Robin McKinley's Blog, page 11

The Ambush of Memory

 

When I started writing this Radio 3 was playing Beethoven’s Fifth. About a week ago a bunch of us handbell ringers sloped off after practise to go hear some fire-breathing orchestra detonate Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.  They played some other stuff first—very well too—and I noticed that two of the six double bass players were small, slight women* but mostly I had my head down over my knitting.  Knitting is my default these days.**  And it was (mostly) okay.  Change of air.  Change of scenery.  Change of people.  All good things (mostly).  My three companions were chatting away cheerfully about music during the pauses while I went loop-wrap-pull, loop-wrap-pull.***

And then the orchestra went dah dah dah DAAAAAAAH and I . . . lost it.  WHAM.  Small intimate train wreck.  Wept copiously all over my knitting.  Swallowed one hand and half a box of tissues in an attempt not to sob cacophonously .  Wanted a bag to put over my head so as not to blind everybody else in the theatre with the dazzling redness of my eyes.

I don’t even know why Beethoven’s Fifth.  It wasn’t Peter’s favourite or anything.  But (several of) Beethoven’s symphonies have been somewhat guilty pleasures for me for most of my life.  Beethoven’s symphonies—maybe especially the Fifth—are so . . . obvious. I love, oh, say, Messiaen, but I have to be feeling like a grown-up to listen to him.  Small children and dogs like Beethoven’s Fifth.†  I first fell under its spell when I was a small child†† And I think what happened is that I found myself staring down the long††† unravelling skein of years during which I have listened many, many times to Beethoven’s Fifth and . . .

I know this is a Stage of Grief. I hope it will be over soon. The grief won’t be over soon—you don’t get over the loss of someone you loved, that’s a no-brainer—but this not being able to go out in public without being frelling likely to make a scene is a colossal bore as well as a vicious circle since the more you don’t go out the more likely you are to melt down when you do . . . and the more likely the depths you will plumb while you’re sitting at home staring at the walls will get depthier.‡

So I do go out.  I’m going to see a live-streaming LA TRAVIATA this Thursday.  It’ll be great.  I can cry when she dies . . . .

This is a Stage of Grief. I know this.

* * *

* I assume they have finger, and possibly arm, extensions to get around the half a mile of those strings.

** It’s certainly my default in public.^ My default at home is mostly a milling hellmob wanting to know when something interesting is going to happen.  Now that we’re spending all our time at the cottage^^ which has very limited floor space due both to original square footage and the whole Things in Corners When There Are No Corners and the Rooms Are a Lot Smaller Than They Were Before There Were Bookshelves on All the Walls etc, this question is more urgent than it used to be.

^ WHAT AM I GOING TO DO about that frelling frelling FRELLING Jesus is my totally creepy boyfriend Modern Christian Worship NOISE?  I got through church this past Sunday for the first time without suffering comprehensive disintegration followed by bolting for the door and sitting in Wolfgang in the dark till I could frelling drive.+  But it wasn’t a good or a holy uplifting time.  GAAAAAAAH.  Sermons about the glory and beauty of life are bad enough but the singing . . . .  The long view is that I want to get back on the singing rota—St Margaret’s have no standards, fortunately and would be happy to have me back—because even before 16 December++ I’ve found the power ballad to God thing a trifle testing, and up on stage ‘leading’ cough cough cough turns it into a performance and I can flip the ‘performance’ switch+++ and the emotional manipulation factor is thereby dimmed.  BUT I need to reach a tipping point of self-control before I risk it.  The performance apparatus will stretch, gouge and support only so far.  It’s  maybe like a hammer to thud a few nails further in.  But it won’t abracadabra a frame to clamp you together.  ++++

+ I can’t remember now if it was last week or the week before that it was helpfully raining so I could sit in Wolfgang with the wipers going and nobody could see me chewing on the steering wheel.

++ Although I effectively stopped going to church after 7 September.  I was at Rivendell on Sunday evenings, like every other evening, and I still can’t get out of bed in the mornings when most people go to church.  Well, I can get up, but I can’t get sane and plugged together enough to drive a car, even a very well-mannered# car like Wolfgang before noon.  Two or three in the afternoon is preferable.

# which is to say lacking in youthful pizzazz and top end precipitancy

+++ Just so long as there’s at least one guitarist to hide behind

++++ MIXED METAPHOR ALERT. And now I’m going make it worse by telling you how the necessary planks are still holding up bird’s nests back in the forest somewhere.  I am trying to tell you I am nowhere near the tipping-back-into-prudence-and-rationality# point.

# Not perhaps that prudence or rationality were strong points before.

^^ Oh, and?, she tosses off lightly, have I mentioned that I’ve bought another house? A . . . you should forgive the term . . . third house?  I have spectacular cash flow problems that may result in a failure to buy dog food soon+ BUT I OWN THREE HOUSES.++  Briefly.  Poor Third House goes on the market as soon as I can finish getting it cleared out.  New House needs a name.  Second Third House? Fourth House Minus Two?  Daughter of Third House?  Seventh Cousin Twice Removed of Third House House? Numerical Confusion I Never Could Count House?  Gwendolyn?

+ This will delight the hellhounds of course. The hellterror, not so much.

++ It’s a long story. Next blog post.

*** I’m not going to say clickety-clack because I don’t clickety-clack.  I use wooden needles, not metal, and I’m slow so I might as well be silent too.

^ Not that this saves me from, for example, the stitch I dropped and then picked up again incompetently when I was knitting in bed one night and heard . . . the unmistakable sounds of a member of the hellmob downstairs throwing up. There is now a HOLE.+  I will sew it up during the seaming stage which, as we all know with McKinley knitting productions, never happens.++

+ In the knitting. Not the hellmob.  Or the kitchen floor.  The hellmob are all remarkably resistant to being left in a box by the side of the road.  They tend to climb out and follow me home again.

++ Which will be embarrassing in this case because it’s the latest in my attempts at a baby blanket. ONE OF THESE DAYS I’LL ACTUALLY FINISH ONE. Before the kid goes off to uni.#

# All right. Before the kid goes off to uni may be too much to ask.  By the time its first baby is born perhaps.~

~ But I still won’t have seamed it up and woven the ends in.

† The hellmob prefer LA TRAVIATA. But they’re okay with Beethoven’s symphonies.

†† And doubtless I was a dog in a previous life.^

^ I know Christianity doesn’t do reincarnation.  WE DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING.

††† Long long long. One of the tangential horrors of the current presidential-election follies is that these bozos are my age.^  These scary creeps are my generation. Forty years ago my generation were going to SAVE THE WORLD, especially from the politicians—and the politicians’ policies—of our parents’ generation.  Same old same old same old I DON’T NEED ANY ADDITIONAL REASONS TO BE UTTERLY DEPRESSED.

^ Ted Cruz is an infant.

‡ Also you are so unlike the self you used to be or thought you knew, blither blither quackety quack quack, and this current self is so exasperating and unseemly and difficult to manage^ that you, or anyway I, do find myself trying to ‘manage’ it/me like you might manage any other intractable problem.  What frelling works? Avoidance?  Confrontation?  Drugs?  Handcuffs and a soundproof dungeon?  Chocolate?  I haven’t found what works yet.

^ And liable to mood changes so supersonically fast, as you might say breakneck, you give yourself whiplash.+

+ It’s not that there aren’t good minutes#. There are just so many more bad ones.

# Getting sworn in as an ornamental laic doohickey by my monks was a good minute. Actually it was several good minutes in a row.  Even if they did occur at EIGHT FORTY FIVE FRELLING O’CLOCK IN THE SUPER-FRELLING MORNING.

Moving on. Or not.

