The Cherry Orchard

Oh, my childhood, my innocent childhood! This is the nursery where I slept and I used to look out at the orchard from here. When I woke up every morning happiness awoke with me... 
(Chekhov, 1903)


There were no orchards in Croxted Road, but I can still  picture the garden as it looked from my bedroom window more than thirty years ago.

Most of it was just grass, not grand enough to be called a lawn, spotted with daisies and dandelions, it had a round dip halfway down that we sometimes called a fairy ring. There were borders for flowers, with roses for making squashed-petal-perfume, snap-dragons that would open their mouths as we squeezed at the side, and livingstone daisies that closed tight every night as the sun went down and opened again like magic in the morning. There was a bumpy stone path that led alongside the washing line to the bottom of the garden, where the compost heap and  the gooseberry bushes sat either side of the huge green swing.

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can still see my big sister peering round the flap of her wigwam; I can hear my little sister riding her pretend horse, making clip-clopping noises as she gallops around and around; in my mind's eye, our cat Oliver winds in and out of my Mum's legs as she pegs washing on the line and my Dad sits on the swing smoking a cigarette.

I loved that garden; a place for laughing and arguing, for fighting and playing. Never mind that it was a small back garden in south London, in my imagination it was part The Secret Garden, part Little House on the Prairie, and it came to represent for me everything that a garden should be. For a long time after I left Croxted Road, I wanted to create another garden just the same. A place for my own children to remember, somewhere they could grow up in, then return to as adults, in time bringing their own children with them.

But of course, it didn't turn out like that.

Sometimes the world changes around us and we aren't able, or simply just fail, to take control and change the course of events.  Chekhov knew that. The Cherry Orchard ends with Mrs Ranevsky losing her childhood home, with the curtain falling to the sound of an axe cutting down the orchard. A hundred years later, I understood it too as my dreams of a long-time family home and garden were replaced by the reality of a series of rented houses and other people's gardens.

I like to think though, that there's more to both our stories. Mrs Ranevsky set out for Paris, we came to Otford.

Last year we bought our house and with it, we took ownership of a long, long, garden. It has room for a swing, for flower beds and a path,  there are long stretches of grass, space for games and picnics. We're making plans for places to sit, for climbing roses and a fragrant lilac. It will take a while, but I think we'll gradually turn it into a garden to remember.

And this week we planted a cherry tree.

Do not go gentle into that good night

I’ve been off work this week. Seven days without the petulant demands of the alarm clock and the regular rhythms of the working day. Seven days where time has stretched and contracted, shortened and lengthened, where my days have been filled with hours of no consequence and moments to savour.

As I get older, passing time is delineated in so many ways; the increasing depth of the lines on my face, the greying strands above my ears, the aching hours it takes to recover from any physical exertion. This morning, while getting dressed, I made a decision. As I hopped around the room on one leg, trying desperately to maintain my balance and not topple into the chest of drawers, I made a solemn vow.

No matter how old I get, however bent and frail, I will resist the urge to sit down to put my knickers on.

It’s no great challenge with socks – that only requires a slight lifting of the lower limb. But it’s a whole different trial with underwear; especially once you’re one leg in. There is a particular level of agility required to raise one foot and shoot it through the hole, without snagging your big toe on the elastic. No matter. I will not let the soft and beguiling edge of the bed tempt me; I will not sit down.

However feeble and wobbly I ultimately become, I will don my underwear while standing. I will dress upright until I am upright no more.

Time

About a month ago the clock on our sideboard stopped. It's the old-fashioned kind, that needs winding once a week; we bought it in an antique shop in Otford, long before we came to live in the village. It felt like bringing it home when we finally moved here.

Every Sunday evening before going to bed, one of us would take off the round brass cover at the back and turn the key carefully, winding it just enough but not too tight; ensuring that the gentle ticking sound was there to see us through the week ahead. Somewhere along the way though, our routines changed, the regular winding became more sporadic, it turned from a soothing ritual to something of a chore.

It had stopped at 11.25, that much was easy to see, though I couldn't say how long it was before either of us noticed. I don't know if the quietly reassuring tick had stuttered and stilled while we slept upstairs, or while we sat watching other clocks in our different offices, hours away from home and each other.

