Between Mammy and the chats and the cousins and the chats and the neighbours and the chats and the tea and the chats and the rain and the chats and the dogs and the chats the coffee and the chats, I just haven’t had time to write anything today.
After almost six weeks in the UK, tomorrow we will travel to Ireland. We haven’t started packing yet and the tiny bedroom we’ve been sharing at my father-in-law’s house looks like a bomb site, after all these weeks of us living out of our suitcases in there. But we’ll pack with care tomorrow, and say our goodbyes, and tomorrow night, all going well, I’ll be at home.
This took me back. Today, the girls and I visited the Black Country Museum in Dudley, northwest of Birmingham. We learned all about coal mining in the 19th and early 20th centuries, went down a drift mine, and saw how people lived from about 1850 to 1950. It was all great.
But this is what did it for me. The chair-o-plane. I don’t know what you call it where you’re from, but at the fairground (or ‘carnival’ as we called it) in Courtown in Co. Wexford back in the early 1980s, this was a chair-o-plane (or, as Lily suggests ‘chaeroplane’).
Each year, Edenderry Shoe Company closed down for summer holidays for the first two weeks of August. Daddy was foreman of the warehouse and Mammy worked three afternoons a week in the shoe shop, selling ‘seconds’ (slightly damaged shoes that didn’t make it past quality control) to women who travelled from all over Ireland to buy these stylish and good quality shoes.
During August every year, when the factory was closed, we went on a weeklong family holiday. We tried out a few destinations (always in Ireland) but the one we returned to over and over again was Courtown, a seaside town on the southeast coast, in Co. Wexford. We often bumped into other shoe factory employees there too, also on their holidays.
My parents would rent a mobile home in the same caravan park each year. My Nana Tyrrell came most years and sometimes another family member – my aunt Louise came one year and my cousin Colette another.
We spent our days on the beach, having hauled the deck chairs, the wind break, and the day’s food down what, at the time, seemed like a very long lane to the beach but which now I imagine was no more than a couple of hundred metres. I loved those days on the beach. They felt endless.
And then evening came and, without fail, we drove to the carnival. There was a chair-o-plane, a merry-go-round, swinging boats, waltzers, bumping cars, a huge slide, a ghost train and a huge hall filled with slot machines. My sister and I spent our time out on the rides. She was five years younger than me (indeed, she still is!), so, in the early years, she was stuck on the little kiddie rides, while I went on the chair-o-plane on my own and got Daddy to come with me on the waltzers and swinging boats. That week was always the best week of the year.
Mammy liked to spend her evenings in at the slot machines. One year, it must have been the early 80s, she won £27 on one machine early on in the holiday. It was a small fortune. I remember the coins pouring out of the slot machine and Mammy running to get a plastic tub to put them in. She couldn’t believe her luck. We ate fish and chips and burger and chips every night of that holiday, paid for by Mammy’s winnings.
So today, when we got to the Black Country Museum and we discovered the funfair, I immediately had to go on the chair-o-plane. It brought it all back to me. I couldn’t have been happier. Later, we went on the ghost train and then converted £1.60 into old pennies and gambled at the slot machines. We won nothing, of course. After lunch, Katie suggested that we go on the chair-o-plane once more. She didn’t have to ask twice.
It was just as wonderful as I remembered from 40 and more years ago. I had a grin on my face from ear to ear. I was a kid again, back in Courtown in the 1980s.
The library has become noticeably busier this week, now that schools in England have finally closed for the summer. The girls and I have been feeling very sorry for all these English kids who are still at school six weeks after Spanish summer holidays started. (Irish holidays aren’t much shorter than Spanish holidays. How I relished those long holidays as a child).
With so much going on in the library, I’ve had to move to a different table, this time near the front. I sit at one of two round tables; the other is reserved for signing children up for the Summer Reading Challenge.
All morning, mothers arrive with their kids, mostly in the 5 to 7 age range. There are laid back chilled out mums, frazzled harried mums, mums who’ve been bringing their kids to the library since they were born, mums who’ve only stepped into this library for the first time today.
The young member of staff assigned to the task of signing kids up is great. She focuses on the kids, asks their name and how to spell it, asks if they know their birthday. She finds a point of interest in almost every kid – catches something they say or some object they have – and lets them know she’s their ally. For one kid, it’s Pokémon – asks the kid which is their favourite and then says she likes that one too. For another kid, it’s their favourite colour (green), for another, a book they like. Did I already mention how great libraries and librarians are?
