Danceswithcats

I Cannot Wander or Dawdle

An overgrown paddock, full of brown scrub, is overlaid with a veil of dew-covered webs. A white sun rises behind a large oak tree at the edge of the field.

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.

A rough, puddled lane is bordered by trees and hedges. At the end are a wheeled shepherd's hut and a small modern van. A horse box truck is parked to the side.
A rusting JCB digger, photographed from behind, its bucket arm stretched towards the camera like a dinosaur's neck.

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.

A dog runs towards the camera on a path mowed through an overgrown paddock. Autunmal morning light glows across the field.
Late afternoon sun illuminates mature woodland surrounding a foreground of scrubby pasture.
Pillows on a freshly made bed, with plastic crown and tiara. The bedhead is carved wood and the walls are pine clad.
Red petals spell out P heart A and scrabble tiles spell out "A treat for Hazel". A bag of dog treats sits in a plastic tiara.
The cabin sitting room in the morning. An e-bbok reader sits on the arm of a leather sofa, the stove is dark, the telly is off. A small circular chlakboard, hung on the wall with a ribbon, reads, "Welcome! Peter, Amanda & Hazel."
A path mowed through scrub and late summer wildflower leads to a collection of garden furniture. An early evening shadow lies over the foreground: the edge of the scene is framed by brightly lit trees against a deep blue, clear sky.

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.

Dozens of dew-covered webs are stretched between the brown stalks of scrub in an overgrown paddock. A misty Autumnal first light shines from the left of the picture.
A path bends wetween web covered scrub and a bank of tall green grass flecked with late summer wildflowers. In the background is a fence to another field, covered in ground mist, rising before a row of far wood.
The derelcit cab of a JCB digger. The seat is torn, the controls are rusted and there are brambles growing up from through the floor.

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.

A dog lies on the blue patchwork quilt, between her owners who are in the bed. The french windows have condensation on the panes, and the greenery outside glows in the morning sun.
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.

A map showing Winborne Minster and its northern surrounds, including Martha's Retreat's approximate position indicated by a red dot.
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.

A couple's legs are stretched out on a bedspread. He wears jeans and socks; her feet are bare. At the end of the bed are a pair of French windows looking out at eh yard surrounded by greenery. Sun glows against the windows.
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.

A small camper van, with doors open and picnic laid out on its table inside the door, is parked in a forest car park. In the foreground,a dog is tethered to the van on a long lead and looks into the camera inquisitively.
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.

A man's legs and bare feet are framed by the light of a wood burning stove. On his lap is an e-book. Text is visible but indecipherable.

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.

  1. https://www.booking.com/hotel/gb/marthas-retreat.en-gb.html [↩]
  2. This one: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n16 [↩]
  3. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n16/james-butler/trivialised-to-death [↩]
  4. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n16/ruby-hamilton/natural-born-biddies [↩]
  5. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n16/josephine-quinn/age-of-hypochondriacs [↩]
  6. https://cafethrive.co.uk/ [↩]
  7. https://redcoteleisure.co.uk/ [↩]
  8. A Confusion Of Griefs [↩]
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