Goodbyes

The bit of this journey I was rather dreading was returning to Malvern, the place Mum lived for 35 years and where for at least a decade I’d visited her every year for about four weeks. Her cottage was (and still is) high on the side of Old Wyche Hill and commands a view of four counties.  When there are floods they glitter silver on the horizon.  On a cloudy day the valley below is full of cotton wool with the pale sky above.  The sun rises plumb  in the middle of her living room window which mum in her day would toss  open with energy and joy. She was a London girl through and through but she found peace and satisfaction in the Malvern Hills with her various dogs, Norman, Hattie, Jeannie and Polly, all of whom had their trying little ways.  Norman hated anyone in uniform and Polly had a thing about cars and thunder.

After Mum's funeral two years ago, Grant and I shot off to eastern Turkey where we'd arranged to be before Mum died and we had our curtailed holiday there.  There hadn’t been time to say goodbye to the hills that had been friends to me through the thick and thin of Mum’s aging and before that too. I hadn’t gone to the Holy Well either, an annual ritual visit to the curious little chapel you could only find if you concentrated and took the right forks in the paths. I’d walked those hills like a ship in full sail when pregnant with Finn. Once I’d brought the children back to Mum’s cottage on a night train when we’d been in Cambridge on Grant’s sabbatical and he and I had had a blood curdling row.  He came to make peace next day and we stayed on with Mum.

 There was a winter visit where a perfectly constructed igloo had been built at the little school at the bottom of the road.  Winter had its challenges.  The road up to mum’s cottage is steep enough to make the fittest person stop and puff and in winter requires snow shoes to navigate.  Day care people who minister to the needs of the aged residents too obstinate to move on to the level, regularly have small accidents in the snow and ice and are unsung heroes.  Stupid delivery trucks taking short cuts do it at their peril.

It was Grant who made me go up there again.  His questing soul was driving him to get some Malvern Water from one of the many wells that perforate the hills.  At these places water runs willy nilly from spouts into drains and it troubles my now Australian spirit.  So much waste.  I wish I could turn off the taps.  On the other hand it bespeaks a great earthy generosity and interesting things happen at these springs.  I heard tell, while saying at our B and B in Malvern of a group of Muslims who once undressed and ritually purified themselves, perhaps for some feast day.  Other people swear that any other water with whisky is sacrilege. As for me, though, I had said my goodbyes and was ready for the next staging post in our long journey. A can of Sprite would have done the trick but it was not to be.

Despite all my fears, my goodbyes were not too difficult.  I realised that my friend Judy and fairly new friend Kevin and his son Alex had their own tomorrows, their own lives and there was the internet anyway.  My brother Michael and his wife Olya were on their own paths and while it was good to cross ways – ultimately we each had our own.

What I hadn’t bargained for was the heart squeezing nostalgia and memory soaked scent of the hills themselves and most of all Mum’s absence from them.  Is grief for the dead just selfish reluctance to accept mortality?  I don’t know.  All I do know is some part of me was calling out “Where are you Mum?”  I knew there was no answer. She seemed everywhere and nowhere.  I wasn’t sure she was OK and yet I knew that was a silly worry. It is so much harder to say goodbye to the dead than the living.

Brexit

“I am sick to my stomach” said my long time friend Judy on the morning that the Brexit poll results went public.  And she looked so sick too as she had to sit down with the tray with our coffees on it. She was in pain. “My heart” she said as she patted her chest and tried to make light of it.  She’d been up since six am fielding calls from distraught friends, mostly young, who felt their identities and futures as Europeans had been stripped from them overnight.  

Somehow the seriousness of the situation – the possibility of the Leave vote getting the majority had not been apparent before that horrible morning.  The people who wanted to stay in Europe seemed quietly confident that sense would prevail, that the clouds of xenophobia and nostalgia for tough little Blighty who beat the Germans twice would disperse when the moment came to choose.  The strings of  fluttering Union Jacks in the High streets generated a party mood, the jubilation of a jubilee which has now taken on a bit of the flavour of a dance of death.

Losing a referendum is not like losing an election when there is wrath mixed with disappointment but no damage had been done – yet.  We consol ourselves - maybe the buggers won’t be as awful as we fear.  They may improve, who knows, especially with effective opposition. But disappointment doesn’t cut it when it comes to losing a referendum.  The damage is all done and there’s just a gun to look down the barrel of.  

A disturbing revelation is the fact that the majority of Leavers were apparently the older generation.  A bitter young woman on the radio said more or less “What right have those who won’t be here that much longer to decide for us whose lives have just begun”.  I can see her point. Having money in the bank has always conferred power, but perhaps having years in the bank should count for something too.  

I don’t know all the arguments and until recently was barely aware of Brexit let alone its ramifications.  I’m sure I’m not alone in that.  Now, though, it all seems such a ghastly mistake to let what amounts to a national fit of peak threaten the power balance of Europe creating barriers everywhere.

Enough.  I am upset like so many others here and probably everywhere else.  And England is so very beautiful at the moment. Warm sunny days, lanes with hedgerows full of flowers and little creatures.  Green grass that’s been let turn into meadows.  All so lovely and so vulnerable.  Along with the Union Jacks in the High Street here are other strings of flags. Red crosses on a white background.  I last saw one of these at a performance of Henry V being upheld by a standard bearer on the field of battle.   The flags of the rest of the United Kingdom joined it to make the sporty little number that the British flag is now.   Is that really what people want – a denuded flag, a denuded England, just cheddar and no camembert or bratwurst?

There is a petition on the go for a second referendum on the grounds that yesterday’s was almost fifty fifty to say nothing of the fact that Scotland and Northern Ireland were heavily pro Stay.  Maybe given a second chance the dice would fall differently.  Let’s hope so.

