In Brief

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today is mostly pictures, because I am tired.

I am sad the Queen did not win the Derby. 'Oh come on, your Majesty,' I found myself shouting. (The dogs were amazed.) It is quite odd to love an eighty-year-old woman whom you have never met, especially when she embodies the madness of the hereditary principle. And yet, I love the Queen. Love love love her. When this first came upon me, I was rather embarrassed about it. Now I think: don't care. It can just go along with the other peculiar freaks that I have in my head.

'Oh the poor Queen,' chorused the Mother, the Stepfather, and the Step Uncle and Aunt, as I took them some chocolate fridge cake.

'And to be beaten by the French,' said my mother, in horrified tones.

'At last,' I said; 'payback for Agincourt.'

The lady herself took it with her usual stoicism, dignified in defeat.

Luckily, my small friend B had been to visit, to make up the for the disappointment. She instructed me on how many fairies can live in a hollow acorn. It is seven, you will be interested to know. Almost certainly she will soon tell me how many angels can dance on the edge of a pin.

Lunch with the Younger Niece, and my friend M, who made me laugh.

Now I am exhausted, and going back to my Sitting Very Still plan.

Here are some pictures:

The dog of the Older Niece and the Man in the Hat. That slightly melancholy look is because she really, really wants me to throw a stick for her and I cannot find one:

The Pigeon is being so adorable today that she gets two pictures, for the full beauty. The first is very slightly blurry, but I love it because she is doing her Grace Kelly look:

And the second is Dignity on her monument:

The hill:

Thanks, as always, for the enchanting comments of this week. I worried yesterday that I might have been guilty of the dreaded Over-Share, but the kindness of your response sent all angst running for the hills. You are the very best of Dear Readers, and I thank you all.

Light and shade

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

A sudden, violent storm of tears last night. There was a day of calm, in the sunshine, and then, out of nowhere, a great cloudburst. It was that kind of visceral weeping that comes from the gut; it was end of The Railway Children tears. It wiped me clean.

I think: this is what is supposed to happen. It is like an excavation; all the dirt and silt and detritus must be got out, or it will calcify inside, into a block of nothing, and that is what gets you stuck. I think: this is the correct human reaction. I have a suspicion that we are taught to fear sadness. It must be conquered, driven out, fixed, and then everyone can sing a happy song. Yet it is one of the most profound and crucial emotions. Imagine if someone you loved died, and you did not feel sorrow. That really would be frightening.

At the same time, I think: is this what people do? (Don't know who these People are; ones who have all the answers at the tips of their fingers, I suppose.) I come back to my desire for a manual. I want to turn to the chapter which says what you should expect in week four.

It was partly because the Younger Brother called to tell me of the memorial. ‘It was very sweet,’ he said. ‘People kept coming up and saying how much they loved Dad, and how he made them laugh. They talked of his kindness.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes. That is nice.’

‘I saw Orlando,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ I said. And that, for some reason, was the moment that I wished I had had the steely strength to drive those five hundred miles for the third time in a month. Orlando was a friend of the Older Brother, who brought him home one day when I was ten. I took one look at the tall, golden, laughing boy and fell helplessly in love. He was the second great love of my life. The first was an old racing man called Eddy Harty, who was a friend of my dad’s from Ireland, and had the weather-beaten face of a man who makes his living outside. I loved Eddy Harty so much that whenever he came to the house I ran upstairs, put on my best party dress, and went and sat on his knee. I was two. It is practically my first memory. (I also have a terrible feeling I may have told you that story before; for which, I ask your forgiveness. I love my Eddy Harty story.)

Anyway, poor Orlando, at the age of twenty, had to put up with a ten-year-old child following him round like a lovesick puppy. He must have wanted to listen to records and drink beer and do whatever twenty-year-olds did in the seventies, I don’t know, talk about prog rock or something. Instead, I was always hanging about, with my moony face, dragging him off to see a foal, or the cow, or my pony. He put up with it with extraordinarily good grace. He even danced with me at my brother’s twenty-first birthday party, for which I was allowed to stay up. I remember feeling awfully self-conscious in my poofy dress, while all around were languid, slender girls, wafting about in groovy threads from Biba or Fiorucci. But the handsome fellow danced with me, and that made it all alright.

