“Wait a minute, Mr Postman…”

Until sometime around the early ’80s I was very Little Britain, very provincial – I just assumed that everybody had a letterbox in their front door, plus a postman to trudge round every morning pushing letters through it. It wasn’t until my sister emigrated to Canada and started to tell these tales…

Well, it seems that even in the middle of winter, when temperatures are 40 degrees below or whatever, if she wants her mail she has to don full arctic gear and big, slip-proof boots and trudge down the newly snow-ploughed driveway in order to spray something on her mailbox to melt the overnight ice that has welded it shut. She also needs a chisel or screwdriver in case the spray doesn’t work, and then a key…

And it wasn’t until sometime in the 90s, when I went to work for a university college providing postgraduate distance-learning courses to students all over the globe, that I realised there could be such a thing as a dwelling that does not have a well-defined address. So we could be mailing giant parcels of course materials to “Beyond the village, turn left at the lake, third hut.” I used to wonder how they plugged their computers in, because surely a hut whose location could only be vaguely described would not have electricity. Students also had trouble with beads of sweat dropping onto the page, creeping damp, and ants. Paper-chomping ants.

You would think I would be grateful for my nice, civilised British letter-box and my nice, predictable British postman – or in fact, lady – but I have come to mostly dread what might tumble through it. I cannot properly concentrate until the witching hour – mid-day or thereabouts – has passed and I know I am safe from yet another bill or – OMG, the Bank Statement. That always arrives on the 13th. I spend the whole month dreading the 13th. I count down to the 13th. In various ways I aim to distract myself from the fact that the 13th is drawing ever closer.

Aside from bills there is the monthly Parish Council Newsletter to cast a pall. This is a single sheet of A4 paper folded into three. This month it is yellow. Even the folding-into-three depresses me. It reminds me of when I was a legal secretary and had to fold my boss’s signed post and put it in the envelope, with the address showing exactly in the centre of the glassine window. I was very good at this.

In fact I still am. I only have to look at an A4 sheet of paper and I can fold it exactly into three, with the edges exactly touching. I can even accomplish this feat with my eyes shut. Trouble is, it reminds me that a) I was no good at any other part of that job and b) it was the only thing I ever managed to do that impressed my mother. It seemed to be my life’s work to impress my parents in some way but all I ever manged was the paper-folding thing. And then only my mother.

The Parish Council Newsletter enrages me because it lectures me, in badly-written, ungrammatical prose, on things I have not done wrong:

“Dog Fouling: Please be aware it is an instant fine for not picking up after your dogs. It is also unhygienic and nasty!” I don’t have a dog.

“Parking: Complaints have been received,  (and why the comma?) that there is an issue with people parking in places that can be considered dangerous. It has also been reported that there has been parking on paths and green areas, you can be fined up to £500 for this offence.” But not me, guv. And where? What green areas? What paths? And complaints by whom? At least make it interesting.

“Speeding Cars: Please note that the exit road from the village is a 30mph road, and many concerns have been received especially from parents walking children to and from school.” How is anything managing to drive at over 20mph, say, when the road is beset with giant speed-bumps so large even the bus has to slow right down to negotiate them? Is there a manic 40mph cyclist about?

Or else it tells me things I don’t care about even though I feel I probably ought to:

“The Annual Seniors Christmas Lunch in the Village Hall. Forms available from the Post Office.”  Just went gluten-free. And went last year. That was an experience.

“Christmas Lights Competition –  6 prizes of £25 each.” Why not use up the earth’s dwindling resources and pollute the starlit night sky with tawdry flashing lights? Why not spend £100 on lights and electricity in order to win £25?

“Park Renovations – The Village park is in need of a new paint job, this has been sourced and the work should start shortly.” I’m confused. Are they painting the grass a more acceptable shade of green?

The stupid yellow creature just makes me feel slightly at odds with the rest of the human race – defective, somehow.

Into the Recycling you shall go, ee-aye ee-aye ee-aye oh
And if I catch you bending…

Knees up, Mother Brown…

But enough of that, now.