But after this no more referenda.  Just thoughtful government to take responsibility for what is to happen and voters on guard and ready  to argue if we don’t like what it says.  That arrangement makes me feel more or less safe.

Family Ties

Our next stop was to be Kings Langley, a village close to London. We are going there as a consequence a Christmas card I’d received a few years back from a very old distant cousin.  It had a letter written in tiny handwriting in it covering all of the white space of the card. It began “You won’t know me from Adam, but Adam is my name”. In fact I did know him a bit from when I was a young girl. My great aunt Bobby took me and my brother Michael to visit him on his farm called Hellions. He’d been a rather fierce and dashing Devon farmer. I had a vague memory of wearing unsuitable transparent knickers when being hoisted up on the combine harvester.

 But the Christmas card was troubling.  As an old man he seemed very uneasy about how life had turned out for our family. Our father, his cousin, had drowned when my sister and I were tiny.  A posthumous child, a boy called Michael after his father, was born nine months later.  We survived by renting out rooms in our big Earls Court Road house but it was pretty chaotic, and mum with her bohemian ways was not drawn into the bosom of the my father’s respectable middle class family. I remember the atmosphere of opprobrium well.  We reluctantly used to visit an Auntie Minnie who lived in Kingston and she used to say to Mum  “We all need to make sacrifices Stella, even you.”  What could she have meant, I wonder now.

But Adam’s Christmas card made me sad. He’d got some things wrong and I thought he shouldn’t go to his death feeling bad about anything.  I wrote and told him about us all - how we had thrived and not to worry.  I never heard back.

Some time later I got a letter from Kings Langley saying Adam had died and he, John West, his nephew, had found my letter pegged on a string.  And so a friendship seeded itself in the muck of the long gone past.  Unlike my sister I have never taken much interest in family connections and had perhaps inherited a wariness  about the family of the father I never knew .

The next time, when I was visiting Mum in the UK, John organised a family reunion in a country pub. My sister Sarah and I drove there.  She was going on to Cornwall to see her kids and I hadn’t realised that the pub was miles from anywhere and I hadn’t a hope of finding somewhere to stay the night. John and Peggy, his partner took me in as they had booked rooms for themselves and her children, a little boy called T and a girl Natalie.  It was such a kindness.  Peggy and her kids were born in Zimbabwe and John comments wryly – who would have though it – a confirmed bachelor like me ending up with a family.

We all went for a walk next day and little T took photographs of the tiny golliwog called Little Eb that Sarah had given him.  I was a bit disconcerted by this gift as golliwogs have long been decidedly politically incorrect but T loved it and Little Eb had his picture taken by a stream, up a tree, in amongst the buttercups beside the path.  I promised that next visit Grant and I would take them out to dinner, but Mum died and we never did.

 So this year we met again with a booking at the local pub. John and Peggy had a   wedding last year and I sense a contentment in the family. “The wedding day went by so quickly” said Natalie.  “If only it could have gone on longer”

 T is a beautiful young man now and Natalie a decidedly attractive young woman and both are at different agricultural universities – a particular English phenomenon with echoes of the USA, horrible hazing rituals including dark passages with dead birds hanging from the ceiling.  Drinking clubs where downing sixteen pints of beer is considered a poor showing.  I dunno, it all seems a bit much but I am sure they are up to the challenge.

I like this  family so much for their warmth and toughness and indeed they do have their difficulties.  The middle class part of England that they inhabit is still quite xenophobic.  Peggy and Natalie are fierce and forthright when they encounter racism but T deals with it in his own confident and laconic way.  A dead fish slipped under a door gets his message across. 

I think as I write this, how pleased Adam would have been if he’d known what links and friendships his Christmas card musings had brought about.  I shall drink to him tonight.

Julia and Frank come to dinner

Today Grant announces that he wants to go to the Borough Market.  I ask why and he says he wants to get some raw milk and he has a lead - the Borough Market - a historic market that has gone very gourmet. There is a new process that shoots milk through a filter to catch all the tubercular and other germs without the need for the insensitive heating process, which wreaks havoc with the savour of the milk.  Somehow I find I can’t care much and what I really want is a day without tourism or quests.  I want to lie on the big bed with a coffee and read a nice thriller.  I want a gentle lead in to cooking coq au vin for Frank and Julia who are coming to dinner tonight.  For simplicity’s sake I refer to them as my step-parents to our landlady who asks who is coming to dinner.  I realize then that it is probably quite a complex process to acquire two step-parents but what the hell – I love them both and the dinner has got to be nice, especially as Frank is almost always painting and when  he’s not he likes a quiet night at home.

Grant leaves and I start with the first part of my plan, an inventory of ingredients, quail eggs, smoked salmon, brandy for flambéing the chicken, a leek and bacon and a bottle of red wine which will turn the chicken purple. Nothing missing so I don’t need to go up the little gravel walkway past the Christadephian meeting hall and through the three locked iron gates to the wild world of the Blackstock Road.  Peace is mine and I make a cup of coffee and pile up the pillows.

As I might have mentioned before staying at Air B and B places is a different from staying in an impersonal hotel where the customer is just that. But its not quite like staying with friends who like you and can forgive any little peccadilloes.  Your  Air B and B hosts always greet you welcomingly but the smile is underpinned by wariness. Who are these people we are letting in to our nice place? We smile too and hope that we come up to scratch as guests.  There is a lot of smiling.

