9.4 Rewilding

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

It all started when I was eleven years old. I was lying on the grass at the edge of the village cricket ground, with views of the wooded North Downs all around. A cricket match was in progress but I was more interested in my book, The Hobbit. All at once I realised that I loved this landscape and that one day it could be lost. Whether that was the result of something in the book, or whether it was something in me, I don’t know.
    Later in my teens I explored the Downs and their flora, first with the help of the botanist mother of a friend and later on my own. The wildflowers stunned me with their variety and beauty. The landscape was alive and breathing. It spoke to me. I was connected to it.
    In my late teens and early twenties when I went to London to work I was equally stunned by the horror of the place – the concrete and tarmac, the dirt, the greyness, the noise, the smell, the frightening people, the money-grabbing. The pointlessness of it all.
    Once in Devon, even though at first I thought the landscape was dull after Kent – where were all the trees? – I grew to love it, especially the hedgerows that brimmed with colour from March to October. With the realisation that this too could all be lost, a pain grew inside me. I read an article that described that sort of environmental anguish as deep grief. That was exactly what it was.
    Over the next few decades, I joined conservation organisations, wrote about the environment, campaigned with Friends of the Earth. But nothing seemed to change, either in me or in the world at large.
    I joined a protest against a motorway being pushed through sites of Special Scientific and archaeological interest, not to mention beauty, but it seemed pointless. Many locals wanted the road. I realised that anger and criticism never changed anything.
    Everything about the environmental movement I concluded was negative – don’t drive, don’t shop, don’t eat this or that – and prescriptive. There was only one way to think. It was yet another straightjacket.
    Then, as usual, I read a book.

It was the title that caught my attention, and the picture on the cover. Both reflected how I felt: trapped in an alien world. The book described a new, wholly positive, solution to the environmental crisis and the crisis in human being.
    The solution was ‘rewilding’, which meant letting damaged ecosystems heal themselves and bringing back missing species so that nature could look after itself.
    I could see so clearly that this was the only thing that would save the world – and me – and humankind. We needed to be wild and whole too.

Then I read another book.

This described the actual rewilding of Knepp, a tired farmed estate in West Sussex. It was written by the owner and read like a novel. I couldn’t put it down, and what was more the estate was only a couple of miles from where my brother Danny lived and was open to the public. I raced to see him and dragged him and his family out there.
    As we drove through the grounds to the carpark, I could see either side of us instead of the usual manicured grass an enticing jumble of scrub. The relief. I was back in my childhood. I remembered those sorts of places. I remembered crawling and hiding and making dens, imbibing the scent of bark, scraping my knees. I started to cry. 
    We entered the estate on foot through an arch of intertwined deer antlers. It was like entering Jurassic Park. My heart started to thump.
    Once in, I gazed at a jungle of scrub and trees, stretching to the horizon. The shop and carpark had vanished. We were in a separate place, another dimension. 

    It was late September and the leaves were beginning to change colour. Late blackberries and bedraggled wildflowers lined the path. Then a flock of storks flew over.  I was in a dream, like I had been in Australia. I had zoomed back in time to the early days of humanity. I was in some lost paradise. I started to cry again.

    My family probably thought I was mad, but then they always had. (Or perhaps I thought I was mad.) My sister-in-law gave me a hug and a smile.

We spent several hours wandering, interacting with cattle and pigs living wild (piglets squealed in the undergrowth next to the path) and birdspotting on the wetlands. 

These cattle and pigs are old breeds, close to the original wild species. Both went about their business, completely ignoring us.

At last we had to leave the rewilded area to cross to the final part of the estate. We walked up a perfectly respectable path lined with trees but for some reason we all sped up and began walking with purpose.
    ‘How peculiar,’ I said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Frog. ‘The “dawdle factor” has gone.’
    He’d put it perfectly. For a dyslexic, he certainly had a way with words.
    I was bereft. Dawdling had felt good. Was this what humanity had lost?

