Whatever the season, it’s beautiful and today, sharply cool with the low winter sunlight dusting the world, it’s magical.
The Christmas spirit is probably responsible as every house seems to have a gleam of fairy lights from their windows, even though it’s only half two in the afternoon. I know our house will have been given thefairy-light treatment to within an inch of its life. My mother, Giselle, loves Christmas and has never been able to pass a charity shop without searching out any baubles someone else has discarded.
Stefan spends a lot of his December weekends stapling icicle lights to the whole outside of the house and wrapping white fairy lights round the maple trees in the front garden. Even the hen house gets fairy lights, although the hens don’t seem in the least put out by the added shininess.
Giselle, wrapped up in herolive-greenhome-felted coat with her silvery hair hanging in a long plait down her back and looking like a faery person herself, directs it all like the art director on a fantasy movie. Adding in some of the ivy she spray paints silver when it dies and then working out which of the metal artwork she makes will look best in the right spot, is her next job, with Stefan holding the ladder and saying he should do it and then watching her anxiously as she bounces up each rung without fear. With a house called Rivendell, what else can you do? Giselle is a hugeLord of the Ringsfan and had renamed the house instantly when she moved in. This and the fact that I call her Giselle rather than Mum almost tells you all you need to know about my mother, except that she is utterly special, one of life’s truly good people who never sees the bad in anyone.
MyGreat-Granny McNamara left her the house and apparently, my grandmother, who was not a person to be trifled with, was outraged. But Giselle, already a fully fledged free spirit, pointed out thatGreat-Granny McNamara had always had second sight and that the house needed her. She was also pregnant at the time and when my father said he was too young to be a dad and maybe after he finished college he’d consider it, she needed a place of sanctuary. Rivendell became that place. My father never returned.
Before long, Giselle installed herself and a few equallyfree-spirited friends in the house to keep her company. They dallied with New Romanticism, attempted to grow their own vegetables and failed miserably until it became clear that some of them would have to get jobs.
‘Jobs.’ Giselle smiles dreamily whenever it’s brought up today. ‘We were so innocent. We thought we could live in the wild and be our own people but it turned out that we still needed money and you can only eat so many turnips.’
Despite the gardening disasters, the turnips grew. They bought lentils. I still hate both.
The garden’s fruit trees, hidden behind a tangle of briars, became the Rivendell family’s saviour. They learned to make jams. Apple jellies, French apple and almond marmalade à la Madeleine, rhubarb and ginger jam, gooseberry jam. If it stood still long enough, it was made into jam.
The house was an ancient Edwardian wreck which gradually improved as the various shifting inhabitants got better at fixing plumbing and shoring up against the damp for a few more months. I grew up with lots of people and children: artists doing things with tiny canvasses and nearlydried-out paints to sell in the city squares at the weekends; sculptors busily making insane wire sculptures in the huge back shed; one enterprising girl who thought she could start a business by growing cannabis in her bedroom.
The gardeners might have been useless with anything that wasn’t a turnip but they could recognise hash plants when they saw one. She’d had to leave. A little recreational smoking was fine – growing with intent to supply was not.
Other kids in school thought I was a bit weird as a child, but they envied me too because it was quite obvious I didn’t have to do my homework. If Mum was called into the school for some infraction of rules, she’d trail in happily and tell them that Sidonie was afree-spirited child and that children should be allowed to make their own decisions. Not the big ones, but the ones that called to them. ‘One day Sidonie might understand the value of education. And then,’ my mother would say happily, ‘perhaps she might settle a bit more at maths.’
I never settled a bit more at maths.
Nowadays the house looks a bit better, which is 100 per cent due to Stefan’s inhabitation. Stefan and my mother fell in love twenty years ago when he came along with some rather more industrialjam-making equipment he was selling. With him came stability and most of the commune moving out, because for the first time, my mother envisaged a life with just the three of us – and eventually darling baby Vilma in the house. With, of course, the dogs, the cats, the collection of hedgehogs and the two African grey parrots that nobody had known what to do with when their owner, old Mrs Ryan up the road, had died. It was a very happy menagerie.
Giselle was at the kitchen table stirring a giant bowl with Christmas cake mixture in it, watched hungrily by two dogs and one cat, when I arrived. The scent of cinnamon, which I adore, was heady in the air and thesixty-year-old cream range, which had defied all of us until Stefan moved in, was quietly heating the room to a blissful warmth. Blue, the other cat, was curled up on a couch beside the fire, warming his arthritic bones and ignoring the culinary efforts.
