Handmade Part Four

PART FOUR

Normandy 3

We are in the Normandy holiday house. It's after lunch and Alma is standing at the sink, washing up. J and I are at the kitchen table, the children having gone outside with Kit. J has phoned home and learned that F's funeral will take place the day after our return. We are discussing arrangements and whether the children will want to come. At some point J leaves the room.

Alma turns from the sink to face me, 'I don't know why you're thinking of taking the children to a funeral,' she says dismissively, 'they're far too young and anyway they didn't really know F, did they.'

This is not true, although she would have liked it to be. F was their grandfather. Not as involved as Kit, but nevertheless he was part of their lives and there whenever we visited J's family.

I've spent the best part of fifty years up until this moment appeasing Alma, terrified of incurring her disapproval. Now something in me snaps, as I said before - it's the straw and the camel and I am in no mood for appeasement.

'That's not a nice thing to say Mum, please don't let J or the children hear you say that,' I reply.

I may as well have set a bomb off.

Alma does not answer. She turns her back on me and from that moment stops speaking to me. She doesn't speak to me for the rest of the holiday. I am sent to Coventry, which is not such an unusual place for me to find myself, refusing to speak to me being one of Alma's specialities.

Later the next day, I make a well rehearsed attempt to cajole, to persuade her to come on a trip to Mount St Michel but she refuses and remains determined to cut me off and J too, though she still speaks to everyone else. Rather than come on the outing she stays in the house and Kit stays with her.

Back in the UK our youngest opts not to go to the funeral. He goes back to Somerset overnight with Alma and Kit. When we return from the funeral in the Midlands to collect him, she is still not speaking to me. She asks nothing about the funeral. She ignores us. It's left to Kit to make conversation and to make us a cup of tea before we set out again on the long journey home back to the North.

There is one less grandparent to rival Alma now F is gone but I'm not sure she cares any more. Alma had turned her sights on me. I will have to suffer for what I've said. She is out for revenge.

Becoming Old

Now is the time of becoming old, the time of, ‘children born to children born to sing us into love,’ as Joy Harjo says in her poem Becoming Seventy. I love this poem despite its length, I love the losses that come tumbling down. I love how memory saves us with red shoes and a red dress. A whole lifetime is here. Women of seventy have lived, believe me, and yet it's rare to read such a celebration of our lives. Where are our voices?

My three granddaughters have four grandmothers between them, each with our lives, our own red dresses and red shoes. Our loves, our heartaches. But we're not here for memory. Think twice before you write us off, out of the script, or decide our only role or purpose is to look after the grandchildren.

I admit you might well find us looking after the grandchildren, we do a lot of it, we love them, but you're just as likely to find us cycling through Thailand, working voluntarily for a charity, working hard in the community, or on a writing retreat in the Alpujarra mountains in Spain, writing our next book.

I for one am eternally grateful to the other grandmothers in my children's and grandchildren's lives. Sharing with them means love and support are multiplied, quadrupled, between us we've got most bases covered. It saddens me that Alma was too insecure to recognise the other grandparents in my children's life, that she didn't know how to share, that she suffered from extreme jealousy, that she lived like many women in the denial and fear of growing old and becoming invisible to men.

Me, I like being invisible to men, life is easier, its far less complicated. Though what I like best about growing old, apart from family, is having arrived at a place where I have a rich creative life and a room of my own.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote, 'A woman must have money and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.' When I started to write, which was after Alma died, I had a full-time job but no money (well not much) and no room of my own. At that time, the children were just into their

teens and were getting more expensive to keep by the hour and it took all of mine and J's resources to keep us afloat.

Crucially however I bagged the only bit of space going begging in the house which was the box room. I found a cheap desk and an ancient computer from the loft which my son helped me set up. I made it tolerable with the odd vase of tulips and some bookshelves. It had a view of open fields, sometimes there were sheep or cows. Uphill a line of copper beech stretched out along the cemetery wall.

