A little girl with flaxen hair in pigtails, a gap where her front teeth used to be, a hand-knitted cardigan.
Not a girly girl - a tomboy, always on a rope swing, climbing trees; a rebel, a naughty girl, too often over her mother's knee.
Her name? Virginie.
I was with her little brother in a park today. Such an odd couple we made, sitting in the dappled shade of one of the small parks off Rue Luxembourg near the flash glasshouse of the European Parliament.
I had time to spare, French class not due to start until 9am, so the park beckoned; one corner of it, where the sun shines early in the morning slanting long shadows across sandy paths. A rare moment when there is nothing to be done except sit and, perhaps, write a little.
It's quiet in here. Close by, on the other side of the railings, smart women click clack on heels and the teenage girls are all casual prettiness, perfect mussy hair and flat shoes. The teenage boys have that lop-sided shuffle and cocky-cum-gawky rolling gait while most of the older men are in suits - identikit beings in jackets and trousers albeit in varying shades of blue. They move with that important 'should have been there 5 minutes ago' briskness.
I clock Virginie's brother immediately, walking more slowly than all the others. As the rat race rushes about him he turns into the park, to a bench, to the only bench in the sun, my bench.
Seventies, possibly 60s, difficult to tell. He doesn't look like he's slept well - shadows under the eyes, stubble round his chin, unkempt grey receding hair. A bit of a tremor to his hands and an unevenness to his gait. Perhaps he hasn't slept at all. Perhaps he doesn't have a bed to sleep in.
He sits at the opposite end of the bench and I see the suit he wears is not so smart. A little frayed at the cuffs and the ankles. The odd faint stain here and there. He must be hot in that overcoat.
I'm uncomfortable that he has chosen to sit so near. But there is no threat from him, none at all.
I keep writing but I'm constantly aware of him. He sits for a while, doing nothing, but glances across several times. I nod - a polite acknowledgement - and am not surprised when he speaks.
He points at the book.
What am I doing, he wants to know. What am I writing about?
I pause, just for a second, considering a myriad of options. But can't bring myself to lie.
'I am writing to my son,' I say. 'He died and I like to write to him.'
I immediately regret it. It comes out more abruptly than I intended.
I think I said it half hoping it might shut him up, make him go away.
He doesn't do any of the things I might have expected. He doesn't say he is sorry for my loss, or ask any questions or apologise or redden with embarrassment; he may have crumpled a little, I'm not sure. But he doesn't go away. He simply sits back against the bench.
A blackcap chatters deep in the foliage of the nearest tree. I'm aware of its song filling a sudden, odd vacuum that wasn't there before.
I shouldn't have said what I said. I start to stand up, language failing where an apology should be, but he holds out his arm and flaps his hand, motioning me to sit again, asking me to wait. Something he wants me to see.
He leans forward, loosens the cords of his shopping trolley - a grubby, tartan-patterned two-wheeled contraption he'd pulled into the park behind him.
I see that it quite possibly contains all that is left in his world.
A thin duvet comes out first, then a pillow, odds and sods of clothing, he piles them on to the bench; some packets of biscuits, cans of beer, and then, arm right in, shoulder deep, he hits somewhere near the bottom and emerges, a little frazzled, holding a book.
A photo album.
He nods encouraging me to take it. I don't want it but I have been rude already. So I hold it while he starts gathering his things again. He sees me doing nothing with it and gestures at me enthusiastically, using his hands to mime the opening of a book.
It feels wrong and intrusive and I am embarrassed by all his things. By the pieces of his life. By what people might think. The pillow is now on the ground and it will get dirty. But he seems not to care.
The album is barely whole. The sticky bits no longer sticky, the cellophane torn, some of the pages browning, others missing. It is held together by a few bits of fake leather and threads of brittle cotton.
But in the middle, still stuck under the cellophane, two photos.
Two children, beaming faces, a boy and a girl.
In both pictures the girl is hugging the boy. She is a few years older, possibly 12, maybe 13. She is clearly in charge, holding the little boy tightly across his middle. She has long hair in pigtails, a gap in her front teeth, a slouchy cardigan straight from a knitting pattern. The boy is mop-haired, thin cheeks, a shirt that looks too big for him.
The pictures are black and white and it is impossible to date them. This man's grandchildren, perhaps?
But no.
He leans over and prods the photograph. The boy in the picture is him...and the girl holding him fast, his sister, Virginie. 'My Virginie,' he says. And he pats that part of his chest where his heart beats.
'God took her,' he said. A pause. He visibly gathers himself. Not long after the photographs were taken. A fever of some sort. He shrugs at the detail.....'what does it matter what they called it. She died.'
Then: 'It is the worst......to lose a part of you. It is the very worst. Nothing is the same.'
This shabby man speaks with such dignity and I don't know what to say for a moment. Then I ask about her and he tells me how she liked to run and how he always tried to keep up with her. And how she was disobedient and wild. And he laughs out loud.
We communicate clumsily, using Franglais and sign language. I tell him she is beautiful. I think I say the right things...but it goes to show that in the face of another's grief, we are all made mute, clumsy - even when we have a similar story to tell.
The world scurries around us, yet for a few moments this noisy city is forgotten, the years peeling back as I see Virginie, her life and death, played out in this man's eyes.
Virginie. Who was always in trouble, the big sister who refused to be the tidy, pretty, home-spun girl his mother wanted her to be.
He pulls out a handkerchief from a pocket and mops his eyes and I'm not sure whether he's rheumy or tearful. I wonder at the hold this long-dead sibling, this little Cathy Earnshaw, has on him, still.
I try to picture him as a little boy on little legs chasing the sister he adored. I wonder, did her death at the beginning of his life ultimately lead to him being here on this bench, worn and frayed and sad, with a shopping trolley for a home. I wonder about his mother and his father. Where are their photographs? But he has told me what he wants to tell me and will say no more.
He tells me I am saying her name wrong though. I am saying VirginiA. I ask him to spell it and he is delighted when I write it in my book.
Then he starts packing his things away and I give him back the album. He asks me your name and I misunderstand and give him my name instead.
'Votre fils, Nicholas?' he says (with no pronunciation of the 'S')
'Thomas,' I say. Digging into my bag I show him your picture. 'Voici Thomas'.
'Thomas, Thomas, Thomas,' he says, looking at the photograph. 'Bonjour Thomas!'
And then. 'It is hard..no?' And I want to say yes, it is hard, but that because of you, Thomas, I meet people and hear such stories. But my French fails and I just say 'Oui, mais pas encore'.
There is a little more talk about other things of no importance....and I can tell he wants to be off. He pushes himself up and fastens the trolley. I sit there, feeling useless. Should I offer him money? I can't bear that it might humiliate him. He pats my hand and his palm is raspy and dry.
He says something - I can't fathom it so I say just say 'thank you'. And off he goes.
Near the railings, before leaving the park he turns and gives a mock bow before he sets off for who knows where.
Where is he now, I wonder?
Perhaps in another park, on another bench, talking about the sister he loved and lost? Making friends of strangers just to have the chance to say her name out loud?
Thursday, 21 June 2012
Thursday, 7 June 2012
Flamborough
I drove here on impulse.
It certainly hadn't been the intention when I set off this blistering morning. The plan was lunch in Leeds with an old colleague followed by shopping.
The lunch had been wonderful - we'd talked and talked, wondered where the years had gone, hiding from the heat of the day in the coolest part of the restaurant, before emerging, blinking, into unbearable brightness.
The city was feverish and the heat sapped all desire to shop - so instead I went back to the multi-storey and sat for a moment with the engine turning, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in, listening to the busy, busy city; the thrum of shoppers, buskers, sirens, road drills.
And sitting there, suddenly, I knew where I wanted to be...and it was all-consuming, urgent, as if I was already late.
Leeds was congested and impatient and getting out of the city took a frustrating amount of time. But eventually the hire car was chewing up the miles. Through glorious countryside, past fields of yellow, heady, scented rape; swinging round York, around Driffield, through Stamford Bridge, past the Burton Agnes duckpond, crawling behind tractors on the A614, bypassing Bridlington..
