An Encounter with Eve

I hear the creak

Of her high-backed chair

And before I even see 

Her beautiful face

I know it is her 

 

She has come to me in dreams 

And once when I summoned her

With my angel board

She is my guardian and protectress

Watching over me day and night 

Keeping me from harm 

 

She gifted me 

With her talent for words

And from her I learned 

To love a good tale

She made my childhood unforgettable 

And her passing grieves my heart still 

 

For decades I have 

Suffered the guilt

Of a dark secret 

Too painful to share 

 

Something rotten at the heart

Of our little family

A sinister predator

Who robbed me 

Of my childlike innocence 

 

She already knows the details

Perhaps she has always known the truth

Without me having to speak of it 

She utters these words:

 

“I’m so sorry this happened to you 

You no longer need to be afraid 

It’s not your fault, you were just a child

I will always love and protect you

You are safe now

Rest here with me a while”

 

And with that

She takes me into her arms

And I relax into her embrace

And let the tears flow

 

 

Lola's Friendly Stag

  

A long time ago 

On a winter’s day

Your daddy and I 

Went out to play

As it was cold 

And there was snow 

We hoped to find 

An Eskimo

We’d heard they live

Where it is cold 

We weren’t sure where

As we hadn’t been told 

But though we searched 

Both high and low

We found no sign 

Of an Eskimo 

Just then we heard

A sudden sound

Like thundering hooves 

Upon the ground

And there before us 

In the wood

A friendly stag

Most proudly stood 

His branch-like antlers 

Held on high

His nose turned up 

Towards the sky 

He looked at us

With deep brown eyes 

His gentle face 

Filled with surprise

“Hello, dear ones”

We heard him say 

“I wasn’t expecting 

Any humans today” 

“This is my wood

But you may stay 

Just be careful where you play

So you don’t scare my friends away”

“Don’t worry, dear Stag”

Your daddy said

“We will remember what you’ve said

But may we pat you on the head?”

“Of course, dear chap”

The Stag replied 

“Just come closer

By my side”

We stood and stroked

His shaggy coat

The fur so soft 

Around his throat 

Until he said

“It’s time to go”

And leapt away

Into the snow 

Although we felt sad 

To watch him go 

We forgot all about 

The Eskimo!

Snail Mail: A Letter of Gratitude

 

Five long years have passed since you’ve been gone

Since we last heard your unmistakable laugh

Like a schoolgirl, who feels self-conscious in her spontaneity

 

But time has done nothing to fade

The memory of your voice, your words, your gestures

Those things that made you unmistakeably you

 

You have left me motherless and alone

Yet something of you lingers on in me

Deeper than shared experience or DNA 

 

I see the evidence of your legacy every day

It shapes the values that determine how I live 

My love of travel and the written word

 

I remember the stories you read to me when I was small

A different one each night to spark my imagination

The soft lilt of your voice lulling me to sleep

 

And how I discovered the truth about Father Christmas 

The year you tripped over the foot of my bed

Delivering my stocking after one too many glasses of wine

 

I remember how you stood up to my teachers

When they refused to give me a chance

“If she’s so bright, let her prove it” they said

 

Undeterred, you replied

“She can’t, she’s too depressed to get out of bed

It’s not her job to prove anything, it’s your job to teach her”

 

In the end, they relented 

Worn down by your tireless appeals

To their better nature

 

I remember how brave you were

Faced with the knowledge that your illness had no cure

No trace of self-pity, the grace of your acceptance a lesson to us all

 

And how hard you fought towards the end

Struggling for each breath, with that same steely determination

That characterised your entire life

 

We will always miss you Mama

You gave so much to those you loved

I was blessed to have you as my mother

A Memory of Winter

Last night, I dreamt I had returned in time to inhabit the small body of the child I once was. In my semi-conscious state, I saw before me a dreamlike version of the magical wintery scene that I witnessed when I was 8-years old. The dream was so vivid that when I woke up it took me some time to reengage with the reality around me. 

In the real-life version of events, I remember that I was sent to bed early after a minor disagreement with my parents involving my stubborn refusal to eat dinner. The following morning, my brother and I had woken early to find that the world outside our house was covered in a thick blanket of snow. At that time, we were living in a small village in rural Oxfordshire and nature’s presence dominated our daily lives. We lived on a cul-de-sac surrounded by trees inhabited by many different species of wildlife. The snow in such a setting is distinctly different from how it looks in an urban context. I remember the sense of excitement I felt as I flung back my bedroom curtains and saw the branches outside my window hanging low with the weight of its heavy ivory mantle. At that early hour, the only imprints on its pristine surface were the footprints of birds and small mammals, and the temperature was still cold enough to prevent it from turning to slush. We were too excited to wait for our parents to get up, or to eat breakfast; we wanted to be outside feeling the icy air on our cheeks and having our first snowball fight of the season. 

