Each year without fail for the last sixty-five years I’ve had a birthday in this month. It always turns up, as regularly as clockwork at the time the chestnuts come into full flower. I used to think that my parents had been very clever to arrange for me to be born on the most beautiful day of the year, but the reality turned out to be somewhat different: my conception was an unintended, but not wholly unwelcome product, of the 1945 Japanese surrender. My father and mother were so impressed by the achievements of General MacArthur that they got quite carried away. I suppose I (and later my sister) were some kind of peace treaty in their more domestic hostilities. If we were, then peace didn't last very long and both went their separate ways taking one of us each along with the furniture and the curtains and each spawned new families along the way. The families became estranged, by design rather than accident.
Once sixty-five was a fine old age a time of white hair, a lined face, a permanent stoop and nodding off in the afternoons. Today sixty-five is merely a beginning - or so I try to tell myself. What has gone before - a lifetime’s exhilarations and futilities - is just the gestation for a period of maturity and flowering, of threads being drawn together, of putting one’s duck’s in a line.
Birthdays are a particularly good place to start this renewal process. So I thought it might be a good idea this time to introduce some of my sisters to some other of my sisters who had never had the privilege of meeting before. My full sister had never met any of my half sisters (of whom I have five), nor had they met my half brother either for that matter, or his family.
As we were staying with Rosie and Jim down at their son’s Mill in the southern Auvergne, I suggested that I might hold a little party and ask the various sisters - or at least the two half-sisters who live in South-West France and the full sister who lives in Suffolk, to come. They most kindly agreed; the invitations were sent and the sisters who had never met arrived in due course.
They brought with them roast duck breasts and a magnum of champagne to show us how they live in Gascony while Rosie baked an intriguing cake most improbably out of courgettes and cocoa that made a satisfying accompaniment to the champagne. More: it played Happy Birthday, courtesy of some clever Asiatic piece of miniaturisation.
Incidentally, it was the first time I had ever to pour champagne from a Magnum bottle and by jingo you need strong wrists to control it for the bottle is heavy and you have no idea how far the liquid will gush. I spilt more than I had intended. (For a Jeroboam or Methuselah I suspect you would need some species of harness).
Several kind souls, including the former mayor, joined us from the village and also brought gifts - his speciality being a home-made concoction of raw alcohol laced with fruit flavouring. Never have I tasted anything as strong. Still if ever we should run out of petrol....
More practically, his wife brought a wonderful ‘fouace.’ This is an auvergnat bread cake shaped like a giant doughnut and exceptionally tasty. The following morning (see picture at the head of this post) we climbed up to the village for coffee and cake in the sunshine on the terrace of Dennis and Caro’s beautifully converted barn from where you can see for miles and where the rays of the midsummer sunset pass through the a special window cut into the bedrooms.
But back to the sisters: I don’t know quite what I was expecting. I suppose I had some romantic vision of sisterly love. Great embraces accompanied by oceans of tears of the sort you might find written into one of the more dreadful soap operas. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. They were strangers and strangers in mature middle age do not fall upon one another’s necks. Instead they made polite conversation about the price of ducks and enquired of each other whether one had come far.
Well at least they didn’t fight. And they did eventually did show a modicum of interest in each other and the sixteen children they share between them. If the temperature is not yet warm, at least the ice has been broken, the ducks on the same pond if not yet in line. You never know they may even meet again sometime. And we did have a splendid party. I wonder what my old father - our old father - would have made of it?
Here they are falling upon each other with excitement: from left to right: Vicky (full-sister), Sarah and Alyson (half-sisters).
