Drempelvrees

One of my pleasures is listening to music (CDs) while driving. My choice at the moment is ‘Across The Borderline’, an album by the great Willie Nelson, on which is a gorgeous version of ‘Graceland’ by Paul Simon. Three of the lines always make me cry: 

            Losing love is like a window in your heart.

            Everybody sees you’re blown apart.

            Everybody sees the window.

They move me because when I first lost Frog everyone was so kind to me, even complete strangers like supermarket checkout people. It was as if they sensed what was going on, and Paul Simon has obviously had the same experience.

At least, that’s what I thought the words were. But when I came to check them for this post I discovered that I’d misheard the last one. It's not ‘window’ but ‘wind blow’, and that doesn’t work for me at all. Never mind. It’s still a beautiful version of the song and I can sing my own words loudly over the top of the official ones.

 

In Miriam Margolyes’s scurrilous autobiography ‘This Much is True’, which I’m currently laughing my way through, she mentions a Dutch word ‘drempelvrees’ which means ‘threshold fear’. She says that the Indonesians (who were once colonised by the Dutch, as you probably know) use the word more specifically to mean the moment we gather ourselves up to appear in public. They do consciously, she says, what most of us do unconsciously before going out - putting on a persona, an exaggerated version of ourselves, ourselves as we’d like to be.

I’m doing a lot of that at the moment. Or maybe what I’m doing is pretending to be what I hope I’m becoming. Dawn French, in her memoir ‘Dear Fatty’, first alerted me to this phenomenon. Before becoming a new person, she writes, we have to imagine that new person and play the part for a while. I found that very helpful. It’s such a good way of getting out of a rut and taking the step forward that we need to take.

 
However, both techniques have their drawbacks. They can mean that we’re not being true to our whole self, perhaps hiding or protecting something, and in my case it means that I’m glossing over the vulnerable grief-stricken part of myself, which is still there and may always be there.
 
When Frog first died, I didn’t have a persona. I couldn’t present an idealised version of myself. I couldn’t protect myself. I didn’t have the energy. It was as much as I could do to get up in the morning. And I think that honesty was one of the things people responded to. That was why they were kind to me.
 
Unfortunately that unexpected kindness doesn't happen any more in quite the same way, even though I’m probably just as fragile inside. Yesterday was a case in point, when I tried to engage the woman at the Sainsbury’s till in conversation and she looked at me as if I was mad. It threw me for the whole day.
 
I’ve a lot to learn still about this ‘being myself’ business, about how to face the world as me - new or otherwise, how to combine strength and vulnerability. Frog was much better than me at it. He never pretended. All his failings and weaknesses were on show. He knew he was an idiot (as we all are really). And I loved him for that.

 

Endings and beginnings

Last week I stayed with family in Kent.

I was brought up in that county on a farm on the edge of a village with my two brothers and two sisters. My sisters have returned to live in the village, and the rest of us visit as often as we can.
 
Kent is known as the Garden of England because of its fruit orchards and I have vivid memories of my mother buying us lucky children a crate of cherries from a local grower and us working our way through them, having spitting competitions with the stones.
 
On Friday however when I went for a walk it looked more like the Mediterranean. I believe it has the hottest (in summer), driest climate in the country. My sister’s lawn was too parched and prickly to walk on with bare feet

My sister's lawn

and the view from the hill was more brown than green.
 

The view from the hill

 
The village lies in the North Downs, a chalk ridge designated a National Landscape (as I read on the internet). I think that means it’s special. Well, I’ve always thought so, anyway. There are footpaths everywhere, lots of trees and loveliness round every corner.

Looking towards the hills and their beechwoods

Our farm – which I remember as being mostly grazed by cows whom we dodged in order to climb the trees that dotted the fields and who ate the underneath of the giant horse chestnut visible from the house and kept it neat - is now a vineyard.
 

Rows and rows of vines

 
The vineyard is open to the public and has a shop and restaurant – a vast glass edifice built over the concrete yard where I used to play hopscotch with a friend. The whole place, I'm told, is an extremely popular day out for people from nearby London. Fields have been turned into carparks, and neighbouring landowners put up boards explaining the farming business. (So much better than fences and 'keep out' signs.)
 

An overflow carpark

An information board

A stream flows through the village and I remember spending hours with my siblings and friends trying (and failing) to catch fish with twigs and string, paddling in it, falling in it and crawling through it under the road.
 
Chalk streams (I read) are globally rare, and important because they support so many species. They are fed by underground water which percolates up through the chalk. This is full of minerals, very pure and clear, and of a consistent temperature (cold!).
 
In a wood I pass some tributaries of the main river, a welcome feature on a broiling day and somewhere my sister’s spaniel spends as much time as she is allowed.
 

Welcome streams and shade

I skirt the cricket pitch where a brother and I used to take charge of the scoreboard, and I helped the ladies making the teas in the hope that I would be able to eat some of the delicious food. They were so deft with their knives, whipping up squishy butter from a large plastic tub and sweeping it over sliced white bread. I still think of them every time I make a sandwich.
 
From the cricket pitch there is a view of a cross cut into the chalk. This commemorates those killed in the First World War.
 

The cricket pitch and the cross

 
Finally, I make my way through the graveyard next to the church, where I pause at the newly filled grave of a sister-in-law’s brother, whose funeral was the reason for my visit to Kent. He was the same age as me and had lived in the village all his life.
 

This morning on my second day back at home, I realise that I need to commit to my life in Devon. I feel divided between Kent and Devon but I don’t want to go and live in Kent. I love it in Kent and I love it here, but I have a very big family and at times they overwhelm me. Here, on my own without Frog, is where I am at last finding myself.