Nailed

My digestion and I awake in the wrong hours again last night, and today lowness of spirits at a new low. But we've just nailed the nesting box to the tree in the garden, which feels like a hopeful sort of thing to do. And been round to visit our tenant, and do the annual inspection of the house, as she's now been there a year. All is well there, the damp in the cellar improved by work done by Ultimate Pest Control, and she is not being made redundant (we'd heard of job losses in her company), and has no plans for moving on. Strange to be walking about in our old home though, up the white painted stairs clackety clack, the view from the velux in the spare bedroom...

Yes, and so this means it's a year this week since we moved here. By some distance not the best year of my life, but maybe worth remembering not the worst either.

L came back from Leeds with a present for me - Jo Shapcott's 'Of Mutability', which has just won the Costa prize. Not that that means much to me; I wanted it when it first came out, but book-buying is verboten at the moment. I'm working my way slowly through it, as if walking round a garden, taking in the scene gradually, knowing I can come back and look at this shrub, this tree, this quiet corner seat again later. It is good, strong, moving poetry. I'd like to be inspired.

Next Saturday we're going to a poetry reading in Leeds. I'm at my Personality Development Seminar in Manchester til 2.30, then will get the train all the way back, and on the other way to the second city of the day, where I'll meet L who is returning there to buy the shoes she hesitated over this week... Major treat, as the whole excursion will cost me well over £15, notwithstanding some fab deal like 2 pizzas for £12 at Pizza Express beforehand! We're going to hear George Szirtes, which is very thrilling to me, and lovely Clare Pollard, who was one of my tutors on my Arvon course in 2009. Also Clare Shaw, one of our local treasures, and two or three others I am not familiar with. I'd like to be inspired, but I'll settle for being moved, excited, entertained, diverted.

(Do tell me if I'm becoming obsessed with money.)

Blossom And Flourish, Wither And Perish

Stuff seething and simmering in my mind about the mysteries of youth and aging. The young man from three doors up walks past, returning from his paper round in a thick cream knitted cardigan. He is perhaps 17. In the year we have lived here, he has grown taller, wider, more solid. I don't know him, but I observe. There is C, day on day, moving through his life. He is young, and doesn't know it. When I was that age I had no idea how young I was. I wrote impassioned poetry about trees, kissing and drunkenness, felt all sorts of named and nameless longings, saw life stretching ahead of me, not requiring me to make choices so much as just to follow and see where it led. Felt life was my right somehow. But was more aware that I was older than I'd ever been before and getting older year on year, than I was of being barely formed, a new adult blinking in the bright world.

My mother, 81 on Sunday is old now, officially, and how can it be that I never saw this coming? And how can it be I've only now realised that much of what has been happening to her, the memory loss, depression, dwindling interest in life, loss of concentration, and the viciously aggressive outbursts, all point clearly to the early stages of one or other form of dementia? Because she's my mother is why. And she is not, in terms of my inner working model of the world, permitted to become old and infirm.

At 48, my life has foundered, and I feel 'on the outside looking in' at people with secure jobs, nicely developing careers, established roles in the world of work. Of course I know that there are at this time many like me, out of work, more or less, many others fearful of losing jobs and the security that goes with them, but what I tend to be wincingly sensitive to, on the radio, in the paper, in overheard conversation, is the feeling of complacent entitlement people have to their work identity, the social and economic validation so unthinkingly gained from going to work and doing whatever they do year on year. And I am chilled to the bone, thinking I've lost it (even though next week or the week after I may perhaps regain at least a little of it), and may never be readmitted to the charmed circle of the working. And I'm 48. Too old for a major career change, too young to retire. Too young to be old, too old to be young. I have never really known what I wanted 'to do with my life', and now I am so sharply aware that 'the life' I have left is finite, is very likely less than the life I've already lived.

It's not just work either. What else is important to me? How do I want to live? Surely I should be thinking about these things... I have so much time at the moment, but not the spare psychic energy for much creativity, tied up as most of it is with the matter of my economic survival.