All of this takes me back more than a decade, when we still lived in England and the girls signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge, two years running, if I’m not mistaken. They had to set a goal for how many books they’d read (one six year old this morning said he was going to read six hundred billion million). I can’t remember what the goal was now – five maybe? Or maybe that’s too low. I can’t remember.
Anyway, the point is, Lily was the reader. She’d picked up reading early, read her first Harry Potter book at five. (Looking back now, even I can’t believe that’s true, but it is). So the ‘challenge’ part of the Summer Reading Challenge didn’t really exist for her. But for Katie, it really was a challenge – for her and for me. I despaired of her ever reading. She refused. She wailed. She simply would not read. By the time she was nine, I was resigned to the fact that she was never going to read. I don’t mean she was illiterate, but she was so halting and uncomfortable with reading that I had decided that maybe it just wasn’t for her.
She turned 10, then 11, then 12. Two summers ago, just before she turned 13, she discovered the joy of reading. It started with a graphic novel and then reading a novel by the same author. Once she got going, there was as no stopping her. She now puts Lily and me in the ha’penny place. This year so far, she’s read more than 20 novels. The first place she wanted to go to when we arrived in the UK was a bookshop. Here are her books just for the few weeks we’re here:
The summer reading challenge now? Figuring out how we’ll stay under our luggage limit, thanks to all of Katie’s books!
It’s been too wet the past couple of mornings to go walking through the fields, so Hudson and I have been taking a route through the village that takes us up to the village church and through the graveyard.
I love old graveyards. There’s something peaceful and soothing and familiar about them. The silence they offer, with their old mature coniferous trees standing stately amongst the graves. I love headstones that are so old and weathered that they are barely legible and that thrill when I squint or run my hands over the inscription or rub it with grass to better see it and discover that it is the grave of someone who died two or three hundred years ago. There is something timeless and beautiful – an unbroken thread of connection – in seeing someone who was buried only yesterday alongside someone buried 300 years ago.
When I was a child, we visited our family grave at least once a week, usually more. My father’s side of the family is buried in the beautiful country graveyard on top of Carrick Hill, in the shadow of the ruins of Carrick Castle. Back then, there was little traffic on the roads, so we regularly walked the mile from home up to the graveyard – on a summer’s evening, after dinner on Sundays in winter – and we always dropped in to the graveyard on the way home from Mass on Sunday mornings or, indeed, any other time we were driving by. As I grew older and more independent, I would often walk or ride my bike up on my own or with friends, and have a picnic amongst the graves. There were usually other people there too, someone tending a family grave or, like us, dropping in on the way past. So, the graveyard was as sociable place, where we caught up with neighbours and people we might not otherwise see much.
I loved wandering amongst the headstones and discovering the history of the place where I lived through the stories that the inscriptions told. The people buried up on Carrick Hill were the parents, grandparents, great grandparents and all the other relatives of people I knew. I guess it was the nascent anthropologist in me that was interested in family lines and family histories, in relationships and kinship, and in what I could discern about the living from the inscriptions of the dead.
Like many rural graveyards, Carrick tells the history of my family and my community; where people are laid down in death is a reflection of where they resided in life. The Tyrrell family grave contains the bodies of my great-grandparents Eliza and William, my grandparents Roseann and Michael, my great-uncle Pat (his arm buried a few months before he was, after it was amputated due to cancer), my aunt Cissie and Daddy, along with the ashes of my uncle Willie, aunt Vera, and Julian. (I never thought Julian would end up there, but Katie and Lily suggested it and I thought, why not).
Immediately next to my family are the graves of our cousins – who are also our immediate neighbours – the Hickeys, the McGlynns, the Mulraneys, the other Tyrrells. All around the graveyard are similar clusters of neighbours and extended families buried in proximity to each other. The graveyard tells the history of my community and of my family in simple metrics – birth dates and death dates, beloved daughter of, father of, grandson of, sometimes a wife’s maiden name. This simple information weaves together a story of community. The graveyard also tells a social history of status and class, from the small simple headstones of the majority of people of lesser means to the few large headstones and even those who, long ago, were placed in tombs. Although those grave markers are the outward representation of social status in life, beneath the ground everyone meets the same fate.
