You can run, but you can’t whistle.

It didn’t take long before I decided enough was enough.  ‘For all our sakes’ I announced, a tad dramatically, ‘we are breaking for the border.’  Forty eight hours later we walked through the door of our Other Life.

My mother had always said you should be able to march straight into the kitchen of that house, put the kettle on, and put your feet up.  Do you think she somehow knew that we would all, in turn, come to use the place as a bolthole?  I can’t express the joy of pressing a switch and having whatever was on the other end of it, actually come on.  Lights worked, doors closed, the water was hot and the ice was cold and above all, beyond all that … there was silence.  That wonderful ear buzzing, bone melting silence that makes your limbs soften and tension evaporate, visibly.  (Well, when children, dogs, seabirds, wind, waves breaking, shingle shifting and all the rest, allowed.)

But, of course, it didn’t last long.  Day two was all it took on this particular trip – and ‘trip’ it was, in more ways than one.  Off we went in the RIB to climb to the heronry on the point opposite.  I took particular care to strap Jib into his lifejacket that day: it was a bit choppy and he was still somewhat prone to hurling himself into/over/under/out of things, and frankly I couldn’t face the paperwork of registering a missing child, gone overboard.  (Let alone the headlines, or the opprobrium at the school gates on our return to the south where people notice these things and feel extraordinarily free to comment.)  So, deaf to his complaints, I straight-jacketed him into the thing, and told him not on any account to blow the funky orange whistle now attached to his front, and for the four zillionth time to sit still and STAY still, and off we set.

Can you guess?

No, we landed perfectly safely on the other side.

Relieved and not a little surprised, we decanted.  Try as I might however, I found I now couldn’t unstrap Jib.  In turn we all battled and swore (adults only, of course) and wrestled with the hitherto obvious system of straps and clips: eventually we gave up, persuaded him it was cool to stay trussed like a beef brisket, and set off up the track through the trees.  von Trapp-like we revelled in the nature all around us.  Perfect mother that I am I pointed out creatures and growths of interest, reminded them about moss mostly only ever growing on north facing trunks, swatted at the midges that rested on my little darlings’ fair skin.  I tell you, Disney had nothing on us.

‘Where’s Jib?’ Bug asked.

‘On ahead!’ I replied, blithely.

‘Er, no ….’ said Whizz, reaching the corner.

Trying very hard not to look down to our left, where the climbing path dropped somewhat abruptly to the rocks and the water below we sped up the track, calling his name.  Nothing.  No answer.  Just the wind, and the waves, and my unfit panting.  The hitherto beautiful surroundings were now hostile: every gnarled root tried to catch us as we ran, and every twisted trunk could be hiding a small boy in a ludicrous vest.

And then we heard it.  A piercing shriek from yet further up the slope.  Bug was off like a hare: by the time we reached them, he was on the ground with Jib in his arms, rocking him.  ‘Let me see!’ I insisted, peeling them apart.

Now I’m not very good with blood.  It’s very inconvenient, actually.  Until I had children, I was fine but the minute the first was born, it was game over – a pinprick remains just about manageable but anything else is still seriously bad news.  A scraped knee elicits retching; a shaving cut requires a bucket and mop.  The scene that now met us had me spilling Jib to the floor as I bent double in the undergrowth, honking for Britain.  When it was over, I braved it and took another look.

‘Let me see!’ I repeated, gulping bile.

Remember the whistle?  He had got out of sight, and put it in his mouth, and trotted on enjoying the squeaks it made as he breathed.  Uphill he went, loving his day and his freedom – until he tripped and fell, shoving an incisor right back and forcing both it and the whistle into the roof of his mouth.

That was the first time we went to A&E by boat.  Quite fun, actually.

 

Life on the Edge (of the Arctic Circle)

Newly at leisure, Eeyore became very good at his version of the 3 R’s – Relaxing, Resting, and Recharging.  I maintain that many years of marriage have made me into a patient woman, but I grew increasingly frustrated as the list I had thoughtfully produced for him of things that needed doing grew ever longer.  To begin with I loved the fact that he was home.  For the first time, he was really living in his house.  It was a pity that he couldn’t have done it while it was at its loveliest, before the Great Shake, but at least now he could enjoy it all day every day, in all weathers – and, as the months passed, in several seasons.

I’ll tell you when I knew it was time to get him back out there, though.  It was when I walked into the kitchen at about lunchtime one day, mid-week, mid-winter.  I was carrying yet another enormous basket of dirty washing and asking myself whether it really needed doing, or was my motivation actually  the prospect of ironing it all in the small, warm, steamy laundry room?  The rest of the house was absolutely freezing – hold on: let me just explain that.