Being a Beastly Sister

In my parents’ bungalow the door-handles were made of Bakelite. Indeed, in those far-off days almost everything was made of this hideous proto-plastic – radios, telephones, pipe-stems, toys…

Bakelite was always brown, at least in my experience, and there was something threatening about it. That was why my little sister believed me when I informed her in a scary kind of hiss that all the handles in the passage were actually radios, and if you touched one you would almost certainly be electrocuted, or else the handle/radio would send a signal to spies to come and get you. For a long time she would sit crying under one or other of the seven Bakelite door-handles in the passage, unable to let herself in, even to her own bedroom. Eventually, of course, she blabbed to Mum and I got punished – that time by Mum rather than Dad.

I was always getting punished by Dad. I got punished for things I had done to my three-year-old sister – like telling her the passage was also full of dragons. Ragonies, she would bleat, tearfully. Ragonies in the passage!

Yes, I would say, GREAT BIG RAGONIES. The red ones breathe fire and scorch you to bits, the blue ones just EAT you…

I was horrible to her. I hit her when no one was looking. I dragged her along the passage (the passage seemed to feature in most of our episodes) by her long hair. I laughed when she made a mess eating her food and had to have her face wiped with a flannel. That chubby, innocent little face irritated the bejesus out of me. I just wanted to… I just wanted to…

And yet I loved her, and she loved me, and she’s now all I have left in the way of family, emotionally if not in fact.

Later in life, having digested far too many self-help paperbacks and psychology manuals, I have come to understand why I was such a Beastly Big Sister – possibly.

I think it may have been the thing with Dad – unless I was just born spiteful, which is also a possibility. I was his first child and I was weird – long, sulky silences alternating with day-long howling tantrums. I would barricade myself in my bedroom – or the toilet, if he was chased me. This annoyed everyone, since there was only one toilet in the bungalow and I could be in there for a day at a time, huddled on the floor, hiccupping, drying my eyes, crying again, hiccupping… I remember thinking, I have no food and I have no water but I can spend a penny if I want to, and blow my nose on the loo-paper. Though it was Izal in those days. A sheet of Izal was akin to a sheet of glass as far as bottoms, or sensitive, swollen noses, were concerned.

He punished me with slaps – ferocious slaps around the face and legs and any other bit of me he could happen to reach – because his father had punished him that way, and probably the Army or Air Force or whatever it was he was forcibly conscripted into had also treated him that way, for years. He had a knack for backing me into small corners, against a wall or a door, say, thus combining the slaps with bangs to the head.

The wrong thing might be contradicting him (because he was wrong – I was a persistently, foolishly argumentative and logical child) or answering back (because he was wrong).

A bad thing might be elbows on the table at mealtimes, and reading (which he did all the time, but apparently this was a rule only for children – illogical).

A bad thing might be my sister spraying the living room wallpaper (every single wall) with ink from a fountain-pen but since I was the oldest I should have stopped her. She and I were both clumsy and disaster-prone.

A bad thing might be picking up a cactus and getting a palm-full of prickles or falling on a glass shelf and breaking it.

A bad thing might be throwing an apple through a window, in one of my rages.

A bad thing might be putting my own fist through the garage window, where he had locked me for some earlier misdemeanour, and cutting my wrist in the process.

Trouble was, I had a goldfish-like short term memory. By the time he had found out and worked up a head of steam to come after me, I had forgotten.

He also had a way with words. Anger seemed to release this gift in him and I would be on the receiving end of a stream of steaming vitriol. He knew me so well that he could take me to pieces. And he did take me to pieces. I swiftly forgot/forgave the slaps and the bangs on the head but I never did forgive the words.

And so I suppose, when you are a child you don’t know why you’re being Beastly. Nobody’s yet explained to you about Kicking the Cat. You only know you’re angry and you want to oppress someone. I inherited his height, his physical power, his intelligence and his verbal facility and I did what he did with those thing – I hurt a helpless child; I used words to make pretty lies, and monsters to scare her. Because I could.