Until at last, here I am, finally. In the car park. Beneath the wheeling, spinning mirrors of Flamborough Head lighthouse.
It's 4pm - and the first thing I hear as I turn off the engine is the crunch of car wheels on gravel. Timing is perfect, most are leaving and the car park is almost empty.
The urge that brought me here has become overwhelming and for some reason - there is no logic to this - I need to hurry. I throw open the door and there is the sudden quick blast of a foghorn. Another blast follows - not the evocative tremor of a deep bass, but a higher frequency, and it's confusing to hear it on such a bright day.
Looking seaward though all becomes clear. There is no sea. There is no sky. They have blended in the haze, melded so absolutely that it is impossible to see where one ends and the other begins. There is no horizon.
The gorse and air fizz with birdsong. The skylarks' high-pitched musical trill is constant. It hurts the eyes to look for them but I see one - a dot in the sky, hovering before it loops and swoops, silent now, to the ground.
It is a gentle but exhilarating walk to the cliffs and gradually the song of the larks and the chatter of the pippits quickly fades, replaced the raucous calls of thousands of seabirds.
I sit close to your ledge and the foghorn sounds again, just as it did on the day we let your ashes fly from this very spot. And the air carries and lifts the sound so that it resonates and vibrates long after it has ended. But it is fainter out here, muffled by the waves and the cries of the gulls.
To the left a huge, riotous, breeding colony of kittiwakes hugs a white cliff face and to the right is the famous Flamborough Head stack, domain of the herring gulls. One throws back its head, opens its beak wide and gives that ululating seaside town fish and chip holler.
There's quite a breeze here and below the sea is lively with white horses.
The waves swell, crest and roll, foam dissipating on the surface. The water is blue, azure, almost Mediterranean and the pale rocks in the shallower parts are easy to see. The suck and roar, the pull and push, is mesmerising. It always is.
The air is filled with birds, and on the sea colonies rise and fall, bobbing on the swell. Razorbills - scores of them, their wings churring like the legs of a clockwork toy - guillemots, blacked back gulls, shags, fulmars.
The kittiwakes are unmistakable - yellow bills, black tips to their grey wings and white bodies as pristine and as clear as porcelain. They are tiny compared to the herring gulls and black backs.
They make their 'kitt-eee-wayke' call as a greeting, as one returns to the nest where the other is brooding. Their nests are strong, sturdy cones and arriving birds bring more materials - twigs, tufts of grass - as opposed to fish. No chicks yet then.
Occasionally the wind changes and a gust rears up the cliffs from the sea and the smell, the guano odour of this huge colony catches on the air. It's kind of stable meets zoo, only less....palatable?.
A gleaming roly-poly seal bobs on the surface, glances around with big shiny eyes and then loops and dives.
Further out, gannets, three of them, are streaking towards Bempton Cliffs. They are huge flying darts. And behind them a group of shags, inches from the surface. Their reflections are visible on the water despite the haze.
Suddenly, as if as one, the entire colony of kittiwakes leaves the ledges and take to the air. There are hundreds circling and calling. Something startled them but there's no sign of the culprit, possibly a bird of prey or one of the bigger gulls who are crafty, vicious egg stealers.
I love this. I love the wildness, I love that you are never ever alone, that it's teeming here with nature going about its business of birth, life and death.
Your ledge looks different though. It slopes a little more than it did before. The forces of wind and rain at work, and I know some day it will be gone.
For an hour or so I just sit, watch, listen and absorb until the brisk northerly breeze starts to bite. It's hard to walk away, but not unbearably so, because you are there but you are not there. You are everywhere and I take you with me.
I head to a bench perched on a grassy mound a few hundred yards away, where grandma and grandad used to sit with you. The wood is warm. The wind drops and I hear what sounds like a church bell. It comes from a buoy out at sea and it tolls with a regular rhythm, rocked to-and-fro by the swell.
I've only ever heard it once before - that foggy, grey morning when we came here, numb with cold, numb with grief and we cast you to the winds. And I hadn't expected it today..and it is loud and and resonant and somehow, significant, as I sit in your place amid the pipits, swallows and skylarks.
The bench was placed here as a memorial, as a remembrance, by another family. But it has become special to us too..and I know the words by heart:
"He lived for those he loved. And those he loved remember.
It certainly hadn't been the intention when I set off this blistering morning. The plan was lunch in Leeds with an old colleague followed by shopping.
The lunch had been wonderful - we'd talked and talked, wondered where the years had gone, hiding from the heat of the day in the coolest part of the restaurant, before emerging, blinking, into unbearable brightness.
The city was feverish and the heat sapped all desire to shop - so instead I went back to the multi-storey and sat for a moment with the engine turning, waiting for the air conditioning to kick in, listening to the busy, busy city; the thrum of shoppers, buskers, sirens, road drills.
And sitting there, suddenly, I knew where I wanted to be...and it was all-consuming, urgent, as if I was already late.
Leeds was congested and impatient and getting out of the city took a frustrating amount of time. But eventually the hire car was chewing up the miles. Through glorious countryside, past fields of yellow, heady, scented rape; swinging round York, around Driffield, through Stamford Bridge, past the Burton Agnes duckpond, crawling behind tractors on the A614, bypassing Bridlington..
Until at last, here I am, finally. In the car park. Beneath the wheeling, spinning mirrors of Flamborough Head lighthouse.
It's 4pm - and the first thing I hear as I turn off the engine is the crunch of car wheels on gravel. Timing is perfect, most are leaving and the car park is almost empty.
The urge that brought me here has become overwhelming and for some reason - there is no logic to this - I need to hurry. I throw open the door and there is the sudden quick blast of a foghorn. Another blast follows - not the evocative tremor of a deep bass, but a higher frequency, and it's confusing to hear it on such a bright day.
Looking seaward though all becomes clear. There is no sea. There is no sky. They have blended in the haze, melded so absolutely that it is impossible to see where one ends and the other begins. There is no horizon.
The gorse and air fizz with birdsong. The skylarks' high-pitched musical trill is constant. It hurts the eyes to look for them but I see one - a dot in the sky, hovering before it loops and swoops, silent now, to the ground.
It is a gentle but exhilarating walk to the cliffs and gradually the song of the larks and the chatter of the pippits quickly fades, replaced the raucous calls of thousands of seabirds.
I sit close to your ledge and the foghorn sounds again, just as it did on the day we let your ashes fly from this very spot. And the air carries and lifts the sound so that it resonates and vibrates long after it has ended. But it is fainter out here, muffled by the waves and the cries of the gulls.
To the left a huge, riotous, breeding colony of kittiwakes hugs a white cliff face and to the right is the famous Flamborough Head stack, domain of the herring gulls. One throws back its head, opens its beak wide and gives that ululating seaside town fish and chip holler.
There's quite a breeze here and below the sea is lively with white horses.
The waves swell, crest and roll, foam dissipating on the surface. The water is blue, azure, almost Mediterranean and the pale rocks in the shallower parts are easy to see. The suck and roar, the pull and push, is mesmerising. It always is.
The air is filled with birds, and on the sea colonies rise and fall, bobbing on the swell. Razorbills - scores of them, their wings churring like the legs of a clockwork toy - guillemots, blacked back gulls, shags, fulmars.
The kittiwakes are unmistakable - yellow bills, black tips to their grey wings and white bodies as pristine and as clear as porcelain. They are tiny compared to the herring gulls and black backs.
They make their 'kitt-eee-wayke' call as a greeting, as one returns to the nest where the other is brooding. Their nests are strong, sturdy cones and arriving birds bring more materials - twigs, tufts of grass - as opposed to fish. No chicks yet then.
Occasionally the wind changes and a gust rears up the cliffs from the sea and the smell, the guano odour of this huge colony catches on the air. It's kind of stable meets zoo, only less....palatable?.