Inspired by my new friend, novelist W who came to work in the prison with me, I wrote my first novel in this room. On cold winter nights and balmy summer evenings, at weekends and holidays while somehow managing to provide a taxi service for the kids, keep up with work and also look after things at home, I wrote. Far from considering it impossible, writing junkie that I'd become, I loved every minute of it.

Growing up on the Highbridge estate, I didn’t know a woman who had a room of her own, certainly not one with books in it. Alma often rightly complained about the lack of a room where she could leave her materials and her machine, whatever she was working on. The rooms of my childhood did not always feel as safe as they might have, so although I don't need a safe space now, I still appreciate that feeling of having a room that is entirely mine, comforting, safe, where I'm surrounded by books and paper, where I live in the time of becoming old and where good things happen.

School Uniform 2

Despite my nervousness, my fear of getting things wrong, my already well-formed belief that I have to be perfect, that nothing less is a failure, school continues to be a happy place for me. I am considered clever. This is a label I come to believe in, that I cling to. And I am eternally grateful to my teachers for this. I sometimes struggle with maths, which incidentally M is brilliant at. He will go on to become a mathematician. Mrs A who I like best of all tells Edith she thinks one day I might write a book. My spelling is not the best, but I work on improving it. I sing. I sing in the choir. Encouraged by Edith I have lessons. I sing in Eisteddfods. I sing in a concert party with my cousin L. Our lessons are sometimes hilarious and always fun. But Alma says my voice is not strong enough to sing in front of an audience and although I carry on singing with L, I come to believe her. I come to the crippling belief that unless you can do something to the highest level then you shouldn't do it all.

I am predicted to pass the Eleven Plus - (the exam in the 1960s which separated children into streams for Grammar School or Secondary Modern). Although I'm fatter than I should be I'm popular, and my friends are kind to me. Later in this same school, M is bullied for his dinner money by a particularly nasty individual and Edith goes to the Headmaster to complain. Alma has little sympathy. She says M must toughen up. Alma believes in 'men being men,' as she puts it. She makes it clear that Kit is not a man in her reckoning.

It's Kit who on Sundays polishes our shoes for school. Kit who is always first up, warming the house in winter, readying it on Christmas mornings. In later years when he doesn't have to leave for work so early, he brings us a cup of tea in bed with a custard cream biscuit.

Kit wants us to do well at school and to be fair so does Alma. They recognise the opportunity inherent in a good education. As a young man growing up in Plaistow, in London's East End in the 1930s, Kit passed exams to become a librarian. But there was no possibility of him taking up the training. The family needed money, and he was sent out to work. I don't think he resented this. It was the way of the world for the families in his community, but he knew it was a lost opportunity, and he didn't want it repeated.

The Brush With the Wooden Handle

I am eleven and in the last year of Junior School. A new girl, F, joins our class. She lives in Highbridge not far from our estate. She invites me to her house to stay overnight and Alma agrees. I omit to tell Alma that F's parents are away and that only her older sister will be there. One afternoon in the holidays, with Alma's permission I set off with my pyjamas and toothbrush. When I arrive at F's I find she is alone in the house. Her sister is out.

F wants to play, husbands and wives. This is a new game to me. It mostly involves lying on the bed and kissing. F kisses me on my neck. It sends shivers through my body. I like the way it feels, warm and sensuous, but at the same time it feels wrong. I worry that it's sinful. I start to feel anxious. I fear what might happen if Alma finds out that there are no parents here. Lying by omission weighs heavy on my mind. I know it's wrong to lie. I tell F I can’t stay. I have to go home. I make up my mind to confess. I will go home and tell Alma the truth and say I'm sorry.

Alma is hanging out the washing in the garden. She's surprised to see me.

'I'm sorry Mum, ' I say. 'I’ve come home because F's parents aren't there. She's on her own. I'm sorry but I lied to you.'

She looks hard at me, leans down, picks out one of my father's shirts from the washing basket and without taking her eyes off me, pegs it out.

'I’m sorry,' I repeat, 'I’m sorry for lying.'

She flashes me the look: the dark, narrow-eyed look. How dare I lie to her, she says. How dare I?

