Black and white; the day seems far away. In the hectic pink flush of my mother’s cheek, I am there – or at least the idea of me. My uncle just JPEGed me a colour photo of the day. Double click, double click, open and OK: my parents’ wedding, 24 August 1963. A windy day. My mother’s lace dress with its hooped petticoat, lifted up and hurled against her own proud sentry mother in a sky-blue two piece. Dress and coat with matching ‘I’m looking for something for my daughter’s wedding’ daisy-petalled hat. ‘He loves her, he loves her not.’ He loved her, just not for long enough. And my gran, my gran who liked an orchid, exotic in a clear plastic box; it was burgundy. A nice contrast, we all thought, against the blue.
The huddle then, from left to right, my father (now deceased, in a dove-grey silk tie), his hatchet-faced mother (my other grandmother in a dark-blue suit), my sky-blue gran and the pink-cheeked bride. My mother is the only one to smile. I cannot tell if his mother is trying to smile and unaccustomed to it or whether she is thinking: ‘This will not end well.’ A groom then, two widows and a bride. I think he should have guessed how it would end. The way it often ends for men. Dead. And gone. Did I mention he was gone?
Still, I am glad I went to the wedding, stood with them in the breeze awhile, smelled the flowers, admired my gran’s hat, the sheen on my first father’s tie. I magnified his face to a pixelating blur. A blur the size of a daughter’s hand. I know this to be the case. I pressed my hand against his glass face and measured it. Taking it away and looking hard, I thought I saw him smile.
Saturday, 14 July 2007
Galloping Gordons
I spent the afternoon dressed as a Victorian to sell cakes at the school fete and the evening in a gown at the hunt ball. The hunt ball. It is worth repeating. ‘How was your weekend?’ ‘Oh, y’know, busy. Did the shopping. Trip to the beach. School fete. Went to the hunt ball. On at the castle.’ I was slightly disappointed because I had thought we would eat dinner on horseback, but they insisted we sat on chairs at a table. I had thought we would eat roast fox, but it was braised Northumberland beef. I also thought we would burn an effigy of Tony Blair before the dancing started; instead, we were entertained by white-fleshed belly dancers. It could have been a chartered accountant’s annual thrash had it not been for a couple of clues like the chaps in red tailcoats who are the masters of the hunt and the raffle prizes which included an £80 voucher to ‘buy new tack for your horse (saddles, bridles, bits)’ as well as a pallet of ‘haylage (which) provides the ultimate in high nutritional forage … sweet and appealing to even the fussiest of horses.’ I was so disappointed when I did not win the haylage.
My Best Friend From School came up and we went with the Accountant, the Sheep Farmer and his wife, who is pregnant with their third child. The Sheep Farmer said to my Best Friend From School: ‘Mind, she made a hell’uva bad job of shearing that sheep.’ I did not think he was joking. He went on: ‘Look out the window on the A1 and you’ll see it. It’s the one that limps.’ After dinner, there was dancing. I am not sure what these hunting types are like on the field, but they are bloody dangerous on a dance floor. Gusto does not cover it. Hooves pounded the ground, sweat flew from flanks; they leapt over ‘Come on Eileen’. The hounds scented their prey and they thundered on past ‘I Predict a Riot’, ploughing through the mud, the blood beating in their ears. Women in silk and beaded frocks cantered around the dance floor on high and skinny heels; occasionally they whinnied. I had decided against high heels. This was possibly a mistake. The organizer is particularly beautiful. Another very tall woman, like my Riding Pal – perhaps it is the Viking blood. Her legs are as long as I am; the top of my head is about level with her midriff. I looked up at this Hunt Ball lovely. I said: ‘Well done. Everyone is having a fantastic time.’ She smiled brilliantly at me, a vision in bronze and black satin. She said: ‘How nice of you to say that.’ As she turned away, she patted me on the head. I wondered briefly if she was going to offer me a sugar lump.
Wednesday, 18 July 2007
Moving mountains
We eventually managed to get hold of the removal company and arranged it for today. It was grim. It usually is. We did at least have a removal company this time rather than three mates and a horsebox, but I almost wished we had stuck to the horsebox. There was some mix-up in communications. I said to my husband: ‘Are they sending a pantechnicon?’ I am not sure what a pantechnicon is, but it sounds big. He told me they were sending three vans. It sounded odd at the time, but I thought: ‘OK.’ They did not send three vans, they sent one van and two men. Two unhappy men who took one look and did not like what they saw. They immediately started talking about their tachograph. I do not know what a tachograph is either, but it sounded a lot less helpful than a pantechnicon. They had only just arrived and were already grumbling about getting back in time and needing four men instead of two. Not even bacon, egg and mushroom sandwiches from the village bakery quietened them. And they are particularly good sandwiches.
