From Charing Cross to Sevenoaks

It's late afternoon, the end of a summer Sunday and the train is full. We sit quietly, each a little tired, each perhaps thinking about the film we've just seen.

I look out of the window, watching the jumble of office blocks give way to the backs of houses, seeing the concrete yards become gardens that gradually get longer and greener. I wonder about all the people who work in those offices, live in those houses and play in those gardens. I think about the girl from the film. So many different lives; chances taken and missed, opportunities grasped and squandered, promises made, words spoken and regretted.

A woman sits opposite me, leaning against the window. Her arm is loosely draped around the daughter who's half sitting, half lying across her mother's lap . Next to the girl is a young boy, maybe six years old. He sits cross-legged, tidy, taking up hardly any space. I imagine him sitting on the carpet at school, listening closely as his teacher reads a story, trying hard not to miss a word. He's holding a small bag of sweets, slowly licking and nibbling at each one, as though trying to make them last the whole journey home.

Across the aisle are three teenage boys, each wearing the football strip that betrays how they've spent their afternoon. They're talking at each other, across each other. One bites into a burger, another shovels in a fistful of thin chips. The third takes his shoes off, and rests his bare feet on the empty seat opposite. I try not to think about the trace of adolescent sweat they'll leave behind.

"I want Mummy to sit in the middle" says the six-year-old, pulling my attention back to our side of the train carriage. "Then I can have a cuddle."

"You can have a cuddle when we get home" his mum offers. "And I'll read you a story."

She looks across at me and smiles, and I wonder if she realises how lucky she is.  I glance again at the football fans, their shirts tell me they support the same team as my sons. I try to remember the last time I sat on a train with my boys, or walked along the street holding a small hand in mine.

And I want to tell her to cuddle him now. I want her to know that all too soon, her tidy little boy will be six foot tall and too embarrassed to hug. I want to urge her not to miss her chances, but I don't. Instead, I look at the boy, who gives me a huge grin, and then I smile right back.

Gatwick South

Without even thinking to check my phone, I set off early for the forty minute drive to the airport, anxious to be there before they land. It's not until I park the car and walk into the terminal building, that I see the message saying they're delayed.

I sit and watch the arrivals board, seeing the details of their flight slowly inching to the top as the minutes tick by. Other planes land and there's a constant trail of people emerging from the baggage reclaim hall; you can tell straight away who's expecting to be met, they pause for a moment, looking around for a friendly face or a familiar name on a sign. You can tell who's pretending they fly all the time and don't need to be met - they determinedly don't look around, just march through, quickly heading to the car parks and onward transport. The unlucky few look lost and lonely, standing there hoping that someone will show them where to go.

Time passes.

When we were young, and air travel was still something of a novelty, my Dad would sometimes take us to watch the planes. I've never quite forgotten my surprise at how huge the planes were when you got up close; I've never got past wondering what strange sort of magic could lift a gigantic metal beast into the air then bring it safely back to ground again without smashing it to smithereens.

I was twelve when I got on a plane for the first time; heading for a holiday in Bulgaria with my family. It was the last time my sisters and I would go on holiday with both parents, though I didn't know that then.  I don't remember anything of the flight; my memories of the holiday are little more than snapshots, captured quickly without much thought, momentary images that have somehow stayed.

In one, I'm wearing a cotton sun-dress, small bright flowers on a white background, a ruched elastic bodice, thin straps tied on my shoulders. The photo, taken from behind, catches me at the moment when the wind lifted the skirt of my dress, revealing nothing but the skinniest legs imaginable. I hated that picture so much, squirmed with embarrassment every time someone looked at it. In another, I'm wearing blue and yellow sandals with cork wedge heels. I'd insisted on buying them for our big holiday, never mind that they were impossible to walk in and went with nothing else. I wonder now at the defiance in those shoes and my pride in the looks they elicited from other holiday makers; so at odds with my shyness over the picture of my legs. Perhaps that's what it's like when you're twelve; nothing is consistent.

