her stepmother, who it seems rejected her, her sister and younger brother. Her stepmother went on to produce a much favoured half-brother and sister. Mum went to work at age fourteen and in the evening played the piano for the silent films at the local cinema in Gerrards Cross – a lucrative addition to her income: a whole shilling (5p) for an evening’s playing.
Mum was to repeat this performance for myself and my sisters many times, and again to the delight of my own children. Verbally she gave them the black and white silent film story of the distressed maiden tied to the railway line while she matched her hands to the words. Her gift of playing by ear was a thread that ran through her life and touched all who knew her. From playing ‘God Save the King’ at the end of some school play, to evenings around her much loved piano singing ‘Bless ‘em all’ and ‘Pack up your troubles’ with the mildly merry cricket club at the end of a successful match, Mum’s piano playing was at the very heart of it all: it fed her soul. Everything she played was slightly syncopated, even when it was a hymn. I heard some Scott Joplin on the radio recently and found myself close to tears. It felt as though she was right there in the next room playing, as I was just coming in the back door, home from school.
I remember sitting on top of this piano in a biscuit-coloured, appliquéd nightdress, aged about four, with my red hair rolled in rags, getting progressively dizzy on home-made elderflower wine. I then fell asleep, curled up like a contented cat, while the singing and jollity went on.
My father came from the next village, from a family who had at one time been quite wealthy. He spent his childhood in Australia, returning to England in his early teens to their home in Chalfont St. Giles. This, the home of my paternal grandparents, seemed very palatial to me as a child. I used to run upstairs to press the bells in each bedroom, slide down the banisters and run across the stone-flagged kitchen floor to see the wobbling room numbers on the wall plaque that had once summoned the servants. To do this was an act of extreme bravery – there was a terrifying monster of a stuffed bird in a glass cabinet at the top of the stairs!
I can imagine this lifestyle captivating my mother, who ran away from her unfriendly stepmother’s home on Gold Hill Co
mmon to marry the charming, rather roguish character of my father who took her pillion dirt-track riding on his motorcycle. Together they won much local acclaim and many awards for their motorcycle achievements.
My two elder sisters were on the scene when the Second World War was declared and my father, in typical flamboyant style, signed up on the first available day, despite being in a reserved occupation. His exploits as a despatch rider were later to enthral us, including how he was invalided out of the army after Dunkirk. He was listed as ‘missing believed killed’ for several weeks and landed up in an English hospital, having escaped on one of the last Red Cross boats to leave St. Nazaire.
I arrived, rather unexpectedly I’m told, to take my place in the family; a wartime baby. My childhood meandered happily through the cowslip fields, paddling in the River Misbourne and feeding the ducks on the village pond.
* * *
I would love to have been able to walk Harriet through a cowslip field. There is a harshness about the golden celandines that inhabit part of one of the walks we’re on today. They run along the side of our path as we head downhill to where the field bursts into view when we come out of the wood. Harriet bounds ahead of me here, all the way down to the little brick bridge over the river where I used to bring the children to play Pooh sticks. I lean on the brick edge of the little bridge and Harriet comes and jumps her front paws up next to me, just to see what I’m looking at. I watch the fish as they disappear beneath me and I cross to watch them emerge swimming downriver on the other side of the bridge. The river is very clear with bright green weeds streaking across just beneath the surface of the stream. There are the beginning buds of what looks like a wild water lily beginning to push up through the water as the fish wiggle past. The rounded stones lie undisturbed on the river bed, smoothed by the water’s journey.
* * *
But these gaudy celandines lining our route to the river have neither the charm nor the profusion of those glorious cowslip fields of my childhood – me ankle deep in their nodding heads, returning home with two hands clasped around the stems, presenting Mum with my find and her placing them on the scrubbed kitchen table in the white milk jug.
The village pond in Chalfont St. Giles holds many memories. I sat on its banks the day sweet rationing was abolished with an enormous bag of assorted goodies, unable to believe that the local shopkeeper was not demanding coupons as well as my pocket money. I stood every day on my way to school and threw stones into the pond, watching the ripples spread out carrying my thoughts, joys, frustrations and tears all the way to the bank, while I fed the ducks with my crusts. The crusts were from breakfast, smuggled into my satchel when no-one was looking; at least, if she did know, Mum never let on and allowed me to feel triumphant at my deception. I still hate crusts, but I don’t have to feel guilty about leaving them anymore because Harriet devours them as though they are some precious delicacy, allowing me to pretend that actually they are the best bit that I have saved exclusively for her; so the dishonesty, indeed the fraud, continues.
There was a security in that village pond, its constancy: the undulating wrinkles in the water were always there, even when the ducks had wandered off for a walk in the fields. I seemed to gain the same comfort from this scene then, just as I do now from watching waves crashing on the shore, with the monotonous back and forth of the tide.
