Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  The Evangelical Woman was clambering off her bike when I called down to her from the bedroom: ‘We have lost the car keys. Say a prayer we find them.’ I could have added: ‘Or I won’t let you in.’ I didn’t. I think it went without saying. What is the point of having religious zealots as friends unless they are of some use to you? No one remotely divine was listening to me and I wanted my car keys back. Right now. She raised her right arm, closed her eyes. ‘Lord,’ she said. (She does do this. Even without asking.) ‘Please help us to find the car keys. Our friends need them and we need your help in finding them. Thank you, Lord.’

  I thundered downstairs to put the kettle on. ‘We’re supposed to be going on holiday tomorrow,’ I said, panting in my anxiety, as they came into the kitchen. ‘Have the children got them?’ she asked calmly. ‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘I asked the boys and they say they don’t have them. They’ve been helping me look for them. They know we really need them.’ ‘Have you looked outside?’ she said, even more reasonably. Christians are very reasonable people. Reason had long ago deserted me for blasphemous fury. I marched out to the garden and crawled through the undergrowth to the boys’ den. I looked around their sanctuary: a shiny Roman shield, three foam rubber swords, a broken Thunderbird 1 rocket and underneath a pile of leaves among the roots of a fuchsia bush, the jutting end of a key. Praise the Lord, pour the tea and saddle up my horse.

  Saturday, 22 July 2006

  Summer holidays

  Tactical mistake – we are holidaying in the country. I pointed out to my husband we are living in the country. Why would we want to spend more time than we have to in it? I want time off for good behaviour: dirt, smog and traffic jams. I want binge-shopping. I certainly do not want rural Wales.

  It takes eight hours to get from Northumberland to West Wales. No one in their right minds would want to make the 300-mile cross-country journey – either way. My husband said: ‘We won’t book into a hotel. We will start driving and stop when we get to about Chester.’ His ideas are rubbish – I am surprised a siren does not go off when I hear them. The problem is he is so eminently plausible when he explains them. You find yourself saying: ‘OK,’ and admiring the blue-green of his eyes. This time, my husband had not bargained on the Golf Open.

  North-west England was full of golf fans, and the Welsh borders were no better. I never realized that golf had groupies. As the three children slept in their seats, we traipsed round hotels much as Mary and Joseph did on Christmas Eve (but with more children and less of a result). No one offered us so much as a bunker for the night. Driving round a street brawl in Wrexham, trying to avoid killing the staggering and drunk (I presume they were not golf fans. I would hope golf fans do not behave that way), I said: ‘Do you know, darling? I think we should have booked a hotel after all. We will have to drive through the night.’ We had set off at 9.20 p.m.; we arrived in my brother-in-law’s farmyard at 5.10 a.m. I am so pleased to be able to enjoy a grey dawn in the Welsh countryside, such a nice change from Northumberland.

  Monday, 24 July 2006

  Hell is …

  We had to go to the Royal Welsh Show organized by the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society. Why? I am not royal. I am not Welsh and have no interest in tractors. It was also far too hot and I hate crowds. Did I want to go to an agricultural show? I did not. Unfortunately, my brother-in-law and his Welsh wife did.

  Someone tried to blag money from us as we parked the car in a field, halfway up a mountain. Moonies? Communists? Someone with a clipboard and a tofu smile. He was certainly a risk-taker asking a woman with three children and a thunderous black cloud over her head for money. I had already seen him inveigle another mother with a small boy, as she tried to lock up her car. I snarled on my behalf and hers as he walked up the grassy slope towards us: ‘I don’t think so. Do you?’ He looked mildly outraged that someone, at the start of such a nice Welsh family day out, would refuse him money. I rejoiced. I wanted to offend him. I wanted to bite his leg. After I had seen off the panhandler, I had to pee in the field. I always know it is not going to be a good day if I have to pee in a field.

  Heatwaves are rare in Wales but we hit one. We baked in large, hot crowds of large, hot Welsh people speaking Welsh and looking at combine harvesters. I rather liked the Welsh goats, but the highlight was the Welsh sheep shearing. Aside from the sheep shearing another personal favourite was the pole climbing, which is much as it sounds. We sat on the grass, watching the pole climbers clambering up enormously tall poles. I doubt I was the only person in the crowd hoping one of them would fall. The children were picking up tips on dangerous activities they could try when we got home and I was musing: ‘Would I hate living in Wales more or less than living in Northumberland?’ when the woman who was our nearest neighbour suddenly let out a yelp. She started frantically tossing her hair from side to side and wriggling her shoulders. She had been sitting down, leaning against a wooden shed while she ate her ice cream. Never lean against a wooden shed at an agricultural show: it is likely to contain a sizeable animal which will piss down the wall and all over your ice cream. If you are lucky, you will notice what is happening before you finish it. I decided I would hate living in Wales more.

