Something to think about

Quotes: I've learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. (Maya Angelou)..The destiny of every human being is decided by what goes on inside his skull when confronted by what goes on outside his skull. (Eric Berne).. Work while you work, play while you play - this is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline. (Theodor W. Adorno)

Wednesday 3 June 2015

7 Eyes of blue

Today is a special day. I am two years old, at last old enough to visit my aged grandfather, who has stopped being a tyrant and become a senile old man confined to his bed most of the time. The time has come to be reconciled. I am the white flag of truce, I suppose, dressed in my prettiest frock, with my wavy, fair hair combed back prettily and tied with a bow. I am aware of the solemnity of the occasion, and when I am led into the old man’s bedroom, I realise that I am in the presence of death.
But birth and death are close to each other, and since I have hardly left the sphere to which he is returning, I know no fear. On the contrary, his proximity to eternity fascinates me, the youngest member of the family, the innocent one. I do not know that I am to be the bridge back into the bosom of this family. I am to mend the slight of rejection Mama suffered for daring to break out.
Mama makes an effort to reach out to her father, remembering their close bond of long ago, though now he looks more like Father Christmas in the pictures on Christmas cards, if you think away the beard. But he does not remember and she does not seem to be unduly moved by the realization that his life is drawing quietly to a close. That is probably the first time I realise that Mama is virtually incapable of showing emotions apart from rage and jealousy. Whatever happened to her soul?
I look around me. There are no guardian angels hovering above this bed, and no ministering spirits surrounding it. The grey in grey figure of my grandmother stands motionless and strangely dispassionate to one side, scrupulously ignoring me. She has spent most of her life serving the dying man and the rest of her family. It is not entirely her fault that Mama is the way she is, but it is unforgivable that my grandmother, a bright and intelligent woman, has stood by and watched Mama’s misery. Mama is thinking of the beatings and rapes she has suffered. She makes no further attempt to get near enough for a second time to touch her father. Instead she stands with clenched fists and pursed lips, waiting for the visit to end, dawdling so as to appear not to leave hastily, though she would have liked to. It has become a waiting game rather than a sick visit. Even at two and a bit, I am aware that I must not be a disturbance.
There is no music in this room. There is just this old man with startling blue eyes and a full head of hair as white as the sheet covering him, and a pack of relatives waiting for their share of the booty.
After a little while he becomes aware of our presence and gestures to be helped into a better sitting position. His eyes are the same cool blue as Mama’s, and when he talks he shows pearly-white teeth, a full set except for a gap at the front.
He says something to me, but I cannot understand him, because his words are jumbled up like a foreign language. Now everyone is laughing, but I do not know what they are laughing at. Is it because I have asked for a drink of the smooth golden liquid in the tall bottle under his bedside table?
I am aware of my childishness and his senility, but I am not aware of any kinship or kindred spirit. The intimacy of the situation only serves to emphasize the lack of nearness. Like so many others, these kinsmen are still together because that is what life has ordained. Feelings no longer count. Maybe they have never counted.
My grey grandmother hovers in the background and to pass the time Mama tries to make conversation, but I don’t listen to them and their jumbled-up words about this and that. I just stare back at this old man, propped up against the starched white pillows and scrutinising me as if I had landed from another planet.
After a time I am led from the room. I never see him again, but his eyes are reflected in every blue sky I shall ever see. They are my mother’s eyes too, my grandfather’s eyes. They are eyes as cool and empty as the universe is empty of warmth when the sun is not shining.
Not long after that visit, my grandfather finally steals out of this life into the next in his sleep. The feud is over. Mama lays the corpse out the way she is to lay out the earthly remains of all her other close relatives. She is dispassionate when it comes to the practical details of passing over. That is a quality farmers have in abundance, and Mama is, after all, her father’s daughter.
