GOING BLACKBERRYING

It was decided, it being a sunny afternoon, that I would take my little grandson blackberrying.  He even turned off, by himself, the television where the umpteenth episode of Shaun the Sheep that he had watched so far that day had been playing  a moment before.  He loves his Shaun the Sheep does our little Theo.
    Tupperware bowls in hand - a small one for him, a larger one for me - we set out hand in hand towards the lane where the blackberries grow, with Theo pausing here and there to pick some shrivelled offering growing by the roadside and putting it in his mouth. I explained about petrol fumes but I don’t think he was bothered.
    Eventually we came to where the fruit grew more plentifully.  I had taken the precaution of bringing with me some secateurs the better to approach some of the wilder hedges and started to snip, clearing a way for Theo. This was a mistake.  Here was a far better pastime than blackberrying. He demanded the secateurs and began to snip. I had lost one blackberry picker and in return - I turned round to watch his progress - I had gained a snipper of leaves, a little pile of which lay on the ground.  He was not one wit interested in cutting out the bramble shoots that had grown so vigorously across the path.  He just wanted to cut a happy little nest of leaves.  Luckily at that point I found a lovely little crop of fruit at the right height for him to pick. I relieved him of the secateurs and gave him back his bowl.
    But then came a howl - a howl of fright more than anything. I thought he’d found a dead body,  a half-eaten rabbit perhaps, he came rushing back to me gasping for breath.  He struggled to get the words out - “there, there!” he panted, pointing.
    “Where, what?”  I started to go over to where he was pointing.
    “No!” he shrieked.
    “There’s nothing here.”  And there wasn’t.  Not anyway anything that I could see.
    “Spider’s web!” he intoned in terms of dread.
    Now that I looked more closely I could see if I bent down to his height that the sunlight caught a corner of a cobweb.  Theo has a relaxed relationship with arachnids, but for some reason their webs terrify him beyond all reason.
    “It’s nothing,” I said, and avoiding the web as best I could, picked the blackberries.  Theo watched in anxiety as if expecting me at any moment to be turned into a pillar of salt. 
    I went further into the lane hoping that there might be fewer autumnal spiders’ webs but Theo was loathe to follow. I think he thought the vegetation which towered around us might suddenly come alive and imprison us.  Both literally and metaphorically another blackberrying avenue became closed off.
    Reluctantly I retraced my steps, but then found a bush which I could guarantee free both of overhanging vegetation and spiders’ webs.  At last Theo might add to the three meagre specimens in the bottom of his Tupperware.
    He began reaching hesitantly for the fruit, but then dropped the bowl and clasped his hands over his ears.  He came running back to me.
    “Bees, bees!” he shouted and he did a little jig on the spot still with his hands over his ears as though convinced that if you couldn’t actually hear a bee then it wouldn’t sting you.  The poor lad has never been bitten by a bee though  in recent weeks  he has unfortunately been stung by a wasp. Naturally, when I looked I failed to see any bees. 
    Another wail - this time Theo had been stung by a nettle.
    At this rate we were not likely to return home with much of a harvest. So then I hit on a plan.  Theo could give me his bowl and stay six feet away from the brambles and the nettles but from where he could still see to point out the blackberries to me, especially the low lying ones which he could see from his height and I couldn’t see from mine.  This plan worked most excellently.
    “There!” he would say, “there, underneath.  Look!”
    We had the bowls filled in no time and then we went home and baked a crumble with Theo mixing together the flour and the sugar and the butter, picking the mixture up and letting it slip through his fingers.  He even cleaned up the mess on the table afterwards.

A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.

A STORY FOR THEO - WATCH OUT FOR SEAL HOLES

A Seal Hole - with a Mole (I mean a Seal)

Christmas is coming. Our little grandson, Theo, came into the house yesterday and looked down the long hall into the sitting room where the newly decorated Christmas tree twinkled under a thousand and one lights and let out an excited 'Oooooooh'! His face lit up like a Christmas sparkler.

How wonderful to be not yet three and this  the first Christmas you remember.  something you really are seeing for the first time: trees and presents and candles and general festivity! He took the tree baubles in his hands, squeezing each gently.  I think he expected them to be balloons or tiny footballs.  Whatever was this wonder chez les grandfolk?

Still the excitement may have been too much for shortly afterwards he curled up in the big red armchair with his favourite soft toy - a Penguin.  The poor lad has not been terribly well, laid low by a bug, and has been hot and fretful with a hacking cough.  Yesterday he was better but exhausted.

So I sat with him on the arm of the chair and made up a story about Penguin, while he went in search of the land of nod.  As far as I remember it went like this. 

One wild Antarctic day, when the wind howled and the snow blew all around, Penguin was trudging home across the ice after a day’s fishing.  Slish, slosh, slish he went, for parts of the ice were melting.  Penguin hadn’t been very successful with his fishing: he’d fished all day and hadn’t caught a single herring for his tea.  He was sure to be scolded when he returned home. But the fact was that the herring were becoming fewer and fewer and the ones that remained had all grown devilish shy.
 
So his creel was empty, poor Penguin, at least empty of fish.  For with his fishing net (which all clever Penguins carry in their fur) he had caught some shrimpy little things, which can be quite delicious, but which are not the sort of thing to fill up a family on a cold, damp and windy evening.

Anyway, there he was, splish sploshing along through the snow and the ice and looking up at the sky and wondering whether he might have better luck tomorrow when suddenly, CRASH! and Gurgle! and Bbbb-otheration! He found himself up to his armpits (or rather his flipperpits) in seawater.  He had fallen into a seal hole. 