I’ve never thought of graveyards as maudlin or dark places. At times of death, they are a place where community comes together to pay witness to a life lived and to console the bereaved. At different times in my life, I have found it comforting to sit by the grave of a loved one, and feel an ongoing connection. But, most of the time, they are places that instill in me a sense of peace and that intrigue me in the stories they tell and the histories they reveal.
There’s an ongoing battle taking place on in a living room in Warwick. My father-in-law insists he will make space for me to use the kitchen. I insist that I have no intention of using the kitchen. In fact, I want to stay as far away from the kitchen for as long as possible. We go through the routine multiple times a day. “I’ll be out of your way soon,” he says. “Take your time,” I say. “You’re not in my way.” He seems desperate to get me into the kitchen to cook elaborate and time consuming meals for myself. But, while he busies himself making batches of hearty barley and vegetable soup and rich meaty liver and sausage stews (in the middle of a heatwave!), that he will freeze for use over the coming weeks, I want to use the kitchen for no more than making a cup of tea or grabbing something quick and easy out of the fridge.
You see, I’m a solo parent. That means that, like so many parents in my position, I am 100% responsible for everything. My kids are great, they help out (when asked or urged) but, ultimately, the buck stops with me and me only. Apart from Sunday lunch at our next door neighbours’ house and the very occasional meal out, I am responsible for planning and making three meals a day, every day of the week, week in and week out. Sure, I take shortcuts such as batch cooking and eating leftovers, but that still requires planning. In addition, we live in a remote place without take-away options or the option of a quick trip to the supermarket to buy something last minute. I’m responsible for making sure the washing up gets done (by me or the girls), that the shopping gets done, that the gas bottle gets replaced for the cooker, and so on. I love cooking and baking, I really do. But the day in day out of it can become monotonous drudgery that takes up far too much time and head space.
So, for me, a holiday is not having to do any of that or, at least, reduce it to an absolute minimum. The girls have been away all week and I’ve only had my own food needs to think about. For me, that was as good as spending a week in one of those 6-star hotels in the Maldives or Dubai. Seriously, it was bliss. I gave absolutely no thought to what I would eat for any of my meals. When I was hungry, I grabbed a piece of fruit from the fruit bowl or popped up to the M&S Simply Food just 200 metres away and bought a yogurt or a meal deal. One night I ate microwavable mac and cheese in front of the TV and it tasted like haute cuisine, simply because I didn’t have to cook it and I didn’t have to clean up after. For lunches, I popped into a bakery near the library and got a spinach and feta roll or a sausage roll.
The break from cooking is part of a larger sense of what ‘holiday’ means to me. As a solo parent, I am constantly in decision-making mode for every single aspect of my life and the lives of my two children (with advice and support coming from wonderful family and friends). Financial decisions, educational decisions, health decisions, house and car decisions, and on and on. So, a holiday for me is also a break from decision-making. When friends and family ask what I want to do when we’re in the UK and Ireland my answer is “I don’t care.” And I really mean it. So long as I don’t have to make a decision about what to do, I’m up for anything. By the end of the past twelve months we’ve just had, I can’t tell you what it’s like to set aside my decision fatigue and rest my tired brain.
The girls are back now from their week away and, boy, did I miss them. But it’s pizza for dinner tonight and maybe a take-away tomorrow. I’m still in holiday mode and, try as he might, my father-in-law is going to fail in his bid to get me into that kitchen.
I’m walking along the Grand Union Canal that runs behind the estate where my father-in-law lives. It’s a glorious evening and I’m on a video call with Katie who is away on the south coast this week with Lily and their uncle and aunt. I walk past four or five narrow boats. On the last boat in the row, a modest white and blue steel boat, a man is standing. I have the phone up, so he thinks I’m filming him or taking his photograph. He gives me a big smile and says something. But I’m talking to Katie, so there’s some confusion. He then realises that I’m not taking his picture and I realise that he’s talking to me. More than that, I hear his Irish accent and he hears mine.
