Now, not sure if I’m remembering the day from itself or from the photo. Or remembering a bundle of days like that. There were countless of them, those hiking days, the stiles and sheep gates and views and resting places and bogs and rocks. Different kids of course, give or take, but the same complaints: blisters, hunger, thirst, boredom, wet, cold. Same smiles, too, even if just for a photo. Same lunches in paper bags, wolfed down somewhere out of the wind if we were lucky-roll with luncheon meat or similar, choice of cheese triangle (see poem above) OR hardboiled egg, Yo-Yo OR KitKat, an apple, and a carton of orange squash. All litter including apple cores and eggshell to be carried home.
What became of luncheon meat? It wasn’t that bad if you were hungry and freezing. I have clearer recollection of the luncheon meat than of the waterfall. Has anybody ever put luncheon meat in a poem?
Bye for now
A.
In the end, only my grandmother’s smile proved inexhaustible. Her hips gave up and her hands also became arthritic but she continued to smile, working her knitting on her lap a little more slowly. She took painkillers smiling over the rim of her glass; when she got too crippled to get in and out of the bath I brought basins of water and washed her in her chair, and she would smile. Afterward I would take her compact and lipstick and dab her face and lips and leave her smiling in a sugary-scented haze. She found these washing rituals exhausting; almost at once she would doze off, vacating the smile that would somehow wait on her pink frosted mouth until she returned from sleep and re-entered it.
By then I was suspicious of it, that smile. It seemed to me implausibly rapturous. It could mean only that she had decided to see in her darkness certain things and not others. She talked about the view from a hill somewhere in the north one April day when she was young, and I could tell from her face that she had gone back in her mind to gaze at it again, seeing from her chair next to the sweating gas fire and the liverish wallpaper patterned with brown lozenges, skylarks’ wings brushing against the clouds over a sparkling reservoir half a mile away and stiff stripes of sun and shadow rippling deep violet water. I think she returned there easily, to this place whose name escaped her, to that bright cold day more than half her lifetime ago. Her mind was not so much failing, as obscuring the importance of knowing precisely where or when a thing occurred; she spoke of her gratitude at being able to remember it at all, and smiled.
As the walls between the years and decades came down, she began to think that life had a way of turning out all right in the end; there were ways back, after all, from disaster, and the old cruelties, even her husband’s, had seldom been deliberate and so perhaps had hardly been cruel. Just who had inflicted them anyway, and upon whom, exactly? The smell of alcohol, the sounds of someone falling against furniture and crying out, furious words, the swipe of a hand or a fist came out of darkness and at random whether from her husband or from anyone else. And it was either now, or it was all a long time ago, she didn’t remember. Time had lessened the sting; time reduced all wrongs because misdeeds died just as people did. Records faded and got muddled and generation melded into blurry generation the way photographs piled on a windowsill imprint shadows of themselves on the image below, one upon another. So my grandmother settled into her smiling contemplations and let her fragile and partial visions illustrate a whimsical philosophy of all things being for the best. Her memories, freed from sequentiality and filtered clean of bitterness, ceased to add up to her true history and so ceased to trouble her.
To conjure these flimsy apparitions from the past was work that kept her no less busy than her knitting did; she knitted, I now think, for more than the comfort of repetition. I think she knitted so that her skipping fingers might somehow impart some of their agility to her mind, to help it go on sifting through its gallery of imperfect and far-off images. There was perhaps something of a grimace of concentration about her smile.
Because how unimaginably tiring it must have been for her, every day, to summon from the dark a faith that the world though invisible to her was benign, finally, and had been all this while busily fashioning out of the uncoloured fragments of everyone’s defeats and little pleasures, not just consequences, but parables. Or perhaps, spared every smear and crease on the surface of events, every blank glare on her daughter’s devastated face, my grandmother found it easier than I did to believe that nobody’s life was ever so blighted as to be wholly without point, that memories never were thin and useless but bloomed out of experience to some good end, to become stories that would stand for something greater than themselves.
Dear Ruth
I remember that story of yours in the Save Overdale Campaign Newsletter but that was back in the Eighties, when we were trying to stop them from closing it. I knew you had your writers group, Della & her cohorts, and there was that booklet of poetry and whatnot you got printed up that one time. All well and good.
But I never saw anything you wrote. You never showed me a word. You called it all “work in progress.” You always made it sound as if you were just practising. You most certainly did not mention a novel and here it is popping up all over the house.
The Overdale photo, I keep it on me now. I don’t remember if it was taken before or after the juice carton incident but we all look well, if not cheerful. You can’t smile nicely into a force five gale, not even for some lad’s Duke of Edinburgh Award Special Photography Project.
But Ruth, see, the picture. It’s what’s not in it. It’s got 1969 on the back. It looks about late April so it must have been Easter. You can just see lambs there with the ewes in the field miles away on the right, little white blobs close to the big dark ones, and look at the state of the bracken, it’s certainly not October. Which means it must have been just after. Might even have been the very morning after! Funny how you can’t tell from our faces. You’d think it would show.
Remember, Ruth? 1969 Easter at Overdale, only a few weeks after the February half-term when we first met there. The night we arrived, the Thursday before Good Friday, when we sneaked out and we talked in the dark? You told me you’d been the first person at your school to put your name down to bring the Easter party to Overdale. You’d made yourself a bit unpopular in the staff room because you’d just been at half-term, but it was first come first served. And that was all because I’d happened to mention at half-term that I’d likely be back at Easter with another of my lot?
I was pleased when you told me that, Ruth, but I couldn’t say so. I couldn’t tell you I hadn’t “happened to mention” coming back at Easter. I’d worked it into the conversation just so you’d know. Shaking with fear in case I was making it obvious. It seemed important I wasn’t obvious, can’t think why now. Not able to do the direct thing and just tell you I had to see you again. Dropping a hint instead of saying what I wanted and then making it happen. Calling it being shy when all it was was weakness. Weak with words.
I’d spent that Thursday travelling with the kids on the bus. The usual mayhem-three vomit stops- and my insides lurching, wondering if I’d see you. Getting ready for a big letdown in case you weren’t there.
But you were. Your brown hair in a single long pigtail right down your back and some pendant made of pottery on a leather thong- you looked like a squaw. I couldn’t wait to get the kids’ tea and the first round of the darts and table tennis tournaments over. We postponed picking the Snakes & Ladders teams, and let them skip showers, remember? Thought we’d never get them settled. The first night’s always the worst, they’re high as kites, been cooped up on the bus half the day. And first night there’s always one or two feeling lost and homesick, the silent weepers you have to watch out for. The dorms didn’t go quiet till nearly eleven, and by then it was well after dark.
That stumped me! I’d thought of asking you to come out to see the sunset to get you away from the others, and it was already pitch dark and I didn’t know what to do.
But you said, So, Arthur, you’re the ornithologist, do you get nightingales hereabouts? I’ve always wanted to hear a nightingale.
And I nearly said, Nope, no chance this high up, or this far north, or this time of year.
Then I saw your eyes, and I said, Oh, uh… well maybe, and it’s a fine clear night. Care to venture out?
