Category: Uncategorised

The Wearing of the Green

Two o’clock of an early March afternoon and into the hurly-burly of the supermarket to buy birthday cards and vegetables. We like the wonky ones and tea in the upstairs cafe. The grandchildren will like the gingerbread men. You can run, run, run as fast as you can…You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man!

A cup of tea and a teacake later, I’m in the lift going down with the trolley while John, as usual, takes the stairs for exercise. Past the Easter eggs and on to the checkouts. I find a seat while veg and cards are counted up and slammed down to make the computer say yes. Then we’re off, past the secondhand books and bubble-gum machine, back towards the car park.

Under the hot fan, through the security bars and out into the cold foyer. A gunmetal grey sky – the same colour as my first high heels – and still the freezing rain on the windows. Past the bin guarding the outside doors and trolley-line, then the cold blast hits me.

My coat is a sort of spring green, like a young cabbage. It keeps me warm all winter and has a feather filling, so I have to dry it with three tennis balls in the washing machine to make it fluffy as well as clean. Ria turned up with it after Dom died – must have been in the winter of 2012 – “…to keep you warm Mum.” Since Ria died, I’ve worn it every day. I fasten the top button and feel for my gloves.

“Hello Leigh. It is Leigh, isn’t it?”

I turn towards the still small voice.

Isolated on a wet sleeping bag and rucksack, with her hands clasped under her chin, looking cold and anxious. Looking very cold. There she is.

“Yes, I’m Leigh. How are you?”

Don’t we ask ridiculous questions when we’re taken aback?

I bend down beside her, looking closely at her face to see who she is. Her skin is pale and her little face framed with tangled black hair. Eyes like small black sepals supporting petals of periwinkle blue and smiling at me.

“Have we met before?”

“Well, you talked to me and I saw your green coat.”

John leans in to us to ask if she’s hungry.

“I’m starving. Coffee and sausage from the hot food counter please.”

She puts her hands hesitantly to her mouth. Not hands warmed by soap and water.

“I’ve forgotten your name,” I venture.

“Kelly.”

“Where do you sleep Kelly?”

“Werneth Park. It’s my birthday on Monday – March the eighth.”

“How old will you be?”

“Thirty-seven.”

The hot coffee and sausages lend some warmth as we leave.

Early April now and self-isolated, I can’t get back to her. Kelly stays close in my mind. Just twenty years younger than Ria and fearless as a pirate beauty.

Stay safe. But where’s home?

April 2020

Ouse

You were never so Great.

Swan-song down-draughts of Lift

Feather-flung dippings of dive

This river-embrace of years and tears.

Your bread-on-the-waters women still

Share their far-bank love feast

And gaze into numinous exile-epiphanies.

… On this bank your motherless child

Glides into the sunlit shallows of backwater days.

Eileen Walke, 2006

to be

To be nobody but

yourself in a world

which is doing its

best day and night to

make you like everybody

else means to fight the

hardest battle which any

human being can fight

and never stop fighting

e.e.cummings

My Firstborn

When we were knee high to grasshoppers, my friends and I would love to walk alongside the wildflower and grass verges of Cambridge Road in Bedford, past the cabins and boats down to our left on the Ouse, then up the sandy lane to Cardington Mill and Mill Meadows. We watched the growth of the cooling towers going up on the new power station across the fields. We discovered the huge round pipeline ready to be laid under the meadows and had great fun being brave enough to climb and crawl in it.

On August 15th 1962, I was nineteen and in Bedford having a sleepover with my Auntie Betty because my Uncle Vic was on nights at the power station. I was company for her. In the wee small hours of the morning I soaked the bed when my waters broke all over my beloved Auntie Betty. Loving and kind as always, she reassured me, helped me get dressed and I walked home in the early morning, where the streets were all empty and the birds were stirring. My Dad met me halfway and we phoned the midwife from the phone box near the shops, but she’d gone out on her bike.

It was me Mam who delivered the 6lb 2oz bundle of joy with lots of black hair. We called this treasure on earth, Maria. My Dad played Bing Crosby’s True Love loudly on his radiogram downstairs, then came up with a little tray of sherry glasses to toast Maria. He adored her. She made the final days of his life very happy.