I go towards the bed and its spotless white quilt cover and some gremlin makes me trip and coffee goes over everything, quilt, pillows, the lot.  It’s awful, but at first I think confession is my best option. Nobody is in the big house so I resort to rinsing everything and draping the place with wet linen.  Not a cool look for the little bistro I hope to transform the studio into, in now,  less than three hours.  I have a go with the hair dryer but it’s hopeless.  I can’t leave and go to the launderette because Grant has the keys to all the gates and the front door.  I decide to ring him in my despair and do so.  His peculiar ring tone sounds and I think who the hell is ringing Grant at this particular moment until I realize with phones at either ear that of course it’s me and he’s left his phone behind.

Considering everything, the perverse induction cooktop that beeps and turns itself off from time to time, the peril of flambéing the chicken with the smoke alarm ready to go off and the need, mostly psychological, to have a go now and then at hair drying the linen, the chicken comes out nicely.  Grant comes home with the keys and is mellow from shopping and sympathetically takes the wretched quilt cover to the launderette to dry.

Then it’s as if the gods of travel think I have been punished enough for not padding about London in the proper way.  Frank and Julia arrive and are charmed by our little place and we have a really nice time.  We do our special family ritual involving aquavit and beer and looking each other in the eye twice over.  We all relax and relish the time and the place and the food and wine.  Frank tells us all about his early years working in a bakery and we all agree that Fortnum and Masons is no bloody good any more and I think what fun it is to be with them.

 I have a revelation.  Even though Frank is only fifteen years older than me he has always been a sort of father figure, and like any little girl I have wanted to please and impress.  Even up to this afternoon.  But now I realize that tonight we are all in the same age bracket called elderly.  Me and Grant in our seventies, Frank and Julia in their eighties.  We are collaborators in the war against deterioration of our minds and bodies.  We are all players in the comedy called Old Age and we are able to laugh.

The evening ends and we want to walk them to their car which is parked in their zone and not ours because of the complexity of the parking machine system in London these days.  They refuse but we insist. Its nice - me and Julia merrily arm in arm, Grant and Frank discussing life behind.  We hug goodbye and leave Julia to do her U turn.   I have a sense of change in myself.  It has taken me seventy years but I feel I have at last grown up and am not a nervous daughter any more.   Just an old friend.

And I did confess about the coffee in case there were any spots left. “These things happen,” said our landlady and all was well.

Rain and dark thoughts

When travelling I find a lovely day is often followed by a trying one, as though the patron saint of travel sees the need to cut you down to size.  Today began by my discovering I had lost my wallet in the restaurant last night.  I remembered putting my handbag under the table in the tight space and cleverly manipulating with my feet to retrieve the special bottle of wine we’d bought from Greece as a present for Frank.  I had knocked my wallet out then, it seemed as Anna, the restauranteur had it.  I castigated myself as this was the second time on this trip I had carelessly lost a crucial thing.  People like me shouldn’t be allowed out except on a lead, I thought, and Grant’s restraint as far as mockery was concerned only made it worse.

Then we went to Fortnum and Mason’s, a place I remembered as the epitome of a lovely London city food shop, full of all the food smells that evoke the good life.  My mother once remarked that even if a tramp went into Fortnum’s he (or she) would be treated like royalty.  It was a principle of the place.  Indeed as a fifteen year old girl I had decided to spend my first pay packet on food for a celebratory feast for the family. After all I had a pay packet.  I was grown up. As a salesgirl at David Greig’s grocer’s shop I didn’t get much but I bought a little duck and meringues and I remember the respectful service I received from the uniformed gentleman who helped me.

Nowadays, however, Fortnum and Masons doesn’t stock much ordinary food any more, quirky luxuries, teas in special tins, obscure brands of gin and weird beers have taken over. Mustards and vinegars and nostalgic reproductions of wartime tins sent to the trenches.  The luxury it represented for me all those years ago has gone uber, canned and bottled and in a real sense untouchable and unsmellable too.  To be fair though, the gentlemen (and ladies now too) are still uniformed and kindly and they rather surprisingly did have quail eggs which we wanted as part of a dainty entrée for the meal we were cooking for Frank and Julia next night.

Out in the street it had begun to rain heavy icy drops so we huddled in a doorway for a while before finding a 29 bus and heading home.

While I think of it, a fact anyone going to London should know is that you don’t need to buy an Oyster card to travel.  Just tap your visa card on the buses and trains and it works like magic.  With buses you only need to tap on, but trains need tapping off as well or you get massively charged.

After a catnap we went out again and visited Jake and Lizzie in their lovely flat which looks out on to the London skyline with St Pauls, the Gherkin and the strange translucent Shard on the horizon.  Above them all rolled the moody clouds and I thought if I lived in this flat I would spend a lot of time just gazing at all this. Jake says it’s different every day.

It was tipping down again when we reached Blackstock Road and we sheltered under the front a building near the passage to our flat.  There was a group of men of middle Eastern appearance in animated discussion beside us. They were seated on the step and looked as if they had been there a while. I wondered why they weren’t in their homes on a night like this and wished I could understand their language.   What were they up to?  I caught the eye of one of them and I grimaced and made a shiver gesture pulling my jacket around me and looked up exasperated at the sky.  He smiled and I relaxed.  We had communicated and likely as not we were allies on this rainy English night.

Undressed at the Victoria and Albert Museum and another family dinner

Yesterday we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington and it was special.  Full of surprises and absolutely alive despite being made up of things from the past.  Eddy, as a little boy had what he called “a collection of collections” and this is very much the V and A.  Every exhibit had the flavour of its chooser – an abolitionist perhaps collected a little statue of maternal Nature with babies Africa and Europe at her breasts. It was created in the early 18^th century when France became the first country to abolish slavery.