So that boy with the great name was a part of the enduring memories of childhood and my early teenage years. He said to the Younger Brother, yesterday, that he remembered going to the house, and how welcoming Dad always was to the young, and how lovely that was. ‘He was so kind,’ he said.

I don’t know. I think that was the thing that made me cry.

But here is the thing. I have my crazy old family, tight around me. The dear Stepfather gave me some 1955 port last night, for strength. My step-aunt and uncle are here, and it is a keen pleasure to see them. This morning, the Beloved Cousin calls, and gently talks me down off the ceiling. She has a miraculous talent for that. She says she is looking out of the window, where my godson is flying his kite. ‘He’s been doing it for an hour and a half,’ she says. ‘It crashes down and he just picks it up again. I love watching it. Those are the things that matter.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Those are the things that matter.’

The Younger Niece rings up and makes me laugh. ‘I love you so much,’ I yell down the telephone.

The sun is shining again. The dog of the Older Niece and the Man in the Hat is staying, and I take her and my Pigeon for a swim in the burn. They splish and splash about under a sun as hot as the South of France.

I have the glorious spring. (I know it is June, but it still feels like spring here.) I have my little garden. I am planting many things in the black earth. My acer is about to arrive, which fills me with delight. I have the Dog. I have the Family. I have the Love. Sometimes, I am sad, an acute, yearning sadness that comes from missing my dad and my dog. But you know, I think that is what happens now. I think it is not something to be feared. I think it is human.

I think: my plan is to sit very still, and let this thing gently pass.

 

Pictures of the day:

Water dogs:

Look, look, The Pigeon is smiling:

(Actually panting a bit after scrambling up the river bank, but I choose to interpret it as a smile.)

This is what I like a dog to look like; all wet and muddy and dirty and doggish:

Then we walked through the wild phlox:

Past the old tree trunk and the gorse:

Along the path that runs by three of my favourite trees:

Back to the garden where the honeysuckle buds are growing more purple each day:

My dad's tree seems happy in the light:

The first peony is out:

I was never mad keen on these geraniums. I thought they were a bit mimsy with that pedestrian mid-pink, neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. Now I am growing rather fond of them:

The wonderful bush hydrangea or tree hydrangea or whatever it is called.  The one that grows tall and slender instead of bushy and squat, anyway:

The salvia and the perennial whose Name I Cannot Remember:

This dear old Portuguese laurel got absolutely clobbered by the snow and the frost this year. It was a big old bush, but the lower branches were so burnt from cold that I lopped them all off, and presto, now it is a tree. Rather elegant and continental, I think:

Pigeon with very, very serious face on. This is because I have just said the word biscuit. Her expression suggests that she is thinking: Do not use that word unless you really mean it:

The hill:

Just as I was finishing this post, there was a knock at the door, and two smiling gentleman were standing on the step.

'Have you got my trees?' I said, rather breathless with excitement.

'Oh yes,' they said.

The dogs danced out to greet them.

'Look girls, I said. 'Here are the lovely men with the lovely trees.'

Sometimes I am not sure I should necessarily say every single thing I think in my head out loud. The men looked mildly surprised, but they went along with it. They probably think I am some sort of care in the community project.

I was so thrilled by the arrival of the acer that I could not even wait to put on my gloves and boots. I had to plant that thing in the good earth. (As a result, I am typing this with black fingers, and my All Stars are filthy with mud, but I don't care.) I bashed away with my spade, mixed up the finest organic compost with two different kinds of plant food, watered the whole thing in, and stood back, quite ravished by the beauty. Now, in amongst the antic greens of the apple and the elder and the cherry and the lilac and the box, there is a harlot flash of red.

I think we can say that one is for my dad, too.