My only consolation was that I could not entirely make out what the gaffer was saying. He had a very thick Scottish accent. He would hold out a box and say something like: ‘Eurrrgh rrrrrrrhhing khhhheeeargh?’ Occasionally, he would say: ‘Eurrrgh rrrrrrrhhing tachograph.’ When he said something like that, I did not want to understand him.
I could not even make the point that they had been sent an inventory and it was their decision to send the one van and two men, because we were so very much in the wrong for not putting every last fork in a large cardboard box of its own. I had to accept responsibility for that one. For some reason, I had to bail out for an hour yesterday, walk up through the woods at the back of the Accountant’s and go lie on my own on the wooden bench to look at the castle and the lighthouse and the sea for a while. I could not tell you whether I was low because of the grinding boredom of moving again or because I was thinking: ‘OK, this is it then. I really have moved to Northumberland. No more coxing and boxing and renting. I will have a proper home. It is time to start feeling like I belong.’
Girl Friday offered to stay and help, but I did not think that was fair. By midnight, with some way to go on packing, I had entirely lost the will to live. My husband kept going but I went to bed. I decided the children’s toys could stay in their own unlidded plastic boxes. I asked myself: ‘Why unpack drawers when you can put a piece of paper over them?’ I told myself it was entirely reasonable for my husband to unhook the computers and pack away his office paperwork in black bin bags and suitcases while the removers were shipping stuff out of the house. It did not work well. It certainly does not make me a pin-up as client of the year back at the removal company depot. I also decided I had gone off my husband. Communication is the key to a successful relationship. He said: ‘Do you resent me for making you do this again?’ I was barely speaking to him. This was our third move in two years. I said: ‘To be accurate, I resent and dislike you in equal parts.’
I should not have stopped putting my life away in cardboard boxes. I was totally in the wrong. Apparently, everything needs to go in a box. I am the only person in the world who does not realize you break the social contract with your removal company when you fail to put your plastic boxes and carrier bags in their cardboard boxes. It is something to do with stacking them one on top of the other and squaring them off. I thought the boxes were optional extras, like those small bottles of shampoo you get in hotel rooms. You are not actually obliged to use them to wash your hair. One of my builders has moved seventeen times in sixteen years. He has an infinitely more patient wife than me. I said: ‘When you move, do you put everything – I mean everything – in cardboard boxes?’ He said: ‘Yes. My wife is very organized.’ The upshot was they did two runs between the rented house and the cottage but did not quite finish the job. My husband said I am not allowed to go back to the rented house and see how much has been left behind. I think I will sneak in like Bluebeard’s wife when he is busy elsewhere. It is possible the village might hear my scream.
Monday, 23 July
2007
Things fall apart
Every now and then when we think he might be fighting off a stomach migraine, we put the four-year-old on medication. The intermittent medication works well, but yesterday he came down with his stomach migraine again. Watching Scooby Doo in the sitting room, he threw up all over the new beige, textured three-seater sofa we had just got out of its plastic wrapping. I had not even sat down on it unwrapped. He also threw up over a new wickerwork chair, the new oaked floor and my husband. Later, the child in bed, my husband said: ‘Is this all a huge mistake? Are you sure you still love me?’ ‘Is what a mistake?’ ‘The move, all this. The three moves’ – he gestured to the cardboard boxes of who knows what, toys spread across the floor, burgeoning piles of paper, black plastic sacks of clothes. ‘Too late now,’ I said. ‘We’re here. We’ll sort it out. It might take a while.’ I do not know when my husband asks me this if he needs to hear that all is well, how he would feel if I raised a hand, said: ‘No, stop the wagons. Turn back. I’ve been far enough away for long enough. This adventuring is not what I was looking for. Let us return to what we know.’