A gleaming roly-poly seal bobs on the surface, glances around with big shiny eyes and then loops and dives.
Further out, gannets, three of them, are streaking towards Bempton Cliffs. They are huge flying darts. And behind them a group of shags, inches from the surface. Their reflections are visible on the water despite the haze.
Suddenly, as if as one, the entire colony of kittiwakes leaves the ledges and take to the air. There are hundreds circling and calling. Something startled them but there's no sign of the culprit, possibly a bird of prey or one of the bigger gulls who are crafty, vicious egg stealers.
I love this. I love the wildness, I love that you are never ever alone, that it's teeming here with nature going about its business of birth, life and death.
Your ledge looks different though. It slopes a little more than it did before. The forces of wind and rain at work, and I know some day it will be gone.
For an hour or so I just sit, watch, listen and absorb until the brisk northerly breeze starts to bite. It's hard to walk away, but not unbearably so, because you are there but you are not there. You are everywhere and I take you with me.
I head to a bench perched on a grassy mound a few hundred yards away, where grandma and grandad used to sit with you. The wood is warm. The wind drops and I hear what sounds like a church bell. It comes from a buoy out at sea and it tolls with a regular rhythm, rocked to-and-fro by the swell.
I've only ever heard it once before - that foggy, grey morning when we came here, numb with cold, numb with grief and we cast you to the winds. And I hadn't expected it today..and it is loud and and resonant and somehow, significant, as I sit in your place amid the pipits, swallows and skylarks.
The bench was placed here as a memorial, as a remembrance, by another family. But it has become special to us too..and I know the words by heart:
"He lived for those he loved. And those he loved remember.
 |
| Flamborough in the haze, on May 24, 2012 |
Wednesday, 6 June 2012
On Public View
You were always happily oblivious to the stares of strangers. The attention you drew when we were out and about, it passed right over your head. More important things to contemplate, like where the next cafe stop was coming from.
I wasn't though, I felt their eyes on us even when our backs were turned.
I didn't mind the brief glances. Humans are designed to be nosey, born survivors because of our natural curiosity. We can't help but look at a toddler throwing a tantrum, we all turn to trace the source of a sudden, unexpected noise.
Your little quirks and eccentricities, your shoutiness, your puppet-like gait, your habit of picking things out of other people's shopping trolleys, they were my joy. They'd told me you would never walk and yet there you were, striding on thin legs through Tesco's..shouting in that language only you could understand...
But to 'the general public' you were different, a heartbreaker certainly, but not as other children - and so people would look, of course they would.
And sometimes they would catch my eye and smile, even say hello to you.
Strangers at their loveliest? The couple who came to help after you, in a temper, accidentally knocked to the floor with a sweep of your arm most of the contents of a restaurant table - plates, cutlery, sugar bowl, teacups - because your fish and chips hadn't arrived quickly enough.
They got the waitress to pick up the bits and pieces and then, when the chaos was under control, the old man took your hand as if in a handshake and said 'well well young man, what will you do for your next trick?' and his wife said how bonny you were and you looked as if butter wouldn't melt and I was so relieved and grateful.
People got to recognise you and your ways. 'Hiya Thomas' the fish and chip shop man would shout at us ever after, when we walked past.
There were many acts of kindness - but there was the other stuff too.
And I don't know which was worse; the starers for whom a look simply wasn't enough, who wanted to absorb and gawp and stare and stare and stare, only looking away when they realised they'd been rumbled?
Was it them...or was it those who opened their mouths and stuck their size 10s right in?
'We never used to see them out and about in my day'
'It must be awful for you'
And, of course, the one heard more than anything else: 'Isn't it a shame'.
The starers I would deal with differently depending on my mood. Mostly I ignored them, sometimes I deliberately about-turned and started towards them, on a collision course, just to watch them scurry away, scared of confrontation.
I'm imagining a sandwich board we could have worn that would have solved the problem: "Yes, we're interesting aren't we? Come say hello. We don't bite - mostly. *winking smiley* ".
Sometimes I would speak to them, 'can I help?', I'd say. And sometimes I would meet their eye and stare back hoping they'd got the message, hoping they'd registered every ounce of venom I was daggering their way.
And then I'd get in the car, belt you in and drive home. Hot tears and guilt. A sense that I'd somehow made it worse. They were ignorant, rude without meaning to be and yet awkward, not knowing the right thing to do. After all, how might I have once reacted?
Funnily enough I found the other ones, the ones who opened mouth without engaging brain, easier to cope with, hurtful as their comments were. These were mainly elderly folk, of the generations when the 'handicapped' were hidden away by their families or left in 'institutions'.
I would become the journalist, relentless but gentle: 'What do you mean?', 'Explain yourself?', 'Sorry?...'them'??' and then, when they were blushing and spluttering, we'd chat. I'd tell them about you, your happy life, and I think that most of the time we parted with them feeling it wasn't such a shame after all. One of them even gave you a pound to 'for your piggy bank'.
It was exhausting though, always being 'on duty' as your champion, as your defender. When all I wanted was a loaf and something for tea.
A mum* posted on Twitter today about going to the shops, taking her autistic daughter with her in a special needs buggy. 'Why do people have to stare and then look away as soon as I look at them?' she wrote on her timeline.
Why indeed.
I have a friend whose child needed 24-hour care due to her hugely complex needs. The child was a twin, her sister died in the womb. My friend absorbed all her grief, her agony, and converted it into loving her little girl, giving her the best life she could. She adored her beyond words.
What broke her? What reduced this defiant, courageous woman who never gave in, who never gave up, finally, to tears?
A middle-aged woman who glanced into the pram as she was in a supermarket queue one day and said: 'probably best if she hadn't been born love'. The queue was long, those around heard, no-one intervened.
My friend left the trolley where it was.
People have such power to change another person's world for the better Thomas. But they can destroy it in an instant too.
If only they would think...
It doesn't take much..
*Jeannette, a Twitter friend, can be found at Twitter.com/@AutismMumma
I wasn't though, I felt their eyes on us even when our backs were turned.
I didn't mind the brief glances. Humans are designed to be nosey, born survivors because of our natural curiosity. We can't help but look at a toddler throwing a tantrum, we all turn to trace the source of a sudden, unexpected noise.
Your little quirks and eccentricities, your shoutiness, your puppet-like gait, your habit of picking things out of other people's shopping trolleys, they were my joy. They'd told me you would never walk and yet there you were, striding on thin legs through Tesco's..shouting in that language only you could understand...
But to 'the general public' you were different, a heartbreaker certainly, but not as other children - and so people would look, of course they would.
And sometimes they would catch my eye and smile, even say hello to you.
Strangers at their loveliest? The couple who came to help after you, in a temper, accidentally knocked to the floor with a sweep of your arm most of the contents of a restaurant table - plates, cutlery, sugar bowl, teacups - because your fish and chips hadn't arrived quickly enough.
They got the waitress to pick up the bits and pieces and then, when the chaos was under control, the old man took your hand as if in a handshake and said 'well well young man, what will you do for your next trick?' and his wife said how bonny you were and you looked as if butter wouldn't melt and I was so relieved and grateful.
People got to recognise you and your ways. 'Hiya Thomas' the fish and chip shop man would shout at us ever after, when we walked past.
There were many acts of kindness - but there was the other stuff too.
And I don't know which was worse; the starers for whom a look simply wasn't enough, who wanted to absorb and gawp and stare and stare and stare, only looking away when they realised they'd been rumbled?
Was it them...or was it those who opened their mouths and stuck their size 10s right in?
'We never used to see them out and about in my day'
'It must be awful for you'
And, of course, the one heard more than anything else: 'Isn't it a shame'.
The starers I would deal with differently depending on my mood. Mostly I ignored them, sometimes I deliberately about-turned and started towards them, on a collision course, just to watch them scurry away, scared of confrontation.
I'm imagining a sandwich board we could have worn that would have solved the problem: "Yes, we're interesting aren't we? Come say hello. We don't bite - mostly. *winking smiley* ".