Our lives were blessed with you Ria, from that dawning.

Sunday Birthday

I’m seventy-seven today. It’s Sunday and I went to online Mass at St Pat’s at ten. Fr. Phil wished Happy Birthday to everyone who has one today. I have flowers and cards and John’s making a modest chocolate cake, so I’ll get a wish. To be honest, I can’t believe I’m still alive. Eric and Ella stopped by on their way to the park to give me their card and my birthday book – called ‘A Monster Calls’.

St. Pat’s is Our Lady and St. Patrick Roman Catholic church in Oldham. It’s a ‘gem church’. And it is. Fr. Phil knows I hover over it as a closet Catholic.

When I was eleven, I asked me Mam and Dad if I could become a Catholic. My friends and primary school  playmates of many young days all went to the RC church on London Road and I used to wait at the entrance gate for them to come out – wondering about the mystery of Saturday evening confessions. My Dad didn’t mind one way or the other, but me Mam climbed up on to her Methodist wagon roots and said a firm No. So that was that. My first taste of anti-Catholic bigotry.

At fourteen, I was given permission to join the C of E and was duly confirmed in Blunham village church by the Bishop of St Albans. It’s amazing what ‘passing the scholarship’ can do for a mother.

And so it was that I stopped going to the C of E after my divorce years later, as divorcees were not welcome. Living on Langley Estate in North Manchester with my children Ria,  Dom and Chris, I took to going back to a C of E church – All Saints & Martyrs – where I was lucky enough to get to know the curate, Fr. Alan Cooke. I used to ask him to read through my essays – part of my induction to the Y.M.C.A., my employer – in Manchester. He was always helpful and positive. We’d have a coffee and a few fags and a good natter. He’d visit us at home and loved my children.

When I married John in 1982 and came to live in Oldham, I lost touch with him.  Yet lo and behold, some years later, glancing through church notices in the local paper, I found that St Mark’s C of E in Chadderton had a vicar called Fr. Alan Cooke!

I found the church, with vicarage alongside and walked up the path to the huge wooden front door – loving the climbing plants around the garden – and knocked. The door opened slowly and that  familiar face smiled at me. He asked me in for a cuppa and showed me his front room, with two sofas, bookshelves and fireplace. Then to his kitchen, a minimalist, simple area to cook and eat. I recognised again the monastic qualities in the man.

From 1990 and for twenty five years or so, St. Mark’s was where I went to pray and contribute to its small community. There will be many people, dear Reader, who have never known the blessing of a good priest. Fr. Alan was much loved by local people. He walked in streets whenever he could, rather than take transport and was not short of the abuse some wretched souls save for the clergy.

I discovered his lively interest in the Arts – a lover of music and poetry and a man who could write and deliver a sermon which meant things to those people lucky enough to hear it. A Mancunian, born and raised in Droylsden and familiar with Rome, where he trained as a Roman Catholic priest at the English College for some time. After this came a decision to work for C of E.

He prepared Dom and Chris and Hinnie for confirmation and was there for us all when Dom died. He and his friend Fr. Paul Plumpton, led Dom’s funeral in 2011 and stayed close to us throughout.

Like me, he is retired now. He lives in Sliema, Malta. We write to each other from time to time  and he probably meets up with old parishioners when their cruise ship docks in Valletta. He is happy there, with Fr. Paul and their adopted son Matthew.

I still miss his ministry. And I hover over St Pat’s and Fr. Phil because I still haven’t found the courage to become a Roman Catholic. It would be a treat to land in Malta, find Sliema and knock at his door again.

In the Garden – October 2011

He stamped his feet and looked down
At the unlaced familiar boots
And their soil. How he welcomed
Its clinging, its living, its smell
Of earth and its companionship
On this journey of dying.
Like that year in its autumnal grace
Of harvesting and planting, he was
Harvesting his loving kindness from
His midsummer field – and planting
Pale tulips of hope
To stand like sentinels at the door and
To gaze upon the silence of
This coming Infinity and
This long goodbye. I say hello.

Leigh Cook, Sliema, Malta, 8.11.2013