‘In four years, I lost six people,’ he said. ‘How dreadful,’ I said, as you do. Anxious as I was to get us all some breakfast, there was a moment I turned away from him to order the milk and pastries for my own little family and I never asked him his son’s name. I should have – I have wondered about it ever since.
Then again, who says God does not have a sense of humour? We spent six and a half hours getting to the centre of the world for another children’s birthday party – at a city farm with my six-year-old’s best friend. I said to my husband: ‘If you love the country so much, you could get a job here, mucking out.’ He pretended not to hear me. The city farm is yet more evidence that nobody really has to live outside London. The boys and the baby saw animals and got lots of fresh air in between the balloon fights and butter-creamed cake. The city even ‘does’ the country better. At the city farm, there was a café with proper coffee. One Northumberland café I go to boasts ‘instant cappuccinos’ on its menu, and they are talking not about the wait but about the ‘tear along this corner’ perforated packets. The London farm also offered classes in upholstery, stone sculpture and bike maintenance, with particular attention given to ‘wheel truing’; I have always wanted a true wheel. Best of all, there were helpful signs attached to the animal paddocks. I never knew, for instance, that sheep have very good memories and ‘can remember a face up to two years after a first meeting’. That is better than me. I picked up a magazine while I was there (as you do at the farm). It was full of suggestions of what you could do and where you could go if you had young children in London. In it was an advertisement offering ‘life coaching for children’. I nudged my husband’s arm and pointed to it. ‘Look. If we lived in London, the children could have life coaching,’ I said. He looked at me. ‘Alternatively, we could let them grow up,’ he said.
Thursday, 25 January 2007
Beauty and the Beast
Motherhood takes so many things away from you. Or should I blame age? Various things happen when a woman reaches a certain age. There is a moment in her youth when she unzips her make-up bag, wipes a sponge around a peachy cream in a silver compact, loads a sable brush with beige powder and looks into the mirror ready to start her work. She scrutinizes the face in the glass and pauses. She thinks: ‘What is there to do?’ She uses her thumb to flick the powder from the brush and the cosmetic dust explodes into the sunny morning light flooding the bathroom. She lets the water run warm from the tap and holds the sponge beneath it, the foundation running in rivulets down the white porcelain and into the drain. She zips up the flowered make-up bag, which came free in a glossy magazine she never read. Fresh-faced and perfect, she goes out into her day. There is another moment in a woman’s journey when she unzips a larger and altogether more expensive make-up bag. Rubbing at tired eyes, she fingers the duelling scar slashed across her cheek by the Egyptian linen sheets. She gazes at her face and thinks: ‘Where do I start?’ and then: ‘How long is this going to take?’
I am at, indeed past, that ‘Where do I start?’ moment at the vanity table. As the fine laughter lines begin to tell around my eyes and jaw, I start to see my mother in my face. But as I do, the real McCoy slips from me. I look at her carefully coiffed and greying hair, her hesitant walk and white stick and I think: ‘My mother is getting old. I really do not want my mother getting old. She never told me she would get so old. When exactly did that happen?’ Now, instead of baking sultana cakes and folding vests, she wears elastic stockings on her legs, an electric whirligig seat climbing the staircase instead of her.
Last night she rang to say: ‘Daddy and I have had a little accident.’ It was late and I was lying, melancholy, on the sofa contemplating sleep. ‘We wrote off the car,’ I heard her say, the wind knocking at the sash window. ‘We’re fine. I broke a rib, that’s all, and your father is a bit bruised.’ They had been crossing a carriageway, given the nod by the driver of the car in the lane nearest to them but unseen by the driver of the car in the other lane. A classic accident. As she speaks, I play it out in my head. My father, reassured by the kindness of the other driver, slowly, oh so slowly, old-man slowly, pulls out and across the road and whoomph. Slammed into by the other car, spun round and round in squealing, metal-shrieking fear. Twenty minutes on the side of the road waiting for the paramedics; panic attacks under a yellow airtex sheet in a metal-framed bed in the Accident and Emergency cubicle. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said, cheerily. ‘Because I’m blind, I was relaxed when the car went into us, and everyone was very nice.’ I should have been there. I should have draped them in foil blankets and given them sweet tea, held their soft papery hands and told them they were OK. I do not want them to go out any more. I want them to live in my wardrobe, safe from the mishaps of old age. I will bring them food in plastic trays, a torch and a wind-up radio. I will keep them safe from harm.