 A spinner maybe found a lap sized ornate spinning wheel the like of which apparently were used by fashionable ladies at social gatherings.  How funny it must have been to see all the ladies in their gorgeous gowns winding their little spinning wheels and making lumpy homespun thread as they gossiped.

We darted like bees from one intriguing thing to another and discovered facts like the bedroom was once the main entertainment venue and no, not for what springs to mind but for social gatherings - hence huge lavish daybeds with gleaming and ostentatious upholstery.  There must have been a lot of sprawling at these events.  I can’t think how one could sit nicely on one of those beds.

All the while there was rather beautiful almost monastic chanting coming from down the way.  As we got closer we could hear the lead singer who had a lovely tenor voice.  He would speak the words of the chant which would then be intoned by the choir.  As we got closer we saw the singers were seated round the edge of a spherical dome which was a Cuban artist’s interpretation of the enlightenment.  There was a passivity about the singers which emanated peace.  Gradually I realised that many of them had Downs Syndrome.  They had lovely voices.  Their leader led them out of the dome and they circled it singing the same strange melancholy tune, each time with different words called by him.  They came back into the globe and I crept in behind and sang quietly with them.  I was uplifted.  I asked afterwards who they were and it turned out they were from an organisation dedicated to the propagation of learning through visiting museums and galleries.

There was a special exhibition called “Undressed” dedicated to underwear over the centuries.  We bought our saucy tickets inscribed “Seniors Undressed” and saw fascinating stays and bustles and what lies beneath a crinoline.  There was information about particularly hazardous corsets that endangered the reproductive organs (the S corset which squashed your tummy and exaggerated your bum). Jaeger made good shrinkproof woollen undergarments.  One panel made the thoughtful observation that whilst revealing one’s underwear has always been fashionable, only in modern times has exposure of flesh been respectable.

There was a titillating S and M case

and a film in which fashion designers spoke about their views.  One French lady said “The thing I like about a beautiful women is they she is always trying to be more beautiful.”  I thought that was a puzzling comment and I’m not sure I agree.

We had such a lovely evening with Frank and Julia, Jake and Lizzie at a Greek restaurant called Daphne.  There are nights when pleasure seems to overflow and this was one of them.  So much to say, lovely food and warm friendly service from the family who run the place and have known Frank and Julia for many years.  I had lemon poussin which I called, in my Australian way, spatchcock, and was corrected by my English family. I insisted on my choice of word.  No right and wrong just GB and Australia.  Funny how languages split off from each when they are spoken in different places. Tea and dinner and all that.

All in all a lovely day – ten plus on my happiness scale, or just a little bit more.

Back in London and all the new Sherlock Holmeses

It is strange to be in London again.  The gracious old buildings are the same but marble white instead of the post war black I remember as a child, thanks to the London clean air policy which prohibits the coal that used to keep us warm.  Some things are exactly the same and stir up memories of for me.  The way the traffic lights have amber between green and red both ways as if to say as we do “Careful now you’re going to have to stop’ but also “Wake up now you are going to have to move.”  It’s nice.  It’s gentle.  The millions of steps to get to platforms on the Tube.   I realise how safe everyone must have felt sheltering down there during the blitz.  It’s so deep “You have to be a fit old lady to live in London” says Sarah, my sister complacently as she watches me puff.  Despite these odd bits of effort, life in London is so bright and easy and as tractionless as a dream.  Shops have everything in them and cars meticulously stop at traffic lights, (unlike in Sydney). 

We are staying on Blackstock Road in Finsbury Park, a Muslim area where even the Subway chain uses Halal meat. It’s fun. The shopping street is lively and groups of people hang about talking as well as doing their errands. The greengrocer has an enormous breadfruit for sale as well as other exotica.  It’s good to be here and yet there is a disturbance in my heart too.  It is perhaps the weird pain of nostalgia – a sadness that the shabby London of my childhood has developed into this fine place while my back has been turned and I have been living another life on the other side of the world.  I could have belonged to all this but didn’t, and never will now.

Sarah takes me up a funny little staircase near the tube station and suddenly we seem to be in the countryside.  It is the beginning of summer and the wasteland around the train tracks has been allowed to turn into a meadow.  To call it a park would be a misnomer.  It is just wild flowers allowed to grow amongst the feathers of seeding grass.  Sarah and I ritually name them – “Foxglove, herb robert, love in the mist, teasel, sorrel, hollyhock, blackberry…”  We follow the path to the old millpond near Arsenal Stadium and I am calmed by all the flowers which come up year after year just as they always used to.  They haven’t modernised and they don’t seem to care about my defection to Australia.  They are just being themselves.

Despite my anxiety, meeting my people again isn’t momentous or disturbing .  It is lovely and absurdly easy, partly because they’ve all been reading this blog and I don’t have to do travellers’ tales. The time apart seems to dissolve and  we just slip into talking about what we are going to do and the puzzles of Brexit which nobody really seems to understand.  Julia offers me her washing machine for our grubby clothes and Frank says we are all going out for a Greek meal tomorrow night and Jake and Lizzie will be there too.  Sarah and I lollop on the bed in our flat and I hear all about her grandchildren and tell her about mine and we conjur up photos  from our I books. Still lying down we take selfies, covering our double chins as best we can.

We go out and have a beer in the Ten Pins where everyone is watching football on a television the size of a small cinema screen.  I am sleepy afterwards but Sarah, disciplinarian that she is, won’t abandon our plan to go to a book launch party of a new Sherlock Holmes sequel.  Apparently it is all the rage to update Sherlock Holmes and an editor friend of hers has midwifed this particular one. She wants to see what such an event is like so she can have one for her books in time. We go to Truckles, a sort of café bar and take our wine down to the cellar where everyone is seated in front of  the slightly bashful author, along with an actor in a deerstalker hat holding a violin and Sarah’s friend Kevin who is MC and an actor too.  We are all rather surprisingly given raffle tickets.  Mine is blue 321.  The prizes are varied, including the Chinese edition of a biography of Benedict Cumberbatch. "A collector's item" says Kevin.