Sometimes I would speak to them, 'can I help?', I'd say. And sometimes I would meet their eye and stare back hoping they'd got the message, hoping they'd registered every ounce of venom I was daggering their way.
And then I'd get in the car, belt you in and drive home. Hot tears and guilt. A sense that I'd somehow made it worse. They were ignorant, rude without meaning to be and yet awkward, not knowing the right thing to do. After all, how might I have once reacted?
Funnily enough I found the other ones, the ones who opened mouth without engaging brain, easier to cope with, hurtful as their comments were. These were mainly elderly folk, of the generations when the 'handicapped' were hidden away by their families or left in 'institutions'.
I would become the journalist, relentless but gentle: 'What do you mean?', 'Explain yourself?', 'Sorry?...'them'??' and then, when they were blushing and spluttering, we'd chat. I'd tell them about you, your happy life, and I think that most of the time we parted with them feeling it wasn't such a shame after all. One of them even gave you a pound to 'for your piggy bank'.
It was exhausting though, always being 'on duty' as your champion, as your defender. When all I wanted was a loaf and something for tea.
A mum* posted on Twitter today about going to the shops, taking her autistic daughter with her in a special needs buggy. 'Why do people have to stare and then look away as soon as I look at them?' she wrote on her timeline.
Why indeed.
I have a friend whose child needed 24-hour care due to her hugely complex needs. The child was a twin, her sister died in the womb. My friend absorbed all her grief, her agony, and converted it into loving her little girl, giving her the best life she could. She adored her beyond words.
What broke her? What reduced this defiant, courageous woman who never gave in, who never gave up, finally, to tears?
A middle-aged woman who glanced into the pram as she was in a supermarket queue one day and said: 'probably best if she hadn't been born love'. The queue was long, those around heard, no-one intervened.
My friend left the trolley where it was.
People have such power to change another person's world for the better Thomas. But they can destroy it in an instant too.
If only they would think...
It doesn't take much..
*Jeannette, a Twitter friend, can be found at Twitter.com/@AutismMumma
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
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.
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
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
Picture Gallery
Thursday, 26 April 2012
A Street of Dreams
I don't see your face.
But I sense that it's you, a perception of your essence, your being.
The weight of you as I casually sling you on to my hip, holding on to you as you lean giddily, heavily out and away, waving goodbye. Wearing shorts and no shoes or socks, a red t-shirt. It is a warm day and I can feel the heat of your torso.
Chubby hands.
Strange. Your hands were never chubby. They were elegant, long-fingered, people always said you'd have made a good pianist.
And when did you ever wave goodbye? Unless it was through someone else's actions, someone who loved you holding your forearm and swaying it: 'Say bye bye to mummy!' - your wrist waggling as you looked in the opposite direction. Ever the rebel..
But it was you. I know this.
And when the alarm invades I lie still as consciousness seeps in; those few muffled seconds, half awake, half still in a dream. For a while enveloped, cocooned, comforted by your presence and then..
...scrabbling, the mind flailing, panicking, grasping at remnants.
Birds. Traffic. A clattering from the kitchen. The woman moving around in the flat upstairs. All these things I become aware of.
And inevitably, as fine as a spider's web, as soft as gossamer, the warp and weft and threads of you untangle and dissolve into air.
And it's not as if tears come or anything like that. But there's a heaviness, a weariness - I saw you, and now you are gone again.
In the early days I never dreamt of you. I think that was probably a good thing.
I think your brain protects you from yourself, if that make sense.
Or maybe it was just the pills.
'Take one when you need one,' the doc had said. I misunderstood, misheard, was perhaps too far away to listen, but anyway, I took one every night for two weeks and slept the sleep of the dead.
And in the weeks and months afterwards there were tortured, feverish, teasing apparitions with no sense or meaning, just colours, rage, anguish and confusion.
I kept a diary that first year and wrote, in a frenzy at times, all that I could, but there was no meaning in the dreams and little comfort.
Then, just after we'd marked six months, a dream of such clarity.
We were sitting next to each other at a church service, you calm instead of your usual fidgety, shouty self.
I remember a coffin. I think it was your funeral. But afterwards, after people had said goodbye, you and I were walking hand in hand, splashing ankle deep through bright water, so bright, glinting in the sunlight.
It was a terraced street; I remember a long row of houses on each side of us but the light was almost blinding, turning everything into silhouette. I was alongside you but at the same time I was behind you, watching us both walking up this street, going who knows where, splashing, holding hands. You loved splashing.
I remember thinking, when I woke up, rummaging for a pen to commit the dream to paper, how often I'd put out my hand for you to hold, only to find you not there, for my hand to close in on itself, fingernails against palm. How firm your grip had been in the dream.
People have put all kinds of meanings to it. I choose to believe all and none of them. You'd come back to me, that's all that mattered.
'The sunne may set and rise
But we contrariwise
sleepe after our short light
one everlasting night...'
Catullus
But I sense that it's you, a perception of your essence, your being.
The weight of you as I casually sling you on to my hip, holding on to you as you lean giddily, heavily out and away, waving goodbye. Wearing shorts and no shoes or socks, a red t-shirt. It is a warm day and I can feel the heat of your torso.
Chubby hands.
Strange. Your hands were never chubby. They were elegant, long-fingered, people always said you'd have made a good pianist.
And when did you ever wave goodbye? Unless it was through someone else's actions, someone who loved you holding your forearm and swaying it: 'Say bye bye to mummy!' - your wrist waggling as you looked in the opposite direction. Ever the rebel..
But it was you. I know this.
And when the alarm invades I lie still as consciousness seeps in; those few muffled seconds, half awake, half still in a dream. For a while enveloped, cocooned, comforted by your presence and then..
...scrabbling, the mind flailing, panicking, grasping at remnants.
Birds. Traffic. A clattering from the kitchen. The woman moving around in the flat upstairs. All these things I become aware of.
And inevitably, as fine as a spider's web, as soft as gossamer, the warp and weft and threads of you untangle and dissolve into air.
And it's not as if tears come or anything like that. But there's a heaviness, a weariness - I saw you, and now you are gone again.
In the early days I never dreamt of you. I think that was probably a good thing.
I think your brain protects you from yourself, if that make sense.
Or maybe it was just the pills.
'Take one when you need one,' the doc had said. I misunderstood, misheard, was perhaps too far away to listen, but anyway, I took one every night for two weeks and slept the sleep of the dead.
And in the weeks and months afterwards there were tortured, feverish, teasing apparitions with no sense or meaning, just colours, rage, anguish and confusion.
I kept a diary that first year and wrote, in a frenzy at times, all that I could, but there was no meaning in the dreams and little comfort.
Then, just after we'd marked six months, a dream of such clarity.
We were sitting next to each other at a church service, you calm instead of your usual fidgety, shouty self.
I remember a coffin. I think it was your funeral. But afterwards, after people had said goodbye, you and I were walking hand in hand, splashing ankle deep through bright water, so bright, glinting in the sunlight.
It was a terraced street; I remember a long row of houses on each side of us but the light was almost blinding, turning everything into silhouette. I was alongside you but at the same time I was behind you, watching us both walking up this street, going who knows where, splashing, holding hands. You loved splashing.
I remember thinking, when I woke up, rummaging for a pen to commit the dream to paper, how often I'd put out my hand for you to hold, only to find you not there, for my hand to close in on itself, fingernails against palm. How firm your grip had been in the dream.
People have put all kinds of meanings to it. I choose to believe all and none of them. You'd come back to me, that's all that mattered.
'The sunne may set and rise
But we contrariwise
sleepe after our short light
one everlasting night...'
Catullus
Tuesday, 24 April 2012
The Girl on the Train
She dropped into the seat with a heaviness that suggested utter exhaustion.
Her mousey, flyaway hair scraped back into a heavy, scruffy pony tail; her chin all teenage spotty.