In which the sun shines

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today, the sun came out and shone and shone and shone. It was properly hot for the first time this spring. The wind, which has been cold, suddenly had a warm, desert aspect to it.

The swallows are madly excited by the whole thing. The first sound I hear when I walk outside with The Pigeon is the whooshing, raging, whistling sound of the swallows making their song. Except it doesn’t really sound like song. There is no warbly aspect to it, no hitting of a note. It is wide and improvised and undifferentiated. Also, they all do it in unison, in harmony, so it is like a wall of sound coming at you, a wave of sound, a rush of noise. It is very high, pitched up, and it swoops and falls and flies like the birds themselves. It is as if they are not doing a tune, as other birds do, but making a vast affirming shout of life, out into the air.

They are teaching their young to fly. I love this process, and watch for it every year. When the fledglings are very small and fledgy, the parents keep them close to the nest. They bring them in and out of my shed, in short training runs. Then they take it to the next step, which is to swoop up over my roof, and down the other side. They circle round the garden, and then back to the shed again. Then, when they are sure the babies are ready for it, their muscles built up and their wing feathers developed (I am supposing), they go out into the big testing ground. This is what I saw this morning. About two hundred yards away from my house, the ground falls down on a slope, into a long stretch of wild meadow, and then up again the other side, into the trees. This makes a perfect curve, a wide U-shape, like a miniature glacial valley. It is here that the swallows go for their serious exercise.

There they were, sweeping low over the ground, following the undulation of the territory. It always makes me think of the Second World War: they are like little Spitfires, out on manoeuvres. It is one of the most thrilling sights I have ever witnessed.

I stopped for a while, to watch it. On my iPod, Bedouin Soundclash were singing When the Night Feels my Song. It has a line in it, which they repeat, over and over, which goes: oh beautiful day, oh beautiful day. I felt the sun on me. I saw the swallows, doing their miraculous flight. The Pigeon was gently sniffing about in the long grass. Yes, I thought: it is a beautiful day.

I thought about my father for the first time without the lurching smash in the heart which that memory has brought, over the last few weeks. I have planted his tree; the memorials are over; he is laid to rest. Today was his birthday. I don’t want to grow fanciful, because that would never do, but it feels almost as if this day was like his birthday present. Or something. Whatever it was, there was so much life and beauty and colour and calm that I could hold him in my mind without a tearing sense of loss.

I know that these things go back and forth. I have learnt, through long and hard experience, that life does not go in a lovely linear curve. I used to believe that when I was young, and it took a long time to realise it was not so. It goes in crazy zig-zags, back and forth and up and down and round the houses. That is why you can’t just tick things off and move on to the next part. So I am not so foolish to think everything will now be sunshine. But when the sunshine comes, both literal and metaphorical, as it did today, I think it must be marked.

 

Today's pictures are of what I saw on my walk this morning.

The copper beeches are coming into their pomp:

The light in the woods was so lovely it made even the nettles look pretty:

The wild phlox is suddenly everywhere:

The burn is so clear that you can see the wonderful clumps of green water weeds, like basking seals:

My sister has made a wildflower meadow this year, and this is what it looks like:

The colours today were so vivid that I actually stopped and stared with my mouth open, like a character in a cartoon:

My little rowan trees were so green in the light that I want to invent a new word for green:

Off goes The Pigeon:

Sometimes it is as if she has a sniffing quota that she must fill:

Ready for her close-up:

And today's hill:

 

Thank you so much, as always, for the very kind comments. The ones from yesterday were particularly touching. It never ceases to amaze me that people I have never met would stop and take the time to send expressions of such kindness through the ether. It makes more difference than you know.

My own private memorial

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

At precisely 2pm, when the organ would be swelling and the vicar clearing his throat, ready to start my father's memorial service, I marched into my garden with a shiny new spade under my arm, a bucket in one hand, and a cherry tree in the other. The spade was for digging the good earth; the bucket was for compost to season that earth; the tree was for my dad.

