Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, A Moment of War (17 page)

She pulled from her bag a bone cup and saucer, paper-thin, exquisite, and priceless – except that the cup and its handle had parted company, and the saucer lay in two pieces.

‘Of course, I could get those bits riveted,’ said Mother, holding them up to the sky. The light on her face was as soft and delicate as the egg-shell chips in her hand.

At that moment two carters came staggering down the path with a huge packing-case on their shoulders.

‘Put it there,’ said Mother, and they dumped it in the yard, took their tip, and departed groaning.

‘Oh dear,’ she giggled, ‘I’d quite forgotten…
That
went with the cup and saucer. I had to take it, it was all one lot. But I’m sure we’ll find it helpful.’

We broke open the crate with a blow from the chopper and gathered to inspect the contents. Inside was a ball-cock, a bundle of stair-rods, an aigrette, the head of a spade, some broken clay-pipes, a box full of sheep’s teeth, and a framed photograph of Leamington Baths…

In this way and others, we got some beautiful china, some of it even perfect. I remember a Sevres clock once, pink-crushed with angels, and a set of Crown Derby in gold, and some airy figures from Dresden or somewhere that were like pieces of bubble-blown sunlight. It was never quite clear how Mother came by them all, but she would stroke and dust them, smiling to herself, and place them in different lights; or just stop and gaze at them, broom in hand, and sigh and shake with pleasure. They were all to her as magic casements, some cracked, some gravelled with faults, but each opening out on that secret world she knew intuitively but could never visit. She couldn’t keep any of them long, however. She just had time to look them up in books, to absorb their shapes and histories, then guilt and necessity sent her off to Cheltenham to sell them back to the dealers. Sometimes – but rarely – she made a shilling or two profit, which eased her mind a little. But usually her cry was ‘Oh, dear, I
was
foolish! I should really have asked them double…’

Mother’s father had a touch with horses; she had the same with flowers. She could grow them anywhere, at any time, and they seemed to live longer for her. She grew them with rough, almost slap-dash love, but her hands possessed such an understanding of their needs they seemed to turn to her like another sun. She could snatch a dry root from field or hedgerow, dab it into the garden, give it a shake – and almost immediately it flowered. One felt she could grow roses from a stick or chair-leg, so remarkable was this gift.

Our terraced strip of garden was Mother’s monument, and she worked it headstrong, without plan. She would never control or clear this ground, merely cherish whatever was there; and she was as impartial in her encouragement to all that grew as a spell of sweet sunny weather. She would force nothing, graft nothing, nor set things in rows; she welcomed self-seeders, let each have its head, and was the enemy of very few weeds. Consequently our garden was a sprouting jungle and never an inch was wasted. Syringa shot up, laburnum hung down, white roses smothered the apple tree, red flowering-currants (smelling sharply of foxes) spread entirely along one path; such a chaos of blossom as amazed the bees and bewildered the birds in the air. Potatoes and cabbages were planted at random among foxgloves, pansies, and pinks. Often some species would entirely capture the garden – forget-me-nots one year, hollyhocks the next, then a sheet of harvest poppies. Whatever it was, one let it grow. While Mother went creeping around the wilderness, pausing to tap some odd bloom on the head, as indulgent, gracious, amiable and inquisitive as a queen at an orphanage.

Our kitchen extended this outdoor profusion, for it was always crammed with bunches. In the green confines of that shadowy place, stockaded by leaves and flowers, the sun filtered dimly through the plant-screened windows, I often felt like an ant in a jungle overwhelmed by its opulent clusters. Almost anything that caught her wandering eye, Mother gathered and brought indoors. In bottles, teapots, dishes, and jugs, in anything old or beautiful, she’d put roses, beech-boughs, parsley, hellebore, garlic, cornstalks, and rhubarb. She also grew plants in whatever would hold them – saucepans, tea-caddies, or ash tins. Indeed, she once raised a fine crop of geraniums in a cast-iron water-softener. We boys had found it thrown away in a wood – but only she knew what use to give it.

Although there was only one man in my Mother’s life – if he could ever be said to have been in it – she often grew sentimental about her girlhood suitors and liked to tell of their vanquished attentions. The postman she rejected because of his wig, the butcher who bled from her scorn, the cowman she’d shoved into Sheepscombe brook to cool his troublesome fires – there seemed many a man up and down the valleys whose love she once had blasted. Sometimes, out walking, or trudging from Stroud with our heads to the blowing rain, some fat whiskered farmer or jobbing builder would go jingling past in his trap. Then Mother would turn and watch him go, and shake the rain from her hat. ‘You know, I could have married that man,’ she’d murmur; ‘if only I’d played my cards right…’

Mother’s romantic memories may not have all been reliable, for their character frequently changed. But of the stories she told us, about herself and others, the one of the Blacksmith and Toffee-Maker was true…

Once, she said, in the village of C–, there lived a lovelorn blacksmith. For years he had loved a local spinster, but he was shy, as most blacksmiths are. The spinster, who eked out a poor existence by boiling and selling toffee, was also lonely, in fact desperate for a husband, but too modest and proud to seek one. With the years the spinster’s desperation grew, as did the blacksmith’s speechless passion.