There is a reading of the beginning of one of the stories, stopping at a tantalising point and then a performance by a “Mentalist”, someone who uses the deductive techniques of Holmes himself to fathom the answers to puzzles.  He says it’s a “Soft science”.  Various audience members are co-opted to lie or tell the truth and he sorts them out.  People are given pieces of paper with the name of medical conditions on them and asked to imagine themselves suffering from them while he scrutinises their faces.  A man has pregnancy.  He guesses right. Another has an  STD. He guesses it. He holds up the paper for us to read as there are children present.  It all goes on slightly long and the methodology is so complicated that Sarah and I become bewildered.  We decide afterwards he needs more showmanship skills.  Then there’s the raffle and yes my Blue 321 wins a set of four CDs written by four different modern Conan Doyles.  I look forward especially to “Sherlock Holmes and the Whitechapel Vampire by Dean P. Turnbloom.

A horrible time in Calais

This is the first time we have had cold wet weather.  We arrive at the Budget Ibis hotel in a suburb of Calais called Coquelles.  The hotel car park is chocablock full of police vehicles of all kinds, paddywagons and riot control vans amongst them.  I surmise it’s a kind of reservoir in case of big refugee trouble. Calais is the home of “the jungle” where unfortunate people are trying to get across the Channel to England.  I think that of all places to be stuck this is the beastliest.  The damp, the flatness and the way the grey sea dissolves into a mist where the horizon should be.

I actually like our budget room, soothingly free of personality and so sparse it is impossible to lose anything.  Unlike me Grant is in rather good spirits.  Calais is host to two huge supermarkets, Carrefours and Auchan.  They are bloated for a reason.  The English come over on day trips to do French shopping.  Grant loves supermarkets. “They are the museums of the future” he argues. Huh.  We have nothing to buy but for some inexplicable reason he wants to buy a frying pan.  “We were given two by the boys when we rebuilt the kitchen.  “What about a toilet brush, it’s lighter.” I suggest. “But we have a perfectly good toilet brush.”  It’s hopeless.  I leave him in the long long frying pan aisle and wander off to try and improve my French by reading labels. “Rongeur poison” in the gardening aisle. What kind of thing could a rongeur be now? I wonder if I need some.

I think how lifeless produce becomes in supermarkets.  The little pink and white radishes that teased the eye pleasingly in the Rue de Lilas market lose their spirit under the harsh neon lights of the hypermarche. After a bit I decide enough is enough. I want to get out of this place. I decide to use a ploy that always works in Australia.  I go to the service desk and explain in halting and pathetic French that I have lost mon mari and ask what can I do? The friendly lady says she can call him on the loudspeaker but, she gestures with a wave, it only works in here, and points - not out there.  “He’s in there” I say darkly.  “What is his name?” “Grant Mack Call” I say with a French accent hoping to make it easier to pronounce.  A stream of French adds itself to the tinkle of the musak as he is summoned.  I am not convinced. “Can you do it in English?”  She assents willingly and I teach “Would Grant McCall (proper pronunciation this time come to the information desk”  After a couple of practice runs she picks up the microphone but she must have lost her nerve because the announcement comes out in French.  It works though as it always does. (Except in Ikea where they won’t cooperate unless it’s a code 8 emergency.  Tell me what it is and I’ll cause it, I said, but they wouldn’t.)  The delightful thing about this retrieval strategy is that all the anger at being called in this embarrassing way is subconsciously directed at the authoritarian supermarket and not the instigator of the call.  And there’s no comfortable way of staying on in the supermarket after being called in that way.  And Grant seems resigned to not exploring the rival supermarket, Auchan.  Plus no frying pan.   I’m on a winning streak.

By this time I am hungry.  It’s another of our incompatibilities.  I can’t face breakfast and Grant , because he has a big one, doesn’t eat lunch and seems to regard the need for it as a moral weakness.  Anyway, we cruise the bleak streets of Calais for a possibility but everything is shut except except the friteries, shops dedicated to the production of chips with a few half hearted kebabs available on demand.  Actually a chip or two would go down a treat, I think and we stop and order a medium serve for me.  Grant orders a shish kebab which comes wrapped in a cylinder of tin foil squeezed tight at the ends.  Together with my chips in a polystyrene box, it is bundled into a paper bag with two tiny green forks and we go to the car to get out of he rain.  I begin on my chips but they are really bad.  They taste like old boiled potatoes that have been fried up.  Grant asks for his kebab and I squeeze too hard when handing it to him so a stream of oil lands in his face. I was horrified but I couldn’t help laughing.  There’s  Graham Greene short story about this situation.  A young man’s mother is killed by a pig falling on her when the Italian balcony it was kept on collapsed.  He can never find a wife because every time he tells a girlfriend about the tragedy she laughs.The girls know it’s terrible but they can’t help laughing.  So it was with me.  Grant is very very angry and wreaks the only revenge that matches the insult.  He drives to the other huge supermarket Auchan and leaves me in the car as he stalks in.  I pass the time (endless) reading the latest Julian Barnes novel on my phone.  It’s about Shostokovich and the cultural revolution and I’m not enjoying it as much as I should.  Grant comes back much mellowed in the fullness of time with a frying pan, a saucepan and some charcuterie and we repair to the Ibis to crack a bottle of wine and forget Calais.

