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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
'Charming, touching and very very funny' Jenny Colgan 'Simply too good' Daily Mail From the author of the acclaimed THE GRAN TOUR ONE HOUSE. TWO HOUSEMATES. THREE REASONS TO WORRY: WINNIE AND BEN ARE SEPARATED BY 50 YEARS, A GULF IN CLASS, AND MAJOR DIFFERENCES OF OPINION. When hunting for a room in London, Ben Aitken came across one for a great price in a lovely part of town. There had to be a catch. And there was. The catch was Winnie: an 85-year-old widow who doesn't suffer fools. Full of warmth, wit and candour, The Marmalade Diaries tells the story of an unlikely friendship during an unlikely time. Imagine an intergenerational version of Big Brother, but with only two contestants. One of the pair a grieving and inflexible former aristocrat in her mid-eighties. The other a working-class millennial snowflake. What could possibly go wrong? What could possibly go right? Out of the most inauspicious of soils - and from the author of The Gran Tour - comes a book about grief, family, friendship, loneliness, life, love, lockdown and marmalade.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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THEMARMALADE DIARIES
THE TRUE STORY OF AN ODD COUPLE
BEN AITKEN
For Megan
Contents
Prologue
This is not a book about marmalade. Marmalade features – it is the glue that supports the whole – but it is not spread lavishly all over the place. I say this to forewarn readers who want a book about marmalade, which this isn’t. Marmalade is in the title because I consumed it each morning during one of the strangest years of my life.
It was one of the strangest years of my life because for the most part I spent it with a recently widowed 85 year old. I moved in with Winnie because she had a spare room and needed a hand around the house (or several, as it turned out). I needed a spare room and could lend said hand. What neither of us needed was a strict and protracted national lockdown to commence ten days after my moving in. Had I known what was around the corner, I would have stayed where I was. It was by no means my ambition to spend 96 per cent of the foreseeable future with a stranger 50 years my senior. I’ve got quite a flexible conception of what a good time looks like, but even I would have baulked at that.
I didn’t know what was around the corner, however, and so I moved in, and over the following months Winnie and I more or less resembled a newlywed couple, minus the consent and passion. We did much of our chatting at breakfast – long, wintry, lockdown mornings. It was over marmalade that we bonded, if you’ll excuse the image.
What follows is a record of our unlikely cohabitation, which lasted until it reached a natural endpoint in the summer of 2021. The record is unlikely to be treasured by posterity, or join the ranks of existing diaries of socio-cultural significance, like those of Samuel Pepys and Bridget Jones. Hey-ho.
1
Under no circumstances am I to inherit the house
21 October 2020. I’m moving in with Winnie. She’s 85 and lost her husband Henry ten months ago. Her children feel she could do with someone in the house (someone other than themselves, presumably), for a bit of security and to assist with odd jobs, including but not limited to fetching coal and removing lids. I saw the room advertised online. When I clocked how low the rent was, I wondered if there was a catch. Turns out the catch was Winnie.
Winnie’s got the space. She’s naturally gifted in this regard. It’s a six-bedroom Victorian job. Detached. Halfway up a hill. Whopping garden. In every way opposed to any dwelling I’ve hitherto inhabited. I’ll be lodging in a small flat at the top of the house, where the servants used to recuperate and share notes regarding the general pleasantness of their masters. I’m promised a view of Croydon.
Winnie Carter, 85, widow. That’s pretty much all I know. That and she likes to garden and talk about paintings. She used to volunteer as a guide at a couple of art galleries, I’m told, illuminating the human condition via Titian and so on. Her son, Stewart, a diplomat who lives six miles away, said that I’m not to mind his mother’s ways, whatever that means. He said that once I’m accustomed to her idiosyncrasies things will ‘settle down’.
Of course I asked about the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, about whether Winnie would prefer me to keep my distance and so on. The opposite, said Stewart. She’s fit and relaxed, said Stewart. Just don’t snog each other, said Stewart. I can’t help thinking Stewart wouldn’t mind if his mum popped off early so he might inherit his old bedroom sooner.
I stand in the driveway and size up the house. Name: Windy Ridge. Windows: sash, single glazed. Brick: yellow. Door: red. Knocker: unusual. Stewart answers the door.
‘Hello!’
‘Stewart?’
‘Ben?’
We fist bump – two modern souls in sync. I offer my fist to Winnie. She just looks at it then shuffles past me – ‘I’m just going to check on the bins.’ Nice to meet you too.
The next hour or so is a bit of a blur. Stewart shows me how to do the alarm, how to lock the garage door, how to lock the back door, how to lock the front door, which bottles of wine are worth more than I am, etc. – the practical stuff. Then Winnie and I sign a contract, about how under no circumstances am I to inherit the house. I’d read the contract in advance, so put my name on the line without ado. Winnie hadn’t read it in advance, and doesn’t intend to read it now by the look of it. She’s not fussed. ‘Yes, yes – give him a key.’ I can’t help thinking my moving in is more for the family’s sake than hers. I suspect I got the nod from Winnie less because she reckons I’ll be terrific company and more because I used to be a carer for a lad with cerebral palsy. Winnie’s eldest son has cerebral palsy, you see, and I wouldn’t be surprised if my new housemate planned to send me in his direction twice a week. Though I’d struggle to be of much use to Arthur at the moment. Apparently he’s in a care home a few streets away that currently has a zero-tolerance policy to visitors. Whatever the reason Winnie’s given me the nod, I’m grateful to have got it.
