Full moon last night. I opened the curtains of the west-facing window in my bedroom this morning and, as the sky brightened, I saw this.
It felt primal, and explained my mother’s odd mood yesterday. It might be disrespectful to compare your dementia-afflicted mother with a neolithic character in a sitcom, but there is evidence of lunar effect in a variety of conditions, accepted by a majority of mental health professionals.1 Indeed, I remember that when my mother worked in residential care for people with severe learning difficulties, she told me that a number of medications were cycled to the phases of the moon.
She seems happy this morning, and the morning is beautiful. The moon has faded now, but is always there, as Robyn tells us.
Living outside a village at the top of a rural lane, I feel more in touch with the seasons than I have for many years. This autumn feels like an adventure, and lovely with it. Although the summer keeps fighting back, giving us one, two or even a week’s worth of bright, dry days, autumn has taken hold and has been a severe one this year.
There are bare trees, thinning trees and trees whose leaves are turning, like the one in this picture, to display a palette of change, rich and beautiful. The wetness of the autumn, so disastrous for the farmers, adds to the sense of abundance for those of us who don’t depend upon good weather for our living. I wear my wellies to walk Hazel, and the smells of dampness and earth and grass and horse poo fill me with an awareness of the life around me, even though I seldom meet anyone on my walks.
I no longer live with Amanda and Hazel, but they visit three or four times a week, and I walk Hazel then. On the days when we have a carer in and I go over to East Cowes, I still take her on the local, suburban walk I’ve used for years,1 so familiar that certain turns trigger memories of audiobooks I have listened to as I passed that same point.2
Today, I made soup and rolls, and Amanda came over after finishing work at lunchtime. It is the wettest of days, the rain pummelling from leaden skies in ten minute bursts before becoming lighter, but not stopping. My mother finds the weather gloomy and needs cheering up, but I love the power of the dark clouds and the rhythm of the rain on the pond and the patterns of raindrops on the windows.
After lunch, we had a quick cup of tea with some of my mother’s birthday biscuits, then I went out to do some shopping while Amanda sat with my mother. Aldi and Morrisons were busy and damp, and I rushed through the shopping, which is always fatal for the household economy, but I wanted to be away from the eddies of people, milling around with our mouths opening and closing in resentful avarice, like the fish in our pond.
When I got back, I changed into my wellies and my big raincoat, and took Hazel out. Our walk is now well-established and Hazel trots ahead, seeking out smells in the verges and horse poo on the lane. At the bottom of the lane there is the farm which gives this place its name, a site that goes back at least a thousand years. Although the current building is mostly nineteenth century, there is, apparently, a cockpit in the building that dates back many hundreds of years. We turn at its gate and get on to the track that is in the picture at the top of this page, a rough path, often flooded, that goes between horse paddocks where angry women struggle with the the gulf between their dreams of horse ownership and the reality. Today, fortunately, the horses were unmolested, the chronically weird women not braving the weather.
The path winds downhill in two dramatic drops. On one side, the marginal land given over to horse paddocks banks up in small, bramble hedged parcels. On the other, new woodland, planted within the last couple of decades, many of the trees still wearing their plastic sleeves around their lower trunks, creates a barrier for the privacy of the two landowners in this isolated spot. From maps,3 I know there are two houses, each surrounded by a large amount of land, but you’d hardly know it. It is like an area of secret installations, where nefarious goings on are hidden by strategic planting: havens against planning restrictions. I often here the crack of shooting from this end of the path. That is the perversion they hide.
A steep slope from here leads through some thin woods to the lowest point of the path, that is raised only half a metre or so from wetland where the trees grow out of almost permanent puddles. A very light rise gets us to the cycle path; the Red Squirrel Trail4.
Some days, we turn back here. It is enough of a walk for Hazel, and the cycle path is a bit boring, being open and tarmacked and often quite busy. If I am in a full daydream, I don’t want to acknowledge my fellow walkers. However, today I was happy to wander further. I had a full poo bag to get rid of and there is a bin at the end of the section of path, where it crosses the road at the bottom of the village.
So, we hiked on, Hazel trotting ahead until she was distracted by some particularly interesting scent, when she would stop to investigate and I would get ahead of her. After a time, she’d come flying past me, having run to catch me up, and then turn around to get my approval of her return. The hedges on the side of the path are full at this time of year, but there are gaps enough to see into the fields beyond, and then into the industrial estate on the hill going out of the village, where the brewery has its distribution centre and the excellent garage has a large yard and workshop5. For a while, there are streams on both sides of the path, until a channel burrows under the path to unite them, with a strange anti-climbing device on the outside of the safety barrier making it look like a fortress below the path.