Just had breakfast.  Thought I’d better after yesterday.  I was the only woman in the cafeteria . Everyone else except Grant is a policeman in mufti but with a gun peeping out from his waistline.  I ask in what looks to be an incident room in the room next to ours. “Is this a police station?”  One guy nods and one shakes his head ”Non non”.  Ah well, why should policemen be more startling than say, travelling salesmen, as co-residents?  I suppose it’s just their reason for being that makes their presence  a bit chilling.

On to England now and Brexit , which I learn is being whipped up into a nasty racist debate.  If Turkey gets into the EU all sorts of extremists and rapists will come sneaking across the Channel and Britain would best be out of it.  Alas if it were only that simple.  A home grown American has just mown down fifty odd people in a nightclub in the name of Allah.  What a world.

Paris - the Rue de Lilas, transport and the finer points of Air B@Being

We found our air B and B studio flat just down the road from the block in which my nephew Leonard and his family live.  The young woman who owned the place was waiting there with her boyfriend to hand over the key and I guessed she’d probably not rented out her place before.  She seemed anxious and reluctant to leave.  You really need to be a bit cold blooded about your place to let strangers take it over and she wasn’t. There’s an umbilical cord that needs cutting, which mercifully she managed to do in the end so I could flop down on her bed, tired after the six hour run from Lyon to Paris.  It is a pretty flat, all furnished brightly with Ikea stuff and three poppies, human size, have been glued on to the white wall, stylish and cheerful.  I feel a bit uneasy though.  So much of her is left behind, her toothbrush in the bathroom for example.  It takes a while not to feel like a guest without a host.

Claire, Leonard’s rather striking wife met us with the key to the underground car park where they have a space they never use on account of being bicycle people like Gwen and Stephane.

Back in Sydney there is a plan for a new neighbourhood where the old rail yards once were.  “There will be hardly any cars” the planner said airily “and the population will be mostly under 38”  “What when they grow up?” I asked at the meeting.  “What when they have kids?”  Well France is proving me wrong.  Families seem to manage perfectly well without cars here. People use all sorts of things to get about as well as bicycles – portelettes, the old fashioned scooters that used to be only for children can now be seen with young and old on them, skateboards and the rather absurd two wheeled platforms that hum along with their human cargo upright on top – all these are taking over in this interesting Paris neighbourhood where blocks of flats dominate and public spaces are full of people, especially children. 

There are brightly dressed women of African origin and men dressed in jabalahs with caps on their heads. But everybody has bags of shopping and nobody seems startled by anybody else.  There’s an amiability about the place which makes me feel at home.  One building here until recently accommodated over a thousand refugees, mostly from Eritrea.  Now that building has only a hundred and fifty in it and the rest of its occupants have dispersed into other places.  Like Lesbos this place must have had its stresses during the current migrations.

Claire, took us up to the family flat after we had dropped off the car in the deep and rather dank car park.  Leonard rose to greet us and it was so good to hug him and give him the two cheek kisses in the French way.  The kids emerged with twinkling curious eyes to see their grey haired uncle and aunt from far away.  Unlike Gwen and Stephane’s kids they were on their own ground and so not shy at all.  There was Albane, twelve with a wild crown of curly hair

and the identical twins Ysoline and Cebelie who are six. Kisses were scattered everywhere and I was introduced to Nacre, the hampster. “Can he go on the table?“ asks a twin. “Why not” says Leonard benevolently and the little thing patters amongst the plates of lovely cheese.  Albane brings me a funny note on a piece of paper with a wolf drawn on one side.  It says “1(picture of a heart) for you” The twins get Albane to bring out her exercise book of wolf pictures.  Usually, little girls of about twelve draw horses all the time but not Albane.  For her it’s wolves with the occasional dragon, all different, all vital and doing different things.  “Why wolves?” I ask “Not an elephant or a giraffe?”  She smiles secretively and says she doesn’t know.

The twins are fascinating.  They operate as an intense little unit, dressing a soft

toy pig and chattering away to each other.  At one point one disappeared and returned in a silken fancy dress but mostly they are together intent on some mutual purpose. I asked how their sister Albane felt when they were born and apparently she loved them from the start.  The only problem about having twins, their mother says, is that her love must be seen to be shared equally between them “Even down to the kisses or there is trouble”.

 We all go to the Sunday market together as Grant and I are going to make dinner for them as we did with niece Gwen’s family in Lyon.  The market is marvelous with beautiful tomatoes and artichokes the size of footballs, chickens that look authentic in a way supermarket ones don’t, yellowish and a bit bristly.  I want to buy some radishes but the man on the stall says something I can’t understand. “He says you can have a cucumber with them for three Euros” says Leonard. I accept and move on to the fish stall.  There are strange things I think are big prawns but are called langoustines.  I get some and say I need a lemon. ”Just take one” says Leonard.  “They are free”. Grant goes off to hunt for ice cream fot the kids and Claire goes back to make a what she says will be a light lunch and Leonard has some small mission so I rashly say I’ll mind the kids in the park while they perform athletic feats on the playground equipment.  One of the twins starts run off and look for her mother and I am dumbstruck. Which one? How do I call her back?  But its OK, big sister is on the case and catches up with the little blonde elf.  I tell the twin firmly I am her maman for the moment but I realize to my relief that actually I am redundant. Albane is watching over them with a worldly big sister wariness.

We have lunch and look at lots of photos – the children when they were truly tiny. Albane weighed less than a kilo when she was born and the twins were four weeks premature.  I am in awe of this couple who must have had such a hair-raising initiation into parenthood.

