Altogether Elsewhere Anthology

On Grandfathers

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Story book grandpas are always very, very old. So old that their white beards are never shaved – maybe because they’re too old and weak to pick up a razor and shaving brush? Their backs are bent and, if there are pictures in the book, the facial features of one grandfather are indistinguishable from any other – just a tangled web of wrinkles, out of which peep (usually blue) eyes, in a perpetual state of either twinkling, or grumpy frowning. The twinkly grandpas offer kindness and comfort. The grumpy ones are a bit frightening but then somehow, in the course of the story, they always turn into the twinkly ones, usually as a result of the winning ways of their delightful grand-children. Johanna Spyri’s grandfather in Heidi is a classic example. He starts out as the cantankerous kind who ends up providing love and refuge for Heidi and is finally reconciled with the villagers with whom he has fallen out, and the church that he has long spurned. Grumpy to twinkly, in a nutshell.

The other kind of grandfather, of course, is the dead or dying one. Again, very old, again very wrinkled but this time with twinkly eyes that are about to shut forever. This storybook grandfather offers children a way of processing sadness and coming to terms with death and grief.

There’s something about these storybook grandfathers that once didn’t make me squirm, but now does. It’s obvious why, really, isn’t it? As I grow older, I recognise more acutely the ways in which old people’s individuality and personalities are flattened out and forgotten. Old is a new, and simpler, category of being; the grandfather is a ‘type’, rather than a person. But the truth is, he’s nothing like the grandfathers I have known, and the ones I know now.

My grandfather – Adolf

My grandfather and grandmother, on my mother’s side, lived in South Africa. They were unreachable, except by airmail letter, the very rare treat of an expensive operator-connected phone call, or a telegram in case of dire emergencies or momentous events. After saying farewell to them at Cape Town’s Jan Smuts (now O.R. Tambo) airport at the age of five, I only saw them both twice in total during my childhood – a visit ‘home’ and a trip by them to London for my brother’s bar mitzvah. But they were very important in my mother’s inner world, her sense of herself and her, sometimes fragile, belief that things would turn out OK in the end. She relied on them, even though they weren’t there to be relied upon. We got to know them via their letters, as well as through the news we received of them from the many visiting South Africans who passed through London on their ‘European tour’.

My grandfather was my mother’s favourite. She adored and respected him above anyone else in the world. So, it was a hard thing for me to discover, reading between the lines of letters and messages passed on by visitors, that my grandfather did not favour me. My grandfather’s favourite was my brother. Visitors were full of how much my grandfather thought of my brother. All the talk was about him and how proud my grandfather was of his achievements, his cleverness, his success at school. And on the two occasions we saw my grandparents, my grandfather made this clear too. I was excluded from playing games of chess – too young, too babyish, I’d spoil the game, my grandfather said. I was on the periphery of his sphere of interest, and never allowed into the warm circle of his full grandfatherly adoration. It hurt.

Now, with two grandchildren of my own, both equally adored, neither a favourite, unable to even conceive of how there could be limits or quotas on how much love is available to dole out, I think of my grandfather with regret and sadness. I missed out on him. But I think he also missed out on me. He died before I left school, went to university and entered the world of work. He knew nothing of the woman I was to become.

My grandfather – Oupa

My father’s father, Oupa, also living in South Africa, died when I was three years old, so I have no direct memories of him, just photographs of a neat, diminutive, dapper man, with a hat rakishly positioned on his head, standing a good foot smaller than my rather less stylish and attractive grandmother. By all accounts he was quite fond of me and my brother but perhaps it was lucky that I didn’t get the chance to know him more intimately as a presence in my life. I’ve written about him in my novel Off the Voortrekker Road. Though a fiction, many of the stories about Oupa are rooted in truth – the fact that he kept my grandmother desperately short of money for the household, that he was a harsh and unyielding father (tying my father’s left hand behind his back to force him to use his right hand and refusing to pay out for a bar mitzvah for him, to my father’s lifelong shame.)  His tightness with money extended to not being willing to fund my father’s university education. He could go out and get a job and earn some money, couldn’t he? Luckily my father was exceptionally bright and won one of only two or three scholarships in the whole of the Cape, allowing him to continue his education. My father grew up and succeeded despite his father, not because of him.

Oupa lacked basic decency in his family life – what Jews would call menshlichkeit. He was definitely no mensh! But this extended beyond the family too. His nefarious business exploits became the stuff of family legend. When times were tough, on two separate occasions, Oupa managed to successfully burn down his hardware stores, pocketing a large amount of insurance money, allowing him to set up afresh. In the process, he also burnt down my father’s treasured matchbox collection, a crime for which my father never forgave him.

Despite all this, Oupa may have also had a softer side and my mother tells a few stories of his kindness to her. Unlike my father, she was a practical young woman, quick to pick up new skills such as those needed in the hardware store –  cutting, chopping, sorting, fixing, weighing, measuring, dealing with customers. He clearly respected her for this. Perhaps Oupa’s antipathy towards my father stemmed from the fact that he just couldn’t understand a son whose intellectual achievements so far surpassed his own, while he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in the practical skills that Oupa so valued.

While it was probably no bad thing that I was protected from Oupa the man and all that went with his tempestuous relationship with my grandmother (Ouma), and my father, the stories I was told about him became a rich and important part of my childhood. Grandparents live on in memories, and this grandfather lived on in a particularly vivid – one might even say lurid – way. Grandfathers have value and significance, alive or dead. In my case, his larger-than-life character and exploits gave him a starring role in my first novel.

My father – the grandfather

My father was a loving parent, but not a hands-on one. Preoccupied with making (or sometimes failing to make) a living, and doing what was expected of him in those days, he didn’t change nappies, make dinner, do bath-time, put us to bed, read to us. On weekends, exhausted, and sometimes quite depressed, he took a ‘schluff’, a long sleep, in the afternoon, waking angrily when my brother and my arguments grew loud enough to rouse him. Practical care fell to my mother. When she was so sick she couldn’t leave her bed – just once in my memory – we discovered that he couldn’t crack an egg successfully. The kitchen floor was awash with slippery broken yoke and white and my father, a child himself, cried in shame and frustration and looked to us for assistance.

By the time my second child was born, my father had resolved his work problems, was much happier and on the verge of retirement. Suddenly Pappy Jack came into his own as a grandfather. He changed a nappy for the first time in his life, played with, and was adored by my son.

‘Why does he love me so much?’ my father asked, bashfully perplexed, yet basking in the pleasure of his grandson’s affection.

My mother came straight back, ‘Because you know who Mrs Goggins is.’

I saw my father become someone else. A grandfather. It was a route to the kind of connection that he’d missed out on with us.

My Grandpa Husband and Me

Googling grandfathers, I find a wonderful site called ‘Famous Grandfathers: A List of Bad Boys Who Are Now Grandfathers’, and they include hell-raisers Ozzie Osbourne and Alice Cooper, rock god Mick Jagger and actors Robert de Niro and Jack Nicholson. In among the stories are delightful photographs, including one of Osbourne pulling cross-eyed, goofy faces with his grand-daughter. How did this remarkable transformation happen?

My husband wasn’t a rock god nor was he a hell-raiser in his youth, and yet the transformation is, nonetheless, a big one. Yesterday – it was only a blink away, not a life time surely? – he was a long-blond-haired, hippyish student, in a leather airman’s jacket, desert boots and loons. He’d hitch-hiked across Europe, seen The Grateful Dead at the Bickershaw Festival, marched against racism and cuts and then gone on to a marriage with me, a demanding, serious job, and bringing up two children. And now here he is, ‘grandpa’.

The roles we played as parents, back in the 80s and 90s, wound up being quite stereotypical, much as we tried to break down the gender boundaries. I took a long maternity leave first time round and then gave up full-time work with our second child; my husband’s long hours and work responsibilities meant that, on weekdays at least, I took on more of the caring role, becoming the ‘expert’ in day-to-day minutiae, keeping track of who needed what, dealing with school traumas, preparing their food. But this time round, with a new batch of little ones, my husband has much more time to revel in minutiae. The one thing I’ve found hard to give up control of though, to be honest, is the role of food-giver. Whether it’s the ‘Jewish mamma’ syndrome, or something else, the pleasure of making food for the children – and now the grandchildren – is something I’ve struggled to be able to share and fought hard to retain. It seems that only I know whether a fishfinger, a sausage, or a plate of pasta is what is really needed and how to cook these culinary delights, despite my husband being an exceptional cook, generally acknowledged to be much better than me. The careful preparation of fishfingers and peas? That’s for me – not grandpa!

Grandpa (and Granny) are not really different from the complex, individual, complicated individuals we always were and always have been – quite good at some things and not others, cheerful sometimes but not always, full of our own quirks and preferences and interests. My husband hasn’t changed fundamentally,  the grandpa-ness being just a new, (very precious and important) add-on, a new layer of experience, enriching but not essentially changing who he is. This grandpa – the one who once went to the Bickershaw Rock Festival `– is not the grandfather ‘type’ but a unique individual.

So, let’s remember the real ones – my father who discovered the pleasures of being with a young child, my one grandfather who was only able to perform the role fully for one grandchild, not two, my other one who I only knew through the myth-making of family memories, my husband who hasn’t had a beard since his hippy days, who arrives for his babysitting duties on his motorbike, and has eyes that twinkle as much or as little as anyone else’s, young or old.

Barbara Bleiman

September 2023

ON RECONSTRUCTION

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1.

Evening light spills through the south-facing bay window, beyond which my neighbour’s wild garden sprawls, in its May exuberance. In front of the bay, and in what will become my living space, sits a lone toilet, surrounded by piles of rubble, ripped-out bits of plasterboard and studwork.

‘Goodness,’ says my friend, surveying the building site. She wanted to see my new flat  before we went out to dinner. And the look on her face says, you must be mad to do this.

But I am not mad. I am an architect, used to refurbishing old buildings. Who knows demolition must precede reconstruction; that it has to get worse before it gets better.

I wanted this flat as soon as I spotted its photos and floorplan on the estate agent’s blurb, which arrived while I was on holiday. By the time I returned, someone had already made an offer. Week after week, I called the agent to check progress on the sale. ‘Going great’ he always said. Until one week, it no longer was.

I was the first one in when it was put back on the market. A diagonal partition wall divided its 4-metre high south-facing room into two awkward bedrooms. In one, a used condom lay discarded on the floor. A couple of young DJs were living there, the agent told me.

I made an offer within minutes. It would be perfect for my new life; a freelance one where I worked from home. The tiny kitchen off the hallway could become my office. A cancer diagnosis, three springs ago, had put an abrupt end to my forty-five minute commute to an architect’s practice in Clerkenwell for twelve-hour days. Life was too short for that. Ever since, I’d been living with and working from my parents’. Now it was time to recreate my own home. And, hopefully, one day, find someone to share it with.   

2.

The news arrives by telephone on a Wednesday morning in late winter, eight years after I have moved into my flat. It’s not exactly unexpected. Still, I have to sit down to digest it.

A woman from the genetics team at The Royal Marsden Hospital informs me I have tested positive for the BRCA1 gene. A genetic mutation that has, in recent years, killed two of my first cousins, only in their forties. And puts me at an up to 80% lifetime risk of a new breast cancer, not to mention a 40% one of ovarian cancer.

I sit on the sofa shivering, unsure whether it’s from the news or from the chill of the March day. The heating is on, but the single-glazed, tall bay window is a poor buffer against the weather. To my husband-to-be’s horror, I refuse to put up curtains. I don’t want to conceal the window’s panelled surrounds.     

The hospital recommend a risk-reducing double mastectomy with optional reconstruction. Alternatively, I can continue with annual MRI screening, until I’m ready for surgery. I am not ready. Even though I ought to be. I am also busy planning my September wedding and trying to conceive a child. Plus, I’ve remained cancer-free for over a decade, so surely I can risk postponing surgery for a bit? 

3.

‘You could go on the beach today in a tiny bikini, and no-one would guess a thing, says Ana, a Spanish doctor at The Royal Marsden, when I see my reconstructed breasts for the first time, on a December morning, two years after my wedding. It is ten days since the four-hour operation in which my breast tissue was cut away and silicon implants inserted.

I was scared I might hate these new breasts of mine. Even though my skin is still bruised yellow from surgery, I have to admit they look good. A little bigger. More uplift. And perfectly symmetrical.

My body recovers fast. But by spring, I am crumbling. I should be happy, I reason. My lifetime risk of breast cancer has been slashed to less than 5%. But inside there’s disquiet. Is it from four years trying and failing to conceive? From having had part of my body chopped off? A part from which I’d hoped to feed the child I am increasingly uncertain I will ever have.

I can’t be sure. But what I do know is I’ve lost my ability to take pleasure in life’s small delights: a movie and sushi with my husband; brunch with my girlfriends; a good novel. Even a holiday to Venice and Croatia doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Anxiety pulses through me. Soon, I’m barely sleeping. An hour here, an hour there. Similar to the new mother I may never become. I try everything. Meditation. Medication. More yoga. Less yoga. More greens and fish. Cake. Even jogging. None of it makes much difference.

I get to the point where I think, thank God I’ll probably never become a mother. What kind of a mother would I be in this state?

4.

Everyone tells me it gets easier after the first year. And what a year: my sister’s sudden death nine days before my son arrived; my ovaries ripped out six months after his birth (another risk-reducing surgery) and the ensuing plunge into surgical menopause.

And it does get easier. For a while. I adapt to a life in which my sister no longer exists and my son does. He starts sleeping through the night. I start HRT and the hot flashes melt away.

Then come the stories: a strange virus from China, whole cities there being locked down. Never in London, I reassure myself.

A few weeks later, I walk through Regent’s Park to Marylebone High Street. On this mid-week morning, it is deserted, most of its shops closed. A premonition of what is to come.

The following Monday, we go into lockdown. Building work is, however, allowed to continue. And our downstairs neighbours have just started a six-month refurbishment of their flat.

Clank, clank, clank all day long. Three of us marooned at home, my husband attempting to work from a makeshift desk in our bedroom. My son failing to nap in the tiny room that was once my office, as drills grate and angle grinders shriek.

I ask the builders if they’ll consider timing their lunchbreak with his nap, a blessed pause in the day for me, too. Or at least only do quiet work then. A resolute no comes back. Very busy. Must get on. Many jobs lined up.

So I take the pram out and walk and walk, mostly through the local parks, which smell so fragrant this spring. In the distance, I see City towers and picture its ghost town, buildings and streets emptied out. What will become of us all? Will London ever return to her former self?

5.

I wake early and walk through the cool of the elderflower-scented park to Marylebone High Street. I arrive at the café in time to avoid the queue, which builds even on a weekday.

No traces of Patisserie Valerie’s chandeliers, green walls and gilt-framed mirrors remain. It closed a couple of years ago, sometime during 2021, and the new café, with its terrazzo floor, giant skylight, and Aussie-inspired menu is more to my architectural and culinary tastes.

Still, I miss the Continental comfort of the old place, its glass display case filled with eclairs, strawberry tarts and mille-feuille. It was where I came, twenty-one years ago today, on the day my life as I knew it was bulldozed by three simple words: you have cancer. My best friends and I drank Earl Grey and ate scones with clotted cream and jam. In my shock, I thought it was quite nice to be spending a Monday afternoon in a café with them, rather than at the office, drafting construction details.  

Today, I’m alone. I sit near the window and look out over the high street. The sun is starting to come out, the shops are unlocking their doors. Just a few units remain boarded up.

I drink a flat white and eat toasted coconut bread and contemplate what I’ll do with myself today. A rare Saturday to myself, as my husband and son are away. I want to do it all. The movies. An exhibition. A spa. Go shopping. Lie in the park and read. Go to yoga. See friends.

In the end, I decide to walk back through the park and savour the rare peace of my home, without a four-year-old running around and strewing the floor with toy trains, diggers and cars.

I sit at the smooth white desk in the living room, from which I can see my neighbour’s lush May garden. I bought the desk when I was seven months pregnant and had transformed my office into a white-painted nursery. In this reconstructed life, which I could never have dared dream of twenty-one years ago, I now use my desk to construct stories, not buildings.

Annabel Chown, June 2023

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On the Pleasure of Literary Picnics

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I’ve changed my life because of a picnic I once read about in a book so it’s fair to say that I take literary picnics seriously.

I first fell in love with the 1930s writer, Denton Welch, because of his exact accounts of picnics taken in the countryside around Kent. In our twenties and living in London, my husband and I would copy Denton’s picnics and cycle round the countryside, trying to stop in exactly the same spots Denton had.

