FAMILY, ENGLAND, MEMORIES, HOLIDAYS AND TALKS!

Remembering our connections with our past and our relatives and future generations.

My Mum told me a story about her dog when she was a young girl living in Teignmouth in Devon in the war. This dog got into the habit of leaving the house in the morning, going to the train station in town, getting on the train for Exeter and then returning home on the afternoon train. I like that, I also like that they had a tortoise which would also roam the streets to be returned to the house by neighbours. Less pleasant was her belief that the pet rabbit had probably been sacrificed for the pot because there was so little food at that time.

She sometimes comes up with stories like these, or others, like the fact that she lived in her parents hotel but never had a room of her own because she was always given whatever was left over to sleep in when the guests were all registered. Or that she and her sister were evacuated to a school in the countryside in the war and rarely saw their mum. Her sister was still a baby; just able to sit up and she would have been about four or five. Or that she remembered the bombing and had thought it funny when the vibrations of an explosion sent a vase crashing onto a great aunt’s head, or that in air raid practice she got so fed up waiting to be rescued that she told her rescuers she was dead when they finally got to her. Or that after the war her parents divorced and that was not the done thing as she was a schoolgirl at the local convent at the time where divorce was just not acceptable. Or that the Guest house of was it a hotel? was flooded when she was a child but they had no insurance for it so lost it. Or maybe that she took to her bed when she was about thirteen and stayed there for months. She says she wasn’t ill and that the doctor who was summoned was wise and said that if she needed to be in bed then she needed to be in bed. Sometimes she tells us this was growing pains and that she grew three inches in those months but we never really know the reason she spent six months in bed in her early adolescence.

If I could, I would sit down and write all my mum’s stories out; she tells me they are boring but I am fascinated by them. I remember when she visited us in Scotland and sat down with me Wendy and Louie one evening and told us about her experience of the war; how Louie was round eyed with interest and said it was better to hear this than see any movie.

I have only sketchy stories of my mums past and of her parents. Her mum made a number of silly business decisions when she got divorced and lost what money she had and ended up spending much of her life as a ladies companion which sounds very anachronistic now. It was an eccentric life; I remember visiting her in different houses. I remember her telling us children that she didn’t know how to drive but that the lady she was looking after was blind, so she steered the car while the lady did the pedals or the rumour that a lord proposed to her but she turned him down, probably because she was outspoken and opinionated or just plain old contrary and had no time for toeing any domestic line. I remember she walked all the time and that when she came to look after me and my brother, after my sister was born, she could never remember which of us was which and made the most horrible meals.

My grandad, I rarely saw. He had been in the merchant navy in the war on the arctic convoys. He was very, very, quiet; tall and thin with thick curly, wiry hair. We wanted to know his stories of the war but he didn’t volunteer them except to say he was once standing beside his friend on the ship and that friend’s head was blown off by a shell. I think we knew not to ask more after that. He was gentle and kind but we didn’t know how to talk to him. Like his ex-wife he lived in a series of what might have been known as boarding houses. I remember visiting him, to find he had one room that doubled as a kitchen and sitting room and which had a leather strap dangling from the wall with which he sharpened his cut throat razor. He would have had a bedroom too but I don’t remember seeing it. I know we had to be well behaved in order not to upset the landlord. He came to Norfolk to stay once and took us swimming every day in the North Sea whether it was calm or rough; oblivious to the fact that it was winter. We loved it and vowed to carry on swimming when he left but never did. He was some sort of engineer and part of his job was cleaning out industrial furnaces which were often covered in asbestos; it was the asbestos that finally killed him.

I am with my Mum just now. We go for a walk every day, down at the sea or up on the cliffs. I tend to walk Dash the dog; striding away, a bit beyond Wendy and my Mum and sometimes I hear her telling Wendy about my Grandma. Grandma Costa spent the last years of her life in Seaford, finally ending up in a nursing home before dying at the age of ninety two. Wendy says she would have loved to have met this eccentric, opinionated woman. She walked and walked, she had a beach hut, she sat in from morning to evening and when it was warm she would strip down to her bra and knickers to sun bath; scorning things like bikinis or bathing costumes. She was very good at riling up my dad who did not know how to deal with her and very good at saying outrageous things. My mum was often summoned by the care home to account for her mum’s behaviour which often centred round her liking for sherry.

She insisted that if she wanted to drink sherry in the evening she could do but the Care Home disapproved, rightly she got her way and drank her sherry.

