I’m writing this from my childhood bedroom.
These walls hold memories.
They’ve been painted over in a more acceptable cream but remnants of bright blue and florescent pink can be seen in those hard to reach corners. The overfilled bookshelves are lurid lime green and the ceiling is home to a sad host of glow in the dark stars. If you look closely you’ll see the initials of various high school boyfriends carved into the wooden beams. The colour choices were from the 90’s when everything had to be fluro. I didn’t have any patience for my Mum and Dad’s hippy ways. I was obsessed with the Spice Girls. I saved up my lunch money, bought neon orange platform shoes and hid them in my bag to wear at school. I shaved off my eyebrows and drew two thin lines in brown pencil. They never recovered. I’ve done a lot of questionable things but if I’m honest my only regret is my eyebrows.
It’s not just my bedroom that time forgot. The whole house holds the past delicately and stubbornly in every piece of crockery that was never smashed and every book that has stayed in the exact position on the shelf for years, in every piece of newspaper stuffed into the cracks for insulation. I pulled one out a few years ago. The date was March 1984.
There’s a large window above my bed. I keep it open and never draw the curtains so I sleep with the rain and wake up with the light. I’m a world away from my highly scheduled life as a yoga teacher, business owner, important person who goes to meetings and these mornings feel vast and vaguely terrifying. I’ve been reading in bed and dozing and having bubble baths at 10:00am which feels luxurious and cloying all at the same time. Life moves in slow motion from the way Mum packs the car to the steady ticking of the large clock on the kitchen wall to the slow pace of my Dad when he ambles through the fields.
Life is simple and spacious and did I mention terrifying. I notice how addicted I am to feeling motivated and productive. It’s so easy to be ‘really busy’ and work all day in a space I created surrounded by people telling me how great I am. It’s much harder to love myself from here, lying in this tiny bed, squeezing words from my stagnant brain.
Dad and I have been cycling to the church most days which is pretty funny considering he is the least religious person I’ve ever met. He tells me stories about the past that I either dont remember or never through to ask.
We walked past a small grave almost completely hidden by the wild grass. ‘That’s Bert Geering. Have I told you the story about Bert?’ I shook my head.
‘As you know I bought Pool Cottage when it was a ruined farmers cottage. It hadn’t been lived in for over 60 years. Only two walls were standing. Ruth and I bought it for twelve thousand pounds. I didn’t know anything about building a house but I’d studied Physics at university so thought, how hard can it be. I taught myself to plumb and wire the house. I got most of the building materials from the scrap heap. We kept running out of money so it took 4 years longer than expected. Ruth got sick of living in a caravan so she rented a flat in Hereford for a bit, I thought I’d blown it but luckily she came back. When you were born we still didn’t have any stairs. We used to climb a ladder and open a trapdoor to get to the bedrooms. Not very easy with a tiny baby. It’s called Pool Cottage because it’s the lowest lying part of Norton Canon. It would always flood so I decided to dig a big trench through the fields. The field next door was owned by this guy Bert. He died pretty recently.’ I look down at the engraving. Died 1994. I nod and smile.
‘Anyway Bert was a German soldier in World War 2. He was captured by the English and sent to work on the farms. He fell in love with the farmers daughter, they got married and then he took over the farm. Pretty good result you could say.’ He stops to clear some ivy from the grave.
‘He was a really interesting character. He liked the conservation work I was doing. I was always banging on about biodiversity before it was a buzz word. Bert said his cows loved the hay from the wildflower meadows. It smelled sweet, like honey. They’d always produce the best milk when they ate the good hay, not this mono-crop stuff you get these days. Anyway when I was digging the trench I realised I’d have to cut through a corner of his field so I asked if I could buy it from him. I think he charged me 100 pounds. So where you’re lying and sunbathing every day, that’s Bert’s field.’
It’s funny how you can spend your whole life in a place and not know it’s stories. In this higgledy piggedly triangle we call ‘the end’, Mum and Dad planted crab apple trees and my brother made dens and a tiny oak sapling poked it’s head up the day I was born. Dad used to carry me up the garden when I was a few days old to get me to sleep. He saw the tiny Oak and named it after me. Every year he’d take a photo of me next to the tree to see who was growing faster. The tree was winning for a long time but eventually he cut it right back so my brother could have more space for his bike jumps. I look at her now. She’s 38 years old and thriving. She’s been cut down and reduced to nothing. She’s come back from the dead many times.
Back at the churchyard I learn that the Castle next to the church isn’t a ‘real’ castle. ‘Oh it’s crenellated!’ Dad laughs expecting me to know what he’s talking about. I raise my eyebrows. ‘In the Tudor times the Barons wanted to show off to their neighbours. They planted all these exotic trees, the Cedars of Lebanon and the Gingko. They weren’t satisfied with mansions, it was castles or nothing so they built these turrets at the top, not for defence, but because it looks impressive. The King realised this could be problematic if there was a revolt and all these barons had turrets so he bought in a new law. Every mansion that was ‘crenelated’ has to have a licence to crenellate! I worked this out from studying the records at Kew Gardens. The English were all about showing off. Look at my castle and look at my fancy trees. What a weird species we are.’
We ride home and admire the stag-headed oak trees. Dead branches like antlers stick out from the canopy cutting a dramatic silhouette against the cloudy skies. Mum plays piano and Dad scythes and builds bridges that will never be walked over.
I sit in my bedroom and wonder who I am. Two white butterflies dance in the trees.