I met a woman I know slightly at the bus stop last night. I was coming home from the pub, she from working, doing healing and Reiki at a local centre. She said she always came away with a big smile on her face, saying (casting her eyes upwards) thankyou, thankyou for letting me do work I love. I just felt annoyed, thought ungracious thoughts about how Reiki isn't work at all and what a bunch of flakey new-agey types this town is full of. Which isn't what I usually think. Much. I think it was her comment about work that hit the raw nerve. I'd settle for doing work I can just about tolerate at the moment... Thoughts of being '50 and on the scrap-heap' haunt me. I know you'll all say no, no, of course you won't be, you have so much to offer... and this of course in my better moments I do know. But this limbo, when none of the possibilities that keep shimmering like mirages up ahead on a hot summer road, seems willing to manifest itself, keeps me struggling to believe that 'all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.'

Say Something

The strangeness of limbo. Waiting to learn that references have been received, either 'satisfactory' or not. Waiting to hear what the school makes of my response to their weird job description - a proposal to do things a bit differently from what I'd agreed to so far. I'd much rather approach the 'whole thing' as one big project - the setting up of a counselling service in a school - than do it piecemeal, a few sessions with a couple of kids, with little or no ground work, and no time for what we used to call 'relationship building' in my late unlamented job. Also waiting to hear something about another possibility for earning some money that a friend has put me onto. I'll save the details til anything actually happens. Been waiting about a month on that one. Waiting too for my membership of grandiose professional organisation one must join in order to demonstrate professionalism to come through. Until which time I cannot put an entry on their 'find a therapist' database, nor another website where therapists and counsellors advertise their services, where one must state which grandiose professional organisation one belongs to, and they will check the truth of one's claim.

And the wind murmurs down the chimney and the afternoon light comes and goes in the kitchen, as clouds blow across the low winter sun. It's cold again - hovering around the zero mark, a tiny scattering of snow this morning. I drink an experimental coffee and eat a toasted tea cake with friend H, who recommends Slippery Elm for dodgy tummy and Mag Phos tissue salts for sleep and various other ills. And reminds me of Flower Remedies for soothing the darker moods. Who needs a doctor or healer with a friend like her? The coffee and tea cake (with butter yet) have done no harm, and were much enjoyed, so there!

Birthday season in our family - my niece's last week, brother's yesterday, mother's on Sunday. The family gathering to eat Sunday lunch with her, except me. I was supposed to have a seminar on Saturday so planned my near-to-birthday visit for last weekend. Seminar has been postponed, due to student demonstrations in Manchester on Saturday, but please don't tell my Mum... It's mad really - the thing that makes her most anxious, and therefore liable to outbursts of unreasonable fury, is having lots of people around her. Originally she said she didn't want to do anything much for her birthday, the big one having been last year, but seems to have been persuaded by her brother and sister-in-law that a 'celebration' is a good idea. How glad I am of the phantom seminar. She can't get much really from sitting round a table with nine people. They'll all talk to each other, and she'll zone out, occasionally getting cross and frustrated. Unless maybe my sweet nephew sits himself next to her and makes sure to stay in touch with her amidst the hurly burly.

L is in Leeds hunting for shoes and a padded jacket, so I have the house to myself. This is both good and bad. Good really, but sometimes I drift into inertia. Shall try to get back to the Dad letters after this. Not sure where I'm going with them. Just need to keep on the scent of the energy in the words. Hunt down the exciting, moving, funny or weird bits, and see what they show me. I should also be planning something about the work in the school, where I have a meeting next Wednesday. Hard to know exactly what to plan at the moment...

Hard to know exactly what to plan at the moment.

Perturbation

The two things that really gave my Mum pleasure were the big bunch of white lilies I took her (now a well-established tradition), and the ten or so letters of my Dad's I took and read aloud to her. I have to say they read very well aloud, and she was delighted by how well he wrote, how interesting and funny and full of detail they were. 'I shall be thinking about Dad's letters when I go to bed' she said. I said I'd bring more next time. Now have to figure out a strategy on the more disturbing ones...