“Where are you from?” he asks. “Kildare,” I reply. “Ah, a Lillywhite,” he says and I know immediately that I am firm ground. Despite his Dublin accent, he tells me he’s from Dungarvan in Co. Waterford. “The husband of one of my best friends is from Dungarvan,” I tell him. I tell Katie I’ll call her later because I have a feeling I might be chatting here for a while.
Sean and I chat for an hour, me standing on the grassy tow-path, he on the open deck of his narrow boat, the air cooled engine exposed to the evening air. We discover we have people and places in common. He pootled a narrow boat up to the harbour in Edenderry in the late 1960s and remembered going for a drink at The Harbour House. That was my uncle Tom’s favourite haunt, owned by Mary O’Connor, my Irish teacher, and her family. I was only in The Harbour House once, for a pint of Guinness with Tom back in the early 1990s. It was everything you would expect of a small Irish pub, all the old men lined up at the bar. It was renowned for its music and for Mary being as strict behind the bar as she was in the classroom.
Sean tells me about his job at Shannon airport and about people from Edenderry he knew there and at Ardnacrusha power station. I mention people I know who he might have known and we laugh when we get a bit tangled in Johns and Seans and who was who.
I tell him I had been a sailor and we talk about the joys of my Westerly Conway. He wonders how a girl from the Bog of Allen and a boy from the housing estate 20 metres from here could have ended up living on a boat and sailing to the places we did. He tells me of his adventures as a sea sailor and as a narrow boat owner and about his sustainable, no-cost approach to life.
At 80 years of age, he is only a few years younger that Daddy would have been. The Cuban Missile Crisis comes up in conversation (he makes me promise not to tell anyone why) and he shares his reminiscences of those few days in 1962 and I tell him what Daddy told me of his memories and fears of those days.
He explains how he has come to have that Dublin accent but says his heart remains firmly rooted in Dungarvan. He already owns a plot in Dungarvan graveyard where he wishes to be buried when his time comes.
“I had a half pint at the Cape of Good Hope a while ago,” he tells me, referring to the pub just a couple of hundred metres away. “When I went to the bar, I heard two men behind me. A Mayo man and a Galway man. Sure, I had to talk to them. The Mayo man was a bull man.”
“A bull man?” I ask, perplexed. “Ah, you’re too young,” he says. He explains what a ‘bull man’ is and realisation dawns. “Ah,” I say, “You mean the AI man. That’s what we call it where I come from.” He laughs and says how funny that we had that in Ireland where the Catholic church didn’t allow such things for humans. AI, for those of you not in the know, means, artificial insemination, and the Bull man or the AI man was, and remains, an integral part of our dairy and beef industries.
My daughters always tease me when I speak to other Irish people, accusing me of changing the way I talk and the way I hold myself. They’re not wrong. But I don’t do it on purpose. When I’m with other Irish people I become the version of myself that is the oldest part of me. I speak in the way I learned to speak as a baby, in the first accent I ever heard from the people and the place where I grew up. It is the accent, grammar, syntax and vocabulary that I am most comfortable with. There’s no modulation, no register change, no code switching. I am me at my most comfortable.
We all change our registers in different contexts. For instance, the way we speak to small children is not the same as the way we speak in the corporate office. The way we speak in church is not the same as on the terraces of the football stadium. But changing accents is something different. Over the years, I have modulated not only my accent, but the words I use when in conversation and the order in which I say them. Why? Well, for two reasons – one that I am comfortable with, the other less so.
For most of my life, I have chosen to live among people for whom English is not a first language. Therefore, to make myself understood among English speakers in Japan, Nunavut, Spain, and elsewhere, I slow down, speak carefully, use very standardized words and phrases to be understood and to make the person I am speaking to feel more comfortable. That is now second nature to me.
The other reason is that, over the years, I have been very aware of people making fun of my Irish accent – people laughing and repeating my pronunciation, my use of certain phrases or my Hiberno-English sentence structures. In order to reduce the feeling of discomfort (and anger) that this fun-making and ridicule causes in me, I modulate and change register. It’s just easier. I don’t like it, but it is how it is. That too is now second nature to me when I am around native English speakers who are not Irish.
But, when I speak to other Irish people, I can feel my body physically relax. I don’t have to think of an alternative phrase or word for ‘give out’, ‘press’, my use of bring/take, my pronunciation of H and th, or a thousand other usages of words and phrases. I’m not going to be laughed at for calling my parents Mammy and Daddy. I can throw in a reference to the GAA or to Eamon Casey or to the Angelus or to a million other things, and no further explanation is required. I can just be.