Our spaghetti dinner was a success and the girls had a bit of a rumpus on our bed while we had nuts and cheese.  It was a very good night and this time I just didn’t think about partings or any of that.  Maybe that’s the secret. To live in the minute. What’s the point of doing anything else?

  

A family meal

It has begun. The bated breath (what a funny expression that is) before meeting close kin we hardly know. The delight in seeing them and their children who belong to me by blood as I do to them and then the sadness of saying goodbye just as we know we like each other.  I look into Gwen’s face and she looks into mine and we see each other and also other people.  She sees her grandmother, in me and I also see a bit of mum in her too, along with her father’s dark eyes. The children both have the amazing thick hair of my sister and little Elise’s has a wonderful chestnut hue.  They arrived on bicycles and we had to decide what language to talk because we didn’t want the kids left out.  In the end it was a mix, trading words amongst ourselves so we could say what we wanted to.  And there was a lot to tell.

The kids were cautious at first but delightfully hungry and gobbled up our predinner snacks with relish while we waited for Stephane, still caught up in the aftermath of the shooting at work. (Nobody was hurt it turned out but it was very disturbing of course).  I clumsily tried to show the kids their two cousins in Sydney and one in Siem Reap.  They loved the video of Caiden eating yoghurt and saying “Yog”.   Then Ewan took over the phone with the competence of all children nowadays and found the photos he wanted to see.  Grant being Grant had a video of Gwen and Stephane’s wedding of ten years ago on his phone and that enchanted them for ages.  “Look at Mama!”  In fact Gwen looked lovely in a special green silk wedding dress as she walked down the aisle on her own, deploring the idea of being “given away” by her father.

We sat at the little iron table in the garden and ate the chicken and the lovely chocolates Gwen had brought and we talked about all sorts of things – the fear that had attended Ewan’s hole in the heart operation which had been 100 per cent successful, their work, our Greek trip, the migrant crisis.  The children crawled into our bed and had a fight in which Ewan pulled Elise’s lovely hair and so Elise settled for the sofa. 

Eventually it began to patter down with rain and I wondered how on earth they were going to cycle home, especially as Ewan was now sound asleep.  True cyclists as they all were they tossed off my worries. When the rain stopped we said goodbye with heaps of urgings to come to Australia and we watched them all glide down the road,  Ewan decidedly somnambulistic (there must be a proper word for riding a bicycle in your sleep).

Of course I wondered if we’d ever meet again and felt a little sad.  But, I thought, we’ve signed our names in the books of their lives.  They will remember the dinner in our mad little flat with plants growing out of the wall and a whole wall made of a shattered mirror.  They’ll remember the old aunt and uncle who came from Australia just as we’ll remember them with their honest souls and their bicycles.

Gwen my niece

Lyon

I am struck by how thoroughly anglophone Europe is these days.  There are two workmen fixing the facade of our building.  Our uber cool little studio has access to the garden courtyard where  one man is abseiling half way up the building.

  I am sitting at the little iron table. with an umbrella over it.  The second guy comes up to me aimiably "Be careful my colleague up.  I would not like any alteration to your head"  I go in nervously. "Sit outside" he invites and moves the table away from the swinging ropes for me. Hardly anyone doesn't speak English. 

We went into Lyon today slightly downcast because we hadn't been able to get in touch with my niece and her family and we'd bought lots of chicken yesterday to cook for them tonight.  Finally we got a phone call and it turned out there'd been a crisis at her husband's Stephan's work.  Something about somebody being shot so I'm not surprised they lost track of us.  Anyway they are coming tonight and the chicken is nicely simmering in wine with Greek herbs.

Actually something might be going on in Lyon.  A metro station we went to had at least twenty soldiers with machine guns patrolling it. Nobody seemed unduly peturbed however and a woman was on the special pedalling machine which recharges your phone.  But surely there aren't enough soldiers for every station to have so many.  All a bit uneasy making.  And a black unmarked van was being towed away from an official building with a string of ambulances and fire engines standing by.  Could France be a bordelle after all or is it my hyperviligance, the anxst that comes with every simple thing being fraught with possible mistakes - crossing the road, parking the car (and we get towed way if we get that wrong) - queueing in the random way the French do. No nice relaxing lines but they still know whose turn it is.  Even apologising can go wrong.  I don't like "Pardon" because it is a bit rude in English, but I'm not sure about "Excusez moi" either. The world bustles by in Lyon and the traveller becomes something of a lost soul.  Irrelevant and clumsy.  The natives all around are from everywhere and there is a cheerful Muslim presence - a big Halal meat counter in the supermarket with a "Bon Ramadan" sign above it.  That seems oddly contradictory to me.  I thought Ramadan was supposed to be a time of deprivation, not a blow out like Christmas is for us.  But perhaps the "Bon" is meant in a deeper spiritual sense.  Who knows.

One incident on the metro impressed me. A thoroughly mutilated woman came into our carriage sort of hopping along on her bottom with her legs out behind her.  She was begging in that practised pleading way that accustomed beggars have.  Everybody shook their heads or averted their gaze round us and she passed on only to return in a bit, not performing any more. A black guy by the door sheepishly slipped something into her bag thus breaking the pattern of the carriage.  I wondered if this was perhaps a Muslim thing - to give to beggars and I wished I'd done it too.  It must be nice to have simple feelings about giving to strangers.

We went to the rather formidable and expensive Museum of Tissues and Cultural Design.  I'd hoped for lovely fabrics and I suppose in their way the exhibits were indeed that.  It's just I didn't like them very much.  They were mostly 18th century wall hangings, florid and opulent and silky with far too many fat cherubs on them. The mighty tapestries had gods and goddesses with silly expressions on their faces. How is it that painting can bring alive ancient characters but tapestry makes them deader than ever.   And so much work it must have taken to produce these huge dark wall hangings.  It seems a pity.  I realise that what I like is rather rough stuff, serviceable and dashing but not exquisite.  Not the product of years of slavery and lost eyesight anyway.  I want to be delighted rather than impressed which seems to be what the stuff in this museum is all about.

