I Bless the Day

The attic room at the top of the tall Belfast town house was chilly, even in summer.  I shared the slanting space with my little sister, Pauline Mary. She is just sixteen months younger, but littler than me, nonetheless. The house faced the busy Oldpark Road, a wide thoroughfare which led up to Cliftonville Circus and onwards towards Ballysillan. The bus stop was right outside the house, a fact that irritated English visitors, but never us. We were used to the slither and smack of doors and the regular expiration of air, like a sigh from a large animal. A garden the size of a picnic rug protected us from the road, the narrow space bordered by a low wall sprouting a dusty hedge. There was also a fuchsia bush, a splash of colour against the grey, and I showed my sister how to suck honey from the base of the waxy flower.

It matters where you come in a family. I am the bossy big sister. On Sundays we were taken to church at least four times: morning Sunday School, morning service, afternoon Sunday School and evening service, at our own church or in one of the mission halls where our father worked. In between (was there any in between?) we were allowed to engage in Sunday activities only: no ball games, riding bikes or reading comics. We did not own a television.

I can recall assembling my siblings in the parlour where the two bar heater took pride of place. I arranged them on the settee and the meeting began. I led the service, chose the hymns and preached the sermon. I think I put my sister in charge of giving out the hymnbooks.  She was compliant, as ever.

Our mother made our clothes. One year our Sunday-go-to-meeting outfits consisted of blue grey tweed skirts and bolero jackets with matching hairbands. I vividly remember suffering agonies of shame in case the fabric bands did not properly constitute a head covering. Would God be happy with the hairbands? My sister was not worried. I was older, so if there was any divine retribution, it would fall on me.

I always got the blame. She discovered early on that if she kept quiet and stayed under the radar, I would fight the battles for her. And battles there were aplenty:  wearing trousers to church, reading non-Sunday books, begging to go to the cinema, refusing to go to the Girls' Brigade/Christian Endeavour/Sunday School.

Our father was a preacher and as we grew older, he took us with him to the meetings. Too young to play the organ or give our testimonies, we trundled up to the front to recite Bible verses or perform. We cannot have been more than seven or eight when we sang acapella:

Clean hands or dirty hands,

Brown eyes or blue,

Pale cheeks or rosy cheeks,

Jesus loves you.

I was dark-haired with wan skin, so I dirtied my hands for dramatic effect and splayed my fingers on cue. My eyes are blue so I twinkled them in harmony with the notes.  My little sister has brown eyes so the song worked, but as I recall the experience I am amazed that our parents allowed her to point cheerfully to her rosy cheeks.  She was, in fact, born with a birthmark on her face which may have added weight to the spiritual message, but now feels like exploitation. Pauline bore it all without complaint.

 

Pauline and me

Back in the attic, the room glowing orange from the streetlights, we sang the Everly Brothers in two-part harmony: 'I bless the day I found you/I want to stay around you/ Now and forever/ let it be me.' At Christmas we lay together listening for Santa's sleighbells and squealing with delight at the discovery of an orange in the toe of one of our father's old socks.

When we moved to Newtownards, our lives went in different directions: different schools; different friendship groups; different careers.  At one point, however, we did date brothers: John and Sandy and wasted innocent sunny days together among the yellow broom in the Easter Field. My quiet sister worked in Cafolla's after school and on Saturdays - always earning her own money, always independent.  She became a nurse, riding a scooter to work in the Ulster Hospital and going on to qualify as a midwife. She married the naughty boy she always complained about in school and is the mother of four lovely young adults and grandmother to her precious Evie.

Now she is sixty and I am blessed to know her. She has shown great resilience and love in supporting her husband through unimaginably sad family loss; she leads the local community midwifery team with justice and fortitude; she has helped all of the women in the family through the traumas of pregnancy, childbirth and breast-feeding; she meets crises with inner calm and she demonstrates a spiritual strength borne of a faith that has survived a plethora of meetings and a big sister who would only let her hand round the songbooks.

