The death of the cat

I’d been away from Australia for three months – much of it in England where my 96 year old mother lives in a care home now.  When I came back Jack was predictably quite changed, taller, more dexterous, more dark and complicated.  Both his mother and I were a bit afraid he’d reject me after such a long time away.  I think he’d been primed to be nice on our first encounter when I got back but  he was cross with me after the initial pleasantries.   “Go way” he said.

Coming home after such a long trip is difficult at the best of times.  The house was dank and gritty with dust and  the garden deep in leaves and the plants either dead or rampaging. The lush passion fruit vine was now just basketwork on the wall.  They don’t live long anyway I’m told.

 But the worst thing I had to deal with was Fergus the cat who had been boarding for some of my time away at a place she’d always thrived in before.  She’d   come back to us plump and purring.  Not this time.  She was skeletal and her eyes were wild.  We took her to the vet and he suggested we send her to a more comfortable place, as he put it.

“You mean a dead place?” I said.

“Well some people see it another way”

I had a  grotesque vision of cats with wings and it was absurd.  Anyway  it seemed all wrong to kill her without her consent.  Nevertheless I grew to dread getting up in the morning to be met with her huge eyes and diminished frame and clear up the night’s mess.

Jack saw her once when she was so sick and stroked her head with a gentleness he would  have been incapable of three months before, and this time she didn’t run away.  “She wants milk” he said with accusation in his voice, “She wants more food”

We anguished for about a fortnight and fed her delicacies which she just  picked at. She grew weaker. She started licking ash from the fireplace.  Every morning I hoped to find her dead, and not by my murderous hand, But  in the end I gave in.  A friend said euthanasia was the last gift you could give a really sick pet.

Graham and I took her in together.  Her little leg was shaved and we stroked her as she was injected with the poison.  It was a bit like an addict getting a hit.  She looked relieved, relaxed for the first time since she’d come home.  But it felt like a terrible thing all the same.  We took her body home in a pillowcase and buried her and cried, both of us.

It began to be OK after a few days.  I reconsidered my position on euthanasia and started to think it would be the way I would like to go if I were as sick as Fergus had been.  A hit of bliss and the vet checking my heart until it stopped.  A pillowcase burial organized by loving mourners.  Perhaps it hadn’t been such a crime, what we had done.

Jack came over about a week later and we made jam tarts and I was   in his good books again.  Our rituals were back on track, the cuckoo clock, the battery powered dog that warbles “singing in the rain” – and then he said,

“Where’s the cat?”

I’d been expecting this sooner or later and told him that she’d got very sick and died.

“She’s sick.  She needs milk.  She needs food”  There was pain in his voice now.  I again said she’d died.  “She ran away”  he suggested.  I couldn’t let that go, especially in the light of having just run away for three months myself.  “No she didn’t run away.  She loved us”  I said.  “She was just very old and she died.”

On and off, all day, he interrogated me about the matter.   We have an attic which has got a bit sinister the way attics get to be as the detritis of decades gets piled into them.  Fergus loved this attic.  It was her bolt hole when Jack was after her or she knew we wanted to chuck her out.

After his bath Jack pointed up the attic stairs with a smile and said with a note of conviction

“The cat’s up there”

“No Jack, there’s no more cat”

“She’s run away”

“No she got ill and died”  

I was weary with Jack and my sorrow and guilt and then I remembered a lesson my mother taught me when I was In England with her this last time.  She has short term memory loss now. She can discuss poetry and feminism but anything new doesn’t stick.   In the early days of my stay this was hugely taxing.  I used to pick her up every day and take her to the cottage where I was staying and she’d quite reasonably ask where she was-

“Could you tell me – where exactly am I?”

“We’re in the cottage I’ve rented for my stay with you”

“Ah”

Then five minutes later

“Where exactly am I?”

In the beginning I would try to vary my answers because it seemed more respectful, more like normal conversation.  So my answer would be perhaps

“”Not far from where you live.  It’s called Cradley”

And then not long after she’d ask again

“Where am I?”

“In a holiday cottage in Worcestershire”

After a while though, I learnt to see the questions another way. The problem of where she was could not be resolved for Mum , but asking was as necessary as breathing.  To stop asking would be a sort of giving up, giving in.   And so her questions became like a sort of birdsong to me.  I stopped trying to vary my answers and just gave back my own simple response to her call.  It began to be part of  our way of getting on.  Nothing to do with information exchange – just reassurance and affection.

