Victory!

Fancy dress competition during Victory celebrations in our village, after the end of the war in Europe and Japan. I'm the one in the nurse's outfit.

The village's victory celebration took place a little while after the end of the war, probably to make sure that all the men who were coming home, had come home.

 I don't remember a great deal about wartime. We lived in the countryside  and there were very few signs of it about. I knew that my father was a long way away, in India, because I received (and still have) one of the small records that the forces were allowed to make to send home. My father's voice seemed to be very hissy and squeaky. "Bye bye, little Bun, have lots of fun. Daddy." I wondered if that was the way he always sounded. 

As far as I was concerned, as a very small girl, life was just the way it was. The world was almost entirely populated by women, old men and children. New clothes came in a ‘missionary barrel’ from a land called ‘America’ or sometimes from one called ‘Canada’ and mostly they weren’t new at all, but I didn’t realize that. Certainly, the shoes we were given pinched. My mother said that American fittings were narrower than ours. I imagined people with long thin tapering feet like those worn with the medieval costumes in my colouring-in book. It worried me how they managed to walk. We had a wireless round which my mother and grandparents would gather, listening intently and not wanting to be disturbed. (It must have been a battery-operated one because we didn’t have any electricity, just open fires and oil lamps and candles.) I remember one evening after the news must have filtered through about what the Allied Forces were finding when they liberated the German prisoner of war camps. I was a bad sleeper, and on this occasion had been allowed to get up in what felt like the middle of the night (probably about 11 pm) and to join my mother and grandparents round the oil lamp at the kitchen table, where they were drinking tea and eating crackers and cheese and discussing  the reports in disbelieving and horrified tones. I heard  the name 'Hitler' several times and I was full of curiosity, because I knew that  nasty Mr Hitler was a very Bad Man, my questions flustered them. ‘Oh, something very very naughty. Very very unkind. ” They dropped the subject and wouldn't say any more.

Then the war was over and the Men came home. Everything seemed to change. 

 

After Wisley

Very thoughtfully, one of my daughters has bought me a small, lightweight folding wheelchair, which means that we can get out and a little more about than has been possible for a long while, and she took me for a trial run to the beautiful gardens of RHS Wisley. 

The forecast was for much colder, greyer weather than we have been having, so we wrapped up with jumpers, cardigans and coats, and, of course, the sun shone and it got warmer and warmer. By the end of our visit the little wheel chair and I were swathed with discarded woollies and coats and we had to stop every now and then to collect one or other which was trailing behind. The chair proved not that easy to push unless the ground was very even, but she has determination and stamina and, four-inch heels or not, tarmac, gravel, bark or chippings, my goodness, did she work hard shoving me up hill and down dale! It was really lovely – and quite a giggle, especially when, as a keen photographer but novice wheelchair-pusher, she darted off to take a picture here and there, forgetting to put on the brakes. Fortunately it only happened on gentle slopes, not precipices!  

The orchards were just coming into bloom, the greenhouses were full of delicious scents, the ducks and geese were marshalling broods of tiny chicks - it was all lovely. 

Over tea and sandwiches in one of the cafes, we somehow got round to working out that her father and I will have totalled up 150 years between us in a month or so. What have we  learned in that time? I won't speak for him, but I  often feel that I know less now than I did in my youth.  I certainly know how much more there is that could be learned that I shall never know. Two things I am fairly sure about: -

Happiness is a choice. 

Listen to the voice in your heart. It is your best advisor. 

Election fever

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee, I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?

                  Roger McGough.

Vanity, vanity...

There are certain things that happen to a woman as you are getting older and they are not all as freely anticipated as long hairs sprouting on your chin or starting to grow a moustache.

(Himself sometimes twiddles the end of a particularly long whisker and jokes that I am getting ready to join the RAF if I haven’t used my tweezers for a while.)

For a start, you don’t just grow white hairs in your eyebrows; you grow great, long, black, wiry ones as well. If you left them alone, you’d start to look like that politician, what was his name? Big bushy eyebrows... Chancellor of the Exchequer... Jim. Jim somebody. Definitely began with a ‘J’. John? James? Jeremy?

Oh, no. Denis. Denis Healey.

And whilst the hair is growing luxuriously all over the face, it is rapidly fizzling out on the legs and under the arms and er-hum… Everywhere else. All those young women are paying for ‘Brazilians’ or ‘Landing Strips’ and designs with names like that, would, if only they would have the patience, save themselves a lot of pain and money. To our surprise, many of us older ladies find ourselves remarkably on trend.

It is, of course, much demanded that one should maintain  a sylph-like figure. To that end (so difficult to lose a baby tum, even when you are a great-grandmother.) I caught a bus yesterday afternoon and went to the big town instead of the little one for a special purchase.  