In a drawer in my kitchen cabinet I have a treasured possession. It’s a dark green wooden coaster, a gift from my little sister, who now lives in Canada. She has probably forgotten it. A worn away label on the back says Cedar Mountain… something, Salt Spring Island, B.C., Canada. It says:

SISTERS

by chance

FRIENDS

by choice

NaPoWriMo 7/4/16: Kenny

Kenny was a funny kind of brother

Spent most of the time on his back

Watching sky go over

Or crouched in the dust with the ants

To hear them whisper.

 Kenny lives in Canada now

In a heated apartment block

But I always imagine him out in the snow

And walking off into the dark.

His songs come over the radio

Beautiful fractured lines

For women he’s seen in the subway

Or in glossy magazines

He sings them sweet and sad and low

For ladies who can’t insist

That he love in a foreign language, or give

What he never has possessed.

 

Thanks, Hindsight

How is the year shaping up for you so far? Have your predictions come true, or did you have to face a curve ball or two?

I didn’t expect my brother-in-law to be dying. That’s the curve ball.

He’s younger than me. When they came over from Canada after Labor Day (always after Labor Day, when air tickets are cheaper) he spent two days painting my bathroom green. Except to him it looked yellow, because he’s colour blind. He did a really good job – not sloppy, like I would have done. Two days of sanding, masking and painting while my sister and I sat downstairs catching up on old times. She said he was tired a lot nowadays, but neither of us thought. He was waiting for a test. The test took a whole year to come round, and by then it was too late. He’s got about a year; maybe longer, with treatment.

I never thought I’d miss him in advance. I mean – he’s not my husband. And I suppose that’s what’s always been the trouble – such similar men, such spookily similar personalities – he’s always reminded me. I wasn’t nice, sometimes; I was prickly; I just daren’t let him take me over, start telling me what to think and do. I’d had twenty-two years of it. Twenty-two years of looking for the strength to leave, and more than that since, of paying the price. I escaped. Except you drag it all along with you, trailing clouds of resentment; clouds of mistrust; all men to be tarred with the same brush.

I was distracted: bound up in Mum and her problems. Mum with her dementia – and even before the dementia, that genius she’s got for sucking everybody in, bending all the attention in her direction. Being deaf will do that, of course. Everybody needs to face you; everybody has to focus on you, mime to you, repeat for you. Nowadays, when you don’t want to listen you screw up your eyes: so everybody writes you notes. When you don’t want to read the notes you screw them up and throw them on the floor. We haven’t told you, and we won’t. By the next day you’d have forgotten.

In the midst of all this it was spreading, this thing you have, and none of us knew. As always you flew over, and as always you did stuff for people. You keep a set of overalls in a cupboard at your Mum’s house. You bring your own drill and all the bits to go with it in a heavy-duty plastic case. A place for everything. You painted my bathroom green and thought it was yellow. Then you drove up North and did stuff for your Mum and your sister. You sorted us all out, like you always do. You did that stuff, flew home, and found out you were dying.

So that’s the curve ball.

My sister phones me most nights. She doesn’t know what to do. I just looked it up – we’re precisely 6,793 kilometres apart. What can I do? Only sit in that uncomfortable chair and listen. Only refer back to my own life, only repeat half-remembered stories from books I half-remember reading. What good is that?

I shall be glad to get out of this house.

Glad not to see those newly-painted walls.

Glad to be somewhere else entirely.

In the kitchen at parties

I never did like parties. Parties don’t suit my miserable, self-conscious, unsociable personality – but sometimes you can’t get out of them. I’ve noticed they get less frequent and more dire in direct proportion to one’s age. I’ve also noticed that my very presence at a party seems to guarantee dismalness…dismality…dismalaciousness…

So, the last party I went to was New Year’s Eve 2014. It was at my new neighbour’s house. Her ex-husband was there and between them they had cooked, or maybe bought (difficult to tell once out of the cardboard box and displayed on a reindeer plate left over from Christmas) a mountain of vol-au-vents, little quichey things, sausages on sticks and whatever. She said come over at nine. That seemed quite a late start but at least it cut down the amount of hours I could possibly be expected to be there. As I stepped over the wonky little brick wall that divides her house from mine I rehearsed my escape story. My sister had mentioned phoning from Canada at midnight our time. I just had to be next to the phone in case she did. So difficult to get a line from places like Canada and the States on a public holiday. All the ex-pats calling home at once. Etc.