 

 

That’s the end of the memoir bits. You had mine first, which came last on the day, followed by some of his poetry, and the grandson with the amazing voice sang Linden Lea* and then it was over except for the champagne and fireworks.**

And then all of us left behind stumbled back to our lives. It’s funny what catches you out.***  Up till this week when it turned suddenly cold at last† it’s been insanely, unseasonably warm†† and all kinds of plantlife has been shooting out—my snowdrops are going to be over before they usually start—we had purple sprouting broccoli in November instead of February, and I’ve just been shelling my first broad beans of the year . . . broad beans? That should be like . . . May.†††

Broad beans were one of my early revelations about life in England. The only big fat round green bean I knew were frozen limas—preferably as succotash—and while they were fine the earth did not move and rainbows did not explode behind my eyes when I ate them.  But broad beans . . . yowzah. YOWZAH yowzah.  They are so spectacularly awesome they are worth the incredible faff of shelling the beggars.  Those of you accustomed to this task will know whereof I speak.  They grow in these massive great pillowy pods and you pick one up and think, YES!  Big fat broad beans!  And then you grapple your way into the thick uncooperative husk‡ and discover it’s mostly the plant version of bubblewrap and you have to lever out the few beans embedded therein.  ARRRRRGH.  Only the fact of the essential divinity of broad beans keeps any rational person at this desperate activity.

Peter derived some amusement out of my naïve horror at the process. And I did get used to it.  Greed helps.  But the thing is . . . it’s something we did together. We certainly did it literally together back at the old house, podding our very own broad beans out of our very own sweat-of-our-brows garden‡‡  And even since we moved into town and our broad beans come by organic-grocer delivery we at least had each other to moan at, whoever did the actual shelling that meal or that week or that season.  Hey! the one would say to the other, shaking a pot with a modest layer of broad beans spread across the bottom.  It took me forty five minutes to shuck that many!

Not this year. And telling the hellmob just isn’t the same.

* * *

* Peter had eccentric tastes in music as in most things. He would tell you he ‘wasn’t musical at all’ and didn’t care for music, or didn’t care one way or another about it.^  But if you put the wrong CD on you would hear about it and there were certain things he did really love, Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings for example.^^  I still wasted quite a bit of time believing that he didn’t care for music and, for example, originally assumed that the mum in SEVENTH RAVEN was a cellist because he needed her to be something, not because he was susceptible to a well-played cello.  Oh.  Anyway.  He was sufficiently unmusical to like listening to me sing, and I’d been learning Linden Lea shortly before one of Percival’s visits.  Peter certainly knew Linden Lea;  I don’t think you can live on these islands without having some vague idea about King Arthur, Stonehenge and Linden Lea, but I don’t think the last had particularly registered with him before I started doing my dying-pig routine with it.  Percival is always happy to take requests and he knew Linden Lea. Golly.  So while Linden Lea was introduced at the memorial service as one of Peter’s favourites it might be more accurate to say it was one of his favourites for about the last year of his life.

^ And long-term blog readers will recall that he did the loyal-husband thing and accompanied me to many operas although this was not his idea of a fabulous night out and he usually complained about the libretto. Well I complain about most librettos.  Any story-teller who doesn’t complain about opera librettos is an alien from the Crab Nebula only pretending to be a human story-teller.  Well, a human story-teller with any pride.

^^ Which I learnt to pay attention to and then to love because Peter thought so highly of it. I wasn’t a Britten person when I movcd over here;  I knew his operas a little because I know most standard-rep operas at least a little, but their emotional reality is mostly too real for me.  There’s no dazzling melodramatic catharsis at the end of Britten’s tragedies the way there is at the end of Verdi’s.  And, just by the way, if I never hear the four sea interludes from Peter Grimes again, my life will be a little brighter.  I should think Mr B would be rolling in his grave at the idea that something he wrote has been essentially turned into a frelling lollipop.  Although I think he was the one who turned them into a concert piece in the first place.  We all make mistakes.

** Well, prosecco. But definitely fizz.^ And yes, fireworks.  Advantages of having a memorial service in January, generally speaking a quite depressing enough month in the northern hemisphere without any help:  It gets dark early for fireworks.  I’ve been saying that we blued the estate on the send-off. It was worth it.

^ I had two glasses and could barely walk.  Maybe I should have eaten something.  They even had a plate of gluten-free and I saw it like once before it ran away and hid in the shrubbery or under the piano or something.

*** No it’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.

† And I found out again how many frelling gazillion geraniums I have when I had to bring the suckers indoors to save them freezing. I had visitors coming and the sitting room floor was suddenly wall to wall to bookshelves to sofabed with geraniums.  I spent a day that might have been better spent cleaning the house^ hacking and repotting and wedging, got the floor clear enough to open the sofabed and the windowsills JAAAAAAAAAMMED . . . and then there was a family crisis and I have a nice clean sitting room floor and no one to admire it but me.

^ I lost the will to live on the subject of the kitchen floor of the cottage several muddy months ago. Now I know the hellmob do walk into the little garden courtyard to pee and so it is not surprising they come back in again mired to the elbows but I SWEAR the flaming mud can jump. I’m standing in the doorway just making sure that no one with a high-angle aim pees on a rosebush and the mud makes a sudden lightning raid and gets all over the bottoms of my house slippers. Arrrrrrgh.

†† AND WET.  AND MUDDY.

††† Not that I wouldn’t be glad to have May’s daylight. This time of year, bad weeks the hellmob and I barely see the sun.

‡ The how-tos tell you blithely to run your fingernail down the seam and split it open. LIKE HELL.  The how-tos, which have obviously never podded a broad bean in their lives, neglect to tell you that you have a better chance of seaming one open if you start at the rear end rather than the stem end, but even so, at least one pod in three disintegrates in nasty messy little spiral flakes as you claw at it.  Think about running your fingernail down a line of bubble wrap and expecting it to pop open.  Ha ha frelling ha.

‡‡ Note however that I personally did almost nothing in the vegetable garden. I was flowers^ all the way.  Our broad beans were the sweat of Peter’s brow.  I admit however that I’ve started surreptitiously growing a few broad bean plants in pots in my little garden.  I get about one good plateful from them, but they’re not fussy as plants, it’s only when you’re trying to extract the frelling beans that their depravity manifests.

^ Hey. Only about 85% roses.  Okay maybe 90%.

 

My Peter, lV

Writer and Seer: Peter’s literary works*

 

Now, for this next piece I need you to imagine that I’m voicing over the sound of a typewriter. It’s coming from up a stairway or behind a study door, and it sounds like this:

Chack-chack-chack-chak. (Pause for thought.) Chackchackchackchackchackchack…  

Peter did not have typist’s hands. He said his fingers were like a sculptor’s, thick and stubby**.  He typed from the elbow, two fingers, hitting the keys so hard that he could break them in ways that the repair people had never seen before.

He wrote books, but not only books. He wrote scripts for plays: amateur productions that we performed with our friends the Stuart-Smiths at their house at Serge Hill***; and for the highly-talented children’s opera group who performed in St James’ Church in London W11†.  He wrote a screenplay for a TV series called Mandog, and drove our little Morris Minor as an extra in one of the chase scenes.

And he wrote poems. When he was re-roofing our large and leaky house at Bramdean††, he wrote poems about it on slates and hid them under the tiles for future generations to find.  He wrote a clutch of painful little poems after the tragic death of Mary Rose in 1988, and more when Robin crossed the Atlantic to join her life with his.  Many of these are in his collection The Weir.

But his books were the main thing. He would write two a year, one adult mystery, one children’s fiction, like a farmer rotating the crops in his field.  Often he’d start with just an idea, and no notion of where it would take him.  He said he could write a third of a murder novel without knowing who had killed whom or why.††† 

His imagination was bold, far-reaching and quirky. He would follow a story set in a Scottish Loch with one in sixth century Byzantium.  He wrote about the near future and also about the dawn of humanity. He did light romance in the General Strike and science fiction in an apartheid Britain where some skins were green.  He loved to set his stories in country houses like this one.‡ And if when you’re looking around you see a drop of fresh oil on a weapon in a display case – that’s the clue!