In the next portion, the park in front of the house, we found wild ponies and a flock of red deer. The grass was short, presumably because of the two sorts of grazers, and even though I heard the mating call of a stag for the first time in my life, the magic had gone. We were too close to civilisation perhaps.

A stag in rut. We kept at a safe distance.

Both Danny and I were inspired however by the visit. He resolved to rewild his farm (which wasn’t his main source of income) and I resolved to rewild my quarter of an acre of garden. The day at Knepp had changed us both.

In our relationship Frog and I were stuck, but the outside world had found a way forward. Maybe we could too.

To be continued

9.3 Our Beautiful Monster

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

A troupe of puppies, their coats a mixture of colours and patterns, tumbled over an assault course of planks and bricks while Frog and I watched them. We were outside a cottage in the wilds of Central Devon’s farming country.
    A large brown and white springer spaniel emerged from the cottage and planted herself next to us.
    ‘I think she approves of us,’ I said to Frog.
    ‘I think that too,’ he replied.

Both Frog and I were more disturbed by Penny’s death than we had been by that of Brindle. Penny had been taken from us prematurely and it was horrible to think that she might have been poisoned. What must she have suffered?
    I tried to walk without her but it wasn't the same. My back went and I spent a lot of time lying on the sitting-room floor in pain and misery.
    Six months after Penny's death I was in the village seeing the physiotherapist about my back.
    ‘I don’t suppose you’re interested in a puppy,’ she said. ‘The sister of the practice nurse has some that need homes. They’re an accident, a mixture of her springer spaniel and the farm collie next door.’
    That had to be a sign, I thought. All the best animals came to you, rather than the other way round, and perhaps a new dog would heal me.

There was only one female left as all the others had been spoken for, and we wanted a female of course. She was outrageously pretty, white and black and spotted like a dalmatian. She watched us as she scampered up a plank, as if making sure she had our full attention.
    The next day, after a night to check our decision, we fetched her. She howled as we took her from her family but as soon as we stopped in a layby and let her out on to the grass (on a lead) she scampered off nose to the ground, intent on exploring her new world.
    The family had named her Lauren, which was a sweet name but not easy to call (and I expected to be doing a lot of calling), so we named her Ellie instead, after the owner.

Ellie, just arrived

I’d forgotten how appalling puppies were, and Ellie was particularly bad.
    She had sharp little teeth which she wasn’t afraid to use, so I had to wear wellies at all times in the house in order to protect my legs, and throw handfuls of tiny dog treats on to the floor to distract her.
    We decided to attend a series of puppy parties at the vet’s so that Ellie could learn to be with other dogs and we could learn how to deal with her. At the first party however, she grabbed all the toys and piled them up under a chair, growling at any of the other puppies who approached.

Guarding a bone

Outside she immediately revealed her sheepdog heritage by tearing off after any woolly creature she saw in the distance, rounding up flocks (if I hadn’t caught her in time) and driving them from one side of a field to another.
    As she grew slightly older and bigger, she tried to do the same with me, running in a circle around me, snapping at my legs. I called it ‘going wolf’ as I could see her transform in an instant from tame to wild, good to bad. It usually happened on windy days in wide open spaces like the middle of fields, and in some ways I sympathised with her because I probably felt something similar myself. I couldn’t stop her however and I couldn’t catch her and I feared that one day she might seriously injure me.
    Frog and I decided that both we and Ellie needed the individual attention of trainer.

I still had a bad back but I don’t think the trainer understood that. I think she simply thought I was rather useless.
    ‘She’s a PhD dog, you know,’ she said. ‘Not an ‘O’ level one.’
    Frog and I nodded in complete agreement with her.
    ‘And how much time out walking are you going to be giving her?’ she asked. ‘She won’t manage with just a trip round the block.’
    ‘Two hours a day,’ I replied, that being my usual dog-walking time and the amount I needed.
    The trainer looked surprised.