Congratulations, Pauline, on your sixtieth birthday! I love you and am glad God gave you to us - born in our parents' bed and beloved by all.

Thank you for being my sister.

 

Pauline

Pushback

The airport at Port Elizabeth is blurry.  The man on the security desk asks me why I am crying and I tell him that I am leaving my baby behind. I can see her waving through the greasy glass.

We left her babies on the stoop. They were crying too - the four-year-old because granny was going and the one-year-old because his brother was upset. Right next to us a Cape Turtle Dove hunkered down on her nest observing the farewells with a wary eye. Frangipani flowers were crushed into sickly perfume beneath our wheels as the huge iron gate clunked behind us.

Maria and Willem with Teddy

I am alone for the first time in two weeks. My sighs subside and I am intrigued by the intricacies of human interaction in an airport lounge.  Everyone in an airport wants to be somewhere else so eyes are alert, glancing at screens and elbows are used as weapons to secure a seat against the probability of delays. Most nationalities speak in stage whispers, conscious that they are sharing a tense and sacred space. The English and the Americans do not.

In front of me a couple of Londoners plonk themselves down. She produces an encyclopaedic size hardback which she scratches open with her talon-like nails painted in holiday cerise.  She does not get the chance to read her tome, however, because he has just purchased the latest copy of Hello! magazine. She is a listener, which is just as well. In that irritatingly loud rasp used by people who enjoy the sound of their own voice, he begins to regale her, the woman in the sari sitting beside them, an elderly Afrikaans couple and me with the latest in celebrity and royal gossip.

I have chosen NOT to buy the magazine precisely because I do not care that John Torode is engaged and what will they eat at the reception or whether Kate Windsor is broody again and how many nannies it might take to manage her growing family but I'm going to hear it all anyway: Doesn't that Charlotte look just like the Queen and what kind of a name is Louis, isn't that French, oh yes Mountbatten, came to a nasty end, those Irish!

I shift my attention to the next aisle. A mother moves purposefully towards her young teenage daughter who is clinging on to summer in her jersey shorts, her feet on the seat under her, legs splayed. Her mum feigns interest in a phone while gently nudging the girl's knees together. A protective gesture. The girl complies but does not know why.

Confusion reigns as passengers begin to surge away from Gate 6 to Gate 5.  Which one? The flight is already late. There is no announcement but an African albino employee with burnt blotches on his face holds his phone close to his eyes and gestures vaguely. It appears that both gates are open to speed up boarding. I am all for that.

In Johannesburg I am lost. The airport is huge and famous for misdirecting luggage. I get my case and finally manage to find the drop off.  Heathrow here I come! When we arrive at Terminal 5 in the wee hours, I walk cautiously along the jetty. This is the exact spot where I suffered pulmonary embolisms four years ago but this time the tight socks, the midnight meanders and the dreaded Clexane have done the trick.

I am in BA's North Lounge for eight hours! I decide to have a shower. I remove my watch and then discover that my bracelet is missing. I rush back to security where I know I have left it in the tray because it always sets off the beeper. I wish I'd just beeped, because now I am bereft.  The manager looks but finds nothing. Report to missingx.com.  I lose perspective and weep my way along the concourse. It's not the financial loss, it's the sentimental value of the little charms which remind me of my grandchildren -  a kind of rosary: a bow tie for the sartorial Finlay; a flower for green-fingered Edith; a jewel the colour of God for Jasper; a red rose for Eleanor Rose; a bee for Bea; a South African flag for Sebastian and a teddy-bear for...Teddy!

I see a gangly man dancing towards a cluster of people and I actually hear him announce excitedly 'OMG, I love y'all, I am American!'