So, several decades later, when we wanted to move back South from Edinburgh, we remembered those country lanes and moved to live in Kent, largely because of how we’d grown to love it through Denton’s picnics.

Here’s his diary entry for 26th October 1944: There were cows in the field opposite, in the misty atmosphere, and beyond on the opposite hill Tudorized houses lost in the soft mist. We ate cheese, fruit cake, biscuits, toast, drank coffee and I ate the only orange in pigs.

            Then we smoked the Dunhill cigarettes that I had bought, and an old lady came behind us and said over the fence, ‘Excuse me, but would you like any boiling water? Can I get you any boiling water?’ I told her we had just drunk our thermos of coffee and she went away immediately to her house saying, “I see, quite, quite.’

Perhaps because he insisted on having picnics through the year, his best were ones that involved a thermos and four squares of dark chocolate. Four squares exactly, not a bar, or even ‘some chocolate’.

Be exact, writers, because your readers will be eating along with you.

Or nearly always. I tried to find the earliest account of a literary picnic and came up with Anthony Trollope in Can You Forgive Her (1864):

‘There are servants to wait, there is champagne, there is dancing, and instead of a ruined priory, an old upturned boat to be converted into a dining room.’

Hmmm.

But if the Trollope account is a little too aspirational for most of us, then what exactly is a picnic? Maybe it’s a breakfast of bananas and sweet corn cooked on a static barbecue in a full car park? Our annual summer holiday treat has now gone into family myth, not least because of the sight of our normally office-bound father struggling to feel at home in the great outdoors. And what could be more British than seeing picnickers sitting right next to their cars as they watch the traffic go by?

At least Patricia Highsmith took her characters off the motorway in The Price of Salt (which became the film, Carol):

Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard’s mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn’t open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

            ‘Caviar. How very, very nice of them,’ Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. ‘Do you like caviar?’

At the other extreme, there was the time I went to play with a new school friend, and her mother threw jam sandwiches out of the window at us so we wouldn’t disturb her at lunchtime. That didn’t feel like much of a picnic so, while there should be an illusion of ‘roughing it’, perhaps there also needs some care involved.

 ‘You English,’ my Dutch neighbour says about the way her British husband fusses with filling the thermos, preparing fruit and yes, why not, a rug to sit on. ‘Why can’t you take some bread with you and be done with it?’

Perhaps our classic children’s literature is to blame. The lashings of ginger pop enjoyed by the Famous Five, or Ratty’s famous “cold-tongue-cold-ham-cold-beef-pickled-onions-salad-french-bread-cress-and-widge-spotted-meat-ginger-beer-lemonade — ” from the Wind in the Willows.

If Ratty had just said he’d got a picnic, even a large one, then who would have been interested? Not me. And I certainly wouldn’t have begged Mum to take pickled onions with us next time we went on a picnic.

I know I’m not alone in loving detailed food descriptions laid out on the page. Recently I had a brain freeze and couldn’t remember the name of a favourite children’s book, so I asked on social media, ‘What’s the name of the book where they have those little sugar biscuits with iced flowers?’

The Little White Horse, several people answered in minutes. And there then followed an animated discussion of all the food Marmaduke Scarlet cooked for Maria Merryweather. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Harry Potter eats well at times too, given that J K Rowling has admitted how Elizabeth Goudge has influenced her.

Among the classics, Jane Austen is the mistress of the niceties and challenges of a picnic – perhaps because she gets so well how it could all go horribly wrong. Her deliciously snobbish Mrs Elton in Emma, has all the important details planned in advance, as she explains to Mr Knightley. ‘I shall wear a large bonnet and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm…. Nothing can be more simple you see… There is to be no form or parade – a sort of gipsy party. We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees; and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to be all out of doors, a table spread in the shade, you know. Everything as natural and simple as possible.’

But Mr Knightley is a man I could never fall in love with. He insisted on having the meal inside with servants and furniture, large bonnets optional.

Perhaps he was feeling under siege like the poor oysters flattered into joining the walrus and the carpenter on their sea-side picnic until:

‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,

‘Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

are very good indeed –

Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.

I used to love this poem until I’d realised exactly what was going on. Perhaps the best literary picnics – like many in real life – are those that teeter on the verge of disaster, such as the glorious beach picnic in Gerald Durrell’s short story ‘The Picnic’, where the family settled on what they thought was a rock but turned out to be the side of a dead horse.

I wonder too if the weather is another reason why the British love eating outside? Because we can never really plan ahead for a sunny day, we don’t let a ‘spot of weather’ put us off. As Edwin Morgan writes:

In a little rainy mist of white and grey

we sat under an old tree,

drank tea toasts to the powdery mountain,

undrunk got merry, played catch

with the empty flask…

In her wartime diaries, Love is Blue, Joan Wyndham writes about one definitely un-Blyton picnic: ‘We lay under a tree in the wind and the rain eating peaches while Zoltan kissed my thighs with his usual air of grave, sad absorption. He undid his shirt so I could put my hand over his heart, and the wind roared in the trees and whipped back my hair.’

Can’t you just taste those peaches?

Oh, your attention went elsewhere? Back to the food, people.

Although not perhaps PG Wodehouse’s picnic in Very Good Jeeves:

I met a fellow the other day who told me he unpacked his basket and found the champagne had burst and together with the salad dressing had soaked into the ham, which in turn had got mixed up with the gorgonzola cheese forming a kind of pasta … Oh, he ate the mixture but he said he could taste it even now.

Well, if the food isn’t that good, at least a picnic can offer the chance to explore. Not just a geographical place, but to escape the routine of day-to-day. A packed lunch made at home to take to the office every day is NOT a picnic. However, the same food brought by someone coming to surprise you with a lunch to take outside in the park is definitely a picnic in my book.

So a picnic can help us try something new. Escaping the routine of day-to-day. Which is, after all, very much what reading for pleasure can be.

‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Mole in ecstasies: ‘This is too much.’

            ‘Do you really think so?’ inquired the Rat seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions, and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it very fine!’

            The Mole never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long waking dreams.’

Sarah Salway, May 2023

What’s The Story?

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It’s intriguing to find a book gathering its own stories besides the one contained between its covers

In 1948 D H Hardwick ordered a copy of Trees In Britain by L. F. J Brimble from WH Smith. It was to be sent to him in the Military Wing of Harefield County Hospital in Uxbridge.

In 2020, author Sarah Salway, recently discharged from hospital herself, came across that same copy of the book in a charity shop.  Having been seriously ill with silent hypoxia in the first wave of Covid 19, Sarah was learning to breathe again. She’d become fascinated by trees, the breathing they do for us, and used the book to learn to identify trees in her local park on her daily walks.

However, a further fascination came when a postcard fell out of the book revealing the details of Hardwick’s original order to W H Smith 72 years previously.

Feeling an affinity with the hospitalised Hardwick, Sarah began to research him and discovered he had a distinguished career as a pilot in the RAF in WW2. As she was emerging from her ‘battle’ with Covid 19, She was pleased to discover this man was a survivor of many missions.

Sarah wrote about this experience in ‘Learning To Breathe with Trees,’ the first essay Blue Door Press published in the anthology, Altogether Elsewhere.

Unbeknown to Sarah, the story of the book was about to have a new chapter.  It turns out that D H Hardwick was hero to another – his nephew Mike Hardwick. Mike was researching his uncle’s wartime career. His internet trawling led him to read Sarah’s essay on Blue Door Press. He contacted her via her website. They corresponded by email and spoke on the telephone.

Sarah learned much more about her tree book hero: the battles he’d survived, what an inspiring uncle he had been to the young Mike, the post-war life he’d led until his death in 1990.  In turn, Sarah returned the book and the postcard to Mike Hardwick, who is thrilled to discover that his hero, uncle Den, had such a positive effect on Sarah’s recovery. 

It goes to show the importance of putting your story out there, as Annabel Chown wrote in her recent piece. You never know – your story might find its way into someone else’s. I wonder if there are any descendants of L. J. F. Brimble – botanist and form editor of the journal, Nature – who might be pleased to discover the stories Trees In Britain has found its way into.

Pamela Johnson, August 2022

Footnotes – part one by Pamela Johnson

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On a visit to Cuba in 2015 Pamela Johnson had an accident requiring emergency treatment. Friends back home remarked how lucky to be in Cuba – ‘they have so many doctors, such amazing healthcare.’ In this excerpt from a work in progress, she revisits the experience and reflects on why the pursuit of healthcare is central to the island’s history

Sunday 6 December, 2015

The bus to Havana isn’t due until nine-thirty.  Last night I packed my suitcase so there’s nothing to be done but, at seven, I get up anyway. I want to savour one last outdoor shower in the tropical air of Cayo Santa Maria. David, my husband, dozes on.

We’ve no idea what the hotel in Havana will be like or even if the booking is confirmed; this might be my last shower before home. As it turns out, I won’t have another shower for two months. I head for the tiled area open to the sky. With slatted fencing all around and tropical vegetation on the other side, it’s entirely private and makes perfect sense in this climate.

Enjoying the play of water over my skin as I rinse shampoo suds, I study a line of ants marching up the yellow tiles. They navigate a route that carefully avoids my splashes.

It’s hard to believe it’s winter and only three weeks until Christmas. I’ve not even thought of cards or presents let alone bought any. There’s nothing to buy here apart from rum, cigars or cigar boxes and t-shirts displaying the image of Ché Guevara. There are no shops full of glitter and gifts.

Two weeks ago, en route to catch the Gatwick Express, a minicab zoomed us along Oxford Street at five-thirty a.m. With no crowds on the pavements we had an unimpeded view of the decorated storefronts. The excess of Christmas-stacked windows in the dawn light was unsettling. All that stuff.  It was a relief to be lifted out of the festive frenzy to focus instead on this beautiful, complicated island; to visit its sites of revolutionary history; to attempt to compare first-hand present-day Cuba with my vivid childhood memories of the missiles crisis.

October 1962. There I am washing my hands in cold water that streams from the solid brass tap, trying to get some lather from the block of pink carbolic soap.  Alone in the girls’ toilets in the basement of Bolton County Grammar School where six weeks ago I arrived in the first year, excited by the potential that lay ahead. I’m alone because my period came mid-lesson; alone with time to think about the news of ships heading for Cuba loaded with nuclear missiles. Everyone is talking about it; about a clock that is ticking. If the ships don’t turn back – Wooosh! A mushroom cloud. No one survives. If I’m going to die I want to be at home with Mum. President Kennedy has been on the news for days talking about the man with a big beard and soldier boots. Castro, everyone says, is a dangerous man, in league with bald Mr Khrushchev, who must be dangerous because he is Russian. Handsome President Kennedy will have no choice. If anyone can, he will save us.

So I’m given to understand and I believed it then, though, growing up and growing in political awareness I came to understand it had been more complicated. Still, the memory of that terrified child surfaced often during our two-week tour, especially at the start in Havana, at the Plaza de la Revolucíon where we’d stood opposite The Ministry of Defence, an unassuming slab of a tower block, site of 1962 operations. I wished I could have sent a message back to my eleven-year-old self as I listened to the Cuban version of the events that led to the unforgettable stand-off.

‘Always it was meant to be a green not a red revolution,’ explained Raul, our guide. ‘Cuba wanted nothing to do with USSR at the start. Ernesto Ché Guevara made a speech here in this place,’ he said pointing to the ground. Raul always referred to the revolutionary hero in this way. Never simply Ché. 

In 1960 Ché said: Are we or are we not struggling to be a free nation among free nations, without belonging to any military bloc, without having to consult the embassy of any great power on earth?[i]

‘After Bay of Pigs, no choice,’ our guide continued, explaining how, in 1960, the CIA had plotted to invade the island having trained fifteen hundred Cuban exiles in Miami.

‘They even painted an American bomber in Cuban airforce colours! Kennedy didn’t want the world to know he’s behind it. He thought Cubans here would join his side.’ When the exiles landed at The Bay of Pigs, on the south coast, Castro had the Cuban air force ready, along with 20,000 ground troops. Over 1000 exiles were captured and imprisoned.

 ‘What did Castro do?’ Raul paused for effect. ‘He traded the prisoners for 50 million dollars worth of baby food and medicines,’[ii] he said with pride, to prove that, even after this affront, the welfare of the population remained a primary concern.

 Following those events Cuba became piggy-in-the-middle of the Cold War.  If the Revolution was to be about social justice – healthcare, education, housing – Cuba could not afford to spend already scant resources on defending a small island against a super power.

‘That’s why Castro agreed to missile bases on Cuba – self-defence.  Did you know that the USA had secretly placed nuclear missiles along the Turkish border directed at Moscow before 1962? Self defence. Not aggression.’

When the crisis was averted Kennedy agreed to dismantle the missiles in Turkey but only if that fact was not made public.  ‘Kennedy did not want to been known to the world as an aggressor.’ And he made sure it was kept that way so it was decades before the facts of USA missiles in Europe became widely known.

As I turn off the shower, I’m well aware that the floor is flooded and there’s no bathmat. Don’t step on wet tiles. I say to myself. I’m being cautious, as I had been round the pot-holes of Havana, the cobbles in the historic town of Trinidad and the showers in all the Casa Particulares where we’d stayed these last two weeks. 

cobbles in the historic town of Trinidad

Recently recovered from torn ligaments in my left ankle, I know how easy it is to fall.  The skin of my left foot is still purple from the bruising.  

I reach for the beach towel that I’d hung to dry over the fence, fold it in half, the better to absorb the water, and lay it over the wet patch. Carefully, I step onto it, right foot first.

My heel skids as the layers of fabric separate and slide away from each other.

I’m falling. Falling. Falling backwards.

My head, my back –

I picture either or both taking a crack on the tiles. I wait for the impact. But there is no blow to the head, no pain. I’m on the floor. Relief!  I’m not unconscious. I turn my attention towards my splayed legs. My right foot flops inwards, as if it will fall off my leg. And what is that raised red patch, that bulge, on my ankle? It’s a bone pushing against flesh, says a calm voice in my head. Keep still. A Girl Guide knowledge of not moving the injured surfaces. At the same time another part of my mind, the bit that’s still falling, hasn’t caught up, says, this isn’t happening. It’s doing a rewind, mentally fixing the foot back onto the leg, does not want anything to do with my hidden anatomy asserting itself.

How can it be broken?  There is no pain, discomfort, yes, a clicking of shifting bones if I move any part of me but it’s nothing like the searing, out-of-body pain when I tore the ligaments on my other ankle. I’m amazed by this but also concerned. If I move will the bone protrude? Two thoughts: 1. If I can get a cast put on we might still be in time to catch the bus to Havana. 2. Bang goes the Christmas shopping and I certainly won’t be able to cook a turkey.

 ‘David,’ I call calmly. ‘Can you bring the first aid-kit? I need the crepe bandage.’ Though I already know that no amount of half-remembered Girl Guide crisscross strapping will be enough. How will I get up off the floor, never mind back to England?

In the last two weeks we have learned much about the health service in Cuba. Now I’m about to experience it first-hand, I try to recall another of Raul’s talks.

It’s easy to see why healthcare became central to the Revolution. The Cuban war of Independence in the 1890s might have seen off Spanish colonialism but not without some US backing. Although the Republic of Cuba existed from the early twentieth century America retained a prevailing influence.  In the 1920s, Prohibition brought the Mob to Havana. Lucky Luciano controlled many casinos through which to launder money and trade cocaine. A few wealthy Cubans in the capital benefited while the majority of the population outside the city was illiterate, undernourished and in poor health. There was a high rate of infant mortality. 

It was against this background that, in 1960, Ché Guevara gave his address, On Revolutionary Medicine. He described children he’d seen in the Sierra Maestra as ‘offspring of hunger and misery,’ who, ‘appeared to be eight or nine years old, yet almost all of whom are thirteen or fourteen.’  His vision was clear as he urged, ‘Our task now is to orient the creative abilities of all medical professionals towards social medicine … to find out what have been chronic miseries for years…The work entrusted to the Ministry of Health is to provide public health services for the greatest possible number of persons, institute a programme of preventive medicine … If we make war preparations the centre of our concern, we will not be able to devote ourselves to creative work,’ that being the health of the nation.

