60 Going On 16

The WWOOFer, the FiNZ and the chain gang

There is nothing that my Friend in New Zealand (AKA the FiNZ) and, indeed, many of my friends, and I like more than a tale of coincidence, synchronicity, or six degrees of separation. I'm never sure whether to attribute the fascination I have with these notions to my early love affair with the great Victorian novelists, many of whom thrived on the stuff, or the story I was told by one of my first bosses. As well as teaching me everything she knew about working with the media, she also kept me entertained with a plethora of Fleet Street stories and sayings, from the time when all our national newspapers were actually produced there - or as near there as makes no difference.

Given my predilection for the above, this was my favourite: 'There are only thirty-two people in the world and, sooner or later, you meet them all.'  I may not have the number exactly right; it is, after all, more than thirty years since I first heard it but you get the idea. The words are those of Louis Heren, one of this country's most distinguished journalists, who worked for The Times for almost 50 years.

Tales of coincidence are best savoured, I always think, when they come out of the blue, as the one I am about to relate did . . .

'We've got a WWOOFer* from New Zealand staying with us for a while,' said my Smallholder Friend, on our most recent weekly get-together, when we set out for a trudge across muddy fields a bracing walk with our Labradors, together with Basil, one of my canine guests. 

'Oh, whereabouts in New Zealand?' I asked.

'Somewhere near Nelson, I think,' said my Smallholder Friend.

'Ah, that's where the FiNZ is,' I replied, my Smallholder Friend having met the FinNZ when she was in England a couple of years ago. 'In fact, she was a sort of WWOOFer, when she first moved there. She went to stay on . . .' and I mentioned the type of farm where the FiNZ had lived and worked. 'What's his name?'

My Smallholder Friend told me and said she would ask her WWOOFer if, by any remote chance, he had come across the FiNZ and I said I would do likewise, although both of us thought it highly unlikely that they had met, Nelson having a popuation of about 60,000. Our questions were, we felt sure, going to receive a similar response to the one that travellers give when they are asked: 'So, you're from X? Hey, I have a brother-in-law called John Smith in X. I don't suppose you've come across him?' (For X, substitute the name of any city with at least several million inhabitants.)

But not this time.

The WWOOFer did, indeed, know the FiNZ and had met her several times . . .

This information arrived via email early on Saturday evening just as I was finishing my previous blogpost and I could hardly wait to tell the FiNZ, for whom it was already Sunday morning, and who - by chance, of course - just happened to be checking her messages. We exchanged a rapid flurry of questions and answers. Yes, yes, she knew the WWOOFer and his family, whose land just happened to adjoin the farm where she had stayed. She had fed their chickens when they were away and even, on one occasion, employed 'some fancy footwork and elaborate planning' in herding her farm's small flock of sheep to the WWOOFer's family land to graze.

We both agreed that what was needed now, at our respective ends of the globe was a pot of strong tea and a sit-down to contemplate the relatively small number of people and the equally small chain of events that spanned 11,000 miles of land and sea, connecting a woman, originally from Zambia - who had travelled from South Africa to live in New Zealand, and who had stayed on a farm in a very quiet valley, on the outskirts of Nelson - with a young man from the very same spot and who had travelled across the world to stay on a smallholding in a quiet valley in Devon.

Before we sat down with the tea, however, I mentioned that she might enjoy the post I'd just written because it was a subject close to her heart - dark skies, environmental responsibility, carbon reduction and so on. (At this point, you need to scroll down to the previous post or click on this link to see - and hear if you wish - the song that it includes.)

Fifteen minutes later she was back online: ' I read your blogpost and I'm in the kitchen making tea . . . listening to Radio NZ National . . . and . . . WHAT do they play?'

I suspect, dear readers, that you already know the answer. And you would be right.

*You can read more about World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) here.

The extraordinary comfort of aunties and Twix bars

The Edinburgh Boy and I are now back from our travels - to the Midlands, the Lake District and various points north. I would have posted as we travelled but our ultimate destination was a surprise party in East Lothian, so I was not allowed to reveal anything in advance.

But a journey north meant that I could visit my beloved Auntie Rene, whom I write about here, who lives with her daughter in Derbyshire. Rereading that previous post from last November serves as a reminder of what a traumatic year it has been for them. She is now much recovered but the attack on her grandson, Michael, has left its mark.

Michael was 29 at the time, had a good job in the banking industry, and was enjoying a quiet evening out with two female work colleagues when two young men started to harass his companions. He asked them politely, because he is a polite, gentle young man, to stop. Their response was to launch an assault so violent that he suffered a fractured skull and brain haemorrhage and was left for dead. 

As a result Michael was away from work for six months and his head injuries have led to memory loss and reduced concentration; he still has flashbacks and, for the time being, can only work part-time. His life has changed irrevocably. The assault was captured on CCTV and his 19-year-old attackers were arrested shortly afterwards and brought to trial. They were sentenced last week: both received two years' youth custody.

I imagine that most people's reaction to that sentence will be similar to mine.

But if anyone can help Michael's recovery, it will be Auntie Rene, whom I can only describe as one of life's natural Buddhists - calm, kind, gentle, warm and loving. She has that rare ability of making you feel, when you are with her, that there is no-one else she would rather be with and nowhere else she would rather be.

Despite all that had been happening in their lives, Auntie Rene and my cousin Margaret - and their dog Sooty - made us so welcome. We had a proper high tea, straight from childhood, with salad and strawberries and ice cream, and then mugs of steaming hot tea served with Twix bars. The dogs romped in the garden and I felt about eight years old again, until Margaret reminded me of some of our misdemeanours when we were London teenagers in the 1960s. Oh dear. 