Back in the lounge I lunge towards a young mother battling with a crying toddler, a buggy and a mound of bags. I ask her if she is travelling alone.  She gestures in contempt at a good-looking but useless man tapping on his phone, oblivious to his wife's struggles. I melt into my seat as he lifts the screaming infant and tries to walk manfully down the aisle pretending to be a father.
Young men in suits sit at a glass shelf with computers connecting them to a better world while the colourless morning presses against the window. Above the drinks stand are suspended plastic curved train tracks, glittery pink like something in a pre pubescent girl’s bedroom. A woman tries to pour a glass of wine but struggles to extricate the bottle from its metal holder and so lifts bottle, holder and all. Making a meal of it.

Beside me there is a family reunion: a loud curly-haired little boy is the centre of attention. Can I have a hug, an aunt gushes. No. Pushed back.  She remembers and is embarrassed. The boy is not. He is clutching an oversized iPad, housed in a bright blue soft-edged plastic cover, supplied no doubt by the education authority. He is listening to something through red headphones. He should be wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with Please Do Not Touch Me. It would save a lot of trouble.

We sit on the tarmac and wait. The man who operates the pushback tug has broken his headphones. The pilot cannot hear him.  We cannot move.  I gaze out at the grey mizzle. Who rubbed out all the colour? Africa is big and scary but bright and beautiful and I yearn to go back to its wonder. Nature's Valley on the east coast is a paradise of amber lagoon, raging seas and fynbos that kisses the tide. Port Elizabeth is a bustling port with towering cranes like huge giraffes astride the beach. Lots of wet but no water for a bath. They live there; I do not.

Belfast is the same as ever - familiar and smelling of mouldy earth. Home.  

Sebastian

The Uninvited

I met my first Syrian last week. Amer (note to self it's pronounced Amir) came to a class for immigrants to learn English at The Link in my home town.  He came with his family: wife, little daughter, mother and brother. Amer is intelligent and eager to understand and contribute to the country that has welcomed them.  I am interested to learn their story, but for now all I know is that they came via Lebanon.

Inspired by the promise of this new friendship I bought Khaled Hosseini's book, Sea Prayer. It is hard to believe that it was three years this month that the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian refugee who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach safety, was splashed in all its raw horror across our newspapers. He would have been six now, the age of my eldest grandchild. Little Alan's limp body, his too short life and his cruel death accosted our hearts and briefly challenged us all to do something about Syria. At least to pray.

Alan Kurdi

Hosseini did more than that. He penned this beautiful tribute to a child he would never meet and the city of Homs which is not his own.  The voice is that of a father speaking to his son about the country of his birth, the beauty of the landscape and the bustle of the Old City: the souk, mosque, church and Old Town Square. He records the sounds of his grandmother's clanking pot, the bleating of goats and the smell of fried kibbeh.  He is trying to fix memories in the mind of a child who may never return for they are about to embark on that most dangerous of journeys, the flight to freedom.

The book's poetry floats on pages awash with beautiful illustrations. Dan Williams' water colours capture the essence of Syria in greens, golds and warm ochres. A mother and child walk through a field 'blown through with wild flowers' where poppies spill down the page in prophetic poignancy.  The political changes from protest through siege to war are chronicled in colour, or lack of it. Blues and greens bleach to inky hues and then to black, white and smoky grey as the city burns.

A bomb crater becomes a swimming pool and still the children play. The rubble is their schoolroom and they learn that dark blood is better than bright.

One double page needs no words at all. A huddled mass of humanity trudges wearily from bottom left to top right - sepia toned men, women, children and the elderly broken and beaten by despair. Those who bear witness to many deaths are as dead on the inside as those who die.

Now the father waits with his child. Hell and the devil are behind them and they face the cold waters of the deep blue sea. 'Hold my hand. Nothing bad will happen,' says the father, repeating the age-old lie of parents who hope against hope that the world will be kind.  The father prays that the sea will know and care how precious is the cargo as they embark on their last voyage.  They are at its mercy. The colours are stormy black and fomenting ocean green. Inshallah.