I know then she will punish me. I feel the injustice of having come home to tell the truth which seems like a good thing to do, only to be met with rejection and punishment.

I'm angry. I hate her. I hate Alma. I don't ever want to be like her. I do not want to model myself on a person who is so angry and so mean.

I blurt out, 'I hope I never grow up to be like you.'

Alma tells me to go inside and wait in the back room. She finishes hanging out the washing.

I wait. Before long I hear her come in through the kitchen into the back room. She pushes past me to the sideboard where she picks up a brush, a hairbrush, or maybe it was a clothes brush. I'm not sure, but I know that it was made of wood, it was heavy and had a long handle.

Alma begins to beat me with the brush.

'Don't lie to me. Don't you dare lie to me,' she repeats in rhythm to the blows.

I make myself as small as I can. I put my hands up over my head. I don’t know how long the beating lasts. I have no memory of pain, or no knowledge of the bruising I imagine must have followed. I only know that I am small and filled with shame and that Alma is big and filled with rage. A shouting, righteous, rage that implies I have made her do this. This is all my fault.

When she’s finished, she sends me upstairs to my room.

This is how I learn that truth is a dangerous thing. This is how I know never to confess to Alma. No matter what I've done, it will always be safer to lie.

The Morning After the Storm

I am far from home in the Alpujarra mountains in Spain on a ten-day writing retreat. This is the second time I’ve been to Casa Ana, the first was in the cool of November now it's September and still hot. I work mostly in my room at a small desk with the curtains drawn to keep out the heat. Yesterday afternoon a storm blew through the mountains bringing rain and wind. Today is cooler and I decide to write outside.

I sit on the terrace looking out at the mountains. Below me is a deep gorge, filled with trees and the ever-present sound of an unseen river making its way to the sea. Small birds I cannot identify flit in and out of branches, their wings flashing silver in the sun. I open my notebook and draft the account of Alma beating me with a brush. It's short, it's over quickly. Like the storm that blew the loquats from the tree, leaving them to be squashed on stone underfoot, that brought down unripe apples and flooded a nearby valley, the beating has gone. The rain has slaked the thirst of the trees and there is life in the green, new life in the gorge below us.

There is no one else here with me. Chairs sit drying in the sun, small piles of paper leaves litter the terrace. Someone has taken care to set four fallen pears out on a pillar to ripen. A breeze moves the leaves like water, rippling sun chases cloud; even the dead trees, bone-white, lichen-covered with not a leaf between them, shift to pink in the light.

I rest my pen and notebook in my lap. The rage of which I’ve been writing, which I’ve been re-experiencing, is dissipated, swallowed in church bells, in the sun warming my feet, in the soft Spanish voice of Sunday radio. All a million miles away from a beating with a wooden-handled brush.

Dinner at Casa Ana, and the women, women much younger than myself, are talking about anger, about the way as women their anger has been suppressed. I say that I found it impossible to express the anger I felt toward my mother.

That night I dream I’m a child again. I'm lying in bed awake, and I can hear Alma's footsteps downstairs. I do not want her to come into my room. I pray she won't. I'm afraid. I get out of bed and shut the bedroom door. I creep back into bed, pulling the covers over my head but I hear her approaching, coming up the stairs. She's pushing open the door to my room. I lie as still as can be. Alma comes over to the bed and climbs onto it. Alma climbs on top of me and I sink down under her weight. A vast, unbearable weight presses down on me. A weight the like of which I've never felt before, in waking or in dream. I cannot breathe. I cannot speak. I think I might die. I struggle to escape. I try to call out. Anger rises in me. I wake and the weight is gone.

2024

Fallen fruit; the wind from the northwest. Leaves gather on the pavement by the gate and the Virginia creeper on the fence blushes pink. Before long it will be a bonfire of red.

In the time I've been away on retreat autumn has arrived. J has been looking after the garden, weeding and cutting the lawns. As we draw up in front of the house, I think how fine this modest house and garden is. How well it has served us these last thirty-seven years.

