Himmelschlusselchen

Hedda-Eileen-Omi-Mutti-und-Tante-Anneliese-Celle-1960

Hedda-Rainer-und-Eileen-Celle-1960

I met the sweetest nurse this morning. Her name was Gabrielle. She’s from Co. Wexford and is looking forward to taking her children over to see her parents at half-term. I told her how much I love Ireland and stopped short of all the background stuff…but I did mention that the only other Gabrielle I know is my German penfriend – still call her my penfriend because we haven’t met for the last fifty six years. We write.

As you already know, sweet readers, I am a War Child born in May 1943 in Bedford, England. There is another War Child who has had a  significant influence on my life, born in Celle, Germany, in July 1943, just eight weeks after me – Hedda Gabriele Weichler. The baby girl, I understood, was named after Ibsen’s heroine cos her Dad loved that play. Today she’s Hedda Luftmann, but always Hedda Gabriele in my mind.

My early years were spent in an anti-German world. Films, songs, snatches of conversation, men and women in military uniforms, tanks and jeeps on roads, Civil Defence, air-raid shelters, toy guns, children’s war games with toy soldiers… and in the skies…. well, Celle, like Bedford, was close to military airfields, so as we grew up, Hedda and I shared the sights and sounds of bomber and fighter planes flying low over the town to and from their bases.

We wrote to each other from 1959. That was the year I started learning German and after four years of learning French, I fell in love with German’s depth of music and clarity of structure. When we were sixteen, an exchange visit between our schools was  on offer. I didn’t dream my parents would be able to pay for it, let alone agree to it – but, for which they have my eternal gratitude, they found a way to do it and in April 1960, Hedda came to Bedford.

Of course, we did the whole sharing of what goes on in an English girls’ school and  the group visits to London, to Cambridge and to Whipsnade Zoo. Yet what stayed with me  was memories of Hedda in my home. I loved the way she called my parents Mum and Dad. I think now of how daunting it must have been for her to suddenly have three English brothers – and the youngest just six years old. Hedda is an only child and I’m one of four children. Our home was one where  all the adults chipped in to find ways to make ends meet.

Meals were more fun than usual with Hedda, like Sunday dinner with Yorkshire pud and gravy first, then vegetables, followed by rice pudding. Heaven knows what she thought! One teatime I remember as clearly as a starry night!  She took a slice of my Mum’s ginger cake and solemnly placed it between two dry (no margerine) slices of bread and sat happily munching it. I also remember her telling me that her Mum had asked her not to mix with any existentialists! She was certainly mixing with Geordies in our home – and to this day I wonder what she made of the accents outside compared to the inside accents of our daily life in exile from Tyneside. She loved to listen to my Nan.

In the summer of 1960, our school group saw Europe for the first time. From Calais onward, I looked out on miles of cornfields as we passed through Belgium and on up into Lower Saxony. The coach which met us delivered each girl to her penfriend’s house  and I started to notice windows for the first time. The little houses had plants on every window sill. The net curtain didn’t cover the whole window like a shroud as it did at home, but hung high above the plants, giving them a frilly and sometimes a coloured frame. Windows are still very important to me. Like eyes.

Hedda lived in an apartment on the top floor of an older house – something totally new to me. It seemed dark at first, but I soon got used to the ways of things. I met Mutti. She has always been my Mutti. I know now how hard she must have worked to keep things going in that little home. Out early in the morning to a job in the court in town. Mutti was always smart, with short dark hair and a straight bearing. She loved, or needed, her cigarettes. At first, she made me anxious, with something of the stern primary school teacher about her, but I gradually learned about the love offered in their home.

And I met Omi, Mutti’s mum – and Hedda’s Nan. Omi lived with us – a small, active woman, with her grey hair drawn gently into a loose bun and always wearing her apron over her dark dress. I did not find it easy to understand Omi’s words, but I understood the woman and tried to respond to her. One day she showed me a small black and white photo, no bigger than two inches square, with a large family group on it. I remember holding it up between my fingers to look at it as she repeated ‘Meine Familie.’ Gradually I understood that this was all her family in East Germany and that she was cut off from them.

