Dear Readers, I will have more to say about horse chestnuts in general, and conkers in particular, later this week. But today, in memory of my Auntie Mary, I wanted to share this piece from 2016. See what you think. 

As I walked through St Pancras and Islington Cemetery earlier this week, I came across the shed leaves of a horse chestnut tree, and a windfall of conkers. Some were new and mahogany-coated. Others had been crushed by cars, revealing their white, mealy interior. Some were still partly wrapped in their spiky green coats, and looked like half-open eyes. And as I photographed them, I suddenly remembered Auntie Mary.

Auntie Mary wasn’t a ‘real’ auntie at all: she was my maternal grandmother’s sister, whatever title that bestows. And yet we knew her better than we knew some of our official aunties. I can easily bring to mind her toothless grin, her thin dark hair held back by a hairgrip, her National Health glasses, the way she shambled around, shoulders hunched.

It was said that when she was a child, a boy had picked Mary up and swung her around while she screamed with delight, until suddenly his grip slipped and everything fell silent. Mary struck her head on the kerb, and was never the same again. These days, we would say that she had Learning Disabilities. When she was growing up, it was whispered that she was Simple.

And simple she was, in many ways. Mary never learned to count or to read or write. Her chief role was as wheelchair-pusher for my great-grandmother, who was crippled with polio. And yet, it would be a mistake to say that Mary didn’t understand what was going on.  When she was sent out to the corner shop to buy cigarettes, she remembered exactly what coins she had handed over, and what she got back. There was many an occasion when Mary was cheated, and my nan marched her back to the shop to say exactly what had happened. Faced with such evidence, most shopkeepers confessed to a mistake and returned the money. It was a trick that they didn’t try twice.

Mary was a generous soul with the little that she had. She loved the tiny chocolate-covered toffees that you could buy at the newsagents. Unfortunately, so did our mongrel dog, Sally. Sally would sit beside Mary and gaze up at her. Mary would resist for a few minutes, but then relent.

‘Alright!’ she would say, ‘But just one’.

And she would take out the paper bag that she had folded and folded until it was tight shut, and unfold it, and take out a single toffee the size of a bean, and give it to Sally, who would chomp it down in a tenth of a second. Mary would screw up the bag again and put it back in her pocket, but the dog was unrelenting. Mary would heave a huge sigh and take out the bag again.

‘This is the Last One’ she would say. But it never was.

Mum maintains that the dog had more of the sweets than Mary ever did.

Mary lived with Great Gran and Nan and Mum for years, but there came a point where it was all too much. Nan couldn’t look after a huge woman in a wheelchair and her own disabled sister any more. Great Gran went into one home, and Mary into another.

As was Mary’s way, she just got on with it. The home was in a mansion in Chigwell with rolling lawns and huge horse chestnut trees. We would go to visit, and play Banker with Mary. This easiest of card games involves breaking the pack into piles and betting on which pile will have the highest card. It’s pure luck, and Mary loved it, as did my brother and I – I was eight, and my brother was six, and so we were all pretty much at the same level. Mary’s glee when she won was infectious, and somehow she always won, probably because she wouldn’t let us stop until she had.

Mary was never loud or badly behaved, but the same could not be said of the other inhabitants, who were sometimes in the last stages of dementia. The screaming and the erratic behaviour of some of the ladies frightened my brother and I, and when it all got too much Dad would take us outside. In my memory it was always a damp autumn afternoon, and we would rustle about under the horse chestnut looking for conkers. The glint of the polished nuts shining amongst the fallen leaves, the faint smell of bonfires, our shrieks of excitement as we found yet another conker – these are the things that I associate with those last days, with the white mansion behind us and the lawn falling away. We would collect a whole shopping  bag full of conkers and bear them away. Strangely, I can’t recall playing conkers more than once or twice – it always seemed like a violent and dangerous game, in spite of Dad’s enthusiasm. I do remember sticking pins into the chestnuts and turning them into little temporary animals, before they were all tidied away in time for Christmas.

Mary went into hospital for a cataract operation one day. Something went wrong, and she died, never coming round from the anaesthetic. Apparently there was something wrong with Mary’s heart that had never been diagnosed. The staff at the hospital, and at the care home, were griefstricken.

What is a life worth, I wonder? It seems to me that the hole that is left in the web when someone dies is a bigger indicator of someone’s value than any money accrued or status acquired. Mary’s simple soul had drawn people and animals towards her like a magnet. She never created a great work of art or became a person of power and prestige, but she lived her life with joy, and never knowingly did harm to a living soul. The world would be a better place if we all lived so gently.