Friday, 26 January 2007
The thin blue line
As my mother lay ill in bed, bones aching and eyes tightly shut, a shiny silver-buttoned policeman knocked on the door. ‘I’ve come about the accident,’ he told my father. ‘Who is it?’ my mother feebly called. They climbed soft-carpeted stairs to her bedroom, the policeman and the stooped offender; a gilt-framed Sacred Heart watching from the Anaglypta wall, a rosary-wrapped St Anthony bearing witness from the dresser, as the policeman cautioned my aged father. ‘Now, I don’t want you getting upset but I have to caution you,’ he told him, this aged threat to the public good. ‘It’s like what happens on TV,’ he reassured them, getting out his notebook and a black-inked pen. The plaster saints looked away in shame. ‘You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence …’ the officer chanted on. My mother, crash-bruised and still in shock, began the ages old lament of the criminal’s wife. ‘My husband,’ she spoke out from the soft pillows, in between her tears, ‘did nothing wrong. It was an accident.’
Later, steel-tempered by her encounter with the law, this fan of TV’s Morse and Frost rings. ‘I told him straight,’ she says. ‘Coppers don’t frighten me.’
Saturday, 27 January 2007
Tally ho
Now for something I thought no one would ever hear me say: ‘Boys! Put your boots on, right this minute. We are going to be late for the hunt.’ They probably shoot you if you are late for the hunt. ‘I say. Do you know what time it is? You’re ten minutes late. Stay where you are while I pour the powder into my pistol and load the shot, dammit.’ I did not want to miss a moment. It must be – gosh, how long is it since I went hunting in London? Oh yes, that is right – never. I have decided to roll with those moments which make me think ‘Who am I again?’
It was one of Northumberland’s apple-crisp, beautiful mornings. The winter-blue sky looked like a child had smeared white paint across it with his fist. There we were, cold, with mud on our rubber boots, on a faraway farm, the snow-capped Cheviot hills brooding in the distance and surrounded by nice giletted women thrusting haggis balls at us – well, it works for me. It is ten o’clock in the morning and suddenly something called a Percy Special seems like a good idea – a half-measure of whisky mixed with a half-measure of cherry liqueur. In the city, this would be called an alcohol problem; in the country, it is a tipple. I could not decide whether it made it more or less likely the riders would fall off. It would certainly make it less likely they would notice if they did.
The Sheep Farmer and his wife have a lot on – their farming business, two children, she keeps the books and they are involved in an application for planning permission to get a wind farm on their land, eighteen turbines at 125 metres high, and not everybody likes the idea. In fact there are posters up saying ‘No’ alongside a picture of a wind turbine, which must give you a nice warm feeling as you drive by. Despite being so busy, she has decided I should get out more. She invited us along since the hunt was meeting at her farm. Out of respect to her, I worked very hard not to think city thoughts like: ‘Didn’t Tony Blair outlaw this?’ I also decided against talking the pros and cons o
f hunting through with the children before the outing. The risk of ‘Mummy says animals have rights too, don’t you, Mummy?’ over the coffee and shortbread was just too high. I must reprogramme them tomorrow before they think what we did today was entirely normal.
Clutching warm sausage baps, we stood in the farmyard watching the clipped horses grandly pirouetting amidst stiff-tailed hounds. I fought not to morph into a Japanese tourist, politely insistent that strangers in flat caps and down jackets take digital photographs of me to display to the folks back home. I failed. I explained to one farmer: ‘This is just so different from what we are used to.’ ‘No offence,’ he said. I braced myself for the inevitable left hook. ‘But I am constantly amazed how naive townsfolk are about country ways.’ He walked away, leaving me standing there with my Percy Special and camera.