Five hundred, I remember from Raul’s talk, 500 polyclinics throughout the island, free primary healthcare for all with a doctor in even the smallest community. But we are on a far-flung archipelago off the north coast. We are forty-five minutes from the main island. The only way off here is via a causeway, flanked on either side by sea and mangrove. Will there be a clinic out here? If the main function of the polyclinic is primary, preventative care will they have A & E facilities? 

Undisputedly I am in Cuba but I also inhabit a strange hinterland, the place-where-this-has-happened. In that place, I’m still naked and wet; my mind is still willing my foot back on to my leg and I need the loo.

David hauls me upright onto my left foot. Too shaken to hop, supported by him, I manage a swivelling movement into the bathroom. David is as shocked as I am and still half asleep.

‘Call Alex,’ I say. She’s an English woman on the tour who befriended us, a dentist also trained in facial fractures who regularly works in her local A&E.  Over mojitos the other night she’d described how she had reconstructed the cheekbone of some high-up in the Air Force. In return he’d given her a ride in a Chinook helicopter. ‘Alex will know what to do.’

Alex’s arrives and her voice reaches me in my hinterland. She’s calming David.  Now she’s encouraging me to raise my leg as she piles towels on the bidet which becomes a foot rest.  She administers ibuprofen. I tell her I have no pain.

‘For the swelling,’ she says.

I can hear her on the phone talking to reception, asking them to call an ambulance, to bring ice and a member of staff to accompany us in the ambulance. She is calm, clear, polite, softly spoken yet authoritative. She brings me a t-shirt dress, slides it over my head. Putting on underwear is too complicated. It involves disturbing the clicking bones.

How will I get down the steps – there are at least six to ground level?

Now a man in a white medical coat appears with another man in a t-shirt. And there is Belkis, a member of the hotel staff. They are weighing up the options for a route out of the room. Several arms raise and support me on to one leg. The injured leg clicks uncomfortably as it dangles. I’m scooped into strong arms, carried down the steps to a waiting trolley, then fed into a white van. Apart from me on the trolley and the man in a white coat, nothing about the van says this is an ambulance.

‘Carlos,’ the man in the white coat introduces himself. He is a doctor. He lays a reassuring hand on my shoulder. ‘We go International Clinic,’ Carlos says and Belkis nods and smiles. This clinic is 7 km away. It sounds promising.

I wince as the van bumps over potholes, mainly at the fear of further damage rather than pain.

‘I find solution,’ says Carlos pointing to my foot, ‘I always find solution for my patients.’

Belkis smiles and nods and David explains to me that there is, indeed, a clinic out here on the Cayo. I silently give thanks to Ernesto Ché Guevara. Soon we are pulling up beneath a huge portico of what looks like a new building, the van parks beneath it. It protects us from the warm rain that has begun to fall as they slide me from van to clinic, which, a sign proclaims, is Clinica Internacional Cayo santa Maria.

The grandeur of the entrance disappears once inside. It is bare, as if not yet furnished, as if uninhabited. Then into a room in which there is a cumbersome machine that takes up most of the space. Nothing else except for a medical couch. Discussions in Spanish and broken English. I’m not to be lifted onto the couch. Instead, an awkward maneuvering of the trolley until they can swing the arm of the machine over my foot. Everyone leaves the room as the x-ray is taken. I can see David in the corridor on his phone, calling up the medical emergency service that comes with our travel insurance. I’m wondering, since Dr Carlos is now facilitating a ‘solution’ if a precious phone connection might be better spent alerting the tour company that, though not today, we will be in Havana in time for our flight tomorrow.

Once it emerges, several people gather round to discuss the x-ray; an almost two-foot square sheet of negative is held up to the light. Urgent talk in Spanish.

‘Santa Clara. Santa Clara,’ I hear mentioned several times. Santa Clara means a big town, possibly with a big hospital; it means a bumpy two-hour road journey; it means the site of the final defeat of Batista’s troops in 1959, the site where the Revolution was won by the derailing of a consignment of US-Supplied arms coming from Havana and meant to defeat the rebels. Loyal followers of Ché whispered along the track, sent word to say which train and at what time it was expected. A crowbar loosened the points, a yellow Caterpillar bulldozer slung across the track for good measure. The derailed carriages still lie where they fell, now house a small museum to this victory, the crowbar proudly displayed, and at the entrance to the site the bulldozer sits on a plinth – Este monumento a los combatients de la batalla de Santa Clara.

Now my personal derailment is going to send me back there. It’s thanks to the bulldozer and the crowbar that there will be a medical facility where I can be repaired. I steel myself for two hours of foot jiggling, bones clicking. Trying to ignore the fact that, though Dr Carlos, David and Belkis are all putting on a positive face, something in the mood has changed.

I begin to understand we are not going to Santa Clara, though I’m not sure where we are going only that it is much nearer.

‘Half an hour,’ says Belkis. 

We are on the causeway, the road that skims the shallow sea, towards the main island. Through a grubby window I catch glimpses of mangrove, bits of sky, sea. Lying flat on my trolley, I feel as if I’m the one skimming the water.

Dr Carlos continues to smile and press a comforting hand on my shoulder each time I wince as we hit a bump.  It’s not pain so much, rather the disturbing thought of bones set loose. I can’t bear the sound, the unnatural clicking, from a foot I can’t control, that no longer has any relationship to the leg to which it’s meant to be fixed.

Click, click, click. 

It is not my foot, and I am not me.

 ‘Soon,’ Carlos says, ‘soon find solution.’

Solution? This could mean: amputation, death or, at the very least, surgery. The kind of surgery Tricia had last May. Oh, yes. Tricia. The woman I walked and talked with just 12 days ago as we toured the eco village of Les Terrazaz at Viñales.  I push away thoughts of the image she’d shown me on her mobile phone. An x-ray of her repaired ankle – her fibula with its metal plate pinned in place, the tip of her tibia held secure by a stainless steel screw.

 ‘This is worse than the pavements in Havana,’ she’d said having spotted me being super-cautious over uneven ground.

‘Yea, you really need to concentrate.’

We’d stopped for a rest on a low wall. I’d rambled on about my left foot.

‘A nasty sprain, six weeks ago. Still purple, it swells in this heat,’ I held up my foot to demonstrate. That’s when she pulled out the image, trumped my sprain with her break. Walking in Wales she’d stumbled into a hole in the ground and a rock had fallen on to her ankle.

‘So easily done,’ she’d said. She’d been left to sit in the waiting room at A&E for several hours. Her ankle had swelled so much she needed ten days in hospital with her leg elevated for the swelling to reduce enough to make surgery possible. Surgery. Weeks in a wheelchair. Months of physio. No. This won’t happen to me. I have no pain, only clicking. No rock fell on me.

When he’s not reassuring me Dr Carlos is making hasty calls on his mobile. Belkis explains that the person we need is on his day off. Of course, it’s Sunday. We must collect him from his home. I pick up a tone, a look, the sense of an apology, that this is the only way they can help me, that this is some kind of makeshift option, which on the bright side means it can’t involve surgery.

At last we are off the causeway and turning round a roundabout on which sits a giant concrete crab – through its massive pincers I see its bulging eyes. We are on the main island at the small town of Caibarién on the Atlantic coast.  

We had commented on this crab, four days ago. And the blocks of flats on the edge of the town built in the 1960s. Once state-of-the-art homes, now in need of repair. They were built for workers in the sugar factory and the small harbour from which sugar was once exported, but no more.

Today, we keep stopping to ask directions. Carlos is not clear where our man lives.  In this jumble of tracks, criss-crossed by wires sagging from telegraph poles, it can’t be easy to follow instructions. We drive along streets of much older, colonial style, one-storey houses, with crumbling porticos and faded, peeling paint in every shade: turquoise, yellow, pink.  

Eventually, we pull up at one of these and into the van climbs a man in paint-spattered jeans and t-shirt.  He has a two-day beard and large hands with which he’s been doing up his home, happily engaged in DIY, until we arrive.  He smiles a reluctant sort of smile and Carlos tells me this man has no English. I don’t catch his name and begin to think of him as Dr DIY. He now directs the van to the clinic.

A crowd gathers, a woman holding a baby, children. It’s stopped raining and the sun shines right into the van. I try not to think of my lack of underwear as they lift me out. A horse and cart clip-clops past, hens scratch around the pavement. The kerb is broken; they must lift the trolley to a position where it can be wheeled into the clinic. I notice the words Policlinico II stencilled on the blue-washed wall. Thank you, Ernesto Ché Guevara. No chance of surgery at a primary healthcare centre. Whatever’s happened to my foot can’t be that bad. 

There are colourful walls in the waiting room and many rows of chairs but only one woman waiting. There is a blackboard with a chalked handwritten list that seems to relate to today. I’m wheeled into a room off this waiting area. Along the far wall a sink unit and surface all white tiled but not clean. Above it a window barely covered with a tattered curtain.

Dr DIY finds a bucket and begins to mix what I take to be, hope is, plaster of Paris and try to block out the fact that I have an urgent need to pee. Instead, I begin believe this means an end is in sight – I have a broken bone and Dr DIY’s cast is the solution! He works swiftly, but what he puts on my leg is only half of a plaster cast.

‘Back slab,’ explains Carlos, ‘to hold foot in place.’ In this firm gutter my leg can rest, my foot will be restricted in its movement but clearly, and I see it on Carlos’s face, this not a solution. 

Nobody has named the injury or explained the protruding bone or said how routine this might be or how serious. But it’s becoming clearer by the minute that treating what they’d seen on the x-ray is beyond this facility.

‘When plaster is set, he will bandage, make secure,’ explains Dr Carlos. Clearly Dr DIY is not an orthopaedic surgeon. He may not even be a doctor but a maker of plaster casts. Will there be a hospital in Santa Clara or Havana that can properly set the bone? With the right expertise bones can be manipulated into a cast, can’t they? What do I know – I’ve never broken a bone before. And, could I make a ten-hour flight with a tight cast on my leg?

I don’t want to be a nuisance but I’ve needed to pee since they wheeled me in.  Now it’s urgent. I don’t want the indignity of peeing all over their trolley but, equally, I don’t want to make more demands. In the end I figure getting me to a toilet is less trouble than cleaning up after me.

‘Toilet? Is possible?’ I venture.

‘Soon.’ Dr Carlos puts a hand on my shoulder and points to Dr DIY preparing to swathe the plaster gutter in lint and bandages.  He leaves the room as the last of the bandage is taped into place, returns with a shiny stainless steel bedpan. Relief.

Back in the van, there are rapid discussions in Spanish between Belkis, Carlos and DIY.  I listen out for the words, Santa Clara. No. This is about money. I have the sense that my treatment has been unofficial. At the first clinic it was agreed we’d pay the hotel with a credit card and they would settle the account. The polyclinic is a place for free primary, preventative healthcare for Cubans not A&E for pesky tourists. Out of kindness they have brought me here rather than schlepped me all the way to Santa Clara. Out of kindness Dr DIY agreed to help.

As it’s our last day we are running low on Cuban currency. David counts all the CUCs[iii] we have and offers the notes to Dr DIY. We’ve been told a CUC is worth 25 times more than the local currency, the CUP. We can only hope the amount we give isn’t insulting.  Dr DIY looks hesitant, awkward, pauses before he takes it. Why? Because it’s unofficial, because it’s too much, not enough?

For the first time he speaks. Pointing to my pristine plaster says:

‘You go your country. See doctor. Soon.’

Dr Carlos looks disappointed but has to agree.

When we pull up outside DIY’s place. He gestures for me to sit up, points towards his house and encourages me to wave to his wife. There, in the doorway, of a modest home that is under substantial repair, sits a smiling woman with a child on her lap. The child is all uncoordinated movement, limbs everywhere, severely disabled. I wave, and his wife waves back.

On the return journey to the hotel, back through the sea, Dr Carlos, with some translation from Belkis, explains that Dr DIY works very long hours. His wife finds it hard to cope on her own with the child and often calls him to come home. And I have taken precious time from his day off, time with his family.

I would like to know more – does Dr DIY work at the other clinics, does Carlos sometimes work at the polyclinic? Clearly they know each other well. Clearly both are committed to caring but are working with scant equipment, doing what they can with so little. I can’t ask complicated questions because I don’t have the Spanish. Even if I did I’m not sure I trust myself to speak because, after all, this isn’t really happening. 

‘What time is it?’ Eventually I try out words that do seem to come from me.  

‘Eleven-thirty.’

Over four hours since something unpleasant happened in the shower. Two hours since the bus left for Havana without us. Now, it seems we are travelling backwards, skimming through sea to the cayo and, hopefully, through time where I may unslip in the shower, watch as the foot realigns with my leg, climb back into bed to start Sunday again.  In reality, as it’s December, high season, with hotels all fully booked, we will arrive at the hotel we should have checked out of to find our electronic room key no longer recognises us.

Part 2 of Footnotes was published on Thursday 31 December 2021 you can read it Here

You can download Footnotes, part 1 here …

FOOTNOTES PART ONEDownload

© Pamela Johnson, 2021

Pamela Johnson is the author of three novels Under Construction, Deep Blue Silence and Taking In Water, which was supported by an Arts Council Writers’ Award.  Her poems appear in magazines and anthologies. She has also published short stories, art criticism and journalism. 

From 2002-2018 she taught fiction on the MA in Creative & Life Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London, and has devised writing workshops in a range of contexts: schools, community groups, U3A, residential courses for The Arvon Foundation.

[i] On Revolutionary Medicine, Ernesto Guevara, originally spoken August 19, 1960 to the Cuban Militia. Online version at Ché Guevara Internet Archive, 1999, translated by Beth Kurti

[ii] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-13066561

[iii] back in 2015 Cuba operated a dual currency system. Tourists use Cuban Convertible Peso (CUC), locals use the Cuban Peso (CUP). The CUP is worth much less than the CUC; US dollars aren’t accepted as legal tender. From January 2021 this system is now being phased out.

Lagos, 1971 (Excerpt from Don’t Mention Her) by Jane Kirwan

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In 1970, when Nell qualifies as a doctor, she and her Nigerian boyfriend Jerome decide to leave London and the hostility they’re experiencing as a mixed-race couple. They move to Lagos; Jerome hasn’t been back since the Biafran war started in 1966.     

***

Lagos   1971

Jerome was slouched against the hospital gate near where the mini-bus would swerve to a halt. If they were lucky. Nell made herself look relaxed – thank goodness he still came to meet her.

 Jerome straightened up and they hugged; ‘Was the day ok?’  

  ‘It was ok.’

 Nell backed away as a tiny boy stuck a basket inches from her face. Just before sunset, warm, no breeze, smell of rotting fruit. They’d do the long journey home, repeat it early in the morning. Soon, once Jerome’s job came through, she’d face travelling alone.

   ‘The nurses make it easy.’ Nell smiled at the boy and shook her head. ‘But this time Nneka couldn’t help – a man was staring at me with such venom.’

‘Oh, ignore those idiots,’ said Jerome.

‘It was pure hate, his gaze like ice. Nneka said he was a ‘Been-to’.’

Jerome kissed the top of her head, two small girls giggled.

‘So am I, Nell.’

‘I begged her but Nneka wouldn’t make him leave – she said he’d cause trouble.’

The boy was selling peanuts. Nell found a few kobos, bought a paper twist. The child was in rags – he looked exhausted. Not that they must appear so impressive, Jerome was sweating as much as her in the evening heat. They were both scarecrows; at least at work a white coat covered her shabbiness. Jerome was thinner than in London, his shirt patched, jeans worn out.

‘Did you meet up with Ifechi?’

‘I saw him and his smart new office,’ said Jerome.

Ifechi had come back just after the war ended and, like Jerome’s other contacts from London, proved elusive. When they’d first arrived, people confirmed Jerome’s years in journalism meant finding a job would be easy. He was given appointments for the final paper work – just wait a few days. Slowly, hideously, the offers melted away. Whoever promised it, disappeared; suddenly no one knew anything. At least the hospital had given Nell sessions so they could pay the rent. The flat had been hard to find; they were lucky, but it was miles away on the Kiri Kiri road, the other side of the city.

‘Apparently Ifechi got married as soon as he arrived, has a couple of children.’

Jerome didn’t sound envious, just resigned. Thank god they didn’t have a baby. The boy tilted the basket to show Jerome but Jerome was tougher than Nell, brushed the child away.

They crammed into a space by the door of the packed minibus, its sign In God We Trust; after a while they’d have to change, trust another god. Jerome took her hands. ‘Ifechi wondered if we’d really thought things through?’

‘Oh, great help.’  Nell frowned at the blocked road. Nothing was moving.

