Fairy Tales, Part One
When I was a child I read a lot of children's books about countryside adventures, and grandmothers in pretty little cottages with roses around the door. I was always rather smug about my own grandma, known to us all as Barbie, who was straight out of one of those books.
She lived in a house called Whitewells, in the middle of the Derbyshire countryside, with a large and beautiful garden which she and my grandfather Bill took great pride in cultivating. As a child I would do gymnastics on the striped lawn, or climb the flowering cherry tree and sit in its boughs reading about Jennings or the Five Find-Outers and Dog. Or I would sit on the fence and gaze out over the cornfields at the forest on the hill, or help my grandma pick home-grown blackcurrants, gooseberries, redcurrants or brambles and use them to make jam.
In the twilight she would send me out slug-collecting. I would fill my bucket and then rehouse them in the nearby fields. They were always displaced, never killed. My sweet little grandma couldn't bear the thought of death or suffering, not even for a slug.
For dinner we would eat home-grown lettuce, Jerusalem artichokes, tomatoes, courgettes, potatoes in mint, onions, chives, rosemary, marjoram... and so much more. The vegetable garden was immense, with two giant compost heaps on permanent rotation.
My mother grew up in this house and garden, and I would gaze at the shed with the pint-sized door and imagine the days of her childhood, when it was a chicken coop and the surrounding garden also housed goats, ducks and bees (even though Barbie was so allergic a single sting could kill her - but they never did; not even the bees would harm dear Barbie).
I remember one summer holiday when I visited on my own and was paid to weed the many flower beds. By day I sat there in the earth and watched the spiders. They would sit for an age in shadows cast by clods of earth, patiently waiting for a clear coast, before scuttling through brightness to the next shadow. In the evenings I revised for my A levels. This was the real point of the visit: To get peace and space for the revision I never managed at home. Because at Whitewells life was perfect and so was I.
Inside, everything was made of wood. Walls, floors, doors, beams, and even the toilet seats were made of mahogany.
They first moved there in the 40s. Their house in Essex had disappeared under a bomb. A direct hit - one of the last bombs of the war. They picked over the rubble and found a few odd things - a teddy bear, a teapot, a coffee grinder. "That came through the bombing," they would say.
The house - large, detached, with five bedrooms - was cheap because it had no electricity or gas. They bought some extra land from the farm next door and gradually cultivated their little slice of paradise. My mother grew up with paraffin lamps, and even after they finally got wired to the mains all the cooking was done in "the Aga room," which was warm and cosy with its namesake snug in the corner, and when I remember my grandmother in those times it is always standing at that solid-fuel cooker, filling my hot water bottle from a giant cast iron kettle.
My first camera was given to me at a family Whitewells Christmas. The very first photos I took were of a Christmas tree set against wooden walls, and cousins standing on their heads in Dennis the Menace pyjamas.
One Christmas we woke to find snow outside on the lawn, and the message "HAPPY CHRISTMAS" spelt out in drunken adult footprints. One Easter we had an Easter Egg hunt, and the eggs were finally found on a haystack built from scythed grass on the edge of the meadow. My grandfather loved his scythe. He was a draughtsman at a nearby iron foundry - he designed the Parkray fire - and I remember how excited he was when he retired and went freelance and bought his very own fully-adjustable drawing board / easel, with all its knobs and drawers, which we children were forbidden to touch.
I could write about Whitewells for hours. The oak tree, the apple trees, the piano, the real fire, the surrounding countryside, the cat (Whiteypuss, half-wild, who made you feel blessed if she deigned to let you stroke her, and who was fed on a home-made mixture of dripping, bread and plate scraps), the uneven stone terrace, the black-and-white tiled bathroom, the scary pull-chain cisterns, the wooden highchair and cot, the suitcase full of tiny dolls and cars from my mother and her sisters' childhood, known only as "the Little One things", the cast iron bed with its sagging mattress and cracked black bedknobs, the chipped china knick-knacks, the half-embroidered antimacassars, the little-girl statue in the rockery, the rowan trees and their berries, the fresh-picked posies on the bedroom window sills...
But behind it all is my grandma, in her apron, smiling, asking if I'd washed my "paddies" (hands), and telling me at bedtime every night that there would be "another lovely day tomorrow with lots of lovely things to do." According to the blurb in the flyleaf of her children's books, she never tired of the company of children. I'm sure this is true.
It was unbelievably idyllic. It always felt like a dream, and even though they moved away twenty years ago I can still smell it, still see it, as though I had dreamt it only last night. And I still miss it.
Barbie has Alzheimers now. She is 94 years old. A few weeks ago she and Bill, who is 98, celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Not long afterwards, they moved into an old people's home. I've just come back from a visit.
[to be continued here]
First Memory
by Barbie
Backward looking through the ages
Into childhood's distant scene,
Turning mind's old musty pages
Finding things that once have been
Wandering through long distant summers
Scent of flowers forgotten now
Legs abathe in luscious grasses
Neath the cherries driven snow
Froth of blossoms laced with blueness
Of some vivid windblown sky
Only loveliness remembered
With unconscious subtlety.
All the tranquil life of childhood
All the half-forgotten dreams
All the urgent aspirations
And the mad ambitious schemes
How in all the wealth of memory
To select which stands apart?
All is richly interwoven
And one cannot find the start
Source from which the others come
First impression on the brain
One can only half remember
With a faint nostalgic pain.