I have occasionally wondered what happens on a hunt. Riders come along in muddy Land Rovers pulling horseboxes; they do not just leap out of the nineteenth-century print a favourite uncle hung in the hallway in the shadow of the grandfather clock. I am not knocking hunting. The outfits are great. Before today, the nearest I had ever been to a hunt was a Jilly Cooper novel in which I am sure jodhpurs were eased down over taut thighs. It is certainly true that everyone looks sexier on a horse, jodhpurs tight over taut, etc. They played it all wrong when they fought and failed to keep their hunting rights; they should have campaigned on the slogan: ‘We look sexy – leave us alone.’
They set off, hounds legally following the trail of a bunch of rags tied to a quad bike, rather than a fox. Fox, what fox? The Sheep Farmer’s Wife and I gave them a head start and then followed on with my husband and the five children piled into the back of a Land Rover. The slightly strange thing about hunting is that the hunters too are hunted by quad bikes and 4×4s, some of whom follow the riders into the fields and some of whom wait at vantage points with binoculars as if they are on safari. ‘Is that an elephant over there? No, no, it’s just Edgar on Tinkerbell. Tally ho, Edgar.’
Sunday, 28 January 2007
Of mice and mess
We eventually found a couple of builders on the recommendation of the Evangelical Man, and in just under two weeks’ time we are due to move into an unfurnished, rented house in the village to allow them to start work on knocking through the cottages to create that dream home I was promised. I suspect our stone-built rented house is cold. I am so cold, so much of the time, I am contemplating sewing myself into my thermal underwear like someone from the Depression.
We have to clear out next door, which we have used as an enormous cupboard since we took possession. ‘Hello, I come from London. I like to live in one house and buy the house next door to keep my clart in.’ I cannot think why there is a rural housing crisis, or for that matter why second-home owners are despised by locals up and down the country. The only good thing about moving is that we will escape the mice, who are overrunning us at the moment. They chewed the baby’s romper the other day – even worse, I put her in it. The move means packing up this house in all its Playmobil glory. Who invented Playmobil? Who had the bright idea to invent a children’s toy that comes in one zillion bits? I figure if we leave enough Playmobil behind, when we move back in five months’ time the mice might have built the Viking longboat.
Because we have decided that we do not have time to sort out next door, we are renting an enormous metal container to put in the barn at the back of the cottage and shunt our mess into. We really need that container. There are TV programmes which feature busybody women with sharp noses who declutter your house; I do not watch them. I am incapable of decluttering anything. I have not even started packing. I am hoping Walt Disney will appear in the kitchen one day and start drawing arms and legs on my pots, pans and general detritrus which could then pack themselves while they whistle an Elton John hit.
A friend dropped by for a cup of tea. ‘I so admire you,’ she said, gazing at me as I moved a dirty saucepan to get to the kettle. I looked round my kitchen at the enormous Gilbert and George-style painting of the children we all did together, the wilted yellow roses on the table, their heads just visible above the breakfast cereal packets. I picked the baby up from the wooden floor where she was eating her brother’s buttered toast crusts. ‘Do you?’ I said, touched. ‘When I was a young mother,’ she carried on, reaching out to take the grubby baby from my arms, ‘I was always cross with the kids for making a mess, I was always picking up after them, cleaning and keeping house. You just don’t bother. I do admire that.’
Monday, 29 January 2007
Cherry scones
The Yorkshire Mother invited me for coffee this morning. As we arrived, she was still rubbing her fingers free of doughy gloves and the smell of baking cherry scones hung about her busy kitchen, spilling fragrant through the open door into a wintered garden. ‘Drop by for coffee, I’ll make scones’ – I say it out loud to see how it sounds. Unconvincing, in my case. She, on the other hand, knocks out a warm batch of home-baked treats with the same nonchalance as I swill a crystal glass of cool and gooseberry-tanged Chablis.
Some friendships you keep for a life. Others for only a train ride. Some friends you lose and never know why, and when you are old you think: ‘Whatever happened to?’ or ‘What did I do?’ Some friends you mourn; some walk away and you do not notice. This friendship is spring green and sweetly brief, lasting weeks. Now my new friend is about to move somewhere bouncing hot and sandy to feed oily egg and cigarette-thin chips to fat Englishmen who would prefer to eat their egg and chips at home. I want to say to her: ‘Don’t go out of my life. You have only just arrived there.’ But in her head, she has already quit this place for a different tomorrow.