Dear Readers, whenever I enter Whittington Hospital I am flooded with emotion. This is where they looked after my mother when she became ill with sepsis on Boxing Day 2015. It’s here that they saved her life, so that she could go on to enjoy her sixtieth wedding anniversary party, and to relish some of the small sweetnesses of existence as she became increasingly ill. I remember so well sitting in the canteen before the ward opened to visitors and walking back down the stairs in tears after a tricky visit.

Today, I was there for a whole raft of blood tests. I have some strange numbness and tingling in my feet, and as Mum, Dad and my brother all have type two diabetes, I thought I should get it checked out. Never one for half measures, my doctor has also requested lipids, liver function, bone density, a blood count and anything else she could think of. I expect that my left arm is now a few ounces lighter than my right.

The phlebotomy clinic is very well-organised – you’re checked off, given a number, and ten minutes later you’re leaving. The receptionist was apologetic that things were running a little late, but in the end I was actually seen five minutes before my scheduled time, so I’m definitely not complaining. I used to sometimes faint when my blood was taken, but fortunately I seem to have grown out of it – provided I don’t watch, it’s fine. And I should know the results by the end of the week. I never forget how lucky I am not to have to worry about the costs of medical procedures like this.

Anyway, today I wanted to share this original piece with you, written while Mum was still in hospital. It was the first time that I’d shared anything personal on the blog, and it changed everything for me. So, let’s go back to December 2015.

My mother and father came to stay with me in London this Christmas. All three of us knew it was a risk. Both my parents have the full range of late-onset ailments ( COPD, diabetes, dicky hearts) but this is the only holiday that they get, and, besides, prizing safety above all else means that we gradually retreat into our shells, like hermit crabs, afraid that every shadow is a shore-side bird waiting to gobble us up.

On Christmas morning. Mum was trying to pin one of the brooches I’d bought her onto her jumper, fumbling with the clasp. She sat back and smiled, the filigree butterfly a little skew whiff. Then, I remembered.

‘One last present,’ I said.

I’d almost forgotten the orchid that I’d hidden away in the bedroom. As I walked back downstairs, I looked at the flowers. I am not a great fan of orchids – they have an alien quality that looks sinister to me. And yet, my mother has a gift for coaxing them into flower time and again. This one was pale pink with mauve bruise-like blotches. The mouth of each bloom opened like a man-trap with long, backward-pointing teeth.

‘It’s beautiful!’ said Mum, as I passed it to her.

As I removed the wrapping, one of the flowers detached itself and floated to the ground. I picked it up, feeling the waxiness of the petals. I showed it to Mum.

‘Oh, put it in some water’, she said, ‘I can’t bear to think of it just getting thrown away’.

‘Really?’ I said. ‘Won’t it just die anyway?’

But she looked so upset that I found a dish and floated the flower in it. It’s still there now.

———————————————————————————————————————————-

Early on Sunday morning, I heard a rasping whisper from Mum and Dad’s bedroom.

‘I think you need to call someone’, Mum said. ‘I can breathe in, but I can’t breathe out’. I could hear her chest wheezing and crackling from across the room.

An hour later, she was in an ambulance, being given oxygen, heading for the nearest London hospital.

The doctors confirmed that she was 80 years old. They heard the recitation of her health problems, shook their heads over her oxygen levels and the sounds coming through their stethoscopes. They ascertained that at her best she could walk only ten paces without having to stop to gather her breath. They admitted her to the hospital. She was put in a huge room on her own. There were no windows, but there were lots of empty navy-blue storage cupboards, as if this had once been a kitchen but all the appliances had been removed. The fluorescent light gave off a constant background hum. It was like being in the belly of a great machine.

‘I’m not afraid of dying’, said Mum. ‘But it makes me so sad to think that I’ll never walk around Marks and Spencer again, or walk in a park. And I know I’m lucky and there are lots of things that I can still do, but somehow, just now, that doesn’t help’.

Normally I try to protect myself by avoiding what is really being said in these conversations, by trying, like Pollyanna, to look on the bright side. But today, I just sat, and held her hand, and cried with her.

As I walk to the hospital, I notice how bright all the colours seem, as if I’m hallucinating. The thoughts are chasing one another round and round inside my skull, as scratchy as rats. There is a wall alongside me and beyond a wildflower garden, at head height. The low winter sun lights up a patch of trailing bellflower. I see the way that the stamen are casting a hooked shadow on the lilac petals, the way a single raindrop trembles on the edge of a leaf before falling, in what seems like slow motion, onto the soil. And for a moment, I don’t think about Mum at all, and I feel my shoulders relax. I take a deep breath, then another. And then I walk on.

————————————————————————————————————————————-

It used to be that hospital wards were full of flowers, the stink of lilies and gently decomposing chrysanthemums rising above the smell of antiseptic and hospital cooking. But now, all plants are banned ‘for hygiene reasons’. Probably the nurses are so overworked that they don’t have time to cope with browning foliage and wilting poinsettias. But I can’t help thinking that something alive and beautiful is as important for healing as drips and antibiotics. Mum’s bunker looked completely sterile. But I had underestimated her.