I have been suffering from very poor sleep, and recurrent indigestion. The first I attribute to 'hormonal perturbation'. The second perhaps to stress, or to my system objecting to certain elements of my diet. Anyway, it prompts me to a more careful way of eating - little bread or dairy or coffee. Lay off the alcohol. And the cakes!

Poor sleep may not be helped by yesterday's revelation that the school is asking my referees about 'disciplinary action'. My supervisor emailed saying I hadn't been the subject of any had I? I set to work to establish the exact definition of 'disciplinary action' and discovered via the ACAS helpline (a stalwart of the original drama) that there is none. My advisor thought my interpretation - that it refers to actual verbal, written and final warnings or dismissal, was a reasonable one. My supervisor then emailed again to say she'd realised she didn't have to fill that bit in anyway as it was for 'employers only'. Which leaves my other referee, my former manager at the children's charity where I was called to a Disciplinary Hearing at the Final Stage (Dismissal), but resigned before it ever happened. The question is apparently whether they have any disciplinary action on my file... I can only wait and see if the shit hits the fan, and if it does - tell them the truth, if I'm given the chance. There's no other way. And I guess they may decide not to take me on because of it - because it makes me 'a risk'. But let us hope not.

Sun And Moon

Intense sunshine by day and moonshine by night, the brightest shiniest full moon I've seen in a while, and hard hard frosts again. Thick ice in places up on the Calderdale Way above home. Winter still not done with us, but when the sky is blue and the light crystal clear, I'm not so impatient, though I could cheerfully not encounter the sub-zero air on my face again for a long time to come. And there have already been hints of spring. Green bulb shoots in the garden. That purplish haze in the trees that presages the new leaf buds swelling.

A draft contract arrives from the school, and an entirely inappropriate job description, given they have only engaged me to undertake two counselling sessions a week for 10 weeks intially. Item 1. reads : to strategically lead the overall development of a range of support services for students and the wider community. I'd be glad to develop such services for the students, if they engaged me for a decent amount of time each week, but I'm not so sure about the wider community... Also item 6. to maintain regular consultation visits to partner primary schools and other school partners. I'm wondering if, without having mentioned it to me, they are hoping that, after a trial period, they will be able to take me on for a more substantial role. I hope so, but meanwhile there will be a few important points to clarify...

I'm off down south to see my Ma tomorrow for a couple of days. I shall cook her fish pie, drink wine with her, read her extracts from Dad's letters, show her some photographs, watch the Australian Open Tennis with her and generally keep her company. Her spirits are low, and she always cheers up over the course of my visit, so I have to just manage my difficult feelings about her Eeyore-ishness, and believe that it's worth it.

My friend K's friend G died on Tuesday night. I was hoping I might be able to see her when I'm down seeing my Mum, but she can't make the time, feeling at the moment very responsible for her goddaughter, G's 18 year-old, now alone in the world (in terms of family.) My friend C's 96-year-old Mum died peacefully the week before, C's partner M chanting beside her as she slipped away.

Outpatients II

There is no-one but me waiting in this little corridor, outside the outpatient minor surgery theatre. I sit on one of four grey speckled plastic padded chairs, with a small coffee table separating them two and two, a few unattractive magazines not fully covering its wood effect formica top. The fluorescent light makes my eyes feel funny. I can hear the doctor's voice from inside the theatre, but not what he's saying - then laughter - he seems to have quite a line in cheery repartie. The previous patient had refused to have local anaesthetic - fearful of the needle - and is told his GP will discuss general anaesthetic with him. It might need some thought as you're not the fittest says the small woman in blue cap and scrubs. She then suggests he go and wash off the ink marks with which the areas of his face that were to be treated have been ringed. He suggests he could do it at home. She, as if speaking to a child, but not unkindly says you've got biro on your face - go into the toilet and wash it off. He complies silently.