His characters were complex, his prose rhythmic, his ideas tantalising. He would do nothing obvious or cheap. For him, all worthwhile moral questions were complicated and ambivalent. But he did not want to lecture his readers. He took them round the byways, through the wild woods of imagination, and if they came to ask themselves the sort of questions that he was asking – as it were, by accident –  that was all he could hope for.

He kept it up, for over sixty novels. That’s a gravity-defying career by all standards. They’re all still available – just go to http://www.openroadmedia.com/contribu... or find his website http://peterdickinson.com/.  [Here we (*&^%$£”!!!! go again:  I can’t make the suckers live.  Time to call in Blogmom.  Apologies.]  Some of them won prizes. Tulku and City of Gold won the Carnegie in consecutive years. Others did not, but his quality was always high.  Have you tried The Last Houseparty? Ah, you should.

Phil and Polly remember accompanying him to Crime Writers’ Association dinners and rubbing shoulders with the greats like Harry Keating and Dick Francis.‡‡ James and I remember our excitement when he fell into a correspondence with Richard Adams (I think Peter was less than excited about this, actually).  He served as Chair of the Society of Authors. He went on lecture tours, he was awarded the OBE for services to literature.  But he was no highbrow.

He won prizes, he said, because his books were the sort that adults thought children ought to read.‡‡‡ He was ambivalent about that. He told an Exeter conference in 1970 that the danger of living in a golden age of children’s literature was that “not enough rubbish is being produced.”

And he added:

“Nobody who has not spent a whole sunny afternoon under his bed rereading a pile of comics left over from the previous holidays has any real idea of the meaning of intellectual freedom.”

Back then that was fighting talk, and he had to defend it.  Which he did.  It wasn’t in his commercial interest, but it was what he believed.

So we thought we’d give you a bit of Peter’ essay “A Defence of Rubbish”. Here he is, the writer’s writer, the librarian’s favourite, up and fighting for children to be allowed what the hell they liked, even if, to the adult eye, it contained no value either aesthetic or educational.

…Third, I am convinced of the importance of children discovering things for themselves. However tactfully an adult may push them towards discoveries in literature, these do not have quite the treasure trove value of the books picked up wholly by accident. This can only be done by random sampling on the part of the children, and it is inevitable that a high proportion of what they read will be rubbish, by any standard. But in the process they will learn the art of comparison.

Fourth comes a psychological point. Children have a very varying need of security, but almost all children feel the need of security and reassurance some time. One can often tell how happy or insecure a child is feeling simply by what she is reading. And sometimes she may need to reread something well known but which makes absolutely no intellectual or emotional demand. Rubbish has this negative virtue, and I would be very chary of interfering with a child who felt an obvious need of rubbish.

My fifth point is more nebulous. There is no proof, or even arguing about it. But I am fairly sure in my own mind that a diet of plums is bad for you, and that any rational reading system needs to include a considerable amount of pap or roughage—call it what you will. I know very few adults who do not have some secret cultural vice, and they are all the better for it. I would instantly suspect an adult all of whose cultural activities were high, remote and perfect.

I have to take the podium again to make my confession here. I spent a fair amount of my childhood re-reading football comics.  I was probably aware that I was being allowed to get away with it.  I had no idea at all that I owed it to his faith in intellectual freedom.

Books, Peter said, are like leaves. They fall from the tree that made them and for a little while they lie golden on the ground.  But very soon they are buried by the next layer of books, which of course are doomed to be buried in their turn.  It’s a melancholy but realistic reflection on how much of a monument a writer can expect from his own works.

But of course, the monument is not really in the book at all. It’s in the readers who found that treasure trove and were touched by what was in it.  Even if they can no longer remember the title or the author’s name.  And sometimes they do.  A few years ago I met a young writer who said: ‘Peter Dickinson? We had one of his books in the school library when I was twelve.  It was called The Gift. I loved it.’

The Gift. Ah yes. Thank you, Peter.  For that one too.

* * *

* by Peter’s son John, yes, that John Dickinson:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Dickinson/e/B001HOK3VO/ref=sr_tc_2_0?qid=1453003824&sr=1-2-ent

He has a blog and a website, but they have been a trifle neglected: he says himself that do something about this has been top of the list for . . . er . . . quite some time.

And here is an interview John did about Peter right after he died: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06spffh

The bit about Peter starts eleven minutes in. Several people have told me it’s good. I haven’t listened to it—I can’t bear to—so don’t talk to me about it.

** Peter had gigantic hands. My hands are big enough I can only get into size large dishwashing gloves but he could swallow one of my hands in one of his.  Walking down the street holding hands we had to do it palm to palm like you do with a kiddie:  if we tried to lace our fingers together I’d dislocate my knuckles.  I’m wearing his wedding ring on a chain around my neck.^^  I could almost wear it as a coronet.

^ Trying to find dishwashing gloves that would fit him was epic. The holy grail was nothing on trying to find dishwashing gloves for Peter.

^^ Sigh. . . .

*** Hertfordshire. North of London.^

† Notting Hill. Next to Holland Park, as previous.^

^ . . . apologies to my English readers. But the majority of this blog’s readers are American and I’m making the assumption that they don’t know any more about English geographic niceties than I did thirty years ago.  About the Europeans, Australians, Asians, Africans, Antarcticans and Martians who read this blog I will not hazard a guess.

†† And he did a VERY GOOD JOB. It DID NOT LEAK in my era.

††† I’m pretty sure I’ve told the blog this story: Peter lived with me in Maine for a couple of months while I finished DEERSKIN before packing up to move to England (eeeeeeeeeep).  He borrowed my old manual typewriter [sic] and started typing (as above:  CHACK CHACK).  After a few days he gave me the first chapter of what would become THE YELLOW ROOM CONSPIRACY.  Since it’s the first chapter it’s not much of a spoiler to tell you that it ends with the two main characters saying calmly to each other ‘I thought you murdered so and so.’  I looked at Peter with very large eyes:  Wow!  What happens?  Who did it?  —I have no idea, replied Peter.

‡ Avington Park, where the memorial service was held, and which is so much more fabulous than its web site makes out. Some day when I’m feeling jolly and expansive I’ll tell you about finding it.

‡‡ I met Harold Pinter at one of these things. I didn’t take to him.  But then he didn’t take to me.  Harry Keating was a sweetie. 

‡‡‡ Ahem. He also won prizes for his murder mysteries.  Ahem.

My Peter, lll

Dad–Punch, Mary-Rose and family: *

 

So there was Peter at Cambridge. Dad, typically, said that he felt he wasted his time there, worked ineffectually and took little part in the many extra-curricular activities on offer. He didn’t get the hoped-for first in his finals, but even so, the college gave him a bursary to study for a PhD.  Half way through this he walked into the Dean’s room and the Dean looked up from the letter he was reading and said “Would you like a job on Punch?”

The background to that story was that when the youngest member of the five-strong editorial staff of the satirical magazine Punch turned 40, they decided that they were getting too old and needed to get some younger blood in to keep them relevant. The editor wrote to a don he knew at Cambridge to ask him to find someone to train up. Allegedly someone else also wrote to a don at Oxford who never replied. So Peter was the only candidate. On his way to the interview for the job he was knocked down by a tram and arrived covered with blood and dirt, but they gave him the job anyway. It makes a great first job story and eventually made its way into his novel Death of a Unicorn. 

Around this time, Peter went to a party in a friend’s rooms at Kings and met my mother, Mary-Rose. A pretty girl, standing by the fireplace laughing delightedly because she had just managed to break an unbreakable glass in the grate.  Family legend then goes that soon after they met, she was whisked away to India (allegedly because my grandparents did not approve) and he thought he’d lost her forever. Almost a year passed—and Dad was at another party when she came up behind him and rapped him on the shoulder with her fan—he turned around and there was the girl of his dreams.