With regard to Ellie’s tendency to ‘go wolf’, the trainer said, ‘You’re going to have to get on top of this, otherwise you’ll have a problem dog and then you’ll have to pass her on to someone who can control her.’
    The trick she said was for me to keep Ellie on a long lead at all times when we were out. When she started circling I had to stamp on the lead and work my foot up it till I was as close as I could be to the snapping jaws. This should leave only a few inches of lead and make it possible for me to immobilise her. Then, keeping my feet planted on the lead, I had to take hold of Ellie by the collar under her chin and keep her head still until she calmed down (and switched back into domestic-dog mode). Which could take some time.

    We practised during the training session, but back home on my own I was terrified because I could see that it would be dangerous to get it wrong. I knew I had to do it however because of what the trainer had said, and I did, first time. I was proud of myself.

Once Ellie had finished her course of injections and could go out in public she acquired another delightful trait, or series of traits.
    Because she was so pretty she gained a lot of attention. Men and people with dogs tended to leave her alone but everyone else fondled and cooed.
    Ellie would play up outrageously, rolling on her back and pretending to be sweet. She could spot a likely person at a hundred yards and would trot towards them imperiously. Frog and I called these people her ‘victims’.
    Often she would tag along with complete strangers, obviously thinking that they were a far better bet than we were. We would then have to retrieve her with profuse apologies.

    When people stopped making a fuss of her she would nip their hands in order to show who was boss. Not everyone appreciated that.  
    It was hard to train all this out of her because it was the people we had to train as well. We thought about getting a harness for her with a message on it that read something like, ‘Beware. Femme Fatale. Please ignore.’

It was tough going, and my back still hurt, but as Frog said, ‘She’s a monster, but she’s our monster, and we’ll do our best by her.’

Our beautiful monster at one year old

In any case, far bigger things were happening out in the world.

To be continued

9.2 Spiritual Healing, Affirmations and Being an HSP

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. See right for more information and a list of instalments so far.

‘Will we actually be doing any healing this session?’ I asked.
    I was butting in, I knew that, but Stephanie had been talking for half an hour about her psychic experiences and the session was only an hour long.
    I think she was trying to convince me of the reality of healing and her credentials as a healer, but I didn’t need either.
    I’d had enough experiences of my own to convince me that the material world was only the beginning, and I’d already had elsewhere sessions of healing, or ‘spiritual’ healing as it was sometimes called.

    I don't know if the sessions achieved anything but they'd always been relaxing and enjoyable. Sometimes I’d felt heat and sometimes nothing and, because the healers  hadn’t touched me directly but simply moved their hands over my body, slightly above it, the experience had been pain free and non-invasive.

    Stephanie herself came with endorsement.

    I’d become slightly deaf eight years earlier and now wore hearing aids (‘What don’t you want to hear?’ asked Louise Hay, the answer of course being my parents.) I attended regular hearing clinics at a local NHS health centre, an extraordinary place more like a mini hospital for non-urgent problems than a GP surgery. While waiting one day I’d discovered a (non-NHS) complementary health wing and Stephanie was one of the practitioners.

    So here I was.

Since my middle-of-the-night revelation, I’d worked my way through You Can Heal Your Life, chapter by chapter, each day typing out a list of affirmations and taking them with me on my walks so that I could practise them. I did a lot of crying both while reading the book and while reciting the affirmations to myself, but I knew from what Cheryl had said that this was because the words were hitting home. I was a word person, so I now had an effective and appropriate tool on my healing journey.
    Stephanie, I hoped, would show me others and cast some magic over me.

She did stop talking eventually that day and I continued seeing her weekly for several months. (Even so, she still talked too much, and I still had to butt in.) I didn’t have physical sensations during her sessions but my mind wandered into sky-like spaces, coming back with treasures. One of them was the certainty that I needed to stop drinking alcohol.
    Not only was I suffering from near constant migraines, but I also felt hungover most of the time. The two ailments were similar but not identical so sometimes I would be suffering from one, sometimes the other, and sometimes both at once. I’d cut my alcohol intake down to half a glass of wine a night, but I still felt ill.
    So I listened to that prompting and stopped my nightly dose of oblivion, and the fact that that was how I saw it was probably message enough that the stuff was doing me no good. Stephanie’s healing simply pushed me over the edge.
    I missed the alcohol dreadfully, but persevered.