Two tanks of medical oxygen on their wheeled stands wait silently beneath a poster that says Targeting Oxygen Safety. It is all about O2 saturations, from 88% to 98% illustrated by a target with five rings of different colours. Nearby, weirdly since this is a place where clearly the public wait regularly, if not in vast numbers, other posters declare that Bradford Teaching Hospitals are having a year of improving patient safety. The branding for this series of posters is the word SAFE! made to look like a rubber stamp, in various colours. There's a poster about patient observations, another about ward rounds. What makes a great ward round? it asks. A series of bullet points includes Patient dignity and privacy is maintained. Also Patients are introduced to yourself and colleagues. (I think of Getting On, the excellent and excruciating recent dark 'comedy' series on the BBC starring Jo Brand, in which the ward rounds were - well, not great anyway...) The poster about patient observations carries the slogan Competent staff = confident patients.

Stalking

A strange time of picking up old threads while trying to find new ones strong enough to get hold of, to follow. And of just surviving this winter, now shifted from the seemingly relentless cold to mild but windy and frequently dull, though there was a glimmer of sunshine as we drove back from Todmorden this lunchtime, after visiting our new friend H.

L is stalking the house for rogue drafts with a candle. Thank goodness for the warmer weather - we had been burning more pounds a day than I care to tell you - I hold my head and moan every time this conversation arises. We look at brochures for woodburners, weighing the initial outlay against the steady drain of funds on gas.

My finances are close to rock bottom, and I can't afford to do anything akin to a luxury. My brother's partner is having a 60th birthday party in May. They live in Brussels and I can't afford to go. It's an odd experience. I have not really been quite this poor before. Still hoping the school work will start soon, but have waited all week to hear when the planned meeting next week is to take place. No word. Painfully slow, the progress towards a living. And my one child client has this week decided she wants to stop for a while, maybe forever. Awake in the night in panic - the ground dropping away beneath me kind I experienced when the complaint was first made, and I realised I would probably lose my job. A diluted version of that. Sleepless like I haven't been for ages. Wide-eyed and nervous system roaring at 2.30 and 4.30 am.

At the same time I feel a steady growth of optimism, of excitement.

I have tracked down my first therapist whom I haven't seen for nine years, and exchanged emails. Strange. Important. Somehow linked with reading my Dad's letters. I went to her the year he died, sensing that somehow my numbness wasn't right.

Element

Dad, so long gone,
suddenly here in khaki
like a dream,
lying on your belly
on a makeshift bed
in a windblown tent
in pouring rain
somewhere near Naples
typing in the half-dark,
in your element!

In Brief

I see that my Dad's letters - those extracts I've posted here - have vividly shown something of the character of the man, and have caught the positive interest of some of my commenters, and that has made me see my Dad in a new light somehow - as something entirely other than my father. What is hard for me is to know how to respond. I have encountered him anew in reading the letters, and feel a very odd mixture of excitement and sadness. I wish I'd known him better, and that he'd lived longer, which might have allowed that to happen.

Maybe a first step is simply to answer the questions as they were posed.

Did your father ever write his novel?
No. It was clear that in his retirement he had once again planned to write one, but there is no material that suggests he actually started it. I guess I see him as what Julia Cameron calls a 'shadow artist', living his creativity vicariously through working closely with authors (see below). He used to write witty political poems for competitions in the Spectator and New Statesman, and frequently won £5 or a bottle of Scotch!

What did he do with his life?
In 1953 he married my mother, and together they went on to have our family - my elder brother and sister, and myself. My parents separated in 1978 - my mother's initiative.
He was a distinguished editor, a director of the Bodley Head, a small highly regarded publishing house based on Bow Street in London. He worked there for his entire working life. Notably he worked with Graham Greene, and his last project before retirement was the Collected Letters of George Bernard Shaw. The Bodley Head had a fantastic children's list, and my earliest memories are of him bringing me home the latest picture book, extracting it like treasure from his battered brown leather briefcase.
In 1987 he retired and in February 1988 he committed suicide aged 62. Some of you already know this from my previous blog.