  Friday, 18 August 2006

  Pegging out

  I do things in Northumberland that I would never do otherwise. I hang out washing. I enjoy the weight of a wet shirt in my hand, the reach of my arm and the tidy clip of the plastic peg. Sunshine in my eyes, I squint-string the clothes along the line which runs across the common grass between the sea-fringed fields and the cottages. Then, I catch and heave and hoist them up to the clouds; a length of skinny, metal piping, standing guard, the line caught in its wooden, snake-tongued mouth. They flap and flurry in the northern breezes, lift, noisy and excited in the whippy gusts straight blown from the world’s other side to here. It relaxes me to do it, see it, hear it. Mind you, I do not like to iron it. No other sort of housework relaxes me. I will avoid housework of any other kind. I make an exception for laundry. Washing and drying I like to do. You can keep the rest.

  Tuesday, 22 August 2006

  Silence is golden

  I have worked quite hard this month writing features for a student guide to universities. The problem when I work is that my life shrinks to this row of cottages. Sometimes when I look up and see the sea on the horizon, I think: ‘That must be the edge of the world. Will I drop off it today?’ Thought we all deserved a break, so I invited over the Sheep Farmer’s Wife and another mother, who happens to be a shepherd’s wife, for a playdate. I keep having these moments where I say something and there is a long pause while the person I am talking to thinks about what I have said. During that pause, I start wishing I had not said it at all. I did it recently with the Evangelical Man when he biked over for tea and buns. I said: ‘Do you ever think when you are reading a book and the children sit down next to you and you can’t move your arms that it’s like being in a limo with two Mafia hitmen?’ There was silence. The man, who is a devoted father to his three children, shook his head, took a mouthful of tea and said: ‘I can’t say I have.’ I wrote a mental Post-it note to myself and stuck it on a synapse. ‘Shut up!’ Then I did the same thing today. The children were all playing nicely together. The Sheep Farmer’s little girl and the Shepherd’s two boys were running in and out of the shrubbery with my two. The Sheep Farmer’s younger boy played at his mother’s feet as we sat outside drinking tea and my baby sucked on her fist. I said: ‘My five-year-old was deciding between giving me a plastic teddy bear filled with rainbow-coloured sand or a dinosaur and he gave me the dinosaur. He said he thought I was more like the dinosaur.’ Silence. Pause. The Sheep Farmer’s Wife said: ‘Really?’ The Shepherd’s Wife said: ‘Weren’t you upset?’ I am thinking: ‘A) They now know my child thinks I’m a monster; and B) that I quite like it.’

  Friday, 8 September 2006

  The farmer wants a wife

  It is true to say that if I was not a wife, I would not be here, but as I get to
know these women, I watch how the clock on the kitchen wall of the farmhouse runs slower than other clocks. Times may be a-changing but they change more slowly for farmers’ wives than for many, I think. A farmer may choose a wife because of her shapely calves; it helps, of course, if she comes from farming stock and knows the drill, although he may be willing to bring in fresh blood to improve the line. She marries not just a man but his family and his farm. She must be more generous than many women. Chances are, the farmer has not just a wife but an aproned mother and a tweed-capped father who may still be partners on the farm. These in-laws may still have an interest in the farming of the land, financial and otherwise. They may still live in the big farmhouse, the home where she wants to live. They may have an opinion on how she runs her own house and her own life and how she looks after her family. She may bite her tongue more than many women. They may take money out of the farm when they retire, and even when she gets into the big house it may never feel like her house. There may be no money to take and they may have to sit on by her range. If the farm is a tenanted farm, she is but borrowing the house. She may be more nervous of the future than many women. She may have stuck to her traditional role, cooked a breakfast, cooked a lunch, provided afternoon tea, then cooked a dinner to mop up any emptiness. Her hands may be redder and her feet more sore than many women. She may feel, when the children go to college, that she should stretch her wings; that may be harder to do than she thought. She may get a little job, open a farm shop, a café, run a B&B or run round cleaning holiday cottages on Saturdays. She may get up earlier and go to bed later than many women. She may watch her own children grow, and wonder if they will be farmers and whether they will earn enough to keep the farm in the family. She may worry more than other women.

  Tuesday, 12 September 2006

  The neighbourhood

  At dusk, when the children tip into sleep, I step outside and walk along the access road a little way, stopping to look across the pasture, waiting for the lighthouse to blink, for the bats to notice me, swoop down and then away. I walk past the empty, ranked, blank windows of the row. I think: ‘This is their cottage home from home. This one theirs. And this one here is theirs.’ I nudge a wooden bench tighter against a wall, lift up and right a terracota pot, wonder: ‘Will she come this weekend or next? … How soon will they be up again? Half-term perhaps?’ I think what I might say, what he or she might say to me. I hope we make good neighbours; at least, I like to think we do.

  Thursday, 14 September 2006

  Hedgerow

  Brambles hang heavy, sweet with berry temptation on their hedge branches. You drive by; they shout after you: ‘Pluck me!’ You stop, glance back, reverse, stop again and wind down the window. ‘Fill up your mouth with my round sweetness,’ they call and pout. ‘Roll me over in your warm, wet darkness before you bite and swallow me. Eat me up till your lips blacken and your tongue shrinks from my taste. Wrest me from this thorny green and let me die happy in a shortcrust pie.’ You nod. You say: ‘How much?’ They say: ‘Your lucky day. Today, all day, I’m free.’