All migrants, no matter what their language or their circumstances, experience this distance from their first voice. Some people are happy to leave that first voice behind. I am privileged to have had so many opportunities to travel in my life. I have learned so many wonderful ways to speak and to see the world through the eyes of others. But speaking in the way that is oldest to my being is like relaxing into a large warm bath.
Sean is stuck along this stretch of the canal for the time being, as he waits for a lock gate farther along to be repaired. I tell him that if he’s still there the next time I walk that way, I’ll invite him down to the Cape of Good Hope for a beer. Who knows? Maybe the AI man will be there.
A conversation I had while out walking the other evening with Sarah threw up a memory of the summer of 1988, when I 15 years old.
We were having major renovations done to our house. A central heating system was being installed throughout, and the sitting room was being made a little bigger by the removal of a storage room (the cubby hole) in one corner. The contractor, Henry, had delayed starting the job so that his eventual start coincided with the start of the summer Olympics in Seoul. Daddy and I, sports fanatics, were not impressed. Neither was Mammy, when Daddy decided the large television on its wheeled stand would have to be moved to the kitchen for the duration of the renovation work. The kitchen was small enough as it was; negotiating a large clunky television in the middle of it would be most inconvenient.
The house, built in the late 19th century, had originally been a three room cottage – two bedrooms and a kitchen. The first two generations of Tyrrells lived there without electricity or plumbing. In the late 1950s, the house got electricity and Daddy was the first person on the road to have both a radio and, later, a television. In 1971/72, just before my parents got married and Mammy moved into the house, Daddy built an extension that included a new kitchen and, for the first time, indoor plumbing and a bathroom. The old kitchen now became the sitting room and it was this room that Henry was ripping up and reshaping during the Seoul Olympics.
In 1971/72, the new kitchen had been built onto the back of the house and what had been a small window now became a hatch between the kitchen and sitting room. The walls of the old house were thick, so this hatch was almost two feet deep, with a door that could be opened from either side. We used it to pass things between kitchen and sitting room and the newspapers that Daddy bought every day were stored there until they were burned or repurposed.
It was the late 80s, and the hatch just didn’t seem trendy, so it was decided to fill it in. In hindsight, it could have been made into shelf space, but then where was hindsight when we needed it?
And so to the Seoul Olympics. Being on the other side of the world, all the action was taking place in the middle of the night, our time. There was mounting excitement in the build up to the men’s 100m final. There was the great Carl Lewis of course, but also this new guy, the Canadian Ben Johnson, muscular and stocky and not built at all like the other sprinters. But he’d come through the heats impressively and we knew he was one to watch.
Because of the renovations, my sister and I were sleeping in our parents’ bedroom and they were in our rooms, which were the other side of the rubble. Before the 100m final, Daddy planned to wake me up so we could watch it together. I remember groggily stumbling into the kitchen at about 2 in the morning and Daddy and I watching, open mouthed, as Ben Johnson smashed the world record and left Carl Lewis and everyone else in his wake. We couldn’t believe what we had just witnessed.
I went back to bed then. When I got up the next morning, Daddy was eating breakfast at the kitchen table. He told me the news. Shortly after his unbelievable win, Johnson had failed a drug test. He was pumped full of steroids. This was shocking. These were the days before Lance Armstrong, before the East Germans, before accusations against Michelle Smith, before doped up horses. Performance enhancing drug use was unheard of – at least in our innocent little kitchen in Ballygibbon. It was all we could talk about for days. Indeed, it was all the media could talk about for days and Ben Johnson’s photo was splashed across every newspaper in the world.
When it came time for Henry to inset a plaster board wall in the hatch space a few days later, I suggested we put a newspaper into the space for posterity. So, we carefully placed a newspaper from a couple of days earlier, one with Ben Johnson on the front page, and columns of space devoted to what had occurred, in there. That newspaper is still there.
In 10 or 50 or 100 years time, when the house is knocked down or refurbished again or meets whatever fate awaits it, I wonder what they will think when they find that meaningless newspaper and all the kerfuffle about Ben Johnson. For us, it meant everything for those few weeks; for the discoverers of the newspaper, it will mean nothing.