What is it like reading the letters as his daughter?
Extraordinary. Very moving, and also unbearably tantalising. Here's this intense glimpse into the mind and the life of my father over a two-year period aged 20-21, and suddenly it ends with his long-awaited demob. And he's gone. There are many passages that evoke the inner conflicts he struggled with then, and was to struggle with all his life. Seeing these roots so clearly is both strangely reassuring and utterly heartbreaking.
I have a few vivid memories of him from my early childhood, but then it is as if he went into a slow fade, mirroring the disintegration of my parents' marriage. After my parents separated I saw him infrequently. I lived to regret this.

Pondering

Having told my kind commenters that I would post further about my Dad in an effort to answer their interested questions, I now feel a certain challenge emerging. It's a challenge for me, and a challenge for The Phoenix. Having read the letters all through again - 73 in all, not 150 as I wildly estimated after reading them the first time - and catalogued them after a fashion (numbered, recorded dates and addresses, summarised, tagged), I wait to see what the next step might be.

One step will be to select a few to take and read to my mother in a couple of weeks' time when I visit. I mentioned them to her on the phone when I'd just begun to read them for the first time, and she was very interested, in fact quite excited to hear about them. She had not been aware of their existence. As I progressed through the letters, there were more and more that touched on matters I didn't feel inclined to discuss with her, so another difficult decision is - is it my job to be the censor? After all I could just let her have them for a while, and let her make of them what she will. On the other hand her resilience level has dropped to something of an all time low, and I fear they might upset her in ways she'd find hard to manage alone...

Then there's what I've stirred up in myself by reading them and, paralleling this, your interest kind readers. I'm digesting and pondering. Watch this space.

Dad II

Here's my Dad back off leave in January 1947

'None of my companions seem to have changed in the slightest as a result of their leave. They are as loud and foul-mouthed as ever - all voice and nothing to back it - and damned unpleasant to live with. It is absolute hell by comparison with the pleasant devil-may-care atmosphere radiated by Lymington's jeunesse doree. They are the two extremes, quite unconscious of one another - happily so really, for they would never get on....
I sometimes become very angry with Fate for playing this dirty trick on me. Fate, incarnated in the military authorities, seems to treat me as a football to be kicked hither and thither at will, an inanimate, inconsiderable thing.
I must get really wrapped up in something that will keep my mind far away from its physical environment. I think I will have a shot at writing a novel. At least it will keep me from suicide!'

In March, fairly certain of his demob number coming up in the next few months, he writes

'Honestly, I grow fonder of my coarse, foul-mouthed companions every day, because I realize that in six months' time I shall be saying goodbye, not only to them, but to the spirit which has resulted from our friendship. I don't think anyone who has not experienced it, can know just how strongly bound we soldiers are to one another. There are, I suppose, fifty chaps here who would do anything for me, and for whom I would do anything - we would die for each other if it came to the push, I think. It is not that we know each other very well - most of us - but that there is a team spirit abroad amongst us (just because life is pleasanter that way) which doesn't allow us to let each other down. I think most of us would do a favour for a perfect stranger, if he was in khaki. And why are people so much nicer in the Army than out of it? Simply because they feel secure. They do not have to win the bread - it is given to them. In "Civvy Street" there is always a fear that the bread may run out. This fear drives people to get all they can for themselves - and to HELL with everyone else: an ugly fact, but true. And they just go on and on money-grabbing, thinking that when they have x thousand pounds they will feel secure. But before they have x thousand pounds the thing has become an obsession. What a miserable existence! ..... We must get a team-spirit in the World. To read the papers one would suppose that it existed now - "United Nations" etc - but can you show me anything that it has done, achieved? "Freedom from Fear of Insecurity at some Future Date" is the first stage to be reached, then, it would seem. But why worry about our individual security when the security of the world is at stake. We are fighting a battle - no, that's not true, we're not, but we should be. As long as there is selfishness and patriotism - which is mob selfishness - there is no hope at all for the WORLD, which is what matters to me; not just me, or just Britain, but the WORLD.'

