I hate birthdays, as anyone who knows me will attest, I will not even have them mentioned – but only my own. Those of others’ I adore and look forward to and of course none more so than the birthday of the one we all remember today and for whom we have reason to give thanks for this day which brought him into being way back in the lilac-strewn Spring of 1947, surrounded by the love of his big sister Pauline, whose own birthday is on Tuesday (and which was also a day that I looked forward to for so many years), and the love of his adoring parents, Vera and Thomas.
Birthdays are an odd juxtaposition of the known and the unknown. There is absolute definite fact – a birth happens and a new being enters the world. Fact. There is so much unknown too though, what will this new soul bring and how will they develop? What potential do they hold for good and for ill? Who will they become and what will they do with this beautiful gift of life? How long will that life be and where will it take them; whose other lives will they touch and what light might they bring, what light might they receive? The sense of hope and the sense of seemingly unbridled options bring to each of us observing this new life a renewed joy of opportunity within our own lives too and for excitement in the great gift of watching and seeing what might come. Just one reason why DR always adored taking Christening services and celebrating new life; why he loved sitting all night watching chicks hatching in the incubator or delighted in sitting patiently and watching for the stirrings of seedlings emerging from the dark soil in the greenhouse.
This past week I have been busy digging over some beds at Yonsea and filling a large mixing bowl with seeds, adding some brought from home to others more recently purchased online to sow hope across the barren soil which, with prepared ground and careful nurture of watering and weeding as the shoots come in the weeks ahead, should with any luck bring forth an array of bright colour - a cheerful encouragement to all who pass by. It felt good to be working back with the soil, something I have missed in my life but have had little appetite for doing since leaving our precious garden. Something I have been dreading doing alone. The memories of so many times spent gardening whilst he sat in the chair beside me came but were less painful now and it was nice to feel the connection with DR as I caught up with the Archers’ omnibuses for company, fingers covered in dirt and my nose full of the smell of a new season.
These scents are something which always takes me back to English lessons at school. Impossibly these seem always to be filled with warm balmy summer air drifting in through the open French windows of the downstairs classroom, dappled sunlight of the trees outside calling. (There must also have been many cold rainy days when English lessons took place too but those have been long forgotten!) Memories too of my wonderful and inspirational English teacher, Miss Weston. I was lucky for she was just one of an impressive list of extraordinary teachers of whom I was gifted from all manner of subjects and who seem to feature more and more in my memories as I grow older and for whom I am so grateful, but it was Miss Weston who nurtured in me a deep love of poetry. The poet which is so evocative when working the garden is of course always Thomas and either Digging or Tall Nettles comes almost screaming into mind every time I lift a piece of soil and smell its earthiness but, as these are both most tellingly and tragically for Thomas at the tail end of the year, I will more optimistically switch to one from his great love, Frost, and think more of the much more appropriately Robert-seasoned Putting in the Seed:
You come to fetch me from my work tonight
When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree.
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ‘ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
The marking of birthdays puts in mind for me one of DR’s favourite oft-quoted Eliot references from Burnt Norton of “Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained within time past”. These anniversaries allow us to put a pin in our lives one day each year to act as mile stone and whilst standing at that point to look around us; to look back along the path we have walked and also to look forward to the one yet travelled. I DETEST time - and DR was always amused and I think intrigued by my loathing of its constrictions and how I rebelled against its parameters! Just as with maps (which he also adored!), I suffocate under their authority, under their inflexibility. Conversely, he embraced time and thrived within a security and sure foundation he felt within its bounds. I clearly am the wild weed whilst he was the rose seeking a trellis! Interestingly, a trellis was something he always likened his approach to public speaking appropriately enough, no doubt giving the structure to his unique ability in preaching and lecturing without notes and yet still keeping to the second, “by plotting everything mentally like a rose climbing a trellis and one can go out along the branch but always then return to the trunk as one progresses upwards”. Perhaps this loathing of time is one reason why I have always hated birthdays but for him it was just a simple partitioning of the plots of life, large and small, into which seeds could be sown to bring forth colour, to bring forth fruit. A tolling of bells marked his days, a blowing out of candles marked his years. Birthdays for him were therefore just the labels at the end of the rows which allowed him to look and see what had grown, what was currently growing or what needed yet to be planted. I suspect it is telling that the seeds I will sow this afternoon, having prepared the ground, will be cast far and wide with no perceived order. And yet colour still will come, a less ordered collection of shapes and forms and yet colour all the same. Diversity of seeds. Diversity of bloom, both floral and of each one of us in our own wonderful array of variety, each with different gifts to enjoy and different gifts to share within this beautiful world which we have been born into and in which we grow, each nurturing and supporting one another but on this day remembering one gardener in particular perhaps:
Our Father kept a garden,
A garden of the heart;
He planted all the good things,
That gave our lives their start.
He turned us to the sunshine,
Encouraged us to dream;
Fostering and nurturing
The seeds of self-esteem.
