mns  2005-12-21 17:09   

Winter came while I wasn’t looking. I had been sitting in the park nearby watching squirrels chase each other, frolicking on the grass and racing up and down trees when it suddenly occurred to me that it was getting very cold. A few days later after a howling gale I walked through Islington Green and all the poppy wreaths around the memorial had blown over and were strewn on the ground. I was unsure if I was intruding on other people’s place of grief but I decided to pick them all up and to replace them around the memorial. I had this fear someone would shout at me ‘don’t touch them,’ but I risked it and I thought of both my grandfather and my father while I did it. My grandfather disappeared in the Charing Cross bombings in 1941. My father was on his way to meet him… and he never found him. I justified my interference by these thoughts – and then I read one of the cards on a wreath. For Fred from his sister. Fred was a mere nineteen years old when he was shot down and the card expressed the love and affection someone still held for him. This is over sixty years later and I was brought up short at how we remember, how we hurt and grieve for those we lose, and at the brutality of war and the absolute courage of people who gave their lives for ‘our tomorrows.’ Whatever stupid embarrassment I was feeling was replaced with reverence. I can only walk through Islington Green in relative freedom because of young men like the nineteen-year old Fred and my own father who had been in the Royal Air Force.

The best parts of the last month have been a visit from Norbert van Woerkom and Rachel Daly. Norb came and helped me with a chapter of my next novel – my Dutch chapter, as I like to think of it. Mijn dank is groot, Norb. A group of us went to see Joe and I at the Kings Head and I have to say I thought this was one clever and intriguing play. It takes place in Terence Rattigan’s apartment where he is visited by Joe Orton. The apartment is haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde. Wilde is played by Brian Murray, Rattigan by Peter Bowles (whose stage presence is surpassed by none), and the young Joe Orton (was he ever anything else?) was played by Simon Hepworth. Rattigan wrote to Orton to congratulate him on the success of his play, following which Orton turns up. I thought it was wonderful (although I know I am the only one of the six of us who went who thought so – which is always embarrassing as it was my suggestion). The script was clever, the idea unusual, the plot both witty and seductive and the acting excellent.

A friend has written to tell me of the benefits of fish oil supplements and in the light of what happened to me on the bus on the way to see King Kong (far too long a film and not my genre at all) I am now about to check out if this friend is right. Apparently the supplement helps suppleness and also alertness. Anyway, to return to the trip on the bus – mid afternoon mind you see, so no real excuse for lack of alertness – I fell. No – it was no mere fall, it was more like being shot from a canon gun; and flying through the air two thoughts occurred to me: the first was, please please please don’t let me land on the flowers (a man had a bag of something on the floor that looked remarkably like flowers. It was difficult to identify while I was being propelled at such a speed) and the second thought was, no matter how bad this is it cannot be as bad as the day someone put furniture polish on the stairs and I slid/fell the whole way down.
Wrong on both counts! I did land on the bag, but it turned out to have tea in it. (He was very nice about his squashed boxes of tea.) And bad and all as it is coming down fourteen stairs in the privacy of one’s own home, it is not as bad as flying through a bus in front of some fifteen or more strangers. JC says he tried to catch me but he too had been taken off guard by the bus’s jolt and that anyway he couldn’t have caught me because I was thrown so fast. What happened was remarkably painful – knees and ankles got twisted, shoulders got lurched out of their sockets and I had a desperate problem in biting down the tears. So I’m going to get the cod liver oil with Omega 3 525 mg and hopefully my suppleness will return and I may become more alert.

The trees in Islington Green have been lit with green and blue lights – this creates a wonderful eerie feeling as I walk past and even if not particularly Christmassy there is a foggy exciting atmosphere about them. And down the road where the enormous steel wings of an Angel (or a seagull?) are suspended above the mall, there is blue and silver bunting which is incredibly pretty.

I finished my next novel – The Lost Garden – and it is now with the printers, due in hardback in March and in paperback in June. Searching for Home is out in Large Print (published by Magna), and Retreat is out in Turkish with the wonderful title Masumiyet Asla Geri Gelmez. And Christmas is only a few days away. I hope it is a good one for everyone.