Summer birthdays

I have a summer birthday. I have always rather relished having a birthday away from specific festivities. For I find birthdays are days that always contain emotional nuggets whether you want them or not. A sense of time passing. A glance back at what can seem to be a crumpled life. With way high expectations unreached. A reminder of people whom you can no longer offer a slice of your cake. A chance for better. A feeling you could fly. As a child, my birthday came as school was breaking up for the summer. There is a cine film of a birthday party when I was about ten in the back garden of our brilliant house in Moss Lane. I wasn’t a popular girl at school but I managed to get quite a few friends over to a party with promises of a rounders games on the back lawn and a slap up tea. The cine film is evidence of why I wasn’t a popular girl because I apparently spent the entire party in a ballet tutu and I think I refused to play rounders. Around this time, my parents bought a tiny flat in the north of Spain, an economical way of spending holidays and giving us exposure to another culture. All sounds promising, except as I said my birthday fell as school broke up, so we would wave good bye to school at lunchtime and by that evening our famiy would be on the south coast waiting for the ferry to take us over the channel where we would drive for 14 hours straight until we could unpack our cheddar cheese and tea bags at our postage stamp of a holiday home in Calella de Palafrugell. To clarify, My entire birthday would be in the back seat of the car, chasing some audacious Citroen down the autoroute. Parent “ Don’t worry, we’ll just celebrate your birthday tomorrow.” Child “ But it won’t be my birthday.” Parent “ we can pretend it’s your birthday.” Child “ ( with a gold medal for sulking) but it won’t be…” As I moved on in life I found Birthdays to be a reminder of what I hadn’t achieved. I was embarrassed by people celebrating me for just having been born, when all I could see was the procrastination or apathy that had filled the previous twelve months. When I was working on location on a film in Texas, the catering crew would always make something special for a birthday. Candles, a cake, the whole crew singing… they found out about mine and made me a huge English trifle as a surprise at lunchtime. I was just about to enter the tent, I knew what was in store and I literally turned round at the door and ran away. Ran away… good lord… Not my finest hour. For years I didn’t let anyone sing that rather silly and repetitive song. I didn’t allow cake or candles. We could do tea or supper on my birthday but no one was allowed to mention it. That wasn’t my finest hour either. But that’s behind me now. Nothing like making a loud noise as a way to not be noticed. I read that in certain cultures you don’t celebrate birthdays when someone is young. You wait until they are older, and then every year is a marked as a marvel of survival. So on my birthdays, I try to do something I had never done before. Like take a flying lesson. Kayak across a bay.

I always have a breakfast of grilled tomatoes on toast and there are raspberries and cream at some point in the day. This year I went to supper at a Polish Club and caught the BBC proms at The Royal Albert Hall.

I wore a new dress that I now think looks like a French tablecloth but hey! And down which I managed to spill something oily. But I was with dear friends and them wanting to be there turned out to be enough.

I think birthdays are little pockets which gently remind you of how far you have come. And how lucky you are to have had the life you had with those people who make you see that the life you have is a good and worthwhile one. Well done my friends and my family, that is what I say now. For persevering with me over the years. Thank you for your good wishes. For the ribbons and the cards and the flowers. For the outings and the reassurance and yes, even the cakes.

I am thrilled to be in your company, I am happy to be who you believe me to be, Even though I have my suspicions you are misguided.

But I have enough raspberries today to make my birthday last another day. I just have to get more cream Hip Hip Hooray! For us summer birthday people.

And it is of Hollyhocks I now must speak….

My parents were not great gardeners. But we inherited houses that came with gardens that had been designed with some care. There were hydrangeas that skirted the entire house and deep red geraniums in window boxes. Long stretches of daffodils under the weeping willows. Rockeries with small tufts of flowers all down the right side of the lawn. And then the garden devolved into raspberry canes and gooseberry bushes. Curved greenhouses for tomatoes and glass boxes for cucumbers. Then across the stream there was the fiefdom of my welsh grandfather. Who made rows and rows of neat shallow trenches laid out with string in military precision that held broad beans and potatoes and wigwam structures for runner beans and peas.