I realized Jack’s questions had no answers that he could process either.  Where indeed was the cat?  But he needed to go on asking just the same.  He had to confirm her going and his staying.  He’d loved her after all.  And so I began to answer not with my mind but like a grandmother bird with the same soothing song.

 I should have left it at that but I’m afraid I didn’t.  I suppose I was tired and it was the end of the day.  I half remembered the vet and his attempt to reconcile us to the cat’s death.   I am not a believer in the afterlife but Jack’s parents are.  So what the hell, I thought.   When Jack asked again “Where’s the cat?” I answered “She’s gone to heaven” and immediately wished I hadn’t.  It seemed another sort of lie.  Jack liked that answer though and savoured the word “heaven”

Rachel and Miles were rightly a bit shocked at me  making free with their belief system when it was convenient  and I was ashamed.  But I am left with a lot of confusion in my heart and my head.  Why are answers to questions so problematic? Why don’t they work? Which is the higher duty – to tell the truth as one knows it or to provide comfort and closure of a sort even if it requires  a compromise with sincerity?  What are questions for anyway?  After all some are downright rubbish like “How are you?”  Or is that really so?  Is it another instance of human chirruping – question and answer just to be nice?

 At this moment I wish that somewhere there could be some nice mother bird to take me under her wing  and sooth my soul with a few answers.  I don’t think I would really care if they were true or not just as long as they were there..  And I could ask again and again.

Jack and Barbara

On the days I look after my two year old grandson Jack, we sometimes cross the road to visit my friend and neighbour Barbara.  She’s the senior resident of the street. She’s lived here for over sixty  of her eighty four years and can tell anyone around what went on in their house before they got into it.  She can tell you about sousing a brawler with the contents of a chamber pot and boiling up lead to make sinkers for Chas, her husband’s fishing rod.  They raced pigeons from the back yard then.  It all sounds much more interesting than today.  Now Chas has died and Barbara still misses him a lot.

I started taking Jacob over when he was a tiny baby.  I was rather in awe of him and I think Barbara was too.  He had black eyes and a furious cry.  There was nothing pleading or pathetic about it.  Whilst I did all I could to identify the cause of his rage and calm him, Barbara had a different approach.

“Let it all out boy” she’d say, “Let him get it out”

I couldn’t do that of course and went on trying to sooth him.  Eventually he’d exhaust himself and go to sleep and we could both relax with our tea.

As Jack grew there were more divergences in our approaches.

“What’s he eating?”

“Just his mum”

“Well there you are,  He’s hungry.  You should give him some sugar and water in a spoon”

A shiver of horror passed through me.

“Oh no his mother wouldn’t allow that” And nor would she.  Likewise when he began to crawl and touched a plug

“You need to give him a little smack for that.”  I held my own and didn’t.

When he began to make sounds but not known words she’d interrogate him fiercely

“What do you mean?  Talk English can’t you.”  She was joking but formidable all the same. She has a shock of white hair and the deepest voice of any woman I know.

But Jack has taken her in his stride and until recently I’ve managed to resist all attempts to undermine the modern parenting style I try to copy from his own exemplary  mother and father. Healthy food, no sugar, no snacks, gentle guidance on to the safe right path.

However, when Barbara got the biscuit tin out I began to lose my grip.

“No,” I said.  “He doesn’t have biscuits

“What!”

“His mother doesn’t want him to have sweet things”

“Look at him. He’s hungry .  You’re starving him.” She’d say. “He’s got to eat.  He’s growing”

Jack was in fact fixing the tin with a beady eye.  He looked at Barbara with trust.

“It’ll spoil his lunch” I parried with an old phrase taken from my own grandmother.  But I lost.

“Only a plain one”

What?  You think I’ve got anything else.  I’m a pensioner.” She said smugly.

And after that Jack would go and stand by the biscuit tin shelf every time we visited and watch the battle commence.  When I realized  it was their  two wills against my one and I wasn’t going to win, I thought I’d try at least to minimize the damage.

“Could we call them something else Barbara,  If he starts saying the B word at home his parents are going to wonder where he learnt it.  Lets call them peacocks – and only one. ”

 Last time he’d wangled two.  I was especially anxious as now Jack would joyfully say as we crossed the road Barbara - Bikkit.  I hoped the peacock ploy would at least confuse the issue a bit.

