I’m still in reflective mood after my previous post. Yesterday I
went for a run. I only started running again
last week, after recovering finally from two debilitating chest infections
which led to my asthma worsening.
Running provides a structure and routine that I lack in pretty much most
aspects of my life, including writing.
Especially writing.
It was good to feel the warmth of the sun, at last, and for
the first time in ages my feet found a rhythm again and I was able to relax.
Noticing all the flowers in bloom, I was transported back to childhood, walking
home from school across the field and picking wild flowers to take back to my Gran.
Everyone walked to school in the 1960s and 70s.
My parents didn’t even get a car until the early 70s, but even when more
people had cars, the thought of being dropped off by your Mum at school was definitely
not cool! As kids, we were all far more
independent, thank goodness.
Anyway,
back to the flowers. Lots of yellows;
coltsfoot, celandine, pale mustard, dandelions (which for some reason we
thought made you wet the bed), golden buttercups, and a sweet pea-like flower
that when paired with purple clover we called egg and bacon. Another purple
flower, delicate and intricate, which I think we called vetch, was popular with
red ants and you had to be careful to brush the angry insects off when you plucked
it from the grass. Daisies grew in every patch of green. Wild flowers were abundant
then.
As Mum and Dad both worked, my
brother and I had breakfast and lunch with my Gran, or Nanny, as we called both
our grandmothers then. Ethel was my Mum’s Mum, a matriarchal figure who had
given birth to 15 children, all at home (which for the first three children was a
barge on the river Nene). I used to be
fascinated by her long silky grey hair; it reached right down to her waist in a
long plait, which she wound around her head.
She had been born in 1900, and I marvelled at the things she must have
seen, living through two wars, and enduring endless hardships and challenges. I
wanted to know about her past, her childhood, and I was always full of
questions which she seemed bemused by.
Why did it matter? It was past,
done. Life was about the present. She
just got on with it. When we lost her to bowel cancer, well into her eighties, she
had never spent a day in hospital and passed away in the council house where she had brought up her large family and lived in most of her life. Those women were made of strong stuff.
So, I started out this post running and then moved on to the
death of my Nan. That’s what fascinates me about the way memories work and how
they are triggered. I run outside, I see
wild flowers, they remind me of childhood and I am back in Nanny’s kitchen
presenting her with yet another straggly bunch of wild blooms which she puts in
water in a reused jam jar. And as I
write, I am crying for what has been lost.
Not long after Nan’s passing, I wrote my second children’s
book, Wild Horse Island, and she
found her way into the story – a different version of her, but with the same
heart. She reappears in a more recent
book, Always in my Heart. A writer can immortalise that which is
precious.