Occasionally Stephanie asked me about myself and one day, because of what I answered, recommended a book called The Handbook for Highly Sensitive People, written by Mel Collins, a friend of hers (cue another long story).

At the beginning of the book was an exercise called ‘Are you a Highly Sensitive Person’. This was a list of twenty-two questions, such as whether I felt overwhelmed in groups of people, whether I was affected by other people’s moods, whether I often felt deeply hurt, whether I had used alcohol, drugs or food as a coping mechanism, whether I struggled with self-love, whether I was a perfectionist and highly conscientious, whether I was deeply concerned about social and environmental problems.
    I answered yes to every question but one, which read, ‘Do you feel you struggle to find the right relationship or have a history of “failed” relationships because your partner doesn’t understand your sensitivity?’
    I didn’t tick that because I had Frog, didn’t I?
    ‘Don’t you think you ought to tick that one too,’ said Frog gently when I showed him the page.
    Oh, I thought. Does that mean he doesn’t understand me or that our relationship has failed, or is he including Brian and my parents in that? In which case the answer would certainly be yes.
    Whichever, the fact that Frog wanted me to tick that box, was simply another spur. I had to continue the process. I had to stop thinking that everything was all right really.

    The relevance of the questionnaire was something of a shock.

    

I skimmed the rest of the book, arranged in two main sections entitled ‘Self-help Strategies’ and ‘A Spiritual Perspective’, as most of the recommendations were avenues I was already exploring and I tended to get overwhelmed by other people’s systems, preferring to find my own with gentle nudges from elsewhere. (Another HSP trait?)
    What the book did do however was give me a reason for why I was like I was and permission to carry on in what I thought was an abnormal way. For instance, needing large amounts of time alone in nature, needing days to recover from social occasions, avoiding people in general unless I really trusted them, never watching The News on television if I could help it.
    And it showed that I could appreciate, even love, myself even though I found it so hard to fit in - especially with my family.
    Although HSP was not an official diagnosis, like newly recognised adult ADHD, it was helpful to know that I wasn’t either damaged or wrong. Not that I would ever have said anything about being an HSP to anyone, except someone I recognised as being another, as they would have thought (I imagined) that I was being highly pretentious.

‘Learn to share your amazing qualities of empathy, compassion, creativity, healing and much more with the world so that you can lead the happy fulfilling life you deserve,’ proclaimed the book's blurb.
    Well, I wasn’t anywhere near that yet, but I was on the way, I hoped. And I had plenty of time as Frog and I were only in our mid-sixties. We had another twenty years to go, didn’t we?
    Meanwhile, we had an addition to the family and she certainly wasn’t an HSP. Oh dear.

To be continued

PART NINE. 1 I am Now Willing to Begin the Healing Process

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

2018


Of course, it wasn’t only my relationship with my parents that had come between me and Frog. It was also my experiences in London, in particular losing my virginity to Brian, the black shutter that had rammed down immediately afterwards and the black hole I fell into.
    The two traumas – that caused by my parents and that caused by Brian – had happened within a few years of each other when I was in my early twenties and utterly incapable of dealing with them. I hadn’t been brought up to have emotions or process them. I’d been brought up never to complain, to act as if everything was perfect, and to bury problems. The effects of those events had fed into each other, made each other worse and kept each other fixed.

I didn’t often think about Brian. He wasn’t constantly in my mind like my parents were. After all, he didn’t have to be. He was long gone. I’d fled to Australia to escape him (among other things). But whenever I did, I realised that somewhere deep inside I’d come to the conclusion, because of how he’d behaved, that men vanished after you’d had sex with them. It wasn’t safe to give yourself.
    So whenever sex threatened, I froze.