They were married at Bramdean, Hampshire, on April 26th 1953.  They set up house in a flat in Pimlico, he continuing at Punch; Mary-Rose working in the display department of Heal’s furniture store. A couple of years later, I came along, followed by Polly the following year.

They then moved to a seedy area of West London called Holland Park** and set about converting a tall, thin terraced house into a single family home (in common with all the other houses in that street, it had been let as single rooms with coin-operated gas fires***). The pub over the road was a favourite haunt for that era’s unpopular immigrants, the Irish, in London, and Friday nights were frequently enlivened by fights in the street. Occasionally accompanied by a drunken fiddler.

They did as much of the conversion of the house as they could themselves. Dad made cupboards and shelves and created ingeniously designed tables and benches to fit small spaces.  Many of our childhood memories include laying slabs, bricklaying, painting and decorating in every house we occupied.

Meanwhile at Punch, Dad was progressing through a number of editorial upheavals and jobs. At various points he was Art Editor (despite only being able to draw dragons and trains sideways), resident poet, Literary Editor and eventually Deputy Editor.  It was clearly an extraordinary place to work (occasionally the editorial team played cricket in the corridors) and brought him into contact with some of the great humorists and cartoonists of the time.

At home, the family was growing, with the arrival of John and James. My parents bought a couple of small ramshackle cottages in Hampshire and set about converting them into a single dwelling. With a well, a chalk heap, a growing vegetable garden and wonderful views, this was a great weekend and holiday home—and also eventually became the setting for The Devils’ Children.

Some of the most abiding memories I have of my father from this time are the stories. He would read to us every night without fail and every car journey there would be a new episode of a story to listen to. As I think back, I realise how extraordinary this was but at the time, we just took it as normal. Sometimes they were re-tellings of great legends –with a twist, perhaps.  More often they would be completely new.  The boys always wanted a battle, so there were lots of those. It was a brilliant way to keep four lively kids quiet on long car journeys.  He was our in-car entertainment.

Around this time Peter started tinkering with what he believed to be an original idea for a crime novel, working on the kitchen table after supper.

In 1965 Peter and Mary-Rose moved from their cottage to take over half her parents’ house at Bramdean, which must have been a huge stretch on a journalist’s wages. It was a wonderful place in summer—though freezing cold with a leaky roof in the winter. They developed a large vegetable garden and Dad started brewing beer (more successful than his efforts at wine making!).

By 1966-7ish Dad realised that the crime novel he was writing was completely stuck. That must have been a bad time. But it also brought him the cold-sweat nightmare which became the first scene of The Weathermonger.  The following evening, he put the crime novel aside and poured his heart into writing his first children’s novel.  Once that was done and on the way to his publisher, he returned to the crime novel, saw pretty much instantly what he needed to do with it and finished The Glass-Sided Ants’ Nest (published as Skin Deep in the UK allegedly because someone at the publisher declared that no woman would ever buy a book with an insect in the title).

In 1968 both The Weathermonger and The Glass-sided Ants’ Nest were published to great reviews. By that time he had completed two more novels and was starting on a fifth. With these successes under his belt, he had what my maternal grandfather described in his diary as ‘a sudden rush of blood to the head’,  left his job at Punch to become a full-time author – and also bought the other half of the house at Bramdean.

* * *

* by Philippa^ Dickinson, who, when she retired a year ago, was Managing Director of Random House Children’s Books UK, and is now in training to become ruler of the universe because the universe so badly needs ruling.  Peter and I used to listen with rapt fascination to Philippa’s tales of taking on various corporate miscreants^^—the kind of miscreants who are used to ploughing ordinary members of the public under, and probably still don’t know what hit them. The trains/transporters/teleportation booths will run on time in Philippa’s universe. Also, the reason Peter’s memorial service went as brilliantly as it did is largely down to Phil.  It’s end of year holidays and everyone is closed for business?  Well they’re just going to have to open up again.  It’s beginning of year holidays and everyone is on a beach in Barbados?  Well they’re just going to have to come back again.  We all^^^ pitched in at our various levels of competence—that would be me blubbing along at the bottom—and the Dickinson Managerial Gene in its rich panoply of manifestations was much in evidence# but the honours go to Phil.##

^ I had a brain failure last night—they’re a bit endemic at present—and forgot that I hadn’t already posted Phil’s and was queueing up to post John’s. Fortunately he didn’t answer by return electron.

^^ As if running a large wodge of frelling Random House wasn’t enough.  I’m talking about corporate miscreants outside publishing, where no one would know that this woman with the pleasant smile and mild manner is dangerous.

^^^ chiefly Peter’s four kids and I, with crucial input from various spouses, cousins, and Peter’s brothers

# None of Peter’s kids is a wallflower. They had an excellent role model. I remember, early on, once complaining, after a Dickinson family dinner party, that I hadn’t been able to get a word in edgewise.  Peter looked at me in surprise.  Shout louder, he said.

## This includes a lot of kind and patient support of the blubbing widow. 

** For anyone who doesn’t get this joke, Holland Park is like the place to live.  Buckingham Palace?  Don’t be silly.  Notting Hill?  So last century.  Holland Park is the place to be.  But sixty years ago it was urban blight.  Peter and Mary-Rose were in the first wave of gentrifiers. 

*** And, according to Peter, electricity that consisted of a single naked light bulb on the landing of each floor, and a loo at the bottom of the garden.

Post-memorial placeholder

 

One day at a time is a good idea when you’re a little more plugged into the concept of ‘day’. I was planning to post another piece from the memorial last night, but I’d had a really nice day out with a friend* followed by supper at a pub** and when I got home . . . home was darker and colder and emptier even than usual since 16 December, despite the presence of a hellmob who were more than happy to join me on the sofa for some mutual support*** and I couldn’t face posting more remembering-Peter stuff.  This evening I got home from my interview at the abbey to become an Ornamental Laic Doohickey appended in some mystic and numinous manner from the monkish community†, firmly opened my laptop and addressed myself to the next memorial piece and . . . realised I needed to ask its author a few questions before I posted it and he didn’t get back to me by return electron what is the MATTER with the man.††  My sensible alternative was to hang some photos—there were posters full of photos at the memorial service, most of them patiently loaded and tweaked into available digital format by the tireless Philippa—but I can’t face that right now either.†††

So you’ll have to make do with this for tonight. Tomorrow is another day.  For better or worse.

* * *

*Fiona. We went to a YARN SHOP.  That was a no-brainer, wasn’t it?  But it’s a yarn shop that specialises in small indie spinners and dyers where if you see something you like BUY IT IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE IT WON’T BE THERE IF YOU GO AWAY FOR A CUP OF TEA TO THINK ABOUT IT AND COME BACK HAVING DECIDED ‘YES’.  The problem with going in there even having decided in advance to kill on sight—er—I mean snaffle and stuff in basket on sight is that these frelling itsy bitsy indies—I mean the tinies, doing it in their kitchen sinks^, seem only ever to produce one middling-sized skein of anything. Which does make for a highly engaged day out, scampering around the shop looking for something that complements the single unique skein you have fallen in love with, which alone has about enough yardage^^ for a bow tie and one earring.  This matching trick is likely to be impossible however because you’ve got to get the same gauge—the thickness of your yarn—and the mix of fibres similar if not identical between or among your skeins or your knitting will come out a gnarly ramshackle mess.^^^  This odds-against pursuit also goes some way to preventing you from buying more yarn than will fit in the car.#

^ You can tell what mum or dad is dyeing by the colour of the food on your plate. Orange meatloaf.  Green bread speckled with dazzling yellow pumpkin seeds.  Red peanut butter.  Pink brussels sprouts.  All finest wholesome vegetable dyes of course.  That’s probably beet juice in the peanut butter and maybe in the brussels sprouts too.