And suddenly we're OAPs, walking our dogs together. How did that happen?

*****

It was the first time since I visited India in 2008 that I'd had the opportunity to sit down with Auntie Rene and show her the photos of the army barracks in Kirkee (now Khadki), near Pune, where her grandmother (my great-grandmother), Elizabeth, had been born in 1839 and which had been home to Elizabeth's parents from the early 1820s.

 

And that's when my 91-year-old aunt had her lightbulb moment. 

"I remember now," she said, "I remember, when I was a little girl, the grown-ups used to talk about India. I didn't know why at the time and later on I often wondered but I never thought to ask."

Now, at last, she does know why.

It was such a special visit that I completely forgot to take any photos but here's a favourite, taken a few years ago at one of our family reunions: Auntie Rene with one of my many cousins, her youngest niece, Alison. They were talking about Alison's much-loved late mother and, as always, our aunt had found exactly the right words.

 

A couple of days later the Edinburgh Boy and I were on our umpteenth walk, across the fells in Cumbria, soaked to the skin yet again. I reached in my pocket and found one of the Twix bars that Auntie Rene had insisted I take for the journey. Extraordinarily comforting. 

On connections and the usefulness of the butterfly mind

I may not share Ferdinand Mount's politics but I don't let this get in the way of my admiration of his writing; his autobiography, Cold Cream: My Early Life and Other Mistakes, is a compelling read. Mount was one of Margaret Thatcher's speechwriters and his account of the period and of the legacy of Thatcher's policies is fascinating.

Several years spent in that particular political hothouse were enough and, besides, says Mount, " . . . going on was her strong suit but it wasn't mine . . . If you want to get on in life, it doesn't do to let your attention wander." Quite so. He attributes his butterfly mind to his father. I'm not sure where mine came from but it probably explains why I would never have quite cut the mustard as an academic.

Drawing of Lucie Duff Gordon by George Frederic Watts

When a book is as absorbing as Cold Cream, there is often something of a hiatus before one decides where to go next. At the top of a fairly random pile, however, is Katherine Frank's biography of Lucie Duff Gordon, the sight of which takes me straight back to Egypt (c1991) and going up the Nile, from Cairo to Aswan, on a steamer, reading Lucie's Letters from Egypt, the ideal companion as the long, water-borne days unfold on that great river.  Some time after I returned, Penelope Lively, who spent her childhood in Egypt (wonderfully chronicled in Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived), wrote an article for the Sunday Times magazine about Letters from Egypt. Best read, she advised, drifting along the Nile so I dropped her a line to say how much I had enjoyed both her article and reading Lucie D G's letters in situ. A handwritten postcard arrived by return post and remains tucked between the covers of of my dog-eared, early Virago edition of Letters from Egypt, along with Penelope's original article. 

So there I was, first thing yesterday morning, about to open Lucie's biography when I decided to check my emails. They included the day's poetic offering from The Writer's Almanac, which happened to be Shelley's Ozymandias and I am back in Egypt again, standing alongside some tumbled antiquities on the edge of the desert, while our Egyptian archaeologist guide asked if anyone could quote the opening line of the poem. We were a small group, a lively bunch of Guardian readers on a half-price, two-week Thomas Cook tour of Egypt and one member of the party, a retired architect, was able to quote not only the opening line but the complete poem. The rest of us were most impressed. 

 

Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell. Shelley called her his "child of love and light."

Ozymandias popping up like that was, I thought, a sure sign that I needed to revisit Lucie without further delay. But it wasn't just the Egypt/Duff Gordon connection. It was the Shelley connection too because Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley) once lived in the town where I now live. (And Shelley's friend, Thomas Love Peacock, lived across the road from Percy and Mary. I expect that there will be more of him anon.)  It was here that Mary wrote Frankenstein, here as in, according to local historians, a house that once stood on this very spot - the terrace where I now live. 

You see what I mean? I'm not sure what all these connections and coincidences signify but I do love it when they manifest themselves and send me who knows where. It's at times like this that I most appreciate the benefits of a butterfly mind.

Happy landings, Kalk Bay Friend

From time to time, regular readers may have spotted references to my Kalk Bay Friend. We met in the second year of our homeopathy course in the 1990s and, twice a week for three years, we would get together for private study sessions, learning the properties of hundreds of different remedies, refining our professional practice skills and revising the mysterious and complex workings of the endocrine system. And much else besides. But we punctuated those sessions with telling the stories of our lives, weaving a tapestry of the heart and mind. Thus are friendships formed.

I missed her terribly, as I knew I would, when she returned to South Africa some years ago but friendship knows no boundaries and emails flew - and continue to fly - between us. Sometimes we even managed to make our Skype phones work simultaneously. 

As it turned out, the miles between us created opportunities for new experiences: she introduced me to southern Africa and then we went travelling together in India. Had it not been for my Kalk Bay Friend, I would not have looked out across the Indian Ocean from the verandah of the Sophea Gallery and  Tibetan Tea House near Simon's Town, nor listened to monkeys clambering across a roof in the Tsitsikamma. I wouldn't have watched elephants at a watering hole in Addo, nor been spellbound in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. And I might never have read the novels and poetry of Finuala Dowling.  I would not have watched the sun set across the Arabian Sea, nor discovered the oily delights of ayurvedic treatment. And I would not have gone in search of, nor found, my great-grandmother's birthplace near Pune.

But today, she will cease to be my Kalk Bay Friend, because she is flying out from Cape Town to begin a new life here:

Bon voyage, dear friend; I wish you courage and joy on the new road. And I've already started saving for that plane ticket to New Zealand ...