While Eeyore had been working in London, he had had a rule about the use of the central heating.  This was born not of financial need, nor of green conscience, but of a total lack of imagination.  He couldn’t – or wouldn’t – understand that at home, we weren’t basking in the regulated warmth of a city office block.  We were deep in the 19th century, where we constantly blew on our fingers and were often taken aback by our own sudden, jerky shivers.  Because he wasn’t there, he was resolute: the heating remained off, until either a) the temperature in the back hall hadn’t risen above 5 degrees for three days, or b) there was snow on the ground – proper snow mind, none of your ‘light dusting’ nonsense.  The oil level in the tank was monitored assiduously, and he took to quizzing guests to determine whether or not his law had been broken.  Any complaints were met with instructions to ‘put another layer on’, or ‘move around more’.  My insistence that when the wind was from the west I could sit in the study, at my computer, and have snow blowing onto my feet had been met with … well ‘scorn’ is a harsh word, but here I’m afraid it’s bang on.  (The hours I spent crawling under the desk trying to find where the stuff was coming in were warm enough, it’s true, but as a model for the future it really wasn’t a goer.)  I took to leaving earlier and earlier on the school run: seat warmers and the heating on full blast meant that short trips mysteriously became longer …  We were generously allowed to light the log burner in the sitting-room, but not before the children got back from school.  Electric blankets were acceptable, but lying in bed all day to benefit from them, was not.  Apparently.

Embarrassingly, once he was at home all day, and began to realise that bone-aching cold was wearing and indeed impractical, I got stubborn.  There was no way he was going to crank up the thermostat on my watch – we had suffered: now, he could too.  Yes, I know it was childish and petulant, and that I was cutting off my nose despite my face and all the rest, and that a sensible person would have cast off several layers and basked in the new-found warmth of a habitable home, but this is me we’re talking about and I was more than happy to Suffer, loudly of course, to make my point.

Anyway – on this day I walked into the kitchen and there he was.  In multiple grey layers, looking more like a heron than ever, he was perched on the edge of a chair with his German banker style glasses balanced on the end of his nose.  I’m afraid to report that he was wearing a cravat.  And my (rather fetching) orange felt wrist warmers.  He was eating cold tinned sardines in tomato sauce on toast, and reading the newspaper in poor light and total silence.  Suddenly I had an insight into our future: increasingly monochrome, in an echoingly quiet, freezing house that smelt of fish oil.

From that moment on the honeymoon was definitely over and the gloves, improbably, were off.

 

The rural idyll is shattered …

Back in the real world I quite often found the best part of the day was when I drove Eeyore to the station at 6.45am.  Assuming we got out without waking a child or two (never a given: being largely deaf he has the perfect excuse to claim that he has no idea of how much noise he makes) we would set off with our hearts in our mouths in case someone heard us.  Poor Sylvia got used to turning over and going back to sleep for another half an hour: the cars were parked under her windows.  But for the mother of any small child, the idea of starting the day proper at a time with a six in it is too frightening for words.

That winter gradually turned into a wonderful snowy one.  In London we had failed to notice the passing of the seasons and in the warmth of the city the only weather that impinged on the hell of rush hour was rain.  The subtleties of the year were wasted on us but now, although still inevitably dashing for the train, we had space to notice the first frosts that brought a peculiar quiet light to the empty countryside.  In the summer the roads were buried between high hedges and invisible from the house.  In the autumn they were gradually laid bare, and the winter left them shining with frost before burying them again in snow – it seemed that whichever the season, we were not going to be subjected to ugly grey tarmac ribbons as in London.  ‘Shepherds Bush’ might sound wistfully bucolic but fat foxes do not the country make: on just one run here in the wilds we spotted a heron, a herd of deer, hares, a moorhen and a red kite – all in the first two miles.  David Attenborough, eat your heart out.

With luck, having dropped my beloved at the station I would be able to creep back into the still sleeping house and crawl under the covers again for a sneaky ten minutes before the second start to the day.  I defy any mother not – at least sometimes – to hear the stirring of her offspring without experiencing a certain sinking feeling at the prospect of starting the whole daily merry-go-round again.  Pathetic though it may sound, the quiet snatched trips to the station in the morning could be very therapeutic.

My fortieth loomed.  Gone were all plans of a marquee job on the neatly manicured lawn.  It looked like the Somme out there.  Not gone of course was the post-baby weight, and there was no way I was gone to waddle through my own party.  I said I didn’t want to do anything and I got my own way.  Instead we agreed that as the day coincided with the end of term for No1, I would leave No2 and No3 at home with St Sylvia and collect him from his scarily smart school miles away, en route for London and dinner at Ken Lo’s.  (Remember: I had been away for some time now, and this seemed the height of sophistication and excitement.  Please don’t judge me.)  Then the night at the flat, and home the next day for the start of Christmas and jollity and all the rest.

At 2am on my birthday I woke to the unmistakable sounds of No3 suffocating.  Newly enamoured Sylvia was out, Eeyore in London – I had begun to see a pattern emerging: whenever anything went really horribly wrong, I was always the only adult present.  Puffers and the nebuliser had no effect and at 3am I rang 999.  Forty scary minutes later I could see the ambulance going backwards and forwards along the road at the end of the drive, presumably being driven by a blind driver with a blind co-pilot.  I stood with a very blue No3 in my arms, in the door-less doorway of what remained of the original dining room, flashing the 32 light bulbs on and off furiously in an attempt to get their attention.  Finally they got the point and came haring into the yard and up the drive, arriving with a screech that was barely audible over my frantic yelling.