At Christmas dinner, I had handed out some crackers that I’d bought from a wildlife charity. Each one contained a card that, when opened, released a snippet of bird song. The game was to guess which bird was singing – nightingale, blue tit, wren? Mum had put the cards in her bag. When the very important Consultant and his two trainees came along to see how she was doing, she produced one of the cards and pushed it into the Big Man’s hand.

‘Open that’, she said.

He looked at her askance, and opened the card. The sound of a song thrush in full-throat filled the bare room, flooding the place with the sound of woodland wildness.

The consultant’s face changed. He closed the card and opened it again. He turned to the two trainees.

‘I know you want to go home’, he said to them, ‘But listen to this!’

And he ‘played’ the song again, before closing the card and handing it back to Mum with a bow.

After a few days, Mum is moved to a different ward. As usual, she hates it at first – relationship is what Mum thrives on, and in each new location she has to charm everyone all over again. But she does have a window now.

‘At night, I can see all the planes flying over’, she says.

I notice that there’s a spider outside the window. At first I think it’s dead, but then I see that it is on a web, blowing backwards and forwards as the wind buffets the building. I decide not to tell Mum. She isn’t the world’s biggest spider fan. But it makes me happy to see this little note of anarchy in this antiseptic place.

‘At least I can get a breeze here’, says Mum. ‘Though when I was standing up next to the window yesterday they made me get back into bed in case I caught a chill’.

Her temperature is still too high, she is coughing most of the time and she’s pulled her canula out.

‘ I thought I’d be feeling a bit better by now’, she says. ‘But they’ve still got me on that bloody antibiotic that doesn’t work’.

I know that doctors don’t like to be told their jobs, but still.

‘Did you know that Mum’s been hospitalised for Proteus infections several times?’ I ask the doctor when he’s next on his rounds.

‘No’, he says. ‘Maybe we should talk to the people in Metabiotics’.

———————————————————————————————————

Proteus is a super-bug, and Mum probably acquired it in a hospital. Along with MRSA and C.Difficile, it is infecting our clinics and operating theatres. Proteus is so-called because it hides in the body, changing location. There are several variants, many of them immune to one antibiotic, some to several. The use of several antibiotics simultaneously is called Metabiotics.

This is the age of the antibiotic-resistant bacteria. On a bad day, I feel that we are standing on the threshold of apocalypse. I remember a display I saw about the Jamestown settlers in America. Several of them died from a simple tooth abscess that could not be treated, became infected, and spread through the body.

As we seek to sterilise our homes and hospitals and schools, life is creeping back through the keyhole, pouring under the door, finding the draughty spaces around our windows.

The doctors change the drugs. My mother’s body becomes a battleground. At 3.30 a.m. she rings me.

‘I’m in The Game’, she says. ‘I’m trapped in a room, and they’re murdering people next door, and slaughtering them like animals, and they won’t let me out’.

‘Mum,’ I say, heart racing, ‘You know that none of this is real?’

‘I know’, she says, ‘but I want to get out and they won’t let me go’.

The phone goes dead. I call the ward. After what seems like a year, the nurse answers. I explain the situation.

‘I’ll talk to her’, he says. ‘It’s the drugs’.

The next morning, Mum can’t remember any of it, but her breathing seems better. Then her blood sugar climbs to 32, a dangerously high level. It seems that, somehow, the bacteria are fighting back. This is not going to end any time soon.

On my visit, Mum hands back the cards with the bird songs in them.

‘Take them home’, she says. ‘Keep them safe. They don’t belong here’. And she closes her eyes, a look of concentration turning her face to marble. She is not beaten yet.

Today, there is finally good news. The blood sugars are under control. Mum’s breathing is improving. Her poor body has fought back again, and if all goes well, she will be out of the hospital in a couple of days.

I am making my peace with the orchid. The buds are clenched fists, but the newly opened flowers are poppy-shaped, like cupped hands, around the soft inner petals. I see that the long, tongue-like leaves have a fine layer of dust.

‘I’d better clean you up’, I say to the plant. ‘Before Mum comes home’.

Update

Mum finally left the hospital on Thursday, and is travelling back home to Dorset with Dad and I on Sunday. She isn’t fully well yet, as might be expected, but she is getting better.I am deeply grateful to all the staff at the Whittington Hospital in north London for their unfailing care of my mum, and for their patience and dedication. The NHS truly is a pearl beyond price.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers, after the fog, the snow, the icy winds, the rain and the general gloom it was a delight to be in St Pancras and Islington Cemetery today. The crocuses seem to have all burst into life within the past few days: the temperature was in the low thirties Fahrenheit last week, but today it was nearly sixty degrees, and everything seems to be in flower. What a joy it is! I spotted this queen buff-tailed bumblebee in the grass about ten metres from a patch of snowdrops, and I was quite concerned.