Epiphany

In the school calm prevails today, and young people in green sit in rows and learn. I meet the chaplain and the assistant principal, and the woman whose shoulder the kids cry on when they have a headache or a heartache. On the wall a display of work - they have been learning about Hundertwasser. I walk optimistically along the polished corridor to look at the little room where I shall work, my visitor tag round my neck, and it feels like old times, feels like new times.

Slow Rising

The snow that fell this morning in soft floating flakes like feathers has all but melted, and the day is darkening at 3.30 as fog sinks onto the tops. The school across the road has not reopened. Today is the funeral of one of their teaching assistants who died just before Christmas aged 56. Death seems to be around every corner. Yesterday came the news of Pete Postlethwaite's untimely demise from lung cancer. And my friend K is involved in the final stages of the life of her friend G who has cancer now in many parts of her body. Her friend becomes frail and thin and ill, needs oxygen, a commode, help to walk. And is afraid. As is K.

On I go with Dad's letters. Just at the point where he finally gets to go home on leave in December 1946, after a bout of dysentery, and in poor spirits, having been led to believe he may not be demobilised until early 1948 (in fact it was July 1947).

This winter feels long and hard. My feet inside socks and slippers feel cold. But my conversation with K, and watching an interview with Judi Dench yesterday evening have inspired me. Death waits for us all, and for some of us it doesn't wait long enough. But while we're here we do what we can. My habit of undervaluing myself and what I am doing can be corrosive. Even in this low time my endurance, my patience, my keeping going, are important. Even when I feel utterly impotent to help K with what she is going through, she tells me how much my thoughts, my insights, my support mean to her, and I must believe her. Judi D too seems to struggle to believe that what she does is good. Yet she does not run herself down. She is still and dignified and respectful of what others tell her about her glorious performances.

On Thursday I go back to the school for a second meeting and something new will begin. I have to keep on trusting this slow rising.

Dad

Here's my Dad writing home from Greece in July 1946. He starts by saying he hasn't had a letter from either parent for a fortnight and is worried he may have said something that's upset them.

'If I do say rather startling things sometimes, it is because I am no longer prepared to accept as gospel everything that I see in print or am told by my elders and (would-be) (crossed out) betters. I have thrown off the burden of accumulated conventional ideas, doctrines and parrot creeds, and am now in the process of sifting them in the light of my experience of the world as I find it. I find that a great part of the teachings of the church ... and of our schools, both Public and public, are no more than anti-social propaganda of the most efficient and soul-destroying nature. And I don't like it one little bit ... I was never taught at school that our failure in France in 1940 was largely due to the fact that Baldwin the Bad witheld his knowledge of the full-steam German rearmament, on the ground that if he announced it, there would be such an uproar that he would be ousted at the next election. I have to ferret these things out for myself. We have all been corruptly educated because Mr Bloody Baldwin and his retinue of rich rascals must lie to capacity if they are to keep the proletariat underfoot.

Tomorrow I start teaching English [as part of an Army Education Programme]. I have some misgivings as to my ability to do so, as my knowledge of the parrot-formulae of grammar is negligible, such grammatical astuteness as I possess having been picked up from the reading of the works of authors, whose command of the language is quite evident, and an inducement to emulate them. I shall start off with a brief historical outline, showing how the English language came to its present state. Then I shall tell them one or two good reasons why they should learn to speak a standardized form of English ... For some reason, soldiers are never satisfied with calling a spade a spade. They prefer not only to call it a *!?*!? shovel, but wherever possible to translate the shovel into some obscene tongue, or else to refer to it solely and always as some foul thing which they think it resembles, or with which it rhymes.

Thus bread = Rooty, margarine = mucking, beer = pig's ear, I don't care = Demborazie or Mahleesh or Allah Keefik, tea = char, cake = wad, to mention only 1% of the whole. Such words are their vocabulary. They're (sic) speech is full of such errors as "didn't ought", "It looks like this is them", and other such vile imports from Hollywood. So you can see that I have a hell of a job before me. But it is so important that I hope to make something of it, anyway.'