I went to an auction in the village. I took a little time to figure out my bidding strategy. A couple of lots had come up: a tent and a blackboard. Tucked away at the back of the bidding, panicked by the auctioneer’s song of ‘DoIhearfiveIhavesixonmyleftsevensirthankyoudoiheareightninetenonmyrighttenten soldtotheladyonmyright’, my nerve failed me and I ducked out of the bidding. I decided on the ‘I want it’ approach for a map of the shipwrecks off the Farne Islands. I stood at the front and nodded decisively at every opportunity. I thought it might psyche out any opposition – I may have been bidding against myself at times. I got the print for £50.
It is a work of art, put together by a lifeboatman of twenty years who doubled up as the local funeral director. The map has a little scroll in the bottom left-hand corner telling you his name: ‘For Those in Peril, John Hanvey, 1976’. I rang him. Life is like that in Northumberland. I said: ‘I love your map.’ He told me he spent seven years researching the wrecks, using information from the logbook of the Longstone lighthouse keeper as well as from RNLI records, Lloyd’s, a local museum and newspaper. He said: ‘I carried around a pocketbook. Any old fishermen I met up and down the coast, I would say: “I have the name of a ship I suspect was wrecked, what do you know about it?” ’ When he had put the information together, he drew up around fifty of the maps, each one taking him a week at a time. Later, he had the prints made up.
The names of the ships and the small hand-drawn crosses remind you this is a map that charts bravery, smashed hopes and the graves of drowned men. The earliest wreck: 2 November 1462, ‘Two French caravels’ in the area off Bamburgh sands. Another early disaster (‘vessels foundered … positions doubtful’): November 1774, when six ships and ‘100 souls perished in one night’. Some of the losses are more recent. East of Longstone, 25 January 1940, the steamship Everene of Latvia was sunk by torpedo with nine drowned. Cobles, sloops, ketches, tankers: the hungry sea will take what it can. Occasionally, it will lose its grim and salty battle and the ship can be refloated. More often, they are lost and there are deaths such as those on 11 October 1840, when the steamship Northern Yacht foundered with twenty-two passengers and crew, or again on 20 July 1843, when the steamship Pegasus sank with fifty-four passengers and crew (both around Goldstone Rock, midway between Holy Island and the Farnes). In the worst cases, they are lost with ‘all hands’.
The map of the wrecks is in blue, with the rocky islands brown and lapped by a dangerous and broken green. The sober columns of dates and black-inked names are broken by the picture of a seagull aloft – to some, a seagull represents a sailor’s soul – a ship in full sail and a lifeboat breasting stormy waves. Underneath the lifeboat are the words of the sailor’s prayer: ‘Oh! Lord the sea is so large and my ship is so small.’ These lost ships and sailors are not forgotten: their names still sail on a paper sea. John Hanvey made it so.
Monday, 22 October 2007
Boxes and blues
Ever since we moved up from London, we have had ‘stuff’ in cardboard boxes hanging about us. First, we kept the boxes in our own house; desperate for space, we stored them in Number 1 before eventually moving them into the metal container in the barn. The King of the Castle is about to demolish the barn and build a new one, so this weekend we opened up the container and emptied it. Straight into the bin for the most part – or the brazier, the tip, or for recycling. I cannot believe we wrapped it, moved it and kept it all for so long.
One box was worth the waiting. As I unwrapped the newspaper from the cut-glass candlesticks, I thought: ‘Ah, home.’ A wooden bowl from a hot and dusty place and a blood-red vase with a golden glass stag, once my grandmother’s; a doll from my childhood, all smile and shiny blue trouser suit. Photographs, too: my husband, absurdly young, holding a glass of champagne and looking out into his future; my mother in hyacinth blue, more radiant than the bride, on my wedding day. Two small and rose-strewn hearts capturing the exchange of rings – not the congregation’s laughter when the wedding band would not slide on to my finger. A picture of my eldest the day after he was born, and in folding pine, my wrapped-up boys fishing and laughing hard. Memories, my most sparkling things; no hallmarked value, no antiqued glory, precious only to me. But I grew sad as I unwrapped my loot, which had once sat on the mantelpiece of a black stone hearth against sunshine yellow walls in London. ‘I do not have a mantelpiece,’ I thought, ‘and now my walls are cream.’ Still, I polished them and scattered them about, sat back and thought: ‘My memories about me where they belong. Now, am I at home?’