I climb the stairs. And then again. Up to the top – a sort of flat, with bedroom and kitchen and bathroom and study. I size up my new nest. Odd, always, to arrive at a new place. Odder still a new home. Even odder the home of a person resident for 50 years, newly widowed.
Why this move? Surely there were more likely housing options? Yes and no. Yes – at my age one should (if they are the least bit attentive to orthodoxy) be trying to buy their first home, or trying to move in with their partner(s), or trying to rent a room in a part of town not dominated by people drawing a pension (or several, as the case may be). No – I don’t have the money to live where I’d like, or with whom I’d like. I would have to work for 300 years to afford this property outright. London: attractive, repulsive.
But it’s not just the money. It’s not just that the rent is 200 quid a month. My decision was also based on recent events. A couple of years ago I went on a series of holidays with people twice and thrice my age: all-inclusive coach holidays whereupon I played umpteen games of bingo and copped countless anecdotes about rationing and Thatcher. I wrote a book about my intergenerational travels. The Gran Tour was not endorsed by Richard and Judy and nor was the book in anyway a bestseller. (Unless we count a particular fifteen-minute window in a particular bookshop in Norwich when I bought four copies myself.) But it did pay a very significant dividend: it equipped me with the knowledge that an older housemate is no more likely to be unbearable than a younger one.
It doesn’t take long for me to deduce that Winnie isn’t a keen chef. I pick up on the idea when she says, about ten minutes after Stewart has left, ‘So what’s for supper?’
I play it safe and do a bolognaise, and in the process use the wrong pot or pan about a dozen times. (It’s fair to say she’s pedantic about kitchenware.) She takes one mouthful (still on her feet, which is a novel approach) and then declares it amusing, which, as far as I’m aware, isn’t a condition bolognaise aspires to. I serve the pasta with some focaccia which she describes as determined looking. She’s certainly got a way of putting things.
We eat at the dining table, which dominates one side of the sitting room, which boasts two sets of French windows that give onto the garden. There’s a sofa, two boardroom-style swivel chairs, a reclining armchair, another chair made from what appears to be pinewood, several dressers and a corner cabinet (I believe the term is), wherein, for all I know, are the remains of Winnie’s previous tenant. I’m not usually one for furniture – I tend to just sit on the stuff and get on with it – but I make a point of mentioning all this because it’s pretty much all I’m mentioning to Winnie over dinner. My conversational tactic so far has essentially been ‘say what you see’. I’ll give you a taster.
‘Nice lamp,’ I say.
‘Has a habit of blowing bulbs.’
‘Garden looks nice.’
‘A jolly nuisance.’
‘Is there meant to be a man in it?’
‘He comes once a week. I give him £30 and a can of beer.’
‘For the day?’
‘I wish. He does three hours. Which isn’t nearly enough.’
‘No?’
‘In fact, I’m given to understand he’s appreciative of assistance.’
‘That’s a nice peppermill.’
‘Rather obstinate, I’m afraid.’
‘What plant is that?’
‘Arguably the most common houseplant in the world.’
‘Ah.’
‘It’s a weeping fig. Or Ficus benjamina.’
‘So it’s got my name on it.’
‘It might have your name on it but it shan’t have your hands. I don’t expect to be relieved of any possessions. I’ve had enough of that.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Some members of my family were recently living here and they appeared hellbent on commandeering everything but the chimney.’
‘The arrangement didn’t work out then?’
‘No. It didn’t. Hence your arrival. Shall we open another bottle?’
On the whole, dinner has the nice awkwardness of a first date. When our fingers briefly touch going for the parmesan at the same time, Winnie displays reflexes that belie her years. Notwithstanding my opening gambit of itemising everything in the room, which only made Winnie worry I am pricing all her stuff, I’d say the conversation is generally OK.
But I’d also say it is generally surface level – until, that is, Winnie spills some salt on the table and something about the mishap prompts her to remember losing her elder brother when he was eighteen. (The world is strewn with cues at 85, I fancy.)
‘He drowned at sea attempting a rescue,’ says Winnie. ‘The boat was called Illustrious. I remember my father taking the call. Saying, “Right you are, right you are, yes-yes,” keeping a brave face, but with tears streaming down his cheeks.’
She gives this some thought – the discrepancy between what’s said and what’s felt – then smiles, looks at me, and says, ‘Do you come with pudding?’
At the end of the day, the dishes done, news of rising cases coming through from the telly in the sitting room, she quietly sets the kitchen table for breakfast. She sets it for two – two plates, two bowls, two butter knives, two spoons, a jar of marmalade – but the second setting isn’t for me. It’s for Henry. You can tell by the way she’s doing it – so slowly, so lovingly. She sees me seeing, goes to put one set away, then decides against it. ‘Oh, there’s no harm.’
