Wednesday 30 May 2012

The Stray

Typing amid the tannoys.
Leeds station bound for London bound for Brussels. Starting to feel familiar, this.
It's been a bit of a bonkers 10 days in the UK, in truth.
Only natural, I suppose, to try and race about, to see as many people as possible, to catch up with family and friends...but it feels as if I've been moving too fast, a blur sweeping through towns and counties to meetings, lunches, a different bed every other day.

Some strange moments...
Going back to Chesterfield last week was uncomfortable, especially driving past our little house, now the abode of rent-paying strangers. I stopped outside. All was as it should be - and yet a tiny part of me couldn't compute that I was actually there at all. That I was ever there. Brain playing concertina with time again. Does that make sense?

 The town was as it always is - right down to the same traders shouting bargains from their market stalls - yet it was if something had shifted, and everything was the same...but different.

 It disturbed me, how little it felt like home......as if I were an outsider looking in. I sat there, at the wheel of the hire car, and I thought 'I don't know where home is any more'. Home was always where you were. And you were never here.

 A few days ago, visiting a friend in Halifax, we walked through the Stray at Lightcliffe; a pretty park - swathes of green grass, cherry trees lining the pathways, an ancient, tired little children's play area and a new playground being built near the site of some long-demolished, grubby old shelters.

 Let the time machine do its work here and you will surely find me at all the ages of my life.

 It's where I ran with the gang, swung on rusty swings right up to the bumps, went roly-poly down the grass slopes near the posh houses on Sutherland Road, ruined shoes climbing the low-hanging branches of the cherry trees with Sarah Ramsden.

It's where we played bicycle lamppost tig, hide and seek in the bushes, did cartwheels and walkovers, fell out, made up and all on a permanent diet of penny chews, sherbert dips, ice-pops and icecream screwballs.

 It was there where, on rickety roller skates fastened precariously with nut and bolt, we'd fly from the war memorial all the way down to those grotty urine-smelling shelters, screaming, veering and careering, only stopping by about-turning and crashing into a wall. Here, where we would wade through thigh-deep snow to the top of the hill and plummet to the bottom on rubbish wooden sledges, scraping knees and shins on the way.

 It was where I nervously, met my first 'boyfriend' after he asked me out at a Hipperholme Grammar School disco. Hardly a fairy tale first love...his friend fancied my friend and we'd had a clumsy, awkward snog to, of all things,  Joe Dolce's Shaddup-You-Face. Yes. Really.
So we met in the shelters. He gave me his scarf and then I decided, just like that, that I didn't fancy him after all. And I ran away. Literally. Silly girl. I never saw him again..and he never got his scarf back.

It was in this park where I got about as rebellious as I was ever going to get - splitting a packet of 10 Regal King Size with a friend, smoking five each, then scoffing a packet of Polos to try hide our faggy breath from our parents. We would sit, pretending to inhale, bubble-permed teenagers in stretch jeans and pixi boots, in the shadow of the war memorial, plucking up the courage to go to the phone box to ring whichever boy was flavour of the month.

Then, oh so many summers later, it became our place Thomas.
First, gentle walks with a pram - a new mum, scared to death, worrying, worrying; worrying if you slept, worrying if you didn't, just worrying.
But I found a peace and a freedom there, in the park.

You'd sit in the pushchair and shriek with a laughter punctuated by dirty giggles as funny mummy flew higher and higher on the swings pulling daft faces and singing nursery rhymes.
Then you had a go. Slow pushes on the baby swings, moving on to the big swings once you'd learned how to hold on.

As you got older I could heave you up the steps of the slide, sit you down and let you slide to the bottom by yourself. Remember when it was wet and you got stuck halfway down and got a soggy bottom? And other children and their parents watched as I clambered up the slide to free you, me laughing and crying, embarrassed but drinking in your smiley face as I scrambled towards you.

In summer, you'd wear your shorts, and I'd see from the corner of my eye how others would stare at your plastic leg splints.....noticing your difference.

It meant we almost always had the swings to ourselves. People would circumnavigate us, pretending to look the other way, waiting for us to leave, ignoring their toddlers straining and pulling. Mostly it didn't bother me, but sometimes it felt lonely.

We made them uncomfortable. I know it was because they didn't know what to say. I'll never forget the mortified woman who shushed and slapped her son when he asked why you had 'plastic legs', even as I tried to tell her it was ok and I was happy to answer his question. Stupid stupid woman, dragging him away, scaring him half to death.

None of it bothered you though, which was all I cared about.

 I would show you trees - how you loved the texture of the rough bark! I would pick flowers and tell you their colours and sometimes, on sunny, breezy days, when the grass was dry, I would lie down and try and pull you down with me on to our backs to look at the scudding cotton-wool clouds. You always sat bolt upright again though, as if you were worried about missing something.

 I would stand you under a cherry tree and shake it and shake it and shake it until the blossom cascaded and you looked and looked amazed as petals and sometimes whole flowers tumbled and showered around you, landing on your head, your shoulder...

 And sometimes we'd just take a picnic rug and a drink and a yogurt and a book.

 All this I remembered as we walked through the park towards the swings. And suddenly I am 10 years old again, swinging and swinging and swinging, higher and higher. And the tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes are caused by the rushing wind, nothing more.

 Every step I take I know you'd taken it before. I put my palms against the trunk of our horse chestnut tree and wonder if it still holds your imprint. The cherry trees are again full of blossom and I pull down a small branch and shake it. The wind catches the petals and lifts them into the air.

 I stand for a moment, feeling my own roots plunging deeply into the soil of this park where I played the games of a carefree child..and where you did too.