I'd heard they were miraculous. I chose black, rather than the white or nude ones which were also on offer; they seemed more glamorous. I was tired when I got home, though, and I had to water the plants and cook a meal and one or two other things, so I put off trying them on till today. I'll have a go this afternoon.

*

Well, I've tried them on and it looks like another bus journey. I followed the instructions carefully and rolled them up like you do with tights before trying to get into them, but I could hardly get them up as far as my knees.

They're back in the packet now. It was worth a try.

I remember my Mother

My mother had kind grey eyes. She had long, dark brown hair which she wore parted in the middle and swept up in a thick roll about the back of her head. She had a small, smiling mouth and smelled of Pink Lilac talcum powder. She would sing me to sleep every evening.  I thought she sang like an angel. She didn't; she sounded very much like me and you don't want to hear me attempting to warble. She had a very bad stammer. My aunt, her younger sister, told me recently that she had been told that it started before my aunt  was born, following some incident during World War 1. At that time, my soldier grandfather was away in Egypt, doing his bit, leaving  my grandmother alone with her small daughter in an isolated cottage at the top of a steep hill. They had no water or electricity and it was my mother's task to fetch the day's supply of water from a spring in woods on the other side of the lane. One night, one of the many discharged and abandoned ex-servicemen who were roaming the countryside  came to  the house. Something happened. The stammer started after that. That was all my aunt  knew.  

She was my whole world, my security, my warmth, my safety in a frightening world. She died forty years ago this coming April. 

I still miss her. 

A sketch of what Jim and Mary's attic bedroom ('Someday, Maybe' ) might have looked like. 

Fiction or Non-fiction?

Where do you stand on fiction versus non-fiction? Which do you prefer?

Amongst those who came to have a few words about my novels ‘Someday, Maybe’ and ‘Moving On’ when I was in South Harting the other week was an elderly gentleman who told me, with a certain touch of disdain,  that he was not interested in reading fiction.

               “Why would I want to read about imagined events that happen to imaginary people?” he asked. “Why waste my time with something that isn’t real? Fiction is pointless. Non-fiction is informational, mind expanding. When I read, I want it to be something that will teach me something, make me think.”

At my elbow at this moment are the two books that I am currently reading. One is Emma Healey’s novel, ‘Elizabeth is Missing’ and the other is professor of physics Chad Orzel’s ‘How to Teach Quantum Physics to your Dog’. Across the table, my husband has columnist and broadcaster Rory MacLean’s ‘Berlin: imagine a city’ and the novel, ‘The Finckler Question’, by Howard Jacobs. Sometimes the mood and the moment is right for the reading of one, and sometimes for the other. Surely, there is a value in both fiction and non-fiction and very much a time and a place for both.

Certainly, non-fiction can be educational, informative, engaging and educative, given the infinite variety and complexity of reality.  Slower labour is required; you have to proceed to the next paragraph only after you have managed to grasp the previous one .You need more energy!  It involves slower, line-by-line reading;   you can’t just glide over the words. Fiction may not require as great an intellectual effort, and is, of course, dependent on the experience and imagination of the author and his or her idea of how a person might feel, think or act – though non-fiction, too, depends on the research skills,  integrity and organisational skills of the author, as well as his judgement as to how to represent or interpret the information at his or her hand at hand – but some intellectual effort is required in fiction reading in order to recreate the world of the book and the characters according to  the words the author has given us. There is also an argument that information may be remembered better when presented in a fictionalized form.

More importantly, though, I am with those who think you can gain insight into other people’s lives, human nature and emotions and develop human empathy through reading novels. During my conversation with the gentleman  I mentioned David Halberstam, who spent two years in Vietnam during the early stages of American involvement in the Vietnam war and who wrote a non-fiction book about it afterwards,  ‘The Making Of A Quagmire’.  Afterwards, he said, he had felt that he wanted a way to portray the frustrations and the emptiness of the war and so he wrote a novel about it, too.  ‘One Very Hot Day.’

 Like Halberstam, I believe that stories don’t just entertain, but also enlighten and engage us and allows us to learn about social interaction, psychology, history and so on  in a way that non-fiction can’t. By drawing us into their imaginary worlds, novels don’t just give us a narrative or stimulate our imagination, but also enlarge our understanding of ourselves and increase empathy with others. We identify with fictional characters and think about how we would react and respond to their situations. We try to imagine what it would be like… As someone said, novels are word machines which carry us through time and space. 

My gentleman said that truth is stranger than fiction.  Mark Twain said that it’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

 Pity I didn’t remember that quotation at the time!