  Saturday, 16 September 2006

  Nit happy

  I have been asked by a newspaper to ring round Labour MPs to see how they are feeling about Blair. I have known some of them the best part of twenty years. That makes me feel old. You can get a surprising amount by phone but I miss being there at the heart of it. Blair is not the only one with problems. The Dairy Farmer’s Wife decided her own husband needs her more than we do, and leaves at the end of the month. I decided I would get a full-time Girl Friday to help with the children and the house and to give me more flexibility with work. All I have to do now is bring in some work so that I can pay her. The King of the Castle said he knew the perfect girl for the job – his farm manager’s daughter, who works as a carer in an old people’s home. She showed me a note from one of the relatives. It said: ‘God bless you for all that you have done to make Mum’s life as good as it has been during this dreadful disease. I shall always consider you to have been one of the “Angels” who blessed our lives and made the “unbearable” so much more bearable … You have always brought such joyous smiles to Mum’s face. I am well aware that you mean so much more to her now than even we do.’ I thought: ‘That’s good enough for me.’ So far, so good. Then my five-year-old catches nits. The hairdresser found them. Yuk. Even worse, this being Northumberland, the hairdresser is my new nanny’s sister. The shame of it.

  I looked ‘nits’ up on the Internet and immediately wanted to shave my son’s head and burn his bed. Instead, I go to the chemist to buy a nit comb. It would have been less shameful to buy flavoured condoms with tickly bits at the end. I whispered: ‘Do you have a nit comb?’ The overalled assistant said: ‘Pardon?’ They should not employ deaf girls behind the counter of a pharmacy.

  My head is crawling and hot even thinking about it. Do I have nits? If I have nits, I will borrow a gun and shoot myself. School sent round a note after I told them, telling parents: ‘There are nits. Treat your child’s hair.’ But every mother I mentioned it to has resolutely not treated their child’s hair. Some of them claimed they had not even seen the note. You do not spontaneously combust with nits. One of their children passed them on and the problem will not go away. They will come back. Nits: The Revenge. I think I may have made a policy mistake. I mentioned the nits to one mother. She said: ‘You are very brave to admit your child has nits.’ You should never do anything other people label ‘brave’. ‘Brave’ is just another word for stupid. My poor baby came home from school. Some little beast had called him: ‘Nit head. Nit head.’ What that mother meant was: ‘You have just told me your child has nits. I am going home to tell my child. He will tell another child, who will brand your child a nit head.’

  Wednesday, 20 September 2006

  Ladies who lunch

  I took the Yorkshire Mother out to lunch. It was a strange sort of occasion. She has four sons – sprawling, brawling sorts of boys, much like my own – and an older daughter. She should have five sons, not four. Her eldest would have been twenty-one today, but no key of the door for him. Dead before his time, seven years ago. Last week, waiting for our boys to come out of school, she said: ‘Wednesday would have been his birthday. I’ll be going to his grave instead.’ My heart took on the colour of her sadness. I said: ‘Would it be weird to have lunch with me before you go?’ A mother does not forget a son’s birthday, however far from home he is. We chinked our glasses, drank up the champagne fizz, wiped out the bubbles with our fingers, then filled the empty glasses with our tears.

  Tuesday, 26 September 2006

  Good night, sleep tight

  My three-year-old and I play this game. At night, after we have read our books, I lean over him the better to admire the curtain lashes and the deep blue of his eyes. I pause in wonder at the boy. I kiss his nose and say: ‘You’re great.’ He lies pressed flat beneath the tiny duvet dinosaurs. He says: ‘You’re great.’ I say: ‘You’re magnificent.’ He says: ‘You’re magnificent.’ I say: ‘You’re wonderful.’ He agrees that I am too, and on and on we go until I catch and giggle at how marvellous this echo thinks me. I do believe that he will tire of me before I should ever tire of playing such a game.

  We had to take him in to hospital for a biopsy because every six weeks he throws up for about thirty-six hours. He has always been tender and mirthful to the core; now he complains of stomach ache and joint pains and is grumpier even than me. Whatever is askew in his body leaves him with large black circles that look as if they have been carved into his face. He was pale and so very good as we walked together from his bed on the children’s ward into the operating theatre. He hung back slightly and hard-gripped my hand. When he lay down and they put him under, his eyes closed, his head went back and he was gone. Seeing his sudden slide into oblivion was terrible. My husband and I waited outside in the sunshine, drank black coffee, thought black thoughts and fielded ‘How is he, do you think?’ phone calls from my mother. We went in again just after
he woke up. They were looking to see if he might have coeliac disease, but could not find any evidence for it. The grey-bearded consultant came to see us as we sat by his bed, my black-and-white boy against his pillows, watching technicolour cartoons. The doctor, who is a gastrointestinal specialist, told us he believes he has what he called stomach migraine and that it will keep coming back. We now have two very large bottles of medicine. You need nerves of steel to be a parent.

  Saturday, 30 September 2006

  Old school ties

  It is not just my children who have gone back to school. My Best Friend From School made me do something I did not want to do. I do not mean smoke and drink a cocktail of gin and canned tomatoes (she made me do that too). Something I promised I would never do and I will never do again. Go to a school reunion.