In another beautiful book dabbling in the water theme, Mary Oliver writes about teaching children:

'Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent beautiful blossoms.'  (Upstream)

It is too late, sadly, for little Alan Kurdi and the thousands of other innocent children who have perished since 2015, but we who remain can and must work and pray for peaceful places where our little ones can flourish.

Heart's Skin

I have been a parent for thirty-four years and I am the grandmother of seven darlings but this week, for the first time, I had a little one in bed with me all night.

When the man and I were getting engaged someone gave us a piece of advice: 'Never allow your children to sleep between you in the bed.' That seemed ok to us and was consistent with the good parenting practices of our peers. In fact, we didn't even have our babies in the room with us.  They slept next door in a cosy smaller room where I went to feed. I breastfed them all for a year and so have no regrets about bonding, but the received wisdom now is that babies need to be close - all the time. This looks as exhausting as it sounds. My daughters carry their babies next to their bodies and sacrifice their sleep to reassure them during the night.

The man is away in Pakistan, Bethany was camping with her two eldest in a pod at Castlewellan lake so I agreed to have her eighteen-month-old baby overnight.  Jasper Nathanael is grandchild #5. In the daylight hours he is the cutest, sweetest little boy, trotting along behind his big brother and sister, joining in their mischief: climbing trees, exploring woodlands and wetlands, jumping in puddles, jumping in the sea and happily playing in all kinds of muck. He is joyful child with a sunny disposition and an inscrutable smile. When he turns his brown eyes on me, my heart melts.

Come the midnight hour, however, he turns into a werewolf.  When you put him down to sleep he goes from nought to distraught in seconds, howling to the moon like one of the abandoned infants of Shakespeare and so many fairy tales. His heart-rending wail is impossible to ignore. I tried sitting in the dark patting his back until the sobs settled and the breathing was steady, but as soon as I stood up to sneak out of the room he lifted his strawberry blonde curls and fixed me with a look that said, 'Don't you dare!'

So I brought little Jasper into bed with me, where he slept soundly till morning. I did not! He is a wriggler. He stays still for a few minutes and then lifts his whole body and hurls himself through ninety degrees to lie at right angles, his head hanging dangerously close to the edge of the bed. I dozed fitfully, my hand clutching his sleep suit to save him from falling.  The sleep deprivation was worth it, however; for one night only, I might add! It was a joy to cuddle my beautiful boy because he is in my heart.

In the car the next day I listened to Poetry Please on Radio 4. Viral poet, Hollie McNish, had selected her favourite poems and I wept as I listened to this one by Hull great grandmother, Norah Hanson:

 

Grafters

 

They come into your life, naked,

vulnerable, a mighty force you

have no defence against. They

cry you to attention, graft their

desires on your heart, take sleep

and reason from you and cast

a spell on you which you can't

or won't break.

 

They strengthen their hold with

every passing year, grafting their

joys and sorrows onto the throbbing

pulse of your life, and their children,

and their children, graft on the grafts

of generations until your heart's skin

is patched and stretched and aching

with the love and hurt they bring you.

This week I also heard the fabulous Aslan singing, Crazy World, and I cried some more:

'How can I protect you in this crazy world?

It's all right, it's all right.'

A Different Kind of Psalty

It was Christmas morning in Nature’s Valley in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The rain poured down as we walked to the community hall nestling in the trees. It was 7 am and we wanted to make it to the early church service delivered in both English and Afrikaans. We sang alternate verses of carols and I did my best using A level German pronunciation – not quite right, but as close as I could manage: ‘Ons buig in blye aanbidding’ (O come let us adore him) ‘Verlosser en Heer!’ I held my newest grandson, four-month-old Teddy, in my arms and sang praise for new birth and hope. Alternate verses in different languages is just about right for him, with an Irish mother and an Afrikaans father. Big boetie, Sebastian (3), is fluent in both and, recognising the sense of worship and thankfulness, he asked if this was 'a different kind of Psalty'.