22 October.When I come down in the morning and enter the kitchen, she’s having an argument with the answerphone. She can’t erase the messages, with the result that new messages aren’t getting through on account of the backlog. I try to assist but the device defies me as much as it defies her. Neither of us can clear the slate. ‘Just what I need. Do wonders for my social life this will.’ When she offers me a piece of toast, I have to tell her I’ve already eaten upstairs. She gives me a look – like that is it? I apologise and explain that I didn’t want to get under her feet. She says, ‘But what are feet for if not to be got under?’ and then directs me to the coal bucket, and then onward to the coal shed. She’s always kept a fire and doesn’t mean to pack in the habit now.
I do lamb chops for dinner. She shows me a trick: heating the red wine in the oven with the plates. She’s inflexible about the plates. Reckons they simply must be heated, and never mind if the food gets cold in the meantime. I suggest they could be warmed in the microwave to save time, but the lady is not for turning. As with wood – the older, the less inclined to bend. When I share this insight she knocks on my head and makes a noise to suggest it’s hollow. I think the kitchen might prove to be a bit of a conflict zone.
Dinner chat is initially dominated by the garden, but then a slice of baked cheesecake prompts recollections of New York. Her father was sent out to be one of the British Reps at the newly formed United Nations, with the result that Winnie was out there for the last two years of school. The family went by boat, as was common back then. Winnie remembers being upgraded to a first-class cabin on account of seasickness, which she’s happy to admit wasn’t entirely genuine. Winston Churchill was on board for the crossing. Winnie sat opposite him one night at dinner. ‘And what did you make of him?’ ‘I thought he was just another pale lump.’
Odd how one thing leads to another. ‘Arthur wasn’t a pale lump, that’s for sure,’ Winnie’s saying now. ‘He came out blue. I remember thinking: babies aren’t meant to be blue. This was in the Philippines. Henry got a job out there with an oil company. They had to cut my pelvis open because he was breached. Arthur, not Henry.’
She takes a step back, or sideways, to provide a bit of context. They were newly married, in their early twenties, living in a flat on Manila Bay. After Arthur was born, Henry was immediately sent ‘up country’ for two weeks, which Winnie could have done without. Caring for a cerebral palsied newborn wasn’t something she was accustomed to. The couple were in the Philippines for about two years, came back with all sorts of lovely furniture – plus Arthur of course.
I do the dishes then retreat upstairs, not yet confident to loiter in the sitting room. I leave Winnie in the kitchen, filling a hot-water bottle.
23 October.She’s between courses when I come down in the morning – muesli and toast. With regards to the latter, she prefers a granary loaf. Gets it without exception from the Italian baker on Kingston Road. She does so because the baker, Mr Spinnici, used to be a racing driver and once changed Winnie’s tyre without complaint or charge when she came to a halt outside his shop in 1972. She’s been going twice a week ever since. Winnie says that Mr Spinnici is looking forward to making my acquaintance, which must be her way of saying I’ll be fetching the bread from now on. Her marmalade looks decent, so I mention the fact. ‘We’re running low,’ she says, and leaves it at that.
She really is quite fussy about crockery and so on. ‘Oh you can’t do an egg in that,’ she says when I start doing an egg in that. ‘You have to use the one at the back that looks like it’s got a tropical disease.’1 And she almost snaps my hand off when I go to use her favourite fork. She owns about a hundred forks but only ever uses one of them. Its middle prongs are bent and misshapen. She and Henry found it on the Portobello Road just after they were engaged in 1958, she explains, putting it away carefully.
She phones Stewart. Activates speakerphone so she can continue making tea. Before Stewart has said hello Winnie has begun vocalising a constellation of historic thoughts and present concerns. ‘Stewart. It’s Mum. Gloria Lamont at 46. Turns out she’s got dreadlocks and is very slim. (This teapot’s on the blink.) She reckons we’ve got Japanese knotweed down the bottom of the garden and it’s starting to encroach. (I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Ben.) Anyway, how are you?’ Then, having posed the question, she’s out the back door and into the garden to scatter some crumbs for the birds, leaving Stewart to deliver his answer to the kitchen. Never have I seen or heard such original use of a telephone.
Dinner is pumpkin stew. She has this to say about it: ‘It was certainly different. But then again, I suppose some things are.’
24 October.Along with The Times (which drops with a diurnal plop) a flyer lands on the mat. It’s for a production of Educating Rita at the local theatre, recently revived after a substantial hiatus on account of coronavirus. I take the pair through to the kitchen, where Winnie’s applying her marmalade. I ask her if she’d like to see the play, fancying we might spy in the drama an echo of our own situation – namely, a senior figure bringing a junior one up to scratch. She answers my question by reminding me that I didn’t tend to the fire this morning. I tell her I didn’t realise it was exclusively my responsibility. She says the last person that didn’t realise that didn’t last long. Then she points to a picture in the paper of a government minister and says, ‘According to him, we’re all in this together. What nonsense. We’re in this apart.’
Winnie gives me a slow tour of the garden. Along the way, she tells me what most gives her a headache – ‘that damned Japanese knotweed’ – and what most gives her joy – the tulips and roses. At the end, she pauses for a moment to weigh it all up. ‘The headache-joy ratio rather depends on the season, I’m afraid, and right now it’s headache-heavy. Hey-ho.’
