Courage to Contradict

I have a very clever daughter. Well, I actually have three clever daughters but the one I’m thinking of is working in medical research towards her PhD at Trinity College, Dublin.

It’s really interesting. Did you know that there is a group of women known as the Dublin Cohort who were given contaminated Anti D treatment during childbirth which infected them with Hepatitis C for life? Many developed chronic liver disease but others were discovered to be clear of infection years later. The question is how did their immune systems overcome what is an incurable disease? Can the body’s natural killer cells be boosted to counteract infections such as Hep C and HIV? One hundred and seventy million people worldwide currently have Hep C and every one of them would be please to know that there are people like my daughter working long hours in lonely labs looking for new pathways to minimise the side-effects of treatments.

However, smart or not, this aforementioned daughter has gaping holes in her education. I stood with her recently in a well known supermarket as she deliberated in the cleaning products aisle. She gazed in consternation at the colourful bottles on display. She was having difficulty differentiating between detergent, with which to cleanse clothes, and fabric conditioner, with which to separate the tangled weave and leave garments smelling of 'summer breeze infusions with pure oxygen freshness'. Much to my amusement she was genuinely bewildered and admitted that she has never really known which was which. I blame her mother! When she had her head in Chemistry and Maths books I should have been teaching her to hand wash delicates and iron collars and cuffs first. Had I not neglected instruction in the essential art of homemaking she might have been better prepared for important life choices.

The Sunday Times ran a feature in their Style magazine this week detailing advice mothers give to their daughters on how to achieve success and happiness. Apparently formal education cannot teach the life lessons our offspring need to know. Among the ‘Pearls of Wisdom’ imparted by loving mothers to their daughters was the warning to beware of a boyfriend who fits your skinny jeans (because his legs should be bigger than yours) and the injunction to snog at least one man with really long hair!

I was clearing out some of my parents’ papers this week when I came upon their marriage certificate. I was amazed to find my mother’s occupation listed as a ‘domestic’. I had never heard this word used as a noun until we went to live in Zimbabwe where maids were officially known as domestic workers or ‘domestics’ for short. Ours was called Veronicah, or at least we thought that was her name until several months into our relationship she confessed that her name was actually Ronicah but a white woman had mistakenly added the prefix and she had not had the courage to contradict her. We settled on Vero.

My mother was not just domesticated ie a woman with finely tuned skills in polishing, sweeping, cooking, scrubbing and baking but she was a domestic ie a woman who was defined by this homely role. Like many in her generation she never had a paid job outside the home, in spite of a latent longing to be a teacher.

Being a domestic was certainly not bliss in the days before automatic washing machines, microwaves, dishwashers and dysons. Women had few choices and for those like my mum who grew up during the war, there were even fewer as the men went to fight and the women took over jobs on the farm. However, without any ‘ologies’ to her name her spirit was strong enough to break the mould, date a German prisoner of war and be the first in her village to go off to college in Scotland, no less.

Anyway, according to Style magazine I’m going to turn into my mother and my girls are going to turn into me:

‘The daughter of the mother is a total clone, a carbon copy from the elasticated waistband down and the doughy chest up.’

How did they know about my doughy chest? Heaven help them if this is true. I had more opportunities than my mother and I want my girls to climb higher than I. It’s character and courage that count for women. I don’t want to pass on beauty tips to my daughters like ‘a tan fades but wrinkles don’t’ or teach them how to make a fancy cocktail - they can discover those things for themselves. I want them to be strong on the inside, to remember who they belong to and to love people. I want them to have the strength to go for it, to say what their real name is, to stand up for what is right and good, to have the courage of their convictions and to keep on becoming till the end.

In final frustration I explained to my daughter that washing her clothes in Lenor would be like washing her hair with conditioner. Like Archimedes, another nerdy scholar who probably didn’t have detergent or conditioner in his famous bath, Eureka! She got it.

Love thy Neighbour

I stood in the butcher’s the other day and watched him crack pork ribs apart with a meat cleaver. Not unlike a machete, I thought. As he shook the powdered barbeque sauce into the bag my eyes wandered round the market square outside. The place was crowded with Saturday morning shoppers: families with young children by the hand or in buggies; elderly men and women out and about for a few ‘messages’; teenagers lounging on walls in the late summer sunshine watching the world go by. People were eating Cafolla’s ice cream and gazing into shop windows at the ‘Final reductions’ and new school shoes.

Fleetingly, because that’s all I could bear, I allowed my mind to imagine the carnage if suddenly neighbour turned on neighbour to torture and kill – right there in the street while the sun beamed down, with kitchen knives. How long does it actually take to kill a struggling, screaming man with a blade? Where does the killer cut first, and second? How much blood is in one person? A whole family?

