On the trail of the lonesome agapanthus

 

This is our first agapanthus of the season.  The weeping elm has grown into a massive bush and the rest of the garden is exploding. I wish we were brave enough to keep a goat, but with a vineyard next door, and the endless ways they find to escape, I'm not sure my nerves would be able to cope.

Grass

Tonight I smelled the scent of Africa. It was so brief, and died so quickly, it sat like a heavy weight around my feet. It was the grass cuttings I think, capturing the last moment of heat before sunset. It was that petal thin wisp of time when animals scuttle away with their young after grazing, or start to wake to hunt at dusk. That small moment of capturing an even smaller movement just beyond the eye arch, and wondering "friend or foe? Snake or mouse, leaf or frond?" When the minutes and seconds freeze and you are not sure whether to rouse yourself and shake them free, or be static with them, hoping for a glimpse of something as yet unknown. 

 I remember a midnight bush ride. Bouncing in the back of a vehicle, shining an arc lamp into the dense trees, stealing myself for a view of something other worldly. I got my wish when bush baby eyes stared back at me, and as the light beam passed, so did she. Legs scurried in the undergrowth. We heard them, so we stopped, turned down the light, and listened as the leaves crinkled with the dying heat, and somewhere a bird screeched. 

I miss Africa. I miss the hair on my arms rising to a primordial sound. I miss eating fruit from the trees and wondering if it will mean a night with tummy cramps or a night feeling exotic and far away from home and overwhelmingly free. Strangely, I miss the drums of settlements, of women walking along high ridges at dawn, making their way to fields and crops and hard labour for the day, yet singing an awake lullaby. 

 I remember the roadside markets at night, lit with kerosene lamps, making a road brighter than bright. Twinkly, like Christmas, but smelling of mangoes and bananas, and children running around free in the cool and dust, laughing, not noticing they were poor. 

So I am glad of the drying grass and the wink of the veld and the memory of a distant home.

Dusktide

We are on the cusp of spring and the days are longer. This evening, a rare trip to the supermarket alone prompted very strong memories. I seldom shop at night, but this evening I just wanted the quiet pace, the meandering without pressure.
I wasn't prepared for the effect of being in a car alone at dusk would have on me. When I lived for 7 years in a desert, this was the time I would go shopping. It was generally after a very busy and stressful day in the office. The grinding heat would have lost its edge and you could always smell the scent of some flower or plant as the temperature dropped and the ground sighed with relief.
One of the many delights of my desert life were the encounters with shop assistants. They were all unfailingly polite and friendly and it gave me the chance to make small talk - a luxury not really possible during working hours. My local supermarket had beautiful girls from mainland China at the tills. They wanted to practise their English on anyone who had the time to stop. The giving of change and packing of bags was slow and gently drawn out in order to make conversation. The Indian salesmen in the material souks were charming and funny and would tease and laugh. My local florist was Syrian and kept birds in cages all around his shop. He always had time to talk. The people were often intoxicating, as if from another world.
And there is something in that pause between day and night which triggers the deep emotions I so often felt, returning to an empty apartment, making a meal, checking on my neighbours then falling exhausted into my bed. It was a strange zone between sweet contentment and crushing loneliness. Delight in the ever changing variety of each day, followed by the brief interlude of a sensual dusk, the call from the mosque, and the swish of sand as it hurried across the road.
Tonight I am thankful for a brief return to the intensity of that time. But I am also grateful that tonight I don't fall into bed alone and the only sound of the night I hear is of our resident owl calling its mate.

Battle for the mailbox, Chapter 7

The starling rascals have a new technique. I thought I'd got them by leaving the mailbox lid open to the elements, but the twigs started to appear about a week ago. I have been pulling them out every other day and wagging my finger at the birds on my telegraph wire "I know your game. Leave the mailbox alone" They dive bomb and poop on the mailbox, just to make a point. This morning, as I was leaving the property, I saw something on the floor. I got out of the car to find this morning's mail on the grass at the base of the mailbox. They had thrown it out, and there was a solitary twig, right in the middle of the box, a thumb to the beak if ever I saw one. This means war. I may post photos of the military engagement. I mean, it's not like we are short of trees. We have 50 or so on our property alone, and we are surrounded by forest. Starlings have forgotten how to be tree dwellers it would appear.