25 October.Winnie is having her hair cut in the utility room. I see her in profile, with Liz the hairdresser behind, as I’m going down the stairs. Winnie clocks me as I descend and says to Liz, ‘Do him next, would you? Poor scrap can hardly see a thing.’ She decides to have some colour put in at the last minute.
26 October.We run into an old friend of Winnie’s walking up to the common. They haven’t seen each other for quite some time, I infer. The impression I get is that Winnie hasn’t seen many of her friends for quite some time, having fallen off the radar since Henry got ill (a series of debilitating strokes in the ten years up to his death). Valerie was clearly full of concern, but Winnie wanted to push on, didn’t want to dally.
We walk a fair way on the common. Winnie knows the trees by their leaves. She looks up at one, points to the leaves at its top – the only survivors. ‘They hang on up there,’ she says, ‘because that’s where the light is.’ Walking home, she says that after Henry died she went through a blank period. ‘I was upside-down. Still am, to be honest.’ When we get back, she spends the next hour or so clearing leaves off the pavement.
27 October.There’s a small television on top of the fridge in the kitchen. We eat breakfast while watching a show about Francis Bacon. ‘Brilliant painter, horrible paintings’ is Winnie’s verdict. Somewhat intimidated by the strength of this opinion, it takes some courage to nominate Lowry as one of my favourite painters, chiefly for his throwing light on things accustomed to shadow. Winnie gives my nomination some thought, then wrinkles her nose and says, ‘No. Not my cup of tea, Lowry.’
To change the subject – and perhaps cheer Winnie up a bit – I tell her I got lost yesterday. Up on the common. When I went for a run. She asks whereabouts and I say there was a pond, surrounded by forest, close to the windmill. She knows where I’m on about. ‘I took the children up to that pond once, and one of them – it might have been Stewart – pointed to a corner of the pond and said it was vibrating. And by George he wasn’t kidding. It was a legion of frogs having a gang bang.’ (I almost choke when she says ‘gang bang’.)
28 October.A week in now and things are going OK. Whether Winnie’s feeling any less upside-down, I can’t say, but the optimist in me reckons she might have got fractionally happier as the week’s gone on. Case in point: when the phone went a few minutes ago, Winnie got there before the answerphone cut in, which hasn’t happened since I’ve been here. It was one of her grandchildren, wanting to know if Turner was a Cubist, which caused Winnie to laugh a great deal. It was nice to hear.
30 October.I’m getting used to Winnie’s advice. Don’t get up at 10 and expect a jolly reception. Don’t mix mushrooms. Don’t poke that or it’ll smash. Don’t pull that or it’ll – too late, you’ve broken it. Don’t go out wearing that unless you wish to be stared at. All of the above offered quite cheerily, I hasten to add. If she gets some trick-or-treaters tomorrow night, Winnie plans to give them a few choice words.
31 October.Out for a meal with my girlfriend – our fourth anniversary. Oddly, I almost asked Winnie if she wanted to come along. Walking across Trafalgar Square, we hear on the grapevine that another national lockdown will start next Thursday – on bonfire night, of all occasions. I suppose the coincidence is handy if we want to symbolically throw our liberties and optimism onto the pyre. I guess I’ll be seeing more of Winnie than planned.
1 The limestone in the eggshell causes limescale to build up on the pan, so she always uses the same one to isolate the damage.
1936
Winnie’s parents were contrastingly employed at the time of their daughter’s birth. Whereas Mr Lovelock was in the habit of flying planes out of Croydon airport, Mrs Lovelock mostly occupied herself with worrying acutely about whatever she could lay her hands on. (By way of example: on the eve of the 1923 UK general election – which would return a Labour government for the first time – Winnie’s mother spent several painful hours fearing she’d have to learn Russian.) Yes, make no mistake, Winnie Lovelock didn’t appear out of thin air. If she appeared out of anything it was the maternity ward of Greenwich Hospital in London. The first thing Winnie’s mother said of her daughter – ‘Look at the size of that bottom’ – is thought to have been influential in the child’s development. Winnie was called Winnie upon the insistence of her brothers, who were at that time enamoured of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories. It wouldn’t be long after their sister’s arrival, however, that the boys would come to see that the Winnie of the stories and the Winnie sharing their bedroom were really quite different beasts indeed. The youngest of the brothers opted to express his feelings thusly: ‘On this evidence, give me fiction any day.’
2
What the hell are you doing here then?
4 November.Day before lockdown. Up to the common to sit on a bench and self-consciously pay attention to nature. The trees are all but bare and thus true to form, true to their most basic characters. All sorts out and about. Almost a festive spirit. Someone wishes me a Happy Lockdown. When I get back home, Winnie’s at the kitchen sink, gazing out at the fog. ‘Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,’ she says, which I suspect might be poetry. When I ask if that was poetry she turns and spots me in flagrante. ‘Over my dead body will you boil veg in that amount of water.’
5 November.First day of lockdown. Spirits a bit low at Windy Ridge to be honest. Neither of us bargained on this. Fireworks seem a tad inappropriate, given the occasion. Nonetheless, we watch them shoot up and burst and briefly shine before disappearing by degrees over South London. Dinner is some old pork casserole. I propose rice with it but she’s adamant the two don’t marry. She’s got very strong opinions about what goes together, I’ve noticed, which doesn’t bode well.