I met Hedda’s cousin Rainer, his mother Tante Anneliese and his father Onkel Fritz. Rainer was the closest Hedda had to a brother and he visited most days or we would catch him rolling along on the cycle path to school in the early morning. School in Germany started early.

Coffee and Torte in the late afternoon with Mutti and Tante Anneliese was a new treat for me. Coffee? I’d hardly smelt a cup of coffee until I was in Germany. I’d seen Camp Coffee liquid in a bottle at home, but this was the real thing. The food was exotic:  raw fish, fresh salad, cold meats, asparagus, quark, sauerkraut and black bread – a whole new realm, far removed from the bread and dripping, bread and marmite, bread and rhubarb and ginger jam or home-made scones and ginger cake at home. Peanuts too – we seemed always to have peanuts to dip into.

Sudwall, where Hedda lived, is a road that runs next to the Franzosische Garten in Celle – a beauty spot. The old town of Celle escaped the bombing and looked to me like a fairy tale set, with painted house fronts in many colours and open spaces. Sometimes, on the way home in the evening, we’d come across British soldiers making their way back to the barracks and they always seemed scary and so out-of-place to me.

We went to Hanover and sat in the Herrenhausen Gardens, while fountains played alongside a son- et- lumiere performance of Handel’s Water Music. We went to Luneburg and to the Luneburger Heide, where I had my first glimpse of watchtowers and barbed wire, the symbols of a Cold War. Celle, it turns out, was one of the larger towns en route to what had been the Bergen-Belsen POW and concentration camp. I knew nothing of this. Things might have been said to me about it, but neither my German nor my inclination were strong enough to take it in. Later I learned that it was on Luneburger Heide on 4th May 1945 that the German army made its unconditional surrender. Hostilities were to cease from eight o’clock on May 5th, 1945. Hedda and I were the same age that my beautiful granddaughter Ella is now – almost two years old. And as I write, there is a ceasefire in Syria. May it hold.

I missed knowing Hedda’s Dad. I knew he had died – that was all. I didn’t ask any questions. He was very present in that home and I would love to have met him. It was many years later, when Mutti died that I heard from Hedda he had been a journalist before the war and that she now has all his letters. There’s a bit of a writer in Hedda Gabriele too. Over the years we’ve shared baby clothes, sent postcards, letters, music, Christmas gifts, photos – especially of our beloved grandchildren – and all this I see as a precious gift. Her father was killed at Stalingrad the year we were born, in 1943.

The gift they gave me is the insight  into what people like Mutti, Omi and Hedda had lived through and how they loved and cared for me. I sensed  the futility of war and these things live in my heart. Today, Hedda and Heinrich sing in Munster Capelle Choir and their music and singing sounds to me like managed hopes and their daughters, Iris and Julia, with husbands Stefan and Ole and the grandchildren Marthe, Justus and Malte, part of the beloved families we are blessed with.

aus Die Achte Elegie

Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,
den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen
unendlich aufgehn. Immer ist es Welt
und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht: das Reine,
Unuberwachte, das man atmet und
unendlich weiss und nicht begehrt. Als Kind
verliert sich eins im Stilln an dies und wird
geruttelt. Oder jener stirbt und ists.

Rainer Maria Rilke

from The Eighth Elegy

We never, not for a single day, have
before us the pure space into which flowers
endlessly open. Always it is world,
and never nowhere without the no: that pure
unsurveilled element one breathes and
infinitely knows, without desiring. As a child,
one may lose oneself to it in silence, and be
shaken back. Or die and be it.

Claraland and the Grace of God

Hello sweet readers, let me tell you about Claraland…

After my nephew Gavin and his wife, Amanda, came to visit us some years ago with their three children, Oscar, Clara and Heidi, we started to refer to our home and garden as Claraland. And it stuck.

So let me tell you about the Grace of God in Claraland, because this is about my beloved partner John, whose given name in Hebrew means God is gracious. He’s also known as Dad, Da, Grandad, Dadi, Poppajohn, Uncle John, Captain America, Mr. Cook, Cookie and Urchin. And Beethoven’s Batman.