 

I remember that we dressed as though the house were on fire, not bothering to wash faces or clean teeth, and crept downstairs so that our parents wouldn’t hear our feet on the wooden stairs. I was the first to haul on my winter wellies, and as soon as I had done so, I ran outside and pirouetted around the garden like a ballerina who’s mistaken her ballet shoes for walking boots. There was still a delicate, powdery veil of snow falling, and when I opened my mouth to let out a happy laugh, I felt its icy crystals dissolving on my tongue. My brother soon joined me, and for a while we roared around the garden pelting each other with hastily improvised snowballs. 

 

I can’t remember whose idea it was to go for a walk, but after we had tired of the garden we headed out in the direction of the local woods, conveniently situated down the hill from where we lived. As we trudged cheerfully down the hill, throwing snow at each other, I remember having the strange but exhilarating feeling that we were the only two people in the world. The snow had covered the entire village and there was nobody in sight. We were in high spirits and even the icy water seeping into the bottoms of our leaky boots could not dampen our childlike exuberance. In this state of happy companionship, chattering and laughing as we went, we crossed the main road at the bottom of the hill and passed through the big iron gates that led to the forest beyond them. 

 

I will remember the emotions I experienced as we stepped through those gates for the rest of my days. When I look back, it seems as though there were some sort of sharp demarcation in reality between the moment before we passed through the gates and the moment immediately after we passed through them. As though we had stepped into a parallel universe, where time moved at a slower pace. Like the children in Narnia who stumble across another world at the back of their ordinary looking wardrobe, it felt to us as though we had stepped out of our mundane, every-day reality into a magical universe. 

The scene before us as we entered the forest actually made me stop in my tracks, and the idle chatter between us immediately subsided. A single stag stood directly before us, his snow-covered hooves reflecting the bright light of that crisp and perfect winter morning. He remained immobile, as if frozen in time, and we too remained motionless – hardly daring to breath. He stood tall and proud before us, his magnificent antlers held high, his nose quivering in nervous anticipation. Immediately behind him, the forest spread out on all sides in its full and wondrous winter glory. Elms, ashes and oaks looked resplendent beneath a cloak of snow that draped its way around their trunks and encased their slender branches. Nothing stirred in the undergrowth; there was no movement and no sound, just a profound stillness and a deep silence that reminded me of being underwater. It felt as though the world around us had come to a halt in that single moment, and that we had become immobilised in a snapshot in time. Then, all of a sudden time unfroze and the stag leapt sideways into the undergrowth; his survival instincts finally kicking in. And just like that, the spell was broken. 

 

The sense of all-consuming awe and astonishment that my younger self experienced that day has stayed with me ever since. And although in real time those precious moments only lasted a matter of seconds, I experienced them as beyond time: in another realm where stillness, peace and beauty reign supreme.  

How to decide whether to take a lover...

In 2015, my brave, funny and unbelievably stubborn mother finally lost her battle with cancer. Since then, I have missed her with greater and lesser degrees of intensity with each day that has passed, but I cherish my memories of her and the precious time we spent together. 

 

She had a keen eye and a sharp wit, but she was very much a product of her generation and a rather old-fashioned upbringing on a farm in rural Essex. My parents had a long and not very happy marriage - she passed away just short of what would have been their 50th wedding anniversary - but it would never have occurred to her to leave my father. She was very much of the mindset: “you’ve made your bed, now lie on it.” Her parents before her were much the same, the product of a union between two people who fell in love and then discovered after they were married how little they had in common. In my mother’s view, the only way to survive decades of marriage was to have the occasional extra marital dalliance and I was aware from quite a young age that she was doing precisely that. I didn’t judge her for it, but it was not a mindset that made sense to me. Apart from the obvious complications of sustaining a parallel relationship with two men without them finding out about each other, I didn’t see how any partnership that is rooted in lies and deceit could possibly thrive. So, I’ve always valued honesty and transparency above all things in my relationships. I have had two marriages to date, but I was faithful to both my husbands. My mother thought that I was rather puritanical and that my belief that infidelity in a committed relationship is a deal breaker was rather holier than thou. So, it’s fair to say that her attitude to this subject was very different to mine.

 

This was far from being the only area of life in which my mother and I did not see eye to eye, but we never let it come between us. In fact, we often enjoyed a good-humoured joke on the subject of lovers and their desirability or otherwise. But there was one particular incident that brought this subject out of the realm of theoretical debate into reality, and I look back on it as one of the funniest moments we shared together.

 

One dreary Sunday afternoon in late autumn we were sitting in a companiable silence in the living room of her Georgian house. It was the sort of day whose drab monochrome sky made the passing of time feel particularly monotonous. I recall that there was a strange stillness in the air that day and the only sound to be heard, except for the occasional rustle of my mother’s newspaper, was the steady ticking of the old grandfather clock. 