Barbara’s house is nice for me and Jack.  It is a small terrace  with no doors so I can watch him as he ranges through the rooms, right out to the bathroom at the back where Fred, the parrokeet  lives in his cage . While  Jack  checks out Fred , Barbara and I catch up on the local goings on.  Who’s been burgled and how.  Who’s selling up.  Then he’ll come back and play happily with Barbara’s many childproof bottles of pills and supplememnts which rattle and roll pleasantly and he’ll turn on the torch which she uses to check which ones to take.

Sometimes we go out into the yard where Barbara grows some lovely orchids.  I can never get mine to flower and am always asking how she does it.

As well as Fred the parrokeet in the bathroom there are  two other birds who occupy cages in the  yard.  These parrots joined Barbara’s household decades ago  in one way or another. One of them, an ancient  corella, had been owned by a workmate of Chas  way back in the nineteen forties.  The friend was going on holiday and moaning about what to do with the bird.

“My old woman’ll take care of him for you” said Chas helpfully.  The man never came back and Barbara has the parrot still.

When you open the back door into the yard there is a clatter of wings as about a dozen pigeons take flight from around the cages where I like to think they.ve been passing the time of day with the parrots or maybe they are even descendants of the old racing pigeons.  But Barbara says it’s just the seed that brings them.

Jack was not keen on the  garden parrots.  Both are very very old.  The sulphur crested cockatoo screeches horribly as he furls and unfurls his yellow topknot.  The corella  has a decidedly weatherbeaten appearance not improved by putting his head into a rusty old tin can and banging it on the bars of his cage.  There was nothing about either likely to appeal to a small child but in the beginning I tried anyway.

“What’s that one’s name?” I asked pointing to the cockatoo.

“Charlie” said Barbara

“He’s called Charlie, Jack.  Say Hallo Charlie”

But he just looked from a safe distance and wouldn’t.

“And that one?” There was a silence and then Barbara said

“He’s Charlie too”

It was only on a later visit that I asked why both the parrots were called Charlie.  Barbara looked to see that Jacob was down in the kitchen communing with Fred and then bent towards me “His real name’s Bastardhead” she said “But I couldn’t have him hearing that.”

I was relieved that Barbara had decided to keep that dark. Not just one but two taboo B words in Jack’s rapidly increasing vocabulary would have really brought my grandmothering skills into question.

Jack's Birth

When my first grandson Jack was born everybody around was full of congratulations and merriment.  I didn’t understand the sadness that sat on my heart at this amazing and wonderful time.

I had been at the birth.  Rahel had wanted me there alongside my son Miles and I was glad to go, having been through three births myself and feeling something of an authority. But I also felt tentative.  Would I be useful or intrusive?  Was it my place to be there at the coming of my grandchild or should I wait until the little thing was held out to me for inspection in the time honoured way?

I didn’t hesitate long and when Rachel and Miles went in for her to be induced I joined them at lunchtime with Lebanese takeaway and a Scrabble set.  The two of them were bored and restless and in that funny state of disbelief that things would ever come to a head.  The steps to hurry things along had been taken and we watched her, between our bits of banter,  for any little signs of change.  She returned our looks with apologetic ones.  Nothing yet.

What tedium and how undramatic and not like a novel this was.  The baby whose sex we didn’t know was still non existent and for who knew how long.  For ever?

We had our Lebanese picnic on her bed and surveyed the facilities.  Gas and air machine, swabs and wipes and medical stuff.  Solemn and serious in the face of our skittish levity.

Suddenly a little start from Rachel.  “Just indigestion I think.  It’s the Lebanese”

“Tell us about it” we hassled  “What was it like?”

We put away the plastic takeaway boxes and began to stop waiting.  We got serious.

:”I think I’m going to vocalize a bit” said Rachel, now swinging into role.

“And I’ll count” I said remembering the comfort of Graham timing the contractions at my own births.  Through each twisting pain I could hear the numbers and the higher they went the nearer the end the contraction had to be.

Rachel gasped and made a little mewing call, a cross between a dolphin and a currawong.  That seemed to suit her as Miles held her hand.  The afternoon came and went through the hospital window.  The labour progressed ponderously and Rachel sang on.

“How different it is” she said at one point “having a contraction and not having one.”  She was already becoming an authoratitive birther. 

The strain of watching Rachel’s struggle affected Miles and me in different ways.  I longed to swap with her.  Take the pain off her.  It was much harder than being at my own births.  Miles got hungry. 