Stop right there, I told myself. I paid for the ribs and began to plan the salads for the braai. I stepped back into the square and breathed a sigh of thanks for the normality of it all.

In the week when elections were held in Rwanda, I’ve been reading about the 1994 massacre when possibly one million people were slaughtered in just one hundred days. Some of the horror of it was captured in the film Hotel Rwanda which told the true story of Paul Rusesabagina who sheltered refugees at the Hotel des Mille Collines. He managed to rally all his connections to keep people and his conscience alive.

He and his convoy were among the lucky ones who escaped. From whom? Who was the enemy? The answer is bleak in its simplicity: the man next door. The government had adopted a new policy according to which everyone in the country’s Hutu majority group was called upon to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority (known affectionately as ‘cockroaches’). They imagined that by exterminating the Tutsi people they could make the world a better place and the mass killing followed. Sound familiar?

For the first time in its history, the United Nations used the word ‘genocide’ to describe what happened in Rwanda. Philip Gourevitch, author of We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda, reckons that the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. When I was growing up I often asked my parents who had lived during WW2 why they and their generation didn’t intervene to stop the Holocaust. Now I know why. They didn’t know until it was too late and anyway they were busy getting on with their own lives. Just like me in 1994. I was preparing to go and live in Africa with my young family when I saw live TV footage of a roadside machete attack in Rwanda. It chills me still to recall it. I was teaching in a school at the time where the caretaker was horrified that I would even consider taking children to the ‘dark continent’. I pointed out to him that our own history in Northern Ireland is bloody and violent to which he replied, ‘Ah, but here they only shoot you.’

Most people in Rwanda were not shot. No quick and clean executions but door to door hacking with machetes and ‘masus’ – clubs studded with nails – neighbour betraying and murdering neighbour. Tutsis accepted death as inevitable – warnings were sounded in regular radio bulletins. There was no escape. Some killers cut Achilles tendons so that they could stop to eat or sleep, leaving their victims in agony till morning and certain death. As in any conflict there are too many unanswerable questions: How did so many Tutsis allow themselves to be killed? How did so many Hutus allow themselves to kill? People used to obeying orders obeyed one too many, leaving the nameless and numberless dead.

Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland are neighbours. We have more in common with each other than with people anywhere else in the world. One newspaper headline last week declared that Republican dissidents are on the rise. We must stand together to resist violence because when the blind lead the blind, both fall into the ditch.

It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.

Primo Levi, 1986, The Drowned and the Saved

Old Photographs

I’m back in the wet after three weeks sunning in Florida and Indiana. I took a pile of old photographs over to my uncle’s – small sepia and black and white images of days long gone: a young couple, she bow legged and he in an ill-fitting suit with his hair slicked down posing outside a thatched cottage – my grandparents during their courtship.

I enjoyed listening to Ray reminisce about his days growing up on the farm. My favourite photos are of the horses, Dick and Captain, straining against the plough as they drew clean furrows in the resistant soil. I was thrilled to see the Amish people still ploughing in this way in Shipshewana. There is one beautiful picture of Granddad Harrison tending the huge carthorse while his tiny son grips the reins. The child is smiling and probably thought he was actually holding the horse when in fact his father was in control. A truth in black and white.

I spent my last week in Florida with Robin Mark and the band. People love to worship with them and I was moved by listening to stories of lives touched by his songs and music. He also tells a good tale and one of his favourites is about how his wife pleaded with him not to throw her a party for her 50th. Of course, he ignored her and we celebrated in style with an Abba tribute band, no less! He talks about how he dug out some old photographs for the occasion and discovered a young man staring back at him with hope, confidence and expectation – his younger self. He wonders whether a photograph taken today would show the same hope and optimism and sings a memorable little song:

Old photographs, I’m looking at scenes from history
Who are those people, where is that place?
Is that really me?

I’m older but no wiser; you’ve lost a little weight
Are those angelic faces the ones who stare across my breakfast table?

Old photographs, sweet memories
Happy days gone by
I love them and I hate them
For the camera does not lie

It’s my birthday today. I’ve also been looking at old images of me as a little girl. The scary thing is that I’m still wearing my hair like that! I have a cheeky smile because all is right with the world – I’m loved and happy and the future looks bright.

And what about now, half a century later? Well, I'm loved and happy and on most days the future still looks bright. As Robin sings, I don’t always feel wiser but I want to live what’s left in faith, not fear. I am thankful for the days. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places and I have a delightful inheritance.

One of my most treasured companions along the way has been Oswald Chambers who died in 1917 but whose writings continue to inspire. Today I read his challenge to keep reaching for the highest:

‘There is more than we have got at as yet.’

My Hero

We’ve been stuck in Fort Wayne airport without coffee for hours so what else is there to do but blog?