She looked at no-one, not even with that out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye curiosity you use on the underground, just to make sure you're not about to sit next to a nutter.
She didn't care who was around her.
She buried her nose in her scarf, rested her head against her hand against the window, shut her eyes and shut out the world.
I think she must have been about 16, though impossible to say for sure.
She had bright lime green headphones on - the ones that cover your whole ears - and in the hand that wasn't rested against her cheek she was holding an iPod.
And that might have been that.
As you do on the tube, even a mid-afternoon one, you try not to preoccupy yourself too much with anyone around you. Just in case.
Simple rules. Try not to meet another's eyes, don't invade personal space, don't inhale too deeply when someone a few seats back sneezes...the usual stuff.
A jumble of humanity doing its best to disengage, to disappear, to pretend they aren't there...just until they reach their stop.
This girl was doing a cracking job of all that. But teenagers can can't they? We expect them to shut off, ignore, defy. Sullen-ness their shield - and some of them do it so well.
I glanced again at the girl.
She looked crumpled. Her face had burrowed deeper into the material of her scarf and denim jacket and only her closed eyes, cheek apples and forehead were visible. But part of the scarf material closest to her eyes had become a shade darker. Wet. And I noticed wetness on her cheeks too.
She was crying.
I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but I don't think they had.
The woman next to me was on her phone, had been for ages, high-pitched, shrieky and animated. The man in the seat next to the girl was engrossed in his paper and in the contents of his beer can.
Besides, the girl had done her best to make herself look as if she wasn't there. And just observing her, noticing her tears, felt instrusive, voyeuristic.
She was closed to the world. Eyes clamped shut. But now I come to notice it, there's an occasional but obvious lurch of the shoulders, a sob surpressed.
Seconds pass.
Maybe it's the music, I think. Perhaps she's broken up with a boyfriend. Maybe a row with her parents. Or maybe it's much, much worse than that.
And I realise I'm sitting there minutes later making up stories in my head for what might be the matter with the girl sitting opposite me instead of....instead of what?
I'm ages away from my stop, she's showing no sign of being near hers so are we to sit like this, this girl crying and me, opposite...watching her?
When does minding your own business become a failure of human compassion.
The thought of it.
Am I to do nothing at all?
Hardly aware of the decision I've made I lean over and lightly touch her elbow. I know she can't hear me because of the music.
At my touch her eyes flash open and for a second I see enraged, flashing soaked brown eyes, sodden lashes, not quite a snarl but something aggressive - attack the best form of defence, I suppose.
'Vous etes ok?' I ask. She sees instantly I am harmless but shrugs a shoulder away from me, fiddles with her ipod and wipes her nose with her scarf before hunkering down again and shutting me out.
Her music is classical, I heard a bit of it as she readjusted the headphones. Something searing, something soaraway. I'm surprised, though I don't know why.
I can't reach her and she doesn't want me to.
So I sit for a few stops more with her, not watching, but aware, as she snuffles into her scarf and then at one stop just as the doors are about to close, she moves, grabs her rucksack, and makes for the door, all flying ponytail, trailing scarf and ipod wires.
And she's gone.
And I sit for a few moments more, imagining and wondering... before it's my turn to get off too.
The Metro, where we see snippets of lives, and then they are gone.
Her mousey, flyaway hair scraped back into a heavy, scruffy pony tail; her chin all teenage spotty.
She looked at no-one, not even with that out-of-the-corner-of-your-eye curiosity you use on the underground, just to make sure you're not about to sit next to a nutter.
She didn't care who was around her.
She buried her nose in her scarf, rested her head against her hand against the window, shut her eyes and shut out the world.
I think she must have been about 16, though impossible to say for sure.
She had bright lime green headphones on - the ones that cover your whole ears - and in the hand that wasn't rested against her cheek she was holding an iPod.
And that might have been that.
As you do on the tube, even a mid-afternoon one, you try not to preoccupy yourself too much with anyone around you. Just in case.
Simple rules. Try not to meet another's eyes, don't invade personal space, don't inhale too deeply when someone a few seats back sneezes...the usual stuff.
A jumble of humanity doing its best to disengage, to disappear, to pretend they aren't there...just until they reach their stop.
This girl was doing a cracking job of all that. But teenagers can can't they? We expect them to shut off, ignore, defy. Sullen-ness their shield - and some of them do it so well.
I glanced again at the girl.
She looked crumpled. Her face had burrowed deeper into the material of her scarf and denim jacket and only her closed eyes, cheek apples and forehead were visible. But part of the scarf material closest to her eyes had become a shade darker. Wet. And I noticed wetness on her cheeks too.
She was crying.
I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed, but I don't think they had.
The woman next to me was on her phone, had been for ages, high-pitched, shrieky and animated. The man in the seat next to the girl was engrossed in his paper and in the contents of his beer can.
Besides, the girl had done her best to make herself look as if she wasn't there. And just observing her, noticing her tears, felt instrusive, voyeuristic.
She was closed to the world. Eyes clamped shut. But now I come to notice it, there's an occasional but obvious lurch of the shoulders, a sob surpressed.
Seconds pass.
Maybe it's the music, I think. Perhaps she's broken up with a boyfriend. Maybe a row with her parents. Or maybe it's much, much worse than that.
And I realise I'm sitting there minutes later making up stories in my head for what might be the matter with the girl sitting opposite me instead of....instead of what?
I'm ages away from my stop, she's showing no sign of being near hers so are we to sit like this, this girl crying and me, opposite...watching her?
When does minding your own business become a failure of human compassion.
The thought of it.
Am I to do nothing at all?
Hardly aware of the decision I've made I lean over and lightly touch her elbow. I know she can't hear me because of the music.
At my touch her eyes flash open and for a second I see enraged, flashing soaked brown eyes, sodden lashes, not quite a snarl but something aggressive - attack the best form of defence, I suppose.
'Vous etes ok?' I ask. She sees instantly I am harmless but shrugs a shoulder away from me, fiddles with her ipod and wipes her nose with her scarf before hunkering down again and shutting me out.
Her music is classical, I heard a bit of it as she readjusted the headphones. Something searing, something soaraway. I'm surprised, though I don't know why.
I can't reach her and she doesn't want me to.
So I sit for a few stops more with her, not watching, but aware, as she snuffles into her scarf and then at one stop just as the doors are about to close, she moves, grabs her rucksack, and makes for the door, all flying ponytail, trailing scarf and ipod wires.
And she's gone.
And I sit for a few moments more, imagining and wondering... before it's my turn to get off too.
The Metro, where we see snippets of lives, and then they are gone.
Friday, 20 April 2012
A Life Less Ordinary
IT was her 90th birthday. And she had no-one.
But she knew we were coming so she'd baked a cake.
She had forgotten to add sugar though, and it had been in the oven too long.
She fussed and flapped and served it on a flowery china cake stand on a white paper doily. Then she cut us each a huge chunk with a long bone-handled knife and waited excitedly for our reaction as we bit into it. It was rock hard and tasted terrible.
'Mmmm lovely!' we said (of course we did)....but when her back was turned we scrunched telltale crumbs onto the plate and put the rest in our pocket.
We'd made her day, she said.
And then we got on with things. 'Let's start at the beginning,' I said. 'Tell me about your parents....'
I was a Brighouse Echo trainee journalist of just a few weeks and this was my first '90th birthday' interview. Coached to say little but listen, to encourage with a raised eyebrow here, a shrug there, a 'please go on' or an 'and then what happened?' to keep things flowing...I wrote down facts in over-large crude Teeline outlines in a spiral-bound notebook, putting an asterisk in the margin when a good quote came.
I remember a dark living room but sunshine through the window, antimacassars, a silver tea set brought out 'for best', a bobbled couch and an Engelbert Humperdinck LP.
I remember a cat, dusty silk flowers with cobwebs in them, veined, shaking hands, bingo and the Waring Green Forget-Me-Not-Club of which she had once been a member.