“I know it seems weird but I need to eat something”  The midwife looked aghast and Rachel weakly backed him up.  “He needs to eat” she said and she seemed eased by the sight of Miles munching a rolled up flat bread from the Lebanese plastic bag.  

Soon after that the readings from the monitor showed that things were going too slowly.  The baby was stressed.  Rachel was getting tired.

“I can’t do it” 

There was despair in her voice and for the first time I thought it might all go horribly wrong.

After an interval a whole lot of people came into the room and permission was asked, rather incongruously I thought, for a medical student to stay and see his first forceps delivery.

I was appalled by the strength it took to pull at the head,  the top of which was now visible, bluish, with wet black hair. It looked dead.  I thought no human head should be squeezed in this way and if that doctor had hurt Rachel or the baby I would kill him. It was not a passing feeling but one charged up with impotent rage.  On looking back I can understand why people are chucked out of labour rooms when things go haywire. 

When the  little face came out it wasn’t a pretty sight but it was blessedly alive.  The rest of the body slithered forth and after all that, it seemed a minor point that  it was a boy.  Anything would have done. 

“He has beautiful eyes”  I said “Black and so big”

But Rachel was looking at Miles with the little thing flopped on her.

“We did it” she said.

I did then feel it was time to go.  Rachel afterwards said she was reassured by my matter of fact departure.

“You just said -well that’s that and headed off” she said “It made it all seem so normal”

Out in the hospital car park my eyes seemed far too dry.  It was all too much to live through.  I couldn’t cry and I couldn’t laugh but I knew that my world had shifted on its axis.  I had become a grandmother and it seemed that I had moved one huge stage further on the journey of my life towards where?.  I felt terribly alone and redundant after the sharing of so much pain and triumph.

It was quite a bit later that I found out  I’d been so wrong to be sad.  There were no answers from Jack to my scary questions, but there was huge solace in the little baby .  Looking into his dark eyes there seemed to be so much experience and acceptance. He couldn’t tell me but wherever he had come from but it didn’t seem to have been too bad.  I’m  now convinced  that there is  no good reason to suppose that the great hereafter is any worse than the great herebefore and it’ll all be all right when the time comes.    Meanwhile  Jack’s enraged cries for what he needs right now – a nappy or some milk, remind me that even if this vale of tears isn’t exactly a picnic for him there’s a lot I can do about it.

Jack and the Cat

Jack has always loved the cat but it has been unrequited love.  The cat is old and cranky and has no ears any more because they were surgically removed a few years ago after becoming cancerous.  Her eyes are rheumy and she dribbles a bit.

She didn’t like him as a baby, perhaps because she was always shuffled off when he arrived in his little pod.  We were so fearful for him and legend has it that a cat can suck the breath out of a baby.

Dislike on the cat’s part,  turned to hatred when Jack began to crawl.  Another quadruped was more than she could bear, especially as he was enchanted by her extravagant white tail and she has never let anyone touch that.

Jack was charmed by her little feeding station full of tiny biscuits and take your eyes off him for a second and he’d pop one in his mouth.  Thief and marauder he didn’t endear himself to the cat.

Jack’s mother asked us why we always addressed the animal as Cat and not by name.  Was she not properly loved?  Yes we did love her after our fashion.  It wasn’t that.  The problem was that we had allowed our youngest son to name her Fergus even though he knew she was a female.  The name never sat well on her so Cat she became, or when affection bubbled up, Catty.

As Jack grew and began what I understand is now known as “cruising” – that is, walking with the support of furniture, the cat’s hatred retreated a little.  She would eye him but not instantly flee.  He’d laugh when he saw her beside the heater.

“Gentle Jack.  Be gentle”

But Jack’s gentleness had so much potency behind it.  The flat of his little hand would touch the tips of her fur as he held his breath. ”Haaah” she’d hiss and run away.  Like any other massage client she likes a firm stroke without hint of menace.

“Cat all gone”   Jack would sigh.

Jack is monogamous.  We took him to the zoo once but not even the meercats stirred any tenderness.  His heart is pledged it seems.

He longs to please.  There is no mischief in his love.  No desire to pull her tail or, as one child I knew once did – chop off her whiskers.  He loves without judgment or curiosity and I wish more than anything for such feelings to be rewarded and  encouraged.  I want him in the fullness of time to be this kind of lover.