^^ or meterage

^^^ Fiona, who has been at this scam a lot longer than I have, is also a lot braver. I keep looking at the percentages of stretchy (wool, etc) and non-stretchy (cotton, silk etc) and wanting them to match if I’m going to try to knit them together, and sometimes frelling teeny indies don’t even give you the percentages, so you have something that says wool/silk and something else that says wool/silk but THEY ARE OBVIOUSLY PERILOUSLY DIFFERENT and then you see something that says wool/silk and something else that says alpaca/cotton and they actually look pretty similar and you’re sure you’re losing your mind as you’re kneeling weeping on the floor when Fiona drifts by says, no, feel it—rubbing various yarns briskly between her fingers—it’ll be fine. She also has some INSANE ideas about holding double a 4-ply yarn that matches your unique skein of 8-ply colours in paradisical perfection, to make up the weight.  AAAAAUUUUUGGGGHHHH.  Maybe she could do this without inadvertently stringing herself and three local hellcritters from the rafters but I’m not going to risk it.

# It’s probably a good thing Fiona has a small car.~

~ I have ANOTHER yarn day out planned with ANOTHER friend. This however will be to a serious, sober yarn shop and I shall go armed with a LIST. As Fiona and I were agreeing yesterday, when you go into a random yarn shop you buy . . . random yarn which goes in your stash. If you have a PROJECT in mind . . . of course you have to buy yarn for it because your stash is . . . your stash. You don’t knit from it. Of course not.

** I think I’ve told you that the Troll and Nightingale used to be the brawlers’ pub, the presence of which haven of misbehaviour in deeply staid New Arcadia used to amuse me to an unseemly degree.^ Well it got a refit a year or three ago and has blossomed into quite the many-petalled flower of the art of the gastropub.  I’m a tiny bit nostalgic for the bad behaviour of yore, but mostly I’m happy to have another option for a glass of fizz and some food to hold it down within walking distance.  New Arcadia is so well off for foodie pubs that you can choose your atmosphere by your mood of the moment and you can indulge in a permanent snit with one of your locals and still have plenty of alternatives.  For a cranky person the availability of a righteous snit that doesn’t cost anything in pleasure or convenience is as delicious as . . . well, Niall’s chocolate brownies, say.  Anyway.  The Troll and Nightingale wasn’t expecting much business on a wet Tuesday night in January and were understaffed and service was SLOOOOOW.  But Fiona and I just got on with our knitting.  Knitting rules.^^

^ except when the spilling into the street and the tops of their lungs and breaking furniture+ thing was happening very late at night on a summer evening when your windows are open. I won’t say I would be trying to sleep, but if you’re propped up in bed on six pillows in the wee hours reading, part of the pleasure of the entertainment is the you’re-the-only-one-awake silence.

+ You probably know it’s actually quite difficult to break furniture that hasn’t been Hollywoodised for filming scenic altercations, but it can be done.

^^ Even if I did have to rip that multiply-damned sleeve out again. I would suspect myself of not wanting to finish the last project I’d started while Peter was still alive but since I never finish anything anyway this seems superfluous to requirements.  I’ve done a lot of knitting since 7 September because it keeps me off the ceiling^ and pretending to be calm and sane, knitknitknitFOCUSknitknitknit, but I think it’s all lying around waiting to have some kind of finishing element applied.  Mostly this involves weaving in ends and sewing up seams but I’m also experimenting with making bags for handbells which require felting. Oh, and I made an adorable scarf with my last two skeins of indie yarn.^^

^ Unless of course I’m trying to knit with a double strand of 4-ply to match the every-two-rows swap with the other single-indie-skein of 8-ply.

^^ You’re allowed to knit randomly out of your stash.  You just can’t knit planned projects.

*** And snoring. The hellterror is a redoubtable snorer.

† The monk who is Master of Ornamental Doohickeys said to me kindly that signing up was a significant thing to do at a crisis or turning point in one’s life. Oh.  I thought Alfrick was just stampeding me into something he thought would be good for me.

†† Possibly he has a life? Some people do I believe.

††† The posters themselves, at my request, were handed over to me at the end of the memorial, and they are leaning up against a corner in the cottage sitting room. I want them, I just don’t want to look at them quite yet.

My Peter, II

PETER — EARLY MEMORIES *

My earliest memories of Peter are when he was 4 in our tropical bungalow in Livingstone (now Zambia) — within sight of the plume of spray from the Victoria Falls. We each had an African minder and a pet: Richard a sulky eagle owl chained to a stump, Pete a mongoose which nipped our heels but was meant to deter snakes — Dickie, our Dad, named it Rikki-Tikki-Tavi after Kipling. I had an armadillo which was singularly unresponsive to affectionate stroking. We bathed in the Zambezi protected from crocodiles by wire mesh fencing and had picnics in the dry season on a rock right on the lip of the Falls. There was a lot of travelling. We travelled to and fro — a gruelling three day journey – to Plettenberg Bay on the South Coast of South Africa for the hot weather and then to England (three weeks’ voyage in a Union Castle steamer) to meet our English grandparents. We eventually settled as refugees in our grandparents’ house in Painswick after our father died.

 

I’m a bit confused about the chronology but for several years we lodged with our Hyett Great Aunts in Painswick House, a small dowdy** but beautiful Georgian Mansion in a huge wild garden with romantic Rococo follies half hidden in the undergrowth. For Peter it was heaven. Aunt Lucy knew much of Shakespeare by heart so there were yearly productions of Shakespeare on the bowling green in which Peter always had a part. Julian Slade lived in the village so he was of course the lead! There are many echoes of that lost world in Peter’s books.

 

In a production of Alice, Richard was the Mad Hatter; Peter the March Hare. I was the Dormouse.

 

Of Peter my most vivid memory is of him sitting with his head in a book anywhere he happened to be: on the stairs, under the billiard table, behind the library sofa; on any vacant bed, with his thumbs stuck in his ears to exclude all exterior distractions like urgent calls. The only way to get his attention was to grab the book and run. One winter afternoon he didn’t turn up for lunch. We weren’t too surprised because time was a flexible dimension in his world; but when it started to get dark our mother began to get worried and I heard anxious grown-up whispered conversations. “What shall we do?” When it became too dark to read the ten foot high double doors to the drawing room were pushed open (the room was seldom used) and a rather bleary-eyed boy came out to ask if it was lunch time yet. His mother was uncharacteristically cross with him — I think she had been really frightened. “Peter, what have you been doing? We’ve been calling for you for hours!” “Oh sorry Mum, just been finishing Macbeth and Hamlet. ”

 

He had an extraordinary memory for poetry. At our prep school we had to memorise a poem each week and recite it on demand. Peter learned Chesterton’s “Lepanto”, admittedly in weekly chunks, but could still recite most of it*** years later. I remember him chanting in a gale on Painswick Beacon ” White founts falling in the courts of the sun, And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run, There is laughter like the fountains in that face that all men feared, It stirs the forest darkness the darkness of his beard, It curls the blood red crescent the crescent of his lips, For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships” . Our mother loved Housman’s poems and used to recite them to us on our long cross-country drives in our ancient Morris 8. Peter came to know many of them by heart and as I sat beside his bed in the week before he died we recited several together nudging each other’s memories. I have chosen the last poem he spoke.

 

From there Peter went to Eton as a King’s Scholar. It was a family tradition of several generations that “going to school” simply meant going to Eton. He was remarkably uncontaminated by the experience and seldom talked about it, perhaps because he got terrible reports for idleness and carelessness, but his natural intelligence got him an Exhibition to Kings College Cambridge, initially to read classics but moving over to English as soon as he could. Our ways gradually separated (I was spared the family tradition† ) but when we met we always picked up our voluble conversations more or less at the point when we had last left them. Richard used to complain that we talked simultaneously and much too noisily.