There's a picture of us all on a balcony, dark wooden balustrades marking out the area where we ate breakfast every day; yoghurt and berries, cheeses and hams, so different from the Rice Krispies and Weetabix I was used to at home, so exotic as it seemed to me then. I think there was an abundance of water melons, like huge green bowling balls, or split into slices that we'd spit the pips from. I think I remember ice-cream, chocolate and strawberry flavoured, cold watery crystals. But that couldn't have been breakfast, could it? Another memory from another holiday perhaps.

I think of all the other times I've been here at Gatwick, waiting for my children to return; from trips to their Dad in Ireland, from their first grown-up holidays abroad, from the summers spent working in Greece. I think about how I'm always so determined to see them first, as if not noticing their arrival, looking the wrong way, reading a book, would somehow be a betrayal, a sign I hadn't missed them. Today my determination pays off and I spot them before they see me. I don't know which of them to kiss or hug first, I resist the urge to throw my arms round both of them at once, careful not to over-react, or embarrass them too much.

As we turn and head for the short-stay car park, I think about how I've always loved airports; the huge shiny planes, the lure of far-off places, the excited faces of people setting off on new adventures. Today  though, I realise that what I particularly love about airports is not the idea of going away, it's the certainty of people coming home.

A Penny for them

One of the things about being a mother, and particularly a mother to four children, is that it defines who you are to other people. The moment you confess to parenthood you open yourself up to the judgement of others - from the glowing, usually unwarranted, praise at your ability to conceive, through the well-meaning advice of friends and family, to the looks and comments of those who clearly think that you have no right to be a parent at all.

For a long while, that was just fine. I was just as impressed by my ability to conceive, equally condemning of my failures to get mothering right. And why would I ever want to talk about me, when my children were clearly so much more interesting, intelligent, and downright beautiful than I had any reason to expect.

They still are more interesting, intelligent and beautiful than any other people ever born, but somewhere along the way I realised that I couldn't take the credit for that when I'd never had any real idea how to bring them up. I used to joke that each of them was an experiment and that I still hadn't learned how to do it properly, then I realised it wasn't really a joke. And with that came the recognition that, if I couldn't claim the credit, people's judgement of me had no real basis or reality.

But they carried on assessing my value on the presence of my children.

"I wish I'd achieved something more, something that would leave a mark of my time here on earth"

"Oh, but you've got four interesting, intelligent, beautiful children - you should be proud of that"

And I was. I am. Except...there was a part of me that wanted to be just me.

So it got to the stage, when I met new people, that my kids weren't the first thing I mentioned. I waited until people had formed at least a vague impression of me, before I made a slight, casual, reference to their existence. When I started writing this blog, it was a while before I wrote about any of them; I didn't want to be viewed in that particular way, I didn't want to be labelled a 'mummy blogger'.

And two years ago, when my grandson came along, despite being as pleased as possible, and totally overawed by him and the fact that I have a grandchild, I made only a passing reference to his birth, lost in a longer post about Formula 1 and football.

Then two months ago, my first grand-daughter, Penny-Rose, was born. Since then, I've gradually realised that my views have changed. I find myself wanting to talk about her, and the others, more and more often.

Working full time, I don't get to see her nearly enough, but I saw her this weekend. She is already beautiful and I have no doubt she will turn out to be interesting and intelligent too.  So I sat there holding her, singing long-remembered rhymes and talking to her in that high-pitched, over-animated, way. I grinned inanely when she gave me a first real smile, just as I did with her mother so many years ago and as I did so, the years fell away. I was twenty again, excited and petrified that I had a baby to love and care for, knowing nothing about being a mother, but also knowing that it was the best thing I could or would ever do.

I still want to achieve something in my life, I still want to be judged for the mark I leave behind of my time here on earth, I'd love people to think that I'm interesting, intelligent and beautiful. But if that doesn't happen, and there's every chance it won't, then how can I possibly think it's a bad thing for my worth to be assessed for the  presence here of my children - Claire, Gerard, Charlie, Megan, my grand-son Eddie and now my new grand-daughter Penny-Rose?