In the morning, I drink my first cup of tea in the garden and check on the pear tree whose leaves are the colour of the ripening pears set out on the pillar at Casa Ana. I’ve returned from the retreat buoyed by the support of people like writing host and mentor, MJ, and her belief in me and my writing. All writers need this. We all suffer from imposter syndrome. Coming home I’ve been careful to try not to let it creep in. When it surfaces, I push it away - just carry on I say to myself, just keep adding the words, just keep watching the leaves turn.

For me, autumn is a season of possibility. A season of new places and new beginnings, possibly my favourite season. To quote Camus, Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower. I think my love of autumn has something to do with leaving home in September age eighteen for the University of East Anglia in Norwich, off to a city of trees ablaze with a new season. It has something to do with falling in love with a city, falling in love with life, with trees and my new found freedom.

A Maroon Beret and a Striped Shirt

I am one of only two girls on the estate who go to the Grammar School in Weston- Super-Mare. People roundabout us are still of the opinion that education is a waste of time for a girl who will only get married and have children, so what's the point? I am eternally grateful to Alma and Kit for ignoring the detractors and for standing by their belief in the intrinsic value of education.

The other girl at the Grammar School, is P B. She's fifteen, which seems so much older than me and so much more sophisticated. For the first few weeks of September we catch the bus together and she takes me under her wing. As well as being kind, P B is ultra cool. She wears her beret like a flat pancake on top of her short, bleached-blonde hair. She wears her cardigan long and her skirt hitched up. She’s a rule breaker, often in trouble, who will leave school at sixteen and run off to France with her boyfriend. I am in awe of her and hopeful that some of the cool will rub off through association.

I'm also grateful for the company of R, from junior school. She too is going to Weston Grammar and will catch the same bus. R is kind and gentle. Her parents run a nursery in Burnham. R's birthday parties are always full of flowers, a bunch of which we're allowed to pick before going home.

Alma has insisted on having my gymslip made to measure. It seems I am too fat for the regulation shop bought garment. I wonder now if this really was the case because I’m sure there were girls bigger than me in regulation gymslips. Also, I had a shop-bought uniform shirt which fitted just fine. I think it more likely that Alma was managing my appearance to her satisfaction. The worst of it was, I looked different. The material was darker. I stood out for all the wrong reasons. I hated the gym slip. I hated the way I looked.

Within a year of me going to the Grammar School, I will have a boyfriend. I will have lost all of my excess weight, having embarked on my first diet, schooled by Alma, queen of calories. I will be thinner and wearing the same colour gymslip, but I will still stand out. For the most part my classmates come from another world, from middle class families who live in tree-lined avenues, in big old houses where there are books and pianos. Where I discover, when I stay overnight at a friend's house, that everyone sits down together to eat a breakfast of porridge with cream and brown sugar.

Despite my differences, I work hard. I hold my own, often coming in the top three or four overall in my class, usually first or second in English. School is cold, our cardigans thin, we huddle around the radiators for warmth. Much of the building is prefabricated put together hurriedly after the war. It's situated on the seafront. We play hockey in our navy knickers, out in the teeth of the wind off the sea. Years one and two are not allowed shorts. Under our gym slips, we wear sixty denier lisle stockings kept up by suspender belts.

We ape the private schools of the privileged. Our teachers wear gowns. On special days they wear gowns trimmed with fur and mortarboards. They are on the whole clever, single women, dedicated to their profession. As I go through the school, I will meet many inspiring teachers especially in the fields of History, English, and Art. I am eternally thankful for my grammar school education. It opens up the world to me. It's what makes it possible for me to leave home. It's what makes it possible for me to put distance between myself and Alma.

Remembering a Pink Pac-a-Mac

France 2023

Bubbles float like spit on the water’s skin. In the shallows at the edge of the Etang, dappled sunlight falls on the water, shadowing the eel grass and the black spikes of sea urchins. The speckled seahorses are in hiding, sheltering from crabs and clams that pinch and wound them.

A thing so far back it’s not worth remembering, except I do. I remember his face: a vignette, freckled forehead, cracked lips and blue, blue eyes.