 

He did 2 years National Service in the Royal Signals in the course of which he managed to mislay 4 army trucks which were never traced. He told me that a kindly Sergeant quartermaster added them to his own inventory of mislaid equipment for which he was court-martialled. It sounds a bit like a novel. But that is hardly surprising.

 

One final snippet. Peter loved limericks and invented a new verse form called a ‘Bishopric’ There were strict rules: there had to be a Bishop in the first line and another clerical office mentioned in the third.

 

The Bishop of Joppa

Grew moss on his topper.

He said to his curate

“My wife will manure it,

I wish you could stop her.”

 

The Bishop of York

Ate his soup with a fork.

“My Lord,” said his vicar,

“A spoon would be quicker,

And allow us to talk.”

 

The Bishop of Bude

Used to bathe in the nude.

“My Lord,” said the Dean,

“Wear a hat, lest you’re seen

On the beach by a prude.”

 

But it was to Housman that his mind drifted back at the end. †† Tess †††  is now going to read one of his favourites which seems apt today. ‡

 

* * *

Editor’s footnotes, for anyone who is unaware of blog style:

* by Peter’s brother Hugh, retired Dean of Salisbury Cathedral, which I think makes him a Very Reverend.  He was also my guardian angel both during the funeral Mass on Tuesday that Alfrick took and the funeral Wednesday morning^ which was immediate family only at the crematorium . . . both of which I wept shatteringly through and probably only survived at all because Hugh sat next to me and held my hand. 

^ before the memorial service Wednesday afternoon which is where these pieces are coming from

** Only the overpowering effect of a decade of being responsible for Salisbury Cathedral could make anyone call Painswick House small and dowdy.  I daresay my crude American sensibilities are being led astray by subtle English humour.  But for other easily misled Americans let me just say that  all nine bedrooms of our old house^ would fit in PH’s sitting room.  You needed a telephone or a carrier pigeon to talk to someone at the other end of that room and the ceilings were easily high enough that private weather systems were an issue.  Those of you who have read the Damar stories?  Luthe’s hall?  Yes. 

^ jackdaw-infested chimneys optional

*** All of it on that exciting trek from Bangor Maine in the middle of the night in February.

† Please.  Hugh went to Winchester, which is if anything even posher than frelling Eton.

†† With me it was Kipling–one of the things Peter and I first bonded over was Kipling, and he was murmuring Kipling to me till the end.  I imagine his four kids would offer two, three or twelve more poets. 

††† Hugh’s daughter

‡ This one:  XLV Smooth Between Sea and Land  

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ma...

I’m sorry, I can’t get this ugly beast to light up into a link.  WordPress has been through 1,000,000 updates since I was last posting regularly, each one of them less helpful than the last, and the only old sneakaround I can remember doesn’t work any more.  If you copy and paste it into your own little screen window it will take you to the poem, I’ve just tried it.

 

After

 

 

I can’t get my head around the widow thing. I’m what? Peter’s what? No, no, no, it’s a bad dream.  It’s a shit-sucking multi-tentacled toxic-spiked nightmare.  At heart level I know he’s gone gone gone gongegonegonegone gone:  it’s why I don’t seem to be inhabiting my body, I look at my hands on the keyboard or picking up the chopsticks to seize some broccoli* and think, what?  What are you? Whose are you?  I’m pelting down the pavement*** after the hellhounds and thinking, whose legs are these, that still work so well?  If Peter can’t hurtle any more, why was I left behind?

Intellectually I’m still arguing about the gone gone gone. My body knows.  I can hardly type because my fingers may still bend and strike but they’re crying too, and crying ruins your aim.  I’ve broken three dishes in about ten days—one of them a favourite, and it’s out of print, whatever you call it for china, and I can’t replace it.  I don’t break dishes.  That’s Peter’s job.

Every day I get out of bed and am surprised that I can. And then wonder why I’m bothering.  Well, I have to.  I have to let the hellmob out.†

The truth is that Peter hasn’t hurtled in years. He still used to come with us sometimes on the shorter afternoon hurtles when the hellhounds were young and frelling inexhaustible†† but his long long tramps over (muddy†††) Hampshire countryside had stopped by the time we moved into town.  Being walking distance of the shops, Peter said, was his idea of growing old gracefully.  And he did keep walking to the shops, even if he got a little slower, and a little slower, and eventually he was walking with a stick.  But he was still moving along. . . .

And then the first stroke, two years ago.

The last two years have been sodding bloody puking awful. Even though I can only afford to admit it now.  Now that it’s all over.‡  I don’t know how common this is, but I’ve always been someone who when things are bad, helplessly bad, and the only thing to do is endure, I shut down, and get on with it as best I can.  Admitting the unbearable is unbearable does not help.  So I don’t.  Didn’t.  I joined the Street Pastors and the Samaritans partly because God told me to‡‡ but partly because I could do fuck-all for Peter, and maybe I could have a dab at slapping a plaster on someone else’s mortal wounds.

And? I pretty well haven’t written a publishable word since Peter’s first stroke. It took a few months to catch up with me—that I essentially wasn’t coping—but the proof is pretty stark.  And I’d better start writing soon or retrain as a grocery store shelf re-stocker.

Life sucks and then you die. Or your beloved husband does, after being yanked around by fate and the devil for a couple of years.

I have various friends keeping a sharp eye on me. I rang frelling handbells this afternoon because doubly-frelling Niall is triply-frelling relentless.‡‡‡  Half a dozen of my St Margaret’s friends came to the memorial service and mobbed me after the talking part and before the champagne to discuss how and when I was going to start coming to church again, since I haven’t for . . . about four months.  Since the 7th of September.  I want to start coming, I said, but I can’t face all those people asking me how I am. We’ll come fetch you! they said, more or less in chorus.  And we won’t leave your side for a moment! So there was discussion of tactical defence manoeuvres . . . and one of them, whom we will call Rosamund§, is going to drive to New Arcadia and pick me up, and about four of the others are going to GUARD THE BACK ROW against our arrival.  I’m going to bring my knitting!§§  I may not do anything but crouch in the back, cry, and knit! I said.  That’s fine, they all chorused—including Buck, whose sermon I will be knitting through.

Whatever. Okay.  I guess.  Sigh.  And you all are probably going to tell me I still have to finish PEGASUS.

I’ve got permission to hang the other memorial pieces, by the way, which will follow in due course. And the six minute limit?  Thanks for all your protests on my behalf, but we were trying to cram a lot in in an hour.  It was actually a pretty spectacular show.  Peter would have loved it . . .

So, I’m crying again.

* * *

* Yes I am eating.^

^ And broccoli is my fifth food group, with black tea, champagne, chocolate and apples.

** It’s kind of funny that knitting is soothing when it seems to be being performed by someone else’s hands, but I’ll take what I can get in terms of soothingness.

*** The wettest December on record is morphing seamlessly into the wettest January. I’ve got standing water in my little garden^, which is on the top of a hill and less than a spade-blade length down is full of builders’ rubble which ought to be good drainage, for pity’s sake, even it’s a little short on plant nutrients.  Hannah is coming over next week bringing, she told me, her hiking boots, and I’m wondering if I should tell her not to waste the space:  out in the countryside it’s scuba gear^^ or nothing.^^^  We can splash down assorted quaint medieval cobblestone streets in Mauncester.  Supposing the road between here and there doesn’t flood out.  I seem to have mislaid Wolfgang’s water wings.^^^^

^ This severely displeases the hellmob.

^^ No, a bathysphere. With a strong headlamp.

^^^ If I told her not to bring them the sun would instantly nova and turn us into a desert. I guess she’d better bring them.

^^^^ The hellterror may have eaten them.

† Into the paddling pool

†† Okay, so at least I haven’t been trying to quench two young inflammable hellhounds every day these last four months, and the hellterror, given about four foot in all seven directions^ can hucklebutt herself into a state of pleasant nap-taking collapse. Am I supposed to be GRATEFUL?

^ Up, down, back, forth, in, out and AAAAAUGH

††† All right it hasn’t always been muddy, the last not-quite-quarter-century^ but right at the moment it feels like it has.

^ Our anniversary was 3 January+ but we also celebrated 26 July, which was the beginning of that weekend in Maine

+ Tolkien’s birthday. Yes.  I’ve told that story somewhere on this blog.

‡ He wanted to go.  He absolutely, totally wanted to go.  But I wasn’t ready to let him go.  He won.

‡‡ I’m not going to argue about this. Anyone who doesn’t believe in God^ is going to have no clue why the unsainted hell your faith is a comfort to you in bad times, when God could flapdoodling well sort it, whatever it is, if he/she/it/they blinkety-blankety well wanted to.  I can only say that faith really is your bulwark and buttress and rock of ages and so on, and I’m not entirely sure I would still be getting out of bed in the morning if I didn’t have Jesus and his Mum^^ to scream at.

^ And I’m not going to argue about this either: as Alfrick says, we’re all going to have some surprises when we get to whatever heaven is, all of us, the Christians, the Muslims, the Hindus, the Shintos, the Buddhists, the shamans, the wiccans, the pagans, the everybody else, and the agnostics and the atheists.  Especially the atheists.

^^ That would be God, not Mary, although Mary is good too. Although I have my own ideas about what she thought she was getting into with Gabriel.  I mean, she was a teenager, right?  And Gabriel was cute.

‡‡‡ He’s also responsible for chivvying me into ringing a quarter peal in Peter’s memory a few days after Peter died and before the madness that is funeral and memorial service arrangements had closed me down completely. It’ll be good for you, Niall said.  It will not!  I said.  Jumping off a bridge would be good for me!  No, no, no, Niall said. Think of the hellmob.  For better or worse all my friends know to remind me of the furries at critical moments.

§ Who is another of Alfrick’s devoted admirers, by the way

§§ I took a certain amount of teasing for the fact that I had my knitting with me at the memorial service. I had bought my Good Black Leather Shoulderbag some years before there was any question of knitting needles, and they stick out the top. Yo, I said, if I go to pieces, I will want my knitting.

My Peter

This is what I said at the memorial service* today:

 

Peter’s first romantic fiancé’s gift to me was a pair of secateurs. This was about four hours after he’d said ‘just because you’re taking me on doesn’t mean you have to take gardening on.’  I was in England seeing what I was getting myself into.  Peter and I had had an unexpectedly life-altering weekend in Maine about a fortnight before;  we knew each other slightly through the book world, I’d visited him at home once when Mary Rose was still alive, he was merely returning the favour.  But a week after we parted, feeling dazed and saying to each other, ‘it would never work, we are separated by age, culture, background, about 3000 miles and a national boundary,’ my phone rang at 7 am and I knew who it was and what he was going to say:  ‘if we don’t give it a try we’ll regret it the rest of our lives.’  He had an idea that we could commute;  I wanted to settle down somewhere with him, and I was the Navy brat, used to moving on.  I emigrated.

Writing was the thing for both of us of course. He was an early riser and he’d be at his desk staring intensely at the page curling out of his typewriter or, eventually, the screen of his computer, by the time I staggered past him clutching a cup of strong tea, to go to my desk.  In good weather both breakfast and lunch were in the garden, 7:30 and 12:30 sharp—one of his nicknames was Time Lord—tea followed at precisely 4:30 and supper at 7:30.  He did most of the cooking;  my right to make our bread half the time was hard-won.  Over breakfast he did the GUARDIAN cryptic crossword and lunch and dinner were followed by one of his complex versions of patience;  if he started getting some pattern out too often he changed the rules.  Mornings were at his desk;  after lunch was in the garden—if it was raining he would declare ‘it’s not wet rain’ and go out anyway.

That garden. It was a little over two acres and an insane amount of it was labour-intensive flowerbeds.  Visiting friends and family were shamelessly put to work.  There was some wild, for nettles and butterflies, some lawn, for grandchildren to play on (although heaven help any grandchild whose ball landed in a flowerbed), and a vegetable garden beyond the old stables.  A lot of it was flowerbeds, especially the walled kitchen garden:  people walking into it for the first time in high summer went ‘oooooh.’  The Warm Upford village fete was held there for years;  Peter started opening on the National Garden Scheme with Mary Rose and carried on into my era.  He was in his element on open days, holding forth about gardening, Latin nomenclature and plants, especially clematis, although he had many favourites, especially the weird and wonderful.  I usually hid in the shrubbery with a bucket and trowel, although Peter extracted me occasionally to talk to someone about roses.  He’d been slightly querulous when my rose mania burst out of the beds he’d assigned to it but since it made me a willing victim, I mean partner, in the whole gardening epic he adapted.  He took wholeheartedly to having several whippets underfoot (who were rigorously trained to stay out of flowerbeds).

We lived in the old family house thirteen years after I married him. Peter started feeling his age in his 70s, and the DIY necessary to keep up a nine-bedroom-plus-outbuildings country house, even a ramshackle one, began to escape him.  We moved into New Arcadia almost twelve years ago, where Peter redesigned and replanted two more gardens, even if they were small town gardens, including digging a pond for water lilies, newts and a fountain after he turned 80.  Living in New Arcadia also meant he was walking distance of one of his bridge clubs;  we were out two, three, four evenings a week, I bell-ringing and he playing bridge.  There were still good times, but he’d stopped writing;  ‘the well is dry’, he said.

How do I tell you about twenty-three years with Peter in six minutes?   He was scarily intelligent and terrifyingly erudite;  he knew a profligate profusion of poetry off by heart, and once when I was driving back to Blue Hill from Bangor, Maine after a late night flight from England in the winter, a treacherous trip that took over an hour, he kept me awake reciting poetry nonstop and without hesitation or repeat.  He began with ‘Let me not to a marriage of true minds admit impediment’.  He loved my books maybe even as much as I loved his, and believed in me and my writing without any edge or restraint;  he never made me feel in any way less than him, despite being twenty-five years younger, and indeed after several years in his company I found I remembered the 1940’s well.  (I was born in 1952.)   But he was also not so much stubborn as monolithic:  his way was the only way about many, many things and if you disagreed you were merely bowled over.  He had kept four children quiet in the back seat of the car by telling stories;  he now told stories to me and the whippets as we tramped across the glorious, if frequently muddy, Hampshire countryside.  I called him the plot factory, and several of my stories spring from Peter’s ideas.  I have a few in my notebooks that I’m still hoping to write, if I can stop crying long enough.

He was adorable and maddening in about equal proportions. I assume I’ll get used to his absence;  most people do eventually adjust to loss and grief.  But I’ll remember him every day for the rest of my life, even if I knock Methuselah out of the top spot.

* * *

* We did him proud, if I do say so myself.  I’m going to see if I can persuade any of the others to let me post what they said too.  And yes, six minutes.  I ran about six minutes and ten seconds.  Bad me.  But not very bad.  I’m the widow.^  I have privileges.

^ Widowhood sucks.  Avoid.  Make a note.

 

 

Peter Malcolm De Brissac Dickinson

16 December 1927 – 16 December 2015

Dearly beloved

Much missed

Good news? Remind me what that is again?

 

Peter had a second stroke on the 7th of September.

I’ve got that far writing you a catch-up blog, and stalled, several times over the last two months*. Life-changing events of the negative sort perhaps often have that effect:  This is what’s happened. Noooooo. And your mind goes blank again.  As mine keeps doing.**

He was in hospital for not quite a fortnight*** and then went straight into a care home which is where he still is and where I wearily and dejectedly hope he stays. We’ll call it Rivendell:  that’s the sort of name care homes have, and its real one is almost as silly.†  He’s still Peter and he can still open one eye where he’s snoozing on his bed and put you right about a Shakespeare/Bible/Kipling/Housman/Hardy quote without fully waking up, but he is terrifyingly frail. Terrifyingly. Through Admetus’ kindness we’ve inherited Alcestis’ folding, fits-in-the-boot-of-your-car wheelchair, three-wheelie walker thing†† and flashy red-leather disabled badge holder.  We use all of them regularly.