The block had gone very deep and even Pat’s ministrations – the counselling, the sex therapy, the hypnotherapy - had failed to shift it. She'd kept Frog and me together but I was still a mess. Cheryl had continued my education and introduced me to a whole new world, but that wasn't enough to unstick me either.
    Now, forty years later, even though I’d learnt so much emotionally and spiritually, the damage was still entrenched, stuck like the First World War bullet that had lodged itself in my late grandfather’s arm. He would flex his biceps and it would pop up, the size of a golf-ball, under the skin of a forearm, and we children would squeal with terrified delight. (Or was it really a bullet? Perhaps he just said that to tease us.)

Because of those long-ago events, I hung on to Frog as if he was a lifebelt. He was more of a parent to me than a husband.
    He was resigned by now, rather than angry, but he did often look very sad. It broke my heart.



Pat had introduced me to a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay.

 

This describes how to use affirmations to cure disease and then at the end lists each disease, with the reasons why it’s there and the affirmations to deal with it.
    I’d skimmed the book at the time, thinking that it was just another New Agey publication, a quick fix, one person’s view, too idealistic for words, American.
    And impossible to use. It required a transformation that I didn’t feel capable of making.
    But I kept it by the bed and consulted it whenever I fell ill.

About migraines for instance, the book said that, among other things, they were caused by sexual fears. OK. Louise had got that spot on. ‘Can usually be relieved by masturbation’ she’d added in brackets. Well, I knew that wasn’t true. Anyway, who can do that with a splitting head and vomiting?
    From my Mind, Body, Spirit editing work and my research for MBS writing, I knew that the two sides of the brain deal with different aspects. Put simply one side is logical, the other imaginative. So, personally, I saw the migraines as also caused by me sitting on the fence, not knowing who to side with, Frog or my parents, me or my parents. How can people have such different points of view? Who was right? I simply couldn’t sort that out.
    In yoga, the indigo chakra, the one second from the top that sits over the forehead, deals among other things with reconciling opposites. One of its counter-effects, the result of that level being undeveloped, is of course headaches. I thought that was interesting too.

My migraines had worsened. I now felt ill most of the time. They dominated my life. It was impossible to plan anything because I couldn’t be sure I’d be well enough for it.
    One night, in desperation, feeling utterly dreadful, I grabbed You Can Heal Your Life from my bedside table, and opened it at random.
    It fell open at one of the early chapters, called something like ‘How To Change’.
    An affirmation jumped out at me. It went something like: ‘I am now willing to begin the healing process.’
    ‘Yes!’ I thought. I am.

To be continued

8.8 Free at last?

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

I arrived mid-afternoon.
    ‘Why don’t you have a turn sitting with Mum?’ said Amelia.
    I tensed. Any love for my mother was either gone or buried deep. I was horrified by her decline and what she'd been through over the last three years. I was bruised by all the criticisms of my previous attempts to help. Nevertheless, I followed Amelia into my mother's bedroom.

    The room was on the ground floor with big windows overlooking the garden and the river, with trees beyond. A sofa stretched in front of the windows looking out. The shelves contained either books or pictures of the family. It was a lovely spot.

    It was February but already, on my previous visit, while keeping my mother company in her bedroom, I'd watched crows carrying twigs to the tops of the tall trees opposite in order to start their nests.

   'What are those big black shapes?' my mother had asked.

    I didn't know whether she was referring to the crows or whether she was seeing something else, something that I wasn't seeing. She was on a lot of drugs by now and her brain wandered.

    I didn't want to upset her so I didn't deny what she was seeing but instead said something that I hoped would be encouraging.

    'They're looking after you,' I said. 'Like angels'.

    My mother had nodded, perfectly satisfied, as if that was a perfectly normal thing to say.

    Perhaps that time I had helped a teeny tiny bit. My way.
    

‘Hold her hand and talk to her,’ Amelia said before she left the room and closed the door behind her.
    It sounded like a command but I couldn't obey. My mother was semi-conscious, moaning and thrashing around as if in the grip of a nightmare and I didn't feel strong enough to touch her. It might have been a lie and I dreaded what I might convey to her, as well as what she might convey to me. I fished out my book and tried to read it.
    Some time later the door opened and Amelia reappeared.
    ‘Why are you reading?’ she said, looking shocked.
    I didn’t know how much my siblings knew about my parents’ reaction to Frog and my ongoing difficulties in dealing with it. I’d never talked to any of them about it as I was too afraid they would take my parents’ side and so the whole subject had erected a barrier between us. That hadn't mattered too much when my mother was healthy and independent but over the last three years it had.