Sad family tale

I have come to a place when I can finally tell a story. It is the story of my great grandmother's sister Jane Ann, or Jenny.

When my dad died, I took on the mantle of family researcher. Dad was a natural historian and story teller, and perhaps if the world had been different for him, he could have written down the stories. But instead he collated lots of photos and documents meticulously in folders, and we worked together on mysteries of the family tree, me in one country, him in another.

He periodically mentioned Jenny and her two sons, Charles and Arthur, whom he could not get any further information for beyond the last available Census of 1911.

So after Dad died, I found myself digging, in his memory. What happened to them, and was I genuinely the last of this family line, being an only child with no children of my own?

Like many who investigate their long deceased relatives, information often comes in waves, sometimes a piece of flotsam on the beach leads to revelations of joy and sorrow. In Jenny's case, it was mostly the latter.

Through a group of genealogists on Facebook who gave their experienced help gratis, I discovered that Jenny had four daughters in addition to Charles and Arthur (Dad didn't know this). Three had been born and died between the Censuses. Almost by accident I uncovered a census entry for the second daughter, living far away from either her mother or father's family. It transpired that she had been put into the care of Barnados foster families for several years then returned to her father. In the final official information about her, she was living in a mental hospital during WW2. Tragically, this was also the fate of Arthur, her older brother.

This week through wild card searches on the web I discovered that the first girl born in the family had died in a freak accident before her first birthday, being smothered by her own bedclothes. The youngest two daughters died age 2 and 3 after the widowed father returned to the E. End of London immediately after Jenny's death.

Jenny died of consumption aged 38. Her sister, my great grandma had nursed her. I have her death certificate, which had been kept safely with all our family papers. I remember my dad telling me that Jenny and my great grandmother were very close. Their older brother and sister were lost to illness, a burden that many Victorian families bore due to devastating and deadly childhood diseases. My great grandma had lost her firstborn twins and my grandfather was her only child. Then she lost her sister. To my knowledge and my dad's knowledge she never saw her nephews and nieces again. I doubt she knew that the children suffered terribly as their father had a breakdown and turned to drink after his wife's death. So that left me trying to trace Charles. He was last mentioned during World War 2 as a bus conductor and his wife was working making radios for the war effort. I think I found a record of their daughter, and her three sons, who are are of my generation. But here the road stops. There are no more signposts, just lots of dead ends.

This branch of my family has caused many tears for me - a sense of loss, and grieving for lives that were so hard. Arthur and his sister lived to ripe old age, but we didn't know that. If my father had known, he would have visited them. Family was family. If my great grandmother had known the fate of her nephews and nieces, I think she would have tried to adopt them. She only had one child and she and my great grandfather were modestly prosperous. It could have ended very differently. I just hope the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Charles will somehow carry some of the love and grace of their ancestor Jenny.

TS Eliot and Lockdown

April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire...

As a teenager I found Eliot's poetry weird. I didn't understand it or like it. If that makes me a peasant in the eyes of many, I don't care. But this opening to The Wasteland has reverberated since Lockdown. Our extraordinary "halt", standing on a planet that still spins whilst we don't has certainly mixed memory with desire. All the things which only two months ago we could have are now a memory. The spontaneity of showing up at a friends door, laughing with strangers sitting at the adjacent cafe table, the monotony of the weekly grocery shop, planning a road trip to the next city. All gone.

I love being at home. I never run out of things to do and I'm quite happy with my own company if my husband is closeted away writing. But sometimes it is really hard to smell the lilacs, knowing that there are many millions barely surviving.

The Biblical book of Lamentations opens with "How lonely sits the city that was full of people!" The prophet talks of Jerusalem, but his exclamation could rattle and echo around every city in the world right now. I am longing for the muted hum of people against the stones and the walls of my small town again, not the echoing crack of just one footfall. The loneliness of the inanimate is palpable.

