It has been a busy week in the Holme Valley. Seamlessly, the summer that never was is transiting into Autumn, by degrees. So the sun is still warm, when it shines, but its light has a mellowness that I only ever notice at this time of year, it’s the colour of Monbazilliac. Which reminds me, one day I must save up and buy another bottle of Monbazilliac, just in case any of these people who habitually send me doorknobs in the post are reading this.
So, it’s been windy, but warm; there has been some rain, but, conversely, maybe even perversely, ever since we got back from Arran, it hasn’t absolutely pissed down like it did all summer. There is so much to do in the garden, especially re-potting seedlings and herbs that I hope to nurture indoors over the winter, so as soon as I have posted this Epiblog, I will be up to my elbows in John Innes before you can say “Monty Don”.
Matilda continues to find her feet. Finding Matilda’s feet is not a difficult task, because they are enormous. In fact, if the old wives’ tale about being able to tell the eventual size of a kitten from the size of its paws is correct, Matilda should be about 12 feet high, a veritable Calico Cat lioness. I can only hope that, at the age of 9, she has probably stopped growing. Given the preponderance we have for turning every animal in our possession into a furry barrel, and given that Matilda has already progressed quite a distance down that road all on her own accord, the signs are not good.
Yesterday, she met Zak and Freddie for the first time. Zak trembled and stayed in the chair he calls his. She didn’t bother him, and he didn’t bother her. Freddie, who is getting on in years and probably elderly and confused, seemed to want to make friends, however, which earned him a hiss and several growls for his trouble, and – when he didn’t get the message – Matilda then reinforced it by rising from her bed and advancing on him, in full-on “Mighty Battle Maiden” mode, until Debbie grabbed Matilda and Granny grabbed Freddie. Poor old Freddie. Maybe he thought it was Kitty. Still, it’s early days yet. At least when Matilda does start going out in the outside world, if she does happen to meet one of the other inhabitants of the neighbourhood, she will be hard enough to stand her ground. I only hope that I don’t eventually find her dragging in recently deceased squirrels through the cat flap.
The month of September has found us both immersing ourselves in our work. Debbie has four classes to prepare for next week, and will be doing some tutor mentoring on Friday, so she has a full week ahead. As for me, I’ve got such a stack of work to do that it tires me just thinking about it. But in a sense, that’s good, in that it stops me brooding over Kitty. It is, however, stultifyingly boring for the most part, especially doing the year end accounts for 2011, which I have to submit soon, to avoid being fined by Companies House. I must make a note one day to find out if MPs are automatically fined for missing a deadline for submitting detailed schedules of what they spent on (say) paperclips in the previous year; somehow, I suspect not.
Anyway, I chose this crazy life, and I must dree my weird, as they say, north of the Border. Although when I chose this crazy life, it was never intended to have this outcome. Had I known then, what I know now, the outcome would have been very different. And maybe somewhere, in an alternative universe, it was, and is. But you have to start from where you are. I must admit, I have had some unexpected difficulty in coping with the advent of Matilda; on the one hand, the house would be very bleak and empty without any animals at all, but on the other hand, I can’t help but feel it’s all very sudden, very soon. I could have done with a bit more time to mourn Kitty properly, although of course there was no time to do anything other than say “Yes, we’ll have her”, otherwise she wouldn’t be here at all. In any sense of the word “here”. It seems a bit unfair on Matilda, as well. As Bernard, bless him, pointed out to me when I was complaining that I thought Matilda wouldn’t be anything like the companion of my midnight writing hours that Kitty turned out to be, “Give her a bloody chance, lad, she’s only been here two weeks!”
So, a couple of nights ago, I enticed Matilda up into Zak’s armchair after Debbie had gone to bed, settled her down, and gave her a good talking to. I told her all about Kitty, and I actually said sorry to her for not appreciating her. I told her that now she was here, come what may, she was our cat, and I would use my strong right arm to protect her, whether holding sword or pen. She yawned, blinked, then curled round and put her nose under her tail.
Sword or pen; it does seem a bit like wartime at the moment. Maybe it was like this, all those years ago, back in September 1939. The phoney war. That autumn when we were at war, but not at war. The real battles lay ahead, but for now it was a case of take down the lanterns, bring the chairs in from the garden, shut up the summerhouse, put up blackouts, mine the beaches, and Dig for Victory. I’ve been thinking a lot about that era this week, because I’ve been thinking about my Gran, one of two, both sadly no longer with us, but in this case my mother’s mother, Sarah Jane Fenwick, born Sarah Jane Walker in 1888 in Hailgate, Howden.
It all started when we cleared out the old camper van. The old camper van in the driveway, when it ceased to be driveable, was used by us as a repository of boxes of “stuff” from my old house. However, that description might give you the slightly misleading idea that the boxes of “stuff” had been opened and inspected as recently as 1996, when we moved here. In fact, some of them were from my flat in Chichester, and had never been opened or unpacked from the move to Barnsley in 1989. And some of them were boxes of stuff from my Dad’s house, when it was cleared out after his death in 1992, and some of those boxes were boxes of “stuff” from my Gran’s flat, when it was cleared out after her death, in 1980.