Maybe Ifechi had also asked if she might have pressured Jerome to return. She wouldn’t suggest that.

She wriggled herself nearer the door, grabbed Jerome’s arm.

‘Let’s get out, it’ll be quicker.’

The buses were always packed, the other passengers checking her like some pathology specimen. At first, she’d complained, ‘have I got horns?’ but soon stopped bothering. All that mattered was finding a space and for the mini-bus not to get stuck in a jam or change its mind and accelerate off to a more profitable route.

Walking was a crazy idea. There was no path for pedestrians; on one side was a stream with sewage and rubbish, on the other the kamikaze drivers: lorries, buses, vans, revving up to the next jam. Everyone used the centre of the road because the potholes at the edge were lethal. The din as drivers sat on their horns, the screeching brakes and tyres.

Jerome was ahead, almost jogging. A motorcycle missed her by inches as she avoided a couple of emaciated cows being cajoled to the slaughter-house. It was clear from the beginning she should stay this side of the ditch; the shacks, kitchens, and stalls were the same as the miles of living space they’d first witnessed six months ago on the journey from the airport. Not their land, they’d be trespassing; each square foot was accounted for: huts, tea-chests, boxes, tarpaulin hooked over ropes, shells of abandoned cars. Villas for the less affluent – old suitcases, tin cans, marking the boundary of each bathroom, kitchen.

‘Jerome,’ she yelled. ‘Slow down.’

The women standing over stoves had been working since first light. It was mostly children who carried water – tottering miles balancing rusty pails on their heads. One infant, she decided, couldn’t have been more than two, water from a chipped enamel basin spilling on the red dust.

At last Jerome joined her. A couple of boys screamed ‘Oyinbos’. Being called a foreigner infuriated him.

‘Let’s have a treat,’ Nell said. ‘You’ve met up with Ifechi: he might help. Let’s get the bus at the roundabout, go to Kingsway, admire the clothes.’

To her surprise, he agreed.

A blind child was begging outside the department store. A skeletal woman, a toddler swaddled to her back, watched as they kept to the shadow of the buildings.

Nell breathed in the stale, cooled air.

‘It’s quiet as a morgue,’ said Jerome, taking her hand.

‘Did you give them money?’

‘What do you think? I wrote a cheque.’

They wandered through the clothes section: neat rows of shirts, carefully arranged scarves, racks of jackets; everything looked irrelevant and grey compared to the colour and chaos of the street markets. The cool musty air might be comforting after the heat but this was dull compared to Ajegunle where they normally shopped. There, the stalls were packed together: tinned milk next to maize; meat beside plantain then rolls upon rolls of material in vivid colours, an abundance of patterns. On a tiny piece of land by a stall of yams, someone would have set out shoe-laces or a couple of tin plates on a rag. Often the only space to walk was the channels of contaminated water trickling into the ditch.

Two nuns stood at a counter in animated discussion over a pair of socks. They must be baking in their heavy habits.

‘Let’s share a Coke,’ said Jerome as they went towards the escalator.

‘This place is unreal.’

Jerome took her arm. ‘And you relish it.’

               .***

It was months before there was any contact from Ifechi and it wasn’t news of a job but an invite to go swimming. Ifechi wanted them to join him at the pool in the Federal Palace Hotel. It was glorious, water slapping gently against the blue tiles; Nell shut her eyes. Wafts of jasmine. August. In England it was probably raining. Blissful to be here. A midday African sun hit the reflections and she sheltered under an umbrella.

‘Why not get in, Nell?’ said Ifechi.

Her swimsuit was tatty, and anyway it was heaven to stay in the shade, admire Jerome doing front-crawl, ploughing his way through more relaxed swimmers. Ifechi poured a cola slowly, watching it drip into the spaces between the ice cubes. He offered it to Nell, she shook her head.

‘I don’t swim either,’ Ifechi shuddered. ‘Never have.’

An overweight, unfit, middle-aged man, this old friend from London, from before, was meant to be Jerome’s most important contact. But Ifechi was unsettling. Jerome insisted he had nothing to do with the vanished job but he looked shifty, and he flirted.

‘Are you homesick?’ said a beautiful young woman. She’d arrived with Ifechi and another woman, and a gang of children.

Nell must be coming over as some kind of misery. ‘No, no, really. I love it here.’

The two women were fascinating; chatted easily to each other or to Nell but when addressed by Ifechi, refused to answer. Instead they sat back and mockingly admired him. Ifechi clearly found this infuriating. Better not notice how charmed Jerome seemed. 

‘Ifechi is publishing a few more magazines,’ Jerome had muttered when they arrived. Well, that might be helpful.

A couple of the tiny children splashed out of the pool, landed themselves in Ifechi’s lap. He hauled one up, swung it in the air. One of the women frowned, brushed water from her swimsuit.

‘Are they all his children?’ said Nell.

‘I guess,’ said the younger woman. ‘Ifechi has several.’

‘Really? Which of you is their mum?’

The girl smiled, patted Nell on the leg. ‘She’s not here.’

Nell winced at herself. What an idiot.

Jerome pulled himself out, dived again into the water, a clean and perfect arrow that just missed two men.

‘Foolish boy,’ said Ifechi. ‘Well, that’s good that you feel at home.’ He wiped the moisture from a glass of cold beer and offered it. Nell shook her head.

‘Star beer. Not your American rubbish.’

‘Not my American.’

‘Don’t get cross. I love Jerome, truly I do.’

She must try to be agreeable. ‘I like the Star ads.’

‘Ah, the movies again? I love the movies.’ Ifechi made a gun with his fingers, took pot shots at the sunbathers.

‘This is a film-set.’ Nell gestured to the ornate tubs overflowing with flowers, the poolside bar. ‘Or an advert.’

Going to movies had become a treat, a rare one they couldn’t afford. The films were usually American gangsters but the ads were made locally. Lagos was a set where beautiful couples drank beer, smoked expensive cigarettes, drove sports cars and wore Western or Nigerian clothes. Nell went mainly to see the ads: the roads were empty, the water lapping the shores of the harbour uncontaminated with rubbish, oil, sewage, dead dogs. Colours were extra intense making up a world which could be day-dreamed into, and it was here. The other doctors chatted about nightclubs and Highlife. Theirs was a world she and Jerome couldn’t quite get to. None of it. No sitting drinking beer as the sun went down, the right camera angle, lazy long shot.

Jerome was doing a perfect crawl down the length of the pool. He swam so beautifully. Ifechi caught Nell’s eye. He was going to be no help to Jerome at all.

***

The miles of interweaving lanes were unlit, no moon. Nell and Jerome were lost. They clutched each other, could barely make out the path.

‘I never thought of a torch,’ said Jerome.

They were late for Nneka’s party. They’d been to visit a couple Jerome met through Ifechi; supposedly their house was in the same part of Lagos, but they got lost going there and lost coming here.

Jerome was still uneasy after the visit, the man was Hausa and had been intimidating. He was angry at having to wait for them and quickly took Jerome off to his study for a drink. His German wife, Ilsa, looked exhausted. As she took Nell to admire the house, the irritating children, she seemed increasingly uncomfortable with Nell’s questions about life in Lagos.

‘You will get used to it,’ she said. ‘Jerome will help.’

‘We’ve been here two years and I know no one, except at work.’

‘It takes time,’ said Ilsa. ‘And having children helps.’

Well that wasn’t about to happen soon. ‘Jerome is bored with my moans, wants me to be positive.’

Nell was about to tell Ilsa about the small boy in the clinic that morning. Jerome would have stopped her if he’d overheard. Ilsa interrupted, muttering that she should go and organise coffee, see what her children were doing. Nell waited in the garden, taking in the silence. Silly to think people would want to know. No point confiding in anyone about anything, let alone that patient. No point imagining anything she could have done differently.

He’d been sitting in a corner of the cubicle resting his hand lightly on a woman’s knee, making no demands. He had his back to the room, was probably about three. His head was slightly tilted as if he was tired, soft black curls resting against the creamy skin of his neck.

Nell had wanted to delay everything. She could run her fingers up his spine, tickle his hair, but she made herself crouch in front of the boy, read his notes. His mother’s expression was blank – she was staring at the wall.

The patient looked at Nell, his huge eyes cautious. She smiled back. His nose was snub and smooth. His lower lip trembled slightly. Where his left cheek should be was nothing, a cavity with no skin or flesh; it exposed the inside of his mouth, his teeth, his pharynx.

The mother knew the loss was irreversible, its progress inevitable, triggered by malnutrition. Nell would give him a pointless injection of penicillin, send him home. The mother would carry him for miles.

How could any woman do that, watch her child die day by day? And so many like this coming to the hospital for a miracle. As Ilsa came into the garden holding out a grizzling baby, Nell knew she’d never have children.

Jerome was as out of place as she was. ‘We’ll be late for Nneka,’ he said.

At last, by following faint traces of music, they found a gate set into a wall. In a large space circled by small huts, people milled around a central pool of light. Nneka looked luminous. Gold earrings, necklaces, bracelets, gold threads studded with gold beads braiding her hair; chains of gold circled her wrists, ankles, neck. She wore a lemon brocade waistcoat over a lemon satin dress, carried a small chest already overflowing with naira. As she greeted each guest, notes were stuffed among the others.

‘You should have warned me about the money.’

‘She’s your friend.’ said Jerome. ‘Is it really only her birthday?’

After handing over their gift – a scarf from Kingsway – shaking hands with numerous strangers, they sat on one of the benches. Young children ran around handing out cold beer and soft drinks. One of the tiny ones stopped, grabbed Nell’s leg. Nell hauled the child up to her lap. How good to feel the girl using her like an armchair, letting herself be cuddled.

‘That toddler suits you,’ said Jerome.

Was that what might happen? She’d end up exhausted and drained, have several rough children, and Jerome away enjoying himself with Ifechi? And if the children got ill? No, the thought was inconceivable.

Oil lamps had been strung along wires between posts. Nneka and her family walked among the guests, in and out of the light. People had started to dance. Reflections spat and shimmered – not just from Nneka’s gold, most people were wearing lavish jewellery.

‘We’re so drab, Jerome.’

Nell kissed the top of the child’s elaborately plaited hair, the girl smelt of rose-water. The women wore expensively designed wrappers and the men, Jerome the  rare exception, were in embroidered agbadas, mostly full length with matching pants. Guests were still arriving, picking their way along the same muddy lanes.

Dishes started to appear, Nneka brought over chicken and rice.

‘You look wonderful, and such a wealth of presents,’ said Nell.

Nneka shooed away the small girl.

‘Oh, no, Nneka, don’t.’ Too late to stop her.

Jerome finished his food quickly, handed Nell the empty plate. ‘How about more? Fast as you can.’

‘And, if I don’t?’ said Nell.

He was showing off in front of Nneka. All of this, the extended family, the party, the glamour, this crowd of people enjoying themselves, was upsetting him. He’d been disturbed by the couple they’d just visited, but Nell could do nothing; she couldn’t conjure up any family, neither apparently could he.

Nneka grabbed her arm. ‘Come, Nell, let’s get the man more chop.’

As they reached the cooking area, Nneka said, ‘You shouldn’t talk to Jerome like that.’

‘He shouldn’t to me.’

Everyone criticising. Why had Nneka sent away that child?

An elderly man joined them, Nneka introducing him as her uncle. ‘Go and dance, Nell. I’ll take the food to Jerome.’

When Nell left the dance-floor, tired but slightly happier, Jerome was gone. He wasn’t at any of the tables where people were slicing cake, carving up chickens, collecting cans of beer. Where could he go? He’d disappeared. He’d been as lost as she had.

There was a dark corner where she could make herself comfortable, watch the entrance and bench where they’d been sitting. Nneka was having a subdued row with a large older woman in red silk; whenever she paused to listen, the woman tugged at an ornate silver necklace. At one point, Nneka reached across, gently touched it.

As the hours passed, people drifted off. A few dancers stayed with the music, a couple giggled in the shadows on the left. Wait till dawn, find her own way home, but the night was never-ending. She must not cry.

Nneka didn’t seem surprised to see Nell appear, didn’t mention the absent Jerome. ‘Come and meet my mother.’

The woman in red was boiling water on a stove in one of the huts; she beamed a welcome. The room smelt  of coffee. Nneka filled a few mugs and her mother added dollops of condensed milk. ‘Mary, give out the cake, I’ll be back,’ and the mother was gone.

‘Mary?’

‘Yes, and what of it?’ Nneka handed Nell a slice of date sponge.

‘She was giving you an earful.’ The coffee was very sweet.

‘She wants me to find a man, have children.’

Nneka had once told her that her mother had left their village during the Biafran war, come with them to Lagos to find Nneka’s father. By the time they’d got here, he was dead. No money. No support. Three young children. ‘The nuns helped us.’

The sweet drink and rich sponge were too much; it was so warm inside the room, some lilac perfume mixed with the smell of coffee. Nell could barely make out Nneka’s face; it would be wonderful to sleep. Then she remembered why she felt terrible – Jerome had vanished.

Nell woke to the sound of muttered voices. It was still dark, Jerome was back, standing under a lantern by the door, talking to Nneka and a lean woman in a blue suit. Should she interrupt them? He looked relaxed, was enjoying himself. 

Two toddlers were lying on her legs. The blanket felt comforting, the children fast asleep and heavy; there was gentle snoring from the far corner.

There was laughter from beyond the entrance. A bright light flashed through the open door, blinding Nell; one of Nneka’s cousins burst in holding a lamp.

‘Oh, I’m beyond tired! Lord save us.’ The cousin tossed her shoe into the corner.

The snoring shape grunted; Nneka’s mother lifted her head from the mound of blankets, threw the shoe back. The cousin clutched Nneka, and both shook with laughter. Nneka’s gold-braided hair flashed in the light, some of the strands were coming undone. Their hug turned into a dance, they looked glorious.

Nell managed to push the children away. She stood up and touched Jerome’s arm, tried to sound calm. ‘Where were you?’

‘I went to meet some relatives,’ said Jerome.

He had never mentioned relatives.

Biography

Jane Kirwan has published three poetry collections, Stealing the Eiffel Tower (1997), The Man Who Sold Mirrors (2003), The Goose Woman, (2019) and co-authored Stories & Lies with Pamela Johnson and Jennifer Grigg. She won a Arts Council Writers Award in 2002, published a prose-poem collection Second Exile with Ales Machacek (2010), and Born in the NHS (2013) with Wendy French. In 2016 she published a novel, Don’t Mention Her.

You can find a PDF of this story here:

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Out of the Woods by Charlie Allenby

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Charlie Allenby grew up believing that Epping Forest was a place to be avoided, full of ghosts and criminals. It took a global pandemic for him to give Epping another chance. Join him on his morning bike ride as he recalls earlier memories of this ancient woodland

7.30am. Tyres are squeezed and topped up with air in long strokes of the pump. A light breeze whispers against my bare legs, but the empty blue sky and rising sun suggests they won’t be cold for long. Shoes clipped into pedals, transforming man and machine into one being, the journey is underway. Destination: Epping Forest.

*

There was a time when, for me, Epping Forest was altogether an elsewhere place. 

“My cousin said that if you get to the bottom of the hill and leave your car in neutral, it gets dragged to the top.” It’s Year 7, Maths first thing on a Monday after a hot spring weekend, and there’s an excited buzz in the air. Ross Barnwell, my fellow top-of-the-register dweller, is excitedly retelling how a tonne of metal and four pubescent passengers fizzing with hormones were able to defy the laws of gravity in a scary part of the Forest. “It’s called Hangman’s Hill by High Beach. He said the ghost pulls you up the hill with his noose.”

*

7.45am. Cutting east, the bustling streets of Tottenham stand between me and the tranquility of the Lee Valley canal. The sun gleams off of the football stadium’s roof and catches the golden cockerel perched on its south stand. I pass two cemeteries – one for people, the other for cars. The ticker of a black cab has finally given up. After a life spent navigating the arteries, veins and capillaries of the capital, it sits atop a trailer, awaiting its passage to the afterlife. A breaker’s yard on an industrial estate where smog and grime fills every crevice seems like an understated send off.

The footbridge across the Pymmes Brook acts as the fault line between asphalt and escapism. I carefully pick my way through the flotsam that has washed up on the outskirts of the Marshes – two big cement blocks not enough to stop the canny fly tippers.

fly tipping on the outskirts of the marshes

Passing through the barriers and up and over Chalk Bridge, I feel a wave of relief. The satisfying crunch of gravel tells me there’s not long to go now. I’m almost there.