As I drink the coffee and graze on blossom-coloured cake, I gaze at the bonfire of trucks and old jeans piled up on her dining-room carpet, salvaged from the rooms upstairs. Each of her four boys is allowed one black plastic bag of toys to carry with him into his new and sunnier life. The missing boy-child slipped through her floury fingers in one of those ‘Dear God’ disasters that make you catch your breath. Mowing early summer grass and daisies, he cut the lead. Zap. I have seen his face smiling out of a sharp school photograph, and in his mother’s eyes you can see him yet. They are packing for the sun and a fresh start. I admire her determination that the four remaining boys will run from school bench straight into a warm and salty sea, nylon homework bags spray-wet and abandoned on the beach. But I will miss her. She is a new friend and no one else will make me pastries and froth my coffee. While she was packing, she found bed treasures her missing boy once slept with, his teddy bear and a keepsake velvet cushion. In a suitcase at the top of a wardrobe, she found his summer coat, its pocket packet rustling, the crisps long gone. Prawn cocktail. She slipped the packet back into the coat and the coat into a bag to carry with her.
Thursday, 1 February 2007
Ferreting around
As soon as I had the baby, I tried to blend in by abandoning the black, the stripy tights and the embossed leather baseball boots to ‘dress country’. I think it important to look the part even if you do not know your lines. This required the purchase of corduroy skirts in autumnal colours with contrasting autumnal tops, and flat brown boots. I looked dreadful. I have far too large an arse for corduroy. Anyway, when I looked at them, the women around me were not wearing the country camouflage I had adopted but mish-mashed clothes of every hue bought on-line or from country ladies’ fashion shops I never knew existed. I may try another way – animals.
Women up here have strange pets: chickens, pedigree sheep, ferrets. Those who have chickens or sheep seem to spend their entire lives gifting eggs or trying to do something useful with the fleeces. I do not think a ferret produces anything apart from ferret poo. Perhaps you could make jewellery? I am strangely tempted to get one ferret or even two; you keep them in pairs. This is something, rather like the hunt, I would never have previously considered in my metropolitan life. ‘Oops there goes my ferret,’ would not get you any award as Passenge
r of the Year on the Underground. You handle them from when they are a ‘kit’ and they get used to you and play with you. We do not have a multiplex up here, so needs must on the entertainment front.
Two points make me hesitate. The first: I seem to think they are very smelly. My contact in the ferret world denied this. ‘They just smell of ferret,’ she said. I do not necessarily think that is a good thing, particularly if you decide to hang it around your neck and make it part of your ensemble. That and the fact I do not know how the ferret would feel if we went back to London. She might mooch round all day, missing her little ferrety friends and moaning about the quality of the coffee and the lack of a decent hairdresser. I am not sure I could do that to her.
Sunday, 4 February 2007
A Catholic superstition
I visit my parents in Yorkshire. Cloud: it turns out my mother has five or possibly six broken ribs. Silver lining: the police have accepted it was an accident. There is no case against my father, so the miscarriage of justice campaign is cancelled.
There is a window halfway up the staircase of my parents’ house. There, the glass swirls around itself in a thick and crazy dance. You cannot see out and you cannot see in, but as a young child when I climbed the stairs, a plaster Sacred Heart reached out wide to me from that windowsill, his heart aflame, ready to embrace. So familiar was he, burning for us all, that I forgot him quite; but one day when I was total grown, I glanced across and noticed that his heart still flared but the plastered crimson of his cloak and the chestnut of his hair had faded back to white. Undeterred by age, he reached out still for the souls that climbed the stairs. Then horror, my sightless mother, dusting, knocked him off his perch. His arm fell off, his holy head rolled far and snap – his body broke in two. A second suffering for this ersatz Christ. Guilty Catholic woman, tear-streaked at the demise of her companion through fifty and more years, gently placed his body in a box and bag-wrapped it. An Asda shroud. Accomplice father dug a garden hole, said a quiet prayer and buried quick her shame.
Wife in the North Page 11