And I think, here's home...


xxxx
The Stray, Lightcliffe

Monday 7 May 2012

Weeping Angels

When I was a little girl, my grandma - your great grandma - used to take me for walks in a cemetery near her home.
Nothing ghoulish or morbid in that - it was a pleasant place, full of trees, carefully maintained pathways and borders, and lovingly tended plots. Her generation had no fear of the dead, Thomas - they'd seen so much of it.

We'd walk among the statues and gravestones, looking at the dates, reading the names aloud, and we'd have our favourites. One in particular I remember: a cherub watching over the grave of a little boy, Rob Roy MacGregor, who died in 1899, just five years old.

I loved going to see him (of course I confused the boy with the cherub)..and don't recall feeling any sadness as we stood before the little statue. Children have a far greater acceptance of things, don't they? I never once thought about his parents Herbert and Georgina...and how it must have been for them, how they must have stood there too.

I went back to the grave a few years ago. It was all so very different.
Rob Roy's cherub had a missing hand, his wing had been broken off and his grave was full of weeds. Some of the statues nearby had been defaced and gravestones had been pulled down.
It felt faded, jaded, tired...it felt unloved and I wished I hadn't gone back there. Some things are, after all, best left behind....

I thought of my walks to see Rob Roy last week when we spent an hour or so in Laeken Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Brussels. It was a book, 'Secret Brussels', that sent us there.

 I love old cemeteries - they have a different kind of peace, a serenity, a semi-wildness where nature flourishes and wild things roam; a quietness, a sense of long-trodden pathways, of ancient lives.....where the past is not such a foreign country after all.

We were met by a cat, a yellow-eyed, chocolate-brown, stocky fellow who seemed to welcome our presence and he stayed in step with us as we explored, padding alongside us, curling round and around our ankles every time we stopped.

It was a dismal day. The sky was a wringing wet, grey dishcloth, and it was chilly too.....but somehow it suited.
We walked, stepping over puddles, avoiding the muddy bits, and we gaped - there is no other word for it - at the funerary art around us.

A woman, a desperate grief-ravaged young woman, draped in flowing robes, arms bare, hair gently coiled, lies across a family grave as if she has hurled herself on to it. One of her bare feet is on the step of the grave, the other almost touches the gravelled path.

She is startlingly lifelike, like one of those high-street performance artists who dust themselves in pewter-coloured powder to resemble a statue.
I wonder at first whether she is meant to resemble a member of this long-dead family, though I think it more likely she is a symbol of a family's grief, mourning for all eternity, on their behalf.
I have never seen anything like it before.

They are everywhere, these weeping angels. It is Dr Who without the horror.
One  kneels at the foot of a grave, hands clasped before her. She gazes at the inscription on the gravestone and her bare feet, crossed behind her, are visible through the thin material of her robes.
Along from her is a third statue, her hair flowing free. A beautiful long leg exposed, she lies almost prostrate at the foot of a family grave. Someone has placed lilies in her arms.

Her goddess-like perfection, her grace, her ethereal beauty, are a stark contrast to the utterly ordinary faces in the black and white photographs on the gravestone she watches over.

We find a little boy and girl at one grave - the girl is sitting on the granite slab and her hand caresses the polished stone. Her feet are bare but the little boy (her brother?) standing over her, looking down to her, protectively, wears sturdy shoes and thick socks.
It is raining and drops collect, like clear, bright jewels, on his forehead and lips.

Not far from them, another statue - a woman standing fully upright leans against a tall, stone column bearing the bust of a proud-faced man. A hand covers her face. She is distraught. Does she represent the widow of this man, who gazes to the distance above her, oblivious to the grief around him?

And then, most poignantly, perhaps, we find the sprawled body of a young man, a soldier. He lies resting, exhausted. The grave is that of Max Pelgrims, aged 24 when he was killed on August 19, 1914, just weeks after the beginning of World War One.

And so we walk and walk and the cat follows us on soft paws, and the rain drips on us from the cedars and the yew trees, and blue tits and great tits go 'seep seep seep' in the conifers overhead..
We find ornate family crypts and altars, perfect dainty ceramic flowers and laurel wreaths, we find an original casting of Rodin's 'Thinker' and I vow to return because I need more time to absorb this place.

Before leaving we follow the instructions in our guide book to find the entrance to an underground crypt.

It is not a happy place. It is chilling in all senses of the word..and I find it difficult to imagine any family wishing this as their loved one's last resting place.
It is dank and gloomy and the odd vases of fresh flowers only serve to reinforce the grimness of the place.

One of the long galleries is gated off with a metal grill, but beyond it we see another gallery and another grill. Grainy, filtered daylight from dirty skylights only adds to the bleakness, and suddenly we are all very cold..
It could be a sci-fi setting, a cell, and it feels miserable, without hope and soulless..and it goes on and on. There are puddles on the floor and I hear a rustling and water dripping.

I know for a moment, though we never discuss it, we are all silently thinking with relief of your little place, high on a clifftop and of you flying free across land, sea and sky.

We walk back up the steps glad to emerge into the open, to the trees and the birds, and we head back to the cemetery gates with talk of cafe and coffee - leaving the weeping angels and their silent, anguished, eternal vigils, behind.


Laeken Cemetery: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laeken_Cemetery

Max Pelgrims: http://www.bel-memorial.org/photos/PELGRIMS_Max_2882.htm

Brighouse Cemetery:  http://bit.ly/IRy31A

Rodin's 'Thinker': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker

Secret Brussels: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Secret-Brussels-Jonglez-Guides/dp/2915807965/ref=sr_1_sc_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336382334&sr=8-2-spell


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