The cultural design museum also saddened me a bit.  Room after room of splendid 18th century furniture just as it must have been when it was in action.  But to me it oozed a lifestyle of wealth but not enough to do.  I could imagine ladies sitting around with their little workboxes, bored out of their minds and saying thoughtless things like "Let them eat cake"

One item however charmed me and one gave me the shivers.  The charming one was a "beard dish" - a soup bowl with a wide rim which had a mouth sized chunk cut out, presumable so the gentleman could lift up the bowl to drain its dregs with his beard tucked nicely underneath.  What about the moustache, I thought. Really our modern straws have solved a lot of problems.  I wonder who invented them.

The horrible thing was a room full of modern military fabric woven in such a way as to make it defensive and fireproof, fit for any kind of combat. It was displayed on a mannequin soldier with straps here and there, all very battle ready.  It didn't seem at all appropriate to a museum which is after all "a place where you put things you don't use any more"  One can only hope that one day all that nasty stuff will be as bizarre and unused as the sedan chair on the floor below.

Evil eye beads and other things you don't use any more

A languor that is also restless always settles on us when we are about to move on.  We don’t want to do anything.  It’s as if our curiosity has gone on ahead of us.  It took the arrival of two determined cleaners with clean sheets to evict us from our little place.  Grant had a minor mission that sent us to the next village.  He wanted some evil eye beads to put in the little bags we had bought for our great nieces in Lyon and Paris.  When I was in Greece fifty years ago the shops were dripping with them but now they have passed out of fashion along with all things peasanty.  Olive oil soap and smartly packaged herbs there are aplenty but no superstitious evil eyes to ward off envy and spite. 

I spotted a sign “Museum of Rural Life” and Grant  said
“Humph, we’ll give that a miss” “What do you mean humph,” I said,” I want to see it” and we are both so glad we did. 

One of Grant’s students once defined a museum as “A place you put things you don’t use any more” and there were lots of things like that. Gorgeous woven bags and coverlets. Embroidered napkins.  Looms and spindles and agricultural tools, rusty and gnarled.  I thought with a slight sense of shock that in my twenties I’d seen all these things in action – the ploughs, the things for winnowing corn but now they have hallowed museum status because they are redundant.  Apparently nobody is much interested in weaving now in Crete.  I guess it’ll take another fifty years for there to be evil eyes in the shops again and classes in the old crafts but right now everybody is too busy being modern and sophisticated.

The design of the exhibitions was exquisite with mirrors to show the backs of the woven bags and a strange poetic gallery lined with cloth that had regular big rips in it.  You could peer through each rip and see something humble and old, a pile of fairly rotten baskets maybe, or a donkey saddle.  It seemed to sum up the papering over of the past that happens when modernity takes over.

Our journey to Lyons has taken place.  We started out at 4.30 am and saw the weird Cretan dawn when for a while the sky is paler than the clouds and they look black.  A very efficient security lady went through all our pockets and put Grant’s bag through several times looking for an object that made a suspicious shadow on the xray machine.  It turned out to be a metal disk with Linear A script from Phaestos on it.  (A copy of course.)  She laughed merrily at her discovery.  We were not amused at having to squash everything back into our delicately organised luggage.  I was glad I’d done the washing though and there were no grotty knickers to encounter.

We are now in a very surprising little air B and B studio beautifully but crazily decorated.  One wall is a deliberately shattered mirror, another has moss and lichen and all sorts of other greenery apparently growing from it.  I honestly can’t tell if it is fake or some cunningly watered arrangement.  Tomorrow we meet the French Connection, or the first part of it anyway.  Grant is making dinner in our little kitchenette and all is well.

Sleepless in Hernonissos

 

It’s late and I’ve had a couple of glasses of Greek wine out of a plastic bottle.  It’s surprisingly good.  Grant is fast asleep but somehow sleep is not coming my way.  If this is a bit soppy put it down to sculling red wine. 

This is the first time I am going back to England since Mum died, now two years ago.  I am a little afraid.  What of?  The uncertainty of coping with a country without mum in it, and, after seeing the people I love having to say goodbye perhaps for the last time. I am seventy now and probably won't go to England again.  It's such a bloody long way,  but there again who knows.

I went to Australia without a qualm in my twenties leaving everyone who mattered and started afresh.  Some of it was anguish and homesickness but most of it was rich in friendships and a real love for my new hot amazing country, which has  (until recently) always adapted itself to new people coming with their gifts to join the evolving society. There is sometimes a brusqueness in the welcome but nevertheless almost everyone finds a spot for themselves.

 

I feel enormously blessed but scared of the point I am at, on this particular journey -just about to go back and visit England, which, had I had stayed there, would also have been good in its own way.  There are people there whom I love and could have served better.

 Nowadays love doesn’t vanish with migration and, with all the means of communication we have, doesn’t even need to wither.  I see my 18 month old grandson, Caiden, resident in Cambodia covered in yoghurt and saying joyously “Yog” on Skype. We are so lucky these days.

Travelling to new places is frivolous in a way, no emotional cost and a lot of fun, but going back to where you came from is a mixed business.  I feel eager anticipation alongside a sense of the huge minus of mum who is gone. I want to reconfirm what it all meant during those years I belonged and I want to say goodbye and thank you to England for whatever it was that launched me on my life as it has turned out to be.