    I couldn't possibly reply to Amelia's question. What did I say? Where did I start? How long did she have?

    I knew it was my fault for keeping quiet all those years, but I still resented Amelia telling me what to do. We weren't all like her. My experience of our parents was very different from hers.

    So I squashed my feelings back down again and said nothing.

       
In the early evening we five children sat round my mother’s bed, chatting quietly. The two carers hovered in the kitchen next door.
    We were all staying the night. The carers had the spare bedrooms, while I was camping upstairs in the gallery sitting-room with my sister Cass, she on the sofa and me on a mattress on the floor. Where my brothers were to sleep, I don't know.

    My mother was unconscious and calm.
    For some reason the talk turned to money. Jo was a mathematician at the Bank of England and I often asked his advice about things financial.
    Amelia looked at us as if we were worms.
    ‘How can you talk about things like that at time like this?’ she said through her teeth, trying to keep her voice quiet.
    My barriers gave way. Every resentment I'd ever had begged to be expressed. Words rose to my mouth and I had a unfamiliar sense of power as if I was channelling the real me at last.
    ‘Who put you in charge?’ I barked.

Appalled at what I'd said, I rushed into my mother’s garden, followed by my two brothers. I hugged Jo. Danny put his arm round me.
    ‘I think I’ll ring Frog,’ I said, fishing out my mobile phone with shaking hands.
    

Later I crept back inside and upstairs to my mattress. Cass didn’t appear so I presumed she was so disgusted with me that she’d taken herself off to Amelia’s house.
    I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night, I texted Frog.
    ‘Are you awake?’ I asked.
    ‘Yes,’ came the answer
    ‘I’m coming home,’ I texted back.
    As soon as it was light, I walked to the train station.
    Back home I retired to bed. At lunchtime the phone rang. Frog took the call. It was Jo.

    My mother had died.

    

I spent the next day sitting under an oak tree in a nearby park, in an agony of shame and sorrow, finally resolving to send Amelia a card, apologising for my outburst.
    Which I did, but I never had a reply. That didn’t surprise me however as she was even worse than me at dealing with conflict.

A few weeks later Frog and I drove up to Kent for my mother’s memorial service. My siblings were perfectly polite as if nothing had happened.
    In my mother’s garden I caught up with Caroline, my old schoolfriend, the daughter of Trish whom my mother had consulted all those years ago about me wanting to marry so unsuitably. I’d always been a little in awe of Caroline as she did everything correctly (according to the codes of both my parents and hers), but when I told her about my mother apologising to me for the first time ever she was sympathetic.
    ‘My parents weren’t very nice to me, you know.’ I said.
    ‘No they weren’t,’ she agreed.
    That meant a lot.

I was staying with Danny in Sussex and after the memorial we went for a walk.
    ‘Well, we’re orphans now,’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Free at last.’
    He looked me aghast.

    I'd spoken without thinking, not realising that it wasn't the sort of thing you said when your parents died. But there was no way I could backtrack and, anyway, I meant it.   

Freedom was what I craved. It was what I hoped for from now on. The departure of both my parents was like the moment when Frog first told me about Sam. Something supposedly awful had happened but I saw it instead as a chance to make things better.

    My parents had come between me and Frog, and now with them gone could the love I felt for Frog find expression at last?

    Could I finally break free of them?

    Could I finally be real? 

To be continued

8.7 My Mother

This is an extract from an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Meanwhile my mother was managing well without my father, as far as I could tell. She moved to a small modern house next to the river in the village where we’d all been brought up.
    ‘It’s the sort of house I’ve always dreamed of having,’ she said.
    It was certainly different from the large Victorian farmhouse of my childhood, which had meant a lot of work.
    She had a busy social life and plenty of interests, and my sister Amelia lived only a few minutes’ walk away.
    Then she had a small car accident which scared her. She decided her reactions were no longer good enough and made the brave decision to stop driving. She engaged Amelia and her partner to drive her around, do her shopping and generally take care of her.