I remember a 14-year-old in the cotton mills, bobbins, aprons and headscarves, a cluster of friends and neighbours around the only TV in the street watching the coronation, a husband long-dead, and much-wanted children failing to be born.
I remember the garden was her pleasure and lavender her favourite.
And I remember her knotting her hands and looking out of the window as she spoke about a teenage brother who lied about his age and went to Flanders fields and never returned. And how she still had picture of him in a large, oval, silver locket at her wattled, wrinkled throat. And how she still wept for him, after so long.
And then the interview was over.
All these things I remember, yet I have forgotten her name. But when anyone asks what I found most satisfying about being a reporter, I tell them her story....or rather, my story.
You see, I had thought I would do the interview on the telephone - it was 'only a 90th birthday' after all - but my editor, Stephen Firth*, had insisted...'no, you must go see her, it's important.'. And I didn't understand why....
And then I did. Not just because of the cake palaver (though I knew I'd never forget that moment!) or because of the joy we'd put into one person's day by simply taking the trouble to turn up.
But because the rapport we'd built up over the cake and over the admiring of the garden meant that while she was posing for pictures under the gentle guidance of the photographer, she told us something she hadn't shared with anyone else: she had cancer, she said; she hadn't got long and she was planning, in her final months, to make her first ever trip 'abroad', a first and final pilgrimage to visit to her brother's war grave.
I got my notebook out again.
She was a bit nervous but the hospital had said it would be ok for her to go and an old and trusted friend would be her guide. 'I'm going to see my brother again, after all these years'.
I don't buy the phrase 'hardened hack'. I never did. Even now the memory prompts a clearing of the throat.
An ordinary life, is what I remember thinking as we left, the photographer and I, and we walked down to the canal in Brighouse town centre to feed the cake remains to the ducks before going back to the office.
An ordinary life. Yet extraordinary. And goodness I worked hard at that piece, trying to do it justice, to do right by her.
She never made the visit, the dear lady. The cancer claimed her before the journey. But the light in her eyes as she spoke of her impending adventure has stayed with me.
It was an interview that made this naive, awkward, wannabee journo see that it's not only the 'big' stories that are worthy of time, effort and dedication - and instilled in me for the first time a knowledge, that no matter how seemingly insignificant, everyone has a story that wants to be told.
Wishing good luck to my inspirational editor as he prepares for life after the Echo. He taught me all I know.
* http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2012/news/weekly-editor-made-redundant-in-yorkshire-shake-up/
But she knew we were coming so she'd baked a cake.
She had forgotten to add sugar though, and it had been in the oven too long.
She fussed and flapped and served it on a flowery china cake stand on a white paper doily. Then she cut us each a huge chunk with a long bone-handled knife and waited excitedly for our reaction as we bit into it. It was rock hard and tasted terrible.
'Mmmm lovely!' we said (of course we did)....but when her back was turned we scrunched telltale crumbs onto the plate and put the rest in our pocket.
We'd made her day, she said.
And then we got on with things. 'Let's start at the beginning,' I said. 'Tell me about your parents....'
I was a Brighouse Echo trainee journalist of just a few weeks and this was my first '90th birthday' interview. Coached to say little but listen, to encourage with a raised eyebrow here, a shrug there, a 'please go on' or an 'and then what happened?' to keep things flowing...I wrote down facts in over-large crude Teeline outlines in a spiral-bound notebook, putting an asterisk in the margin when a good quote came.
I remember a dark living room but sunshine through the window, antimacassars, a silver tea set brought out 'for best', a bobbled couch and an Engelbert Humperdinck LP.
I remember a cat, dusty silk flowers with cobwebs in them, veined, shaking hands, bingo and the Waring Green Forget-Me-Not-Club of which she had once been a member.
I remember a 14-year-old in the cotton mills, bobbins, aprons and headscarves, a cluster of friends and neighbours around the only TV in the street watching the coronation, a husband long-dead, and much-wanted children failing to be born.
I remember the garden was her pleasure and lavender her favourite.
And I remember her knotting her hands and looking out of the window as she spoke about a teenage brother who lied about his age and went to Flanders fields and never returned. And how she still had picture of him in a large, oval, silver locket at her wattled, wrinkled throat. And how she still wept for him, after so long.
And then the interview was over.
All these things I remember, yet I have forgotten her name. But when anyone asks what I found most satisfying about being a reporter, I tell them her story....or rather, my story.
You see, I had thought I would do the interview on the telephone - it was 'only a 90th birthday' after all - but my editor, Stephen Firth*, had insisted...'no, you must go see her, it's important.'. And I didn't understand why....
And then I did. Not just because of the cake palaver (though I knew I'd never forget that moment!) or because of the joy we'd put into one person's day by simply taking the trouble to turn up.
But because the rapport we'd built up over the cake and over the admiring of the garden meant that while she was posing for pictures under the gentle guidance of the photographer, she told us something she hadn't shared with anyone else: she had cancer, she said; she hadn't got long and she was planning, in her final months, to make her first ever trip 'abroad', a first and final pilgrimage to visit to her brother's war grave.
I got my notebook out again.
She was a bit nervous but the hospital had said it would be ok for her to go and an old and trusted friend would be her guide. 'I'm going to see my brother again, after all these years'.
I don't buy the phrase 'hardened hack'. I never did. Even now the memory prompts a clearing of the throat.
An ordinary life, is what I remember thinking as we left, the photographer and I, and we walked down to the canal in Brighouse town centre to feed the cake remains to the ducks before going back to the office.
An ordinary life. Yet extraordinary. And goodness I worked hard at that piece, trying to do it justice, to do right by her.
She never made the visit, the dear lady. The cancer claimed her before the journey. But the light in her eyes as she spoke of her impending adventure has stayed with me.
It was an interview that made this naive, awkward, wannabee journo see that it's not only the 'big' stories that are worthy of time, effort and dedication - and instilled in me for the first time a knowledge, that no matter how seemingly insignificant, everyone has a story that wants to be told.
Wishing good luck to my inspirational editor as he prepares for life after the Echo. He taught me all I know.
* http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2012/news/weekly-editor-made-redundant-in-yorkshire-shake-up/
Wednesday, 11 April 2012
A Forest Walk (and bear hunt)
It is impossible to tread quietly in the forest.
Every step is a giveaway.
The crack of twigs, the crunch of dry leaves, a squelch through the mud - we are undercover elephants in crusty, dusty walking boots that still carry the years-old muck of a Scottish isle - so long is it since last they were worn.
But so be it. And as my mind plays over and over 'We're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one, we're not scared!!'*, I think it has been too, too long since we last ploughed through long, wavy grass (swishy swashy!), thick oozy mud (squelch squerch!) and crumbly woodland (stumble trip, stumble trip!).
We are in the Foret De Soignes**, a tiny part of the 4,000 acres or so that sweep across south-eastern Brussels, the part which borders the parks and lakes of the Bois de la Cambre, the part that is a 20-minute walk from our flat. And the need to get out of landscaped ornamental park into the thick, dense woodland is overwhelming. To be where the wild things are!
We set off along a narrow mud path, trying to adjust the eyes; binoculars - more recently used to spot the moons of jupiter than spotting a bird - slung round the neck, and we look for a giveaway flash in the peripheral vision, listen for a telltale rustle.
On one side of the path it's as if the forest is playing a magic eye trick: almost identical, slim, tall silver birches, parallel to each other, long, lean and vertical - you can almost be convinced there is a shape you're missing among the tree trunks.
And on the other side a giant, a great, wide-girthed, trunk stretching up and up and up and I'm wondering have I just not seen trees close up for a while or are these really extraordinarily tall. They are the kind of trees you can't just pass by. You have to touch them, to draw your fingers across the bark and wonder what histories they could recount.
Everything is becoming green. Not a thick, dark canopy, but a flittering of millions of tissuepaper-thin leaves, barely emerged, fresh, uncontaminated. And as a stronger breeze gusts up the delicate unfurling leaves of the silver birches rustle, witter and chatter. There are bluebells..only a first few, giving parts of the woodland floor a gentle blue hue and here and there are sprawling clumps of bell-like flowers (campanulas?).
