Wife in the North

by Judith O'Reilly

  Tuesday, 18 December 2007

  Joyful and triumphant

  When we got the car to a garage and the tree home, it turned out it was twelve feet high. It did not look that big in the forest. We left it outside for a couple of days – I think my husband was hoping it might shrink in the rain – and brought it in today. As my husband manhandled it into a stand and screwed it into place, he said: ‘I’m so glad you chose this tree and not me.’ Luckily we could squeeze it into the sitting room in the arches where we have a sloping vaulted ceiling. It is so large it reminds me a little of the one they have in Trafalgar Square; I keep expecting to walk in and find the Salvation Army gathered round it singing ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’. It is beautifully decorated halfway up and pretty much naked at the top apart from the fairy, which my husband strapped to two brooms and levered on. Moral of the story being if you have a very tall Christmas tree, it pays to decorate it when it is lying on its side.

  Wednesday, 19 December 2007

  Poop poop

  My Riding Pal set me up with a friend of hers who runs a local shoot. I knew I needed some gear, so today I called in at the ‘country outfitters’ near the castle. The charming man who owns it is a keen fan of shooting. He obviously approved of my decision to give it a go – I do not think he was influenced by the fact he was about to earn a walloping amount of money. He held up a pair of knickerbockers, or ‘breeks’ as they are technically termed. They are supposed to finish just under the knee. This pair finished at my ankles. I must be shorter than the average ‘gun’. He found me a smaller pair. When I say smaller, I mean leg length. Silk-lined, tweed knickerbockers feel fabulous on, warm and roomy, but they do nothing to minimize your backside.

  I also needed a checked shirt and fitted Barbour jacket because my only outdoor alternatives are my fabulous floor-length coat or a very scruffy tan suede jacket which is falling apart at the seams. The Barbour belts at the waist. I did not think this would be a brilliant idea bearing in mind the knickerbockers underneath, but amazingly it worked very well. It was slightly Second World War (the Nazis, not the good guys). I thought I was done until he handed me a tweed Gainsborough cap (same tweed as the knickerbockers). I looked a picture. I said to the outfitter: ‘I don’t want to look like I’m cross-dressing, you know.’ He laughed. He said: ‘Not at all.’ I am not sure if he realized what I meant by ‘cross-dressing’. I think it is possible he thought I meant it made me look mean.

  I bought the lot and at home climbed into my gear, not forgetting long green shooting socks I had borrowed from the King of the Castle which tied under the knee and over the cuff of the knickerbocker with a tasselled yellow gaiter. I thought there was a chance I looked like a Principal Boy (absurd, cute, sexually ambiguous) and there was a chance I looked like Mr Toad (tweedy, green and fat). I came down to the kitchen. My six-year-old said: ‘Mummy – you look stupid.’ My four-year-old could not speak for laughing; the baby girl said: ‘Where’s Mummy?’ and began to wail. My husband looked me up and down. He said: ‘Exactly how much did that lot cost?’

  Friday, 21 December 2007

  Once more into the breeks

  Walked into the pub where ‘the guns’, that is to say ‘the men doing the shooting’, were meeting. There were about a dozen, along with a gamekeeper and deputy gamekeeper, ‘beaters’ (who flush out the game) and ‘pickers up’ with dogs (who find the birds which have been brought down). Walking into a pub full of men when you are wearing tweed breeks that make you look like you ate a rhino is daunting – the daylight equivalent of that dream where you realize you are naked in the office. The shoot starts with coffee and bacon sandwiches and much shaking of hands and making of introductions before the alcohol comes out at around 9.30 a.m. It is my belief that country folk have larger livers than townsfolk owing to the amount of alcohol they consume while still remaining sober. Ideally the more dangerous the pastime – hunting, for instance, quad-biking or shooting – the more alcohol is consumed.

  There was an administrative reason for the early Percy Special. Thinking about it, there often is a reason for a drink in the country, reasons which include ‘I’m here’ and ‘Well, if you’re offering.’ The pewter cups extracted by the captain of the shooting syndicate from a tan leather ‘field bar’ were all engraved with numbers on their bottoms. The chap knocks back the drink and turns the cup over to read its number, which tells him where he is standing in the line of guns. Anyone impatient to know his number raises the cup high in front of him as if to make an extravagant toast and peers underneath it. If it were not the first drink of the day, I imagine a lot of them might get rather wet.

  After the number draw and the safety lecture from the gamekeeper, which included strict advice to ‘keep plenty of blue sky under the target’, we all piled outside into the 4×4s and headed off into the cold and misty morning for the first of four ‘drives’. A drive is where the chaps with the guns stand in their line across a field while the beaters walk along, making a terrible racket, and chase out the birds. The captain explained that the ‘sport’ is to shoot the bird high in the sky – about thirty yards up. I would have thought there would be more sport if the bird had its own gun, but I did not like to say as much in case he shot me.

  At one point during the second drive, I looked across to the gun next to where I was standing – a local dentist. My own dentist is an hour’s drive away. I watched him fire into the sky and a pheasant cartwheel down to land close to his feet. It fluttered up from the ground, collapsed, attempted to fly again and fell back in a flurry of beating wings. He stepped across, leaned down and broke its neck. I thought: ‘I am so not having you as my dentist.’