I left it till ten past nine. That’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? And I figured it would be packed in there by that time and there would be less conspicuity involved. I tend to like to edge in sideways, find a seat and slither into it, and never leave that seat again unless forced to do so for a bathroom visit, throughout which I worry that ‘my’ seat won’t be there when I get back and I might have to stand.

So I knocked on the door and there was no one there, except neighbour and ex-husband in a rather startling red-walled living room; she had obviously been redecorating in the current local style – feature walls – visual indigestion. I loathe red. And there we sat. The ex-husband was conscientious about small talk. I did my best. None of us mentioned the fact that… well, that was the elephant in the room. All that food. No one to eat it. Then one other neighbour arrived with his girlfriend. He isn’t very keen on me, I think. He talked about long-distance lorry-driving a lot, and the correct way of loading a long-distance lorry, and the correct way of fastening a tarpaulin to a long-distance lorry. And eventually I remembered my sister’s imminent call, collected my coat from the knob on the end of the bannister, and went home. I felt this would be exactly the night for drinking half, if not three quarters of a bottle of Blue Nun all alone whilst watching TV till 2 in the morning and falling asleep on the sofa, but of course I had no Blue Nun so I microwaved myself some milk and put a teaspoon of honey in it.

The one before that was the Christmas before the Christmas before that. That was a lively one. Oh yes. I didn’t escape from that till one a.m. It was at another neighbour’s – the one down the end next the giant field that they seem to plough all year round, even in the middle of the night with floodlights on the tractor, when not spraying it with dung or pesticide.

The house is eccentric, being full of every sort of light imaginable. Everything lights up and moves all at once – pictures (waterfalls, etc) , fairy lights, a multitude of lava-lamps, the blue winking Christmas tree in the window, put there specially to annoy the neighbours over the road (‘Her and her Illegal Scotsman’) who were loathed and never invited; an enormous flat-screen TV with the volume up to 92 or thereabouts, which somebody kept flicking at with the remote control. I never knew a television could have so many channels and so many menus to find those channels on, or that you could watch five or six channels at once, whilst smoking packet after packet of cigarettes, dancing with children, drinking, telling jokes, and experimenting with a home karaoke kit. Forgive me, Delilah, I just couldn’t take any moooooore…

Once again, I found my chair – or rather half a small sofa – and stuck to it. The springs were wrecked and I suspected my bottom might actually be on the floor. It felt like it. People kept coming and sitting next to me, which was nice, if stressful. I wasn’t sure what they were talking about as I’m slightly deaf. Normally I don’t notice it but in any loud environment all I can hear is multi-directional loudness. I am reduced to lip-reading. Although I have become quite good at this over the years, it’s difficult when people are talking about tragic events that happened in the neighbourhood long before you arrived. At twelve-fifty a.m. mine host started to tell me for the second time that evening the tale of the old lady who had once lived next to the Illegal Scotsman.

Old lady, she was, and we didn’t realise she had died. It was them little dogs, you see. When her son found her a week later she was scratched to ribbons – scratched to ribbons, she was. It were them little dogs. He thought she’d been murdered.

Just what you want to hear when you have a vivid imagination and live alone with a multitude of cats. And for the second time in one evening. I couldn’t bear it. My head was spinning, my eyes were watering with all the smoke and I was full of chocolate mini-rolls and mince-pies. I made my polite excuses. No one else was leaving. It all went a bit silent. But we’re only just getting going…

At one o’clock in the morning! Had I been expected to stay the night?

And then there were all those other parties, stretching back into my depressing, lonely past like the white plastic poppers of a necklace I had as a child. I wore it to the Methodist Sunday School party, which was in fact not too bad. The poppers got pulled apart and scattered all over the floor by some idiot boy when we were playing spin-the-collection-plate (oh yes, we Methodists knew how to party) but there were sandwiches, and jelly with dobs of ersatz cream; there were balloons, and crackers with mottoes in them and adult-sized purple paper hats that ended up resting on our shoulders, and little dangly ‘skellingtons’. And best of all we didn’t have to wash up. The grown-ups crammed themselves into the kitchen – a corrugated iron shed attached to the Sunday School room – to do that.