6 November.I’ve started to linger in the sitting room after dinner. Less inclined to retreat, to seek privacy. I ask if she wants to watch University Challenge. ‘Is it Paxman?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Then no.’ She sits down in any case, watches twenty minutes or so before calling it a night. She touches me on the shoulder when she goes off to bed. First time that’s happened.
I switch chairs: to the electric recliner that was bought for Henry after his first stroke. He had a series of them, I understand. He’d had enough by the end. Couldn’t stand the incapacity. It wasn’t his idea of life. His death unhinged her more than she expected. She feels like she’s lost everything. Henry and Arthur were the pillars holding up her life, giving it sense and structure and integrity. Now Henry’s dead and Arthur’s locked up. That’s how she sees it, how she feels it. She used to meet up with various friends at a keep-fit class at the YMCA down the road, but that’s been cancelled. She’s been told to get on Zoom. While she agrees that Zoom doesn’t sound like an altogether bad platform for a keep-fit class, she’s not sure it’s for her. So these days she does her exercises sat on the end of the bed in the morning, listening to news of soaring reproduction rates. She told me all of the above during the final third of University Challenge, meaning I was unable to comprehend any of the questions, which gave her the confidence to ask me at the end of the programme if I was fibbing when I said I went to university.
7 November.There’s an issue with her windscreen wipers. She couldn’t get them to do the back window and now she can’t get them to stop. She tells me to get in the car and then drives us to the Skoda garage in Tooting to get the man there to have a look. When Winnie practically reverses into his showroom, the man there probably gets more of a look than he would like.
We go to the farmers’ market after. Winnie has a word with all the vendors while I buy guinea fowl, pork belly, and a dozen lamb and rosemary sausages, which causes Winnie to ask if I’m pregnant. I buy the two of us a coffee. She’s so appalled by the cost that she has to turn her back when I pay. She says her flat white tastes of cardboard.
She drives home the long way, to show me a few things. It’s telling what she points out – the children’s first school, the expensive dentist, the less expensive but potentially illegitimate dentist, a spot where there used to be an apple orchard. The latter prompts a memory of the first time she got drunk. She was at the indoor market in Oxford, eighteen or nineteen. She was given half a pint of cider by a jolly vendor, didn’t know how strong it was, thought it tasted of apple juice. At the drop of a hat, she couldn’t walk her bike between the stalls anymore, knocked over a load of parsnips. Then she threw up twenty minutes later riding along Queen Street.
She does eggs for dinner. When she asked me what my ambitions were in the way of cooking an evening meal, I said I had no ideas. She said in that case she’d boil two eggs (to discourage me from running out of ideas again, presumably). She shows me how to test for stinkers by seeing if they sink or float. I say, ‘That’s a nice trick.’ She says, ‘I’m not as green as I’m cabbage looking.’ When she gets an egg that floats – a stinker – she cracks it open just to check. Can’t stand the idea of throwing one out mistakenly. She threw one out once – a floater – and couldn’t sleep that night for fear she’d made a mistake, so got up and went out into the garden in her nightie and found it in the compost.
Her brother Jacob died in his forties of cancer. She tells me as we watch someone having two tumours cut out of their liver on the telly. In other news, I’ve stopped worrying about the occasional whiff of cigarette smoke on my clothes since she said she lost her sense of smell in 2016.
9 November.Winnie gets The Times each morning. She’ll have a look stood up at the kitchen table, eating her toast with marmalade. She doesn’t mind a joke at the expense of our elected members, that’s for sure, and she often knows the people popping up in the obituaries, if that’s not an inappropriate way of putting it. She’s started hooking out the crossword for me so I don’t have to wait until she’s done with the paper, which is nice of her. I ask for help with a clue – small finch, six letters. She says she’ll have a quick look. I think she’s going to Google it, but instead she spends half an hour going through an anthology of birds. She says the old method is better than Google because of its deficiencies. The task of locating the anthology and then flicking through the pages ensures you find things along the way. She says her bank wants her to go online, but she’s not comfortable with the idea. ‘Do as you wish, not as you’re told,’ I say. She nods briefly in agreement and then says, ‘But don’t go around thinking the same applies to you.’
She remembers an Italian carer who she wishes had done less what she wished and more what she was told. ‘She was a funny girl. We got her from the agency. On her first day she came up to me and said, “I am Italian. I am lesbian. I look after Mister only. Capito?” She stormed out one evening when she realised I’d put herbs in the bolognaise. Never came back. Reckoned it was sacrilegious. They weren’t all bad though. The carers. Ron was a good one. He was here for nearly ten years. South African. Or Zimbabwean. He was very good with Henry. But he got too involved. Couldn’t help it. I used to say to him, “Don’t get too close. It won’t do you any good.” Cried his eyes out at the end. Was more upset about Henry’s death than Henry was as far as I could tell.’
A letter hits the mat from Gloria Lamont at 46, re an overhanging branch. Winnie gets straight on the phone to Stewart, who doesn’t prove as helpful as Winnie would like when it comes to getting four quotes from local tree surgeons within the hour. ‘Would you like me to quit my job and come and do it myself ?’ asks Stewart. ‘Well I dare say you’ve had worse ideas than that,’ says Winnie.