So, in a sense, it came as no surprise to me when I opened one of the boxes and found, along with a hoard of old photographs, the old brown biscuit tin that used to sit on the mantelpiece at her old house in Ladywellgate, Welton, when I used to go and visit her as a kid and – if I was on my best behaviour – occasionally be given a ten shilling note. (A long bus-ride from Hull, 10 miles out into the country, it seemed like a whole day’s adventure in those days, courtesy of East Yorkshire Motor Services). It never occurred to me, during those visits, to ask what was in the biscuit tin; at the time, I was more preoccupied with being allowed to play in the garden and climb on top of the solid, substantial, brick-built air raid shelter that still stood there. That in itself was a risky business in short trousers, often resulting in skinned knees or grazed shins, not to mention incurring the wrath of my mother for messing up my best visiting clothes.
Now, I was holding the very same biscuit-tin in my hands, wondering what was in it, and turning it round curiously. I prised it open. At first, I thought it was full of letters, but as I removed each piece of paper, I realised what I had were in fact, empty envelopes, most of which had things scribbled on the back in Granny Fenwick’s handwriting. I read a few of them, and realised they were her recipes! Gold dust! Much, much better than a tin of old white fivers. I remember her cooking with great fondness. She used to make wholesome, delicious food, particularly her baking, savoury and sweet, from bacon and egg pie (which today would be called a quiche, I guess) to the traditional Yorkshire curd cheese cake. I have been blithely telling people all these years that my Granny was a great cook, and she used to make things up as she went along, and just throw stuff together and it all worked, when in fact here was the evidence that she noted things down meticulously and always went by the book. I have no way of knowing where she got the recipes from: they may have been handed down by her mother, the redoubtable Great-Grandma Walker, or they may have been noted down from other books, or off the sides of packets and tins of ingredients, or out of magazines. Judging from the dates on the readable postmarks, they were from the time after 1928 when she had separated from Grandad Fenwick, and was living in Elloughton Dale Cottages with such of her daughters as remained unmarried, a dwindling number as three of them were to become wartime brides, leaving only my mother (the youngest), who didn’t marry my father until 1955.
There are also various household hints and remedies – if a cat washes over its ears, it is going to rain; badly smeared glass can be cleaned with a burnt cork dipped in salt, and many others in a similar vein. We laugh at such fancies these days, but they are a reminder of times when people did perhaps live in a more harmonious way with nature, observing its times and seasons, and in their make-do and mend philosophy, of using old socks to make covers for new shoes to prevent them being scuffed, and the like, they presage in many ways the green and self-sufficiency ideas that characterised the growth of environmental issues in the 1970s. Sadly, I doubt very much that anyone will be picking through notes found in a biscuit tin dating from 2012, and finding handy hints on how to recycle your broken I-pod as a door-wedge.
Much of the make-do was a product of wartime, of course, dipping your legs in gravy browning to look as though you were wearing stockings and the like. I doubt there was much in the way of a social life in Elloughton in the 1940s, and most of Granny Fenwick’s gravy browning probably went to making gravy, though at least they were spared the attentions of the Luftwaffe, who used to make sure they jettisoned any unused bombs on Hull on their way back to base, after a long night spent bombing the crap out of the West Riding. There was an anti-aircraft site at Riplingham Crossroads, though, intended to defend Blackburns’ aircraft factory and the flying school, a manifestation of war which must have been near enough to have rattled Granny Fenwick’s windows while she was busy helping defeat Hitler by making plum jam in the only saucepan that hadn’t been turned into a Spitfire. It would have been too neat an outcome to have had my father manning it, though; at the time, his anti-aircraft gun was 250 miles away, on top of the cliffs at Fairlight, and he was more concerned with the welfare of his mother, Granny Rudd, back home in Hull, who was rendered homeless in March 1941 when a German parachute mine took out the family home, and most of Bean Street, just off Hessle Road, killing 16 people and injuring a further 22.
Maybe we could do with re-discovering some of that wartime ingenuity to make things go further and last longer, to reverse, or at least slow down, the relentless cycle of consumerism and demand. If The Blight continue their own personal blitz on Britain’s economy, we may have to. If the climate continues its seemingly-inexorable progress towards the hell-in-a-handbasket that is “global warming”, we may be forced to confront these unpleasant realities about the unsustainable nature of the way we’ve been living. The paradox is, of course, that to get us out of the global trough, the slough of economic despond, governments could do with us all starting to buy stuff we don’t want, don’t need, already have or can’t afford, all over again. But there isn’t an inexhaustible supply of petrol to chuck on the bonfire. There isn’t even an inexhaustible supply of petrol, which is another problem. However, there may be an answer in that the entire area surrounding recycling and sustainability in itself presents a business opportunity. A British recycling industry, making sustainable products to help with sustainability, sustainably, could provide jobs and export technology to the rest of the world. But it needs a push from the top. In the war, when the AA guns were banging and crashing from the White Cliffs of Dover to the Yorkshire Wolds, we invented radar in about two years from a standing start. To my mind, the situation regarding climate change is just as grave, today, as the threat posed by Nazism in 1940. We need a few more “action this day” type memos from Number 10, but the problem is that DEFRA, whose pigeon it is, are much more interested in killing badgers (needlessly, and to no avail) than in saving the planet.