But truly, flowers were never the opera stars in our gardens. Everything of beauty survived by luck, the daffodils just kept coming back. The hydrangeas just flowered despite being driven over a few times by my first boyfriend who was not a great driver. Sorry Paul. The roses bloomed and bloomed again, but there was no grafting or specific pruning, they just kept giving these fragrant teacups of colour despite how much they were ignored.

We didn’t have cut flowers in vases. I don’t remember any house plants. There were books and Buddha’s and lamps made by my father in woodwork classes. There were bowls of oranges ( for our breakfast juice) and apples fallen from trees for our anytime. Living now in Santa Monica, I always have flowers on my kitchen table, in my living room and upstairs in the bedrooms and bathroom because for me now it is the fastest way to feel I am celebrating the luck in my life. But it wasn’t always so. I remember living in London and having this sense that cutting flowers was not allowing them to grow their full life. It went hand in hand with my not eating Granny Smith apples with the cape symbol on them because my not buying a pound of apples was really going to have a difference on apartheid. It was my friend Geoff, who drapes flowers like an artist into any vase, who looked at me scathingly as I spouted my concern for the rights of the flowers. That look was enough.

My garden doesn’t have many flowers, I am always surprised when the occasional dahlia pops up or the amaryllis I had forgotten was in that pot at the bottom by the mermaid, shoots forth another exotic bloom, I am thrilled however by the quince blossoms, that couldn’t be more delicate, the passion flower which only lasts a day or so and is so complicated it needs an engineer to dissect it. And the various kinds of scented geranium that cover the ground, peppermint, chocolate, rose. The purple rose that survives despite getting in the way, the French lavender and the brilliant African blue basil, that provides a playground for the bees. Gardens here in England are not all beautiful. Some are over tailored. Some are full of weeds. Some have pavers and couple of deck chairs. Lots of privet and boxwood. There are books published, massive flowers shows in Chelsea and Hampton Court. I would not dream of adding my naive comments on those.

But I can talk of the glorious and slightly insane Hollyhock. “Alcea Rosea” it seems from the Mallow family of plants. And it is everywhere here in this summer month. Native to Europe and Asia. it shoots up so tall and leggy like a wayward teenager, so it is often found propped up against walls and fences.

But sometimes it will emerge in a solo performance waving around some three or four foot tall it’s bright flowers demanding your attention. There is no smell. The blooms shrivel on the stem and drop off. Madame Hollyhock, she is blowsy and big like an opera singer with only a few high notes…but Lordy, are they high. And Lordy , do they give me pleasure in these July days…..

Graveyards

I have always had a fondness for graveyards. Growing up in England where every village had a church and beside the church would be a graveyard where those who had been baptized in the Christian faith were buried. From my avid teenage reading of Thomas Hardy I knew that children born out of wedlock or to pregnant unmarried women were not allowed to rest in consecrated ground. Graveyards are collections of the best names, the saddest stories, the hope for rest at the end of a tired life. Gravestones are often made large enough to carry the family as they die one by one. Bertha, the dearly missed wife of Henry, then Henry the loving husband and beloved father to Harry and Jemima. Then Harry and Jemima, much missed by their children Polly and Bertie. I am not good at counting. I am not going to grace my lack of skill by calling it maths. I count on my fingers. And in graveyards my fingers are busy working out old Martha was when she died in 1859. Or how many years baby Samuel had before he was spirited away with colic or TB. In New Zealand there were many born in Ireland or Scotland, who traveled the length of the world and would die in their adopted country.

In Glenorchy, the head of the Routeburn Track, the jumping on point for the River Dart a remote 50 miles from Queenstown the outdoor activity capital of the South Island, there is one general store. One hotel. Two cafes. A rugby pitch inside of a grass racetrack, a school, tractors in driveways. I went to Glenorchy in the Spring, but the hundred or so houses are set up for Winter snow with metal pitched roofs and double doors.