High above there is the harsh 'shkaaaaaak' of a jay - its wings a flash of white and azure - and everywhere there is the almost-synthesised sibilant 'tsirrup' of nuthatches. They are a grey-blue blur as they fly from tree to tree but, through binoculars, are stunningly beautiful creatures with their bold eyestripe, and deep orangey-pink buff bellies.
If you stop and listen it's easy to hear them at work.
Tap tap tap.......tap tap tap.
There's no confusing them with the rapid drilling of the greater spotted woodpecker we'd seen earlier.
This is more gentle, you really have to stand still to hear it.
Follow your ears, almost pin it down and then it is on the wing, and, as it lands on the next tree, you catch it at last.
It explores tree trunks in a jerky, fidgety gait, hopping with head up, then head down digging out invertebrates, nuts and seeds. It's a clever little thing - able to wedge tougher nuts into cracks in the bark to hammer them open.
And then, on a neighbouring trunk, a treecreeper, a tiny brown bird with exquisite delicate bow-curved beak, flitting, batlike, from trunk to trunk. Unlike the nuthatch which can go in both directions, it heads ever upwards.
There are red squirrels here. They aren't red. They are rusty. And it is a joy to see them unthreatened by their boistrous, bully grey counterparts.
They bound along the ground, flick, flick, flicking their tails, easily identifiable by their tufty ears, even high up, in silhouette, when you can't see their colour, and we watch one with a pine cone, hoping to see it stop and eat or bury it, but it moves too quickly - now you see it, now you don't through the tree trunks - and then it is gone.
There is a song thrush calling, its loud repetitive song unmistakeable, and there are many, many great tits and we can also hear chaffinches, wood pigeons, and, suddenly a melancholy 'peeeeeioooooo' I've not heard here yet - a call I first heard on the high crags and moors on the Isle of Mull many years ago...a buzzard.
We scan the trees and there it is, perched on high, all talons, beak, brown speckles and pale breast. It takes off again quickly, disappearing from view, but we hear it for some time afterwards and I think it is one of the most beautiful, most desolate calls.
It feels a healthy forest - the cracked, gaping crooked limbs and trunks of long-dead trees are left to lie where they fall, for the moss to blanket and for fungi and insects to consume, perfect habitats among which woodmice bound and chipmunks duck, dive and chatter.
Yes, chipmunks. Siberian ones***. This was a surprise. Bright eyed and bushy tailed (literally), we spotted them darting between fallen trunks, over stumps, pausing, observing before ducking into sandy burrows.
One in particular allowed us to get very close. Too close. As if it had forgotten its wildness.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that his great great great great grandfather was probably kept as a pet before making his bolt for freedom and starting a colony. They shouldn't be here. And on learning this I'm unsure what to make of their presence. What has had to make way for their arrival?
The rain falls lightly at first and the wind strengthens. Somewhere close by wood is creaking against wood, that eerie sound that suggests timbers shivering at sea or rusty hinges in haunted houses.
Then it comes all at once. No shelter here! Raindrops gather and congeal on high branches and fall in great plops down the back of the neck and, for the first time, what with the bending and scraping of wood, the insistent wind and the driving rain, there's a slight and sudden fear of taking the wrong path, of plunging in deeper. Too much reading of Wind in the Willows, perhaps.
We turn around and yomp back, retracing our steps and eventually come to the forest edge, then tarmac, then park, then home... thrilled to have found a great outdoors on our doorstep.
A fruitless bear hunt though Thomas.
If we'd been here 1,000 years ago or so we might just have been luckier..and found one hiding in a narrow gloomy cave. They were here then you know.
Now there's a thought...
* Credit and thanks to Michael Rosen (author) and Helen Oxenbury (illustrator): 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. For the memories of happy times reading a fabulous book. In your top 10, Thomas, definitely...and your mum still knows it by heart.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonian_Forest
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_chipmunk
Every step is a giveaway.
The crack of twigs, the crunch of dry leaves, a squelch through the mud - we are undercover elephants in crusty, dusty walking boots that still carry the years-old muck of a Scottish isle - so long is it since last they were worn.
But so be it. And as my mind plays over and over 'We're going on a bear hunt, we're going to catch a big one, we're not scared!!'*, I think it has been too, too long since we last ploughed through long, wavy grass (swishy swashy!), thick oozy mud (squelch squerch!) and crumbly woodland (stumble trip, stumble trip!).
We are in the Foret De Soignes**, a tiny part of the 4,000 acres or so that sweep across south-eastern Brussels, the part which borders the parks and lakes of the Bois de la Cambre, the part that is a 20-minute walk from our flat. And the need to get out of landscaped ornamental park into the thick, dense woodland is overwhelming. To be where the wild things are!
We set off along a narrow mud path, trying to adjust the eyes; binoculars - more recently used to spot the moons of jupiter than spotting a bird - slung round the neck, and we look for a giveaway flash in the peripheral vision, listen for a telltale rustle.
On one side of the path it's as if the forest is playing a magic eye trick: almost identical, slim, tall silver birches, parallel to each other, long, lean and vertical - you can almost be convinced there is a shape you're missing among the tree trunks.
And on the other side a giant, a great, wide-girthed, trunk stretching up and up and up and I'm wondering have I just not seen trees close up for a while or are these really extraordinarily tall. They are the kind of trees you can't just pass by. You have to touch them, to draw your fingers across the bark and wonder what histories they could recount.
Everything is becoming green. Not a thick, dark canopy, but a flittering of millions of tissuepaper-thin leaves, barely emerged, fresh, uncontaminated. And as a stronger breeze gusts up the delicate unfurling leaves of the silver birches rustle, witter and chatter. There are bluebells..only a first few, giving parts of the woodland floor a gentle blue hue and here and there are sprawling clumps of bell-like flowers (campanulas?).
High above there is the harsh 'shkaaaaaak' of a jay - its wings a flash of white and azure - and everywhere there is the almost-synthesised sibilant 'tsirrup' of nuthatches. They are a grey-blue blur as they fly from tree to tree but, through binoculars, are stunningly beautiful creatures with their bold eyestripe, and deep orangey-pink buff bellies.
If you stop and listen it's easy to hear them at work.
Tap tap tap.......tap tap tap.
There's no confusing them with the rapid drilling of the greater spotted woodpecker we'd seen earlier.
This is more gentle, you really have to stand still to hear it.
Follow your ears, almost pin it down and then it is on the wing, and, as it lands on the next tree, you catch it at last.
It explores tree trunks in a jerky, fidgety gait, hopping with head up, then head down digging out invertebrates, nuts and seeds. It's a clever little thing - able to wedge tougher nuts into cracks in the bark to hammer them open.
And then, on a neighbouring trunk, a treecreeper, a tiny brown bird with exquisite delicate bow-curved beak, flitting, batlike, from trunk to trunk. Unlike the nuthatch which can go in both directions, it heads ever upwards.
There are red squirrels here. They aren't red. They are rusty. And it is a joy to see them unthreatened by their boistrous, bully grey counterparts.
They bound along the ground, flick, flick, flicking their tails, easily identifiable by their tufty ears, even high up, in silhouette, when you can't see their colour, and we watch one with a pine cone, hoping to see it stop and eat or bury it, but it moves too quickly - now you see it, now you don't through the tree trunks - and then it is gone.
There is a song thrush calling, its loud repetitive song unmistakeable, and there are many, many great tits and we can also hear chaffinches, wood pigeons, and, suddenly a melancholy 'peeeeeioooooo' I've not heard here yet - a call I first heard on the high crags and moors on the Isle of Mull many years ago...a buzzard.
We scan the trees and there it is, perched on high, all talons, beak, brown speckles and pale breast. It takes off again quickly, disappearing from view, but we hear it for some time afterwards and I think it is one of the most beautiful, most desolate calls.