In her later life although she could and did walk, it was with huge pain as her joints were worn out; you could actually hear them grinding against each other as she walked. She became almost blind and in the very last few months of her life willed death on herself, not walking, not seeing, being in pain, she could not see the point.

I think Wendy is right; she would have loved to have met her. Wendy for all her kind and peaceable ways is, in the right company, wild and outrageous like my grandma was and has a similar sense of humour about the absurdity of the world. I can imagine than wittering together in a way that I would never have been able to.

These last few days have been wonderful. I always get cross with myself when I am down here for not coming to Seaford more often. The drive took two days and was hot and sweaty and noisy with traffic and smelly with traffic fumes and sometimes scary as cars swerved in front of us but I could fly down more often and stay just a few days so I don’t have to take time off work.

I find it very strange to realise we are now also old, like Grandma Costa was. Mum is eighty seven; tiny, she eats in the healthy way I should eat, little oil, not much bread or potato, lots of veg and fruit and fish but I am not so sure that is what she should be doing; to my mind she needs to put on some weight just as I, at sixty two, really need to lose some weight. Like my grandma she also walks, it is a way of life for our family. If mum doesn’t have her daily walk, she feels miserable, much as my sister does or my brother. I walk Dash the dog but do not have the same compulsion any more, I prefer to lie down and read or sleep if I have nothing much I need to do. My mum is gregarious; the number of friends she has and looks after, the number of times she still does her duties at Samaritans and the coffees at her church. She has taken up exercise classes for older people and tomorrow I will pick her up after her class to save her having to walk back home up the hill.

She has an easy rapport with Wendy; they are always talking and always making fun of my drinking or my weight or my preoccupation with my phone, but in a good way, a loving, we want the best for you kind of way. Somehow; we seem to have spent the holidays all practicing insincere smiles at comments we all make, or maybe sarcastic smiles. It started with Wendy but spread to me and mum and now, like schoolchildren, we cannot stop giggling at the latest fake smile one of us gives to the other. It is good this; the chance to be silly and rude in safety.

Our time here has mainly been about walking. The first day we walked along the shore to Newhaven; we trod on the shingle and got blown about by the wind. We walked on the remnants of the old railway line that used to link up with the old flour mill. We passed Sea kale and mullein and poppies, we passed sweet peas and a whole host of other flowers. We skirted the old foundations of the hospital for young disabled people and the tarmac for the old seaplane base. The wind was strong but warm compared to Scotland. I was a bit anxious because it was on this walk a couple of years ago, that mum fell and bruised and cut herself, leading to some hours at the urgent care centre in Lewes.

The next day we went up to the barn walk, queuing to drive up the narrow road to the cliff top. Again, I walked Dash and took photos of flowers while sky larks sung high overhead. Wendy and mum wittered, I worried about Dash getting off his lead and falling off the cliff edge as he surely would, if left to his own devices. We saw so many butterflies, spotted white ones, blue ones, brown ones and mottled red ones. We got hot in the sun and sat on a bench and heard that for some people, the Seven Sisters that we could see, were a must visit, almost sacred site to visit when they came to England.

We looked at tourists standing close to the cliff edge for selfies and heard that most years, one or two of them will step too close and fall off. We looked at the blue green milky sea and I held Wendys hand to combat the vastness of the skies and the open spaces.

In the afternoon I bought food for salads for tea and we wandered the Seaford streets, looking in the few open charity shops for trousers and a shirt for Fiona and Michael’s wedding back in Scotland at the end of the week. We also sat in the sun outside a café and ate ice cream.

Yesterday we were down by the sea again. Walking from the house to the promenade; wandering along the path past the beach huts and ice cream sheds, past the Martello tower which has some of my Dad’s uniforms from the Air Force in its collection. I remembered my dad, in his later years, driving here in his buggy making a point by leaving us far behind, so we sometimes had to run panting to catch up with him.

We reached the end of the promenade where the fish sculpture seats are and where once, many years ago, my niece turned to Wendy and me for help and we gave what we could.

Back in town my mum carried on home while we toured the shops and had another ice cream; Rhubarb and custard for Wendy and passionfruit for me. We paused at an alternative crystal shop where I was tempted to buy amber spider ear rings for Louie but instead Wendy bought her an incense holder and heard the story of the young man in the shop who had just been dumped by his girlfriend and had come in to buy a revenge candle to burn his distress away. The shop owner was more concerned about how he looked after himself than his revenge but he grinned at us as he left.

