Epiblog for Whit Sunday

It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Summer has finally burst over us, at last, coating everything with thistledown and blossom, dust and sunburnt warmth. The Clematis is its own constellation of pinkwhite stars improbable against the deep blue of a flawless sky. The trees are a million greens as their leaves dance and dither in the soft wind.

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf,
A land of trees that stand;
Where trees are fallen, there is grief;
I love no leafless land”

Says A. E. Housman, and he should know. Or, if one poet isn’t enough for you, how about Andrew Marvell’s

“Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought, in a green shade”

After a couple of days of “scorchio”, even Kitty has realised, as it finally permeated her furry little walnut of a brain, that the getting of heat was not longer confined to the precincts of the stove, but in fact there were lovely warm sunny windowsills, chairs, even the decking outside was hot. Not just warm, but hot under her paws, where the sun had scorched it. She delighted in the discovery, and is like a cat ten years younger than her age, and this week has probably spent more time out of doors than in the previous six months!

She still looks as though she’s asking me to light the fire before I go to bed, though, and the other night, worried that she might be cold without the stove, I spread out the two new crocheted cat blankets that arrived in the post for her in a huge parcel from her Auntie Maisie, and then wrapped my scarf round her to keep out any draughts. She purred her approval, and was still there, in exactly the same position, when I came through the next morning, so my improvised cat-nest obviously did the trick. In fact, at one point, it looked like I was going to have to do like Mohammed did with the sleeve of his garment, and cut the scarf in half to avoid disturbing her. The reason I thought of Mohammed was that the scarf is one of those arab ones with the little knots along the edge, which I was delighted to find is called a “tagelmust”, which is far too good a word to be wasted on a scarf.

Grandad’s been ranging far and wide with Zak and Freddie, although by the weekend, Freddie, grumbly old codger that he is, had had enough of the heat and refused to go walkies, preferring to lie with his head on a cushion. Not even the mention of squirrels would rouse him. He’s earned the right to refuse, after all – he’s 84 in human years.

Brenda the badger and other semi-official denizens of the night have been rather more conspicuous by their absence. I do not know much about the habits of badgers, but I would imagine that, being nocturnal, and the earth being cool, they will stay underground during the day and that now, if I want to actually see her demolish the food I leave out, it would involve me staying up til two and three o’clock in the morning, which I am simply too tired to do.

The squirrels, however, have been very active, taunting Freddie, foraging in the garden and on the decking every day. I have said it before, that I know they are essentially tree-rats and I know they are single-handedly responsible for the demise of our own native red squirrel, but grey squirrels are impossibly cute. There’s one with a very distinctive marking, that regularly comes to the decking to steal the bread I put out for the birds. It has a dark patch of fur under its right eye, so it looks like it’s got two eyes on the same side of its head, one above the other. I have named him Isaiah, because, as I said to Debbie “one eye’s higher than the other”.

Notwithstanding what Eliot said about cats, the naming of squirrels is even more complex. Carey and the team down at wheelchair services, whose offices are down in the valley bottom, below our garden, share many of the same squirrels with us, and have named them all. I can’t remember offhand what they are all called, but I recall Rusty, Dusty, and Wilbert Whitear, who sounds like a Viking chieftain but is actually … a squirrel.

I’ve been having some trouble with one of the wheels on my wheelchair recently and I had occasion to phone up Wheelchair Services to arrange an engineer to call, and they were on voicemail. “Probably all out squirrel-spotting” observed Debbie, mordantly.

Not everybody shares mine and Carey’s view of squirrels. Bernard, my erstwhile compatriot in Calderdale Royal, came to visit during the week, bearing gifts as usual, in this case leeks and rhubarb from his farm, and while we sat having a cuppa and setting the world to rights, Isaiah appeared on the decking. Bernard denounced him as a tree-rat, and Isaiah continued nibbling at whatever he’d stolen from the bird food. For a moment I thought Bernard was going to emulate Freddie and hurl himself against the glass door of the conservatory, barking, but the opportunity passed.

Deb has been shepherding her various charges through various exams, and looking forward to half term. She was preparing a lesson about “informative text” and asked me why it was that the Queen ascended the throne in February 1952 but wasn’t crowned until June 1953. I explained that Coronations take a lot of organising, there’s the crowds to consider, the days are short and cold in February and people are less inclined to stand and cheer; plus, the Archbishop of Canterbury has to consult his diary. It’s not as if the heads of state who need inviting can come over at a moment’s notice, either. I mean, Malawi probably hasn’t got much on, but I would imagine that the diary of the President of the United States is pretty booked up weeks in advance. I agreed with her, though, that it was easier in the old days when the monarch simply wrested the crown of the bloody, severed head of his predecessor, on the battlefield, and jammed it on his own.

We’ve even been planning our camper van trip to the Hebrides later in the summer, if it happens. I say “if” because, like everything we do, it’s characterised by last minute panics, lack of forward planning, and frequent changes of plan. I had gone so far as to draw up a tentative itinerary, and show it to Debbie, which was probably a mistake, because she immediately started picking fault with it, and the Calmac brochure had to be re-consulted. She was disappointed to find that you can’t take cars to Iona.