Willem, Maria and Sebastian

The American singing songbook accompanied us and our four children when we lived in Zimbabwe and travelled to South Africa in the school holidays. On one occasion we drove the twenty-four hour journey from Bulawayo to Cape Town, where my daughter now lives, and it is wonderful to hear the old songs again and see the same calming effect on my grandchildren.
Nature’s Valley is an absolutely beautiful place. A steep road descends through the mountain into lush forest floor dotted with holiday homes surrounded by indigenous plants. It is a conservation area on the edge of the Tsitsikamma National Park housing bush buck and leopard in bountiful Fynbos undergrowth. Tsitsikamma is a Khoisan word meaning 'place of much water' and although it was not safe to dip in the churning ocean, I loved swimming in the brackish waters of the lagoon, like bathing in cold tea - the amber colour drawn from the roots and minerals in the surrounding hills. We stayed there for two weeks with my son-in-law’s family – a generous, warm-hearted house party with at least 16 people staying and many more stopping by on their way through. The heart of the house is the stoep, where people gather for coffee and rusks in the early morning, collapse after a swim or a sup (stand-up paddle board) and congregate in the evening for G&Ts, good conversation and the inevitable braai or potjie. There we stood breathless and watched as a pair of magnificent green loeries swooped down and perched on the wooden rail with a surprising flash of vermillion.

South African loerie

The stoep is the place of stories: how many dolphins, how strong the current or how long the cycle ride. Everyone brings their own flavour to the feast: the surgeon who told of how no one is allowed so much as a whisper while the heart patient is under the knife; the farmer’s brother who described a bush fire which destroyed acres of Knysna; the Polish girl who raved about boiled cabbage and the accountant who caught someone fiddling the books. We laughed together and shared each other’s lives, but the most special moments were when we stood together holding hands and gave thanks before we ate: for holidays, for friends, for food and for family.

Teddy bear

It behoves travellers to educate themselves about the places they visit. While the man took himself on The Great Trek Uncut, I have been on A Passage to Africa with George Alagiah, in a personal intimate portrait of the continent during his time as a foreign correspondent with the BBC. He traces its wars and sorrows in the countries where he worked, from the new dawn when Ghana first achieved independence to the more recent hopes for a rainbow nation in South Africa. He is unwavering in his harsh judgement of both the black leaders who disappointed their people and the white rulers who failed to accept personal responsibility for their blindness and greed. He describes Africa as a blighted continent but also imagines how the knarled and twisted baobab trees of Zimbabwe have seen it all and do not despair because no condition is permanent and Africa is stronger than she looks. Nkosi sikele Africa.
Before leaving Africa, we returned for a few days to the windy city. We traversed the southern tip of the continent along the Voortrekker Road through the mountains with their haunches bent together like huge giants huddled in a rugby scrum. We visited a wine farm at Boschendal where I found this amazing metal wire sculpture of Ouma Sarah, sitting on the vertebrae of a whale and musing on the lives of her offspring yet unborn. The book lying beside her is open at the following poem:

It's 3.23 in the morning
and I'm awake
because my great great grandchildren won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do when the planet was plundered
what did you do when the earth was unravelling
surely you did something when the seasons started falling?
as the mammals, reptiles, birds were all dying?
did you fill the streets with protest
when democracy was stolen?
what did you do
once you knew?
(Drew Dellinger)

 

Ouma Sarah

Cape Town sits cradled where the mountains sweep down to the sea like our own beloved Mournes. The stark difference is that in Northern Ireland water is in plentiful supply. The Western Cape is in the grip of severe drought. My son-in-law is digging a dry toilet in his back garden because there is now no question of showers or flushing the loo. It is reckoned that Cape Town will finally run out of water by 12 April, already declared 'day zero' and will make history as the first modern metropolis to exhaust its clean water reserves. Very soon there will be one tap per five thousand people and my daughter will have to queue for her allocated 25 litres. ‘How will I carry it?’ she wailed on the phone. ‘On your head, of course,’ I replied. She is dreading the moment when nothing at all comes out of the taps. I am preparing the guest room!