As a grand-mother, I have the chance to experiment all over again, an opportunity to have the slightest influence on the person she'll turn out to be. And who knows? I might even learn something this time.

Soundtrack stories - Trouble

I've never owned a song by Coldplay and until recently I didn't even know what this one was called, but if I hear the first three notes, wherever I am  and  whatever I'm doing, I'll stop for just a moment and think "Oh, it's Ged."

And suddenly I'm back in the house in Bickley.

It was always a strange house; an old lodge that had once marked the entrance to a much grander building. A bungalow, built in the shape of a cross; it had a series of rooms leading off each other, each of them tiny, and each of them impossible to keep warm.

In my memory, I'm always sitting at the table in the dining room, looking out on the ivy-covered wall that separates the house from a busy road. The table is covered in a red and white checked cloth that doesn't quite match the raspberry-painted walls. The ironing board stands in one corner because there's nowhere else to keep it, and just behind where I sit is the bookcase with its shelves of books arranged by the colour of their spines.

And all the children still live with me.

Claire and Megan are in their bedroom, tucked behind one of the doors leading from the lounge. The eight year gap in their ages brings a strange mix of cuddly toys and sparkly make-up to the mess that surrounds them. Charlie is sprawled on the sofa watching tv. In one corner of the lounge there's a huge open fireplace, piled up with the pine cones we've collected from the garden. In the opposite corner there's a small wooden staircase that leads to the boys' attic bedroom, and up there sits Ged playing on his Yamaha keyboard.

As I sit at the table, gazing out of the window, I don't notice the sound of the traffic outside, or the shouts from the tv in the next room, because all I can hear, flowing down that small wooden staircase, are those three notes.

Back then, I didn't know what the song was called, but I looked it up on Google recently and read the lyrics. And now, as I sit at the dining table in another house and time, I'd really love for the girls to be here squabbling over make-up, for Charlie to be glued to Match of the Day, and for Ged to be somewhere upstairs playing those first three notes, so that I could sing back to him, in the words of the song.


Oh I never meant to cause you trouble; Oh I never meant to do you wrong.

Memories and mementoes

I unlock the small square door and reach up to pull down the aluminium ladder. Above me, in the dark, dusty, cob-webbed space is the task I've been dreading most since we started packing up the house to move.

I'm not scared of spiders and I don't mind a bit of dirt, but nevertheless, the task of clearing the loft fills me with trepidation. Though there's no picture of Dorian Gray hiding up there, I know that, stacked up in a corner and hidden behind the suitcases and bags of old clothes, are the boxes that represent another life. They've sat there unopened since we moved to this house. Treasured keepsakes, each with a meaning of its own, each telling a story about a different me, as daughter, wife or mother; these are the possessions that sum up my life before Philip; the stories of my family.

It should be a simple task to lift these boxes down and pile them up with all the other boxes for the removal men to transfer to our new house in just over a week's time. And it would be, if I could resist the temptation to open them and sift through the contents.

The first box holds medals and trophies from when the boys played football for the cub-scouts and school teams. The trophies are wrapped snuggly in the shiny fabrics of a dozen replica football shirts. I remember the freezing hours I spent, standing on the touchline, shouting and willing my lads to run and score and win, until they were too old and too embarrassed to want me watching them any more.

Next is a container of all the kitchen things I bought for Megan when she first went away to university. The saucepans and colander for all the beans and pasta I thought she'd be eating; the tea caddy for her unquenchable thirst for a nice cup of tea. She only stayed in Leeds for one term, hating every minute of her time there. I remember driving up to collect her and bringing her home; the box has been in the loft ever since.

There's another one from Charlie's slightly longer, but no more successful, time at Manchester University. It holds his study materials; a collection of pens and papers, a calculator and his student ID card; all evidence of the good intent to study that he took with him, but which evaporated as quickly as his student loan. I'm suddenly hit by the recognition of how lost he must have felt, away from home for the first time, his money all gone and a slowly growing panic as he fell behind in his studies.  At the bottom of the box I'm surprised to find a fountain pen. It's mine, and I'd assumed it was long-since lost. I've no idea how it came to be in the box; I'd like to think he chose to take it up to Manchester with him.