I am now taken to the farm regularly. Sometimes I sit under the shiny black grand piano in the front room of the new farmhouse, which was a symbol of their affluence at the time and isn’t really new because Mama grew up there. Sometimes I am taken to the shabby old farmhouse, which has been standing there for more than two hundred years and still has the original beams and flagstones.
It is now occupied by a farm hand and his family. They have a lot of dirty children and the house smells funny. But the lady is friendly and I am allowed to sit next to the fire and make toast on a long fork. I like being there.
My real world is, despite or perhaps because of contact with the earthiness of farm life, a fantasy world populated by winged fairies and crinolined princesses, not least because I am not allowed play with children who have not been vetted by Mama. As a result, it is quite an adventure to be amongst this kind of family, where everyone shouts all the time and uses words I do not understand, let alone dare to repeat. I’m not sure why these people have not been vetted as unsuitable. I think it has something to do with keeping the peace between Mama and her family. At the tender age of three I am already able to discern what is good for me. I am really quite an arrogant little girl with a finely tuned instinct for ‘us’ and ‘them’. ‘We’ have comfortable lives to go back to. ‘They’ are stuck in their bog of poverty and dependency. We can get out. They can’t.
On the way home to our bungalow with the ranch-type wooden railing around the raised patio that goes all round the house, Mama tells me stories about living in the old farmhouse before the new one was finished and of how, when she was very little, she used to save her sugar for her father’s tea. She tells me all about the horse and cart that took her and her father up the hill to the next village, where she would sit outside on the step while he had a few beers with his cronies. The faithful old nag would find its own way home after closing time, and Mama can still sing all the songs her father sang to her. He must have been a much pleasanter character in a drunken state than sober. Mama tells me how he used to clean his teeth with soot out of the fireplace, and how he lost his two front ones while breaking in a particularly bad-tempered horse.
I try to imagine what it must be like to have a father who lets horses knock his teeth out and drinks so much beer that he sings all the way home perched on a horse and cart. Despite his failings, he was the hero of her childhood recollections right to the end. In retrospect it must have been these scanty happy memories she cherished of those happy days that survived the nightmare ones of later years.
My grandmother ruled the family with an iron hand, and must once have made a conscious choice between a husband who was prone to binges and a bankrupt family and uncertain freedom, choosing to go where she had power, rather than risk the coldness of a disapproving outside world in an era when women were as often as not fated to be merely chattels.
But my memories of her are scant and blurred. I don’t think Mama can have wanted her to influence me. So Nain, as grandmothers are called in Welsh, is but a grey shadow in comparison to my ‘heroic’ grandfather or Taid. I know nothing about Nain that Mama hasn’t told me: that she was apparently unable to function out of shouting distance of her home, that consequently she never once slept a night away from her own bedroom, and even when she once wanted to attend the doctorate ceremony of her cleverest son she became homesick on the journey there and had to turn back. Mama never admitted that Nain’s origins were in Portsmouth, almost as far south in England as it is possible to get. Her maiden name had been Norman, which is certainly not Welsh.

Despite not being given the chance of higher education, a privilege usually reserved for a son in those days, I cannot recall Mama ever resenting the fate meted out to her by her mother, who was in her eyes, inexplicably, a paragon of rectitude and virtue. I suppose most wounds can be healed with hindsight.
Mama had been devastated that the person she respected most of all turned against her simply because she found happiness in a marriage to somebody her mother disapproved of, so I did Mama a favour by being born, because that paved the way for reconciliation.
But it didn’t take long for her to forget that.

Before I have time to grow up enough to understand what is going on around me, both grandfather and grandmother lie buried side by side in the old churchyard and the new farmhouse has been sold to a local doctor. The farm property is divided up between the sons and Mama is to spend the rest of her life raging about the injustice that has been done to her, in particular by her eldest brother, her mother’s declared favourite, who has apparently seen to it that she received almost nothing of the inheritance she believes to be her birth right. Always assuming that Mama is not making it all up, of course.

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