We passed the cyclists’ cafe6, and got to the road. Hazel is very good at sit and wait commands, and I leave her while I go to the bin then treat her when I get back. Then, we retrace our steps, along the cycle path, which always seems much longer on the return, and then up the lane, through mud and puddles, rain soaking her fur and pattering on the top of my raincoat’s hood.
Today was not a bad day at home. Being a carer, mood dictates everything, my mother’s and mine. Seeing Amanda, walking with Hazel, enjoying the drama of the weather, all helped to break the monotony of being stuck in a home that is not my home, with a mother who is no longer my mother.
Despite it not being home, this is a rural place, where beauty is closer and more constant than in our suburban home. Today, although we are in the middle of October, there was still a huge amount of colour in the banks and the hedgerows. I have swapped a life of hobbies and activity for the consolations of natural beauty and a sense of virtue. I hope I have made the right decision, but there is no backing out now.
It is exhausting, this life. I do it because I love my mother and I want her to be safe and free from fear, but it is a form of imprisonment. I do not have the space to work, or think or dream.
Every respite is ruled by a ticking clock, a time by which I must be back. I cannot wander or dawdle. I must keep to the timetable, do my assigned activity and return to duty.
Nothing I do, apart from housework, cooking, shopping and companionship, is complete. When I pick up the book I’m reading, I don’t remember where I am. This post is a muddle, because it’s made in grabbed moments, tied together from separate half-hours, rather than written as a contemplative day of absorption.
However, thanks to my sister, I have a weekend off from caring for my mother once a month. Very kindly, she agreed to extend that weekend this month, to allow Amanda and me to go away for a few days, to celebrate our fifteenth anniversary. She arrived late on Wednesday and extended her stay on Sunday morning to make us lunch. For the first time in ages, I didn’t feel I was rushing to get back.
We booked a place to stay far enough away to feel we were having a holiday but near enough that we wouldn’t sacrifice two full days to travel. Amanda bought an electric van last year and had it converted to a mini campervan earlier this year, and she wanted to try it out, but I didn’t want to be camping, so we found a place on a booking site, Martha’s Retreat,1 that would give us scope for some picnic trips.
Martha’s Retreat was, at first sight, a little disappointing. The yard was a bit of a dumping ground, with a horsebox and a rotting JCB spoiling the illusion of rural idyll. The cabin was great – lovely, in fact, but the paddock behind was overgrown with scrub and dead cowparsley, and other mysterious uglinesses. It was rush hour, and the B road that the farm was on was busy. I was tired, though, and hungry, and not yet unwound. Gradually, I took in the paths that had been mowed into the field, the seating area with a wood burner in the middle, the messages of greeting and the extras scattered throughout the cabin. I began to relax.
On the first morning, I took Hazel out early, into the paddock, and, while she chased smells and celebrated the misty sunlight, I picked blackberries to go with our cereal.
We had toast with our second cuppas and then we lay in, something we used to do at least once a week, but something that has been rare for a long time. On other weekends off, we have been trying to fit too much in to the one day I’m at home and Amanda’s not working to allow us to waste a morning on books and breakfast in bed. Hazel loved it as much as we did.
No rush to be anywhere or do anything.
I’m reading Marjery Allingham, her second Campion Novel, Mystery Mile, but I wasn’t in the mood for it, so opened an LRB2 and read several articles in a row; a luxury I haven’t enjoyed for a long time. I recommend the one on a calvinist writer’s view of Genesis,3 the review of three books by Celia Dale, who appears to be a writer of Ealing greyness and gallows wit,4 and Josephine Quinn’s review of a book about the Antonine Plague, which may have been the worst pandemic in human history.5
We’d missed the owner on the day we arrived, the Wednesday. We’d stopped in Southampton for lunch at Thrive6 and he had to go out before we arrived. When we did bump into him, on the Thursday morning, after we had finally got ourselves together from our epic lie-in, he was as warm and generous and quirky as his hospitality suggested and we talked for at least an hour, getting the story of his life, of the JCB, of his Bentley that poked out of one of the sheds in the yard.
It was one of those conversations where everyone is being equally chatty. Our mutual enjoyment was palpable. After an hour, we began to joke about our collective volubility and, eventually, we called a halt, so Amanda and I could go and get lunch and Trevor could get some gardening done.
Our evenings were equally contented. There was no wifi, though there was a TV/DVD and a library of soppy films. On the Thursday night, our second night there, we watched Music & Lyrics, an old favourite we saw at the flicks when we were first together. The fact that the disc was in the cabin seemed serendipitous.
