Part OnePart TwoBarbie and Bill are in a care home, but their
house in the Lake District hasn't yet been sold. I decided to take Felix and Oscar with me, to stay there for three nights, visiting them during the day.
Whenever I'd thought of them leaving, tears had threatened. They valued their independence for so long and so well, and neither had been keen on the thought of leaving. Their home and most of their possessions, left behind, probably never to be seen again. But it wasn't until I got out of the car and let myself into their empty house that it really hit me. Such a well-known place, with all its familiar smells, but the key ingredients missing.
We had been eating fruit in the car, and along with bags of food and belongings I found myself carrying two banana skins into the house. I looked around for the compost bin, and that's when I lost control of my eyes. The composting of vegetable waste is deeply ingrained in me, and all because of Barbie. As soon as I had a garden of my own she lent me a book on how to create compost, and yet here I was in her house, adding skins to a heap that she would never make use of, that probably nobody would ever use.
Felix was nervous of the big empty house, wouldn't go anywhere on his own and made me change the sleeping arrangements so that he, Oscar and I all shared a bedroom, and I had to sit at the end of his bed with Oscar feeding on my lap until he went to sleep. But finally both he and Oscar were in bed and I had the house to myself.
It smells of books, old paper and old wooden furniture. The staircase smells of Digestive biscuits. The staircase at
Whitewells smelt the same, I don't know why. One of the first things Felix did when we arrived was to look for the Digestives tin ("I like my great grandma, she gives me biscuits"). He was so disappointed to find it contained only water biscuits.
My mother had fished out a manuscript, the very first novel my grandmother wrote. When she was told the house would have to be sold to pay the nursing home fees, she wondered whether this book could be found and sent round the publishers again. It was a carbon copy and covered in crossings-out and edit marks, making it hard to read. There were also carbon copies of three other unpublished novels (she had
five published altogether, I think), and my mum had been wondering what happened to the top copies. I'm good at finding things, so my mission was to find these missing manuscripts.
I'm also incredibly nosy. I looked everywhere, becoming increasingly aware that I wasn't just looking for manuscripts. I was looking for... well, I'm not sure. Insight? Intrigue?
I looked in clothes drawers, in wardrobes, under beds, on top of cupboards. I found journals everywhere. The most recent were written on scraps of paper and the backs of envelopes and bundled together with string, but it seemed that up until a year or two ago she kept a diary every day of her adult life. And I read them. Well, I dipped into them. And felt guilty. But did it anyway. Somehow, now that she can no longer write...
I wouldn't have even considered it a year ago.
I found so much. Not just the journals, but letters and photographs. Cuttings kept, favourite and interesting passages from books, carefully transcribed. Articles, poems and short stories written by Barbie. A letter to Santa written by my sister and kept with Barbie's handkerchiefs. A letter written by a fictional character created by my mother and/or her sisters as a child, and something about a "Lovers' Gang". Stories and articles written by my mother. Letters written by myself as a teenager. Letters written by my aunt when she was briefly at boarding school. Photographs of my grandparents as a young couple in the 30s, on the beach at Mevagissey, larking about. A copy of my grandmother's school magazine from 1927, containing a poem about violets by one Barbara J.
Dipping into those journals, various themes recurred. An interest in theology and philosophy. Several quotes from The Perennial Philosophy by Aldous Huxley, a copy of which I found at the bottom of a clothes drawer, tatty and spineless and full of clippings and letters. Careful notes of piano lessons and piano practice from a 1951 diary. Details of housework and gardening and what she cooked for tea. Constant mention of her children and grandchildren, how nice it was to hear their voices when they rang. In a 1979 diary, a description of a visit from my mother, my sister and me. She would have been in her sixties then, and I suddenly appreciated what a lot of housework and cooking she did when we all went to visit. It must have been exhausting, and she describes being tired, but she wouldn't have dreamt of avoiding it as long as she was capable.
She describes one meal, cooked for us all, with Golden Cap for pudding. I used to love Golden Cap. It was an upside down suet pudding, with golden syrup on the top / bottom. A bit like sticky toffee pudding. With custard (I didn't like the skin). Yum yum. And fresh buttered artichokes, from the garden.
The other weekend I visited my friend Rachael's allotment, and she dug me up some artichokes, which I boiled and ate with Lurpak butter (slightly salted), and thought of Barbie.
And after I had searched through the house and created a pile of things to look at later (letters, photographs, poems, short stories) and things to take home and read (manuscripts of three novels) and even some work (the manuscript of her first, semi-autobiographical, novel, which I am charged with editing according to her notes and making readable for the rest of the family), I sat down and read Elaine's diaries.
Elaine is the woman who lived with them, approximately two weeks out of every four, in the last eighteen months in their own home, and took care of them. She kept a diary of her visits and has left it behind for the famliy to read.
It gripped me. It was beautifully written, witty, and very honest. Some days she had to escape to the neighbour's house or to the beach with her dog. Sometimes she hid things from them, or locked Barbie out of the garden, and all of it faithfully recorded.
I didn't go to bed until 2.30am, and then under duress. I wanted to keep reading, keep looking. I was woken at 7am by my eldest son. The usual trick of sending him downstairs to watch telly on his own wouldn't work in this big old empty house ("It's like a castle!"), so I trugged down after him, bleary-eyed.
Later that day, tired and slightly overwrought, with a son who was missing his dad and asking to go home, I pulled up in the drive of my grandparents' new home.
[to be continued
here]
High Vocation
by BarbieA day of tasks all dovetailed in,
Each following one from one,
Dictated by necessity, -
Things clamouring to be done:
The dishes swimming in the sink,
The kettle's urgent noise,
The black and sluggish-drawing flue
The floor dust hid by toys -
It seems at whiles there isn't time
To stop and know one's mind;
Explore the Spirit's plenty
A quietness to find.
But when the evening lamps are lit,
The fire burns clear and bright,
And curtains with their gentle folds
Are drawn against the night;
The bustling voices of the day
Are quietened and stilled,
And languid hands lie in the lap -
The heart with peace is filled...
The body's tiredness frees the mind
Relaxed - and lights the way
To know itself, and find anew
A purpose in the day.
Then comes that lovely certainty,
One to one's task belongs -
The work is worthy of the way,
The singer of the songs.
___
Labels: Philosophisering, The Past