‘Sidonie!’ exclaims my mother, throwing down her wooden spoon to throw her arms around me. ‘You’re early.’
‘We only did a small hike today. Everyone’s exhausted: work parties, Christmas madness, etc.,’ I said, holding on to her tightly. This had been my third hike with Finn, the second where we’d had company and while it was fun hiking over the mountains, chatting and breathing in fresh mountain air, it was weirdly not as much fun as when we were alone. ‘I thought you’d made cakes already.’
‘Oh I have,’ says my mother, helping me out of my coat, ‘but myself and the Romantics are doing a cake run next weekend for ten of our darling older inhabitants who we feel could do with some cheering up. We’ve got very gentle chilli jam, plum relish, a few tiny bottles of sloe gin because we don’t want them all to get sozzled and Rowena’s sloe gin is like rocket fuel, and the cakes.’
The Rivendell gang from the early days had nearly all settled nearby. They drove sensible cars, had normal jobs and astonished their children with stories of how they’d lived for several years in the Rivendell house and survived on their pooled resources. Their nickname for themselves was the Romantics as it made them laugh, thinking of the days when they’d thought they could survive outside normal life without rents, mortgages, car loans, pensions and school shoes. Carrie, who was a couple of years younger than I was and had moved out of Rivendell with her mother when she was seven, was an accountant, having watched her mother qualify as an accountant and marry another accountant. Every once in a while Carrie and I met up, normally during the holidays, and Carrie would tell me that she couldn’t really remember much about Rivendell, apart from the fun and the menagerie of animals and the first hedgehog. We children called him Hedgy and we went to great lengths to ensure that he was happy and that the dogs, cats and the goose we owned for a brief period left him alone.
Hedgy had eventually shuffled off into someone else’s garden one day and we were heartbroken, because he never came back. We used to love his adorable little snout, and how he’d look at us with great intensity when we got down on our knees to gaze into his eyes. Contrary to popular opinion, hedgehogs don’t immediately curl up at the first sign of people looking at them. While Hedgy didn’t precisely let us stroke him, he was perfectly happy to snuffle around near us when we weren’t with the dogs. And whenever we had to lift him out of harm’s way, his spikes weren’t spiky at all, but were like delicate bristles. I loved that about them.
But our garden’s suitability for hedgehogs must have spread among the community because we were always being gifted with ones wandering into tiny gardens or found perilously crossing andre-crossing dangerous roads despite all attempts to put them into fields.
‘I wish I could have a hedgehog now,’ Carrie once said mistily, ‘but we have two Labradors and they’d probably think he was a football.’
I had met her two Labradors, and they were so adorable I couldn’t imagine them treating a Hedgy with anything but respect. But perhaps she knew best.
I think about my first beloved cat, the little calico called Miaow, and telling Finn about her. I feel so strange when I think about Finn – feelings I thought I’d never feel again. Different from the way I was with Marc. We had been running away together, from our situations at first and then later from real life. Not the basis for a relationship, as I’ve found out.
Maybe I was a bit like Hedgy the hedgehog, not quite as spiky as I tried to imply, but gently bristled. To keep people out.
‘Tea?’ says Giselle now, after I have hugged her. She abandons the cake for a moment to sit down on the couch beside the fire, and I join her and stroke Blue gently. You have to be gentle with Blue, because his poor joints ache so much. But I have discovered a tiny little nodule at the base of his spine, whereupon you can massage gently and he arches his back ever so slightly because it’s pleasurable. Hours on the couch on Pinterest can come in handy, it seems. I am not wasting my life.
‘No, I’ll make the tea,’ I say, kissing Blue on the top of his grey furry head, ‘then I’ll do some stirring.’
Passing, I stick a finger into the bowl and scoop out a squelch of the delicious mixture. ‘Oh,’ I say as a moan emerges from me. ‘I think it’s better uncooked.’
‘Everyone says that until they’ve licked three bowls,’ Giselle says matter of factly. ‘Then they say they are going to be sick. I have made a lot of cakes and a lot of children have passed through this house.’
‘I know,’ I say, ‘I was just thinking about Carrie. I’ll have to give her a ring over Christmas and perhaps we can meet up.’