*

The tale of paranormal activity wasn’t the only thing that defined Epping Forest in my childhood. As I grew older, the stories turned darker. Gangland murders, buried bodies, remnants of clothing found within the decaying mulch. “I heard that if you dig a hole in Epping, you’re going to stumble across some bones,” said another friend, Liam Lockwood, who like me, has found it hard to shake the area’s notorious reputation. The Wikipedia entry for Epping Forest has a separate section on ‘murders.’  It currently includes 11 incidents over six-decades. 

Growing up in Chelmsford in Essex, less than 30 miles from Epping, I never had a desire to put the rumours to bed. My horizons extended north and east: screwball ice creams with their bubble gum ending on the promenade in Maldon, avoiding the tide on Frinton’s concrete sea wall, the salty waft of Leigh-on-Sea’s cockle sheds. The nefarious goings on, on the outskirts of London, were a reason to steer clear; the ancient woodland remaining an uncharted territory that I had no urge to uncover

*

7.55 am. The River Lea is glistening in the morning sun as I make my way north on the canal path. A black cat scampers across my path, diving into one of the nomadic canal boats that line the water from the Thameside mouth to its source in Bedfordshire. The touring bikes and pannier racks of the elders usually found perched on the benches by Alfie’s Lock are nowhere to be seen. No doubt they will be in their usual spot in an hour or so on my return journey.

At Ponder’s End Lock, it’s time to leave the tranquility of the river and rejoin the traffic. Flanked by the banked edges of the William Girling and King George’s reservoirs, the tops of oaks flicker into view on the horizon.

*

My first adult visit to Epping Forest didn’t exactly change my boyhood opinion. In 2019, on my 27th birthday, my girlfriend Izzy and I had gone to hire a rowing boat at Hollow Ponds. Our excitement was soon punctured by a gruff middle-aged man with week-old stubble and the hallmarks of a heavy night, who told us that he doesn’t take cards and we’re going to need to go to the hospital if we want to get cash out. In hindsight, he was just telling us that the nearest ATM was in Whipps Cross hospital, but there was a menacing air to his directions – as though he’d be only too happy to give me another reason to visit A&E if the mood took him.

Having dodged Hollow Pond’s collection of swans, Canadian geese and coots, we jumped back in the car and decided to head deeper into the unknown. The feather-shaped block of dark green stretched its way across my phone’s screen from Forest Gate in the East End to the Essex hinterlands. Stabbing my finger at a car park in its centre, it was time to immerse ourselves in the real Epping.

*

8 am. Approaching gate 101 along Hawksmouth, the tarmac falls away and becomes a rugged, pothole-strewn path. Weaving my way through the craters, I feel my serotonin levels return to normal as soon as the grassy fields come into view. My focus shifts from the actions of the drivers to my new environment – roaring engines replaced by wind rustling through leaves – and a maze of trails unfurls in front of me. I have a roughly plotted regular route but the beauty of knowing somewhere intimately means that, even if I end up on new ground, I’m never truly lost.

The Obelisk at the top of Pole Hill is a necessary, if thigh-burning, pilgrimage – especially on a clear day. Sitting at 0° longitude, it was installed in the 1800s by geographers at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, who would set their telescopes by searching for the granite landmark exactly 11 miles to the north. A neighbouring trig point marks the hill’s peak, but I’m not here for the monuments – in fact, I turn my back on them. Laid out in front of me is a visual history of London. Although a couple of centuries of population and vegetation growth mean you can no longer see as far as the Meridian Line, the latest additions to the city’s jagged skyline hover on the horizon, while in my immediate vicinity lies woodland that stretches back thousands of years.

Obelisk at the top of Pole Hill. Charlie rests his bike after a ‘thigh-burning’ ride
London’s current skyline just visible above trees that have been there for centuries

Photo snapped, I jump back on my bike and let gravity do the work as I descend into the darkness of the forest. A dog appears out of nowhere, a boxer chasing my shadows until I come to a stop in a clearing. Realising the blurred shape wasn’t fair game, it turns on its heels and scurries back to the increasingly desperate voice in the distance.

The tracks from here vary in shape and size – bridleways pockmarked with the U-shaped shoes of horses, down to openings in the undergrowth no-wider than a rabbit. I settle for something in the middle. A patch of wood anemones in full bloom catch the speckled rays that have broken their way through the thick canopy to the forest floor. The trail hugs the outskirts of the golf course until it is intersected by Bury Road. Despite being in the depths of nature, the brash hand of humanity – the manicured greens and macadam roads  – is never far away.

wood anemones

*

Even now I know the place better, I don’t think I could tell you where we parked back on that birthday visit in 2019. Rucksack filled with sandwiches, we set off in a westward direction, navigating bomb holes and jumping ditches until we came to a clearing. Our ears were met by the growl of motorbikes – the cracks of the carburettors punctuating the low level hum of riders out for a bank holiday run.

Settling down on High Beach’s grassy opening, it was hard to escape the closeness of the other revellers. Tinny, distorted music blared from cheap portable speakers. The smell of burnt meat wafted from disposable barbeques. Giddy children with bright red faces queued for blue ice pops from the rumbling ice cream van. It was a far cry from the place described in John Clare’s poetry – of airy bounds and left feeling high. Retracing our steps back to the car, my opinion of Epping had hardened.

*

8.15 am. I make my way northwards, loosely following the forest’s ‘Main Path’. Runners, walkers, hounds and horses share the wide dirt track. The gnarled trunks and branches of hornbeams are awash with catkins, ready for the wind to spread their seeds.

The undulating up-and-down of the appropriately named Hill Wood gets my heart rate pumping before I find myself back at High Beach. The cooler temperature and earlier time mean it’s a shadow of the bustling hub I encountered on my first visit. Recounting ‘A Walk in the Forest’, I can now see things through Clare’s eyes. I too love the break neck hills, that headlong go, and      leave me high, and half the world below.

Back on the Main Path, I whizz along Claypit Hill’s gravel-lined forest roads, stopping only to take in the views across the Lea Valley from the lofty heights. The expansive opening and its falling gradient is a brief sensory overload for my eyes, which have become accustomed to navigating the narrow, enclosed trails.

Farthest northern point reached, it’s time to make my way back towards Chingford. The Green Ride path I’m following south was built especially for Queen Victoria’s visit to the Forest in 1882 (although she stayed firmly in her horse-drawn carriage). The mounds to my left are in fact ‘Tank Traps’ built during the Second World War by the local Home Guard as part of the perimeter defences surrounding London. And that’s before you get to Loughton Camp – a collection of banks and ditches that were once the site of an Iron Age fort. Used by countless legends of British folklore – whether that was a base for Boudica during her uprising against the Romans or as a hideout for Dick Turpin – it’s hard to escape the feeling that stories are woven into the fabric of the forest.

The Green Ride built for Queen Victoria’s visit to Epping Forest in 1882

*

Since March 2020 when the pandemic first brought me back to Epping, I’ve uncovered a different side to the forest. This circuit now forms the basis of my near-weekly trips to the wild corner of north east London. The dark and murky side to the ancient woodland still simmers away in the background, but its natural beauty has come to the forefront.

*

9am. The final stop of my Epping Forest loop is Connaught Water. One of more than 100 lakes or ponds that dot the heaths, woodlands and grass, it’s another thing we have to thank the Victorians for. Created in 1880 to drain a marshy area of the forest, it soon became a popular spot for paddling and boating, and was named after the first ranger of Epping Forest – Queen Victoria’s third son, Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught and Strathearn.

Connaught Water

The only thing swimming in it now are the birds that call the lake home, but it’s still one of my favourite spots in the entire forest. Sitting on a bench, tucking into a slightly bruised banana, it’s a great place to watch the world go by. Mallards scrap over bread thrown into the water by a young family, before the resident Canada geese and Mute swans muscle their way through the maelstrom, bringing calm and grace to proceedings. The sun is fully beating down on my bare calves now, providing a welcome warmth after a long and layered locked-down winter.

Food finished, I join the Ranger’s Road and the start of my journey back home. Loose mud flings from my tyres like mortar boards on graduation day as soft dirt paths are replaced by unforgiving, onyx-coloured roads. Retracing my pedal strokes through Chingford, hills seem easier, passing traffic quieter, my world rebalanced thanks to the restorative power of the forest.

I never thought the darkness surrounding this notorious place could be banished, but there is now a lightness and warmth where there was once fear and trepidation of the unknown.

Charlie Allenby is a freelance journalist for various publications including the Guardian and the Independent and is the author of Bike London: A Guide to Cycling in the City. He is currently working on his second book, a cycling-based memoir.

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Square, Kings Cross by Annabel Chown

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‘Square, King’s Cross’ is a story from Annabel Chown’s work-in-progress, ‘Blueprint of Love,’ a sequence of interconnected stories, in which the lives of thirteen Londoners interconnect, sometimes fleetingly, at other times intimately.

 The characters in ‘Blueprint of Love’ navigate their individual desires and challenges against the backdrop of contemporary London. Some own multi-million pound architect-designed houses, others live in squats or in homes that are about to be demolished.

This is a book which grew out of Annabel’s passion for London and its architecture. In this story, we meet Ilona, a young woman, who left her small village in Hungary for London, and dreams of creating a future in this complex yet intoxicating city.

Ilona spun the wheel. The ball skittered round and round and hands darted across the board, placing chips. As it slowed down the hands moved faster, until Ilona waved hers across the table and said ‘No more bets.’

            There was a hush, as if everyone were holding their breath. Eyes fixated on the tiny white ball, minds willing it, willing it.

            Fourteen.

            A hissed ‘Shit’ from the young Chinese guy in the baseball cap she saw almost every shift. A sigh of relief from a middle-aged woman with unruly black hair and deep rings under her eyes. What was she doing here, alone at three in the morning, Ilona wondered, sweeping away the chips.

            The room had now thinned, but even at this hour a trickle of newcomers still descended the curved glass stair, sucked into this pit where day and night merged. Fruit machines shrieked and bleeped, chips rattled and clicked, and the music played on and on.

The first time she came she’d been excited by the glamour; huge chandeliers with dripping strings of crystals, rich with gold light. Now she also saw the grasp it had, saw the hunger, the addiction, the same faces appearing day after day.

#

After her shift, she showered and ate a bowl of Rice Krispies and two slices of buttered toast at the casino, before walking the short distance to Leicester Square tube. She caught a grumbling eastbound train, her lower back and feet aching after hours of standing, her jaw sore from so much smiling. At least after a night shift there were always seats. Her few fellow passengers were a random mix of early-risers and all-nighters.

            It was still dark when she reached King’s Cross, and St Pancras was lit up. With its turrets and spires, it was more like a castle than a train station.

Most of the curtains on Belgrove Street were still drawn. One side was hotels, the other taken up by the brick storage building. Her ‘home’ for the moment.

Joe was on duty this morning. 

            ‘Good to see you, Ilona. How’s it going?’

            He was always cheerful, even though he claimed not to be an ‘early-bird.’ She liked this phrase.

            ‘Looking forward to sleep!’

            ‘I’ll bet.’

            She was glad when he was around. Not that the other guys there were unfriendly.

            ‘I’ve explained our arrangement and they’re ok with it,’ he’d said. ‘Just keep yourself to yourself. Management wouldn’t allow it, but no need for them to know. A few weeks I’ve told the boys. Until you get yourself sorted.’

            She’d already been here a fortnight. How many weeks did ‘a few’ mean? It was not a precise expression. She had not yet found somewhere else to live. Had searched only half-heartedly, reluctant to visit tiny rooms, some without even a window, in areas like Leyton, New Cross or Arnos Grove, which would take at least fifty pounds a week from her. She wished she could find another squat. Was ‘keeping her ears open,’ as they said, for these were not advertised. Since she first left Hungary, she’d lost count of the number of places she’d lived in.

            Joe was the neighbour of the friends she’d gone to after she’d left her room in Dollis Hill the previous month. She’d arrived home from work one morning to find her landlord, a man in his fifties who owned the house, in the kitchen, a bottle of whiskey on the table. She was pouring cereal into a bowl, her back to him, when he pressed himself against her and put his arms around her. She turned around and pushed him away, shoving her knee between his legs, screaming as loud as she could. She left that day. Stale breath, hot against her ear, the bristle of stubble against her cheek. She still felt sick remembering it.

            Her friends lived in a tiny studio near Mornington Crescent. The first couple of days there her shifts at the casino finished at six in the morning, and she slept while they were at work, was gone soon after they arrived home. But then came nights with the three of them crammed into the room, Ilona on the floor, her friends in their bed.

            It was lucky she got chatting to Joe in the hallway.

            ‘If you’re really stuck I might be able to help you out with somewhere. Just for the short-term.’

            She wasn’t expecting a storage unit.

            ‘How much will this cost?’

            ‘Nothing.’

            ‘Really?’ People never gave you things for free in this city. Why was he doing this?

            ‘There are always empty units. Seems a crying shame people can’t use them  – I hate to see wasted space. You can buy me a beer in return sometime.’

            At first she’d been on alert with Joe. But he was always just his usual good-natured self.

#

Ilona walked down a corridor, past identical closed doors the colour of egg yolks. Fluorescent lights, evenly spaced, hung from the ceiling and were reflected in the pale grey metal walls to the units. Hers was in the basement, right in the centre of the building. Joe had told her it was one of the warmest spots. And one of the bigger ones. Big enough for the mattress, which he’d got her from an abandoned unit, to take up only half the floor area. ‘You’d be surprised how often people stop paying up and just leave their stuff,’ he’d added.

When she switched off the light, her space, with its four metal walls and metal ceiling, was thrown into blackness. In this respect only it reminded her of her bedroom at home, especially on nights where the moon was barely visible. In London there was always light, pushing through thin curtains or under-sized blinds.

That morning she slept soundly. Sometimes there was noise. The rattle of trolleys when people moved their things in or out. Conversations.

            ‘We get all sorts here,’ Joe had said, describing an actress who lived in a ‘shoebox’ nearby and hired a unit for her wardrobe. ‘There’s an old fellow opposite you. Uses it to store his collection of globes. His wife won’t let him keep ‘em in the house. Comes in most days.’

            His door was ajar when she opened hers. She’d never seen him though. More often than not there was no-one around. Just all their possessions waiting quietly.

#

Early afternoon she stepped through the wide doorway onto Belgrove Street, blinking. It was so sunny for late October. And warm enough to eat lunch in the square behind the storage building. She had been taught that the word square meant a shape with four equal sides, but this one was more like a rectangle, and with its far end on an angle. On the next bench sat a man with very short dark hair, speaking Polish on his phone. He’d also been here last week. And she thought she’d even seen him before, somewhere in the city. At the casino? Or had it just been a person who looked similar?

He’d noticed her too, was looking in her direction as his voice rose. He finished his call and walked towards her.

            ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I know you. We meet before.’

            ‘Maybe. But where?’

            ‘With Antek.’

            Hearing his name, she flinched.

            ‘He bring you to see house we make in Primrose Hill.’

            Of course. ‘Boss man,’ as Antek had described him. They’d been to the house just before they broke up. It was on a tiny street. ‘Is called mews in English,’ Antek had explained.

            ‘Just two people will be living here?’ she asked, walking through room after room with him.

 ‘Boss man’ – she couldn’t remember his name – said something in Polish to Antek after he was introduced to Ilona. They both laughed, and he thumped Antek on the back.

‘What is he saying?’

‘That he is not surprised I have kept beautiful girlfriend hidden.’

Beautiful girlfriend. So beautiful Antek couldn’t stop himself having sex with the waitress from the Moroccan restaurant. The one she’d always been suspicious of. After almost a year it still angered her that she’d had to leave the squat in Mayfair because of what he’d done.

‘What’s your name?’ Ilona asked the man.

‘Pawel. And yours?’

‘Ilona.’

They shook hands.

‘You are working near here?’

‘No, staying nearby. And you?’

‘Working.’ He pointed at a house on the corner, whose dark brick walls and high white-framed windows Ilona had admired. ‘We make refurbishment. So how is the Antek?’

‘I don’t know. We are not together. He is not with you anymore?’

‘No. I have to fire him many months ago.’

She was relieved.

‘Was very good,’ Pawel said. ‘Then he change. I don’t know why. Maybe too much vodka!’

‘Perhaps we are meeting up again sometime?’ Pawel suggested to Ilona before he left. ‘This weekend?’