About this time six years ago, I started to drop in to visit my friend Angela regularly. She was 82 years old at the time. What started as a one-off visit for a gin and tonic one Sunday evening, turned into a weekly affair. I’d pop around at 6 o’clock each Sunday evening (or later during the summer), the gin and tonic on the worktop ready for me to pour. I’d make us a glass each and then we’d sit and chat for the next couple of hours, with Miranda the cat sleeping by the gas fire, Mora the dachshund trying to sneak onto my lap, and Archie the African grey parrot adding his own opinions to the conversation. Our conversations were far-ranging. We talked a lot about the books we were reading, the movies we had watched, with each of us often taking up the others’ recommendations. She frequently quoted poetry to me – long-remembered lines that popped into her conversation, appropriate to whatever we were discussing. We talked politics – from our little village all the way up to the international level. She talked about her childhood during the war, her years in London as a trainee nurse, and then her married life raising her three children in Wales. Being a retired nurse, no topic of conversation was too delicate or too squeamish for our Sunday evenings. With deteriorating eyesight and hearing, she preferred these one-on-one get togethers with friends in the quiet of her own home.
When COVID came the following spring, our Sunday night visits continued via WhatsApp video. We’d each pour a glass of red wine or a gin and tonic in our respective homes, only a few hundred metres away from each other and carry on our conversations are normal. How happy we were when we finally got to meet in person again.
As her eyesight deteriorated, she found ingenious ways to continue reading and watching movies. She turned to Audible and listened to books now and she devised an iPad and magnifying glass set-up to allow her to continue watching movies. For a woman of her years, she was remarkably tech savvy and had a weakness for buying clothes and gadgets and all sorts of wonderful things online.
One Sunday evening in the early summer of 2021, she announced, “I think I’ve gone and something totally mad.” I expected it to be some new online purchase. “What have you done?” I asked. She told me that, at the age of 84, she was tired of living in a house that didn’t have a garden. In whatever remaining years she had, she wanted to grow vegetables again and keep hens. This wasn’t too shocking. After all, at the age of 77, she had decided to sell her home in Wales and moved to Sanlucar de Guadiana. “What are you going to do with this house?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t thought about it.” “Would you sell it to me?” I asked. The girls and I were living in a big old rented house at the time and I was despairing of ever having a house of my own. “Yes,” she said, without pausing to think about it. I’d no idea how I was going to afford this house, but was determined to find a way.
And so began the next phase of my relationship with Angela. She was happy to sell me the house, but under certain conditions, the main one being that the girls and I live in it for a year to see if we really liked it. During that year, I would pay her a tiny amount of rent, which would allow me to save up for a deposit for a mortgage. If, at the end of that year, I decided the house wasn’t for us, we could walk away, and she’d put it on the market. A couple of months later, she moved out into her new house – just 50 metres along the same street – and I moved into her old house and she became my landlady. Our weekly get togethers continued, now at her new house and we continued to put the world to rights for those two hours every Sunday evening.
When I quit drinking and she mostly quit drinking, our Sunday evening chats came to an end and I started to drop in to her on Monday or Tuesday mornings instead. I never tired of our conversation and felt something was missing on those occasional weeks when, for one reason or another, I couldn’t make it over to spend time with her.
Almost two years ago she fell in the house, slipping on a piece of plastic on her living room floor. She broke her hip and spent some time in hospital. But soon she was out, valiantly doing her physio exercises and getting her fitness back on a stationary bike that she bought and installed in the spare room. Although she was frustrated with her slow recovery, the rest of us were amazed by her speedy recovery and soon she was out walking the dog again, first using a walker, then crutches, then a walking stick. About six months later, she fell again, this time breaking her wrist, when she got tangled up in the dog’s lead while out walking up a steep hill one morning.
Her eyesight continued to deteriorate and her next ingenious online purchase was a gaming chair and TV. The sight of a tiny 87-year-old woman sitting in a teenager’s gaming chair was something else! I’d drop in and she’d tell me about some 1940s black and white movie she’d watched, recalling Hollywood stars in movies that were old even when I was a kid. She introduced me to The Rest is History podcast and we got great mileage discussing the various episodes we’d listened to.