And then there was the one when we were supposed to go in fancy dress. That was soon after I got married. We made our own costumes, thinking that was what you did. I went as a tree because I happened to have some brown cloth and some green cloth. I think I had an apple or two attached. I can’t remember what my husband went as. Everyone else had hired proper costumes and stared at us. It was in an expensive cottage, half way down a steep hill. The sort where everything gleams.

And there were the ones where we suddenly realised dancing had changed since we were single, and that imperceptibly we had become a couple, and dull. And the earlier one where I met my husband – and I would only drink orange juice, which was rather acidic – and somebody was smoking pot, which worried me and I wondered if I ought to inform someone – and I was wearing this long flowery dress which somehow seemed now too long, and not thick enough. And my future husband (I already knew) danced, and that was both embarrassing and endearing because he looked like a scarecrow come to life, all angles and elbows and self-conscious jiggling about. And afterwards we had to stay the night, but there was only the living room so we spent the night together on folding camp beds of different heights, him with his long, long curly hair and his grey gypsy eyes and the trousers his mother had lengthened for him with strips of appalling curtain material, I in my long flowery dress which didn’t look right, securely tucked around my ankles. Horizontally but chastely we conversed – I from aloft and he from below – and played the same three Leonard Cohen singles over and over – and I supposed we must have slept because eventually light came streaming in through the kitchen window, and it was a new day.

BACK TO WHERE YOU ONCE BELONGED

When you are a child you imagine that everything will continue to be as it always was. You think you’re in the driving seat and that time, space and people are yours to command. This isn’t true, of course, but it’s a realisation that tends to sinks in slowly. Re-reading my post ALL THINGS BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL and the Methodist chapel, reminded me that I have been there since – since those days, I mean – and it has not stayed the same.

Five, or maybe six years ago my sister was visiting from Canada. Normally this would happen in September/October but this particular year it was December. The British weather was not playing ball. Although undoubtedly warmer – or at any rate less arctic – than Canada in December, it had chosen to be rainy and black. Day after day dragged by. Rainy. Black. Black. Rainy. We were running out of things to do and foolishly came up with this idea to revisit the Methodist.

I had vivid childhood memories of services there, but when I ceased to go, when I lost interest, married and moved away the actual physical Methodist didn’t just vanish. Somehow you think things ought to do that; how dare they go on, existing, living a life of their own? There it sat, getting older and uglier. The seventies flitted by, then the eighties, the nineties; the arched front door got painted pillar-box red, then royal blue, when once it had been a sensible kind of brown; the nettles round the outside gave way to gravel and the corrugated iron lean-to attached to the far end was replaced by a concrete-looking one. The notice board outside continued to announce the times of church services, but now there seemed to have been a take-over by some multi-faith conglomeration. The services were no longer Methodist, but Christian. What did that mean?

But what did it matter?

So we went back, and of course, wished we hadn’t. It was a Sunday morning and the Christians were inside – so that was OK. What wasn’t OK was that all the wooden pews had disappeared. And the tiered choir seats. And the wheezy organ with the missing notes and the dusty purple silk. And the pulpit and stained-glass windows. All that remained was acres of bright blue carpet and people sitting around in a circle on hard-backed chairs. We subsided into the rear tier of the circle, separately wondering, but each knowing that the other was wondering, how, having entered, we might manage a quick exit. There was some nondescript singing and a bit of praying. Maybe we could slip out while their eyes were shut? But it was too late: we were being zeroed-in on. We were having our hands shaken.

They were pleased to see new people – nice new ladies, wanting to know Jesus. I felt I already did know Jesus, at least as well as they did. Hadn’t I sat in those now-invisible pews year after year, listening to stories about Him? Hadn’t I sung hymns and carols to Him and about Him in shafts of dusty sunlight beneath those now-vandalised stained-glass windows? What were they doing in my church, these happy-clappy Johnny-come-latelys? It was awkward.

