Anguish in the soul

I love all my aunts but Aunt Susan, my father’s elder sister, had a special place in my heart because she was my godmother and because she saved my life when I was only a few hours' old. I was born at home and Aunt Susan was staying to help out. Glancing into my cot, she saw that I was turning blue so picked me up by a foot and shook me till I started breathing again.

    Their mother died of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six. (There were two younger children too, one of whom was to die of muscular dystrophy.) Aunt Susan was always a good talker, a fount of hilarious stories, but in her later years she started to tell me about that time, about how desperate she was, how she prayed and prayed, how she was sent away to boarding school because they thought a change of environment might help her. (It did.)

    She married a Staffordshire farmer and had four boys. I used to love going to stay there, but I think Aunt Susan missed the city-life she’d known when young. As the children left home she began to suffer from depression. Religion still played a big part in her life, but – like me – she took refuge in reading. The library van came every fortnight to Abbot’s Bromley, the village to which she and Uncle Philip had retired. She would walk the mile or so to the van’s stopping point with her tartan shopping bag on wheels and then drag it back home laden with books.

    She died in her eighties and Frog and I went up to the funeral. She was buried in the traditional way, in the village’s lovely country churchyard. It was a beautiful October day, and throughout the ceremony as we stood round the grave and the vicar spoke the service a blackbird sat in a nearby hawthorn tree and sang. I knew it was her way of telling us she was all right at last.

In the last post but one I mentioned ‘golden eras’. My golden era was the year I spent working and travelling in Australia in my early twenties.

    ‘What is it about this place?’ I asked a fellow Brit, whose reactions were the same as mine. ‘Why are we so happy here?’

    ‘The people don’t have anguish in their souls like we do,’ she replied.

    Yes, I thought. She was right.  

     What did the Aussies’ lack of anguish stem from? (I won’t say ‘does’ because I fear they may have changed.) I would say that at least in part it stemmed from the landscape which was still untamed, still so much bigger than human civilisation. It had presence. It gave perspective and meaning.

   What our anguish stems from I don’t know. Guilt perhaps, for what our country has done and is doing to other countries, for what we are doing to the environment. A dearth of spiritual certainty.

    All I know is that Aunt Susan's anguish at least is gone.



Aunt Susan, my father (right) and Bill, who died