In the graveyard, there are about sixty or so headstones. Grouped in families. Most of them coming from Scotland, Dunfermline, Fife. Named Stuart or MacKenzie. Leaving a hard life for a hard life. Schoolteachers, miners, dying in their sixties. Explorers, adventurers, dying in the late twenties drowning in the Dart or tumbling down a mountain. Leaving behind their parents and sometimes their young families. In Britain the graveyards surround the old stone churches. To get into the church you walk though grass pathways inbetween the old headstones. The new ones are either in an area at one side or all now allocated to a place across the road somewhere. Which feels a little unsatisfactory. Like parking at Tesco’s when you have a card in your name at Harvey Nichols. The new stones are often smaller, made from a darker, more glossy stone. They will have potted plants in front of them. A chrysanthemum perhaps. Needing to be deadheaded. Or a bunch of silk flowers, beaten to colourless by the weather. In America families sometimes buy plots with room for a generation or two. I haven’t really looked at those. Maybe that kind of forward planning is too practical to hold any romance for me. I do remember a sweet woman from Central America who cleaned houses for a living whose sister died and she used all of the money that she was left to have her buried. I remember that not making any sense to me, but realizing in that moment, we spoke different languages. Graveyards show me the grip and the unraveling of small societies. Grandmas who lived into their nineties. Husbands who left widows to live on for decades past them. Wives, so much younger than their husbands, who clearly died in childbirth. Young men who left holes where support should have been. Children upon children who lived just long enough to be christened or managed to make it through a few sweet years before being called up to their maker. ( the words carved in stone, not mine.) The weather beaten stones, curved now at the edges, with their dedications and remembrances, dotted with moss and an occasional flower pushing up through the grass. Different to unmarked photograph albums that end up in antique shops, full of posed wedding shots, or young soldiers in uniforms, or young things sitting on the grass in tennis whites, or children in ill fitting clothes standing in doorways. But unclaimed in the same way. Maybe that is why I stop in graveyards and read the names and dates and dedications out loud. To put their names once more out in the air.

Footfall

There is a sound and a sense when your foot hits the ground. It can be first thing in the morning when you get out of bed and wander in a wobbly line towards to bathroom to see what damage your dreams have left on your face. That first wander for me is as if my left foot has been in a plaster cast for a year and is unfamiliar with it’s job as a foot and has to be taught how to behave before the world requires it to take half my weight and get things done. It can be on sand. Sinking in, pulling out. The miracle of all those tiny pieces of silica, the shavings at the edge of the solid world, that right themselves smooth whatever words or holes or castles we make with them. Beaches sometimes ring of summer holidays, but because I have lived so much of my life by a beach it is often in the winter that I love walking on the sand so much. Because then it is often just me and a few other hardy ones and the beach is free of man made detritus and your footprints feel like they are the only ones on the moon. There is cement. There is always cement. In England the pavements, or sidewalks, are often made of paving stones. These slabs of rectangular stone that are in the older streets were still brought in from the quarries of Purbeck and in newer streets from the concrete shop.

I fell on one of those a few months ago. Marching along the pavement, off to the bus stop, avoiding the shoppers with their shopping bags on wheels, scanning the ground for the pavers that didn’t fit so neatly together and whoop de do.. the classic phrase, “the ground coming up to meet you,” did exactly that. It was so fast. Flat on my face. Felled in my pride of over familiarity. Some young man came to my aid. “ No, I’m fine” I said, gracelessly picking myself up from the ground. I was embarrassed at being careless. Not wanting to be one at odds with the ground on which I walked. Not wanting to be a stranger.

I know I have written before about old churches. Not always the big ones, but the smaller ones in villages now consisting of a farm and a scout hut. Where you walk through the grass churchyard with gravestones almost illegible with moss and hundreds of years of weather.