Wednesday, 24 October 2007
Through the looking glass
I became quite desperate to go down to London. Maybe it is because the end-of-year deadline is approaching when we decide whether we stay or go back. We have been up here more than two years now. If I think about London, I miss it. Therefore I try not to think about it. Try not to picture myself living there. I find it easier that way. My last few visits I found so difficult I stopped going, but I had to come back for half-term. For a few days. To see if it was all still there. It is the first visit for a long time when I have been willing to risk haunting the old neighbourhoods and arranging to see a whole parcel of old friends, all crammed together in a week. I decided to take the children to the dinosaur museum. It was such a good idea, every other mother in London decided to have it too. Utterly heaving.
The very worst moment was in the picnic area, where we were waiting for friends to join us. It was crowded. I had wrapped four salami baps in a tea towel, popped in three satsumas for the children and a bottle of mineral water between the four of us. I was entirely happy with this as a lunch until I sat down at a table with a woman, a baby in a pushchair and a little girl. There was a reason this table was the only one with free seats. Every other mother in the place knew that this woman was going to make her look bad. My children ate their baps watching the banquet opposite with wonder. I knew I had made a mistake as soon as I saw the first Tupperware box, but it was too late – we had already sat down. Sandwiches, hummus, carrot sticks, raisins, yoghurt, chocolate soya dessert, sliced melon, green grapes, juice. There was probably more, but my mother has advised me that you can only use your peripheral vision for so long before your eyeballs drop out of your skull. The woman opposite made endless ‘happy chat’ with the little girl; the more happy chat she made, the more silent my own children became. Having watched for long enough, my baby daughter decided she had no intention of eating the substandard fare I had provided; she emptied out her salami on to the floor, picked apart the bread and then dropped half her satsuma segments. My six-year-old immediately handed her what was left of his. The Picnic Queen took pity. ‘She can have some melon if she likes,’ she said and pushed over the leftover melon. This was so humiliating, I blushed. The boys leapt on the melon as if they had never seen an exotic fruit before in their lives. I said: ‘Thank you; that’s very kind’ as you do when someone has just shown you up in front of your children as a mother who cuts corners. She then compounded it by telling me: ‘You worry too much.’ I ‘worry too much’? I felt an incredibly ‘British’ locking up of those facial muscles that were not already in spasm from the humiliation of the pity fruit. I wanted to say: ‘If I worry too much, it is because mothers like you make me feel bad.’ She was the sister of that irritating stranger who accosts you in the street with ‘Cheer up! It might never happen.’ I hate people who tell you to cheer up. I hate mothers who feel sorry for my children. I stopped hating her as they left the table when I heard her say to the little girl: ‘I told your mummy …’ I thought: ‘Oh, you’re a nanny. You should have said. That explains the carrot sticks in their own Tupperware box and the expensive fruit and the relentless chat. That’s all right then – I’ll stop worrying.’
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
Mapping out the past
It is a cold, gold, old time of year as autumn readies itself for winter. Trees which flared like brands plunged into the earth have lost their claim to flame; embered leaves
, dead and dusty now, tumble over their roots while spindly hawthorn twists and turns in the low-slung sunshine thrown splendid across the fields. I thought: ‘I live in the country. I’ll go for a walk.’