As the vuvuzela screech in B flat subsides and the adoration and adulation of the World Cup evaporates, I’ve been thinking about how we choose our heroes. We cheer and get excited about eleven men chasing a ball round a pitch but are less enthusiastic about welcoming disfigured and damaged soldiers home from the war in Afghanistan.

This week I’ve been staying with one of my personal heroes. Uncle Ray is my late mother’s younger brother. As a teenager he left the farm and decided to go off to study at London Bible College. Before graduating, he and his fellow students had to pull a cart round the roads of rural England, stopping in the evenings to hold meetings and sleeping on the floor in churches. They vied with each other to get the space in the pulpit which was carpeted. Like the first disciples, they weren’t allowed to carry any money and they lived off the goodwill of farmers and local people. Six young handsome men stare joyfully from old photographs. They were trained and ready to take on the world for God. My uncle admits he thought he knew it all then. His enthusiasm and confidence knew no bounds.

He went off to teach in Sierra Leone, West Africa, where he met and married an American missionary, Arlene. Together they taught at the Bible College in Freetown and in the years that followed they had four fine sons. For many years they lived in the bush, 120 miles up country in a town called Kabala, accessible only on dirt roads which were impassable when it rained. It was on one of these roads that Ray and his second son Tim, then 10, were travelling on a motorbike when they had a horrible accident which resulted in terrible injuries for both and a long and agonising eight hour journey to get to a hospital. Tim’s leg needed serious medical attention for years afterwards so finally the family returned to the US, where they continued to work in the Missionary Church.

Tim went on to graduate from college and was talking about getting married when at the age of twenty-three he was killed in a car accident. The family had to make the decision to turn off the machine and let their precious son go to God.

Last year, Ray suffered from multiple myeloma, spent many weeks in hospital and went through a stem cell transplant. Over the months, he has slowly regained strength and has returned to work part-time.

Now 73, Uncle Ray should be embittered and angry. Where was his God when he and Tim lay bleeding at the side of an African track; when they pleaded for Tim’s life after the car accident; when he faced cancer treatment? But he’s not bitter; he’s quietly, sorry make that noisily, full of good humour and bad jokes. Here’s his current favourite:

There were three devout men: a Catholic priest, a Baptist pastor and a Jewish rabbi. They were arguing about which of them had the greatest powers of religious persuasion. So they agreed that each of them would go into the woods in turn and attempt to convert a bear to faith.

When the Catholic priest returned he was delighted at his success. He told the others that he had anointed the bear with holy water and that the bear would soon be taking his first communion. It was the pastor’s turn next and he was equally pleased with his efforts. He said that he had preached the word to the bear and that the bear was going to be baptised the next Sunday.

When the rabbi returned from the woods he was badly injured and covered in blood. The others asked what had happened and he said woefully: ‘Perhaps it was a mistake to start with circumcision.’

To me a hero is someone who knows how to handle Plan B – someone who isn’t totally destroyed by life’s tragedies and disappointments but who still chooses to live, love and laugh. In the days following Tim's death, Ray would go into his study and decide whether he believed in God for that day. An act of the will. One day at a time.

Through the sadness and pain he exudes warmth, acceptance and compassion which touch the lives of everyone who knows him. He’s not pretending; he’s living life in its raw reality with a faith in God which is inspirational.

He often says that most of the things we moan and complain about can be fixed. One of Ray’s good friends, Donna Cleven, wrote a poem inspired by his example: (Remember we’re in the US)

Problems (or not)

Here’s something I have learned,
Though at first I thought it funny,
It’s really not a problem at all
If it can be solved with money.

You can’t buy health or strength,
Or the love of a prodigal child.
You can’t buy peace of mind,
Or reason for a friend gone wild.

You lost your theatre tickets?
You burned the dinner rolls?
An ink pen in the load of wash?
Your favourite jeans have holes?

Your dishwasher sprung a leak?
A fender bender at the mall?
Remember: if it can be fixed with money
It’s really not a problem at all.

I feel as if I’ve been staying with a living saint this week. What a privilege! I will be happy to be half as faithful as he. I love and salute you, Uncle Ray. You’re my hero!

Happy Holidays

What is it with the Americans? We’re in Florida – the sunshine state. The man and I are having a week to ourselves before we fly up to Indiana to see family and then return for the madness that is touring with Robin Mark. I often think I’m way too old to be a groupie but for as long as I’m married to an old rock ‘n’ roller, that’s the way it is.

You see – there it is already. An Americanism: ‘way too old’. They creep in, uninvited. When we touched down in Orlando, we were informed that we would, ‘Be deplaning momentarily’. Surely ‘momentarily’ means for a moment, not in a moment and ‘deplane’?! It’s happening all the time. It’s not just that they can’t spell: ‘center’ ‘theater’ ‘traveling’ and ‘color’ but we’re all starting to say, ‘I’m good’ when we clearly mean well and ‘Can I get?’ when we order in a restaurant.