“That’s because they want people to walk there. It’s a very special place.”

“Why, what is there to see there?”

“The ancient Christian ruins.”

“I don’t need to go to Iona to see that, I’m married to one.”

The latter half of the week was dominated by preparations for Owen’s visit. Owen, my school-friend from Wales, is the honorary Master of the Works when it comes to our continuing struggle to set this house to rights and make it more habitable for me in my wheelchair. This time around, we had a hit list of tasks which included trying to empty out the old camper van. Although the pressing issue of this decaying hulk in the driveway had been circumvented (literally) by Owen’s building of the ramp, it still needed doing, not least because inside it were boxes and boxes of books from my previous house moves that ultimately needed bringing in and shelving.

Owen’s list also included fitting a new door, repairing some damaged floorboards, and stuff like that, but this sort of thing is meat and drink to him. He can whip a door off its hinges in the time it takes to boil the kettle, and before you know where you are, he’s planing away at it and there’s a blizzard of shavings and then it’s hup! Hey presto! Buzz buzz buzz buzz and the screws are back in place. So it proved this visit, and by Saturday afternoon there was only the issue of the books and the camper to be resolved. The previous night we’d passed a convivial evening, and Owen had been telling us about his own wildlife encounters at home, where he’d observed a Pine-Marten coming out of his workshop one morning, sniffing at a pile of logs in his yard, and then sauntering off, completely uncaring, into the woods. It emerged during this conversation that Debbie thought a pine-marten was a type of bird, until I reminded her that we’d actually seen one in Scotland – she’d remarked it with the immortal exclamation “Oooh, look! A stole!”

It was another hot day, and I was looking forward to seeing some old friends again in the book-boxes. I sat in the driveway, tape-gun at the ready, and the plan was that Owen would bring the boxes out to me, one by one, I’d have a look inside and see what I wanted to rescue immediately, then re-box the rest, which were going to be stacked in the garage where he’d created new room for them by taking a carload of our rubbish to the tip. That was the plan. However...

Unfortunately, during the decade and a half that the van has sat there, while I was labouring under the delusion that the “camper” half of it was watertight and my books were safe, this was not the case. Two separate leaks had rendered many of the boxes unrecognisable, and likewise the books within. Some of them were so bad, said Owen, that you couldn’t tell where the boxes ended and the books began, or vice versa.

We still had to stick to the plan, but instead of it being a joyful occasion and a reunion with some companions of my past, it was a sorrowful acknowledgement, box after box, of the casualties and losses, which mounted inexorably as the afternoon progressed. I haven’t made a detailed count as yet – we modified the plan in the end to just putting the worst ones straight in a bin bag – and it’s not on a par with the burning of the library at Alexandria, for instance, as some of the losses can be replaced – but it still depressed me, and upset me to think that if I’d thought on, as they say round here, instead of just assuming they’d be OK, I might have saved them all. As it is, about a half to two-thirds of the books I have been accumulating all my life are now unrecognisable mush.

Kitty doesn’t like house alterations and general demolishment, so had made herself conspicuously absent during all the traipsing back and forth, the hammering, the drilling, and the banging of doors. It was only when Owen began to roll up his sleeping bag, preparatory for his journey back to Wales, that he found there was a cat nesting at the bottom of it.

And so it came to Saturday night, and we were finally able to relax a bit, loosen our stays, and watch England lose against Norway (no, not Eurovision, but football, and we narrowly avoided snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with the sort of forgettable, lacklustre performance for which England abroad has become famous). Having exhausted the entertainment possibilities of muddied oafs (or, since it was Norway, muddied Olafs) I flipped the channel and found myself in the middle of “Lord of the Rings”, with the instantly-recognisable figure of Ian McKellen as Gandalf fighting off various Orcs and Nazguls.

“We are NOT watching Harry bloody Potter!” declared Debbie, and – unwittingly – for once, she was absolutely right. Wizard recognition has never been her strong point.

In one of these channel hopping forays, I glimpsed, briefly, with the sort of horrified fascination usually reserved for crashes on the other side of the motorway, the Eurovision Song Contest. I had heard that there was an act appearing called “The Russian Grannies”, who were strongly fancied to run away with the event, and I blessed my good fortune in changing channels just as they were about to commence their number, Only to find, on its conclusion, that apparently I had been watching “Jedward”. The next performer on stage was from Moldova, which prompted Debbie to ask “are these made up countries, or what?” The Moldovan candidate had what looked like a wire coming out of the back of his head, and his backing singers moved as though they, too, were wired up to 240 volts AC. He was a bit like a gay Ricky Martin, if such a thing were possible.