#

On Sunday afternoon he drove them to Greenwich, crossing the river at the bridge with the two towers. It was one of the few times Ilona had travelled through London in a car.

            The weather was still fine. They walked through the park to the Observatory and took photos from each other’s phones, one foot either side of the meridian line. From the top of the hill the silver-grey towers of the financial district appeared very close. When she’d worked at the Savoy, on a clear day she could see them in the distance from the windows in some of the top floor bedrooms.

            They drank coffee and ate cake in a small white building. Always watchful of how much she was spending, she was relieved when he insisted on paying.

            ‘This building is hexagon,’ he said. ‘In Polish we say szesciokat. I have to learn this word in English as I have client who ask me to make small building in her garden in this shape because she say six is her lucky number.’

            ‘And did it bring her luck?’

            ‘She think so.’

            They laughed. 

            ‘That’s good. Do you enjoy being a builder?’

            ‘Actually I am contractor. Owning company. Interesting work, but also stressful. Complicated clients. Always changing mind. I think is aging me.’ He smiled, touching the greying hair above his ears. ‘And now everyone wanting basements. One even with swimming pool. Another lady ask for two kitchens – hiding maid in one to do real cooking!’

            ‘Lucky people.’ Had any of them come from nothing, or had they been born into such a lifestyle? ‘And lucky for you to be getting so much work.’

            ‘Lucky, yes. And some days I think unlucky too. Everybody always wanting, wanting. Perhaps they drive me to early grave!’

            ‘I hope not.’

            ‘And what are you doing?’

            ‘I work at a casino. As a croupier.’

            ‘You like gambling?’

            ‘I’ve never tried. I used to clean at the Savoy hotel. But I became bored – I was always alone in the rooms, doing the same thing every day. This job has good prospects. And it is interesting to watch all the people who come, to speak with them.’ 

            Most were harmless, many lonely. They told her things – their girlfriend leaving, their business failing – that she would not say to a stranger. Occasionally, inappropriate comments were made, in anger or in lust, but she had learnt the ‘kiss-up’ – making a kissing expression with her lips and placing her hand around her mouth – to call over an inspector to sort it out. After four months there she was still not able to believe the amounts of money people were willing to risk. Yesterday someone had put down ten thousand pounds on her table. And lost most of it.

            ‘You will stay in London?’ he asked.

            ‘I want to.’

            She didn’t tell him her plan to work for a few years and save up enough to study here. To one day be a lighting designer for the theatre. Sometimes it seemed a crazy and impossible dream. This city bled money from you. There were even times she thought about returning to Hungary, days when she could not see anything beautiful about this harsh, rainy northern place.

            But it had a hold on her. Like a lover who could be both cruel and kind, whenever she’d had enough, it would pull her close again, reminding her there was no other quite like it. It might be lying in a deckchair by the river, listening to a free jazz band outside the National Theatre, the sun hot on her face. Or discovering a beautiful room – used for breakfast only – at the home of an architect called Sir John Soane, with a domed ceiling and tiny round mirrors that looked like windows. Or simply the pink of an autumn sunset, surprising her on the Euston Road as she exited the tube at rush hour.

#

‘Do you like him?’ her friend Tatjana asked.

            ‘He’s nice. But it’s not like that between us.’

She didn’t mention how, when they’d met again that last weekend, to go skating at the Natural History Museum, Pawel had grabbed her hand while they were slithering around, trying to balance on their blades, and said ‘We will fly Ilona,’ and how the sensation of his large, warm palm in her own had felt safe, yet gently electric.

            ‘What does he do?’

            ‘Building contractor. With his own company.’ She respected that he had worked hard and made something of himself here.

            ‘Successful?’ Ilona could almost see Tatjana’s brain working, calculating opportunities.

‘If you mean how much money does he make, I have no idea. I don’t want to be reliant on a guy. I’m not even sure I want a relationship at the moment.’

It was safer to stay alone. There had been no-one since Antek. And boyfriends could be a distraction. She wanted to do her job well, save as much money as she could.

            ‘You can’t always plan these things. You have to grab your chances. Is he attractive?’

            ‘Not bad.’ There was a solidity to him, which was reassuring and very masculine. She particularly liked his eyes, large and green with long dark lashes. ‘But at least ten years older than me.’

            ‘Older is good.’

            ‘I am hoping to have family soon,’he’d said over hot chocolate, after the skating. ‘Maybe even with you if I am very lucky,’ he’d teased.

‘You’ll have to wait years then,’ she’d teased back. ‘I am too young for that.’

‘So I wait.’

‘What have you been up to?’ Ilona asked Tatjana, to change the subject.

‘The same as before. But now I’m studying too. In Business.’

Tatjana had the ability to provoke envy in Ilona, a reaction she disliked in herself. It was not just the news of her part-time degree, but also the soft grey wool coat, the fitted pale blue sweater, which looked like cashmere, the golden highlights in her blonde hair. In her eight-hour shift at the casino, Ilona earnt less than Tatjana made in an hour.

‘I think I have a long wait until I can study.’

‘You know how you can speed it up. Have you thought about it any more?’

Of course she had. And when she heard Tatjana describe how she mentally cut off those hours from the rest of her life – ‘almost like they belong to another person,’ and how they were a small percentage of her week anyway, and bought her huge amounts of freedom – it was tempting. In Tatjana’s eyes, living as Ilona did had a far higher price to pay.

            ‘It’s just work,’ she’d once said. ‘Using your body instead of your brain. And the men are mostly ok, some attractive even – normal people. And if I don’t like someone I just imagine they’re someone else.’

            Ilona’s rational mind had brought her close to calling the agency. But something – call it her heart, her soul – always pulled her back, protected her. You did not just let anyone near your body.

‘I have. And it’s not for me,’ she told Tatjana.

            Tatjana appraised her.

            ‘Shame. You’d be popular. We could even do a double act! Blonde and curvy with petite and dark. You can earn a fortune that way!’

            Tatiana always had been precocious, even back home. Ilona had not told her that at twenty-one she had only ever slept with two people.

‘Leave it Tatjana. I’m not going to.’

#

The weather had now turned. In the basement, Ilona shivered and tried to get back to sleep, wrapping the quilt tightly around her. It smelt like it had not encountered fresh air for a long time. It was noisy this morning, and an hour later she was awake again. She massaged wax earplugs in her palms, until they were soft enough to insert into her ears.

            A crashing sound woke her from a dream in which she and Tatjana, wearing only white lace underwear and with white feathers pinned in their hair, were standing on a stage. Tatjana was tugging her by the hand, urging her forward, but she was resisting. For a second she thought the sound was her falling off the stage.

            Instinct pulled her upright. She opened the door to the unit, peering into the harsh light of the corridor. A man was slumped there.

            ‘Help,’ she screamed, when she reached reception. ‘Help.’

#

It had been the old man with the globes. A heart attack.       

‘If you hadn’t heard him he’d probably be a goner by now,’ Joe said later. The ambulance had come quickly, the hospital only a few blocks away.

‘But I’m really sorry, you’re not going to be able to stick around any longer. It’s too risky. If he’d dropped dead, the police would’ve been in, and you’d have been questioned. Management would have found out you were here, and I’d have probably lost my job.’ 

‘I understand,’ said Ilona. Someone like Tatjana might have known to stay quiet at the sound of anything that could suggest trouble.

#

The globe-man’s heart attack was like a forewarning. Four days later, when she was staying at a nearby hostel, twenty to a room and missing having her own space, her father called.

            ‘I’m so sorry. Bad news. Granny has died.’

            Her parents had found her, in her bed, after she’d failed to arrive for lunch. She’d shown no signs of ill-health. 

            ‘I’m coming home,’ said Ilona. ‘When is the funeral?’ She wanted to see and touch her parents, especially her mother, who’d cried when she came on the phone, and not just hear their voices, separated by many hundreds of kilometres.

            ‘You don’t need to come. I know you are busy, it is expensive. Everyone will understand,’ said her father.

            Walking along Caledonian Road, towards King’s Cross, the wind blew in her face. People rushed about their business, eyes fixed ahead or on their phone screens. A car sounded its horn at her when she crossed the street just after the green man had turned red.

Her body felt shaky, the edges of her skin no longer quite so solid. Today she didn’t want to be alone. Yet she realised how few people she knew well enough here to call. She dialled Tatjana’s number, then cancelled it before it even rang. Would she understand? She wanted to speak to Pawel. His voicemail asked her to try again later. She was very near Argyle Square. Perhaps he would be at the building site.

            The front door of the house was open. She heard sawing and a radio in the distance. She went up the stairs, peering into rooms. There was so much wood. Not just the floors, but the cupboards and some of the walls too. Its fresh smell reminded her of home, of logs stacked up for winter, of her grandmother making a fire. Her eyes prickled.

            She found three workmen at the top of the house.

            ‘Is Pawel here?’

            ‘Coming maybe one hour.’

            ‘Tell him to look for Ilona in the square.’

#

‘Probably best you going home. One week, two weeks. Important to be with family.’ He sat next to her on the bench, ignoring the ringing of his phone.

            Ilona nodded. How much would a last minute flight will be?

            ‘You need help to pay for ticket?’

            ‘You are very kind. But I am ok.’

            ‘Tell me when flight is, and I drive you to airport.’

#

Early morning and they headed away from the city centre, towards Luton. Tall streetlamps glowed pale orange. Soon the buildings became lower and she was given a glimpse of the open land beyond. They turned onto a bigger, faster road, the lights now a brighter orange. Inside the car it was warm. Pawel’s hands held the wheel. She remembered the feeling of his palm, the day they’d skated.

            ‘When are you coming back?’ he asked.

            ‘In one week.’

            ‘Good.’

She leant back in her seat. It was good, it felt good.

There was a strange beauty to this dark landscape they sliced through; motorway lights, almost floating in the darkness, tracing the curve of the road ahead like endless miniature suns.

Biography

Annabel Chown was born in London and studied architecture at Cambridge University. She worked as an architect in London and in Berlin, and taught architecture at Kingston University. Her memoir, Hidden: Young, Single, Cancer was published in 2020 by Blue Door Press. Her writing on breast cancer has also been published in Red magazine and The Telegraph.

@annabelchown

http://www.annabelchown.com

You can find a PDF of this story here:

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Mirror, Mirror by Mary Hamer

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The glamorous villa she’s rented for a family holiday is all Serena  hoped for. Why then does she find herself beset by figures from the past?

Verona: a girl steps down from a train. The case she’s carrying is cheap, knocked about. It leaves her ashamed. Stoical, she looks around for the stranger, the father of the children she is to teach.

In the car she knows to make conversation. Later, at the house, she will find the dress she meant to wear is hopelessly crushed. She will put it on anyway. The maid will take her for sixteen.

Back in Italy fifty years on, a grandmother now, she gets out of the car. Driving down from Naples, the map on her lap and a sheet of instructions from the agency, Serena hasn’t been looking forward to pleasure.  Fear—of making a mistake, misreading the map, having to turn round and go back—left no room for that.

She’d do a lot to avoid going wrong, having to turn back.

Plus it’s the whole enterprise: renting a villa, inviting every one of the children and grandchildren. So much to take on.

Yet as she sets out to explore, to take possession, something in her settles.

She is starting to register a sense that she’s been here before.

Where and when she doesn’t ask.

She is just aware of being reminded.

It’s not really the house, satisfying and solid, that feels so familiar, though its long mass of pale stone is faintly glamorous, perhaps out of some half-remembered film. No, it’s something about the setting, the caressing warmth. The pines are so tall, the spaces between so wide. As though she had shrunk, was small once more. The needles are crisp, they tickle her feet through her sandals. She treads over towards the low wall that stands between her and the sea. Beyond, a white sailing boat small as a toy, glitters and rocks.

Now, looking back towards the wide terrace below the house she has a distinct sense of recognition. And of responsibility. As though she’s being invited to accept this place as her own, a demesne. Hers to keep ordered, to protect. Those tall trees, the falls of pink and white oleander too, lift her heart: beyond explanation it’s like coming back home.

She comes to a stop. How could that feel good, ‘coming home’? She has put everything into leaving behind the home she grew up in. She’d got away. Escaped.

Caught out for a moment, she pushes the confusion aside. Concentrate. She had put everything into finding a place for her family. Officially, to celebrate her seventieth birthday. Not with a party, they’d had that months earlier on the day itself: no, she just wanted to bring the whole family together once more. She was aware that some resistance was likely.

 ‘Never again’, one family had said after the trip for David’s seventieth. It never occurred to her that the most powerful resistance might be her own.

Serena had conceived the whole project in terms of practical issues: the question of the number of bedrooms, the location, the distance from the beach. Not least the touchy matter of dynamics between families. Longing on her own account to avoid the tense conjunctions, the furious whispered complaints in private, the pressure on her to make life happy that came with being a mother, especially the mother of a step-family, she’d managed to come up with a plan that would definitely keep family A and family C apart. Above all, with discretion. She really didn’t want anyone to guess or feel cheated.

There were four families to accommodate over the two weeks. With a bit of juggling the cordon sanitaire could be made to work. It would all be fair, she told herself. Glossing over the contortions involved, she was confident she had been fair all round. One way and another it had all taken a lot of managing but she was relieved. Everyone would have their due. 

And it was certainly easier to manage than when she was a girl, dealing with her old family. Then all she could control was her own behaviour. She’d been determined to keep some kind of order for herself and her small brothers when the hands-on mother who used to take care of everything collapsed and seemed to have forgotten them. A frightening stranger who kept kneeling down in the street to pray had taken her mother’s place.

She’d turned away from that sight as a girl but just recalling it still froze her. She refused to be associated with that stranger. But she was pleased, looking back, at the way she’d managed to take care of her brothers. She’d made sure there was always something to eat and read the little boys stories in bed every night, like her mother used to. She’d been good at that.

In the days when they were still getting to know each other, David had been curious about her family.  Had it marked her, he wondered, all that responsibility, not even a teenager.

‘D’you think you still feel resentment?’ he’d asked.

The question came back to irritate her as she stood among the fallen pine needles. What choice had she had? She couldn’t just stand back. Let everything fall apart. Collapse. Be like her mother. Never.

‘What choice did I have?’ she repeated.

But now, spoken aloud here in this place that was inexplicably familiar, this place which enfolded her in warmth, the question refused to die away.

Had she forgotten anything?

Even the bathroom was glamorous, all glittering gold tiles and mirrors. They were still admiring it when the grating of wheels on fine gravel brought them out onto the terrace. It must be the cook. As they watched, a figure emerged and started unloading packages from the back seat. A week earlier in London, sitting at her computer Serena had chosen the menu for that first evening. She made for the kitchen. On her way she barely noticed someone, a scrawny woman lugging bucket and mops in the distance. 

Moving between the formica–topped table and the tall fridge was a woman with a broad pleasant face, who introduced herself as Valeria. She explained that Lilli—that must be the woman with the mops—was the maid and responsible for housework. To Serena Valeria looked as much like a nurse as a cook in her white overall and cap. But there was nothing clinical about her. Laughing, gesturing, she displayed the large rough-skinned lemons she’d bought from a neighbour. The cheeses came from a small dairy she knew: tomorrow a special local variety would be available. ‘Basta’, she apologized cheerfully and stopped herself. ‘I do run on.’

Serena only had scraps of Italian picked up in Verona before she was twenty but it seemed they were somehow going to be enough to make a bridge between them. What’s more, their tastes coincided completely. Hearing that local ingredients, simple dishes, were what was wanted Valeria beamed. Just what she herself believed was healthiest and best. Lunch would be at one, dinner at eight. Did that suit? Menus would be agreed the previous evening and she, Valeria, would shop for ingredients every day.

‘I will take care of everything,’ she confirmed.

In the nicest way Valeria was treating her like a child. Her words opened the door to a world without responsibility.

Serena had loved the idea of being free, not having to shop or cook but she hadn’t imagined how soothing Valeria’s daily presence and their evening consultations would be. ‘Non ti preoccupare,’ Valeria would calm her, using the intimate form as though they were family, whether Serena was at a loss for vocabulary or for ideas for the next meal. She brought a steady rhythm to the days. And neither Serena nor David had foreseen how the tiresome squabbles and decisions around a kitchen and mealtimes— ‘we need to eat earlier’, ‘my children won’t eat that’, ‘I’ll just make a snack’—were transcended at a stroke. Everyone showed up, drifted along, and sat together round the long table on the terrace for breakfast, for lunch, for supper without demur.