And you open this wooden door into a stone vestibule where benches line the sides. Maybe for people to shake off the rain or the mud of where they had walked through, before making their way through the second door into the church itself. No fancy stained glass windows, no high vaulted ceilings.

Wooden pews, warm to the touch. These are the everyday of ancient stones. The working man’s path of pilgrimage. Many lifetimes worth of sunday devotions have made worn patterns into the uneven stones. Pressing indentations into the steps to the altar. will give you smooth and shiny stone, worn curves in the steps to the altar. Once bright and tight, now pressed down by so many centuries of feet, that you feel the echo as you walk on them and step where they once did

Footpaths and bridleways. These are not hiking trails. They don’t end up at “ Inspiration Point.” They don’t tell you how many miles you will have achieved if you do the whole loop. They may start with a wooden stile off a small road. They might start at the far end of a churchyard. They often cross fields of wheat or grazing cows. This is also where you pay attention to those grazing cows for the bullocks or bulls among them who can charge and have you running literally for your life to that stile on the far side of that field over which you throw yourself to safety. Sometimes you skim past a grand stately home. If you are lucky they pass by a pub where you can sit on a bench and grab a libation and a packet of crisps. These are the footpaths and bridleways of Great Britain. Criss crossing the countryside. Decreed by law. Drawn in the Ordnance Survey Maps. There is a swishing as your feet move through the cut grass, or the stubble path at the side of a field. There is a give as you walk through the wood that is under a canopy of trees. Not grass here but soft earth with the occasional tree root fighting its way though. This is the world of bluebells and stinging nettles, where tiny birds hop around inside bushes and gnats swarm in late afternoon.

Angela

It was my first job outside of the provinces. My first job in London Town. I knew it wasn’t classy. But it seemed like a step, a diagonal step. if not forward, then a diagonal. I was going to spend a year in “ The Mousetrap.” At the St. Martin’s Theatre. The east end of the West End. One. Nobody said Miss Casewell wasn’t written as a lesbian. I simply chose to play her as someone who had spent far too long on a hockey pitch, Two. The Policeman did it. Three. My career in Agatha Christie plays may now be over. In this year I learned never to rely on anyone for lifts home and I bought an orange Peugeot bike. the extra money I earned bought me a trip round the world when I was done and I met a dear and wonderful man called Peter. Peter Penry Jones was this big polar bear of a Welshman. handsome with a mass of wonderful grey hair that he constantly pushed away from his face with his hand. He had a voice that should be bottled. He wanted to do this job about as much as he wanted to shop in Harrods, but he was pulling his weight for his family. Peter decided to invest in me. I had no idea why. He had no interest in developing his social circle. But to a couple of people every so often, he opened his massive arms and invited in. I don’t know when I started going round to house in Chestnut Road, West Norwood. I don’t remember when it was I started joining them going to the this free form church service down the road on a sunday. I know that a couple of years later I moved in with them for about four months when my flat, that I had bought, was being gutted and rebuilt. I went up to Wales and spent time with Peter, mowing the fields, sitting in that little hut up on the hill at the end of the afternoon, going fishing with his wife’s brother for mackerel off the rocks. And then there was Peter’s wife. Angela. Angela Thorne. Peter was demanding of your intelligence, Angela was demanding of everything else. You could easily get it wrong with Angela. Read the moment incorrectly, say one word too many, Smile when it wasn’t funny, and you were toast. She made me observant of being accurate with my speech, my information. She smacked me down if I repeated unsubstantiated gossip. Her temper was fast and short-lived. Her sense of humour was explosive. Her language was sometimes unexpectedly blue. her loyalty and love were enormous.