10 November.Up at 7 in case the tree surgeons come early – a favour for Winnie. Get the fire going easily enough: coal in, ash out, etc. Tree surgeons don’t come until 9, in the event. Winnie watches them at it from the bottom of the ladder, doubtless offering a few pointers. Then she comes into the sitting room and watches from here. I’ve never seen her look so content. She could be watching a favourite film. You can almost see the serotonin gushing around her body, if that’s what serotonin does. The sight of the tree surgeons has obviously got her in the mood, because next she invites me to clean the downstairs loo and spectates from the doorway, arms crossed and smiling.
Because we’re getting on so well today, Winnie wants to introduce me to the freezer in the basement. It’s absolutely loaded. Winnie could survive an apocalypse comfortably. And maybe that’s the point. She all but climbs in and emerges with a leg of lamb that she tosses to me quite recklessly. ‘See what you can do with that,’ she says, and laughs. Another little flourish of bonhomie – good to see. Incidence rate of such sneaking up I feel.
She tells me about the time she, another girl from school and the other girl’s sister drove from New York to Texas in a Jeep. Her mother allowed her to go on the understanding the other girl’s sister was responsible, which she most assuredly wasn’t. Texas made an impression on Winnie – and how! This was in the 1950s, you have to remember. When black people were segregated. Winnie couldn’t bring herself to look. So she drank cocktails instead, which was a rather shameful approach to the matter now that she thinks about it.
Anyway, when she got back to England, having sailed from New York to Southampton, she remembers getting the train to Oxford, and seeing a green sports car bombing along the country lanes and thinking, ‘I wouldn’t mind matching up with someone who’s got one of those.’ So imagine her excitement when she met Henry for the first time, in his digs at Oxford, where she discovered him putting a sports car together in his sitting room. ‘What colour was it?’ I say. ‘Grey,’ she says.
She looks at her cup of tea, realises it’s gone cold, tips it into the sink, then looks at the washing on the line and says, ‘It was rather passionate, really. We had time to ourselves. His parents had split, and mine were still in New York. I told him – I’m not going to muck about, Henry; if you don’t marry me then I’m off.’ She turns to me and asks, ‘So how long have you and yours been at it?’ I tell her we’ve been at it four years. ‘Then just what the hell are you doing here then?’ she says. I confess to having asked myself the same question.
11 November.‘The gardener’s got bowel cancer,’ she says, passing me the marmalade. ‘Henry got that one. When they pulled it out they said it was the biggest they’d seen. Henry was rather proud, which gives you an idea how competitive he was.’
12 November.I didn’t suffer much of a lockdown last time (March to May 2020). I was in Australia – stuck there somewhat, living in a caravan, having gone for a wedding. The most biting restriction was having to take your coffee away. I can’t say I’m suffering at the hands of lockdown 2.0 – not acutely, not painfully – but nor can I say it’s enriching my life. In so many ways there’s been a depletion. Not one to moan about, granted, but a wide and significant depletion nevertheless. Put one way, I’ve substituted a significant chunk of culture and recreation and wellbeing for a collection of bad habits and Winnie. That’s the crude analysis. Am I lonely? No. Not really. (Maybe a bit.) I’ve been out for walks. I’ve spoken to cashiers and vendors. I’ve met a couple of friends outdoors. And Winnie’s here of course, which is a clear and countable good. And yet, and yet, and yet … It’s a matter of attitude of course. And so far my attitude has had a mind of its own.
Up to the common with Winnie to have a walk in the woods. She says she used to come up most days with the children or the dogs. She’d avoid paths that were ‘too organised’, preferring the smaller hidden trails where you stood a chance of twisting your ankle. ‘You’d have a chance of seeing birds that way. Birds don’t hang around near gangs of people.’ She points to a spot along the bridleway and says she was attacked there once. Aged 40. He got her on the floor and had his hands where they had no right to be. Bilbo (her border terrier) started licking the assailant’s face and Winnie yanked his finger back, which did the trick nicely. She gave Bilbo two dinners that night. She tries to take a photo of a group of tall slim trees. She’s not happy with the result. ‘When you try and capture it, the light is never right, is it? It’s never the same. Which makes me think you’re better off just looking.’ At its end, she thanks me for the walk. She says one isn’t inclined to do it alone, rightly or wrongly.
13 November.Winnie’s granddaughter visits. Tells Winnie she’s got a boyfriend in Milan. ‘Crikey,’ says Winnie, ‘talk about socially distanced.’ When Abigail leaves, Winnie sets about cleaning Arthur’s electric razor, which she does at length with a toothbrush. I ask if she’s able to see Arthur when she nips round to drop stuff off. ‘Through the window. If I’m lucky.’
14 November.Breakfast with Winnie. A beginner’s guide. She always starts standing up. She’ll be stood for her muesli, and perhaps the first pages of the newspaper, as if ready to dash off somewhere at any moment. Only when she’s moved on to her toast will she settle down – and then only by degrees. She won’t be fully sat and stationed and at ease until the very end of breakfast, at which point, as if provoked by the first signs and tingles of relaxation, she’ll leap to her feet and say something along the lines of ‘Right, enough of that, time to crack on with the war.’
