2022 goes floating away

Only once before - since beginning Forms Traced by Light - have I not been in New Mexico to post a pic of the end-of-year sunset, or whatever might pass as a sunset.  There certainly wasn't a sunset here in Wimbledon today - it was such a grey and sullen day that it barely got light, let alone sunny.

These stars were the tails to the balloons that I bought Ray to celebrate his 99th: they seemed too good to waste, so I hung them as Christmas decorations from a light bracket in the hall, where they are twirling very very gently in - well, I guess that proves how draughty it is.  There's quite a gale outside.

Happy 2023, everyone, when the clock strikes - 

 

The Ridgway

I've been walking along the Ridgway ever since - well, ever since I could walk.  This evening, there was a wild, stormy sky as another - yet another - band of rain moved in.  Of course, the shops have changed - the butchers used to be on the right hand side (why we didn't go to the one that was closer, I don't know), where our most frequent purchase was "a quarter of a pound of best mince" (that's ground beef, to American readers), which went straight into our cat.  The butcher who almost always served us was Mr Simmons, who had a medical condition that meant that he nodded his head all the time.  Most of the other kids called him Noddy (quite understandably), but I wouldn't do that, because my mother vehemently disapproved of Enid Blyton, and therefore I thought this was super-rude (which it was, of course, but not because of the Blyton connection).

But something's shifted in the last week. It's still home - or the road to home - and yet it's not. Day by day, I'm processing how my sense of belonging is shifting, and trying to work out why it should be that with my father no longer here, my relationship to Wimbledon as a whole, and the house and garden in particular, involves much more of a feeling than ever before that I'm living in the present than in the past.  Well, duh.  But it's a good, if unexpected sensation.

Must go and feed the foxes ... tonight, in Operation Clean Out Freezer, they will have one dish of Waitrose roast lamb and vegetables, and 12 M&S mini Yorkshire puddings with braised beef.  

 

my father's foxes

On my last visit here - really, only about three weeks ago, but it seems like a lifetime - my father asked: "who'll feed Foxy when I die?"  I think you know the answer to that one, for now.  Not only was there still a large pack of cans of - errrr - cat food in the cupboard (wouldn't dog food have been more nutritionally appropriate? I expect cat food was on special at Waitrose), but I am supplementing this with stuff that I'm never going to eat in the freezer (sausages rolling around loose in there; packets of lamb hot-pot).  

Ray maintained the fiction that there was only one, singular Foxy.  I've seen up to three at a time, but the boss fox is certainly a gorgeously fit mid russet brown, with thick fur: he's on the left.  I was working at the dining room table facing the window this afternoon, and suddenly there were two of them play-fighting outside, and then scampering around the garden.  I told them they'd have to wait a few hours.

The strange texture is due to the fact that the insulation in this house is decidedly imperfect, and that means that condensation builds up on the windows: in turn, that does weird things to focusing ...

 

Dan Leno

I went to talk to funeral directors this afternoon (as I did with my mother's arrangements, I went with the wonderful Poppy's Funerals, who are the women you would want to have running your entire life, kindly and efficiently).  They're situated in the gatehouse of Lambeth Cemetery, and arriving a bit early, I went for a walk round it, final resting place of a million plastic dahlias and roses.

And final resting place, too, to Dan Leno!  Leno was a star of the late C19th music hall and musical theater; a boy clog dancer; then a solo comedian - monologues and comic songs about very everyday subjects; and a pantomime dame at Drury Lane.  He was, apparently, brilliant at all the comedy he did - but hated the fact that he couldn't break in to serious theater, and increasingly drank, as his father had done - indeed, he probably drank himself to death, at the age of 43.  But he lived long enough to have made recordings - listening to them makes one realize quite how the nature of humor shifts from generation to generation ... Also, I'm intrigued by how posh his voice sounds - he didn't come from that kind of background, at all.  Who knew I'd find him here, on a grey, wet day?

 

my Yorkshire heritage - the matriarchal line

One of the benefits of dealing with everything following a death is that one has lots of time to rummage through old letters and postcards (I was more diligent in sending them from my travels than I remember: I'm so touched to find that my parents kept them), and of course photographs.  My father was from Leeds - his father died when he was four (gassed in WW1, so the family story went, and his lungs didn't survive pneumonia); and after a few years trying to make ends meet, Ray and his mother and brother moved first to Derby, and then to live with his maternal grandparents and aunt in Birmingham.

