It wouldn’t take mum long to know when I was lying. At the age of about five, I had mastered the art of creating the perfect temperature on the thermometer. About a minute next to the light-bulb in my sticker-infested cabin-bed produced a fever just hot enough to mean that I could stay at home from school, but not too hot that I was rushed to A&E. This lasted a while, until my illness lies became progressively more extreme, to combat mum’s increasing knowledge of my tricks. I would claim that I had a headache, a tummy ache, a leg ache, a sore throat and sickness all at the same time. Not completely convincing. However, I was able to throw up on demand in those days; the last resort in these situations. Mum always knew that I was lying, so she’d make sure I was resigned to my bedroom or the sofa all day. Any digression would mean that I surely wasn’t that ill after all. I think it’s probably the reason that we never had any fancy TV channels. That would have definitely encouraged my young self.
Thinking about mum now, she was a pretty smart cookie. I soon got over my love of daytime TV and integrated myself well into school life – which I loved. I guess boarding school doesn’t lend itself to the same opportunities for escape as the local primary.
Mum’s stories from Godolphin always made me wonder why I wasn’t sent away to school though. The friendships she made and the mischief she got up to always made me dream of some imaginary world between Mallory Towers and St Trinian’s. Sneaking out at night to watch the trains and emergency knicker-swapping sounded like something straight out of an Enid Blyton novel. Her childhood always seemed ever so wholesome, especially when you consider that this was the sixties. I remember her telling me how she won the ‘most improved posture award’ one year, an award that – if you knew my mother – you wouldn’t doubt. Her elegant poise and flirtations with fashion painted her as an incredibly beautiful, yet humble lady.
I could only dream to inherit some of those qualities. I’ve taken her creative side – all three of us have, as well as her love of literature, gnocchi and mango. I’ve also taken her laugh. She would get the giggles after a glass of wine. I get the giggles over a lot of things – quite often in my sleep.
She would sit in the corridor when Tom, Pip and I couldn’t sleep. She bought me a typewriter when I wanted to write. She occasionally let us have just cake for dinner.
Despite her insistence that she preferred silence to music, mum’s ‘kitchen dance’ has probably made it around the world by now, due to Pip and I replicating it’s gawky style on every dance-floor we’ve ever encountered. The Beach Boys were her vice. Sunday afternoons weren’t complete without ‘Pet Sounds’ providing the soundtrack to a dance involving potato peelers, mixing bowls or saucepans, as props.
Sunday afternoons, as a matter of fact, were something I completely took for granted. I grew up thinking that it was normal to have a full roast dinner every week. She never let us down. It wasn’t until I moved away that it become intrinsically clear that I hadn’t inherited her culinary flair. Aside from her perfect lemon meringue pie and incredible Irish marrow chutney (of which the recipe rests with her), birthday cakes were her forte. All we had to do was dream it, and in a puff of smoke, we had biscuit castles, racing tracks, and even ‘Gizmo’ from Gremlins. We were pretty much the envy of all our friends – apart from the time Tom accidentally stepped on my number ‘3’, closely followed by me sitting in the remaining crumbs.
That was Trevone in 1989. Dad had rounded up every child on the beach for a game of makeshift musical chairs. He sang. I don’t know what was used for chairs. I guess the cake incident shows how competitive children can be.
Trevone has always been a pretty special place for us as a family. I don’t know whether that’s because we spent the majority of our summer holidays growing up there, or because it is the kind of peaceful, sleepy town that just evaporated tension. As holidays go, I’m glad I got to know another part of the UK before I got to know the world a bit more. For me, Cornwall comes close to paradise, and I hope to be able to pass that on to my family one day.
Reading back through the journal that mum wrote to me in her last months, she mentions that the biggest regret in her lifetime is that she will never see any grandchildren. I can’t see how she could be to blame for that. “I’ll come back and watch them” she scribes, in that so familiar yet illegible scrawl, “Good luck”.
I’ve got faith that she’ll come back in one of them, however. Just like Grandma came back in Pippa. And as the doves began to visit the morning after her passing, flocking the house just before the funeral, it gave me an abundant faith in another world. Before this point, I couldn’t say what I believed in. Now I can say, with as much evidence as I have seen, that there is a better place beyond this cruel world. We’re probably living with it underneath our noses.
I found this exert when my uncle Raymond died on January 1st 2008. I think it sums up in beautiful conviction, what we are all capable of believing.
“When somebody dies, a cloud turns into an angel, and flies up to tell God to put another flower on a pillow. A bird gives the message back to the world, and sings a silent prayer that makes the rain cry. People disappear, but they never really go away. The spirits up there put the sun to bed, wake up grass, and spin the earth in dizzy circles. Sometimes you can see them dancing in a cloud during the day-time, when they're supposed to be sleeping. They paint the rainbows and also the sunsets and make waves splash and tug at the tide. They toss shooting stars and listen to wishes. And when they sing wind-songs, they whisper to us, don't miss me too much. The view is nice and I'm doing just fine.”
Author unknown
“Never miss an opportunity to tell someone you love them.” It was a phrase I immediately became to cherish when a list of ‘rules to live by’ were handed to me by an incredibly well respected teacher when leaving high school. There’s a certain promise in that rule; a promise that presents more than admiration, but the ability to verbally offer yourself – wholly and truthfully – as a hand to hold, a shoulder to cry on, and a hug to melt into. After all, without love there’s not much more to live for, is there?