I didn’t stay up to watch the voting, however, since I could have told you weeks ago who would vote for who, and lo, so it proved. I think it was Cyprus who were kind enough to save Englebert from the ignominy of “un point”, but by then I was past caring and went to bed. I was looking forward to settling down under the duvet with Peter Ackroyd (not personally, you understand, I am simply re-reading “Hawksmoor”) when the power went off, and the burglar alarm in the Lodge over the road started blaring into the night. I was in such a state of catatonia that I even slept through that.

This morning, eventually, the power came back on again, followed a couple of hours later by the internet (Virgin Media’s super-fast status confirmed yet again, ho, ho, this time, the dingoes were even late for their own power cut!) In the meantime, I had commenced sorting out the boxes of photographs uncovered in yesterday’s excavations of the old camper. Three hours later, I had reduced three boxes to, er, three boxes, but I had at least looked at every photograph in every folder and made a perfunctory initial sort of what was, actually, in some cases, photographic gold dust.

Here was my whole life laid out in front of me. Pictures of me from school days, pictures of me at college, pics from the Phillimore years, trips to Scotland, the Lakes, Paris and the Dordogne. If anybody ever wants to do an illustrated history of Steve Rudd, everything you need is in those boxes. Inevitably, there is sadness there, also, in the pictures of people I will never see again, for one reason or another. There was also an interesting cache of old family photographs which I had totally forgotten about, which sort of went some way to softening the blow of the loss of so many books.

That is life, in many ways, though. The things you thought you could rely on, like the books still being there, and still being OK, turn out to be problematic and unreliable, and the stuff you’d completely forgotten about turns out to be full of unexpected gems. And, as I’ve often said before, things you thought you had to worry about turn out to be insignificant, whereas things you gave to heed to at the time come back to haunt you, again and again.

On the plus side, the “house renovation project” has moved significantly forward, and I suppose I won’t need as many bookshelves for my office-library as I thought. In one way, it’s a bit depressing that my entire life to date can be condensed into three A4 boxes of photos, but on the other hand, at least I still have them. You can never quite get all the little balls into the middle of life’s maze, though. Like the trendy vicar in “Beyond the Fringe” says, there’s always a little bit in the corner you can’t reach. Or, as A. E. Housman again put it:

When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.

Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here's the fair,
But where's the lost young man?

Where’s the lost young man? He’s in these boxes, captured in slices of 1/60th of a second at F8, in sunshine like we don’t get these days (except we have this week) with other people who all went their separate ways and in places he will never revisit, each of those photos a thin, translucent slice of time, but as full of meaning and colour as a stained glass window. Photos of friends, some of whom are now old friends, familiar as bookends; as Paul Simon says:


Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.

Talking of stained glass reminds me that it is Sunday, and once again I should make my customary enquiry of Big G as to why he hasn’t been around much of late. In fact, I think, if my reckoning is correct, that today is Whit Sunday. A quick check online suggests that “Whit Sunday will not occur in 2012” but that can’t be right, surely? I know that, this year in particular, we’re all being coerced into compulsory celebration next weekend, in honour of the Jubilympics, but even so, Whitsun as a concept, a time when, according to one online encyclopaedia:

In Estonia and Finland eggs are dyed as at Easter because their hens don’t lay eggs until this time. In Germany the day is called “Pfingsten” and pink and red peonies, called “Whitsun roses”, are the symbols along with the birch trees. The English refer to the holiday as Whitsunday with reference to the white garments worn on Pentecost by the newly baptized. Some churches lower a carved dove into the congregation and call this “swinging the Holy Ghost”. Cattle are decorated and an overdressed person is said to be “dressed like a Whitsun ox”.

should not be allowed to go unacknowledged. So, I am acknowledging it here and now, and if I’ve got the wrong Sunday I’m sure my many ancestors will take me to task for it in the hereafter, once I’ve shown them their photos and asked them to identify themselves, that is. I don’t have any pink and white roses, but I’ve got a thousand flowers of Clematis.

Meanwhile, another week of work awaits the hands, brain and heart. But there’s still Sunday evening to look forward to, and working out how to pay for the latest repair to the present camper van (front suspension, don’t even ask) can wait til tomorrow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. If I’ve gone all “King James”, it’s probably under the influence of a small, black morocco bound volume with a metal clasp and thin india paper, which I found in amongst the photo stash. It is the Bible which belonged to Sarah Walker (nee Harper) my Great-Grandmother. In the front, it is inscribed in immaculate copperplate:

Sarah Ann Harper, Being a new year’s gift from her affectionate Grandfather, John Adamson, January 1865.

It is, of course, the King James version. In 1865, religion was full fat, high tar, with all the knobs, bells and whistles. I will have a proper look at it later. But in the meantime, there are cats to be fed, pots to be washed, and rhubarb to be boiled, and all those snapshots of my life until this evening, and all those Victorian and Edwardian lovers who walked the parish bounds at Whitsun-tide in their Sunday best, falling in love, having their Whitsun weddings to inspire gloomy old Philip Larkin, and then passing down their wonky genes to me, will have to just be patient and wait in the pages of history, for me to get back to them, one way or another.