A few years later, when my mother was in her mid-eighties, she contracted pneumonia and was not expected to live. But she did, although her strength had vanished and she needed full-time care. We tried to share this out between the five of us children but we were pretty bad at it and decided that my mother would much rather have a professional than us. As would we. So Jo and my sisters (the three who lived closest) arranged live-in carers.
    My mother said she’d had a dream in which she saw God and God had said to her ‘We nearly got you that time, didn’t we.’ It made me wonder why God had let her live as her quality of life had plummeted. Modern medicine, it seemed, kept people alive at the expense of their spiritual wellbeing. Death was inevitable and we needed to be prepared for that, not patched up and sent off to limp into the future unaided. Or perhaps I was thinking of what I would want. Perhaps my mother preferred it the way it was.
    I tried to do my bit, travelling up from Devon to stay a couple of nights every month or so but I struggled. The only way I could deal with my mother was to cut off completely from her, to divorce myself from all my own feelings and pretend she was a child. It was exhausting.
    My main feeling, I think, was fear. She knew just how to hurt and didn’t hold back from doing so. I wanted to protect myself from that.
    One morning, however, as I was on my knees cleaning out her wood-burning stove while she sat on a nearby chair keeping up a running commentary on everything I was doing wrong, I could bear it no longer and exploded.
    ‘For goodness sake,’ I shouted. ‘Just let me get on with things in my own way.’
    My mother crumpled.
    ‘Oh I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know I’m terribly bossy.’
    It was the first time in my whole life that she’d ever apologised to me about anything. I leapt up and gave her a big hug.

Her health deteriorated and she was in and out of hospital. The brunt of the worry landed on Amelia, as well as my brother Jo and sister Cass both of whom lived in London but often stayed at my mother’s. I was desperate to help, so after my mother had been stuck in a large Kent hospital for weeks, I travelled up from Devon to visit her there.
    The place was manic and the staff so overworked they could hardly acknowledge me let alone answer any of my questions. My mother was surviving in her usual no-nonsense way, but to me she looked like a lonely child, and her brain was wandering for the first time.
    I’d gathered from my sisters – or thought I had - that they wanted to bring her home so, after a long mobile-phone conversation with Cass in a hospital corridor, I set about trying to make that happen. Perhaps I could do something helpful at last.
    During my earlier visits to Kent I’d struggled to do the right thing but either my mother or Amelia or the carer had wanted me to do things differently from what I was doing and from what the other two said. It was horribly confusing and I’d felt utterly useless.
    The staff at the hospital said that so long as my mother could sit unaided (or some such, I can’t remember exactly) and had appropriate care at home (which of course she did have) she could go. I explained this to my mother and with what I could see was a feat of unimaginable determination she managed to do whatever she had to. The hospital said they would send her home in an ambulance the next day. They gave my mother a 6-page form to fill out about her 'hospital experience'. As neither she nor I for different reasons was capable of filling it out, I left it behind.

    Amelia was not at all pleased with the turn of events and, even though I could see it was because the stress was too much for her, I took it personally and felt that yet again I’d got things wrong.
    I went back to Devon the next day, knowing that my siblings had arranged two live-in carers for my mother and thinking that everything was more or less under control.

    Less than a week later however I was called back. My mother was now very poorly indeed.

To be continued

8.6 Penny

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a list of instalments so far, see right.

Penny, our rescue lurcher, had now been with us for nine years.

    She no longer ran off to look for us whenever we left her alone, but even so both Frog and I had acquired the habit of taking her with us in the car when we went out. She was quite happy to wait in carparks while we shopped, and Frog took her to work with him whenever he could. The students at the university radio adored her and had made her an Honorary Life Member of the station.