Our talk at breakfast this morning is all over the place – religion, Colorado, the importance of putting the butter next to the kettle to soften it in the morning – but it winds up at her mother. ‘My mother was a worrier,’ says Winnie. ‘She did very little else. Hardly surprising when you consider that she lost a son at such a young age. Children are precious things. They’re meant to be your future. Not your past.’ She says her mother was cremated. Remembers her ashes being delivered in a Mothercare bag. Winnie thought that was fantastic. Laughs her head off at the memory. (Before leaping to her feet and cracking on with the war of course.)
It’s kedgeree for dinner. The turmeric and curry powder she’s using are fairly mature, I notice, after she’s deposited half of each into the pan. But they’re positively youthful compared to the cream of tartar. It was made by Mitre, who went out of business in 1959. She says her spice cupboard is prize-winning. Says that one of the grandchildren came home from school saying they had to find the oldest spice in Granny’s cupboard. Winnie won by a quarter of a century.
15 November.At Winnie’s behest, I have the remaining kedgeree for breakfast, while she has her standard diptych of muesli followed by marmalade on toast. She’s down to one jar of marmalade – hence her pushing me towards leftovers. Says she can’t make another batch until Seville oranges appear in Lidl. ‘Why Seville oranges?’ ‘It’s their bitterness. It tempers the sweetness.’
My friend Andy visits. The three of us go out for a walk, and in so doing create the social highlight of my week. Andy and I are both slightly terrified when Winnie crosses a busy road with suicidal boldness. She’s unapologetic. ‘One has to plough one’s own furrow, I’m afraid.’ We go to Cannizaro House, a hotel whose extensive garden is open to the public. Andy wants to know what Winnie makes of me. She says that my cooking has been ‘rather busy’ and that my sense of humour is ‘best avoided’. Our lap of the garden finishes at the aviary by the entrance. Andy says the birds should all be released. Winnie knows where Andy’s coming from but argues that the birds serve a purpose where they are – they breed a fondness for birds. ‘No love without awareness’ is how she sums it up.
Winnie’s daughter Rebecca calls by. We have a chat on the driveway. She’s surprised to learn that Winnie was out for so long. Says it’s been years since she walked that much. Rebecca’s also a widow, I’ve been told. Lost her husband to cancer two years ago. He was in his fifties, a scientist, researching the cancer he knew would kill him. How about that for a game of Poohsticks? There’s obvious love between Winnie and Rebecca – a love steeped by or in empathy. That’s not to say they don’t bump or grate – they most certainly do – a few times already since Rebecca turned up. They’re too alike not to, I suppose. Birds of a feather, in my experience, can clash as much as chalk and cheese.
Winnie remarks on a few of the paintings lining the stairs. Points to one and says, ‘Henry’s father looked at this one and said, “What does it mean?” And I said, “No idea.” And he said, “So why on earth did you hang it?” And I said, “Because I like it.” Well – you should have seen his face. The notion utterly befuddled him. “There’s no value without efficacy!” he said. Or shouted rather. He couldn’t handle the slightest hint of ambiguity. A military career will do that, I suppose. Instil a prejudice against things that are nice but don’t do anything.’
16 November.With each day that passes, common inclinations become apparent. For example, we’ve similar priorities in the morning. We both like to share various biomechanical complaints before flipping through the paper and having a joke at the expense of the high and mighty. Whoever cautioned not to match May with December didn’t reckon on the two bonding over a mutual distrust of July. Speaking of distrust, a white dove has just landed in the holly tree and has started having a go at the berries. Winnie is not amused. ‘My brother used to have a rifle for such occasions,’ she says. Yikes. Also ‘yikes’ is the sight of her climbing a stepladder to get at the old clock in the kitchen. She wants to synchronise it. Says it’s fallen behind. She’s clearly struggling to wind it up but refuses my offer of help. She gets there in the end. ‘Back on track,’ she says. ‘For a few hours at least.’
17 November.Nearly two weeks into the lockdown. I don’t wear a pedometer but if I did I’m pretty sure it would tell me that over the last fortnight I’ve walked an average of 36 steps a day, mostly in the direction of the kettle. I’m learning to wake up in the morning with nowhere to go. It’s not an entirely unpleasant lesson, I must say, but it’s a lesson nonetheless, and I never was a good student.
Speaking of the kettle, I make us both a tea. Drinking said, we talk about a neighbour who’s been dead seven years. She was the mother of two girls, one of whom had cerebral palsy. Eileen, the youngest, did a lot for her disabled sister growing up. Too much perhaps, for when Eileen was sixteen or seventeen she walked into an oncoming train. Winnie made a point never to ask Rebecca or Stewart to care for Arthur, and she supposes the two things may be related. She feels guilty about Arthur’s cerebral palsy and always has. Blames herself. Perhaps she shouldn’t but she does. The thing is, she couldn’t have a Caesarean because her blood type is rare and she was in the Philippines. If she’d been in London it would have been otherwise. ‘Stupid woman,’ she says, getting to her feet and leaving the table.