As a teacher of the mother tongue, I’m offended and I want to hate America. I’ve been watching and listening and I can’t escape the feeling that I’m on a film set. The people I observe appear to be pretending to be Americans – loud and in your face. They seem to be putting on an act which involves articulating absolutely everything they think and feel with the volume turned up. Surely this show can’t be just for me. Is it possible that they actually speak like this all of the time? Even when visitors are not here?

The house we’re renting contains a file with instructions which advised me to ‘Check which day the waste hauler will be servicing you.’ It sounds like more fun than it was. We had to put the ‘garbage’ out at 6am to outwit the racoons. We were promised they would make a mess of the lawn. I got up early to witness this and was disappointed not to catch them at it.

Here we have ‘eateries’ and ‘soft shoulders’ instead of hard. Menus offer ‘housemade’ sauces but nearby there is a ‘Home for sale.’ When something is ‘on sale’ it’s not simply available, it’s cheaper. At the end of this road there is a sign declaring ‘No outlet’ meaning a dead end and we wait in a ‘line’ not a queue.

However, America grows on you. They do service well if you can bear the constant injunction to ‘Have a nice one’. The streets are laid out in grids which make finding somewhere much easier ‘Corner of Cortez Boulevard and 46th’. That is unless the place you want to find is the town centre – there isn’t one. Shopping is done in the ubiquitous ‘malls’. Good word, although it should be spelled ‘maul’ because mauled is how I feel when I’ve spent more than ten minutes in one. I hate shopping at the best of times and all of my senses are assaulted by consumerism US style.

But they have sun here. The beaches of the Florida Keys are magnificent – long narrow stretches of glaring white sand. Too hot to walk on at times we tiptoe into the green tepid waters of the Mexican Gulf where we watch with delight as sandpipers and snowy egrets dance their way along the shoreline. And the sunsets are spectacular as the heat melts into the water and pink diffuses across the sky. The house overlooks a private lake. Herons spread their wings to dry and turtles bask on a nearby rock. There is also a pool ‘out back’. Where more perfect for two wrinklies who haven’t yet outgrown the joys of skinny dipping? Life is good.

My favourite cheesy American sign this week is: ‘A smile is a curve that makes everything straight.’ Happy Holidays!

Musings on Mortality

I went up to my mother’s grave this week expecting to see her name on the headstone, but it isn’t there yet.

Somehow it’s not real until it’s official, like a signature. The absence of her details allows me to believe, fleetingly, that she’s not really gone – not completely. I fancy that she’s here somewhere, waiting in the shadows with a shopping list and toenails that want cutting.

She died in January and I’ve been to four funerals since. All of them the parents of friends or relatives, as it should be – in the right order. Some of the funeral services were light and hopeful with intimations of eternity. One second cousin gave a long, moving and humorous tribute to his mother in which he recalled his father and his two brothers making music at home on the farm – the father on the fiddle or saxophone, his brother on the guitar, him on the piano while the youngest boy played on the linoleum! At least they’ll all be able to manage the harps and trumpets on the other side.

At that same funeral I stood by the graveside with my arm linked with my uncle Willie’s, who is 86 with a mop of pure white hair. As the family walked solemnly past us following the committal, the 90-year-old widower stopped to shake my uncle’s hand. ‘And is this your wife?’ he asked, looking at me. I quickly explained who I was, much to the delight and amusement of the bereaved sons and grandchildren behind him. Even in death, there is laughter. We can’t help it. Our survival instinct is so powerful that it overcomes our deepest grief and urges us to live on.

Other people prefer to leave it to the professionals to say something about the departed. One flew with the RAF in the war and might well have met my own father. Koch and Chestnutt are both unusual names, except we didn’t know each other then and it’s too late now to ask the old airmen.

It’s too late for a lot of things – we all could have been kinder, more patient and loving with our aging parents. We could have spent more lazy hours just listening rather than rushing to visit and then dashing off to do.

Do funerals age you? I think they can trigger an awareness of opportunities missed and a fear of too few days to fulfil our dreams. Several in a row can leave us in a stupor of fatalism and rob us of our own moment to live, laugh and love.

A cousin met a man recently who spoke well of my father and paid tribute to his memory. He said that he had been held in such high regard that people who had never met him felt as if they knew him. I still talk to people, twenty-five years later, who loved him and are grateful to him for being like Jesus to them. What a legacy!

During the vigil before my mother’s death, I hoped that she might have something of import to say. However, she was too tired to pass on anything deep and meaningful. I was reconciled to this with the thought that what my mother, and father, gave to me was me! All that I am and enjoy came through their genes, their influence and their example. She didn’t need to say anything more. All her wise words are already in my head and she lived a life of love and sacrifice which I can never hope to emulate. That’s enough to be going on with.