    She was a skinny little thing when she first came to live with us and hardly ate, but she’d put on a couple of kilos since then and usually managed to finish her meals. But she certainly wasn’t a gutso (as Frog would say) like dear Brindle. She did however have two vices. (All dogs have at least one in my opinion, but each has their own particular brand.)

Firstly, she loved rolling in anything smelly, which necessitated frequent baths and showers. Luckily this was something Frog was good at giving her.

 

 Frog bathing Penny

Secondly she was a chaser, which was not surprising given her greyhound ancestry. If she spotted a deer – of which there were many around – she would be off, leaping over hedges, across roads, through fields and rivers.

    If I managed to call her before she fixed into chase mode, she was obedient, but if not she became blind and deaf to everything but her quarry and I had to resign myself to two or three frantic hours at home, waiting for her to return of her own accord. Which she always did thank goodness, footsore, dusty and breathless. And deer-less.

     I didn’t worry too much about what could happen to her when she vanished as she could look after herself. It was the damage she might cause while out that concerned me.

But perhaps I should have been stricter. Perhaps I should have thought ahead more, and not given her the chance to go off on her own. Perhaps she couldn’t look after herself quite as well as I thought.

    One day as she and I walked the lane that went up the hill behind the house she vanished to the far corner of an adjacent field and returned dragging the filthy remains of some long-dead animal. This was so unlike her that I began to feel slightly alarmed.

    Frog was full of stories of how farmers laced meat with poison and left it out to kill foxes and badgers. Many of the dead animals by the side of the road, he said, had been killed and thrown there by said farmers.

    How barbaric, I thought, trying not to believe him. And what about the buzzards and crows that then fed on the poisoned animals?

    Soon Penny was bored by the carcass and left it lying in the road, but a few hours after we arrived home she became restless, which again was unusual.

    Brenda had sold the bookshop and I was back at home editing, having written two (awful) novels and an autobiography on the strength of several inspiring weekends away, a monthly course in Exeter and an online course, all with an extraordinary creative-writing teacher called Roselle. Roselle reached deep inside you by giving deeply of herself, and this – for me at least – had led to writing pouring out of me.

    I’d paused writing for the moment however and gone back to the work I knew so well and felt safe with. I needed a rest from intensity, and to earn some money.

    Even from my eyrie, carved out of the loft when we built the extension sixteen years earlier, I could hear Penny in the bedroom crashing around. So I abandoned my proofreading and went down to check on her.

    By now she looked terrible – panting and almost foaming at the mouth. Something was obviously very wrong. It was time for the vet again.

    I heaved Penny into the car and drove as fast as I could through the twisty lanes, while she fidgeted in the back.

     As we pushed through the door of the waiting-room, she opened her mouth and delivered on to the floor a vast pile of vomit sprinkled with small blue bits, which looked suspiciously like slug pellets. Where had she picked those up? I never ever used them myself as I thought they were disgusting. There were many humane ways to reduce slug damage. And if they'd been in that carcass, why?

    ‘It’s poison,’ said the vet. ‘I’ve seen several cases recently.’

    Penny spent two days and nights at the vet's, while they emptied her stomach (I think) and fed her charcoal, before we could fetch her.

    But she was never the same again.

She never ran for joy any more. She never went chasing. She never wanted to leap into the car with us. She never slid into view with a shy grin on her face when Frog arrived home.

    Then one evening six months later, she started having fits. It was another dash to the vet’s, Frog driving this time and us rendezvousing at the clinic with the out-of-hours medic.

    ‘There’s nothing I can do, I’m afraid,’ she said.

    As we settled Penny on her bed, she fell still and calm, as if she knew what was going to happen.

Frog carried Penny’s limp body to the car, and back home began digging again, using his sleeve to mop from his face a mixture of sweat and tears. We’d chosen a spot one paving slab away from Brindle.

    I stood by, offering silent moral support and watching the clear night sky. Suddenly over the western horizon a shooting star flared into life and vanished.

    It felt like a sign of hope. Penny was all right. She would manage without us.

The next morning I went out to look at the grave. Penny’s sweetness filled the air.

Frog and Penny on Glastonbury Tor

To be continued