We’ve lived together for thirty four years, four months and one day and we’ve shared a path through the joy of births, birthdays, engagements, weddings, anniversaries and moments, as well as through sickness, rage, sadness, suffering, funerals, bereavement and moments. It’s a wild, quiet and worthwhile life we share.

John is the heart of Claraland.  He’s my very own Man in the Moon:  reflective and content to move through darkness. He’s my Morning Glory and my Midnight Sun, creating comfortable places for people wherever he can.

He’s like the standing stones of Wigton, where we circled and prayed in the rain, with a silent herd of damp cows gazing at us in compassion. Solid, wet, grey, sheltering stones, ancient in their wisdom and rust-green with lichen .

John loves moss and even paints walls with yoghurt to grow it.

He has laid stepping stones in our little garden, of different shapes and sizes, where fairies and short people can dance from one to another . He built the sturdy frames and arches that secure the roses, wisteria, honeysuckle, clematis and jasmine. And it’s John who prunes, clips, strims and deadheads and I nip in and out, like a starling in a car park, with seeds, plants and a watering can. That pretty much sums up how we live life in Claraland. A duet of a dance.

There are some night-sky moments  when I discovered he could name all the constellations we could see  – and another where, standing together high over Manchester, the stars and the city lights were so clear and bright they seemed to be all one, the same backcloth to our stage.  Clouds are John’s love in daylight – their shapes and shapeshifting are his muses – his shade from a hot sun  and part of his weather-telling.

We spend quite a few hours in hospital waiting rooms these days. Once he’s settled in, taken in the layout and atmosphere of the room and how comfortable I am, John will take out a little sketch pad and start to draw. He must have a  series of hospital waiting room images and his pencil is a lead magnet to people sitting around us. Sometimes they watch and wonder, too shy to intervene. Once, in the Genetics clinic in St. Mary’s, I watched a young boy – he must have been about eight – leave his seat next to his mother and come and stand beside John, watching the pencil working. Slowly and intently, with all the wonder of childhood, he sat down beside John, gazing at the hand and the pencil tip, completely in the moment.

Claraland is full of paintings and sketches. We are the curators of secret and hidden galleries that John occasionally opens for a visitor – more often for those visitors he loves. He’s an observer who senses genuineness. This always warms him. His silent observation can be a bit disturbing and it’s as if his role is not to be a physical part of what’s going on.  I often see the child called John, separated out, learning the hard way how to observe and deciding what to do with it.

He loves sunsets. Here in Oldham we have long evenings in the summer and autumn and there is a time of day when John disappears. It is a special kind of light that draws him and he melts into it. You might know the kind of light I mean, it’s mellow – as if the whole world is lit by candlelight. John and that light are one.

He sings to express himself, but only in public – not in Claraland. He’s a good listener too, looking for the gaps and chances to transform any crap he hears into something positive. He fixes holes where the rain gets in and shares his tools with his youngest grandson, who makes more happy holes. There’s something of the carpenter and the shepherd about him. I don’t mean like a shepherd working a sheepdog, but more like the one I apprehended on the Ring of Kerry near  Valencia when I was nineteen. He loomed up out of the thick Atlantic sea mist, a grey figure in a long wet coat with a wide-brimmed hat, carrying a crook taller than himself. It seemed he might have been standing there with his sheep all night long, ready to be near with a helping hand  in that soaking April lambing season.

John is the much-loved father and stepfather to our six children and I know that when I shuffle off this mortal coil, they will watch over him and always be his friends. They know  the  lovingkindness of the artist and inventor, who can guide a small team of family elves  to create wedding flowers fit for Titania and Oberon or share his motorbike and helmet with curious would-be riders.

You’ll recognise when we are one and when we are separate if you walk through a wood and notice how the trees’ branches and leaves intermingle, but how their roots are in their own space. The roots  lie in the same earth and the branches reach up to the heavens. In our old age, the dry leaves are beginning to fall all around our feet, but in our life together, we’ve planted a few trees:  a Lebanese spruce, a Kilmarnock willow, a silver birch, a larch, a eucalyptus, a rowan and roses and hawthorn galore.

John’s a north-countryman. The moors are his vision of the road to the wider world, to light and to escape. He loves to come back to them and lives near the city knowing they are there to guide him away. The heather’s in bloom at the moment and the bog-cotton is sleeping.