  To fire a gun, you stand with it tucked tightly into your shoulder. You slide off the safety catch, look along the barrel for the brass bead at the end of it, sweep the gun around, aiming ahead of the target, and pull the trigger, still following the direction in which the bird is flying. It makes a boom noise. During the third drive, my host let me hold his gun. I did not know how my husband would feel about me holding another man’s gun, but he was not there so I did it anyway. The captain stood close behind me to stop the recoil knocking me to the ground and I fired his Beretta twice. I missed. I swear the partridge laughed as it flew away.

  The cock pheasant is a riot of colour, a blue and green head, red circle drawn around his eyes, white neck, bronze and copper-brown body with a duck-egg blue close to the wings. Partridge are a more discreet grey and buff, while woodcock are small birds with long beaks. Back at the cars, a hen and a cock pheasant are lashed together as a ‘brace’ with green string, then dangled from the cross-hatched iron bars of a trailer. Their heads knock together in consolation.

  I can see the attraction of shooting. It is sociable, outdoors and there are bang-bang toys. Of course, I am not a bird. As a bird, I would be less keen.

  Saturday, 22 December 2007

  Home is where the heart is

  My parents arrived yesterday while I was out shooting. It is just as well the Christmas tree is so big, it may take my mother and father’s minds off how cold it is in the arches. Their own house is so warm you could grow orchids in it. They have roaring artificial fires and central heating, which they like to use at the same time. They are careful to close doors after themselves and have double-glazed windows which are sealed so tight that in the event of a nuclear war, they would be entirely safe from radiation sickness and would hold out just as long as their tinned products. I wanted them to be equally as warm here, but the underfloor heating in the arches is not working as it should be. There is nothing more we can do before Christmas. Meanwhile, we have shipped in four heaters to take the worst of the chill off the air.

  I am irritated it is not perfect for them. Last night my husband lit a fire. They sat together on the new sofa, the lights glowing on the Biggest Christmas Tree In The World, my mother drinking tea. I said: ‘I’m sorry it’s not warmer in here.’ ‘Actually,’ she said, and in the dazzle of the fairylights I could
not see if she shivered slightly, ‘it’s just right.’

  Monday, 24 December 2007

  ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to all men’

  We went to the village at the foot of the castle for the Christmas crib service with the children and my mother. My husband took the children in one car and I took my mother in the other, dropping her by the church gate so she did not have so far to walk. My Riding Pal was just going in, so she gave my mother her arm. I felt like saying: ‘Trot – don’t canter.’ (My father did not come because he thinks he will go straight to Hell if he sets foot in a church that is not Catholic. Either that or he hated my mother’s hat.) Early on in the service, the Vicar got all the children sitting on the floor at the front of the congregation and had them place the china figures among the straw. My six-year-old took a king, my four-year-old as yet too shy, my girl more interested in the chocolate Santa she found in the pocket of my wax jacket than Baby Jesus in his manger. I had to perch on a kneeler with her at the front, and the Vicar beamed at me when she saw me hunkered down among the little ones before her pulpit. I smiled back. I said: ‘That was a very lovely service’ at the end as she waited by the oak door giving out balloons to excited children.

  Outside, the Yorkshire Mother was there with her husband and boys. Her son is buried in the churchyard, and the younger boys were going to let off their balloons at his grave. I hugged her. When you lose a child, simple things about Christmas can be hard. A hopping robin – you think: ‘Is that him come to say hello?’ Open a creamy envelope, gilt-winged seraphim revealed, you think: ‘Can he play the trumpet now, my lost and angel child?’ Wrapping in paper penguins her other children’s toys, a mother takes a moment – he would be such and such an age and there is no stocking she can fill with tangerines and chocolate coins, nothing she can buy for him, cover in foil stars and scrawl: ‘Merry Christmas, love from Santa Claus.’

  Tuesday, 25 December 2007

  The Story of Christmas

  Unusually, lunch was indeed at lunchtime, after the children had opened everything – the hit being a helicopter which flew on and off for three hours, after which the rear propeller was damaged in a head-on collision with an enemy table leg. As my mother and father came through from their sitting room and we all sat down for lunch, I allowed myself a cat lick of happiness that the house was doing what it was designed to do and that they were with us.

  Later, we went for a walk on the beach by the castle. The boys tore into the dunes, disappearing then reappearing as I began to worry they had been eaten by sand rats. Soft mauve and pastel blues filled the vastness of the sky behind the castle, soft pink and apricot above a mercury sea touched with white gold; yet the small waves which stood up before throwing themselves to break against the sand were as green as bottle glass. My daughter staggered to the water’s edge. ‘Not too close,’ I warned, and she smiled at me, a small triumph to let the sea cover over her pink-flowered boots. ‘She’s fine,’ my husband said. He reached for my hand. ‘Merry Christmas.’ He stopped walking, pulled me back to him and kissed me.

  Sunday December 30 2007

  Auf Wiedersehen Pet?