And the future lilacs, where shall we find them? I remember a lilac bush in our garden when I was a small child. At certain hours of the day, I could smell its fragrance through my bedroom window. It would catch me by surprise and then its intensity would grow until everywhere I went in the house I could smell it. I am grasping for that intensity now. I want the fruit of this experience to bring something so intense to my life that it changes everything that remains of it for the better.

I am looking for lilacs.

Channeling my great grandfather

Yesterday we saw a small flock of sheep run past our garden gate. They were on a mission, but being sheep, had forgotten what it was.

I phoned a neighbour who told us later they had been captured and their wooly bottoms had scuttled reluctantly home.

This morning, on a rare walk towards our hills, I was almost knocked over by the same flock, skipping down the 'long acre' looking for clover.

Thankfully another neighbour happened to be walking in the opposite direction. She had been the one who had got them into a paddock yesterday. Between us we gathered them up. She ran ahead and opened the gate on a neighbours field. I got behind them and ran them to the right side of the road. They stopped abruptly and started to graze. Then another neighbouring farmer's dogs started to bark which was enough to get the wooly bums hopping through the gate and be secured, until next time.

I had to smile. I have been doing family history research for 6 years, picking up the mantle of my late father. We're an ordinary bunch, no skeletons in cupboards, no hidden aristocrats (at least on my dad's side). We used to joke that we came from a long line of shepherds and sheep rustlers.

I rest my case.

The bungalow on the corner

My dad was a man of many talents. He was a trained toolmaker and spent his working life controlling a massive lathe, making very intricate pieces of machinery. He started with severe osteoarthritis in his 40s, partly the product of standing on cold concrete floors in draughty factories and shipyards.

He was also a very gifted handyman and gardener. When he and mum bought their first home, it was bought from a plan, and needed a lot of personalising to make it into a home. Dad did this by making the most amazing rose garden, lawns and a garden wall, complete with hundreds of succulent plants. I clearly remember him building it from different coloured bricks and stones. It was a masterpiece.

After Dad died, I had the job of going through the hundreds of slides he kept in the wardrobe in the family home. This was one of them. So many memories. I think I was four years old and I remember clearly him building the wall I am stood next to, so this must be one of my earliest memories.

Mum was equally clever with her hands. She made the dress I am so proudly showing off!

A moment of the ordinary in time and space

Tonight I had the most bizarre experience. I was trawling through the internet, trying to find ANY information about my great grandfather's family. In the process of increasingly more desperate and random searches, I came across the website of the photographer and postcard producer Francis Frith. They took photos all over Britain of villages and towns, large and small from the 1860s onwards, although inevitably the bulk were as cameras became less complicated and less expensive to use, producing postcards for the mass market.

I did a search for my father's village, and lo and behold I saw a photo of a Morris Minor that my dad inherited from his godmother. I'd seen the photo before in a book about Morris Minors, so that wasn't a complete surprise. The site invites you to give comments or information on the photos and so I was able to write a small blurb about the family who bought the car from new in the 1950s, and my family's connection with that family.

But then the BIG surprise. I decided to go through all the other photos of the village. There is only one main street and I have very distinct memories of it from my childhood as we spent every weekend there with my grandparents. In the 1960s there were still lots of independent shops. There was a Co-op (my grandma was a great fan of the Co-op and had shares), the Post Office, several pubs, a fish and chip shop, a library and two grocers.

There before me was a photo of the main road and two women walking on the footpath, one elderly. I took one look at the older woman's gait (flat feet) and the way she buttoned her cardigan, and knew it was my grandmother. Next to her, holding her handbag in a distinctive fashion was my mother. They were conversing and walking on the opposite side of the road to the Coop, heading towards home probably via the Post Office. Such an ordinary, unexceptional view, with the two most important women in my life in it! I am hoping to purchase a copy of the photo, and if I succeed, I will add it here.