She remained positive and engaged and witty, despite her body increasingly letting her down. I can’t list all the things she carried on doing – gardening and baking and taking trips back to the UK and just being engaged with the world – that people half her age have already given up on. I thought often of Seamus Heaney’s Field of Vision when I was with her. He might have written the following lines about her:
She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow as clear as the chrome bits of the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.
She was a loyal friend too, not just to me, but to so many of us in Sanlucar. Every single day, without fail, she had a phone conversation with Val (Honeybunch) her friend back in the UK from her nursing days in London in the late 1950s. That’s friendship for you.
For all her amazing attributes, she was my hero. I don’t aspire to be like her in my 80s; I aspire to be like her now. Her attitude to life was like that of no-one I’ve ever met.
Only four weeks ago, she was diagnosed with incurable cancer. I had the privilege to spend a lot of time with her in the first three of those weeks and, despite her increasingly frail body, we continued to laugh and take an interest in life. On the last day I was with her, when her body seemed to not be able to go on any more, she continued to tell me fascinating stories about her life. When I left to come to England last week, I knew how much I would miss her as we said goodbye for the last time and I knew that she would be sorely missed by all of us who have had the privilege of having her in our lives.
Angela died yesterday afternoon.
Being in the UK and, in particular, in this town, brings memories of Julian flooding back. I pass through places by car that I only ever drove through with him. I go to places that I visited for the first time, or only ever visited with him. Indeed, I would never have known this town in the middle of England, had I never met him.
There have been times in the past few years, when being here has been overwhelming. Not only being in this place, but being with Julian’s family and the memories and emotions that being in their company brings to the surface. In the past, being here has caused me to have panic attacks. In fact, last year, after only four days, I ended up in A&E (ER) with a panic attack that I thought was a heart attack. That was a scary day.
This time, however, I am so much more at ease. Time has played a part in healing me, so too have eight sessions with a therapist that I gave as a birthday present to myself last year, so too the memoir I’ve been writing this past year. I’m busy with work (intentionally, perhaps?) and I’m absorbing the sensations of being in parks and along canals and surrounded by nature in this exceptionally nature-filled town. (Yesterday, a falcon had an aerial fight with two crows only metres from me in Priory Park!)
Each morning since we got here, I work for a few hours at Warwick Library. Yesterday, I went in as usual. But it wasn’t usual. It was Saturday, so the market was on in the square in front of the library. Even better, at the far end of the square I saw a van bearing the words ‘Jumbo Hot Dogs’. Memories came flooding back. I phoned Katie and suggested that she and Lily get Granddad to drive them to the library in a few hours, so we could wander the market and have jumbo hot dogs for lunch.
The girls duly arrived and I packed up my laptop and we wandered around the market, chatting to the vendors and browsing the arts, crafts and foodstuffs they had on offer. At the food stalls, there were savoury pies and all sorts of lovely things that tempted me. But I was going for the jumbo hot dogs, for nostalgia’s sake more than anything else.
You see, Julian loved jumbo hot dogs. No matter what his state of hunger, if he spotted a jumbo hot dog stand, he had to have one. He was also someone who stuffed receipts into his pockets. When we both worked, we shared the task of doing the laundry. Every time it was my turn to put a load in the machine, I’d first have to empty Julian’s trouser pockets of receipts. When we lived in Cambridge, I’d often find five or six receipts for the jumbo hot dog stand! How long had he been wearing those trousers? Or how many hot dogs was he consuming a day? He’d laugh sheepishly and tell me he’d occasionally get a craving in the middle of work, leave his desk, hop on his bike and cycle the two miles into the middle of Cambridge for a jumbo hot dog and then return to work. Crazy man.
So, there was nothing for it yesterday but to introduce jumbo hot dogs to our daughters, who’d only ever before had those cheap rubbery vacuum packed frankfurters you get at kid’s birthday parties, and not these juicy British sausages, with real fried onions, ketchup, in a soft, freshly baked hotdog roll. Katie wasn’t sure if she wanted one, so I bought two. One bite of mine and I had to go back to get a third from the friendly chatty couple running the van.
Good God, they tasted good, that combination of good food mixed with good memories. As we ate, I told the girls about their father’s jumbo hot dog obsession, another piece of him revealed to them, another good memory of him restored to me.
Me in place 