The coach used to pull up by the pond for the Sunday School outing for us all to clamber aboard, egg and cress sandwiches packed into a creaky Oxo tin in a brown paper carrier bag with string handles. These handles cut into the palms of your hands at the end of the day, when it was heavily laden with shells from the beach and the very damp, hand-knitted swimsuit wrapped in a towel. This yearly event to Hayling Island was dependent upon Sunday School attendance. Each week, a shiny stamp depicting a picture from the church calendar – Septuagesima, Rogation Sunday, the four weeks of Advent – was stuck in the assigned booklet to be surrendered prior to the allocation of seats on the coach. Too many blanks and the coach would draw away, leaving me on the bank of the pond feeding the ducks, bemoaning my fate.
The oak tree on the far side of the pond was privy to my first real passionate kiss. His name was Danny. He had large, dark brown eyes and I still wish I had eyelashes as long as his were. I think I was just sixteen, but I can’t be sure. What I remember with certainty was that he thought my freckles were beautiful. It does a girl a really good turn to be told, even if only once in her life, that she’s beautiful. We walked home holding hands, with me wondering whether my mother would be able to tell when she looked at me that I had allowed him to undo the top two buttons on my blouse and fondle my breasts. Still there, the oak tree; as are the breasts, though not quite so pert as then, but they, like the oak tree, have experienced the passing of time and yet they still take pleasure in being fondled.
* * *
We’re over here in the fields by the pond, Harriet and I walking along by the River Misbourne where I paddled so often as a child. The fields are verdant with lush grass because of the recent rain. It’s a shallow stream and, as Harriet goes in to paddle, it’s just up to the tops of her legs. She’s struggling to work out how to grab the stick that’s under water resting on the stones on the bottom. The refraction caused by the water means she keeps sticking her nose down to where she thinks it is and then can’t find it easily because it seems to have moved! Eventually she masters it, flings her head up with stick in mouth and runs about shaking and splashing. She really is not an attractive dog when she’s wet; all straggly and bony-looking without her fluffy coat.
I head off away from the stream up towards the footpath and Harriet gallops after me. I go through a gap in the hedge towards the top end of the meadow and as I enter the next door field I realise how much longer the grass is here – at least calf level, probably due to the lack of the presence of any cows here now. Harriet loves to roll around in the long, feathery-topped grass which dries her coat off somewhat and, as we walk on, she becomes her usual ruffled, scruffy self.
Quite suddenly, I stop in my tracks, unable to believe what I’m seeing just ahead of us on the footpath. Emerging from the taller grass on one side, crossing our track and hurrying into the grass on the other side, is a mother duck being followed by her family of ducklings; at least seven or eight of them, still quite young with little brown feathers developing amongst their still yellow fluffy coats. Harriet is as surprised as I am at the display just about six feet in front of us. Before I can stop her, Harriet prances into the middle of the ducklings, carefully stepping over and around them, ears pricked up, with her eyes focused curiously on their quick movements. She makes no attempt to attack them, but mother duck becomes concerned, facing Harriet and quacking loudly. Harriet goes into a play bow that unsettles the mother duck even more. With Harriet refusing to pay any attention to either my voice or whistle calling her to heel, mother duck takes off and flies low just above Harriet’s head and lands a bit farther down the slope. When she sees this has no effect on the pesky dog, she repeats the manoeuvre, and repeats it again. I then realise this clever duck is ‘performing’ to draw Harriet away from her brood… and it works. She takes off, again flying low over the grass, but now she isn’t landing, she’s flying off. Inevitably, Harriet gives chase, her head and tail becoming visible above the waving grass heads with each bound as she struggles to keep up. She runs and runs until she is only just visible as she disappears through a hedge quite a distance away now.
While I know it’s all about the game of chase for Harriet, and that she has no intention of catching the duck, I’m now worried that the ducklings have been abandoned, all because Harriet is just too nosy. I call and whistle and am just beginning to wonder what to do next when I see her appear back through the far hedge, running as fast as she can to get back to me.
Meanwhile, the ducklings seem to have disappeared; no quacky noises, nothing visible anywhere. I then notice a few wavy movements from tall grasses a few feet away in the direction t
he mother duck had taken. The ducklings have all huddled in together, totally hidden, and there isn’t a sound.
Having put Harriet on the lead, I decide to take her away to the top of the field in exactly the opposite direction to that taken by Mrs Duck, and I stoop down behind a clump of blackberry bushes and wait to see what happens. I’m almost holding my breath when minutes later this mother duck comes back, swooping in low a short way from where she was forced to leave her ducklings. She quacks loudly and, almost immediately, I can hear loud chunterings of the ducklings as they head towards the comforting sound of their mother’s voice. As I wait, I can just see the grass begin to move as the little party heads down to the river.
I want to stay and watch for longer but I don’t trust Harriet not to try to disrupt things again so, reluctantly, I move on. The whole episode hasn’t lasted more than ten minutes. How lucky I am to have caught it and to be able to carry with me the magical image of this delightful family outing off for a swim on this glorious morning.
* * *
Any unfortunate times in my childhood were swept away by the excitement created by an eccentric father who would wake us really early on a sunny morning and announce that we weren’t going to school today as we were going to the seaside instead! We crammed into the car and sang and laughed all the way. By the time we reached Stoke Poges on the outward journey, my father’s voice would ring out: