Mandy Baldwin's Blog, page 3

February 27, 2017

Mother’s And Father’s Day

For something so earth-shattering, it’s surprising how normal, how ordered it is, to lose a parent. Losing a child is an obscenity – an offence against nature. But to lose a parent is different. It happens as inevitably as the turning of the year.

It’s August nights growing chilly, it’s rose-petals falling, it’s leaves turning gold in September, it’s the gentle frost on berries in the lane where – you remember – you walked with your parents and collected conkers.

It’s Autumnal, somehow, even if it happens in the Spring – and that in itself is poignant because Autumn was the time when the lights were on in the window as you walked home in the early dusk, and you knew when you reached the lights there would be safety.

The thing with bereavement is, you never actually get over it, although of course you are not always sad. You live around it, like the grit in an oyster, until somehow it becomes a smooth thing which doesn’t cut you, and the memories shine. But it never goes away. You never get used to loved ones being gone. Your relationship with someone as crucial as a parent continues, in a way. It just becomes longer since you last spoke.

And although mostly you are too busy to think about it, and you know it can’t happen, secretly you long for just one more word, because at some point, that person you loved – who possibly always had far too much to say on most subjects – stopped being able to answer you, and although you are aware that before they went, you had a last conversation, you can’t remember what it was about.

However old you are when this happens, when the people who knew you before you knew yourself are gone, taking with them your past, this is when you begin to grow up, because finally, the buck stops with you.

Your source of safety and unconditional love must finally be yourself.

All your life there has been someone who has, metaphorically, been at the school gate to admire your achievement: the painting of the swan, the exam you passed, the job you got, the baby you had.

Now there is nobody who fully understands how it was to see that baby as a bride. It must all come from, and live within, yourself.

But there is a new dignity there, too, because there comes a time when you realise that years have passed and there are loves you have known, and triumphs and failures you have lived through, which your parents never knew of. They happened to you alone, the you who is – outwardly – no-one’s son or daughter any more.

There is something both humbling and magnificent in seeing your children reach ages at which you remember your parents, of seeing your own face come to resemble theirs. You realise then, that you are part of an infinite chain of people who have held and loved each other, stretching back into the mists of time.

And as you near, or pass, the age they were when you last saw them, there is a growing understanding of who they were, and why they were like that, and with that comes a new tenderness for them, which is quite beautiful.

And yes: there is an instinct which tells you that Autumn is not the end.

It’s just a sleep, just for a while.

Life really does go on: the daffodils will open in Spring, and you will paddle in the sea in Summer, and if they never knew the lanes you walk, or the dog you walk with, or the sunrises you see, well, nevertheless you love those things and they are real. You will roll up your sleeves and get on with your life and you will enjoy each blessing you have, and fight all the necessary fights, and there will be sleep, and laughter, and food, and peace in the evening.

Eventually, it’s just occasionally that you ache with a sudden and desperate need to talk with them, just once more; to walk through that door again and find them there just as they were, welcoming you as if the time apart has only been a journey – to lay down the burden just for a moment or two, and be somebody’s child again, or simply tell them that you understand, now…and it passes, and you walk on again, and life is good.

But above all, with time, when that grit in the oyster has finally become a pearl, you realise that the only thing that ever mattered was the love.

And love never dies.

Thanks for everything, you two – wherever you are.

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Published on February 27, 2017 15:16

To Sleep, Perchance?

I just met someone who will have a baby on 25th March, and the baby will be a little girl. I wished her luck, moist eyed, because having babies was the best thing in the world, for me. But I didn’t tell her what would happen on 26th March, or she might have hit me. So here it is…

The waiting is over. Now there is a new little person with a crumpled face, shiny gums, and a strange resemblance to your grandfather. (This is particularly unnerving if your baby is a girl.) Breastfeeding or not, your clothes from the waist up are either starched or wet with milk. I say ‘waist’: actually, I mean the deflated, stretch-marked expanse between armpit and groin. You notice that you smell of cheese.

Let’s call this newborn person Lily. Friends and family come to worship at the Lily Shrine. Some bring presents, and ask to hold the baby. Old hands bring presents, and ask: “Does she sleep?” And – mostly – the answer will be ‘no’. Lily doesn’t know night from day. It’s nothing personal. Not Lily’s fault, or yours. Babies are made that way.

This is fine for a few days. You’re tired, but, if you are lucky – and it’s only luck, nothing more – you are elated enough to handle it. You may even find that, (when you have visitors and nobody turns a hair if you spend the day in a dressing-gown,) those hours you spend alone with Lily are a time of bonding, when Lily seems to know exactly who you are and what you mean to each other. Then hormones hit; three days after giving birth you will most likely have a period of sharp depression and weepiness.

Tell someone who cares – and if it doesn’t pass, tell an expert.

In the months that follow, you’ll learn the difference between the tiredness from staying up all night with friends, (when you can make an appointment with your bed and catch up on lost sleep,) and being Lily’s Mum. You’ll likely not be able to set aside that time to sleep, now. Lily’s Law says she’ll wake and need to be fed or changed, ten minutes after you’ve snuggled down. Soon you start to fantasise about sleep the way you used to fantasise about sex. Just when everyone expects you to be back to normal, you find that normal no longer exists.

What’s the most dangerous word in that last sentence? It is ‘expects.’

If you think about it, expectation is just imagination. Expectation is as realistic as a day-dream of how a person you don’t know yet (Lily) will behave, and how another person you don’t know yet (you as Lily’s mother) will respond. In the long run, 90% of what we imagine, good and bad, never happens. Expectation is fantasy.

It’s a good idea to leave expectation at the delivery-room door, because Lily – an unknown quantity – will be growing up in a world which doesn’t yet exist. Once you’ve anticipated safety risks, you can only accept the unexpected. You may think you have control over your environment, your job, and your money, but you don’t, not really, because it’s all decided in Westminster or Brussels, or in the Council meeting you didn’t bother to attend – and you can control Lily’s world even less than that, because it hasn’t happened yet, and you absolutely can’t control who Lily is. As a baby, what you get is the unedited version of Lily. There’s a time to lay down the ground-rules, but not just yet: for now, Lily is in charge.

There may be over a year before you can sleep without being woken, and if you spend that time fantasising that you should be slender, toned, dynamic at work and multi-orgasmic at home, you are headed for disappointment and resentment. What’s a year? Well, if tomorrow is just around the corner, a year is only 365 corners to turn, although at 3am, it’s eternity.

You can only turn one corner at a time, so – just for today – rest when you can, keep the bathroom and kitchen clean enough to be safe, and other rooms tidy enough so Lily can’t find things to choke on and you won’t trip over clutter and crush the cat. Don’t assume everyone else knows better, because they don’t. The younger they are, the less they know; the older they are, the more confused they are about the details. But ask for help; even the senile and the inexperienced can make a bacon butty for you and wash up afterward, and even if things aren’t done as you like, life will function.

Wash and feed yourself and Lily. If you have the choice between ironing sheets or doing your nails, do your nails, because Lily’ll wee on any number of ironed sheets. If you have a good baby-sitter leave Lily for a few hours and drag yourself out to socialise even though you fall asleep half way through the evening. If friends don’t understand right now, move on. When you’re on the same page again, maybe you can reconnect. For now, try to bond with anyone who is a bit fat and smells of cheese.

Tell yourself this, every single day: You’re doing a marvellous job – you don’t have to be a ray of sunshine into the bargain. You only need to be good enough, not perfect. Remember, you’re the best Mum Lily has.

And know this: like every stage of Lily’s life, good or bad, this will pass. But you’ll always remember, and one day when you visit a friend who’s just had a baby, you’ll find yourself asking: “Does she sleep?”

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Published on February 27, 2017 14:49

The Violins Of Autumn

When I began writing Quarter Past Summer I was in Roussillon and desperately homesick. Sitting with shutters closed against blazing sunshine I watched the Jubilee crowds in London, braving pouring rain and cold wind and just wished I could be there.

The idea for the book had been there for some time, and was so English. When I slept, all through that summer, I dreamed of walking out into a wet garden, instead of a warm stone terrace. I suppose it was then that I knew that, much as I loved the place, and love it still, I wouldn’t be staying in France. It was time to go home. And in order to get home, along with the menagerie, I had to sell my flat, and a studio, in a dead market. At the end of August, everything began to fall apart. During the writing of the book, three lap-tops broke, and I ran out of money.

Let me be clear – when I say I ran out of money, I don’t mean that certain economies must be practised: I mean, I had no money. There was no work. I frantically wrote articles at £5 per thousand words, and rewrote them too, spending hours researching the prices of antiques at auction, and presenting the findings attractively for the benefit of those who had $14,000 to spend on an ugly vase. My food budget was 10 euros per week, and half of that went to my pets. I stopped dreaming of English gardens and instead dreamed of meat, and fruit, and melting butter.

I lived on one meal per day of lentil pie. Yum. And when I say ‘pie’, I mean something confected from a carefully measured 2 ounces of flour, 1 ounce of fat, 2 dessert spoons of lentils, half a carrot.

When you are that hungry, you lie down a lot. You are surprisingly miserable as the weight drops off. But when you stop thinking you might die, you are oddly euphoric. Occasionally, I got together the 85c needed for a baguette, eaten plain because there was nothing to go with it. (The deliciousness of warm bread-crust after a week of lentil pie is indescribable.)

Glamorous old Collette in the local boulangerie, (who had a long memory and wouldn’t serve Germans) pretended never to notice how carefully I counted out the cents, but would offer me a coffee which felt like a blood-transfusion, and ask me to “test” the first batch of croissants – “while you wait” – and shrug off payment because “It is good to talk to you, your French is good for an English!”

The little studio brought in no income, but still cost money. It had run at a loss since the spring, when I had had to carry out major repairs, rewiring, replumbing. It was then Autumn, and the French don’t ‘do’ Autumn in Roussillon, mainly because the Tramontane kicks off in a big way once the fiercest summer heat is over. (The Tramontane is a wind which makes going outside practically impossible and is rumoured to drive people insane.) I had had to drop prices in the summer as the recession bit, and the syndic chose this moment to present me with an unexpected 4,500 euro bill as my contribution toward the building of a new pool complex which I would never use – on top of the usual tax and ground rent and water.

I was of course not entitled to any state assistance, being British and self-employed.

The apartment I lived in attracted lots of viewers but no buyers. The entire residence became infested with cockroaches, which would come out to play at night, swarming from dark corners, so fat I could hear their feet scuttling, so I slept with the lights on but made note of where they had come from so I could mask up and spray those areas in the morning. This would make the sleeping cockroaches rush out of hiding, to die in front of me and be swept up in newspaper, shuddering as for some reason their heads would fall off. (Let’s just say I have never been able to watch the scarab beetle scenes in Mummy, since then.)

The washing machine broke down, belching water throughout the apartment, which fused all the lights. The bathroom, which was at the bottom of the spiral staircase, (the soapy water cascading down this would have looked quite pretty under other circumstances) never recovered: it was always tiny and dark, and without a light, with cockroaches lurking, it was somewhere only to approach with a torch in hand and boots on feet.

This was awkward because, without a washing machine, all clothes had to be washed by hand in the bath, using cheap grated soap (wash powder cost a whole article and was out of the question.) They could then be brought upstairs, and hung over the balcony, where they dripped down onto the perspex roof of a man who used to kick his own door to pieces in a fury if anyone so much as watered a pot plant. So I would move quickly, then duck inside and listen to him bellow. As time went on and temperatures dropped I did this less often: it was pointless as everything froze solid before it dried. I had to stop it altogether when the Tramontane howled for a week non-stop at 90km per hour and a chunk fell off the balcony.

Personal hygiene was a hurried affair, by candle light and a running tap, watching in case cockroaches came out of the plughole.

Nobody ever mentions this, but winter in Roussillon is bitterly cold. The little town I lived in is ringed by mountains, which look beautiful, but the wind sweeping across Centre is forced through the gaps in the mountains, blowing pressurised, powdered snow and ice furiously on houses which were designed for hot weather. Ceilings are wonderfully high, to catch the breeze in summer, and any precious warmth drifts high above where it might benefit those living there. Even the walls are thin, and that wind is a low moan, every minute of every hour of every day and night.

Until living in a tent, this past winter, I had never been so cold in my life: I added layers of clothing which had been badly washed, increasingly rarely, so I looked like a sort of human onion, and was possibly just as pungent. Warmth came from black tea, making one teabag last for four of five cups, the steam from the cup thawing my face, and still a little scented, long after the flavour had gone.

I had built up a small circle of friends, but when you are scruffy and unkempt and grubby, when you begin valuing friends according to the likelihood of them offering you a meal, when you can’t so much as offer someone a cup of coffee, you find you avoid the phone, and don’t answer the door. (Or is that just me?)

So to recap– I smelled, was hungry, was isolated, and desperately worried, rushing to make the place – and myself – look sane and acceptable when prospective buyers came.

And through it all, Quarter Past Summer, this story, and these characters, and this place, just wouldn’t go away. It was my story of my England, and my age group and my class.

I couldn’t even afford to buy exercise books or refill pads. I wrote it on every scrap of paper I could find, including the backs of the increasingly nasty letters from the syndic’s lawyers.

And when everything was settled, and three cats, a rabbit, and two cockatiels were loaded onto a van with what worldly goods it was possible to get down the stairs with the aid of a bad-tempered man from Sunderland and two very old and very dapper bar-owners from Perpignan, this book came with me, on all it’s scraps of paper, tied up in a bag from Super-U and kept by my side in case it was thrown away.

Finally, back in England, I could type it all up and write the ending.

I thought, for a while, that I would never again experience that magic, of having characters and their lives clamouring to be told – but just as Quarter Past Summer took root in my mind, so the English Seaside books have grown from a single idea to something I can’t put down. Maybe it’s being on the road again. Living in a tent for six months puts you outside of normal.

And since when have writers ever been normal?

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Published on February 27, 2017 14:41

The other day, when I should have been concentrating on f...

The other day, when I should have been concentrating on finding somewhere to live other than a tent, I was instead indulging my guilty pleasure – watching Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris for, oh, perhaps the fiftieth time. For those who have never had that particular pleasure, the film concerns a writer trapped in an unhappy engagement to a highly materialistic girl, who despises his attempts at writing a novel, and his desire to move to Paris and walk in the rain, and – with the help of her appalling parents – nags him to return to lucrative screenwriting and a house in Malibu.

One night – making the excuse that walking helps his creativity – he leaves the Paris hotel where they are staying, and strolls along the banks of the Seine, where, on the stroke of midnight a vintage car appears, full of excitable people, who take him to a party. Here he meets his heroes – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway – in fact, all the great and the (not so) good of the Lost Generation of writers and artists who lived in Paris between the wars. He realises that the steps he had been sitting on, lost in every sense of the word, were a portal to the age he wishes he had been born in, when inspiration could be found in the things he loves: including walking in the rain in Paris.

He becomes besotted with a French girl, lover of Pablo Picasso, but their dreams take them in separate ways because she, too, has a Golden Age: it just happens to be the turn of the 20th century.

Eventually, he realises that he can make his dreams reality while remaining in the 21st century, and finds a Parisian girl who also enjoys walking in the rain and sees nothing odd about wanting to complete a novel: which is fine, because the obnoxious fiancee has been indulging in a little extra curricular activity with an equally obnoxious ‘friend’.

Happy endings all round.

The reason this film resonates with me is that I, too, share that adoration of the era of the lost generation – a sense of a flowering of bold experimentation and creativity, the trying on of new lives for size, an appreciation of artistic expression. Show me a quote from one of my Gods (or Goddesses) of that era of damaged decadence, before we became more coldly cynical, and I melt.

I even named my dog Hemingway.

Most of them ended up dead, or mad, of course – and it’s not fashionable to suffer for art, any more. It doesn’t pay the bills…and in any case, most of them had private means, however small, to support a vicarious, brittle life-style. But it’s irresistible to me to step into that mindset just once in a while, to taste that wine, and see those things, and think those thoughts.

Unforgettable and marvellous, their lives of drama, passion, and the nitty-gritty of trying to sell their work still resonate despite the absence of a time-travelling portal (at least, from this tent.)

The past is truly another country – but it’s nice to visit.

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Published on February 27, 2017 12:30

Yours In A Heartbeat

Your heartbeat that day.

Strange, I still remember that.

Oh, I also bring to mind your eyes

And the soft, violet, evening skies.

But mostly, I recall a time

When your heart beat to the rhythm of mine.

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Published on February 27, 2017 12:18

Hunting Dragons

Even the smallest thing can trigger an idea which eventually becomes a story, with characters who take on a life of their own.

My fourth novel, The Seaweed Dragon, began with a goodbye.

In February 2014, my son left England to teach in China. He’d left home years before; university, teacher training, flat-sharing – and I had lived overseas, but this seemed huge. He came to visit me for a couple of days, the last time I would see him for one and a half years, and he reminded me that he was Thursday’s Child, who has far to go. It’s not that I’m not used to saying goodbye, but China is very, very far.

In the morning, after he had gone, I took the dog and walked to the beach, and I remembered that the tall man who had hugged me on parting, was once a small boy, who carefully wrote his name and address on a piece of paper one rainy afternoon, and put it in a bottle and threw it into the sea. How easy it must have been to believe in magic then, because his bottle was found, and a real dinosaur wrote to that little boy for years.

The dinosaur lived in a cave, and had been most annoyed to find a bottle cluttering up his seaweed nest. There were strange and wonderful characters known to the dinosaur; they all lived and worked along the rocky coast of Cornwall, and when the dinosaur posted his letters they were carried to the little boy by pirates. And the dinosaur’s name was Pop.

I learned Pop’s real identity; I learned his real address. He was a writer, Paul Mundy, who took the time to create magic for a child he never met.

I don’t know exactly when my son stopped believing, and the stories ended. But I do know that out of that memory which made me choke back tears on a windy beach on a cold day came an image of a place and time, of childhood and growing up, and around that grew a story of dark fantasy which proves to be true, and a happy ending: none of which had anything whatsoever to do with saying goodbye. And that, for me, is magic.