 I thought of improving the situation by getting him to help me feed her.  His hand in mine we scooped food from the tin and on to the dish and placed it on to the newspaper.  The cat came, not exactly bounding up but she came and nosed  the food.  Jack was ecstatic.

“Hungry cat.”  he said. “Very very hungry cat.”

After that, like a little trapper he would lure her to him with her dish.  I put a chicken drumstick in it once and Jack set off with it.

“Heavy bone” he said and I thought it a powerful phrase.  He carried the dish up our steep wooden stairs with impressive skill and offered it reverently to the cat hiding under the bed in the spare room.

“So it’s room service now” scowled Graham when he found the nasty remains later in the week.

I am trying to become more robust in response to Jack’s love. Painful though it is to witness this constant rejection it is not a viable relationship.  She is much too old for him for a start. A hundred and five in cat years to his two. But I am really not sure that a kitten or a puppy would do the trick.

Just the other night,  Jack’s parents came to dinner.

 “We’ve got a bit of news,” they said, “But you mustn’t tell anybody.  It’s much too early”

And of course I won’t, but suddenly my heart is easy about Jack.  Soon there will be a new target for all that love.  I hope the little one will be able to cope.

Scareda

 I look after my grandson Jack on Wednesdays.  He’s two.  Last week he looked up at me  and said confidently “Scareda ants”  He’s recently learnt about being scared of things and the mileage it can get out of any attending adult.

The first time he was unquestionably afraid was on the beach.  It was exasperating because the beach is such a nice place to be with a little kid – so much space and sand to dig in.  But Jack gibbered with terror at the sight of the lapping sea.  He cried.  He hid his face in my lap and then begged his mother for a cuddle.  We made a big fuss and eventually screened off the sea with our bodies while he mistrustfully held some sand in his little fists.

I think he was pleased when he found a word for the seaside experience and “scareda” is now applied promiscuously to anything a bit odd like the giant ceramic Pro Hart ant brought back (against my wishes) from a holiday with my husband in Broken Hill.

“No you’re not” I said, and gave the horrid thing a kiss.  “It’s nice” and  he agreed to kiss it too.  So that was that.

I wonder where terrors come from and where they go.  I was terrified of a whole lot of things when I was a little girl in England – steam trains that hissed and howled -  the gas that went bang when you lit it – the appalling pulsing din of the London tube trains as they crossed the bridge over Turnham Green Terrace.  My grandmother would snarl with rage at my intransigent refusal to pass under the trembling roar.  She couldn’t understand that fear and I can’t now.

But some fears one grows out of  for no very good reason.  Because I was born just after the second world war I grew up, as we used to say “in the shadow of the Bomb”  There were Aldermaston Marches and slogans like “What do you do when the Bomb drops? Kiss your children goodbye.”  That frightened me very much.  I was morbidly curious about radioactive disease and made it my business to find out all the horrible symptoms.  I remember suddenly starting to cry on the platform of Earls Court Road station.

“What’s the matter now?” my mother said.  I couldn’t tell her that it was the sight of the red patent leather handbag slung over the arm of an elegant lady.  I was sure The Bomb would have dropped before I was old enough to have a handbag like that.  In fact of course I grew up and now have heaps of handbags. 

It is still a dangerous and some would say a doomed world but I hardly ever think about it now.  I wonder where the terror has gone?  Do we get braver as we grow up or just stupider?

Anyway I decided to try and wean Jacob from the “scareda” game.  It’s no way to spend a childhood.

“So you’re not scared of ants any more?”  He loved the sound of “any more” and stretched it out so it rose and fell.  “Not scareda ants ennny mooore”  I could see I was on a winning run and pursued my advantage.

“What about the beach?  Would you like to go to the beach again – with mummy and daddy and me too.  All of us?”

“No,” he said quietly and so I let it go.

But when he was going down for his nap and we couldn’t  locate the much loved dummy he said mournfully

“Dummy all gone.  No dummy ennny mooore.”

I cashed in on the moment and said

“Not scareda sea ennny moore?” and he laughed at the joke and repeated ”Not scareda sea any more”

Well the proof will be in the pudding I suppose and we haven’t been back to the beach since then but I live in hope.

I just noticed this morning that there is another glass ant in our garden. Graham’s been at it again. This one has been perched in a bromeliad and is reading a tiny little book.  I hate to say it but it just slightly gives me the creeps.  But I take a leaf out of Jack’s book and brace myself.  “Not scareda anything any more”  And it feels good.