It was a pity Lilli was in charge of breakfast—it all seemed a bit beyond her, especially the coffee—but that cast the only shadow.

Serena herself was changing. In this world of calm she felt herself opening, letting go. From the first, she felt no call to organise, to make plans. When David spoke of visiting the Greek temples at Paestum she fell in with him, though with reluctance. Such educated interests seemed to belong to another world, a different life. Children’s stories, with their tales of enchantment, were a better match for the life she was experiencing here. As though under a spell she was all sensation, given up to the heat. Charmed by the sense of being wrapped in warmth—even in the early morning, when she stepped out onto the terrace in her bare feet, the stones were already heating up—she looked for no further explanation for the change in herself.

At the same time, though she’d told no one, she was in constant pain. This did trouble her. Not quite physical but almost, insistent, specific. Nothing like anything she’d felt before, she’d been struggling to give it a name. Turning back to the stories her mother read her as a child, ‘A shirt woven of nettles’, she murmured at last. Like the fairytale about the shirts the sister wove with blistered hands to save her brothers. She’d always rather seen herself in that girl.

Only much later did she think of hair shirts and shame. ‘Saints used to wear hair shirts under their clothes, right next to their skin,’ her Irish mother had explained when she was small. ‘No-one else could see, though. It was a secret. They did it because they knew they’d done things that were wrong, and they were sorry.’

But she really couldn’t see how that applied to her.

Insistent, inexplicable, constant, the sense of discomfort would not leave her. Yet it didn’t take away from her pleasure, the satisfaction in this place she’d chosen. It was as though it went with the pleasure, was its twin, this pain that felt as close as the warmed stones under her bare feet. Like the reliable and welcome heat, pain was the constant medium through which she moved.

She had never known anything like this she told herself.

Simple ease wasn’t possible. Fevered skin nagged away at her, couldn’t be avoided, didn’t allow escape. With no idea what it meant or whether she ought to do something about it, she spoke of it to no one. Not so much stoicism as bewilderment: Serena couldn’t understand what was happening to her.

   *

The first couple of days unreeled without any effort on her part. She really had joined the ranks of the children. Though they were a good deal more active. The undergrowth beyond the pine trees crashed and echoed to wild games. On the terrace the occasional pock of table tennis rallies. Younger children, joined by one adult or another, shrieked and splashed, away beyond the pool-house. Mothers peered over their sunglasses to applaud, spread suncream, then picked up their novels again.

Life at the villa seemed protected, positively enchanted. At all hours the faintly orange scent of the pines. At night a young fox blurred by in the dark beyond the gleam of the citronella coils laid out to keep the mosquitoes at bay. Lit by the glow from the kitchen, Valeria stood chatting with the maintenance man’s wife, admiring their new baby. Beyond the curving black trunks of pine and eucalyptus the sea shone. Serena and David swam twice a day.

There were always new surprises, new cues—as it first seemed—for delight. Until the day she came to a halt touching David’s bare arm.

‘Look, along there, down the lane. It reminds me of that Indian film we saw. The procession. Chanting priests, the drugged widow on the way to be burned…’

Her voice tailed off. The memory stirred something like dread in her. 

Behind them the empty path, pale stones underfoot, overhead dark foliage, formed a tunnel. Brooding, deserted, blank. Waiting, as though an actor were about to appear.

In fact, the person who did actually make an entrance every single day was Lilli, bringing the breakfast. A gaunt half-starved figure, overladen, arms at full stretch around a carton packed with supplies she’d picked up from the supermarket—croissants, milk, bags of coffee, yogurts—she would cry ‘Signora, scusa, scusa’ as though the day had already defeated her.

The very sight of Lilli was disturbing: Serena knew it didn’t bring out the best in her. She wasn’t proud of herself but she did resent being faced with this sad creature. Lilli stuck out in that place.

Besides, Serena sometimes feared she herself might look like that.

Deprived, frantic. Placatory.

Lilli had more to do than she could cope with. She ran between kitchen and terrace frowning. It looked as though it was the first time she’d had to serve breakfast. Every morning there was a meal for eleven to lay out but she made no use of a tray.

They wanted to find a way to help but that only seemed to confuse her. The numbers were too great for making coffee on the stove, the only way Lilli was used to. It meant they all had to hang about while children clamoured for food and Lilli herself was miserably flustered as she ran up at last with the tall metal coffeepots. Yet it was too hard for her to change, to face learning something new, something that would be easier.

‘Non sono capace,’ she quavered, when David offered to show her how to use the cafetières. Instead it was agreed they would see to the coffee themselves.

But there was no rest for Lilli. As soon as the family had taken their places at the table, she hurried off to do out the bedrooms.

Serena tried to see as little of her as possible. 

Unexpectedly, she herself became busy. Once she’d noticed the washing machine in the kitchen it seemed to set off some kind of internal alarm. She couldn’t imagine what had got hold of her. In spite of herself she collected load after load. As if she couldn’t just be on holiday, be free. The others did collect their own clean clothes from the washing lines but she still found more tasks for herself. Her arms full of crumpled dresses, she came to a halt. She was as bad as Lilli. What could be going on?

But she was tired of mistrusting herself, all this anxious second-guessing. She must get a move on. She put the dresses down on the bed and set out to ask Lilli for an ironing board. After all the years that had passed since her weeks in Verona as a girl, she could still remember ‘stirare’ was the word for doing the ironing.

She brightened, stepping out into the dazzling light. It brought back mornings in Italy when she was nineteen: her first long vacation from Oxford. A summer near Verona, in a long low house overlooking Lake Garda, engaged to live with the family and speak English with the children.

A godsend. It had saved her from having to go home.

The household she was joining had a steady rhythm. Before breakfast the clack of high heels on terracotta would tell her that Anna, the mother, was hurrying between the children and checking that the maid had set the table properly and was getting on with the coffee. In the afternoons big cheerful local women came in to take care of the laundry. It was too hot inside, so they set up their ironing boards out in the open on the terrace. In the background songs played from a little radio perched on the windowsill.

Serena stopped in her tracks. She’d surprised herself. She remembered it all in such detail, even that awful crumpled dress she’d put on the first day. It was all coming back irresistibly, in a cascade. How they gave her an evening at the Opera, finishing up sharing pizza round a table out in the warm darkness, and once the mother took her to Venice for the day. Another time there was an expedition to one of Anna’s favourite small shops. She made Serena stand in daylight by the shop door, then ran back and forth trying different shades against Serena’s skin, to find the right silk scarf, in a soft green. Later she’d picked out a dress from her own wardrobe in the same tone and made Serena a present of it, with the right lipstick.

Yet those warm memories were mixed with a sense of her past unease in the face of all that was offered her. It was as though she’d known at the time that she didn’t deserve such kindness. In fact, no longer kept in soft focus, the memories of that Italian summer were edged with shame. She approached that gingerly, not sure now what she was letting herself in for. She would have preferred not to know, to forget but the shame wouldn’t go away. In spite of the strong sun, a shiver crept over her and she sank into a wicker chair.

It was too bright out here after all. She was squinting.

She couldn’t stop the flow of recollection now, it moved on like a film unrolling. Here was the evening when a friend of the husband, an American on vacation, arrived for dinner.

‘What a place you’ve got here,’ the visitor had said, transparently impressed, as they stood with their drinks on the terrace, looking out over the lake.

He’d turned to Serena.

‘We don’t have anything at home like this and I guess you don’t either.’

She had been stung, pierced by a resentment and shame she couldn’t bear to analyse.

Fifty years on she stood cold under the bright sun, arms clasped around her heart, breath short. It was as if he knew. Saw through her to the father who had lost his job, the slumped figure of her mother, ash from her cigarette dropping into the sugar bowl unheeded.

 With relief she came back to the present.  Exhaled. Reassured herself. No wonder she hadn’t wanted anyone to connect her with that home.

Out of the shade it was already uncomfortably hot, not ironing weather, as Serena finally made her way up the external steps leading to the bedrooms, wondering all the while at her own actions. But in a few moments Lilli’s response to her request seemed positively freakish. Without a word to show that she had understood, she led Serena into the upstairs salon. By a small table she paused. From a clutter of bric à brac she selected a metal statuette of a horseman. Lifted, it revealed a key.

Lilli looked round.

Finger to her lips, she hissed, ‘Between you and me. Not the agency. Not the owners.’

Serena recoiled, queasy, as at the whiff of something tainted. Lilli seemed so abject, so sly. Even a bit mad. Ever since her mother’s breakdown mad people frightened Serena. Just seeing one in the street threw her off balance, let alone having to engage with one. But this time she couldn’t get away.

All she wanted was an iron. But her Italian wasn’t up to raising questions, plus she was intent on keeping her distance. That was the way she’d managed with her mother. She wanted nothing to do with this woman, Lilli. She must calm her down, appear to consent to this pact. Smiles, gestures, nods. Keep them empty.

She didn’t register how much it disturbed her, this renewed withholding. Instead, she found herself thinking of fairytales where a girl has to ask an old witch nicely for her help. In reality she found it hard to say how old Lilli was. With that haggard look she could have been fifty. Younger than Serena, anyway. Yet in spite of that, in front of her Serena didn’t feel in charge, she felt powerless, depleted, no more than a girl.

Retreating awkwardly down the stairs clutching iron and board, she hovered between triumph and confusion. She’d got what she needed: whatever was she doing? In 30 degrees of heat, she’d set herself up to do some ironing. She wasn’t sure she wanted the others to know.

 Later, in the shuttered darkness of the afternoon, she took up the iron and reached for her favourite dress, a fine black poplin. Expensive. But it had been worth it, she’d loved how it made her look. She spread its billows over the ironing table.

Sleeveless, buttoning at the front down its full length, with wide skirts, she’d often thought it was modelled on a priest’s soutane. Today though, for the first time she asked herself what she’d been up to, wearing it. For her, with her Irish mother, her convent schooling, there was no question. Putting on a priest’s soutane was an act of sacrilege. She had managed, somehow, to avoid that knowledge when she was admiring herself in the mirror.

The iron wasn’t heating up. She jiggled the lead till the red light came on. She wished she had something to spray the dress with while she waited.

Now she was wondering. Could there have been a certain defiance in flaunting herself in that pretty girly soutane? She’d never imagined that. Yet something in her must have been savouring it: the secret pleasure of mocking priests and their authority just by walking down the street.

The street had been a place of humiliation for her as a girl. She used to shrink at the sight of her mother kneeling down on the pavement, arms stretched out, muttering loud prayers. It was worse in church, where she turned up hunched under a vast shawl and made her way to the communion rail bowed almost from the waist, eyes tight shut, lips in exaggerated silent movement.

Serena always pushed the memory away.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Yet today, all of a sudden, she could see the element of pantomime in that scene. Not piety, but performance. A mockery of the priests up at the altar in their embroidered copes? Mockery not unlike her own gesture, dressing up in that soutane.

You couldn’t put a pin between them.

Her mother and herself.

She paused. Stood the iron back up.

Now without any effort on her part a different memory fell into place, a memory of information that had come to her long after her mother’s death. At the time she hadn’t known what to do with it, the rumour that as a girl her mother had complained of sexual abuse—claimed that a priest had been abusing her.

In her mother’s Irish family it had been remembered as ‘troublemaking’: back then nobody would have listened or believed her. She’d have been shouted down.

Serena stood, her task ignored, shame-faced. How could it have taken her so long to put two and two together, to connect those scenes in the street with that whisper of abuse from the past? Now she was paying attention, the scenes she’d resented because of how they made her feel began to look different. To be a sign of resistance. Mockery, revenge. A claim for attention.

Her mother had not given up. You couldn’t deny it showed spirit.

Except. Except that she, Serena, had denied it, seeing only failure.

She was going to need time to absorb this image of her mother. It wasn’t entirely clear where she was left herself.

Meanwhile, the frivolous soutane was much too dry to iron. She stared at it, distracted.

The following day, she was forced to go and ask Lilli’s help for a second time. It really was the last thing she wanted, more dealings with this sad figure. A child had peed his bed and a clean sheet was needed, no question. But she shied at asking for one, at speaking of something so intimate, even though it only involved a child. She’d have preferred to keep her distance, put a stop to Lilli’s attempts to establish a bond with her.

Dishevelled as ever, Lilli was at work cleaning a shower. Serena had no intention of being trapped in a small space with her again: a hail from the threshold would get her attention. Serena had been pleased when she realised she could at least remember that ‘cambiare’ was how to say ‘change’.

As if at the chance she’d been waiting for, a cue, Lilli dropped her mop and let out a burst of Italian. The words ‘ogni giorno’ were repeated. Serena understood enough to make out:

‘I’ve been changing all the sheets every day. They told me to change them every three days but I took no notice. I change them all every day’.

Serena stiffened, shrinking back in shock. The woman really was a bit crazy she told herself.

Lilli’s ongoing quarrel with her employers were nothing to her. She resented being drawn into any trouble with the powers that be.

It was dawning on her that the name for what she felt was anger. She hated having the business sprung on her like this.

She did know, without being able to name it, that she felt accused. She concentrated on justifying herself. It wasn’t anything she’d asked for or thought of wanting, a daily change of bedlinen. She had simply asked for a clean sheet. She would have liked to keep raging that this tiresome woman was putting them both in the wrong with her unwanted favours.

But Lilli had left her work and crossed the room forcing Serena to step back outside. Lilli’s narrow face, too close to her own, was needy, eager for recognition, for thanks.

Resistance, almost violent, took over Serena.

‘This is nothing to do with me,’ she told herself one more time. She didn’t quite have the heart, though, to hold out. Italian or no Italian—and she didn’t have the language to argue— she couldn’t quiet the sense that raising objections, refusing thanks when they were so much desired, would show a mean spirit.

And besides, it had already happened. Lilli had put in all that extra work on their behalf. Serena had to accept that she was under an obligation. Dimly, grudgingly, she began to concede that perhaps Lilli did deserve some thanks for what would have been sweating labour. They must all have slept in more comfort through those hot nights on sheets that were fresh and smooth.

She couldn’t summon the actual words but did manage to force a smile that she hoped looked grateful. Her only thought was to get away. Away from this woman who kept wrong-footing her.

Empty, exhausted, surrendering, she sank onto a long sunbed and lay back shutting her eyes. Gradually she became conscious of the drone of a small machine in the background. Coming from the house, it was soothing, a reminder that out of sight someone was busy and in charge. It buzzed, she sleepily thought, just like the sound of the hoover when she was small, out in the street on her tricycle. As she gripped the handlebars, feet planted, looking out at the world, there had been comfort in that sound.

Still not quite in command of herself next morning, it was with dread she realised that Lilli was looking for her. She wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take. Beckoning her down the path that led along the side of the house, Lilli paused by a vast arched opening, great wooden doors leaning casually apart. Reluctantly, Serena followed into the shadowy space. She was struck how far it reached back. Once upon a time, she guessed, farm animals might have been sheltered there, a shuffling, nuzzling presence.

Once they were both deep inside and out of sight, Lilli pointed towards a large package she’d evidently parked there earlier. Amongst the rubble of past years—forgotten highchairs and collapsed pool toys stored in there out of the way—the shiny new wrapping paper stood out.

Where it had been torn back, there showed through dark blue—oh no, Oxford blue, how did the woman know that? Lilli ripped away more paper, to reveal a stack of thick towels, a good half dozen of them, rich and inviting. Serena was confused. She hadn’t asked for any such thing.

‘They’re new, Signora. All new. I took them for you. From the store. The owner doesn’t know. For the pool-house.’

Finger at her lips, Lilli smiled, scrawny, waiting.

She was being offered a present, all wrapped with care, and she couldn’t get out of accepting it: this Serena faced, however uncomfortable it made her. However nervous she was of Lilli and of getting involved.

Gaining a moment, scarcely knowing what she was doing, she stroked the towels. They were lush, highly desirable, in line with everything about the life they were living in that house, not anything you’d want to reject.

Reject? Once long ago there had been a pile of towels she’d rejected. The shame of it went far deeper than any passing embarrassment. So much more than the towels had been at stake.

It was at the time when her mother was said to have partly recovered, though she was no longer the woman she had once been. Other people still called her ‘Madge’ but Serena was determinedly keeping her distance. She refused to acknowledge the mother who had gone away, leaving her. She closed her heart.

Her mother was no longer behaving oddly, though now a bit unkempt and hesitant in a way she hadn’t been before. She was well enough to go out alone.