And when the winds and rain came,
Protected us enough;
Not too much because he knew
We would stand strong and tough.
His constant good example,
‘Ere taught us right from wrong;
Gave markers for our pathway
To last a lifetime long.
Personally? I’m doing okay I guess – our dear friend Randy Hollerith gave such sage words of advice at the time of our losing the precious light that was DR and one piece was that “grief is not linear”. It comes. It goes – as so many out there will sadly know all too well and I have to say that I am so grateful for the many many hundreds of you that have sent messages this weekend from all over the world and please allow me to apologise for not getting back to each and every one of you directly but do know that I read and value all your lovely cards and letters sent to Yonsea and your emails and messages sent so full of loving encouragement. Friends old and new who are also walking their own paths of grief from recent losses and others more distant have been such a huge source of strength and I now find myself in the unexpected position of doing the same for others who have lost their loved ones. It is like joining the most rubbish club in the world that you never really knew existed before you are hurled through those doors into the crummiest and worst lounge imaginable – I thought I knew about grief and about loss (and of course had lost other very precious souls before, many of them) but until one actually loses one’s reason for being it is utterly unimaginable how everything in life can be inverted. Like one of those silicone jelly moulds one is all bent out of shape and utterly unusable once it has decanted its contents and folded in on itself. I recalled the feeling back when, when I felt like a bottle opener without a bottle – just a useless object without purpose. There are still times, including this past week, when it is hard to move beyond that still – as one of the characters in the fabulous Blue Lights series (BBC, do check it out!) told a colleague upon asking in an episode yesterday (I have already seen it but have been delighting in rewatching it with my mother, who is staying at present) – “grief… changes you”. It does indeed. But we have to draw upon the strength and toughness we developed when still being nurtured. We have to rely upon – and to support in turn – our fellow club members, even if it is the crummiest members’ club in town! Especially because it is!! We have to find the light in the darkness and we have to remember that in a perverse way the loss and pain we feel is in itself a gift beyond imagining for many. One very lovely member of the GC recently wrote and said that she had felt jealous that even after 47 years of marriage and two beautiful children and a comfortable life, she had never felt what she could see I had with DR. What a gift I have had and what a beautiful and brave and generous act of her writing to say that, especially all things considered! When a life has lost its purpose it is good to feel that, at least for a time, it has been made valid. Perhaps we need to remember that often the best treats do not come easily nor without a little mess, a little more complication (or rather a lot in our case!! 😊):
“Birthday Lights”, by Calef Brown
Light bulbs on a birthday cake.
What a difference that would make!
Plug it in and make a wish,
Then relax and flip a switch!
No more smoke
Or waxy mess
To bother any birthday guests.
But Grandpa says, “It’s not the same!
Where’s the magic?
Where’s the flame?
To get your wish without a doubt,
You need to blow some candles out!”
As mentioned, this past week I have had a wonderful visit not just from Mum but also my sister and my little niece Arrabella, whom many of you will remember from the broadcasts – her 9th birthday next week and so a few trips to celebrate including to see The Lion King – with its messages of birth but also the Circle of Life. Another trip along similar lines to see the fabulous new film The Sheep Detectives which had me crying on and off throughout with tears of sadness and also hilarity (disclaimer – emotions have been high this past week, though I do think you’ll enjoy the movie!). This gave a new impression for her with the sheep here at Yonsea, particularly some new arrivals that came just last week:
To sign off, one last “new birth” to celebrate in the coming weeks is obviously Angels Unawares at the Cadogan Hall on 2nd June – the London Premier (others in Finland and Canada are now expected in due time), to which I know many of you will be attending and I hope to be able to say hello to as many of you as possible! One of the additional three commissioned pieces, The Call of Isaiah, which was set to music by the fabulous Millicent B James, was performed at a superb commemorative event of the 25th anniversary of the Genesis Foundation in London recently along with excerpts from other artistic endeavours commissioned by the charity including The Witches and the play 1536. It was a super evening celebrating the extraordinary achievements of John Studzinski and Harriet Cappaldi and the rest of the team which does so much to give new birth and encouragement to the arts across so many disciplines and to whom I am personally so grateful for causing DR to create some lovely pieces for them over the past quarter of a century. We all wish that he had had the next ten years (+!) to create much more of course as we were freed from the constraints of Canterbury, albeit five years prematurely - and it is sobering to think that we should now be entering our planned and structured final year in that most precious pace but for... but at least we have what DR did already have a chance to create and must be grateful for that.
On this day I hope that you are able to get out and to smell lilac and enjoy their heart-shaped leaves (though with an early Spring it is already nearing an end even in the UK this year!) and to enjoy not only the gifts of this most beautiful season but also your own very special and unique gifts, remembering to share them with those around you and to not be too afraid of the wax getting on your fingers as we light the candles!
God bless you and thank you for all your encouragement – the greatest gift of all!