500 Acre Wood

This weekend I went to 500 Acre Wood, near Tunbridge Wells. Bob and I set off there in the car, attracted by its name which reminded us of those endearing creatures from a Hundred Acre Wood in the AA Milne stories.

Place names are so interesting; they can be so evocative, and so unlike the place they are actually describing. As we passed through Crowborough, staring at a map I discovered there was an area in the town called Blackness. So we set off up little streets and round bends to find the elusive Blackness in the heart of Crowborough.

However, after much twisting and turning we found ourselves on a road we could not get off, that wound down the hill and straight into Morrisons' basement carpark. We sat there, amused and befuddled. I guess you never quite know where the Blackness will take you.

500 Acre Wood was just that - not too big with trees still relatively young, only just grazing the sky, leaving ample room for the sun to streak through their leaves. Woods are perfect in Autumn, they feel like the right place to be, like going into some kind of protective womb; a shuffling, muffled silence, broken only by the occasional birdsong; full of life that slowly grows and will soon hibernate or drop its leaves.

I love the dappled darkness in there, the soft damp woodyness beneath my shoes, enclosed yet winding onwards, empty, yet full of presence. In woods I always feel like I am in a room full of silent people. I know that they are thinking and communicating to each other and to me in their own way, but no words leave them. I am well aware of the trees here. They say nothing, but speak volumes. I can't help but be in awe.

As we left the wood, we walked out onto a vista of red and green hills, their vision hazy in my eyes, adjusting as I was from darkness to daylight. We stood by a tree and looked up. There were mosquitoes dancing by a branch. I watched as they circled each other in the bright light and I felt my eyes changing, felt myself change, as the world opened its door and let me in.

I remembered then what I always seem to forget: that whatever it is that's making those mosquitos dance, is the same thing that is circulating in everything. That is still there even when the breath has left and the bones are laid to rest. That brought me here in the first place. Oh yes.

I wonder why I can't see this all the time. Why the vision leaves me often when I most would have it near. It seems an inescapable pattern embedded in my fragile human nature, this forgetting.

I've been reading a lot about St Francis lately. It's been stirring up soul in bowlfuls. This is what GK Chesterton wrote about what happened immediately after St Francis' conversion. It resonated, re-reading it after being at 500 Acre Wood.

He went out half-naked in his hair-shirt into the winter woods, walking the frozen ground between the frosty trees; a man without a father. He was penniless, he was parentless, he was to all appearance without a trade or a plan or a hope in the world; and as he went under the frosty trees, he suddenly burst into song.

I know that I horde life. I keep it under lock and key, lest it leave me alone and lacking. And of course, what we horde, what we think keeps us safe, keeps our very souls imprisoned. I think I know what success means, what life means, what it means to gain and what it means to lose. And I am in a sense right. But so wrong. If I could remember it was never mine in the first place, but a gift, for as long as I exist and longer. If I could know that I am never really alone, even in my loneliest days, or that success can't be measured by worldly standards, only the standard of our souls, I think I'd be a happier person.

But then, somehow it seems that we must forget in order to remember again, and keep trying to follow whatever helps that remembering. Bowing the head, clutching the beads, bending the knee, humming repetitions under our breath. Whether it is in a church or in the middle of shopping centres. Whether it's Benedict or Bukowski. Gautama or Rimbaud. Our betraying friend or our most loyal. Venerating the light. Loving the dark.

Words so easy for me to write, so hard to remember. And I am no St Francis under the frosty trees. Chesterton writes a beautiful description of St Francis' asceticism and finally, his death.

It was not a self-denial merely in the sense of self-control. It was as positive as a passion; it had all the air of being as positive as pleasure. He devoured fasting as a man devours food. He plunged after poverty as men have dug madly for gold. ..It is certain that he held onto this heroic or unnatural couse from the moment when he went forth in his hair-shirt into the wintery woods to the moment when he desired even in his death agony to lie bare upon the bare ground, to prove that he had and that he was nothing. And we can say, with almost as deep a certainty; that the stars which passed above that gaunt and wasted corpse stark upon the rocky floor had for once, in all their shining cycles round the world of labouring humanity, looked down upon a happy man.

Mother's Day

They are selling cut-price flowers in Tesco's, for this special day, for all those last minute sons and daughters.

I came back from Wales yesterday, on a long Pendolino train which arrived at 11 o'clock in the evening, then I caught the last bus home. Today, I am shattered, and have been attempting to cultivate a pottering state of mind - one which concentrates only on the unpacking of tea cups, the re-aligning and colour-coding of books on shelves, and the playing of crap bubble-bursting logic games on my mobile phone.

I knew at some point today I would need to sit myself at my computer and attempt to recapture the last few days, and I knew it wouldn't be easy. My heart feels like it has been pumped with helium, so swollen with life, it is, so engorged with feeling, I fear it might just sail right out from under my tee-shirt, out of my living-room window and into the dark rainy night.

I arrived in Shotton at lunch time on Tuesday, tired from the train journey, the early start and the lack of sleep I've become used to in these recent weeks of late night music and writing sessions. I have been wanting to see my sister for some time, we met jubilantly on the station platform, caught the train together to our village and walked home.