I thought she was dead at first, but as I crouched down she reached out with her middle leg in a very clear ‘don’t mess with me gesture’. As I hunkered back and considered what to do she picked herself up and flew in the opposite direction to the snowdrops, only to do a big loop and head back to them. How do they know, I wonder? Are they smelling the flowers, or had she visited before and remembered them? Anyhow, she had a good feed and then headed away at speed, so it was a most welcome false alarm.

There are two kinds of crocuses in the cemetery: Crocus vernus, which is the more typical garden crocus in its shades of purple, yellow, white/maroon and lilac, and Crocus tommasinianus, which is always a delicate lavender colour, and which seems more inclined to naturalise.

Although the Woodland Crocus gets a bit floppy and falls over more easily than the Spring Crocus, I must say that I prefer it to its blousier relative. Some graves are absolutely covered in Woodland crocus, and the bees and hoverflies are already enjoying it. What a joy it is to see some colour after such a long, dark winter. And I am reminded that Woodland Crocus is known as elfenkrokus in German, which is just about perfect.

The native flowers are coming out too. I saw my first Lesser Celandine, but soon the paths will be carpeted with it.

There’s some red deadnettle, another favourite with the bees….

Some germander speedwell, with its sweet sky-blue and white flowers…

and of course some daisies, with their faces turned towards the sun.

But really it’s the crocuses and the snowdrops that are the stars of the show this week. They lifted my spirits and reminded me that the bulbs that I planted last year won’t be too far behind, though they are always later in my north-facing garden. Here are a few more photos, to cheer you up too…

And finally, it wouldn’t be me if I hadn’t found a grave to puzzle over. I had never noticed this one before, although it is literally the first grave that I pass if I walk my usual route.

There was a big Welsh community in the Kings Cross area of London, and I love how this headstone bears the daffodil, the National Flower of Wales. I used to live very close to Amwell Street, and just half a mile away on Pentonville Road there was a building that used to be the Welsh chapel, with the London Welsh Centre about the same distance away on Grays Inn Road. The story seems to have been a sad one: Lloyd Lloyd was listed as being an ‘invalid for the last seven years’ in 1939, while Margaret was ‘a helper in business’. Their son, David, was a ‘master dairyman and provision merchant’. However, they at least had the money to have not only a servant living with them, but also a male nurse. Margaret passed away in 1946, Lloyd in 1948, and according to the probate records, David received what would have been a very decent inheritance of almost £8,000. A little more digging reveals why – their home at 42 Amwell Street seems to have actually been a dairy, so David had taken over the family business. Something about the name ‘Lloyd’s Dairy’ rang a bell, and so I turned to Google for some help. And here is the site of the dairy. Apparently it opened in 1905 and finally closed about a century later.

What I can’t work out is if there were actually cows on the premises. Many Welshmen, especially from Cardiganshire, set up dairy businesses from about the 1860’s in London, selling milk and cream by the bottle, and also running a milk round. This continued until about 1954, so it’s not ancient history. The dairies tended to pop up along the line of the Euston Road (like this one) so even if cows weren’t kept on the premises, milk could be easily picked up via Paddington Station, which had direct links to the Welsh farms. And (light bulb moment) this is probably why the first trains in the early hours of the morning were known as ‘milk trains’.

It never ceases to amaze me how a simple headstone can reveal so much and yet so little about the people that it commemorates. I now know  a lot about Lloyd and Margaret Lloyd, and yet I know nothing about them as people. Still, I think I shall take some daffodils for their grave next time I visit, to say thank you for the insights they’ve provided into a whole area of London life that I knew nothing about.

Lloyds Dairy as it was (Photo One)I found this photo on A London Inheritance, a very interesting site run by one of my classmates from The Gentle Author’s blogging class back in 2014. If you are at all interested in London and how it has changed, I recommend you dash over to A London Inheritance right this minute.

Photo Credit

Photo One from https://collage.cityoflondon.gov.uk/view-item?key=SXsiUCI6eyJ2YWx1ZSI6ImFtd2VsbCBzdHJlZXQgcml2ZXIgc3RyZWV0Iiwib3BlcmF0b3IiOjEsImZ1enp5UHJlZml4TGVuZ3RoIjozLCJmdXp6eU1pblNpbWlsYXJpdHkiOjAuNzUsIm1heFN1Z2dlc3Rpb25zIjozLCJhbHdheXNTdWdnZXN0IjpudWxsfX0&pg=3&WINID=1533845224776#daMHWlkAf9EAAAFlIEy1ag/62626 via https://alondoninheritance.com/london-streets/lloyds-dairy-lloyd-baker-estate/