If there was one thing that ‘d always given Madge a kick, that was a bargain.  There’d been a cut-price drapers in the village that she enjoyed going round. When she got home that afternoon she was full of triumph in the bundle of towels she’d bought. For Serena, however, they were a reminder of humiliation. In their drab stripes and thin texture, she saw only the shameful proof that they were poor, now her father had no job.

The very thought of those towels used to make her shrink.

With that thought however, came another. She’d always known that her response, ‘Those towels look a bit cheap to me’ had been cruel. But now for the first time she faced what she’d really done. Rejecting the towels wasn’t the worst of it. It was the woman herself that she’d rejected, the mother who had once taken care of her.

Too angry to forgive her mother for leaving she’d frozen her out.  No more enjoying the warmth of each other’s company in the old way. She had never never once melted, despite what it cost. Cost both of them.

The waste, the sorrow of the past could have silenced her.

Yet she had to act right now, in the present.

Her head was spinning as she fought to make sense, to know how best to respond to Lilli. She hadn’t the tools, the language to insist that the towels should go back. And anyway, who knew how Lilli would cope with being challenged? A scene would be dreadful. And too unkind.

The towels weren’t really that important, Serena told herself at last.

It was Lilli.

But how had Lilli managed to see right into her, to catch sight of things that she had put aside, kept hidden away even from herself? Hidden away as she herself had been long ago, one cold day at a bus stop, when her mother’d held open her own brown tweed overcoat so that little Serena could join her, buttoned up inside it together keeping warm.

Lilli was waiting. The silence felt as though it lasted years.

At long last Serena managed to choke out ‘Grazie’.

Then stumbled back towards the light.

Dazzled at first, she put up her hand to shade her eyes.  A faint alarm came over her as the pots carefully spaced along the terrace caught her eye. Surely those oleanders weren’t drooping like that when they’d arrived? Close up, the jasmines too were limp.

It was all her fault. She’d neglected them.

The sickening moment passed and she came to, embarrassed at her own silliness. Common sense took over and she set off to make use of the house phone. A slender young man duly appeared, trailing a hose from pot to pot, missing out a few and having to be reminded.

She needed time to think.

At that hour of the morning the terrace was deserted. She moved a wicker armchair to the corner of shade and sank into the cushions. This was all too extraordinary. Compelled time after time to face a woman she shrank from, only to come away with a gift. It really was like a fairy tale.

Yet as she began to feel more herself again, slowly the commonsense answer came to her: perhaps Lilli’s strange behaviour was really just about money. About being short of money. If Lilli had kept making certain she was noticed, that might simply mean she wanted to make sure of a good tip.

Just looking at her, you could tell that she was not only hard up but crushed, thoroughly demoralised. The sight of Lilli, with her hungry look, a cigarette at her lips as she waited for a lift after work, had made Serena more uncomfortable than she knew. It was unusual, now she came to think about it, to see an Italian woman cut such a poor figure. Perhaps Lilli had no idea how to make the best of herself. Or perhaps, it abruptly occurred to Serena, perhaps too many bad things had happened to Lilli.

Her feet were getting scorched, stretched out in the sun. She tucked them back into the narrow shade.

If Lilli didn’t have magic powers, if she wasn’t some kind of witch, then it must mean that her own mind had been playing tricks. If that was really the right way to put it. Serena shifted among cushions that were suddenly uncomfortable, too big for that chair.

A suspicion began to creep over her. If this wasn’t a fairy-tale, then perhaps it might be a ghost story. Was it too far-fetched to say she’d been haunted? By the mother who had never wanted to give up on her? By her own heart’s truth?

There were no answers for her questions.  Nevertheless, she wasn’t left irritated. She felt calmed.

Resolute, she got to her feet and made for the glittering bathroom with its many mirrors. The image she found there pleased her. In spite of all her old fears, she didn’t look crushed like Lilli, not in the least. But the lock that fell over her right eye—that was just the way her mother’s hair fell, in the photograph by her bed at home.  A smiling woman, her small son pressing against the silk of her flowered skirts, that last summer when she was still herself.

‘You’re exactly like her, the way she was before she fell ill. You would have loved her,’ an old friend of her mother had once said.

From outside came the sound of high-pitched voices.

The families were beginning to gather for lunch. A few details to sort out here too, now she’d come back to herself.

Now as the little boys arrived, tumbling over each other, pushing, shoving, exclaiming, Serena took charge.

‘Let’s make sure they’re separated from now on at mealtimes’, she said.

The parents were surprised.

‘Oh. Don’t you think it’s rather sweet, the little squabbles and the fights they get into?’ came lazily back.

‘Not at my table.’

Her response, assured, definitive, seemed to her uttered in the voice of a grande dame. She knew it came out of a book, didn’t care how it sounded. She meant it.

Biography

Mary Hamer, educated by the nuns and at Oxford, began as an academic exploring Trollope’s writing practice, long before she began to wonder about her own. The books that followed – exploring the image of Cleopatra, on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and on trauma ( see www.mary-hamer.co.uk) – moved her closer to thinking about living women and the world which shaped them. Turning to biofiction in Kipling & Trix, winner of the Virginia Prize, she called attention to the woman who shared a traumatic childhood with her famous brother. Mirror, Mirror is the first short story Mary has published.

You can find a PDF of this story here:

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Snow on the Danube by Francis Gilbert

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Snow on the Danube (Blue Door Press 2019) evokes the lost world of Budapest during and between two great wars  and is recounted in the inimitable voice of Count Zoltán Pongrácz: a fussy hypochondriac who becomes an unlikely and compromised hero when the Fascists take over his beloved country and he is forced to rescue his adored, wayward sister Anna. An unlikely comedy, a document of filial love and a compelling portrait of the horrors of war, Snow on the Danube is the story of one man’s quest to save everything he loves most: his family, his friends – and, perhaps, his soul.

The Beginning    1920

Hungary wore black on the day of my birth. Street vendors tied black ribbons around bouquets of flowers; archdukes donned their darkest garb and thrummed their fingers on gold-tasselled armrests. Tram-drivers left their trolley buses in the depot and sat with their children in their tiny flats. Priests and civil servants hoisted black flags and watched them flutter in the air. The streets were empty. Church bells rang. Gamekeepers cancelled their early morning walks; they slumped in their chairs, hounds at their feet. Maids failed to make their daily trips to the grocers and lay on camp beds in their cubby-holes; bakers neglected to light their ovens and open their shutters. The keeper at the City Zoo threw a few thin slabs of meat to the lions and slouched home.

It was a day of national mourning. In Paris, a treaty was signed that butchered Hungary. Two-thirds of the kingdom was turned over to Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Hungary had supported the losing side in the First World War.

My father had two reasons to wear black on June 4, 1920. Not only had he lost the family’s monumental Transylvanian castle in the unceremonious carve-up of the Treaty of Trianon but he had also, on the very same day, to endure the birth of his son.

My memories from those very early years are vague. I don’t remember much about the family’s life at our chateau in Villány. I can recall my father’s imperious voice barking orders at the workmen who toiled all day at the bottom of our ornamental garden. ‘Down there! Careful now. Easy with those girders!’

His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his bald head seemed to glow as he twirled his silver-topped cane. In his polished hunting boots he was a mass of perspiring muscle, mushrooming dust as he heaved bricks. I had no idea what was going on but I guessed it was of the utmost importance.

My first memory of my sister is of her informing me about those mysterious, grunting proceedings. Her black hair brushed my cheek as she leaned towards me and whispered: ‘They’re building a bridge. Papa says it’s very important that the lions have tongues.’

Trying to connect the idea of the bridge with lions was very difficult for me. I imagined that Papa would place real ones on the bridge and this was the whole purpose of the exercise: to give the lions a decent home.

This supposition was no more ridiculous than what he was attempting to do. My father, being fanatical about bridges, thought that he could somehow rectify the dire financial problems afflicting his vineyards by building a replica of Budapest’s Chain Bridge at the bottom of his garden. He persisted in believing in this illusion for a long time, even after the construction of the imitation bridge had bankrupted him, forced him to sell the chateau and move permanently back to Budapest.

Many years later, when I would stroll with my father on the actual bridge in the Budapest twilight, he would sigh and point to the monumental but tongueless lions, commenting regretfully: ‘People were coming from miles around to see my Chain Bridge at Villány. The archduke Frederick himself greatly admired it. That bridge was the only thing that wretched estate had going for it: it was a rotten, dry, wizened sort of place. We never grew a single decent grape there.’

After the Count’s death, I discovered that this was an outright lie. Although my father sold the chateau, he continued to own vast tracts of the vineyards. He had the good sense to appoint an honest and practical Magyar supervisor to run them all. This doughty chap wasn’t even discouraged by the lack of any venue to make the wine in and converted some abandoned cellars on the estate for that purpose. The fantastic Hungarian wines that this chateau-less estate produced was the only real source of income that my family had.

But, of course, I knew none of this as a tiny child gazing on all those workmen toiling away at the banks of the small river that babbled at the bottom of our garden. At the grand opening of the bridge, which most of the neighbouring villages attended, my father held me up proudly before the stone lions.

‘My lions have tongues that definitively exist — unlike the lions on the Chain Bridge in Budapest. They’ll be seeing my lions’ tongues for miles around! Just look at them!’ the Count roared as he held me aloft before the curled manes of those sandstone felines. To be honest, I don’t remember this but the anecdote was recounted with such regularity in the following years that it has almost become a genuine memory.

Certain smells awaken glimmerings of the chateau at Villány in my mind. The sharp, rich tang of fermenting wine transports me to the time when Anna gave me an illicit sip: I can still see her dimpled fingers wrapped around the glass. The cool dampness of mould compels me to recall the wooden barrels in the wine cellars. The baked warmth of the hard earth makes me see those dry vineyards tapering off into the horizon. And the delicious whisk of a breeze sends me back to the moments when I would stand in the middle of the bridge, watch the water ripple underneath and feel the airy draught against my cheeks. Ah yes, I’m never far from those sensations.

My sister told me that we used to play a lot of games around the bridge’s building site. Her favourite pastime was a game that she had invented after reading Molnár’s The Paul Street Boys. This was a classic Hungarian children’s story about a group of boys who engage in a fierce battle with a nasty gang to claim ownership of some derelict but treasured land in the slums of Budapest. I’m not sure that our massive garden in Villány, with its circular ponds and cherub-infested fountain, topiary hedges and lichened griffins, replicated those conditions but apparently Anna managed to persuade the servants’ children and myself that it did.

According to my sister, we all had a marvellous time throwing sand and bricks at each other and hiding behind wheelbarrows until I received a vicious crack on the head.  Anna had to scoop me up in her arms and run with me into the drawing room where my mother was reading. Mama said there was so much blood spurting out of my head that Anna’s white frock turned red. Because there was no hospital nearby, they had to take me to a gypsy healer who waved some leaves over my battered skull and curtailed the bleeding.

My only memory of the event is of a warm stickiness sprouting out of my scalp and wondering whether cocoa and other hot beverages were extracted from people’s heads. Push back my hair and you can still see the long, white scar.

* * *

Yes, yes, yes: there are black and white photos from this time. There’s my father, the Count, standing in his hunting gear and deerstalker hat with his Purdey shotgun in front of the fat-tongued lions. There’s my mother, sitting under a parasol in her white, floral dress, reading Pride and Prejudice and looking like the fair English maiden that she was before we moved to Budapest. There’s me, as a baby, wearing a long, cotton dress with frilly edges and long sleeves being carried by my mother in the road leading to the Archduke Frederick’s farm – his wine cellars and hunting grounds were close to us and we used to visit them regularly. What big round eyes I have! But you can certainly see in my pale, agitated face the first inklings of the illnesses that would plague me for the rest of my life.

The Chain Bridge, Budapest

* * *

And there’s Anna. Doesn’t she look naughty with her dark, inquiring eyes, her cheeky grin, her thick black hair, and her high, Pongrácz cheekbones, all dolled up in that ridiculous harlequin’s costume and hat? She always loved dressing up, even in the days when she became a hardened communist.

And here we all are together in our stately horse-drawn carriage, setting off for Mass in our Sunday best: my father is dressed in sober black with a top hat and my mother entirely obscured by the huge, netted hat she’s decided to model. And there we are behind them: me, in an absolutely tiny shirt and tie, and Anna looking distinctly grumpy in a Transylvanian frock. She never liked acting the role of a Magyar. But my goodness, she looks so slim and young!

* * *

It’s a shame that I remember so little from that time, but I was only five years old when my sister and I left Villány. My memory only revives when we moved to Budapest. And those first days and weeks I can recollect so vividly that I can shut my eyes and replay them with the same ease that a projectionist can pop a film into his whirring machine and shine it in Technicolor onto the darkened cinema screen.

Budapest 1945

Anna ran out of the apartment. If she had been speaking sense, I probably would not have followed her and tended to the unconscious Miss Virág. But my sister wasn’t herself at all: there was a desperate light of optimism in her eyes, the kind of optimism that quickly dwindles into suicidal depression once it has been disappointed. I felt that she was in more danger than my tutor.

I pursued her onto Andrássy where she slackened her pace, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to keep up. I called out to her to come back but she ignored me and, thus, I trailed after her through the nightmarish wreckage of Budapest all the way down Attila József utca right down to the river.

The relatively intact state of my apartment had been an exceptionally misleading indication about the general condition of our capital city. How can I begin to describe its ruinous condition? The streets were strewn with overturned tanks, burnt-out trams and cars; flames still lapped at the ruins of great apartment blocks and grey smoke drifted around the tree-tops. Great swathes of the apartments on the ring road around Deak Ter had been obliterated, leaving only charred timbers, pulverized bricks, broken tiles and smashed glass, and the dead bodies of dogs and cats. The corpses of Germans, Hungarians and Russians littered the gutters. Although most of the bodies were of uniformed soldiers, I did come across one unfortunate Swabian flower vendor who was still holding out a sprig of heather and lavender in her hand as if she was just about to sell the pitiful herbs. Her throat had been slashed and the blood had dried around the deep wound like old egg yolk.

After that I determined that I wouldn’t look closely at anything lying on the frozen ground unless I absolutely had to. However, despite this pledge to myself, I couldn’t help discerning that much of the snow was streaked with bright, red blood and many of the icy puddles were the colour of English strawberries. Her determination to reach her destination seemed to make her oblivious of the carnage around her; she hopped over bodies, skipped across gutters full of bloody pulp and twisted metal, and ducked around the abandoned trams and tanks.

As we approached the Danube, we heard feet tramping through the snow and the howling screech of a Russian officer. I swivelled round and saw that a large infantry division was marching in our wake: the sound of a drum reverberated through the eerily quiet, snow-thrilled air.

I managed to catch up with Anna on the fragmented remains of the Corso. She had come to a dead stop in front of what used to be the Carlton hotel and was staring at the Danube. The snow mocked us as it fell so peacefully onto the icy water.

“Ahhh!” Anna screamed.

I rushed up to her and took her arm by the railings of the promenade, which were now as looped and bowed as shoe laces. Then I embraced her, and she buried her face in the crook of my shoulder. As I held her, I could see what had happened to this once beautiful part of Budapest: every bridge had been blown up and all the great hotels on the Corso were simply piles of rubble with the occasional glint of a chandelier or hint of red carpet poking through the devastation.

I remember thinking it was a good thing that my father was dead: he couldn’t have borne the vision of the Chain Bridge’s lions with their manes blasted away and the middle of the bridge sliding into the unforgiving currents of the Danube. Nor could he have endured to see the great Buda castle’s dome stripped of its green copper finery and its inner scaffolding exposed to the elements. Most of all, the smell of burnt flesh and rubber and wood, and the crackle of simmering fires eating up the great hotels of the Corso would have told the Count that everything civilised about Hungary had been lost, irretrievably cast to oblivion. And yet, I couldn’t help feeling that my country deserved it. Quite frankly, I didn’t care that the Chain Bridge was totally destroyed.

You can find a PDF of these extracts here:

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Biography

Francis Gilbert found the process of working with the other members of Blue Door Press on Snow on the Danube an enriching and enlightening process. He began the novel in the late 1990s, doing much research and rewriting the novel a great many times. It was not until he worked with Blue Door Press in 2016 that the narrative finally took a compelling and original shape. You can read about this process in his blog here: https://bluedoorpress.co.uk/2019/03/12/the-importance-of-patience-why-it-took-21-years-to-publish-snow-on-the-danube/

The Danube, the Chain Bridge and Budapest