My first boyfriend. I am twelve, in my second year at the Grammar school. He is fourteen. There are no mobile phones, books are still our currency. His favourite is, A History of Torture, which he keeps in the pocket of his coat which is a velvet, Beatles' style jacket. He takes it out with him, to show around. There are photographs of victims in black and white, bound and blindfolded. I witness first hand the pleasure he takes in showing it off and in shocking others. I witness the pleasure he takes in bullying and inflicting humiliation on the first years on the bus. A sharp slap across the face. The time he bowls hard and fast at me with a cricket ball and my thumb nail turns blue, then black, then falls off. He is a fast bowler of some repute, who plays for the County

The time when it rained and I didn’t have a coat and he made me wear his mother's pink Pac-a-Mac which came down to my feet, as well as her plastic rain hood, all the way to the bus stop. Made me stand there and wait, dreading that anyone would see me. Why did he make me do that? Why did I let him?

Further out in the lagoon, purple waves are buffeted by the wind. To the north, Sete like a seal with its scarred, barnacled back rises out of the water, to the south an old white sailing vessel. Between them a long stretch of dunes and scrub, trapping the seahorses.

Then there was the time his mother was out–how I hated it when she went out–and he made me go upstairs and pushed me on the bed and tried to force me. I left for good then, shaken, hurt, but whole, because ripe for victimhood though I was, somewhere in me I found the strength to push him off.

Damsons and Ice Cream

2024

Since returning from Casa Ana, I've developed an infection in my eye. My lovely best, friend M comes because I'm not well and brings me sweet peas for my desk and damsons from her garden. The plums are stewed with a little sugar, and she has brought vanilla ice cream to go with them. In the late September sun we sit in the garden with our bowls of crimson plums and melting vanilla and watch J getting rid of the bamboo by the fence. There is no better day when you are ill.

In her classic text, The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr says that if memoir is done properly, it's like knocking yourself out with your own fist. It transpires that I need an operation to bypass my tear duct and prevent further infection in my eye. My consultant, Mr L, says after the operation I will feel and look like someone has punched me in the face. I don't tell him, I've been feeling a bit like that for some time now, ever since I began writing Handmade.

Out With Lanterns

I remind myself of the countless times I've said I want to find the good in my story, that it won't be a misery memoir. Though in all honesty I believe that misery memoir should not be the pejorative term it is, as if we always have to sanitise and deny the worst. As if the truth cannot be told if it is too unpalatable. But finding the good is as much for my own benefit.

The poet, Maggie Smith's, You Can Make This Place Beautiful, has inspired me in this process of moving through darkness into beauty, in search of self. Smith uses an Emily Dickinson quote as her epigraph, 'I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.'

I too am out with lanterns. So far, I have mostly held them aloft to illuminate the bad. If I hold them aloft to illuminate the good, what do I find?

The old Hillman car that opened up our world. Family picnics in the Quantock Hills, Holford Glen where the water ran cold and flag irises hemmed the stream, where we paddled until our toes were numb. Bluebell and primrose woods, sand dunes, red peonies and ice cream, Kit tap- dancing in the kitchen while making egg and chips. My marble tin, a doll with a purple knitted coat and dress, a mauve teddy bear I kept, that even now lives in an old chest in my bedroom. Chicks at Easter, warm eggs, loganberries and clotted cream from the dairy, Edith's blackcurrant tart. The Flower Fairy Book I bought for a penny at a jumble sale, a copy of Wind in the Willows, given me by an aunt. The library, a prayer book from Edith. Estuary, water, tide. Riding on the fire engine with Jack, a volunteer in the local brigade. Holidays at Butlins, Bognor and Minehead. The Manor Gardens, the mulberry tree, the floral clock. The sliding steps, my giant paint box, my roller skates and later my bike. Carnival, Bridgwater Fair. Sherbet and liquorice, watching TV with M and Kit, watching football and cricket. With Alma the best of it out shopping on Saturdays for clothes.

The Red Shirtwaister

Where did we meet the man Alma spent half the morning talking to while Kit collapsed and had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance? Did we meet him by chance in the town when we were shopping or was the meeting pre-arranged? I have no way of knowing.