Meanwhile, the men on my mother's side of the family had either run off (my grandfather and uncle); or died in WW1.  Although Ray didn't meet my mother there, she was from near Leeds - Batley, about thirteen miles south, and so I quite definitely have a lineage of strong Yorkshirewomen on both sides.  I don't remember this photo well - and I certainly don't remember it being taken, though I do recollect being rather keen on those check trousers.  It was taken in Huddersfield in 1956 - and really looks to be a longer time ago than that, even.  My mother's holding my hand; her mother is next to her; then the tall stern woman is my Auntie Jess.  I bet none of them envisaged that fiercely independent looking small person (and surely that fierce independence - let's not call it stubbornness - came from Ray) ending up in Los Angeles - a very long way from this Yorkshire doorstep.

 

Boxing Day walk

It was a glorious sunny day, which lifted my spirits no end.  I'm so lucky to have Wimbledon Common to go and stomp muddily around, in company with most of the residents of SW19 and their dogs (and for some of them, their new and shiny electric bicycles).  I did a good deal of thinking about what I'll be saying in Ray's eulogy - I think well whilst walking.

During the last couple of months, Ray kept asking me - are there any questions you want to ask, before it's too late?  Foolish me - I interpreted that (or part of me chose to interpret that) - as inviting questions about - oh, I don't know: his relationship with my mother, or his views on the afterlife; or whether I have any surprise half-siblings anywhere, or ... all the kind of intimate stuff that I actually would have had a great deal of difficulty even broaching.  But there are, now, so many things that I wish that I'd asked ...

- how do you turn on the dishwasher? (a fairly new replacement - some of you will remember the saga - rarely used, and when one goes to the Grundig website for it, one's offered the unmissable opportunity to download the manual for an entirely different model.

- where are the spare fuses?  The lights on the Christmas tree have stopped working.  All the bulbs are screwed in tight.  The lights are probably ancient.  Quite possibly this is a metaphysical sign or metaphor, anyway.

- where's the key to the little box by my mother's side of the bed?  It rattles a lot, so there's probably something in it. Cufflinks?  Or maybe the cufflinks were sold.

- which bin is for paper recycling?  The one with the blue top, or the other one?

- really?  Only one burner on the stove works, and that has two modes: off/very hot.

- where is the Birket Foster watercolour that used to hang in the living room, and was taken down some years ago when the room was painted - like very many other bits of art work that then Ray never got round to rehanging?  Here's a C19th print of it.

Indeed, although this had been in my mother's family since the C19th, after I did some work on Birket Foster a number of years back, I became suspicious that it was a copy/fake (BF was much faked in his lifetime) - now I wonder if it might even have been a print, although I think I'd have spotted that.  But whatever ... I was very fond of it, indeed; there are a limited number of places that it could be in this small house; and it's not here.  I have, of course, become obsessed by its absence, and, yes, I can spot psychological displacement activity, thank you ...

The Common offers plenty of space for musing on all the above, and more besides.

 

"chidden"

Ray both loved poetry, and was fascinated by language.  Only the other week he was reprimanding me, as he cried over some Housman, for not getting sentimentally moved.  I knew he wouldn't follow (by that point) if I explained to him that the reason I don't teach much poetry, and don't read it a great deal, either, is that it can ambush me and make me far too upset... One of his fairly recent favorites was Hardy's "Neutral Tones": "We stood by a pond that winter day, / And the sun was white, as though chidden of God ..." - and those might be the most cheerful lines in it.  What, he asked, is "chidden"? ["rebuked," "chastized," since you too are asking.  I had to look it up].  Rest assured, this bleak lyric won't be making it onto the funeral order of service (but the Housman may).

On Wimbledon Common this morning, everything in sight - apart from embarrassed dogs wearing Santa hats - looked decidedly chidden.  It wasn't actually raining, but ... I sat on a bench for a gloomy while, and recollected the stories about the times that Ray used to bring me up here for a walk: the time, when I was about 3, I apparently said, excitedly, "look! look! a black seagull!" (I was glad to find the Zeiss binoculars today: that'll help me recognize crows when I see them). Or the time when he said that he could turn on the street lights as dusk fell by treading on a metal water plate on the ground - stomp - and (by pure coincidence, or well-timed guesswork), on they came.  But I don't really remember these: only the anecdotes.  I do remember, though, after we returned to London after four years in Cumberland, coming to the pond with him to sail my model boats: a yacht with a wooden hull, and a tug boat - I would have thought made from an Airfix kit, but I can't discover the precise model on line.  Maybe it was just model airplanes that I made from sticky plastic-and-glue Airfix kits, and the tug was bought at Peggy Bowbrick's, the toy shop at the corner of the Ridgway and the High Street.

And yes: I'm strongly aware that in starting to dismantle the contents of this house, I'm dismantling 61 years of my life.  I doubt I'll find those boats, though.

And no - not all the day was "edged with grayish leaves" - a daffodil came out.