Carols in the Park

Victoria Park is a place I used to take Jack when he was very small aund helpless.  It’s quiet,with only a distant  hum of traffic on the Parramatta Road.  There’s a pond with ducks and moorhens and big fig trees to sit under. In the beginning he just lay there.  I pitied him for the struggle it was to move his arms and legs.   Later he liked to finger the grass and pop bits of bark in his mouth.  I always knew when there was something in there because of the tight lipped smirk on his face. There was a bit of guarding for me to do, but by and large the park was a safe place.  An everyday place.  Even when it is galvanised once a year by  something like Fair Day – a preliminary to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras it seems safe with coiffed dogs that had their own cafe and couples holding hands happily.

So when Rachel asked me to go with her to Carols in the Park I was unpeturbed and happy to oblige.  She’s a singer and had been asked to do a number on the stage that night and I was going to be on duty while she was performing.  Jacob was about six months then, sitting but not crawling and minding him would be easy.

There was a slightly wild feeling about the park when we got there.  Kids streaking about,  groups staking out spaces with blankets.  We chose a space way back from the  stage which had a huge noise coming from it  Warming up I supposed.  I was thinking protectively from Jacob’s point of view – so different from his usual placid baby life.  He was still such easy prey and I was wary.

I was doubly disconcerted by an ex-girlfriend of my son Miles, Jack’s father, appearing in a Santa hat selling song sheets and candles with little ruffs to catch the wax.  She’d married, by a peculiar coincidence, an ex-boyfriend of Rachel’s.  It was all more than OK but complicated to respond to.

I have long since stopped liking carols.   For the most part hey have become just jingles in shopping malls and right now the crazy invocation of  mid winter on  a hot Sydney night  adds an air of madness to the evenng.  A row of portaloos and a barbecue manned by Miles  are on the right flank of the park.  On the left is a no go zone where fireworks have been set up.  We’ve all bought our candles   and groups borrow fire from one another as not many of us carry lighters now that hardly anyone smokes.  Jack eyes it all with equanimity and I wish I could too.  He’s passed from one church person to another and while I am proud of him I also wish he would just stay with me.  He’s so portable.  I tell myself these are all good people and I don’t have sole rights to Jack do I.

Rachel says she needs to go to the loo before her performance and I say no worries.

Now for a while up on stage,  in between the carols, there has been a running gag  going on.  Two little girls dressed as angels have been going up to the master of ceremonies and one says

“We’ve found the baby Jesus”

“How do you know it’s the baby Jesus?

“Look”

And the first angel would draw back and the other child would be hanging on to a baby.

“But that’s a girl” said the MC.

“Oh” and the angels would go away whilst another carol was revved up.  It was all good fun I suppose but the joke had a dark feeling too.  There was a whiff of sacrifice in the offering of the babies and a hint of rejection in their dismissal.  Were they being spared the knife or shut out of paradise?

I was musing on all this when the inevitable happened.  The two winged girls came bounding up to my blanket.

“Can we borrow your baby?”

“No” I said immediately “His mum’s not here.”

The  angels looked longingly at Jack.  He was just the right size for their purpose.  But Rachel was still at the portaloos and I was strongly on duty.  Then up came the angels’ minder, the minister who had actually married Rachel and Miles.  “Rachel won’t mind” she said.

“Won’t it be noisy?” I parried “I’ll block his ears” she said.

And so I let him go out of my sight through the candles and the horrible racket.  After what seemed a very long time I heard the little voices excitedly announcing

“We’ve found the baby Jesus”

“How do you know it’s Jesus?”

After a pause – and then in a tone of deep awe,

“Because of his eyes’

I had to smile.  He does have unusual eyes. Very dark with a little bit of gold.  When I described him on the phone to my sister Sal in England she said,

“ Hmph Rachel hasn’t been going to any witches' Sabbaths lately.”

  “Don’t tell her I said that” she added hastily.  She’s a midwife and knows all about the sensitivities of young mothers.

Well, Jack failed as a baby Jesus look alike just like the others and was back on my blanket before long.  I wondered what he had thought of it all but he wasn’t crying which was the main thing. Rachel arrived back flustered but not entirely displeased at being chatted up by a man in the portaloo queue. 

“I told him I was married” she said “but it made no difference”

I recounted the story of Jack’s abduction by the angels and she laughed and said she was sorry to have missed his stage debut.