I am twelve. My memory stretches only to sitting in the car, waiting endlessly while Alma and a man I don't recognise sit close together on the seawall, talking and flirting. Alma is wearing a red shirtwaister with a wide leather belt cinching in her waist. Alma has a waist, and I don't, so she says. This is a point of comparison that pleases her and which she will remind me of in years to come. For now, she sits on the sea wall, leaning forward, head turned in his direction, and laughing, something she rarely does at home.

It was a Saturday in summer, Kit wasn’t working. I think it might have been Easter or Whitsun. It was holiday time and M was due to go away for the week with our uncle J and his family. Edith and Jack were also going. I was to stay at home.

When Alma and I left, Kit was dragging the twin tub over to the sink, connecting the rubber hoses to the taps ready to do the weekly wash. To be fair to Alma, she was the one who usually did this. Yet still I was unhappy. I didn't like the fact that Kit who was rarely at home at weekends and who worked all hours was doing the washing. He was stuck indoors on a rare Saturday off while Alma dressed to to the hilt, and myself- a child makes good cover- went off to Burnham in the car.

I didn’t like leaving Kit. Even then I felt that Alma used him, ruled him, treated him like a servant, the way she did me. The problem was that he complied when I so badly wanted him to resist.

When Alma and the stranger had finished talking and we’d driven home, we arrived to see my aunt J and my uncle A, who lived at the the other end of the avenue, standing outside number eight, waiting anxiously for an ambulance. Kit who'd been living on bicarbonate of soda and stomach remedies, had collapsed in agonising pain and sent M to fetch my aunt. He had somehow made it to the bedroom and that's where we found him. He was on the floor, curled in a foetal position clutching his stomach, sweat beading his forehead, his skin bloodless and grey. Alma sent me to get a damp flannel to wipe his forehead while we waited for the ambulance. Then sent me downstairs out of the way because I couldn't stop crying.

Kit was diagnosed with a perforated stomach ulcer and was taken to Weston-Super-Mare hospital where he had emergency surgery. M went off on holiday as planned and I stayed at home with Alma. We spun the clothes, emptied the twin tub and hung out the washing, then we sat together in the back room and waited. Only the ticking of the backroom clock punctuated the silence. We waited. We watched the minutes pass. Time crawled, until it reached the hour we'd been told to phone: five pm. We left the house then, went to the phone box and rang the hospital. Kit was out of surgery, and he was going to be fine.

Alma could not have known what was about to happen when she went out that morning. But I still blamed her for not being there that day, for using me as cover for her flirtations, for not loving Kit, for lying and cheating on him. I blamed her because in my mind such matters were simple. He was my father. I loved him. Why didn’t she? Despite his passivity, he was nicer and kinder than she would ever be.

There was so much I didn’t understand about relationships then. I cannot blame Alma for being unhappy or feeling trapped like so many women of her generation. But as for the way she went about things, the way she flaunted her suitors and later her lovers, I could never accept that. She didn't seem to care whether she would be seen, in fact she courted public attention and she didn't care who she involved, principally me, or how she might humiliate Kit. More than once I witnessed her flagrant and public betrayal of him. She appeared to have no guilt or remorse about any of it. If she did care I saw no sign of it, and it was never expressed to me. Any regret for the hurt she caused was either lacking or buried too deep to be excavated.

When Kit came out of hospital, he was ill with an infection in the wound. Photographs of that time show him gaunt and hollow-eyed. It was Edith who nursed him back to health. He stayed with her and Jack for a fortnight while she fed him and he took long walks along Burnham sands. For a while the stress that had overwhelmed him appeared to be relieved. Alma appeared quieter and chastened. I think it had frightened her.

It was about this time, as he recovered, that Kit conceived his plan to buy a piece of land from Alma's cousin on which to build us a new home back in Burnham. Plans were drawn up for a bungalow. Edith helped him secure the loan from the bank where she worked as a cleaner and work began. Kit dug the foundations. He had a hand in most other things too. Jack laid the bricks. Various uncles and friends did the carpentry and the electrics. The rest of us acted as manual labourers. Alma played her part enthusiastically. We were coming up in the world, moving away from the estate. Alma was about to be a homeowner.