Then, 150 miles away, my mother fell. ‘I’ll just give the carpet a vacuum.’ Trip and tumble. Crash and bang. On to the fake coaled fire and the spiked metal grate. At least the fire was not on. ‘Ooops’ and ‘Ow’. Tears and ‘Shouldn’t haves’. Old-lady preoccupations and old-lady consequences. Vacuuming a carpet she cannot see to pick up dust of no consequence to anyone but her, she tripped over the wire. Her arm grazed by the spikes and bruised by the tumbled-out coals, she lay there a while with the white marble hearth like a gravestone beside her. That is what old ladies do, the etiquette of an aged person’s fall. Lie there and play dead. Lie there and wish you were young again. Lie there and wait for Christmas to come or someone to walk through the door to pick you up and dust you down. Not on to the carpet – it is important to keep your carpet clean at all times. My father was out shopping. She remembered, flat against the woollen twist. She had turned the key in the back-door lock. You can never be too careful. Always lock your door to keep wolves and bad men out. You do not want wolves in the kitchen, they make such a mess – blood and crumbs everywhere. Minutes passed; the shining gilt and glass carriage clock made tick-tock turns around the garden. Slowly, she levered herself up to grasp the handy sofa arm, struggled upright and wobbled to the door to turn the key again. A blessing the sofa was so close to her, pulled away as it was from the walls, for a better and more thorough clean. It goes to show you should never cut corners when cleaning. Without the sofa there, she would never have got to her slippered feet.
She wobbled back to find the phone and speedy dialled a number for a neighbour. Shame she had put in the number wrong. Instead, she rang her brother, miles away, who said: ‘Put down the phone and try again.’ She tried again. No joy. She really must be more careful with her speedy dial-ups. What use else? She rang her niece and talked awhile, of the rain of which there is too much, and of me, of which there can never be enough. ‘Stay with me on the line till he comes back,’ and so she did. Kept my mother company while the old lady cried awhile, waiting for her shop-gone husband.
Monday, 30 July 2007
Roll up. Roll up
Ran away at the weekend to a local agriculture show. There was a climbing wall, studded with stones. My motherhood is filled with fear: that the children might go to sleep and not wake up despite the bedtime prayer; that they might ride a shiny board through salty waves and be taken by a rip tide or a shark; or that the bizarre and snaggle-toothed might snatch them in a supermarket aisle as I turn to pick up beans. I looked at the wall. I thought: ‘You and your like. You are my enemy.’ My six-year-old, buckled in and harnessed to a rope, set off in a pilgrim scramble up the stones. I thought: ‘If you do not climb that wall, you will not fall off it. If you do not climb that wall, you will not climb a mountain when you are twenty. You will not climb another and another. You will not die, young and brave and foolish, caught out by the weather on a mountainside.’ He climbed and climbed; one foot slipped and then the other to leave him hanging by his arms. I caught my breath to see his white face look down at the ground as his body peeled his fingers from the rocks. He fell. He swung of course. He did not plummet then to hit, bang smash, the ground. He reached out once again, caught a rock, clung on, pushed on and scrambled higher, then still higher, taking my heart with him.
Wednesday, 1 August 2007
The knacker’s yard for me
Yesterday, as time folded itself down into the twilight, neat and away, a golden wash lay across the sea and half the fields. Beasts grazed in the last of the sun and thought: ‘You know, I am a lucky cow’; unlucky cows preferred the grassy gloom of the departing day, said: ‘My life is skimmed. Soon it will be the knacker’s yard for me.’ Cotton-rompered babe in arms, I looked out beyond the glass to the shadows and the light. She looked too, said: ‘Night night, cows.’ Then turned away to the rocker and her bedtime books. I sat, rocked once, tipped her in to lie against my chest, picked up the nursery rhymes and said: ‘Shall we begin?’
Friday, 3 August 2007
A stitch in time
I am not a woman with a veil, a distaff and a wheel; I have no pet sheep to shear and fleece to spin out yarn, then weave it into cloth. Unlike my mother, I do not sew, knit, purl or craft in any kind of way. I do not ice tall white colonnaded cakes for grateful niece brides or snip-snap and glue mauve butterflies on to get-well cards. A few years ago, this craft art stopped for my handy, never idle mother who could not knit another pair of eyes when hers gave out. She could not see to find and buy a pattern. Sometimes she might weep, but I have never heard her grumble. Instead of a craft knife and a rubber stamp, my mother holds a white stick and découpage smiles.