She and Peter had met when they were both young actors. She was in Ralph Richardson’s company. The brilliant and beautiful young ingenue. He was in Olivier’s company. The youth brilliant and handsome . He was Welsh from the bones out. She was English with stories of going out to India as a child. Coming back on a boat to go to school. A family that changed shape in a way that must have been challenging as a young girl. She loved her two boys. She didn’t always like the everyday bits of being a housewife. But she adored those boys. She was always keeping track of the life that she wanted. The flat in Marble Arch was one of them. “ if I am going to live in London, I want to live in the centre.” Her career was a prestigious one. I caught the middle and latter part of it. With Alec Guinness, with Stephanie Beacham. In Ayckbourn plays, Playing Maggie Thatcher. In Television dramas, in television comedies.She kept track of her friends. And she had great friendships. She moved fast; in the street, round the house, in her little car. She wasted no time. Had good books on the go. Watched good television. Went to plays worth her while. She wasn’t unkind. She didn’t mean to choose the words she did, but out they came anyway. She had a critical eye and it traveled to her mouth without passing the pause button. One of the times we had tea, she said ,” shall we have biscuits? Or maybe you shouldn’t.” Her Peter left her when he was 70. It was a sad, sad time. For her sons. She said she was very lucky with the people they had married. She had a hoot with her grandchildren, one of whom came to spend the last year living with her whilst she attended a London college. A younger brother and sister, and older brother… nieces, friends ; professional and from way back when. They all had a place. When I last talked to her she said she couldn’t wait for summer so she could attack her garden in Battersea. “ Tidy it up.” She asked me if I knew where I was going to stay when I came back in the summer. “ Darling you know you can come and stay here, if you’re desperate. You know you can, if you’re desperate.” She had the loveliest face, the best hair, she wore fantastic clothes. She adored animals. Her family. The people she chose as friends. she was hilarious intentionally and not. She missed Pete, her Welsh champion, every day. His ashes are under an apple tree in Anglesey. That is where she is going to be too. A sad sort of perfect.

Slow days and bees

Having a slow day. Slow because there is something oozingly gentle about English summers. In the back garden of my friends house in Stockwell. I have doused the baby kefir lime and lemon trees in pots. I have carried a watering can through the house to the front garden and watered the beds containing poppies, salvia and hollyhocks. I am an interim gardener. Just the spreader of water. People are sanding and painting the houses on either side and I have heard talk of planned weekends in Whitstable and the horse to back at the 3.30 at Epsom. They have taken proper breaks at lunch and teatime. I have even seen two bees mating on the wall behind me. It was mating or murder, but am assuming the former because they both flew off but not at the same time. It is that slow. I have time and the attention to watch bees mating. Gorgeous really. In my own house , there is always something I have left undone. A pile of papers. An appointment to be made. An appointment to be kept. A bill. Washing to take in or out. Here in someone else’s house, there is nothing. Apart from watering the garden and two mugs of tea to fill my days. And a book I bought yesterday called “ Seats of London.” Yes, I bought a book on the various patterns of London transport seating.

I was traveling on the northern line with my young American friend and she didn’t understand why we didn’t have plastic seats as opposed to these carpet like ones. I have no answer yet, but I will be an expert after my book. I do know they are made now as they were then, by a factory near Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. If you have read any of my little essays over the years, you will know that I love all things bus and train. Coaches and cars leave me yawning. But the glass curve of a train station, the front seat on the top of a double decker bus, the slide of a train as it shifts from stationary, the old subway tiles of the subway….I am agog. I have only been in London a couple of days. It is the summer. So there are ‘crocs’ of school children on planned excursions. There are foreign students all wearing the same sweatshirts. There are a a lot more foreign tourists than I am used to, because I normally come in the spring or winter. They are all very well behaved and happy to see the Crown Jewels at the Tower or see shows like Wicked or Frozen. Which leaves me more chance to see Eddie Izzard play all the parts in Great Expectations, catch the amazing “ Guys and Dolls” for a second time, wallow in the miracle of “ A Little Life” and be informed by Peter Morgan’s new play about the rise of the oligarchs in Russia.