I have a copy of a map from 200 years ago, the fields named: Wheat Riggs, Bottle Banks, Gin Quarter, Old Cow Pasture, Kings Chambers. Wells and a windmill, limestone quarries where once men gouged out the land, all etched in ink. I thought: ‘I shall walk into history, around Barley Close to the pool where marsh grasses grow and deer drink and once there was a ford.’ I walked down the winding lane, past the green-stoned barn soon to disappear and over the rough ground edging the fresh sown crop – land sliding out to the horizoned Cheviot swell – till I found the blue-green pool water, bullrushes and reeds swaying in the picked-up hurly-burly wind. I walked around the pool, its leaf beach empty of deer, slender grey trees and dead nettles guarding the privacy of a lost and ancient Britain. My way blocked, I scrambled on to a lichen-painted fencepost to better clear the strung-out barbed wire. I paused, considered, jumped; my ankle turned on the rutted ground and I thought: ‘You just cannot trust the countryside.’ I limped slowly back to the cottage and the present. I think I may have sprained my ankle.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Somewhere
This morning, the sky was bruised blue yet the light was gold and true. I had dropped the boys at school, was driving home and saw an arc of splintered light as bright as I have ever seen. Years ago in London, I once saw a prism, a stripe, when a child I loved died, and I thought: ‘That gleam in this gritty dirty sky, that gleam is meant for me.’ Today, between the hedged gaps, we glimpsed the rainbow’s fall to earth, scattering its colours in the grass. I said to the baby girl: ‘Look, look, there are two’ as the other, shadowing, pastel bow appeared. I looked back to the road, a car approaching. I braked, swerved slightly, hit the only curb on the country lane and my tyre blew. Again. I thought: ‘Bloody hell. Bugger the tyre. We’re getting home this time,’ and drove back slowly, my road ahead ribboning through the coloured ‘Welcome’ arch.
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Bang bang bang
Had three bang bang bang nice things happen on one day. I dropped the car off at the garage in the village to get the new tyre put on and went round to have tea with the Little Old Lady. I had been a couple of days before, but she lives near the garage so I walked across and rang the bell. She came to the door and she looked so pleased to see me standing there on her mat. That is it. That was the first nice thing. The tea and cake and chat were all good too, but it was her smile when she first saw me. I put it in my pocket and I am keeping it.
When I went back to pick up the car and pay, the garage owner told me I had done for the tyre ‘good and proper’ driving it home after I knew I had a flat. I shrugged. I said: ‘What can you do? I was in the middle of nowhere. I had the baby. I didn’t have my phone. My husband is away in London, so he couldn’t have done anything. I had exactly the same thing a couple of weeks ago and it took for ever until someone passed by who could help.’ With oily fingers, he rifled through some paperwork and pulled out a couple of business cards and said: ‘Keep them in the car. You can always call us and we’ll come and get you sorted.’ I mean, how good is that? Last time, the RAC would not even come out to me and the AA could not find me. I am tempted to have a microchip embedded in my ear and let him track me with satellite technology 24/7.
Then I got home and rang the King of the Castle about the map. I wanted to know whether he used names for the fields and, if he did, whether they were the historical ones. As it turns out, some of the names are the same and some of them have changed a little in the past 240 years: what was Dinner Flatts is now Dundee Flatts; Garner Flatts, Gardiners; and Wheat Riggs, Wheat Ridge. He told me this and then said: ‘We’re away for a couple of days, but when we get back, we’ll ring you and come round for supper.’ I think I live here.
Wednesday, 14 November 2007
All my sons
I love my children. All four of them: there is one I cannot hold. Not true. I hold him in my heart. I just cannot hold his hand in mine. He would be eight today.
Two days before he was due to be born, he stopped moving. I did the things you do: ate vanilla ice cream for which I had no appetite, climbed awkwardly into a hot bath, dribbled water on to my still belly, fell silent, thought: ‘Fuck and buggery.’ My husband drove me to hospital. I spoke. ‘I’m sure it’s fine, but I can’t feel the baby move.’ The midwife took me in, laid me down, wired me up, turned off the light. She cold-gelled and swept the veined mound with ultrasound. I thought: ‘Now’s the time to wave, baby.’ No wave. She could not find a pulsing beat in the grainy black and white. I thought: ‘I shan’t ask for a picture then this time.’ She said: ‘I’m going to get someone else to have a look.’ I thought: ‘That’s not what you’d call a good sign,’ as the door shush-closed behind her. A brief pause before an older woman came in. Kind. Experienced with bad news. Sweep and look again to find death, tragedy, horror and desolation. She leaned in towards me, said her prayers for the dead: ‘I am very sorry to have to tell you …’ My husband and I clung together as if our world had ended. Our world had ended. I can tell you the exact sound a heart makes when it breaks. It sounds like a wolf. Both of us heard it.