We quickly became accustomed to the shiny brass hands holding their position at not quite the top and not quite the bottom of the round clock-face. After a while we even started making jokes about it. I quite liked that I could turn to Philip, knowing it was really too early to suggest going to bed, and say proudly "but I stayed awake until 11.25" He in turn would say at the end of a long and lazy Sunday "it's been such a great day, and it's still only 11.25"

The clock had stopped, but time kept running on. March came and went, bringing with it reminders of all the events and celebrations that mark our lives. Mothers' Day, quickly followed by the birth of Penny-Rose my beautiful new granddaughter, then my own birthday, and at the end of the month a wedding. As the days passed, the sideboard filled with cards - congratulations and thank-you notes, photographs and invitations. Before long we couldn't see the clock at all.

Two days ago, preparing for the arrival of friends, I decided to clear the cards. Behind them stood the clock, silently reminding me of our neglect. The smooth old wooden case felt good as I picked it up and prised off the round brass cover at the back. I turned the key carefully, winding it just enough but not too tight, and the gentle rhythmic ticking began again, making it feel like home.

Two days ago, Kelly and Nathan arrived, bringing with them the laughter and chatter that always accompanies our time together. We've talked and talked, as we always do, about life and families, about work and food, about reading. About writing.

Yesterday evening, I sat for a while, watching Nathan's fingers dart quickly over the keyboard of my laptop as he wrote another of the pieces that keep us returning again and again to his blog. I sat for a while playing scrabble with Kelly, watching her cleverly crafting interlocking words from the most basic of letters. And as I did, I thought of another ritual that had once felt so comforting then somehow turned into a chore.

This morning, I picked up my laptop. The smooth shiny case felt good as I carefully opened the cover and typed in my password. I started carefully, thinking of the words, just enough, not too many. Before long, the gentle rhythmic tapping of fingers on a keyboard began again, making it feel like home.

Five minutes, more than twenty years

Saturday - Petts Wood

We lived there once.

We moved in just a week before Megan was due, I brought her home from the hospital to the first house she ever knew. As she grew up, we walked through the town almost every day, crossing and re-crossing the foot-bridge over the railway, from east to west, past the library and the church, between school, shops and home. We picked blackberries in Jubilee Park when the weather was good, pick-and-mix in Woolworths when it was bad.

We learned about the Pett family as we played in their woods. I read the faded information boards, green with the moss and damp of the surrounding trees and told my children how the Pett dynasty had built ships for the royal navy. I was busy building my own dynasty then.

In Station Square, there used to be a gentlemen's outfitters. I remember peering into the carefully dressed window as I passed on my way to the bank or the chemist, it was full of tweed jackets, cashmere scarves, woollen socks.  I never bought anything then, and I'm sorry about that now. Today it's a coffee shop.

Sitting in the window where the clothes once were, I stir my coffee and look out across the square. There's a huge pub called the Daylight Inn. It was named for William Willett, a campaigner for daylight saving. I know there's a memorial for him in the woods; a huge sundial.  Just behind the Daylight there used to be a kitchen shop, with a small office above it, where I worked for twelve hours a week while Megan was at nursery. Cornwall Lord Chartered Accountants moved away long ago; but I still remember how I used to dash out of there at lunchtime to pick Megan up, I remember how she loved to cross the road to the bakers on the corner for a hot sausage roll.

Sunday - Sidcup

We lived there once.

I was nineteen when we moved in a month after getting married, and it was the first house I ever owned. In the nine years we lived there, I learnt to cook and clean, knit and sew; I worked out what it meant to be a wife and a mother.

Today, Megan is sitting in the car beside me as we drive into Sidcup. As we go past Queen Mary's hospital, where all my children were born, she chatters on incessantly; but I'm tense and tetchy with her, not really listening to anything she says. As we pass the roundabout, where I once thought she might arrive too soon, she reaches forward and turns up the volume on the CD player and just as we've done so many times before, we both start to sing.

A few minutes later, she points to a house up ahead "there it is - the one with the white fence." I turn into the driveway carefully, trying hard not to hit the gateposts, trying hard to sneak a look at the house.

Megan's friend Lara opens the door. She's smiling as she tells us to mind the wet floor "I've been cleaning for hours" she says proudly. We follow her into the kitchen, and admire the purple accessories - the toaster that matches the washing-up bowl and the cutlery, the purple leather bar-stools and the empty glass fruit bowl. Then she takes us on a tour of the rest of the house; the other rooms are big and bare. Upstairs we look at the bedrooms; I ask questions about where the furniture will go, I smile as she describes a small bedroom as a walk-in wardrobe.

We come to a third room "And this will be my room" says Megan. I picture the room she's left behind this morning, the bed piled high with black plastic sacks full of clothes and rubbish. I try to imagine what this room will look like in a month or two, when she's settled in here and forgotten to be tidy.