My calendar of Saints tells me that today, 16th September, is St Euphemia’s day. Pausing to reflect that “Euphemia” would have been a good name for Matilda if she hadn’t been Matilda, I hastened to look up St Euphemia (ooer, that sounds rather naughty) on the internet.
St Euphemia it seems, was a martyred virgin of Chalcedon. She lived in the 3rd century AD. She was the daughter of a senator named Philophronos and his wife Theodosia, in Chalcedon, located across the Bosporus from the city of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul). From her youth she was consecrated to virginity. I have known many girls like that throughout my life. Or so they told me, anyway.
The governor of Chalcedon, Priscus, had made a decree that all of the inhabitants of the city take part in sacrifices to the pagan deity Ares. Euphemia was discovered with other Christians who were hiding in a house and worshiping the Christian God, in defiance of the governor's orders. Because of their refusal to sacrifice, they were tortured for a number of days, and then handed over to the Emperor for further torture. Euphemia, the youngest among them, was separated from her companions and subjected to particularly harsh torments, including the wheel, in hopes of breaking her spirit. It is believed that she died of wounds from a wild bear in the arena under Emperor Diocletian, although some sources say that it was a lion.
Eventually, a cathedral was built in Chalcedon over her grave. She is, apparently, credited with solving one of the major heretical disputes in the Orthodox Church, from beyond the grave: the holy Patriarch Anatolius of Constantinople proposed that the Council of Chalcedon submit the decision of the Church dispute about whether Jesus had a dual nature, divine and human in one body, or a single, divine nature, to the Holy Spirit, via the medium of St Euphemia, whose wonder-working relics had been discovered during the Council's discussions. The Orthodox hierarchs and their opponents wrote down their confessions of faith on separate scrolls and sealed them with their seals. They opened the tomb of Saint Euphemia and placed both scrolls upon her bosom. Then, in the presence of the emperor Marcian (450-457), the participants of the Council sealed the tomb, putting on it the imperial seal and setting a guard to watch over it for three days.
After three days the patriarch and the emperor in the presence of the Council opened the tomb with its relics: the scroll with the Orthodox confession was held by St Euphemia in her right hand, and the scroll of the heretics lay at her feet. St Euphemia, as though alive, raised her hand and gave the scroll to the patriarch.
The account continues, rather drily:
“After this miracle many of the hesitant accepted the Orthodox confession, while those remaining obstinant in the heresy were consigned to the Council's condemnation and excommunication.”
While I agree, it does have echoes of “all those who didn’t just witness a miracle report to the torture chamber at 0900 hours tomorrow” nevertheless if we could but find a similar figure in this country, we could use her to resolve all sorts of disputes, from whether or not to have gay women lesbian skateboarding bishops to the result of the boat race or the outcome of the next election. My only fear is that the job would be given to someone inherently untrustworthy, such as Margaret Thatcher, and she certainly caused more than enough trouble while alive.
As well as St Euphemia’s Day, today is also, of course, Battle of Britain Sunday, and it would be remiss of me not to mark it in some way, much as I have reservations (and always have had) about the fusion of acts of war with acts of religion and remembrance. As with remembrance Sunday, I find it personally more fulfilling to concentrate on the sacrifice than on the “glorification” of war, and the “endorsement” of military action by a higher power. Since my father (thankfully, or I wouldn’t have been here today to write this drivel – quiet at the back) survived the war, I don’t have a horse in this particular race, except to remember Debbie’s distant ancestor and first cousin twice removed, F/L Jack Ross DFC, who died when his Hawker Hurricane crashed into the Irish Sea in 1941. And, indeed, to remember with sadness all the other young lives of promise cut short by war, just or unjust, necessary or unnecessary.
So, as the second half of September comes in, and the autumnal Equinox looms large on the calendar, it’s time to take stock, and prepare. One day, next year, perhaps, there might be white birds over the blue cliffs of Dover, next summer, Matilda might be happy to sit out on the decking with us, like Kitty, Dusty, Nigel and Russell before her, who knows. For now, it’s time to make sure all is safely gathered in, time to batten down any hatches you can still reach. The real battles lie ahead, but for now it is a case of take down the lanterns, bring the chairs in from the garden, shut up the summerhouse, put up blackouts, mine the beaches, and Dig for Victory.
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