If you have a stillbirth, they do not cut you up, rip out the babe, sew you up and send you away, almost whole again. Lick split. Instead, they say: ‘Don’t swallow this,’ and hand you a torpedo, connect you to a drip and ‘start you off’. They say: ‘This isn’t going to hurt,’ and lie. ‘We’ll break your waters,’ and take up a crochet hook but not to make a table mat. ‘Let’s give you morphine. Usually, we don’t do this.’ The morphine helps but not enough. ‘Not long now’ and ‘Push’ and ‘Stop’ and sixty hours later: ‘Well done,’ and you see how your life could have been.
My baby boy was beautiful. These babies often are. My baby boy was dead. Stillbirth can be like that. Lying on a paper blanket, the bones in his skull all pushed around, misshapen. The dead, they do decay. Yet, when I felt his head push out from me, he had felt wet, warm and wonderful. Don’t look now. The skin, already flayed from his neck, came off at a too tender touch. I do not know the colour of his eyes, but his fingers, tips tinted in scarlet, folded to hold my finger. The first and last time I held his hand in mine. My hand splayed on his chest, his left hand curled round my little finger; my thumb tucked in the other. I felt along the Babygro for his feet, the curve of his calf, the better to remember his body. We had time with him, but not enough; I kissed his rosebud mouth, but not enough; I showered him in tears, too many.
I know how death smells. We lit candles in tins. One for vitality. It did not work. We took endless photos of a subject who never moved. As my husband slept for an hour through the London night, I sat with my baby, told him about Christmas and birthdays and jungle animals and Northumberland which his father loved and where we holidayed each New Year. I swear he heard me. Then the smell got too much and we buried him. I have the bill yet. Keepsakes are hard to come by when a baby dies.
Supply of a small white coffin and transport:
Fee: £150
Extra mileage: £80
Gravediggers: £60
They were toothless. The gravediggers, standing too close and anxious to get on with the job, leaning on their spades as we buried our future. In his coffin we put a teddy bear (cruel of us to bury a teddy), a photo of a kiss, a crucifix (I have its mate), a tulip and a letter. Hardly room in there for the baby. We printed the letter on the order of service for the funeral. It said: ‘We knew you before you were born and we wouldn’t have missed a moment of our time together as a family. Wherever we go in life, you will be with us and part of us. You will always be the little blond-haired boy running alongside us on a Northumberland beach and the sound of your laughter will always fill our home.’
No reason for the death. As the hospital report said: ‘No malformations or obvious infection.’ Often the
way. His heart weighed 19g. Not a heavy heart. Mine weighed more. No medic in rubbered hands can weigh a mother’s love, though. The fact my husband touches me reminds me not to die and he pulls me through the anguish of the days and nights and days. And we whisper a promise to each other that we will not compromise; we will think differently, do what it takes to strive for happiness together.
Thursday, 15 November 2006
Hard road
Bad day yesterday. I went for a walk on the beach at one point. I do not know if that made it worse. My husband was in London – unavoidable – and it was the first time we have been apart on the anniversary. I clambered down the dune path and on to the shore. I walked along to where the earth has pushed up a curved rocky road through the sands and into the sea. I looked out into the water and the clouded sky and shouted out my son’s name as if to call him in from play and to my side. I thought: ‘Can you hear me? Do you know I’m here? That I still love you?’ and called out to him again, this time louder. I do not know what made this year so very hard – my husband’s absence, or perhaps the fact that every year since our first son died there has been a pregnancy, a baby, a prospect of another baby and another redemption but that time is over. Our family is done – no more babies. I looked out to the moving mirror which is the sea. My salt tears falling, more mirrors dropping into the sand, smashing into the white water foaming over my boots, I thought: ‘I wish I could be pregnant again. Pregnant with him again. Do it all differently, have it end differently for him. Make a better job of it this time,’ and from the pain I would say that my scarred heart tore and bled awhile as damaged hearts occasionally do.
Wife in the North Page 26