Saturday and I wake up at 8 o’clock, the time I want to leave for London today. Clearly my unconscious is running the show and being clear that this is something that I do not actually want to do. There is toast adn marmalade with coffee in bed to gather strength adn then there is a flurry of activity as I, my partner and eldest daughter dress and get ready to go to London. On the road by 8:30 ish. The drive was mostly good with one comfort break before we arrived at the London house to met by my youngest and her partner.
The house is partially cleared of furniture and stuff like clothes and bedding, the rest of the contents lay around in disarray waiting to picked over by us. In my head this is a Tomb Raider mission. For the next five and a half hours the five of us pick through the wasteland of my family history, finding unknown artefacts and familiar items. There is a conscious jettisoning of family history and memorabilia. Difficult it is to find that there are the remnants of my mothers parents in the house as they lived with with my family till they both died. My grandfathers army chest with his name and rank on it is unearthed as is a very old music cylinder box. We snack, we drink, we pop out to the café on the corner that was a chemists in my childhood. Next to it is a dentist which ironically was a sweet shop in my youngets days, where we would go and swap ration coupons for sweet treats if we were lucky. Down the road, the old Co-Operative store where I would be sent to buy forgotten food items and was taught to chant my families co-op number, double nine, two o five seven. The house is a mess and a shock to the daughters, this is the wreckage of a life, a family and the inability to ask for and accept help, to even recognise that help was required and available. It is also the wreckage caused by ignorance and bigotry of a mother who sewed the seeds of mistrust in social services and filled her daughters head with paranoia about being taken over by “do gooders” and people who know best. In the end my sisters “independence” killed her. We load boxes with the “essentials” but we all find ourselves slipping “one last thing” into our pockets and into the small spaces left in the boxes. I did at least find the deeds of the house and its documentary history from its very beginnings. At last we could do more than load the cars, hug each other and make our separate ways back to our current homes. I took one photo. It was not of the house, which I will never see again, where I spent my childhood, it was of the single flowering Iris in the front garden. The Iris that my grandfather brought from Kew Gardens when he was a gardener there at the end of the war. It was in full bloom, at least a hundred years old now. On arriving home in Leicester the self same stock of Iris was welcoming me home in a single bloom.
Once home the boxes were unloaded to the hall way and an Indian take away ordered. I am tired and know I am full of the day and everything that it has bought up for me. I eat, watch a film and football highlights. Finally after being alone for a while I take my night meds and go to bed numbed by the effort of the day, the driving, the sorting and the final departure. There are no more of my family left in the city in which we were born and raised. We have either died out or moved on.
Sunday and I wake and doze till 10 o’clock, still feeling tired from yesterdays efforts in London. I have coffee on the patio and chat to my partner about yesterday and then while she goes for a shower I start the blog as I do not want to leave it till the night when I think I will be tired again. My partner and I eat breakfast and then go to our local garden centre to buy weekend food and to get some ice cream treats as the weather forecast suggests some days of warmth. If this is true I plan to garden most of next week. I return to drafting the blog while the afternoon football match plays out on TV. My partner makes me coffee and a coffee and I sit on the patio to indulge and while there I take the opportunity to stitch the sleeves on my Shu Muttens Tigers ice hockey jersey up so that I can wear it as my gardening shirt over the coming week. The football slips into rugby on the TV and I start to unpack some of the boxes that are sitting in the hall. I start with the boxes containing ceramics and begin to replace my youngest daughters swimming trophies with them. The trophies are carefully packed in padded envelopes and I place the new arrivals on the window sill trying to produce the best array to show them at their best. When I have finished what I can I return to a small box of jewellery and start to see what is there. There is an assortment of ear studs, rings, necklaces and my sisters trademark self strung necklaces of polished beads and pearls. I label them all up and then set about verifying the metal in a couple of the rings I’ve found. The first one looks like gold and diamonds so I test it for gold first. It turns out to be at least 14 to 24 carat gold, however I cannot test the diamonds till tomorrow when the battery I need for my diamond tester arrives. The other ring is more straight forward as its hall marked. With the jewellery sorted I move onto the paper work and find the deeds of the house along with other house paperwork including the mortgage my parents took out to buy it. A huge sum of £1800 which they secured with a £200 deposit. It was a 15 year mortgage, which I think they managed to pay off early. My final piece of rummaging finds me going through a file in which my sister was plotting out the family tree By the time I’ve done all this it is time for the evening meal.
My evening drifts from good food to TV and drafting the blog, changing the Tesco order before I run out of spoons and take my meds prior to seeking my bed. Tomorrow I need to get back to some sort of rhythm and to bring some order into my no mans land life. It means writing letters, pursuing my oncologist, extravagantly buying a new painting and retuning to sensible eating and proper training. Most of all my garden calls and there is where I will seek solace. I have to be done with the past as the future is rugged enough with out the extra weight.