If I had been a rabbit, he thought to himself crossly as he struggled to crawl out of the water, I might have tripped over a molehill.  Moles and seals both travel around under the ground, though out on the ice, there isn’t any ground, if you follow me, and the seals have to make do with water.  But like moles they like to pop up now and again to take a good breath of fresh air.  So seals make holes in the ice into which respectable folk, minding their own business and not looking too closely where they are going, occasionally fall.  Bother! thought the Penguin again as he splashed water from his feathers.

He started again to waddle wearily homewards, looking down in case another seal hole should leap out at him unexpectedly, when he heard a cry behind him.  It was his friend William, who had also been fishing out on the ice. 

When Penguin turned around he saw that William was waving to him.  “Watch out for the seal hole!” Penguin cried.

   “What seal hole?” answered William.  But it was too late. There came a loud splosh and William’s dumpy little body disappeared from view.

    Penguin ran back to the seal hole just as fast as his little legs would carry him. He grabbed hold of William’s flippers and pulled and pulled, but William seemed quite stuck. Then suddenly, ‘pop!’ William shot out of the hole like a cork out of a champagne bottle.

    But what was this?  William was covered in fish!  There were fish in his creel, fish in his clothes, fish in his boots (William always wore thick waterproof boots). No wonder Penguin could hardly pull him out of the hole!  When he fell in he must have landed smack in the middle of a shoal of herring and when Penguin pulled him out the fish must have got trapped around him. Wasn’t that lucky?

    So to thank Penguin for saving him and rescuing him from the seal hole, William said Penguin could have some of the herring.  In fact there were more than enough fish for the two of them so in return Penguin gave William some of the little shrimpy like things, for Penguin always believed in sharing, and the two friends then walked home across the ice to the shelter of the mountain, singing fishing sort of songs and telling stories and meanwhile, KEEPING A GOOD LOOK OUT FOR SEAL HOLES!

(The photograph of the seal by the hole is from dougs-antartic-adventure.blogspot.com  via Google's Images for Seal Holes.  Use is acknowledged with thanks).

LOVES OF A TWO YEAR OLD: FOOTBALL AND POSTING

Singing, I have just concluded, makes you happy even if you are someone, like me, who has no talent for singing whatsoever; I merely make a noise. That being the case I have a limited number of options for indulging my absence of talent but undoubtedly the best one is when I am walking down the road with two-year old Theo on my shoulders, returning, as we were this morning, from making the daily purchase of milk and periodicals.

Sometimes we sing the same song, Theo and I; but Theo’s repertoire is limited. He knows the first verse of ‘Old MacDonald’ and can turn in a fine rendition of the Grand Old Duke of York - although that sounds a bit like Italian opera as he has yet to understand what any of the words mean, Grand Dukes and York not figuring prominently in his nursery discourse. At other times I sing and he hums along behind and both of us are - in the expression of my nineteenth century-born great aunt, ‘as happy as sandboys.’

But what is (or was) a ‘sandboy’ and why should sandboys be happy? I’ve never had occasion to think about it before; possibly because I’ve never written the words before, so here’s what Brewer says on the subject:

‘An old established expression from the days when sandboys (or men) drove their donkeys through the streets hawking bags of sand usually obtained from beaches. The sand was used by people for their gardens and by builders and publicans for sanding their floors. the happiness of sandboys was due to their habit of indulging in liquor with their takings.'

As an explanation this seems to me to have more holes than a rusty colander. In the first place, I doubt you could carry much sand on a donkey; Secondly, beach sand would be no use in gardens or for mixing in cement, and what about all those pubs more than a mile or two from sandy beaches? Not everything you read in books should be trusted.

But now that I come to think of it, neither should Theo. For when he’s not singing, Theo has two other great loves: football and posting. We stand at opposite ends of the long downstairs corridor, hoofing a football between us and yesterday we discovered an even better corridor in the walled lane that runs beside the local play area. Even at two Theo can kick a ball with length and direction; I can merely kick it with length, so the ball ricochets back and forth down the lane. When it reaches him he whumps it back like an arrow. I wonder if I could get him a trial for Arsenal?

He’s not quite as good at posting. He has yet to understand that not every oubliette offers the same facilities as a letterbox. Yesterday, things suddenly went quiet for a while, always an ominous sign; then we heard repeated attempts to flush the loo. Perhaps he had finally made the profound connection between messy nappies and a preventive period of contemplation with trousers around ankles. Hopes rose.

I peered hopefully into the watery depths: a soggy mass awaited. Luck alone had prevented the day’s label invoices, all enveloped and awaiting stamping, being despatched to the sewage works. I fished them sadly out; yet I couldn't help wondering whether it would be possible to retrieve a message on the other side of the world that had been flushed down a loo; suitably protected, of course?

Having recovered from this minor calamity we set off into the cold wet afternoon hoping to have more luck at the actual Post Office, which here is embedded in our Spar supermarket. For speed I had plonked him in his buggy. I’ve done this before, yet how quickly one forgets the vast amount of space taken by grandparent and pushchair as ensemble, and how small the aisles. Turning round becomes a manoeuvre to be executed with care and trepidation. Ankles loom everywhere, like land mines.

Now this Spar thoughtfully provides a stack of small trolleys for children. Theo caught sight of them and was off immediately. ‘Oh dear,’ I said to myself using one of his own favourite expressions, for this was not a Good Idea. Now I was the supervisor of two independent wheeled vehicles in a crowded supermarket, one of which was being driven at the speed of a future football winger across the store, while the other had become stuck fast between the jam and the baked beans. I felt I needed public liability insurance with a significant number of noughts.

Eventually by an undignified snatch at the hood of his coat, the rampaging trolley was brought up short. I abandoned the buggy and made a dash for the checkout and then all suddenly became well. No catastrophe. Theo even wheeled his trolley back calmly to the trolley stack. He posted our letters, we retrieved the buggy and rode home. I think we even sang the Grand Old Duke of York with embellishments and trills!