  London Diva and the Godfather arrived last night with their girls and a teenage pal. The Accountant let them stay in his cottage because my parents are still with us. We went across to Holy Island with them. You drive across a causeway which is flooded depending on the tides, cutting it off from the mainland. Occasionally tourists try to make it and the sea rushes in, stranding them on top of their cars or in the wooden hut on stilts at the midway point, from which they are airlifted to safety. Presumably, once they have been hauled on board, the helicopter rescue crew uses a rolled-up newspaper and hits them round the head, chorusing ‘Duh!’ You just hope the same tourists never have to drive over a level crossing.

  There is a very small settlement on the island, a beautiful castle and the falling-down ruins of a priory. A monastery was established here in the seventh century and monks sent out from it to convert the Anglo-Saxons. It is still considered to be a place of spiritual retreat. For some reason, it always makes me feel acutely uncomfortable. Perhaps my inner demons feel anxious about so much Christianity surrounding them, or perhaps it is the feeling I might be trapped on the island and burnt in a wickerwork effigy of a London bus. As we walked through the jumbled-up streets, my husband said: ‘It is lovely here – so peaceful.’ London Diva nudged me. I said to him: ‘Don’t even think about it.’

  When we got home, the Diva said: ‘Are you all right? You don’t look all right. I don’t think I have ever seen you look sadder.’ I said: ‘I’m fine – I’m just a bit tired’ – and I am. In one of my periods where I do not so much sleep as lie back in the dark with my eyes open. Most of all, though, I was thinking about whether we stay or go back to London. If we go back, we return to old friends and the place I love most in the world, but can you ever really go back, and could I live with the guilt of dragging everyone along with me when we have made a life here for all of us? Would I be a fool having spent all this time and money creating a great house for us to live in only to walk away from it? But if we stay, is this life enough for me? Would I live for ever more on the boundary of things and, if so, am I content to live as an outsider? I am not sure I will ever really belong. After all, I do not farm, I do not ride, I do not own a castle.

  Monday, 31 December 2007

  Old Year’s Night

  Luckily it was the four-year-old’s birthday, so I could divert everybody’s attention from the grinding noise coming from my head, still busy with ‘Do we stay or do we go now?’ with birthday cake and the information that in this part of Northumberland, they do not call it New Year’s Eve but Old Year’s Night. We all had dinner, roast Northumberland lamb and chocolate pudding, and around 11 p.m. the Accountant came along, closely followed by the Consultant and her husband, and we drank champagne and watched the fireworks display in London on the television.

  I always review my year then write my resolutions in the sand – I figure you might as well start as you mean to go on. Last year when the Oyster Farmer and his wife were round for dinner, I gave it a mark – four and a half out of ten. This year, a review slipped my mind – why was that? Is it that I do not care about the past any more? Unlikely – I am Catholic and have been in therapy: I virtually live in the past. Do I think there is no room for improvement? Obviously a far more difficult one to answer. Maybe I was too busy still living it. Now I have a moment, the year.

  Bad things included:

  ∗ tears and fears that my elder son was not happy at school

  ∗ anxiety about my younger one’s stomach migraines

  ∗ intermittent loneliness and the blues about where I was and what I was doing

  ∗ missing London, London, London

  ∗ the suspicion I am getting really old and likely to get older.

  Good things included:

  ∗ the children

  ∗ my mother’s health rallying

  ∗ writing this account of my life

  ∗ moving back into the cottage and finally having the space to swing a cat. (Shame my cat did a runner pretty much as soon as we arrived in Northumberland.)

  ∗ giving things a go and seeing the good things about my new life in Northumberland, such as quite how beautiful it is

  ∗ recognizing I had, despite myself perhaps, made friends here.

  Resolutions:

  ∗ more patience

  ∗ more sleep, which might help with the first one

  ∗ be happy and keep trying.

  As for the decision about whether we stay in Northumberland or return to London: Time is up – it is made – I just do not want to say it out loud yet.

  Postscript

  February 2008

  We decided to stay. My husband never shifted from loving Northumberland, the boys love school and their muddy, sandy outdoors life, my girl loves horses and I love all of them. The house, too, is set up to accommodate my parents as and when they need it, wh
ich gives me comfort and a sense of the possible. The decision to stay was not an easy one and part of me will always yearn to be back in London. I am still a Daughter of the City – but it is time to grow up and leave home. Every day I find myself surprised by a suspicion that I ‘belong’ more than I did the day before, that I am being claimed somehow.

  The past two and half years have indeed been an adventure, during which I made friends and intend to make more, learned country ways, tasted at least the beauty and power of this place and grew to appreciate the kindness and warmth of those I now live among. Best of all, I have not been eaten by bears. Perhaps now I will always be pulled between Northumberland and London, between heart and soul, between the wife and mother I am and the memory of who I was. I will visit London and miss it as long as ever I am away, but, for the moment, this is where we stand. Who knows? Things change. Not long ago, my husband said: ‘Let’s face facts. If I was dead, you wouldn’t be here.’ I looked at him. I picked up my coffee cup and held it in both of my hands, slightly obscuring my face. I said: ‘Let’s face facts. You’re not dead.’