How can I ever thank him for his lovingkindness? Thank the thinker… think the thanks…I love him so much.

Beside his fabulous neck and bum, the thing I love most about John is his smile. When he gives a real smile it shines out on the world like the shine of a newly-cut diamond – with all it’s many faces lit up.  That smile sounds like the peal of bells across the fields in the early morning. And I look down at my feet, wet with dew as I walk on through the water-meadows.

Claraland

This home rolled in the eye of the storm
With its contents whirled and scattered
and its chatter stilled.

‘Til its outward aspects turned inward, to gaze
on what Love really is.

Eileen Walke

Coemgen – the fair-begotten Kevin

Let me tell you about Kevin. He’s my meteor shower and my Northern Lights – one of those phenomenon you glimpse once in a lifetime – more if you’re lucky. He’s my nephew – Kevin Walke – and a quicksilver mate. I’ve explained where the name for this blog came from, but Kev is the one who put it into place, secured it and gave me the marvellous journey.

I worried about Kev for years. For some time he chose a quiet life for reasons of his own.  Then, in November 2011, as we arrived at our son Dom’s funeral,  there it was!  – Kevin’s face gazing at me from the crowd of people on the left hand side of the porch to the church. It was just so right.

He’s tall, with the darkest hair you can imagine and with smiling eyes. We met again in 2013 at the Walkefest family gathering in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park when he came to get to know people in his family. Today is his Mum’s birthday and a good time for me to say that her heart was full that day in the park.

I learned that Kev’s heart was waiting to be fixed with what looked like a gas mantle. (Our front room was lit with these when I was knee high to a caterpillar as a War Child). I’ve always noticed their combined fragility and strength – like the wings of a moth near a candle. Anyway, two annual family gatherings and several jolly Italian meals and drinks later, Kev is fixed. Now the long process of healing is holding him in its hand.

Through Kev I’ve got to see what a beautiful city Sheffield is, with its trees and hills, with its history and its presence. Kev makes me laugh. I have to be careful not to laugh at inappropriate moments with him. He’s a keen observer and would make a good birdwatcher.

It’s a few years since I first visited Glendalough and left my heart there. When I’m returned to ashes, I’d like some of them to go into the river there and Ria says she’ll do that for me. More about Ria later… Kev is the namesake of St. Kevin, whose feast day is June 3rd, known as Pattern Day in Ireland – a day for a feast of merrymaking, dancing and riotousness. That pretty much matches what my Kev would want from a feast day. He’s playful, anxious and loves people.

St. Kevin lived to 120 – from 498 to 618 would you believe that now! Kev likes figures too. From the age of 7 to 12, St. Kevin was taught by St. Petroc, the patron saint of Cornwall, who lived in Leinster at that time. I like that. Men of quiet wild places like Kev. he likes to get away from the city into the green when he can.

I’ve mentioned to Kev that he might like to visit Glendalough to feel its sacred stillness (even amidst crowds) and see where the saint lived as a hermit for seven years. His narrow cave above the upper lake was his bed. Later, in 1539, the monastery he founded and nurtured was destroyed by Henry VIII and the English.

You can take the mortar out of the monastery but you can’t take the blackbirds out of Glendalough.

St. Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St. Kevin and the blackbird.
The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside
His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff
As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands
and Lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked
Neat head and claws and finding himself linked
Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand
Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks
Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,
Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?
Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearm?
Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?
Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?
Alone and mirrored clear in Love’s deep river,
‘To labour and not to seek reward’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely
For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird
And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

Seamus Heaney

For Omran Daqneesh and the children of Syria

Sunday morning and the house is quiet, so I’ll write a bit for you my readers. You are the ghosts around me, the stardust of my myriad thoughts and I thank you.

I’m a War Child. Nowadays the media show images of little ones dying in war, bewildered in war, wounded in war, alone in war and crying in war. That’s how a War Child is presented to us. I’m looking back over my life in more detail than ever these days and I would definitely use those words to describe my childhood. The Second World War left its impact on a child who was trying to work out what was going on. It was like living in the set of a stage play that was yet to take shape in my mind.