I found a half-complete field of tapestry sunflowers caught up in a frame. Bundled wool skeins hang from card: lemon, whites, khaki green, dark moss green, pale apple green, dark olive and light tan. You hold up the hole-punched card and a meadow of wool falls from it, ready for the harvest. She sorted, mounted them and named them for their colours. On a cardboard scene, she spelled out the wools that she should use: this line here at the heart of the sunflower, dark brown; around it medium brown, then tan. The petals, yellow, dark, medium and light, the background ivory and white. The borders round the flower and falling leaves, medium air-force blue. She has sewn, half cross-stitch, four sunflowers to top and tail the bordering, winding leaves, mallow backdrop clouds, trees and grassy slope. But the rest, the rest is empty painted canvas, waiting to be stitched.
Her sight lost, hope for remedy lost, she stuck the needle tidily in the canvas, swept up the half-completed masterpiece in wool and said: ‘Here, you take this. Finish it for me. I’ve worked so hard on it. I want it finished. Will you finish it instead of me?’ I looked at it, the complex graphs with crosses, dots and spots of colour, numbers walking up and down the lines. I thought: ‘I’ve no idea. I’d never have the patience.’ I looked at my mother, who hates to leave a job half-done, and said: ‘Yes. OK. I can’t say when.’
I wrapped it in a pillow case, along with daughterly and good intentions, and put it in a drawer. This week, when I unpacked, I found it. Took it out and read what I should do. Keep the tension even, the canvas taut, never start or finish with a knot: decent rules by which to live your life. I thought: ‘I’ll never do this.’ Picked up a length of lemon, then threaded it. Sewed a line of sunflowers in the distance underneath the trees, one arm wrapped around the canvas, the needle pushed, then pulled, the stitch complete. I thought: ‘This will take me till I die. My mother’s work all done.’
Saturday, 4 August 2007
The quest
The Yorkshire Mother came back from the sun with her four boys, man, van, people carrier, table and six chairs. They set out with hope, travelled over a continent and found oranges, not money, growing on the trees. Her boys gobbled up the fruit and the sun bleached out their hair while café businesses unwound. Earning ha
s its season and winter beckoned. The couple had not earned enough to make it through the quiet months, so they shook off sand, repacked the van and people carrier, stuffed them full of furniture and golden boys, drove back over land, sleeping while ferries ploughed the seas, to a county they called home. They arrived without a house, or jobs, or cash – what money there once was spent on the hope of a better life. They have begun another quest – to find a home to rent, new jobs, cash – enough at least for oranges. And peace, of course. I do believe that when you lose a child as my friend did those years ago, that peace may be the hardest thing to find. That after suffering such a wrenching loss, it is difficult for a mother, even if she cooks, to make life taste as sweet as once it did, to rest quiet after supper, close her eyes in bed and think: ‘That was a day well-spent. That was happiness. I am content.’
They are going to stay with us for a while while they look for somewhere to live.
Wednesday, 8 August 2007
Inside out
When London Diva visited with her family, my house was perfect, pretty much, give or take the odd builder or odd box. Houses are one thing; lives are more difficult to primp.
The King said they could look round his castle, so we went to smell its ancient stones. The baby decided she did not want to walk around a castle; she lifted up her arms: ‘Carry, carry, Mama.’ I picked her up, carried her awhile, then put her down. ‘Carry, carry, Mama!’ This time mildly outraged I thought that she might walk. I hefted her anew. The six-year-old clung to my side. ‘I don’t want to be here. What about the ghosts?’ Suicidal soldiers and a small and long-dead little girl, he had heard tell of. ‘Can we go now?’ he pleaded. I put the baby down to rest my back. ‘No, darling,’ I said, ‘we’ve only just arrived.’ ‘I feel sick,’ my four-year-old informed me as the baby began to weep again. I reached across his brother’s head to stroke and pat his cheek, said: ‘Do you, darling, never mind,’ and stooped to pick the baby up. I calculated the distance from the entrance, where we stood, to the exit. Far too far away. We staggered on past china plates, photos of the King as a small, curly-haired prince, armour, and still and waxy dungeoned gore. ‘Look, children: history. No, don’t look there.’ I put the baby down; she wailed again. She did not like my habit. Maybe it is here that ghostly stories start: a weeping child, a desperate screaming mother around a corner and out of sight? Climbing down some steps, my six-year-old barked his shin; his face crumpled. I put the baby down to kiss him better. He cried. She cried. The four-year-old said: ‘Don’t you care that I feel sick?’ London Diva, walking ahead with her husband, her pair of beautiful teenage and near-teenage girls, turned back. She paused a moment to consider the family snap we made and said, reaching out a hand: ‘Is this your life?’
Wife in the North Page 22