On the first night, though, we just let the place seep into us, and the awareness of being free sink in. We’d bought a boxed salad at Thrive and we ate it on the reclining sofa in the last of the fading dusk, and then pulled the curtains and sat with just the spotlights from the kitchenette, in shadow, Hazel curled between us, and had the best conversation we’ve had in a very long while. For once, we weren’t planning or trying to solve things; we just shared impressions and feelings and savoured one another.
The red dot shows the approximate position of Martha’s Retreat.
On the Thursday, after our long chat with Trevor, we had tea in the gardens of a museum, wandered around the town a bit and then, finding nowhere that fitted the venn diagram of dog and vegan friendly for lunch, decided to buy the makings of sandwiches and an easy supper and head back to Martha’s Retreat.
Holiday fully underway.
Is there any better afternoon than one spent on a bed with a book, your lover and your dog? We are not good at sharing the tea-making duties: Amanda has a greater tolerance for empty mugs than I do, so I was up and down a bit, but I read some more articles and dozed a bit, and Amanda dozed a bit more and it was all just very.
Our trips out were more hectic. Amanda likes to fit things in to any journey to the mainland, so we had to post some parcels at an Evri depot on the Thursday – there are none on the Island – and visit a couple of campervan places on the Friday. Wimborne Minster is a lovely town, saved from being swallowed by the Bournemouth conurbation by the A31 which blights its outskirts, as the A14 blights Bury St Edmunds. Unlike Bury, Wimborne Minster is surrounded by protected SSSIs and woodlands and has retained a certain beauty.
All the comforts.
On the Friday afternoon, after one of Amanda’s shop visits, we parked up in Holt Woods, in the car park that sits between the edge of the forestry commission plantation and the moorland that is run by the National Trust. I’d made sandwiches and we had a lazy picnic in the van. It was a success. Small as it is, the van is big enough for me to stretch comfortably in the reversed front seat while Amanda and Hazel have the setee/bed bench thing. Dog walkers and horse riders came and went and we spent a comfortable couple of hours enjoying the quiet, before travelling in search of a campervan place,7 where Amanda bought an awning.
That evening, I had the feeling I remember from the last day of the school holidays: a sense of gloom. It needn’t have been, really. We still had all of Saturday, as Charlotte wasn’t due to go home until Sunday morning, but the anticipation of heading back, leaving this little hideaway, weighed on me.
Amanda went to bed early and I stayed up reading for an hour or so. I lit the woodburner, which was decadent but lovely, and I was at peace.
Hazel, after adjusting to our being in separate rooms, came and joined me, lying on the hearth under my feet, until after I had fallen asleep and the fire had lost its warmth, when she got up in a huff and went through to Amanda. I joined them, I assume, because I was in bed in the morning, but I don’t remember it.
We got home mid afternoon on Saturday, stopping at Waitrose to buy buns and salad. We had an early supper of burgers and oven chips and went to bed to catch up on the last of the most recent series of Dr Who, which we both found disappointing. We’d watched a couple of the other episodes on an earlier weekend off and had loved them: Ncuti Gatwa and Daisy Miller are wonderful together and the writing has recovered this series, but the double bill finale was a bit all over the place and only just saved by the acting. Still, it was a nice ritual.
And, Sunday morning came. I was expecting to be early out, so Charlotte could catch a morning ferry, but when I texted her to say I’d be with her at nine o’clock, she suggested she make lunch for us. Gratitude was unbound. Another morning of lazy tea and dog walk, and then we were back at my mother’s house, feeling okay about it, because we were the guests, for once.
For the first five years or so of our relationship, Amanda and I travelled a fair bit, both in the UK and in Europe. Indeed, one of the reasons I took up cycling to work, and became a cycling enthusiast, was to free up money for holidays. We went to Barcelona, Paris, Gent, St Austell, Northumberland and to festivals in Cornwall and Suffolk. We had fun.
Then came my father’s illness, then his death8 and then my mother’s increasing dependence, and life seemed to close in and become unrelentingly serious. Now, it is as restricted as it has been in all out time together: we actually live apart and I spend my time caring for my mother and she spends her time working and managing the dog and our house, that we really don’t want to give up.
This trip might seem a small thing, and this post a “what I did in my holidays” rote exercise, but it is a holding on, a contributory element in the miracle that is the survival of our marriage through these years of never being first priority in our own lives. I want to preserve it, for the winter, so that I can look back and remind myself that we can have some freedom, some respite and some mutual enjoyment and congratulate us for the fact that we are, somehow, hard as it is, making this work.
