Only Glimpses 4

Apologies as always for the poor quality of the audio recorded late at night , after a bout of laryngitis, and for the long gap.

I’ll be away sailing in the Baltic amongst the archipelago of islands off the coast of Sweden next week; wish me luck as I’m not sure I’m able for it. Sunbeam is a beautiful wooden trawler built in 1905 sailing under a gaff rig. It’s the romance I’m after rather than the technicalities of sailing, having read The Summer book by Tove Jansen, and seen the beautiful film of the book, set on one of the 30,000 islands and skerries, and also now rereading Henning Mankell’s two books about an elderly man living alone on one of the islands after a traumatic event had altered his life . So here is another tale from those couple of intense years which began my life in Ireland.

In those first years in Ireland when I and my husband lived in the mountains of Kerry, our neighbour across the valley at Eskine, was a Dutch woman named Willie (A shortening of the Dutch Wilhelmina, rather unfortunate in an English speaking country, so that she later changed it to Maria ), elfin-petite she was, with long blonde hair. She held a series of healing days to which she invited women she knew.

She had walked over to introduce herself and Ed her partner to us, during the first summer we lived at Coom. When we were not at home she left a note, but when she came again the visit was well timed for I was just taking a homemade pizza out of the oven, and so they stayed and ate with us. We saw them now and then, as they often had Dutch people staying with them on retreat, and took them walking in the Pocket, our wild boggy dead end valley surrounded by a semicircle of mountains.

Our house was the last occupied house in that valley and it felt like our kingdom. Willie told us that our house had a very dark energy but that we had managed to change that with our positivity and joy in living. I was gratified, but completely unaware of any bad energy, though it was physically not an easy house to live in; dark, damp, no electricity or plumbing.

Well the second winter, Willie invited me to the Sunday healing days she was holding in her beautiful wooden studio. I arrived for the first one, having walked across the valley, and she gave me a strange look and invited me to go take a shower. When I looked in the mirror I saw that my face was covered in soot - we had no mirrors in our own house. so I hadn’t seen what I looked like, though I should have had some awareness, as we had become careless with candles, and the previous night we had had a sobering experience with fire.

I had been downstairs late that night, fortuitously as it turned out, nursing my baby, while reading Anna Karenina, so that it was a while before I raised my head, to see black smoke billowing down the stairs. I must have dumped my child somewhere in the room to run up stairs through the horribly sticky smoke, shout at and haul my 2 year old out of bed, and practically push her down the stairs, before going into my own room to find my husband asleep and the covers on fire, having caught light from a candle he’d stuck on top of a transistor radio to read by; but he’d fallen asleep and the candle stub had burnt down and melted the plastic cover of the radio which had caught fire to the quilt. I screamed at him , managed to wake him and we pulled the covers off the bed and managed to smother the fire somehow. but the bedrooms were full of toxic black smoke.

So we all slept in the living room, exhausted and very shaken and I never thought to look at my face the next morning; I was determined though to still go across the valley to Eskine, and it was a very calming day, spent getting to know women from Kenmare, eating good food, doing some gentle yoga, and meditation exercises; all very restful after my dramatic night, and a taste of new experiences. Different women facilitated different parts of the days, so we had sessions of massage, aromatherapy, and dance over that winter, and then, an afternoon about the chakras, using art work as a tool.

After some meditative time , in which we were encouraged to open our chakras, we were asked to use colours to describe different times in our childhoods. In describing my babyhood, I used red and black and made a picture which looked like a jagged wall of fire. It was very satisfying but when I looked around at other people’s pictures I realised how different mine was, and felt uncomfortable.

The woman facilitating the group told me something very traumatic must have happened to me during those years. I was somewhat bewildered and upset, as I remembered nothing that could have been traumatic. The next time I went home to my mother and father, my second child (born a couple of months after we arrived in Ireland ) was crying and I couldn’t settle her (the same one who Id been feeding downstairs on the night of the fire) . My mother confided to me that I used to always be crying when my father came home from work, and he would be irritated, and then she would be upset, so she asked her doctor what to do, and he told her to put me at the bottom of the garden to cry in my pram so that she could pay attention to her husband in peace; I could see how much she regretted it, but that would have been fairly normal advice in the 1950s I’d say. I was horrified, but it dawned on me that this must perhaps have been the trauma which had resulted in my angry-looking art work.

Wendy was at the workshop. I barely knew her at that time, though she had known my husband in England, when she and her husband Scott had lived in the same street; York buildings in Trowbridge, at a time when it was mostly occupied by young people partying, from what I heard, and also by an eccentric woman who kept goats in her terraced house - I had bought my first two goatlings from her, way back before I knew my husband, in the first year that I lived at Park Farm, in Westbury; Elfrida and Alice I named them, wild little nanny goats who proceeded to have two kids each, who were delightful until they got bigger and there were goats jumping over the fences and annoying the neighbours, so that in despair I did a deal with some guy who offered me one nannygoat in milk, (a very old but beautiful, and peaceable nanny goat we called Joanna) and took the whole unmanageable caboodle of goats away. I tried not to feel a complete traitor to them, and hope they didn’t just get butchered.( There are other goat stories but they’re for another tale)

After that workshop, Wendy wrote me a letter, which I have tried to find, as I know I kept it, and in looking through the drawer full of letters and postcards and detritus from the 1990s have spent hours being distracted and pulled back into those years by reading snatches of news from various people, awed by how much we all wrote back then, but sadly having now been through the whole drawer have only found the second page of that letter with these words ‘’…..I don’t know how it affected you as maybe she should have given us more guidance and support……’’

I also found a note which the Willie left on our door the first time she came walking over the valley to see us - we must have walked over and called to them; none of us even had a landline so it seems amazing in these times that we ever managed to see other people atall. But we did!

Several years later Maria, as she had then become, played a role in my life for which I am forever grateful, and we met again after I had moved away, and hearing she was near death, and came to see her. I remember she was lying in a small light filled room with her beloved little dog laying beside her. She was giving away her belongings, and for many years after I wore the jackets she gave me, remembering her with a smile as I did so.

I had been taken aback, and warmed by Wendy’s concern for me. At that time I had never been to a healing day; had never come across such a thing in my life in England, and so I suppose Wendy realised I was particularly vulnerable, yet I hardly knew her atall.

It was the beginning of a friendship which deepened and strengthened over many years; until her untimely death - I miss her still and sometimes talk to her even all these years later.

These were words she loved, and sent me for Christmas one year; they are written on her gravestone in Templenoe Graveyard.