As I sat in my Mum's old bedroom, which looks out over the playing fields, I could see, through the trees in the distance, the partly hidden walls of our old sprawling family home, the house I grew up in from the age of four until I moved out at eighteen. With its vast tangle of bushes, trees and flowerbeds, its large echoing rooms, the endless driveway, it is still very much a mythical place for me, a place I still dream about, I still think about. It is a house of so many memories, and I'm still trying to understand and come to terms with what went on within its four walls.

I've known for a while that I needed to go and have another look at the old house. I hadn't seen it close up in some years, I've avoided going up our old road. Right next to it stands the Poor Clares Convent, just on the other side of the wall. I hadn't been back to the Convent since I was a little girl. I have known for a while that I've needed to return here aswell. I've wanted to see what it was like on the inside, as I can't remember from all those years ago, and I've needed some answers in order to piece together the missing pieces of a puzzle that is my childhood. So I have needed for a long time to go and visit the Poor Clares. This week felt like the right time.

I can't locate much in my memories of childhood that, looking back, seem normal or ordinary, if there is such a thing. At the time, I thought that was just how things were in family life, it was all that I knew. But I so longed to be normal and ordinary, in an ordinary house, with an ordinary family, ordinary friends, ordinary wishes and an ordinary experience. The more I look at it, though I know that the idea of a normal family-life can only largely be myth, the more I think what an extraordinary existence in some ways my childhood and teenage years were.

However, when I remember, it is usually the bad that I remember, the darker parts, the shadowy overhangs of branches in our gardens, the crawling in the undergrowth. It is the creaking in the loft above my head, it is the white statue on the lawn that, in the night, always seemed to be moving. It is the death of the bumble bee in the spider's web next to our back steps, it is the crying in the night. We kept the back door locked tight and the front door gleaming with red gloss paint and a brass knocker.

This is what stays with me most, the feeling that someone was always hiding in those tall poplars that lined our long driveway, that there were forces out there, surrounding us that me and my family didn't want to know about. We were all haunted.

But then there was the Convent, with its clock that chimed on the half hour, with its Cross that stood tall above all our heads. I would hear the nuns singing in the morning at dawn, as my mother took me by the hand and gently led me down the front lawn when I was little and I couldn't sleep, and the sun was just beginning to shine and birds were just waking.

There was something about the Convent that I didn't understand, but which has affected me all my life. I am only just realising why. The nuns would come and visit my Mum and they would bring us hand-carved Crucifixes and tiny painted nuns made out of wooden clothes pegs. I would keep the prayers of St Francis on my head board, stuck with blutack, and I would pray every night and feel the kindness of those words trickling down my forehead.

..Lord .. grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life..

A thread has run through my veins and through my life from as far back as I can remember. I still don't quite understand it, and it is still unravelling. It runs all the way back to my childhood, to the old house and to those closed Convent walls.

We sit on the bank. It feels like spring has come and is spiralling into summer. My feet are twitching in the heat, his eyes are melting. The sky is the bluest it has been since winter came.

Downhill, the graves perch up against each other. Chimney stacks form a fortress above a blue haze of rooves and painted walls. If you scrape back the turf, you can find the names of the dead.

I am unnameably happy. But I sit here crying in the grass with my soft-haired lover, because I don't understand what I feel. And I know that somewhere behind me in this graveyard is the cherry blossom tree that I once stood under, where, a long time ago, I named my love for another man and I meant it forever. He disappeared with the petals that blew on our faces from the branches, and he had a son.

And his son was named after a saint, and now this saint stares back at me from these church walls, a seer and a poet. And this name lives in my own, buried between my forename and my surname, as it is buried in the walls where I grew up, between the winding hedge of our garden and a Convent's vegetable patch.



Poor Clare's, nuns with their recorders, giggling in the garden, their Crosses tied at the waist of their dark brown habits, glinting in the sunlight. They sent poems to me over the wall and I stuck them above my bed. At night I would pray to them.

But I also remember the dark evenings when God was an evil eye watching all the time. I remember turning to the left-side so I could seek out the Devil. I felt him on my back all the time, as soon as the sun went down.

That was when I was younger. An atheist by eleven, I started to scorn the nuns and their silly smocks, their locked up world. I would never give myself up to a man like that. I loved Sylvia Plath and The Women's Room. Then, at thirteen, mixed up teenager, I came across Buddhism, experienced a flash of insight, some kind of breakdown and a resurrection and the feeling never went away.

I remember searching even then, through the curtainless window, past the dark, long, empty garden, into nothing. I remember how it felt to want wings and to fly at night when no one was looking. And to fall, back on the hard carpetted floor, when the sun came up in a voidless sky.

I look now to four solid walls of stone, and a cup of wine. I am too much of a Catholic by temperament to become one now. Too much of a Buddhist to ever be ordained. And I love the stories of the saints, they all seem crazy; they scissored like epileptics across their beds in fits of holy abandon, and wrote, frenzied into the long dawn. They couldn't live a normal life.

I like to read about them as I like to read about Rimbaud or Baudelaire. There isn't much difference to me, there isn't a difference in any of it to me. The cup, the wine, the blood, the calling, the sex, the hunger, the deathly embrace. The space between words, the words themselves. The crucifixion. The flame of light. The empty corridor. The black bull. I can see the pattern in everything. After all, it was all born in my blood.

I look up. The angel's face is covered by branches, and they look like flames.