There are people on every piece of green. The Common. The Parks. Having impromptu picnics after work. The pubs are surrounded by groups, with jackets off and ties loosened having a drink in the evening sun

I will go to my favourite museums. Of course I will. And sumptuous gardens designed with long ago brilliance. But also I will watch bees having their way with each other. And drink tea. And eat strawberries that taste of strawberries. Do I dare to eat a peach?Or shall I wear the bottom of my trousers rolled? Someone, much more eloquent got there before me.

The smiles of Cambodia

Cambodia was always on my list. I had wanted to go the capital Phnom Penh and to the temples of Siem Reap. But then I also wanted to go down the Mekong River and catch that fast train in Laos and have a baguette in Luang Prabang. Of all those things, the only one I had time for was to visit Siem Reap. I didn’t want to be the rush around traveler. I heard the apocryphal story of the coach tour and “It’s Paris, it must be Thursday.” I wanted to be someone who watched the tours go by as I sat on a wall and sipped a fizzy drink. But hitting many countries in just a few weeks means that you are always catching up with your looming return flights. I booked flights and then changed the dates twice because I had seen enough and wanted to move on, or the weather was not conducive to comfort or because there was a promise of a more interesting destination. Having survived the chaos of Hanoi and the downpours of Hoi An; Siem Reap, although it is in the North of Cambodia, promised gentler, warmer weather. And I had been told that it would be criminal to visit South East Asia and not visit the temples of Angkor Wat. So it was, that the small city that means “ the victory over the Siam people”, became my sole Cambodian encounter. Cambodia is still on my list. Along with Laos and the Mekong and the baguette. But Cambodia calls in the sweetest of ways. had been shut down for three years. There were no visitors. There was no work. There was no money. They opened up about 3 months ago and everyone was hopeful that life was going to get better. These people were dignified and gentle and kind. They said We are so Happy you are here, and please tell your friends to come. The driver had gone back to work with his father in the rice fields. Our guide had survived on the money his wife had made serving breakfasts from her cart. The hotel manager had moved to Phnom Penh to be with her husband’s family and have her first baby. The people who run the country, the primeminister, who was once a general in the Khmer Rouge, has been in power for 40 years. His favorites, be it family or cronies…they were just fine... But the people, their people. They were floundering. Their past sits right on top of their present. The Khmer Rouge only died with Pol Pot in 1997. Everyone has a brother or a grandfather or a mother who suffered or died. Our guide lost a younger brother and a grandfather to starvation. His family lost their farm. He is a smiling man. He loves sweet things and carries a catapult in his backpack. He says it is for monkeys. His mother used to sell pickles in the Market. When I suggested that he should watch English TV shows to improve his English, he said he doesn’t have a television . It is too expensive. Apart from being “ evacuated” with his family he has never been further afield than Siem Reap. There were the wars with the Siam people. There was a monarchy who were corrupt and there was the coup of the army led by Lol Non. And from that emerged the Khmer Rouge. Who tried to create an Agrarian culture and forced the evacuation of the population from towns and cities to the countryside and killed everyone who they deemed to be intellectual. That was the civil war. Then the Vietnamese came in and attacked the Khmer Rouge. That was the invasion. Everyone wants a bit of Cambodia. it would suit all their neighbors to bite a bit off. I met a young man who had his leg blown off by a land mine. I met a woman from Georgia whose husband had come to help with the mine clearance. I met a man who had cleared 50,000 mines on his own having been forced to fight for the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese and he didn’t want to talk about the past anymore. “ it is too sad.” He says. Cambodia is still on my list not because just because of the temples. Those that are magnificent and restored, or the ones that are crumbling or those where the trees have grown their way into the walls and their roots cascade like Rapunzel’s hair. It is still on my list because of those extraordinary beautiful people and I want to see more of them. On the ride in from the airport our driver told us the King “ liked dancing.” What kind of dancing? I asked. “ Just dancing” he said. “ we think he might be gay.” and he laughed all the way to the hotel.