In 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. In 1940, rationing was started in the U.K., fishing boats went out to support the evacuation of Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain made its mark. In 1941, the Blitzkrieg was extended from Belgium, France and Holland to the U.K. and Pearl Harbour was attacked by the Japanese. In 1942, huge numbers of prisoners were taken by the Japanese and the industrial-scale murders in Auschwitz and other concentration camps were started.

In 1943 I was born in a little market town called Bedford, England. In the same year the Germans surrendered at Stalingrad, Italy was invaded and the Japanese were being fought in Burma.

In 1944 came D-Day and Paris was liberated while the British bombed a monastery at Monte Cassino in Italy.
In 1945, Auschwitz horrors were revealed to the world, Hitler committed suicide in Berlin and the U.S.A. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now that I realise the impact of this war on the events of my life, you’ll find me returning to them in my writing.

I’ve just been watching a short film by Channel 4 News about the last gardener in Aleppo. Hinnie (our daughter-gardener Inez) sent it to me because she understands me better than I care to know sometimes. After my tears and a second viewing, three things came to mind. The first is Omran Daqneesh, aged five, a beautiful boy in Syria the same age as my beautiful grandson Eric Cook Caka . The second is a memory of the grandfather and granddaughter, (she was maybe nine years old), who came into our garden last year and asked if they could take cuttings from some of the flowers. I wanted to tell them about Dom (our son-gardener who died in 2011), but language stopped me in my tracks and from the old man’s eyes, I could see the cuttings were doing the same thing – I wish I knew where they lived. The third thought was of Oscar Wilde’s short story, ‘The Selfish Giant’.

It was at school in Bedford that I first read this poem. The words that struck me then were “…a white light at the back of my mind to guide me”, and those words have always stayed with me. However,  now, as I read  the poem against the stage set of my life, I begin to comprehend why he wrote this poem at the height of the Second World War and what the Second World War was doing to Louis MacNeice.

This morning, as I write to you dear readers, they’ve dropped barrel bombs on the children and adults gathered at the funerals of children bombed in Syria earlier this week. “They” – are all of us. I keep reading that ‘the world is watching’. Too much watching and not enough doing. The stage is set for war to be stopped in the name of the 250,000 War Children dying, bewildered, wounded, alone and crying in the besieged towns and villages of Syria.

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born; console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze
my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

Louis MacNeice

Painting the town red on Mother’s Day

Mothering about on your Sunday for you
once a year, this year,
better even, I hope, than any old breakfast in bed,
I thank you dear La-la
dear Leigh Eileen La-la:

for spiralling fluidities
quick and silvery
of slippery slapped and wailing thought
in a rush of bubbles

and for thoughts continually drummed out loud
in howls and in vowels
in hoots and in heights
in weights and in measures
I thank you additionally

and for the power of listen
and for the power of watch
it is you I also have to thank

and for a dawning
an inkling of comprehension
of the lovelinesses of skies of Novembers

I thank you as well, long and down-deep heartfelt.

Dominic Mathews

better even, I hope, than any old breakfast in bed

As I’m going to write regularly, this morning I think you might like to know where the name of our blog comes from. Almost ten years ago, arriving  in Victoria Coach Station from a trip to the Isle of Wight with my friend Janet Born,  Dom was there to meet us.

The coach station was very busy and we were rushed to find Janet’s coach to Bedford and wave her on her way.  Then Dom and I turned and headed off to Highshore Road in Peckham for adventures together.

When he was about eight, Dom wrote a poem in school about his favourite colour. I still have it, written in the  clear and careful style of the eight year-old poet. He wrote that red “…is the brightest and best colour of all.”

We spent the next day, Sunday – Mother’s Day- together and Dom gave me this poem…he was forty now.

Inside the hangar

A new thought is floating about the high spaces of the hangar of my mind. I’ve been told my kidney cancer has come back to visit me. No doubt this thought will find itself a place to hang like a glistening cobweb or a pirate flag up there in the heights. In the meantime, I’m aware of it dancing and weaving as I get on with everyday living between hospital visits. I was thinking this morning of how the changes are not unlike being pregnant – except that the child is ahead of you somewhere, in the stardust that is everywhere, within and without.