We sat in the garden in the evening until my mum said it was too cold. The pigeons did their cooing which I say is wonderful and my mum says is irritating. After tea I lay in the couch and listened to Wendy and my mum talking. I liked the wash of connection in the room and dozed until even I realised I was needing my bed.

I like this. I should talk more, I should see if there are any tasks I need to do about the house but here I mainly have little need to do anything and can slowly relax and maybe think of resuming my psychology homework which I have been strenuously avoiding for the last two weeks.

Like my grandma my mum is her own person. When we stopped over with my brother on the way down here. My brother told the story of how he came across mum walking down a lane flapping her arms in the air and going “Whee, Whee, Whee,” with delight in her voice before turning and flapping them at the crows in the field to say “Shoo, shoo”; again with delight.

Away over in Bristol, Keri will be waking after her brain operation that has been done to try to reduce the constant pain she has been in since her head injury over a decade ago. I hope it has worked. I got a text not long ago to say she is in pain and the machine that gives the stimulus that reduces the pain is big and that she is really worried it will all have been in vain. In Menorca, my niece, Jess, will be getting used to her engagement ring, after her announcement of a few days ago. Somewhere; somewhere in the world my son will be doing something and maybe he will be enjoying it. I hope so.

In Edinburgh my ex-sister in law, Gill will probably be trying to decide how long to hang onto the clothes she set aside for me and which I haven’t been able to pick up yet. I am so glad I am in touch with my that side of my family again.

Gill’s daughter, Lisa, lives in the USA with her husband, Paul. He is a policeman and I think his family are originally from Korea. She is expecting a baby soon which is very exciting but I worry for anyone in a place like the USA nowadays.

Arran my youngest nephew is on a farm in Norway and Ella, his sister, is in Poland with her partner who is from Poland.

There are many nephews and nieces, it is lovely getting to know them and strange to find myself going to their weddings or hearing that they are about to have babies.

Wendys children are back at home with their dad and next week will set off for France with him and his partner and her children and there they will stay with his brother and his French wife and children and his other brother with his Polish wife and children. I like these international elements very much and hope that with our younger generation they are part of a swing from bigotry which will leave people like Trump and Farage alone and isolated like they should have been years ago.

Today we went to Sheffield Park, a National Trust property with three large lakes on it, two of which were covered in lilies. It has been sunny all day but was windy enough and the park with its trees, shady enough, to make it comfortable. Dash got hissed at by geese; we ambled and sat and finally ended up in the nicest plant nursery I have ever been in. A walled garden crammed full of plants and pots and tables and signs and sculptures and Knick Knacks. A large part of it devoted to a small vineyard and one of the buildings full of bottles of wine for sale. The owner was gentle and kind; mum bought a couple of plants.

Now we are home. Wendy is in her room resting but luckily her endo is not too painful this month. I am in my room and, as it is four o’clock, mum will be drinking a cup of tea; probably in the garden. I am in my room tapping away, filled with the wonder of family and connection. For many years I was only a half-hearted member of the family and pretty oblivious to what everyone was up to but since I left my ex-wife and especially, since meeting Wendy, those connections have blossomed leaving me confused and ashamed that once they were fragile and stretched to breaking point.

My son lets me message him on facebook. He won’t let me become a friend there and rarely if ever posts there and I have no idea where he lives or how he spends his life but maybe in a while I will send him news of his cousins and Aunts and Uncles and his Grandma and maybe, like me, he will feel some bond with those he is at present estranged from and maybe I will have the wisdom to know I acted in a similar way once and didn’t know, till my fifties, how much I had always been loved by my family and how wonderful they are: those of us who are getting old, those of us who are no longer here and those much younger than me, busy being vibrant adults about to bring new life and new stories into the world.

Tomorrow, I go to London to give my speech at the British Academy the next day. I am excited by it but apprehensive. People who have seen the talk say it is a good one. I am less sure now. I will have to socialise and I will have to sit on a panel and I will have to be polite and all these things. I am not very good at all that at all and will be relieved when I am back on the train home to Wendy, Dash the dog and my mum.

I did give my talk – I will post it and Jane Morris (the Chair of the Scottish Division of the Royal College of Psychiatrists) response to it next Wednesday and yes people were very nice indeed about it!