This was not the plan. But the plan went south twelve years ago when Peter and I left the old house back in Warm Upford, because he was beginning to feel his age.  Plans change.  I don’t really know what the plan is now.  Get through today.  Get through tomorrow.  Get through next week. . . . †††

As you can imagine morale is not high. And there’s a lot of sheer business detail that someone has to attend to.  The brunt of it falls on me of course but all four of Peter’s kids are pitching in enormously.  This isn’t helping my staring into the endless dark at 3 am but it does mean that my mental and physical leaky-sieve qualities are not a disaster.  It also means that the three relatively local kids take him for proper outings.  He’s in Rivendell because it has by far the best reputation in the area, but it’s pretty much at the stretch of my ME-oppressed daily commuting distance.  I can take him to tea in Mauncester‡ and we’ve reinstated our lovely weekly library visits which involve books AND tea than which it does not get better‡‡ but that’s about it.  But Peter is presently having a comprehensive tour of all the local hot spots we never got around to visiting because we live here, compliments his indefatigable children.

My life is on hold‡‡‡; no bell ringing, no voice lessons, no Sams, no Street Pastors, no . . . whatever I used to do.  Some of it with Peter.  I may be forgetting.§  Except for Peter.  I remember Peter.§§

Ask me about my life in, oh, say six months.  Although I’ll try not to leave it that long before I post again.

* * *

* And started this one a week ago. It originally said ‘almost two months’.

** I suppose I could try blaming the ME. It does have its uses.  I’d rather not have it as a scapegoat and dustbin but as long as I do have it I might as well make it work for its keep.

*** And was about ready to steal a cardboard box and live on the street to get out. This seems to me a healthy, sensible attitude toward being in hospital.  If you need it you have to lump it but it’s not a fun time for anyone.  AND. THE.  FOOD.  Dear frelling subgod of food. You’d think that with a lot of sick people under your roof you would be deeply concerned with getting the best possible nutrition into them, wouldn’t you?  Instead so far as I can tell hospitals go to Central Nutritional Casting and order someone who can fill out a balance sheet and lives on Snickers bars.  And our local hospital, at whose table Peter has failed to feast on occasions previously, is far from the worst in this regard.^

^ Very slightly in their defense—very very slightly—he was on soft food for about the first week which limited the initial range.  But, you know, after that?  Um, say, SALAD?  What would that be again?  Something with mayo and macaroni perhaps?  A serving of broccoli consists of one finger-sized floret cooked just short of disintegration point.  If they could harness the precision skill needed for this feat they could probably send that settlement party to Mars.+  How do they expect anyone to get WELL on this stuff?  It’s not like they need to fill beds.  They need to unfill beds.

+ We liked THE MARTIAN. Just by the way.  Our local cinema had a refit just in time to make Peter comfortable in the admirable new sofas at the back.  I will, however, indulge in a rant about disabled access some other time.

† Or maybe sillier.

†† I think these are dead cool. There are a gazillion different styles—Admetus says Alcestis really enjoyed trolling catalogues and the internet for precisely the right make and model.  But they’re all like a kind of souped-up shopping trolley.  This one has a basket, a bag and a tray.^  And brakes, for when you’ve got your shopping trolley a trifle overloaded with all the fresh stuff you’ve been MISSING while you’ve been in hospital^^ and there’s a slope.  I realise it wouldn’t be cost effective but I wish ordinary shopping trolleys had brakes.  My most memorable wheeled and brakeless moment was probably one afternoon chasing a trolley full of champagne^^^ down a long car park toward Wolfgang and flinging myself sideways against the handlebar to get the thing to turn in at the appropriate bay.^^^^

^ Pav would fit in the basket. I don’t suppose she’d stay there.

^^ Lettuce doesn’t weigh much but almost everything else does. And even lettuce weighs a surprising amount when it’s on its own core and isn’t just loose leaves.

^^^ Well. Cheap fizz.  On sale.

^^^^ That experience may be the source of one of Wolfgang’s dents. But it’s a small, delicate, charming dent.  And none of the bottles of fizz exploded.

††† I am so not thinking about Christmas. We’re going to a lavish high tea^ at one of these country house nobody-ever-lived-like-this fantasy places for my birthday with several of the family.^^  If this is fun we may do it again for Peter’s birthday.  Peter, as you may imagine, is not feeling enthusiastic about birthday celebrations.

^ It makes me a little cranky that now that gluten-free has become a fashion accessory almost everyone curls their lip when you ask about availability. On the other hand for those of us who discovered years before it became cutting edge style that gluten-free is a very good idea when we’re under stress it’s nice that there now is availability.  What it is to be ahead of the frelling curve.  Like the ME:  as I’ve snarled here many times before, I’d had it eight years or so before the NHS decided it existed.  Thanks.  Now get away from me with those drugs.

^^ If I can convince someone else to do the Rivendell-tea-Rivendell drive I will have a glass of champagne. At Rivendell I can hit the cranberry juice and sober up before I have to drive home.

‡ Bright spots include finding a fabulous new tea shop with good tea and gluten-free.^

^ Although . . . guaranteed weight-loss diet? Go vegetarian+ a month or six weeks before your husband has a second stroke, while you’re still learning what you can and can’t eat and of what you can what does and does not taste good or sit well in your stomach++, and if you’re dairy free also (yes) most of your new options are lower-cal than your old, and you may absent-mindedly find yourself with a plate of something you don’t eat any more and then can’t be bothered replacing it with anything, because who feels like eating when your husband has just had a stroke?

+ It’s a long story. Tell you some other time.#

# It’s game-bird season and I’m feeling a little wistful. Also.  Christmas without turkey.  Golly.

++ Which in my case is possessed by demons so this is always an interesting gauntlet to renegotiate.   If you had a gut like mine you too would indulge in mixed metaphors when attempting to describe it.  Not too graphically.

‡‡ Yes, okay, champagne. But not when I’m driving.

‡‡‡ Barring the hellmob of course. They’re all yo, we want our hurtles, we want our food,^ we want our hanging out, we want our lying in heaps together.  They are of course aware that Something is Wrong—if for no other reason than that the majority of our hanging-out time no longer occurs at Third House—but critters are admirably single-minded and this does provide valuable grounding when you’re pretty much off your face.  Also the advantages of warm fur during the 3 am bleak-staring phases cannot be overstated.

One of Rivendell’s not-so-minor advantages is that they’re critter-friendly. There are a lot of dogs that visit, now including the hellhounds.^^  There are a couple of bull terrier fanciers however who are waiting for me to have a good moment to bring the hellterror in.  She takes more advance planning and my advance-planning function is a little unreliable at the moment.

^ All right, the hellterror wants her food.  But I think the hellhounds would miss the lively and interesting interactions with the hellgoddess if she didn’t regularly produce food for them to despise.

^^ I’m so used to the staff liking dogs that when the hellhounds rushed one of the carers who came to check on Peter the other night it didn’t occur to me that she would do anything but greet them in the manner to which they have become accustomed and the poor woman had palpitations. Oops.

§ My poor garden. . . . ^

^ I suppose I should say ‘my poor floors’ and ‘my poor dusty and grimy shelves’ and ‘my poor heaps of unsorted gubbins in all the corners and against all the walls’ but housework has never been a major centre to my existence. Although it’s true that when the gubbins start extruding long tentacles and chasing you from room to room, um . . .

§§ Story writing? No. Which may also be why I feel so, I don’t know, hollow?