Rachel sang her carol.  Miles came back from barbecuing and said he didn’t care if he never saw another sausage in his life and we fled  the park with the crackle and bang of the fireworks like a small war behind us.

Not exactly a silent night, holy night, I mused, but a reminder of the dark side that makes one own personal family candle burn well.  I was glad I’d gone.

Cuckoo Clock

 You can listen to me reading this on Australian national radio here

Cuckoo clocks in general are one of the things I particularly dislike.  Their kitchiness, their smug swissness, their phoniness.  So when Graham, my husband,  saw the cuckoo clock shop in Berry and said he’d like one, I said –no way, if it comes into the house I go out and all those sorts of things.

I think my loathing goes back to my English childhood and the regular visits to my grandfather who lived in the Cotswold Hills.  These visits were always horrible   I realize now that he probably had obsessive compulsive disorder.  He used to seal his woollen socks in preserving jars in the summer to keep the moths out. He married a younger woman after my grandmother’s suicide and I was taught to call her Aunty Josephine.  She had never had children but whenever I visited she had a good go at parenting me.  She gave me thorough and rather intrusive baths and interrogated me on the ways of my bohemian and admittedly somewhat haphazard widowed mother.  Somehow the cuckoo clock meant all these things to me –a saccharine sweet face but with nasty leaden pine cones hanging from chain underneath.  An interminable tick and a pokey little beaky thing. that came out , no matter what , on the hour.

But in a moment of I don’t know what – remorse at being mean – sentimental fondness, or simply having no idea whatever to get Graham for his birthday I visited the cuckoo clock shop myself.  They were expensive, they weren’t, for the most part genuine, now being battery powered with hollow plastic pine cones on the bottom of the winding

chains instead of the leaden globs at my grandfathers place.  And some of them did new things.  I bought one that played a tinny German waltz after the cuckoo came out.  That’ll teach him, I thought darkly

I did insist that the clock be  kept in Graham’s’s study above the garage at the bottom of our garden.  Not in the house.  I even offered to tell him the secret of how to disable the German waltz function but he said in for a penny in for a pound - or something like that

Actually I found to my surprise that I grew to like hearing the distant cuckoo as I hung up the washing or repotted the bromeliads.  I thought how nice it was to have the hours marked in this way especially since I’ve never got used to my digital watch which, if I’m not careful, tells me how many steps I’ve walked instead of the time.  I think it’s a shame that public clocks don’t chime any more.  It used to be good to hear the hour and think of all the others round about hearing it too and making their decisions about what to do next.  Even the faint tinkle of the waltzes has come to please rather than bother me.  I smile when I think that my disgusting present ha turned out so nice after all.

Now a new cuckoo clock thing has just begun to happen.

 I look after my small grandson on Wednesdays.  He’s just beginning to talk and I showed him the cuckoo clock one day and we watched it do its stuff.  Now whenever he comes barrelling in he demands ‘cuckoo clock” and I usually say “Later” because it is the wrong part of the hour.  But when he hits it right we go together to the top of the garage and sit on the stairs under the clock together.  “Cuckoo clock?” he queries. ”Soon”  I say and we sit quietly together “Cuckoo clock?”  Three more minutes.  Somehow we chat our way through that long stretch of time and then there is a lovely creaking and grumbling and out comes a tiny white bird with wings outstretched.  Jack’s mouth opens and his eyes grow round. “Cuckoo” and then a little faint echo “Cuckoo”   Over and over, nine ten eleven times.- in and out it goes and then snaps shut.  He laughs for joy.   And then the tune starts. I hold him and we sway on the stairs together.  At the end he’s quite happy “All gone cuckoo clock” he says and off we go.

When I make marmalade, which I sometimes do, I remember Grandpa and the darkness of his bottled socks and Aunty Josephine suspecting my mother of god knows what .  I think of the cousin clock on the other side of the world, probably even now brooding in someone’s hallway and I feel gleeful.   I am here in Australia under another sun .   I am free, I think.

But I wonder - is that really true.?   Will the pattern go on repeating itself anyway?  I wonder what Jack’s cuckoo clock will be like.  Technology is bound to have made a few changes.  Maybe the bird will be able to come out to sing and  fly round the room before popping back through its trapdoor.