I don't stay long. They both come to the door to say goodbye. "come and see us as often as you want" says Lara generously. "Not too often" adds Megan.

I drive away slowly, not really thinking about where I'm going, along streets that were once familiar. It's only five minutes from the street we once lived in. Five minutes, more than twenty years.

I remember the excitement of moving into our first house in Sidcup, the pride of bringing Megan home to her first house in Petts Wood. I know today's a good day.

I just wish it hadn't come so soon.

Casting on

I was sixteen, tall, skinny and awkward; still trying to work out what clothes suited my gangliness, still wanting a style of my own. I wanted originality, but nothing too scary, something that would make people look, but not comment and never laugh; I wanted something more than Topshop but not quite punk.

Of course, I knew how to knit, I’d made squares for charity blankets at school, ungainly mis-shapen objects that really gave new meaning to the idea of casting off. But I’d never attempted something that was actually meant to be worn, not until I saw a pattern for a sloppy joe jumper in a magazine.

So I took the bus to Brixton, to the old Littlewoods store, where I'd seen shelves of wool stacked up high. The pattern told me how many balls I needed, but I hadn't yet learnt about yarn weights, or plys, needle sizes or tensions, so I simply picked the colour I liked best, a soft flecked grey, and some thick metal needles that felt smooth and cool in my hands.

I started knitting as soon as I got home, no messing about with tension squares, I just launched straight in. The two T-shaped pieces of knitting were thrown together with much more enthusiasm than expertise  and, of course, the yarn was too thin for the needles. My joe was very definitely on the sloppy side, but that didn't matter; I’d experienced the irresistible alchemy of taking a long straight piece of yarn and turning into something else. And since then, there’s never been a time when somewhere in the house I haven’t had a bag of wool, a stack of needles, a pile of patterns and a half finished piece of magic. 

I've often wondered what it is about knitting that captured me all those years ago, and has held me ever since. No doubt there's an element of pride in making something myself, a genuine pleasure in taking months to make a gift for someone else.  There's the way the continuous action relaxes and soothes, even the knowledge that I'm continuing a craft that's been around for hundreds of years.

Recently though, I've realised there's something else.  When I knit, I watch something take shape and grow. I have a picture in my mind of how it will turn out, though I'm never quite sure till it's finished. There are a limited number of stitches, but I can use them in a thousand different ways, and it's up to me which ones I choose and how I put them together.   I can work on it a little at a time, make it shorter or longer, bring together different threads, or try a different style. And if I'm not happy with how it's turning out, I can unpick it all and start again.

It's really just like writing a story.

Jejune - a poem

In rising arcs of naïve aspiration,
in glowing pride and unbound admiration,
I saw great depths, a new sophistication,
a worldliness beyond imagination.

I framed a peerless man in my mind’s eye;
I gave you wit, decreed your dullness wry.
I sketched the cynic’s smile you’d never own,
described the haughty brow, you’d never shown.

But then. I came to know a different you,
the hidden artificial, far from true;
the depth of intellect I thought I’d found,
a shallow pool of superficial sound.

Your metaphors came clichéd, too simplistic,
a jaded language so far from realistic;
the symphony, a halting, jarring tune
of disillusion found, too soon. Jejune.

Kiku - a story

So here they were, three sisters, in a strange room without any sofas, looking out from their separate armchairs. They’d never been here before without their parents; they hadn’t even been here very often with them.  

Nobody spoke. 

Rachel played with her socks, rolling them down round her ankles, like fat white sausages, then pulling them back up again. Mum would tell her off if she was here, tell her she’d ruin the elastic. But Mum wasn’t here, and Susan didn’t feel like it, so Rachel carried on; rolling and stretching, rolling and stretching.

Carol was chewing on one of her plaits. She’d screamed the house down earlier that day, when Mum had brushed her hair; she always did, no matter what day it was. Now she sat, curled up in an armchair, staring out of the window. Auntie Joan and Uncle George were the only people they knew who lived in a flat. It was on the top floor of a big old house, so the windows were level with the tops of the trees outside. Today, with the branches all bare, you could see through them to the streets and tall houses that stretched away down the hill, past the park and across the outside edges of Crystal Palace.

It was bad enough that their Nanna had died, worse that they weren’t allowed to go to the funeral. Susan knew that some people hadn’t wanted them going to the big church on the hill, and she could understand that for Carol and Rachel. Neither of them was even ten yet; but she was nearly thirteen, so she couldn't see why they’d all had to be dumped together on Auntie Joan and Uncle George.