It feels a healthy forest - the cracked, gaping crooked limbs and trunks of long-dead trees are left to lie where they fall, for the moss to blanket and for fungi and insects to consume, perfect habitats among which woodmice bound and chipmunks duck, dive and chatter.
Yes, chipmunks. Siberian ones***. This was a surprise. Bright eyed and bushy tailed (literally), we spotted them darting between fallen trunks, over stumps, pausing, observing before ducking into sandy burrows.
One in particular allowed us to get very close. Too close. As if it had forgotten its wildness.
Perhaps the explanation lies in the fact that his great great great great grandfather was probably kept as a pet before making his bolt for freedom and starting a colony. They shouldn't be here. And on learning this I'm unsure what to make of their presence. What has had to make way for their arrival?
The rain falls lightly at first and the wind strengthens. Somewhere close by wood is creaking against wood, that eerie sound that suggests timbers shivering at sea or rusty hinges in haunted houses.
Then it comes all at once. No shelter here! Raindrops gather and congeal on high branches and fall in great plops down the back of the neck and, for the first time, what with the bending and scraping of wood, the insistent wind and the driving rain, there's a slight and sudden fear of taking the wrong path, of plunging in deeper. Too much reading of Wind in the Willows, perhaps.
We turn around and yomp back, retracing our steps and eventually come to the forest edge, then tarmac, then park, then home... thrilled to have found a great outdoors on our doorstep.
A fruitless bear hunt though Thomas.
If we'd been here 1,000 years ago or so we might just have been luckier..and found one hiding in a narrow gloomy cave. They were here then you know.
Now there's a thought...
* Credit and thanks to Michael Rosen (author) and Helen Oxenbury (illustrator): 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt'. For the memories of happy times reading a fabulous book. In your top 10, Thomas, definitely...and your mum still knows it by heart.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonian_Forest
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_chipmunk
Sunday, 8 April 2012
Banging a pan lid for Easter
An Easter time, a spring time that seems so long ago.
A sunny day in the garden. Daffodils, a picnic rug, frogs in the little pond, birdsong, you.
For once you seemed really aware of the camera and in the pictures you are looking, really looking, into the lens. There's a curiosity in your eyes, but also such a settled contentedness.
Why so happy? Well, you've got your noisiest toys, a pan lid to bang and your juice.
You're sitting on the lawn of our place in Halifax and are taking great care to make sure your feet don't touch the grass - you never liked the feel of it between your toes. Sometimes, when you'd rumpled the rug and nearly bottom-shuffled your way off it, you'd have to bend your knees and crinkle up your toes so only your heels were touching...until one of us grabbed you under your arms and hoisted you back on again.
I can't see the helium balloon on the photo but it would be there somewhere, unless you'd already burst it during over-exuberant bashing! You always got a helium balloon for Easter because you didn't like chocolate - something about the texture perhaps. Funny boy, who preferred grapes and satsumas to 'proper' sweet treats any day.
Remember we went to church once one Easter Day morning?
No idea why we thought it might be a good idea....but we were full of the joys of spring and, I suppose, felt it would be a good family thing to do.
It didn't go well. You were extra happyshouty that day and, even though it was a family service, they came over and asked wouldn't it be better if we took you away into a side room.
I refused. Mortified that they had asked. They were probably being kind but all I could think at that moment was that they didn't want you in their congregation, that your difference was an obstacle to their worship. And all my embarrassment, shame and rage at your rejection vented itself in hot, quiet, tears.
Thank goodness for you who, oblivious, and no doubt relishing the wide open echoey spaces of the church, shouted all the louder. That showed them.
The picnic rug pictures were a few Easters later.
Thinking...you had started turning blue then.
Barely noticeable at first.
Like a scudding cloud briskly sweeping across the sun, a shadow would touch your lips, your fingertips, the apple of your cheeks... and be gone as quickly as it had appeared.
I'm recalling that first time in hospital: when they had to take you off the monitor because your oxygen levels dropped so regularly, and every time they did an alarm would sound and ever time it sounded a whole team of medics would race to your bedside...to find you alert and beaming.
No doctor was ever able to get to the root of what was happening to you. The heart doctor referred you to the chest consultant who sent you to neurologist and, at the end of it all, they shook their heads and said: 'see, how little we know...how little we know'.
So with puzzlement in their eyes and a summons for regular check-ups they sent you home - and off you went, striding out, your thin little legs in their plastic splints, along the polished corridors of Leeds General Infirmary's Clarendon wing.
And so those 'blue do's' as we came to call them, simply became part of you, your make-up.
They didn't appear to be harming you, but I worried that perhaps one day they would. And sometimes it got in the way of enjoying our time together.
Easter always seems a difficult time somehow. Everything blooming, colourful, so full of life, of renewal, of promise.
And these pictures well, let's just say sometimes, just sometimes, it's hard to stand before them.
They're showing Mary Poppins on the Beeb today, the Easter Sunday afternoon film. Your absolute favourite. So we know we'd be doing, don't we, if you were still here...
A sunny day in the garden. Daffodils, a picnic rug, frogs in the little pond, birdsong, you.
For once you seemed really aware of the camera and in the pictures you are looking, really looking, into the lens. There's a curiosity in your eyes, but also such a settled contentedness.
Why so happy? Well, you've got your noisiest toys, a pan lid to bang and your juice.
You're sitting on the lawn of our place in Halifax and are taking great care to make sure your feet don't touch the grass - you never liked the feel of it between your toes. Sometimes, when you'd rumpled the rug and nearly bottom-shuffled your way off it, you'd have to bend your knees and crinkle up your toes so only your heels were touching...until one of us grabbed you under your arms and hoisted you back on again.
I can't see the helium balloon on the photo but it would be there somewhere, unless you'd already burst it during over-exuberant bashing! You always got a helium balloon for Easter because you didn't like chocolate - something about the texture perhaps. Funny boy, who preferred grapes and satsumas to 'proper' sweet treats any day.
Remember we went to church once one Easter Day morning?
No idea why we thought it might be a good idea....but we were full of the joys of spring and, I suppose, felt it would be a good family thing to do.
It didn't go well. You were extra happyshouty that day and, even though it was a family service, they came over and asked wouldn't it be better if we took you away into a side room.
I refused. Mortified that they had asked. They were probably being kind but all I could think at that moment was that they didn't want you in their congregation, that your difference was an obstacle to their worship. And all my embarrassment, shame and rage at your rejection vented itself in hot, quiet, tears.
Thank goodness for you who, oblivious, and no doubt relishing the wide open echoey spaces of the church, shouted all the louder. That showed them.
The picnic rug pictures were a few Easters later.
Thinking...you had started turning blue then.
Barely noticeable at first.
Like a scudding cloud briskly sweeping across the sun, a shadow would touch your lips, your fingertips, the apple of your cheeks... and be gone as quickly as it had appeared.
I'm recalling that first time in hospital: when they had to take you off the monitor because your oxygen levels dropped so regularly, and every time they did an alarm would sound and ever time it sounded a whole team of medics would race to your bedside...to find you alert and beaming.
No doctor was ever able to get to the root of what was happening to you. The heart doctor referred you to the chest consultant who sent you to neurologist and, at the end of it all, they shook their heads and said: 'see, how little we know...how little we know'.
So with puzzlement in their eyes and a summons for regular check-ups they sent you home - and off you went, striding out, your thin little legs in their plastic splints, along the polished corridors of Leeds General Infirmary's Clarendon wing.
And so those 'blue do's' as we came to call them, simply became part of you, your make-up.
They didn't appear to be harming you, but I worried that perhaps one day they would. And sometimes it got in the way of enjoying our time together.
Easter always seems a difficult time somehow. Everything blooming, colourful, so full of life, of renewal, of promise.
And these pictures well, let's just say sometimes, just sometimes, it's hard to stand before them.
They're showing Mary Poppins on the Beeb today, the Easter Sunday afternoon film. Your absolute favourite. So we know we'd be doing, don't we, if you were still here...
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