And maybe from wherever I am then I will hear Jack, now bushy browed with grey curls telling his children about their great grandmother.   And perhaps he’ll say 

“ She used to look after me on Wednesdays when my mother went to her  Pilates. She taught me to call her Julia.   She was very nice but I realize now that she was actually a bit mad.  Bipolar disorder probably..  As soon as I came in the door she would whisk me down the garden   Do you know she’d make me sit for hours on the  garage steps waiting for the cuckoo clock to sing and afterwards she’d make me dance this crazy dance with her.  But she loved me very much.”

And that at least is true!  

      

A Grandmother's Tale

You can listen to me reading this on Australian national radio here

I  have Jack on Wednesdays so his mother can go to her Pilates.  We’ve been doing this for almost all his two year old life.  He and I go off with his stroller to a place of interest to us both.  That day it was the Power House Museum, which is particularly friendly to two year olds and has a Wiggles exhibition.

It was good.  Jack was awed by the steam train with wheels that were taller than him.  He was a bit bored by the demonstration of  an eighteenth century engine that was imported for a brewery when beer was safer than water to drink.  But I was  impressed – the effort and power it took to ease the mighty wheel and its cogs around.  The dignity of it.

After that I thought chips and warm milk would be nice for Jacob and a cappuccino for me so we went to the café and snacked away together. “Chips very very hot” said Jack but pelicaned them down anyway.  He’s at the parroting stage.

Then we went to the playground outside the café.  Jack’s a cautious child and it was an unfamiliar modern playground with a pyramid of ropes and various balancing things.  The most innocuous looking thing was a small green cup on a sort of stalk.  It looked as if it would go round and round.  “Hey Jack” I said “Look at me”  I sat in the cup and pushed with my foot.  Disconcertingly the cup tipped up a bit as it went round and then descended.  I missed the moment to jump out and pick up Jack to join me. Round it went.  Fun, I thought, but this is a seriously fast machine.  I missed my moment again and I realised the thing was going faster – nothing to do with anything I was doing.  My feet didn’t touch the ground.  Up and round and down with a swoop.  Faster and faster.  I could hear, but not see Jack crying.  “It’s OK” I yelled but faster and faster whirled the little cup until the sky heaved and  the colours of the scene turned white.  I was scared now and lost my inhibitions.  “Help!   Help me” I  yelled into the space around  “Somebody help me”  Nobody did.  I briefly thought of leaping out but the thought of my granny bones on impact scared me.   I began to despair.  Now I was almost used to the aggressive whirling  and it was like a pain to be borne until – when?  How could it ever slow down when it was  my weight was making it go faster and faster.  I felt alone and definitely leaving normality behind.  But I yelled again and my voice seemed tiny.  “Help me somebody.  Please help me”  Now I wonder why I didn’t scream.  I suppose I didn’t want to frighten Jack.

Finally, with surprising gentleness, like a good aeroplane landing the thing stopped and two huge faces looked in at me.  They were nice kind girls. “Are you all right?” one asked.  “We thought you were just having fun.”  I saw Jack’s teary crumpled face and made the effort.  “It’s all right love I said and I picked up his heavy little body and we hugged.  The girls offered more help but vanished when I said we were fine.  The people on a café table, quite near, I thought bitterly were watching with shock and tentative amusement.  “They’re a handful at that age” said a woman.  “Yes” I concurred though it crossed my mind that that was just what Jack must be thinking about me.

I strollered him back to the house feeling nauseous, vaguely traumatised and full of questions.

Why didn’t it slow down?  If it were that easy to get something going round could it be an energy source – just pop grandmas in green cups (they could be called that) and global warming would be fixed.  More sombrely, would it have ever stopped before it broke and catapulted me somewhere?  Was this what dying felt like?  One gets philosophical anyway when pushing a lonely stroller and I wondered if I’d spun the days of my life in that short?  I had no idea interlude.  I also thought grimly that normal coffee drinking people ignore the unconventional.  They would have rescued a child in my dilemma but a grey haired grandma on a children’s toy was not nice  Maybe mad or drunk and anyway untouchable.  I must behave with more care in future.

But I couldn’t blame myself entirely.  One expects diminished experiences from baby equipment – to have less rather than more of a thrill.

Anyway we got home and when she got back I told my daughter in law all about it.  We put Jack in his high chair for lunch and she started making me a cup of tea.  “You’ve earned it” she said sympathetically and gave me a nice hug.  From his high chair Jack began carolling “Help, help me somebody”  “You see” said Rachel “You’ve taught him a useful word.  It’s been educational.”