Then one day the spinster stole into the church and threw herself down on her knees. ‘O Lord!’ she prayed, ‘please be mindful of me, and send me a man to marry!’

Now the blacksmith by chance was up in the belfry, mending the old church clock. Every breathless word of the spinster’s entreaties rose clearly to where he was. When he heard her praying, ‘Please send me a man!’ he nearly fell off the roof with excitement. But he kept his head, tuned his voice to Jehovah’s, and boomed ‘Will a blacksmith do?’

‘Ern a man’s better than nern, dear Lord!’ cried the spinster gratefully.

At which the blacksmith ran home, changed into his best, and caught the spinster on her way out of church. He proposed, and they married, and lived forever contented, and used his forge for boiling their toffee.

In trying to recapture the presence of my Mother I am pulling at broken strings. The years run back through the pattern of her confusions. Her flowers and songs, her unshaken fidelities, her attempts at order, her relapses into squalor, her near madness, her crying for light, her almost daily weeping for her dead child-daughter, her frisks and gaieties, her fits of screams, her love of man, her hysterical rages, her justice towards each of us children – all these rode my Mother and sat on her shoulders like a roosting of ravens and doves. Equally I remember her occasional blooming, when she became secretly beautiful and alone. And those summer nights – we boys in bed – when the green of the yew trees filled the quiet kitchen, and she would change into her silk, put on her bits of jewellery, and sit down to play the piano.

She did not play well; her rough fingers stumbled, they trembled to find the notes – yet she carried the music with little rushes of grace, half-faltering surges of feeling, that went rippling out through the kitchen windows like signals from a shuttered cage. Solitary, eyes closed, in her silks and secrets, tearing arpeggios from the yellow keys, yielding, through dusty but golden chords, to the peak of that private moment, it was clearly then, in the twilit tenderness she created, that the man should have returned to her.

I would lie awake in my still-light bedroom and hear the chime of the piano below, a ragged chord, a poignant pause, then a twinkling wagtail run. Brash yet melancholy, coarse yet wistful, it would rise in a jangling burst, then break and shiver as soft as water and lap round my listening head. She would play some waltzes, and of course ‘Killarney’; and sometimes I would hear her singing – a cool lone voice, uncertainly rising, addressed to her own reflection. They were sounds of peace, half-edged with sleep, yet disturbing, almost shamefully moving. I wanted to run to her then, and embrace her as she played. But somehow I never did.

As time went on, Mother grew less protesting. She had earned acquiescence and wore it gratefully. But as we children grew up, leaving home in turn, so her idiosyncrasies spread; her plant-pots and newspapers, muddles and scrapbooks extended further throughout the house. She read more now and never went to bed, merely slept upright in a chair. Her nights and days were no longer divided nor harassed by the wants of children. She would sleep for an hour, rise and scrub ihe floor, or go wooding in the middle of the night. Like Granny Trill, she began to ignore all time and to do what she would when she wished. Even so,whenever we returned for a visit, she was ready, fires burning, to greet us…

I remember coming home in the middle of the war, arriving about two in the morning. And there she was, sitting up in her chair, reading a book with a magnifying glass. ‘Ah, son,’ she said – she didn’t know I was coming – ‘come here, take a look at this…’ We examined the book, then I went up to bed and fell into an exhausted sleep. I was roused at some dark cold hour near dawn by Mother climbing the stairs. ‘I got you your dinner son,’ she said, and planked a great tray on the bed. Aching with sleep, I screwed my eyes open – veg soup, a big stew, and a pudding. The boy had come home and he had to have supper, and she had spent half the night preparing it. She sat on my bed and made me eat it all up – she didn’t know it was nearly morning.

So with the family gone, Mother lived as she wished, knowing she’d done what she could: happy to see us, content to be alone, sleeping, gardening, cutting out pictures, writing us letters about the birds, going for bus-rides, visiting friends, reading Ruskin or the lives of the saints. Slowly, snugly, she grew into her background, warm on her grassy bank, poking and peering among the flowery bushes, dishevelled and bright as they. Serenely unkempt were those final years, free from conflict, doubt or dismay, while she reverted gently to a rustic simplicity as a moss-rose reverts to a wild one.

Then suddenly our absent father died – cranking his car in a Morden suburb. And with that, his death, which was also the death of hope, our Mother gave up her life. Their long separation had come to an end, and it was the coldness of that which killed her. She had raised his two families, faithfully and alone: had waited thirty-five years for his praise. And through all that time she had clung to one fantasy – that aged and broken, at last in need, he might one day return to her. His death killed that promise, and also ended her reason. The mellow tranquillity she had latterly grown forsook her then forever. She became frail, simple-minded, and returned to her youth, to that girlhood which had never known him. She never mentioned him again, but spoke to shades, saw visions, and then she died.

We buried her in the village, under the edge of the beech-wood, not far from her four-year-old-daughter.

The seasons of my childhood seemed (of course) so violent, so intense and true to their nature, that they have become for me ever since a reference of perfection whenever such names are mentioned. They possessed us so completely they seemed to change our nationality; and when I look back to the valley it cannot be one place I see, but village-winter or village-summer, both separate. It becomes increasingly easy in urban life to ignore their extreme humours, but in those days winter and summer dominated our every action, broke into our houses, conscripted our thoughts, ruled our games, and ordered our lives.