It’s funny, because he wasn’t much of a tree man. But he bred a tree girl, after all that.

It’s one of the best things I ever did. Some of my brilliant ideas turn out to be a bit ropey, once they get out of my head and into the world. But this one was even more marvellous in its execution than in its conception. I had to dig hard. The ground was tight with roots, and hard with slate. I had to bash away with the spade, and then get in with my hands, pulling up the old slabs of slate and the wicked twisting origins of the ground elder. I thought of choosing an easier place, but then I thought, no, this is right, it should be hard. (How do gravediggers do it, I wondered; they must be fit as butchers’ dogs.) I put The Saw Doctors on my iPod, because everyone knows that The Saw Doctors will save your life, and I shouted along to Michael D Rockin’ the Dail.

I had thought of trying to find some of the old songs my father used to sing, The Outlaw Reparee or Black Velvet Band or Blowin’ in the Wind or The Leaving of Liverpool, but there was no time. The dear old Doctors would do, because they are Irish, and they make me smile, and they were the soundtrack of my formative years.

I laughed as I listened and sang, because I thought of everyone gathered in their proper black, probably singing Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, in a formal place of Christian worship. My Irish uncle would be in his black silk top hat. He is a man of exceptional tailoring. And here was I, in my filthy old jeans, and my bashed up old gumboots, my hands black with earth, singing The Saw Doctors at the top of my voice.

I laughed, I cried, I planted a cherry tree.

Then I sat on the ground, with The Pigeon by my side, and looked at it for a long time. I thought of my dad. My sister said of him, a few days ago: he was not like anyone else. The Man of Letters said, soon after he died: they don’t make them like that any more; where will those wild, eccentric men come from now? A racing man I ran into when I was in the south, who had been a steward with my dad at Bath racecourse, said: Oh, I hated stewarding, and then your father arrived, and it was a party. He smiled, remembering. Your father, he said, made everything fun.

I sat, and listened to more music. These were not the hymns that they would have been hearing in that church in Lambourn, but they are sort of hymns to me. I listened to Nick Drake singing Hazy Jane, and David Bowie singing Oh You Pretty Things, and Van the Man singing Chick a boom, and Bob Dylan singing Simple Twist of Fate.

A high wind blew up, out of the south. It’s unusual; our winds normally come roaring in from the north-west. I thought of something a nice man called Hugh said at my cousin’s funeral. We walked out of the church together, and the wind was blowing, and he looked up and said: That’s right, a good wind to blow the spirit up to the sky. That’s right, I thought, sitting on my mossy grass, in my dear garden, looking at my dad’s little tree, feeling the wind at my back: you can blow his spirit up to the sky now. Now he is blowing in the wind.

 

Here is the tree. It is a prunus Kojo No Mai, and it grows wild on the slopes of Mount Fuji. For some reason, I love that fact:

I planted some nemesia and some salvia as well:

The Pigeon lay on the grass and watched:

And over us, like the rock of ages, hovered the hill:

As I let this moment settle, I think of the thing of planting a tree for someone. I don't know why it feels so wonderful and right, but it does. I think: I would like someone to plant a tree for me. Then I think: we should all plant a tree for each other, not just when people die, but when they are alive, for love. Everyone could plant a tree for everyone else, because, as John Donne said, no man is an island, and then we can save the world.

You see, this is why I am not going out in public just now, because these are the kind of crazy thoughts that are swirling round in my head. You can't just go marching up to people and say: plant trees for love. You can't just be making statements, as my old dad used to say, like: The Saw Doctors will save your life and the trees will save the planet. That is why I am keeping to the safety of my quiet room, just now.

Although, I also think: if I were to say things like that out loud, it would have made my dad laugh. He was not a man of literature, and my bookishness always puzzled him, rather. But we shared a sense of humour; I think I got mine from him. Oh, he would say, you do make me laugh. Oh, he would say, you do cheer me up. I could not do much for him, in the later years, when his body was wrecked, as all those falls caught up with him, and every bone ached. But I am glad I could do that.