[NB The handwriting was hard to decipher on this one; I may have got some words wrong]
___
She lived in a house called Whitewells, in the middle of the Derbyshire countryside, with a large and beautiful garden which she and my grandfather Bill took great pride in cultivating. As a child I would do gymnastics on the striped lawn, or climb the flowering cherry tree and sit in its boughs reading about Jennings or the Five Find-Outers and Dog. Or I would sit on the fence and gaze out over the cornfields at the forest on the hill, or help my grandma pick home-grown blackcurrants, gooseberries, redcurrants or brambles and use them to make jam.
In the twilight she would send me out slug-collecting. I would fill my bucket and then rehouse them in the nearby fields. They were always displaced, never killed. My sweet little grandma couldn't bear the thought of death or suffering, not even for a slug.
For dinner we would eat home-grown lettuce, Jerusalem artichokes, tomatoes, courgettes, potatoes in mint, onions, chives, rosemary, marjoram... and so much more. The vegetable garden was immense, with two giant compost heaps on permanent rotation.
My mother grew up in this house and garden, and I would gaze at the shed with the pint-sized door and imagine the days of her childhood, when it was a chicken coop and the surrounding garden also housed goats, ducks and bees (even though Barbie was so allergic a single sting could kill her - but they never did; not even the bees would harm dear Barbie).
I remember one summer holiday when I visited on my own and was paid to weed the many flower beds. By day I sat there in the earth and watched the spiders. They would sit for an age in shadows cast by clods of earth, patiently waiting for a clear coast, before scuttling through brightness to the next shadow. In the evenings I revised for my A levels. This was the real point of the visit: To get peace and space for the revision I never managed at home. Because at Whitewells life was perfect and so was I.
Inside, everything was made of wood. Walls, floors, doors, beams, and even the toilet seats were made of mahogany.
They first moved there in the 40s. Their house in Essex had disappeared under a bomb. A direct hit - one of the last bombs of the war. They picked over the rubble and found a few odd things - a teddy bear, a teapot, a coffee grinder. "That came through the bombing," they would say.
The house - large, detached, with five bedrooms - was cheap because it had no electricity or gas. They bought some extra land from the farm next door and gradually cultivated their little slice of paradise. My mother grew up with paraffin lamps, and even after they finally got wired to the mains all the cooking was done in "the Aga room," which was warm and cosy with its namesake snug in the corner, and when I remember my grandmother in those times it is always standing at that solid-fuel cooker, filling my hot water bottle from a giant cast iron kettle.
My first camera was given to me at a family Whitewells Christmas. The very first photos I took were of a Christmas tree set against wooden walls, and cousins standing on their heads in Dennis the Menace pyjamas.
One Christmas we woke to find snow outside on the lawn, and the message "HAPPY CHRISTMAS" spelt out in drunken adult footprints. One Easter we had an Easter Egg hunt, and the eggs were finally found on a haystack built from scythed grass on the edge of the meadow. My grandfather loved his scythe. He was a draughtsman at a nearby iron foundry - he designed the Parkray fire - and I remember how excited he was when he retired and went freelance and bought his very own fully-adjustable drawing board / easel, with all its knobs and drawers, which we children were forbidden to touch.
I could write about Whitewells for hours. The oak tree, the apple trees, the piano, the real fire, the surrounding countryside, the cat (Whiteypuss, half-wild, who made you feel blessed if she deigned to let you stroke her, and who was fed on a home-made mixture of dripping, bread and plate scraps), the uneven stone terrace, the black-and-white tiled bathroom, the scary pull-chain cisterns, the wooden highchair and cot, the suitcase full of tiny dolls and cars from my mother and her sisters' childhood, known only as "the Little One things", the cast iron bed with its sagging mattress and cracked black bedknobs, the chipped china knick-knacks, the half-embroidered antimacassars, the little-girl statue in the rockery, the rowan trees and their berries, the fresh-picked posies on the bedroom window sills...
But behind it all is my grandma, in her apron, smiling, asking if I'd washed my "paddies" (hands), and telling me at bedtime every night that there would be "another lovely day tomorrow with lots of lovely things to do." According to the blurb in the flyleaf of her children's books, she never tired of the company of children. I'm sure this is true.
It was unbelievably idyllic. It always felt like a dream, and even though they moved away twenty years ago I can still smell it, still see it, as though I had dreamt it only last night. And I still miss it.
Barbie has Alzheimers now. She is 94 years old. A few weeks ago she and Bill, who is 98, celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. Not long afterwards, they moved into an old people's home. I've just come back from a visit.
[to be continued here]
by Barbie
Backward looking through the ages
Into childhood's distant scene,
Turning mind's old musty pages
Finding things that once have been
Wandering through long distant summers
Scent of flowers forgotten now
Legs abathe in luscious grasses
Neath the cherries driven snow
Froth of blossoms laced with blueness
Of some vivid windblown sky
Only loveliness remembered
With unconscious subtlety.
All the tranquil life of childhood
All the half-forgotten dreams
All the urgent aspirations
And the mad ambitious schemes
How in all the wealth of memory
To select which stands apart?
All is richly interwoven
And one cannot find the start
Source from which the others come
First impression on the brain
One can only half remember
With a faint nostalgic pain.
[NB The handwriting was hard to decipher on this one; I may have got some words wrong]
___
Labels: Philosophisering, The Past
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