Presumably because we were there under false pretences we felt compelled to explain. We told them that we had attended services here as children and had just wanted to see… They continued to be polite, but the light of conquest died in their eyes. They had stopped listening.

Sometimes it’s best not to see what happens. I was forced to see Nan and Grandad’s house when they both had died. My parents were clearing it out prior to sale and I was called to attend, for some reason. Nothing of my grandparents was there – the furniture, the fire, the rheumaticky labador; the pictures; the sideboard with the brass pen-holder and Nan’s two amber hat pins; her little box of rouge; Grandad’s pipe and pipe-cleaners; the books I grew up with, my Sunday reading; the conservatory with the rusty mangle and the view of London Pride and yellow roses. It smelt of hoover-dust and linseed oil. It echoed.

That night Grandad made a walk-on appearance in my dreams for the first and last time. I standing in the kitchen and he pushed right past me, an old man muttering under his breath. It was as if I had become the ghost. I still visit my mother and, since the two houses are in the same road, I am forced to drive past Nan and Grandad’s house every time. Usually I don’t look. Grandad’s carpentry workshop has been demolished and replaced by a double garage with up-and-over doors.

The only way to keep places or people is in your head. That’s something else you learn. It’s better than a film or photograph – you can replay them if you want to; they simply exist in another form. My ‘writings’ once existed on paper; now they exist  in cyberspace. Nan and Grandad were once flesh and blood, now they, and the house they lived in, and the Methodist chapel and a gallimaufry of other people and things exist in potential as electrical patterns within my brain. Nothing is gone, as long as I can still remember.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

To His Coy Mistress: Andrew Marvell

I’LL MAKE A GOOD GORDON, GORDON

Gordon Lightfoot!

Now I remember him from the early days of my (ex-) marriage. My husband brought home an LP from a boot sale and we listened to it a lot. Gordon had a good voice and I liked his songs: they were atmospheric…haunting; especially the one about the gales of November coming early to the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee’*.

Childhood memory:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, Stood the wigwam of Nokomis, / Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis…

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 – 1882)

Many years ago our friend the Engineer invited us to spend a day with him on the River Thames, in a steam launch – barge – oh, some sort of boat with a funnel. He had been working on it and looking after for an employer. I can picture him now, our friend the Engineer, in his beard and green overalls, coal-y and oil-besmeared. Also somewhat stressed. My husband and I, in combination,often seemed to have that effect.

My husband happened to mention Gordon Lightfoot. Oh, snapped the Engineer, that Canadian git!

Unfortunately this has had the effect that now I can’t hear or read the name Gordon Lightfoot anywhere without mentally appending – that Canadian git!

 * The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down / Of the big lake they called ‘Gitche Gumee’/ The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead / When the skies of November turn gloomy / With a load of iron or twenty-six thousand tons more / Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty. / That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed / When the gales of November came early. From: The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald: Gordon Lightfoot (1976)

Argh! I only meant to insert a link to Gordon Lightfoot (‘that Canadian git’) singing on YouTube and the whole video popped in. How exciting!!!

Edmund Fitzgerald photo attrib: Greenmars (Wickimedia Commons)

‘I’ll make a good Gordon, Gordon’. From the film ‘Local Hero’ (1983)

 PS: If anyone wonders why I’ve taken to employing the / symbol instead of setting out lyrics or poems in the traditional way – it’s because this ready-made blog design, although pleasant to look at, will insist on putting acres of space between each line, whether you type direct into the blog or type first in Word, remove all formatting and paste the post in. This sprawls the quotation down the page in a most unseemly and distracting fashion. There are buttons for Italics, Bold, Bulleted Lists, Left Align, Right Align, Centre Align and Strikethrough – a button for almost everything one’s little word-processing heart could desire, but I can’t find the commonest button of all – Line Spacing/Remove Space After Paragraph.

If my lone Reader (hung-over/Penge/New Year’s Afternoon) does happen to be a techno-wizard, perhaps he or she could advise? But if you’re going to tell me it’s a widget and I need to inject this tiny piece of code into this inaccessible portion of WordPress’s entrails – best give up, dearie, and open that second bottle of eggnog, thanks anyway. I’m not going to be able to do it.