Susan looked around her. Even though it was still light outside, the room was dark. The flat was part of a tall old building, one of the scary looking witch-houses they always ran past on their way to the swings. There were three lamps on small round tables, each with a tasselled green shade, but they weren’t doing much to brighten the room. Their weird glowing light reminded Susan of that time they’d gone swimming in the lake; when she’d ducked her head under and squinted up, she’d seen the same sort of dull green brightness.

It felt like they were waiting, but she wasn’t sure what for. She wondered if she ought to cry. Other people had cried when they’d heard that Nanna was dead. She’d tried, really she had; screwing her eyes up tight and thinking bad thoughts. But even though she’d remembered the worst thing, she couldn’t squeeze out a tear.

The last time they’d seen Uncle George had been at their own house. He’d done that trick where he’d put a tuppenny coin on the base of his thumb, then closed his fingers over the end in a fist and somehow clicked the joint, so the coin disappeared. They’d all checked his sleeves to see where it had gone, they’d looked under the cushions and down the sides of the settee, but none of them could spot it, until he’d jumped up suddenly and pulled it out from behind Rachel’s ear.

Susan wished he’d do a trick now, but maybe you couldn’t do magic when someone had just died.

Auntie Joan came in with a tray. It wasn’t like the painted metal one they had at home with the scratched old roses on it; this was a long wooden tray, with high raised sides, and holes cut in each end for handles. On it were three tall glasses of milk. Carol didn’t like milk, she’d never drink it, not even when Mum heated it up in the milk pan and put sugar in it. Susan wondered if she should say something, explain how Mum had written a letter to school, excusing Carol from the morning milk. She watched Carol wriggling in her seat, she noticed how even Rachel had stopped rolling her socks, waiting to see what would happen.

She saw how Auntie Joan placed the tray very carefully on the sideboard, then picked up the first glass and handed it to Rachel, who took it and said a quiet thank you. Susan knew she’d be last because she was the oldest; she knew Carol would be next. So she watched as her aunt picked up the second glass, and with it, a small plate of those biscuits with the nobbly edges, she waited for Carol to shout, or cry, or run out of the room. She could hardly believe it when her sister reached out to take the glass, copied Rachel’s quiet thank you and started to sip.

As she gulped down her own glass of milk, Susan wondered what time it was. There was a big wooden clock on the mantelpiece, she liked its loud ticking, but the numbers were written in Roman, and even though she knew she should still be able to tell the time, just from the position of them, the harder she stared, the more complicated it seemed.

Though she’d never actually been to one, and didn’t have any idea how long it might take, she thought the funeral was probably over by now. But she’d watched Mum earlier on, packing three pairs of pyjamas into the big blue holdall, wrapping their toothbrushes in one of the spare plastic bags from under the sink, so Susan knew their parents wouldn’t be coming back that day; she knew they’d be staying with Auntie Joan and Uncle George for the night.

None of them had ever stayed away before, well, not unless you counted being on holiday; and she couldn’t figure out where they were all going to sleep. If you’d asked her, she'd have said that she didn’t want to share a bed with her sisters, but she did want to go to bed soon; she thought it might be just like at Christmas, the sooner they all went to sleep, the sooner the next day would come. And then they could all go home again.

She heard a door bang shut. It was so loud; it must have been someone in the flat, though she couldn’t imagine Auntie Joan or Uncle George ever actually slamming a door. Then suddenly, there was cousin Vivienne, laughing and saying hello. All in one movement, she seemed to drop the embroidered strap of her bag from one shoulder, unwrap the long striped scarf from round her neck, shake her long hair loose, and scoop up Carol for an eskimo kiss.

Susan watched as they rubbed noses, she saw how Carol giggled and squirmed, how she begged for more as Viv put her back onto the armchair and turned her attention to Rachel, who was sitting across the room, watching silently, chewing on the skin at the side of her thumb.

“Hey Rach, have you ever seen a necklace like this before? It’s made of apple pips. All of it. Would you like to borrow it for a bit?”

Only after Viv had carefully placed the necklace over Rachel’s head and twisted it twice did she turn her attention to Susan. The eldest, always the last, and no lifting up for eskimo noses, just a tight, two-arms hug.

As she buried her face in her cousin’s shoulder, Susan could smell the strange, almost rotten, scent of Vivienne’s coat, with its leathery skin and furry edges. Then coming through over the top of that was another smell, it seemed to be oranges and lemons, sweetness and sunshine.

And then there was no need to screw up her eyes, or think of bad things. Susan breathed in the smell of being grown up, of being away from home; the scents and sense of things she knew and didn’t yet know. And, in the hug of her cousin, she cried for her Nanna.