Like Ouma Sarah, I am concerned about what we are doing with the world. These are, indeed, troubled times. Apparently Yeats’ poem The Second Coming has been quoted more in newspapers in the past twelve months than in the previous thirty years: ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.’ The only antidote I know to the fear that this engenders is another wise man’s assertion that: ‘Jesus is before all things, and in him all things hold together.’ Or as Psalty sings,
‘Anytime I don’t know what to do, I will cast all my cares upon you.’

Birds and Babies

Back in my little heron house after another overseas trip, I am minded of the changing seasons. I can now see Scrabo Tower clearly as Ophelia dances across the fields tossing her hair, leaving trees reaching after her with their bare arms. The roads are awash with mud as tractors trudge their weary way home with the remains of the harvest. The mornings struggle to get out of bed and the sun seldom makes an appearance at all.

The weather was similar in Cape Town last week.  There it is the end of winter and the wet is welcome in a time of severe drought. My grandson bathes in a few inches of water and it lies in the bath all the next day so that they can use it to flush the toilets.  A long dry summer lies ahead for my daughter and her family, but it is impossible to feel sorry for them living in Cape Town, sitting as it does in spectacular scenery dominated by the beautiful Table Mountain.  Their home is in Bellville and they overlook the Door de Kraal recreational dam which is teeming with life.  Across the road is the Majik Forest where the pathway is bordered by young trees with magical names, planted by woodland lovers or in memoriam: milk wood, stink wood, ironwood, the sausage tree and my favourite, the boer-bean bastard saffron. There I encountered my heron, or one very similar, preening himself on the riverbank.

We walked round the dam most days and I was enchanted by the profusion of arum lilies growing wild, each one a milky white bowl upturned like a chalice.  

Spectacular red-eyed Egyptian geese and their babies waddled in the shallows and fussing along under our feet were hundreds of guinea fowl, with their comical mottled square bodies and blue heads, as stupid as their farmyard cousins. Most wonderful of all, however, were the weavers, abundant in their fluorescent colours which flashed through the rushes.  I was excited when one paused for a few seconds swaying on a reed nearby. It was a southern red bishop, brilliant in its orange and black feathers and busy, busy, busy. 

A much larger bird is the hadeda ibis which foraged in groups in the grass. An ugly grey bird in the distance, his plumage has an iridescent sheen, almost like purple scales which reflect the light close up.  The problem with this bird is its call, extremely loud and distinctive and much too like the cry of a baby. I know because I was lying awake listening and in the early morning it was impossible to distinguish which was which.

I was in Cape Town to mark the arrival of our seventh grandchild, a second son for Willem and Maria.  Little Edward Richard was born six weeks ago and I flew out to meet him and reconnect with his big boetie, Sebastian.  A new baby brings joy mixed with sleep deprivation so that the joy is temporarily diluted in exhaustion.  Willem is also studying in the wee hours and in the evenings so the pressure is on.  I was reminded while there of the gift that a new baby is. I knitted a sleeveless pullover for Teddy and left him a little card with God’s promise that he was knitted together in his mother’s womb. He is a gorgeous tiny boy, thriving on his mother’s milk and starting now to settle into something like a routine. It has been a rough few weeks for them, separated as they are from both families, but they are strong and the blessing of the God who made and gave them Teddy bear is on them.  Sebastian’s favourite phrase is, ‘It’s so huge, Granny’ and it is: God’s love for them is so huge.

On my return journey, I was delayed in Cape Town airport for five hours.  There was some consolation to be had from the array of blue and silver Christmas trees which lined the concourse. ‘Tis nearly the season, and we’ll be back!