2024

The few leaves remaining on next door's apple flutter like prayer flags in the wind. J has dug in two new hydrangeas and planted the verbena bonariensis that has up until now been confined to a large pot. The bamboo is dug out, a true labour of love, and the fence newly painted black. I have made up pots of winter pansies and cyclamen, their violet and pink vibrant against the wet greens of autumn. I see them when I look out from the kitchen window.

I am reading Olivia Laing's, A Garden Against Time. She writes of her head being full of plants when she was studying to be a herbalist, how the study and observation made the world more intricate and detailed for her. It reminds me of M, who bought the damsons and ice cream, who I've known for more than half my life. She is a botanist. We share a practice of close observation, but we come at it from different places. Me from the study of the History of Art at university, pouring over photographs of gothic cathedrals and illustrated manuscripts, she from her love and dedication to the natural world. M has been the one to teach me much of what I know of gardening. We share a passion for flora that began for me long ago on the Somerset Levels, in the astonishment and wonder of the landscape around me. This year, in tending the garden, I am bringing the fields of my childhood, their comfort and their sanctuary, as close as I can to my window.

The Impiraresse

That Kit took on the building of a new home was not as surprising as it might seem. He could turn his hand to most things. He mended boats and cars with the fibreglass he brought home from work, the strange material that we were forbidden to touch. He made model aeroplanes with M. People brought him their glasses to mend, their false teeth, their stopped clocks and watches. In the factory he supervised an experimental plastics department. He was self-taught, without any professional qualifications and my son follows in his footsteps. But not me. I do not have many practical skills. I’m too clumsy, too impatient and unlike my daughter not neat enough.

But I've always had the drive to create. I would occasionally draw or make collages but for the most part I didn't know how to satisfy this creative instinct until I began working with writer in residence, W, while I was teaching at Low Newton women's prison. It was W who told me I could write, who said I should write, who inspired me and became my friend and mentor. It was from this point on, when I was fifty, that my life as a writer began. Once I started I couldn't stop. Words spilled from me. I filled notebooks, fashioned poems, short stories and wrote my first novel in a year. Now, with Handmade, it occurs to me that like Kit with a pair of broken glasses or Alma invisibly darning a coat, I am using my words to repair.

I think about a necklace of beads, broken, unstrung, like the blue crystal beads that sat in Edith's velvet jewellery box. I hear author, Tracy Chevalier, talking about the bead makers of Venice. I look them up and find them portrayed in John Singer Sergeant's beautiful but unfinished painting: The Bead Stringers of Venice. These are the impiraresse. They sit in the shade of a Venetian alleyway, trays filled with beads waiting to be threaded onto cotton strings, resting on their laps,

Before I began this memoir the past was like Edith's necklace, its string broken, the individual beads preserved unstrung in the velvet box of my mind. Now, I am at one with the impiraresse. Word by word, I am threading beads to make the necklace whole. Telling it once and for all, all in one piece, as never before. A broken thing put back together, reclaimed, freed from the box in which it has been held captive.

Planting Tulips

2024

On a November morning, with the winter sun struggling to break through the cloud, in still, mild air I plant tulips in anticipation of spring. Tuscan, Byzantine mixes, old favourites: Apricot Beauty and Flaming Purissima. I'm struggling to work after my eye operation and its minor but troublesome complications. Thankfully it will only be a week or so before it improves.

We sweep leaves, tidy the paths and the small patio, use the last of the manure on the roses and the pear. We put the garden to bed for the coming season, for rest and renewal. I think how important it's been this year as a counterbalance to the work on the page, to the personal journey that is still unfolding.

Afterwards, in the kitchen making coffee I look out of the window. The sun is out, and a robin perches on the rake leaning against the fence. It wouldn't be winter in the garden without this small visitor. How easy it is to take for granted its miraculous red breast, its fearlessness, its colour, its willingness to approach and be seen.