 

All of a sudden, we were both abruptly jolted from our state of torpor by the harsh grating sound of the front gate swinging open on its hinges. We weren’t expecting any one and it seemed like an unusual time of day for it to be the postman. I reluctantly rose from my chair and went to see who this unwelcome stranger could be. When I opened the front door, I was greeted by a delivery boy bearing a long, unwieldy looking parcel, which he abruptly thrust into my arms. 

“Needs a signature” he muttered, casting a curious eye over my shoulder at the grand looking hallway behind me. I could see him looking at the ornate Chinese vase on the table and thinking to himself that it must have cost a fortune. I swiftly signed and shut the door firmly behind his retreating back. My mother looked up with a quizzical expression and raised an eyebrow as I returned to the living room with my package.

 

“Did you order something from Amazon for me?” I asked.

“No darling”, she replied. “It’s not your birthday and it’s too early to be thinking of Christmas presents.” 

“That’s odd”, I remarked. “I haven’t ordered anything but this parcel has my name on it so someone must have ordered it for me.”  

We both gazed suspiciously at the parcel as though it held the answer to some explosive secret. I began to examine its smooth contours through the wrapping paper to see if I could guess at its contents. This is something I’ve been doing since I was a young girl, as I love to prolong that feeling of excited anticipation you get before opening a gift. 

“Darling, for goodness sake just open it!” my mother exclaimed impatiently. “You never know, you might have a secret admirer!”

I laughed at this suggestion, not thinking for a moment that she might be on the right track. At that point in time, I had recently separated from my second husband and I was not in the least bit interested in swapping my single status for another relationship. Nonetheless, my curiosity was piqued and having failed to guess at what the parcel might contain or who the mysterious sender could be, I was now impatient to open it. So, I ripped the masking tape from around its bulky circumference and tore a large strip off the top right corner of the package. Inside, amidst multiple layers of protective wrapping, I was surprised to find a long box with a Hobbs label on it. 

“I love Hobbs!” I exclaimed. “But I never buy anything from there unless it’s in the sale and I definitely didn’t order this.” 

“Well someone must have!” my mother retorted. “Look and see if there’s a note inside it somewhere.” 

Despite turning the package and its contents inside out, no such note materialised but I was thrilled to fling open the box and discover a rather exquisite and expensive looking pair of black knee-high boots. Almost the instant I did so, I heard a ping on my mobile notifying me of a new message. It didn’t occur to me that the two things could be connected, but I glanced at my phone anyway in case it was something important. To my surprise, I saw that I’d received a text from a former boyfriend who I hadn’t heard from in a very long time. The message read: 

“I heard from mutual friends that you’ve been having a hard time. This is just a little something to let you know that despite time and distance I’ve never stopped thinking about you. You previously made it very clear to me that you wouldn’t take me as your lover, but I hope that now you’re separated from your husband you’ll reconsider.” 

I was so astounded by the bluntness of his message and the inappropriacy of his gift that I barely knew how to react. My mother must have read the expression on my face because she instantly said: 

“I was right, wasn’t I? Is it from Jake?” 

 

I didn’t bother to ask her how she knew, as she had always had a sixth sense for those things, so I just nodded incredulously. My mother clapped her hands together in girlish glee and let out a deep belly laugh, of the kind I hadn’t heard since she’d been diagnosed with cancer six months previously. 

“That’s wonderful, darling. And what a superb pair of leather boots!” 

“How can this be wonderful?!” I exclaimed. “I may be separated from Alejandro but Jake is still very much married; so, this gift is entirely inappropriate. Furthermore, I don’t even know if they are leather!” 

I’m not sure at what point the material of the boots became as important to me as the morality of whether or not it would be acceptable to keep such an inappropriate gift; but it seems that my love of boots outweighed my sense of guilt.  

“Actually,” I replied, “there is one way to tell if they’re real leather and that is to smell them.” 

Reluctant to waste any more time, I quickly applied my puppy-dog nose to the task and began sniffing at the boots. As I was doing so, my mother remarked drily:

“Do you mean to say that if the boots are leather you will keep them even though they are a gift from a married man? And may I ask if this also means that you’ve changed your views on the subject of extra-marital affairs?” 

“Of course not, mum!” I replied indignantly. “But I can’t very well send them back to the address they came from or his wife will find out that he sent them to me. And if they are leather, then they are way too good to be sent to the charity shop.” 

“Ah, I see!”, my mother exclaimed. “In that case, you have quite a dilemma on your hands. Perhaps you should take them to the cobbler in Saxon Square and say to him: “I’m thinking of having an affair with a married man, but I can’t decide if that is the right thing to do. Could you kindly help with my decision by letting me know if these boots are made of genuine leather?”