Memoir Extract

Next week I’ll be on my way to Oslo. I’m looking forward to visiting very much but it means there will be no newsletter for the next two weeks. So today in recompense, I’m sharing something close to my heart with you - the beginning of PART TWO, of my memoir, Handmade. I’ve only just written this, it’s an early draft, so bear with me - aspects may change.

I decided from the beginning to give my mother and father different names: Alma and Kit. It helps me with the writing, especially when it comes to my mother.

It may help to know that my washing line, my garden, and my newly planted pear tree have featured in PART ONE, along with my childhood up to the age of 5.

The whole is written in short pieces/fragments and moves around in time, between now - 2024, my childhood years, and Normandy in 1997.

After the beginning of PART TWO below, the story continues with me aged five when we move to our new council house

PART TWO

Normandy 1

It's Thursday, the 6th of June, 2024, the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Here in the North, it's cool despite the month, and windy too, though short bursts of sunlight catch the ruffled leaves of shrubs and trees. I'm reluctant to step into the garden, afraid I'll find it bruised by the wind. But I have washing to peg out.  

The garden has survived better than I'd anticipated, nothing destroyed, not the roses, not the tall fox gloves or the slender irises which have flowered now for weeks. It is lush and overflowing with white and pink cosmos, pots of fragrant herbs and expansive hostas. The ceanothus has unfolded in a cloud of blue and the philadelphus is in bloom.

The pear tree looks sturdy, and behind it, spotted a few days ago by J, new shoots are beginning to appear on the stumps of the amelanchier we were so sure had died. Will there be room for the sprouting shrub and the small fruit tree? In time probably not. But for now, it's hard not to welcome the new life. 

I peg out the clothes, resisting thoughts of Alma, especially on such a day. A day that by rights belongs to my father, Kit

I leave the house to shop and when the shopping's done I make for the supermarket café. It's full of older people, people my age I guess. They've pushed tables together in order to gather in large groups. I'm the only person who sits alone, but this is me in my comfort zone with my coffee and notebook.

I open my notebook. As I pick up my pen, I recall last night's dream. The dream of a baby or was it a small child? Someone else was with me in my dream. I don’t know who, but we realised we'd lost the child, we'd left her behind. This is a recurring dream of mine. In it, I am always frantic. Frantically looking for the child and guilty at having forgotten her. But last night's dream was calm, leaving the child behind was not something we felt concerned about. Somehow we knew she was safe.

I wonder in the slow process of writing this memoir, if it's possible that I am beginning to leave the lost, troubled, child I was, behind. 

I think of Kit. Kit who died five years ago now. I've deliberately avoided the news today. Kit was there at D-Day, plus two. Remembrance will bring tears, and a grief which never completely goes away. But despite my best efforts, I cannot avoid it. I write this in my notebook: 

All morning, I glimpse you at the corners of my vision, blurred as it sometimes is now, reminiscent of yours. In a place we used to frequent, I catch you through the window, in the sunlight on grass that could just as well be marram stretching out to the beachheads. Two elderly men are taking coffee together. I imagine them talking about the landings, about the 80 years that have passed, the aftermath, the bodies cleared, the crosses rubbed with sand.

I picture you, young man tap-dancing in the kitchen, old man leaning on a stick. All morning you live in the creases of a jacket, its shoulders too wide as age shrinks you, as you grow tired even of our outings for coffee.

All morning, I have put away my grief until finally I surrender to the stories of the remaining few. The teenagers setting sail with no idea what was in store.

 'We knew something was up,' you said.

The mobilisation had begun. At night, in the darkness, ships lifting anchor, an armada, slowly, slowly, taking off across the water. 

At home, in the afternoon I put on my trainers and take off over the fields above my house. I imagine the path to be knee-high in buttercup and clover by now. It’s a while since I’ve been up here, where the view stretches west and out into Weardale and beyond to Cumbria. This is my favourite walk. I like the feeling it gives me of being on top of the world. But I don’t tend to take this route much now as my back is increasingly inflexible and doesn't cope well with uneven ground. 

It’s steep uphill out of the house, over the stone stile and alongside the first field, now fenced off and not as rich in flora as it once was. No orchids, no ladies smock. The path alongside the field has been widened and the long grass on the other side that hemmed the hedge has been cut down, gouged out. The ground has been churned up, turned over, the work feels blunt and savage.

At the top, I turn west to make my way over the high meadows, only to find as I pass through the gate, that the fields have been planted with hundreds of trees. Hundreds, stretching down to the dip as far as I can see. I wasn’t expecting it. I've taken this view for granted now for thirty years. Tree planting is of course a good thing, but so is preserving our upland meadows. I don't pretend to know how such choices are made. All I know is that this will become woodland now, and I am unlikely to see it in its maturity. All at once I am acutely aware of my mortality. The saplings in their plastic sleeves are reminiscent of the white crosses of the Normandy cemeteries. Endless rows of lost lives.

Kit was never sentimental about D-Day, he was not among the first ashore and he always insisted the heroes were those who did not come home. But he was visibly moved when we visited, Bonneville-la-Campagne, together on a family holiday in 1997: myself, J, our two children now aged twelve and ten, and Alma and Kit.

Our visit takes place the day after we receive the sad, though not unexpected, news of J's father's death. We decide it will be fitting to remember him by visiting the war graves; he was more of a military man than Kit ever was. On a perfect summer's day we wander among the endless rows of crosses, sign the visitor's book and read the names of the fallen. Alma, however, is aloof. She does her best to avoid me. She has stopped speaking to me- a tactic she is fond of. It began shortly after the news came of J’s father’s death. She was displeased with something I said that challenged her.. Although I don't know it yet, this is the beginning of the end, the beginning of Alma disowning me. It takes six months to play out. But it begins here, under the wide skies, among the white crosses of Normandy.