Things happen for a reason. A girl walks into a train because she carried too much too soon. A woman doesn’t share her burden because a girl walked into a train. A woman feels guilt all her life because she couldn’t have a Caesarean. People tend to say that everything happens for a reason when they don’t know the reason. People don’t tend to say that everything happens for a reason when they do. In any case, Winnie makes me laugh twice in the space of a minute and the reasons are these: first, she opens the fridge and says, ‘I’ve been harbouring this wretched egg for yonks and it’s giving me nightmares,’ and second, she points to a picture of Matt Lucas in the paper and says, ‘He won’t survive the pandemic.’
A leaflet lands on the mat advertising a residential aged care facility. ‘That can go in the bin,’ she says emphatically, going out the back door to scatter some crumbs. As she does so, the house alarm goes off. (Both of us had forgotten to unset it.) A minute later the doorbell goes: it’s a police officer who happened to be passing. ‘I heard the alarm. Anything wrong?’ ‘Nothing at all, officer. The alarm goes off when we run out of coffee.’ ‘Do you live here, sir?’
After lunch (broccoli soup), I sit in the living room and read H is for Hawk. Winnie says she’ll join me. Says it’s been ages since she sat down and read. She’s got my book. (I gave her a copy of my latest, chiefly to substantiate my claim that I do have a job of some sort.) She reads maybe half a page and then falls asleep. She wakes up a few minutes later, reads a few lines, asks what a TED Talk is, then falls asleep again. After a few micro naps of this sort, she ploughs through a couple of pages. It’s nice watching her out of the corner of my eye – dark blue gilet, turquoise jumper, colourful scarf, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. ‘Now who told you that an owl can lift up and carry away a lamb?’ she says without looking up from the book. In terms of feedback, that’s about all I get from her. Got more when I brought a load of coal in from the shed this morning. Ah well.
19 November.Morning. I put the kettle on, and as it boils I collect the coal from the coal shed and then attempt to provoke the still faintly orange coals of yesterday back to life. I have an instant coffee and then work on the crossword until Winnie appears, and with her the outside chance of some toast and marmalade. (I daren’t help myself. Not yet. Might be years before I take that approach, I fancy.) She enters. I say good morning. She says, ‘I must get that tart round to Arthur today, even if it kills me.’ Then she heats her teapot, which basically involves filling it with boiling water, letting it stand for a minute, and then emptying it. Then she pops a bag in and fills it again. After giving it at least five minutes, she’ll pour herself a mug (milk already in). And then, more often than not, she’ll forget to drink the damn thing, having been diverted by a task or a phone call or another dove in the holly tree. So it goes.
Winnie’s in charge of dinner. She salts the salmon so thoroughly that I’m led to believe she means to preserve it for years, rather than serve it in minutes. She says (passing me the lemon) that her mother had a nervous breakdown in America. She didn’t take to the diplomacy, says Winnie – too much stress, too many dinners and receptions, too many strangers. Which means that off the back of New York, Winnie’s dad got the medal of St Michael and St George and her mum got a psychiatrist. There you go: things happen for a reason.
20 November.I’m in the drawing room, testing out the chaise longue, when Winnie returns from the Co-op. She says there was a bit of a scene. The ATM spat out her cash and receipt, but not her card. So she spoke to the young lady on the checkout, who got on the phone to someone to ask them to come down and have a look, at which point Winnie found the card in her purse. ‘Damned if I know how it got there,’ she says. ‘I must have had it in there in a flash. I’m too efficient for my own good.’ She looks at me on the chaise longue more curiously, as if only realising now just how unlikely a spectacle it is. She laughs and then says, ‘I suppose I better take some marzipan biscuits round to Carlotta. I’m told she’s not exactly getting a kick out of the lockdown.’
She does take some marzipan biscuits round to Carlotta (95, Austrian), but not before unloading her shopping. Three blocks of butter to go in the freezer (despite there being roughly a cubic metre of the stuff in there already). Two granary loaves from Mr Spinnici. And some special puddings for Arthur. I’m starting to get an idea of her essentials.
Dinner prep. I’m struggling to get the flesh off some chicken legs. ‘Ah,’ says Winnie, spotting my struggle. ‘Nightmarish, aren’t they? You’d better move out the way. I’ve dealt with turkeys.’ Turns out Winnie worked on a turkey farm one summer when she was in her late teens. The previous summer she’d spent in Italy, in a palatial villa owned by the father of a friend. Winnie’s mother didn’t think much of that sort of vacation, said it was about time Winnie came down to earth a bit – by spending a summer on a turkey farm. ‘The local girls who worked on that farm were what you would call indelicate. They taught me everything I needed to know about sex, and much more that I didn’t. In any case, I became a dab hand at sorting a turkey out and did it every Christmas thereafter.’
21 November.There’s been a reduction in the garage. Stewart arranged for some men to come and take away what he’d earmarked as pointless. Winnie oversaw the whole operation, said the removal men were jolly good chaps, though they might have left her the unplayable piano she hasn’t sat at since 1984. ‘The old bathtub’s gone as well, I’m pleased to say. Has a lot to answer for that tub – not least a slipped disc and a broken toe. Not the kind of memories to cling on to. But much of what’s been removed is surely useful