Next comes the photo box. I lost hundreds of pictures after a move 4 houses ago when I stupidly left the albums to go mouldy in an outside shed. The pictures in this box are the only ones I managed to save. Rare and precious representations of my children as babies and toddlers, birthdays, weddings and school photos. I'm surprised to see a younger, slimmer me, secretly pleased at how I used to look.

There's a huge box of paper souvenirs; school report letters; theatre programmes and tickets; newspaper cuttings; handmade birthday cards. Among them a letter from Charlie, telling me he's sorry for fighting with his brother, that he didn't mean to upset me, that he loves me lots. Beside that, a small envelope holding 4 notes from Claire, written to Charlie and me just after he was born.

The last box I look through is the one I know will make me cry. It holds everything I still have of my Dad, bank statements and insurance papers; his final will and testament; details of the arrangements I made for his funeral and the condolence cards we received. I know what's in this box, but I haven't looked through it for four years, so the contents come back to me with a shock. I smile when I find the tickets issued over fifty years ago for a trip to Spain for him and my Mum; I swallow hard when I find the picture of him as a young man in the army, confident and smiling, knowing there is still a whole lifetime ahead. I'm struck by the resemblance between him and Charlie.

 

And then I find the small envelope. Inside it is a typewritten sheet, a story written many years ago by my Dad, for Charlie on his birthday. As I read the story I begin to hear his voice. And then I realise that even though I'll be moving to a new house soon; a house he'll never visit or know; my Dad will be coming along on the journey anyway.

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The Day We Won the Cup - written for 'His Majesty Emperor King Charlie':

Once upon a time, on a sunny summer aftermorning, all the people on earth were very happy. They were dressed in their best clothes, with pink ribbons hanging from their toenails and green ice-cream cornets dropping from their noses. They started the day with a special breakfast, starting with scrambled crocodile's eggs,which were followed by Marmitemud on toast.


The reason for all this happiness was that this was the day of the long-awaited final of the Inter-World Cup between the men from the planet Klobbadog and a special team from the planet Earth. The men from Klobbadog were known as excellent footballers, who had won every game that they had played. This may, of course, have been because they each had three legs worked by batteries, and large square heads mounted on rubber stalks, which made it easy to head lots of goals.


The team from Earth that had been chosen to play against Klobbadog were known as the Longshortworth Rovers who, although consisting on only six players, were famous for the special skills each of them possessed, Up front was the Daddyman, whose special skill was running down the pitch tripping everybody up with a golf-club. Joining him up front was the Mummywoman, whose special skill lay in feeding players on the other side with homemade cakes which poisoned them within minutes. In midfield were the Clairegirl, who wasn't really very good at football, but used to wave her feet at anybody that came near her so that they collapsed on the spot. Alongside her was the Gerardboy, who had a special ability to turn himself into a bear-cub, and at the back was the cuddly Meggygirl who used to talk and talk and talk until she sent everybody to sleep.


But the star player of the Earth team was the goalkeeper, Charlieboy Longworth, who had never given away a single goal, because of his ability to make his arms and legs stretch to ginormous lengths by saying the magic words:

"Abracadabra Hazel and Mush, my teacher looks like a scrubbing brush." 

The Earth team were soon two goals ahead, First the Mummy girl ran up the pitch, turning sideways so that she was so thin nobody saw her. Then the Gerardboy ran forward giving a loud bear-cub growl and frightening all the Klobbadog players and banging the ball in the net.


The game was nearly over when disaster struck! One of the Klobbadog players tripped over the Daddyman's golf clubs and was awarded a penalty. He shot the ball hard with two legs, straight at the goal, but the Charlieboy caught the ball with one of his magical long arms, ran straight up the pitch and scored another goal. The Earth people had won! Charlieboy was the hero of the hour! He was given special toys made of ice-cream and toffee that he could eat when he was fed up of playing with them, and they all lived happily ever after!!!!!