Bear and the Tree - part 2

http://www.abctales.com/story/philipsidneynoo/bear-and-tree-part-1

Lendings

I think about Artie often. It’s been a long time since that day, but when you’ve lost someone, you never forget.  You carry round both the empty space left by their absence and the heavy weight of their loss forever.

When Artie died, there wasn’t much of what was his left and there was nowhere to go to sit and think about him.  We couldn’t afford a head stone and in the end, he had a pauper’s burial because we couldn’t do anything else.

Our mom couldn’t bear what had happened and she moved down Bristol way to live with her brother, taking my little sister with her.  She wasn’t going to let go of another child and risk losing them, I don’t think.  I carried on working on the fair because there was nothing else I could really do and besides, I felt there was still something remaining of Artie, there amongst the fair people.

I rarely went down to see our mom.  I always used the excuse to myself of the work I had to do, but if the truth be told, I couldn’t stand the disappointment on her face when she looked at me and saw I wasn’t Artie.  After she died, I lost contact with my sister - to my great shame now; but somehow at the time, it seemed the most straightforward thing to do.  As you get older, you realise the whole of life is a falling off.

I’ve been putting off the visit I’m making today for a long time, but I know I should go.  After his morning walk, I’ve left Bear snug in our house with his food and water and I’m making my way up the A38 to the national memorial arboretum in Alrewas.  I’ve never been, but my daughter has shown me the website on her computer in preparation for today.

It’s a place of remembrance, built on an old quarry site.  Over the years, all the trees planted in remembrance of people are growing in to what will become part of the national forest.  I like the idea of the trees remembering.  The arboretum is full of memorials, built for honour and the not forgetting of things, but I’m coming to look at one particular memorial.

The drive is a simple one, a straight road through the city and then the A38 out north, flat skies and flooded fields gleaming steely grey in the thin winter sunshine.

After I’ve parked the car and emptied my old man’s bladder, I begin the walk to the memorial I’ve come here to see.   The arboretum is very exposed as most of the trees are still small and the wind whips across the whole, vast area, chilling my bones.

I pass the memorials to people who have died in senseless war after senseless war.  High in the centre of the arboretum is the vast wall of remembrance, where the name of every soldier who has died since the second world war is carved in to the stone.  The sheer amount of names hits me, but what hits me harder is the empty space for future names.  The names of people who are walking the earth today, not knowing that they’re going to die in a war to come.

Everywhere, there are old people.  They are walking and sitting on benches and they all seem to be with other people, apart from me.  Some are crying and some have the grim look of acceptance on their faces that only the very old have when they’ve lived through a lot.  I imagine I have a similar look on my face.

Although the arboretum isn’t completely for remembering people from the armed forces, I still feel somewhat fraudulent for coming here; I don’t feel a part of things.  And then I see what I’ve come here to see.

It’s a carousel horse, wooden and vividly coloured.  Standing on the ground on a black, marble plinth, it’s a memorial to the showmen of Britain who died in the two world wars.  But I’m here for Artie.  I sit on a bench opposite the horse and I think about him and I remember him.  Everything is only ever really lent to us; we never own the people we know, the people we love.  In the old word, they are lendings only.

When Artie died, they gave me the scarf he’d been wearing that day on the big wheel.  It was a blue, woollen one and he always wore it in a dapper knot.  I’d considered bringing it here today, but I’m glad I didn’t.  I can think about Artie here, but the space is too public.  Too belonging to other people.  And the horse makes me sad because out of its back, the brass pole that would usually connect the horse to the roundabout is connected to nothing but the fresh air.  It’s a severed thing; a horse without a carousel.

All the way home, a flock of birds follows my progress up the same straight roads I drove on earlier today.  They’re swirling and oscillating on the wind currents, sticking together before they migrate.  They’re with me for a long part of the drive, but by the time I reach the city’s tunnels, they’ve disappeared.  I leave the city’s outskirts and busy roads where life rumbles on.

***

Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White

By the summer of 1955, things were a little less raw.  The fair was travelling every few days and I was kept busy by the constant upkeep of the elderly rides.  Efisio was still working with me, but in his less precise wood cuts and skewed gluing of broken horse pieces, I knew this wouldn’t be for much longer.

It had been a meandering, hot summer and towards the end of August, we were due to go back to the fairground outside Telford, where what happened to Artie happened.  We’d not been there since the accident and I’d thought about dipping out for a few days, so I didn’t have to go back.  But then I reconsidered because I reckoned going there wouldn’t change anything.  It wouldn’t make his death any more, or less real.

We were to be pitched at the fairground for a couple of weeks this time, the longest we were ever settled anywhere.  My days were spent in fixing and maintenance and then the evenings were my own.  I was meant to be on hand if anything needed sorting, but I could wander round the fair and do what I liked as long as I could be found at short notice.

One evening, as dusk fell, I borrowed my pal, Jimmy’s car.  He ran the dodgems and had no need of it while he was working.    I told him not to let on and I drove out of the fair, up the road to where I could get a good view of the Wrekin.  I wanted to see the hill as Artie had done on that last night, the summer sun setting behind it.  The trees were in their late season glory and the whole countryside appeared as though it was coloured pink and white, softened as it was by a shimmering heat mist.  I remember wishing Artie was there with me.

A couple of days later, towards the end of our time there, an unexpected thing happened.  The girl with the wide green eyes appeared at the fair.  I saw her at a short distance, over by the shooting gallery.  She seemed to be waiting for someone or something and when I looked at her and met her eye, she came over to me.  Her name was Peggy and she remembered exactly who I was and in what circumstances she’d seen me before.

That first time, we talked long into the night.  She pitied me for what I’d lost, but her pity wasn’t maudlin or suffocating.  It was pure and it was true.  In talking to her, I could speak about Artie in a way I hadn’t been able to talk to anyone else about him before or since.

As the fair shut up and the lights were turned off, the warm, night air turned in to the chill sharpness of early morning.  We’d ended up on the steps of the carousel, the scuffed hooves of the horses at our eye level.  Neither of us wanted our time together to stop and we arranged to meet the following evening.  Peggy was a local girl and we organised for me to pick her up in Jimmy’s car at the end of her street.  Our plan was we would go together up to the top of the Wrekin, to get another perspective.  A different perspective to Artie’s final one.  That is, we wanted to see what the fair looked like from the high point at the top of the hill.

That next day, the weather broke.  It was still warm, but all day the sky was a flinty grey and although the rain that fell was mizzle only, the clouds were full of the promise of much more.

By evening, it was raining in torrents.  Leaving the fair, I could hardly see through the windscreen.  The whole atmosphere was soaked with water and the noise of the rain on the bonnet and car roof was almost unbearable.  Jimmy had a radio in his car and I turned it up as loud as I could to try and mask the noise.  I drove slowly through Telford’s outskirts, watching the road and peering at the street signs through the water, so I didn’t miss where I’d turn to pick up Peggy.

Of course, our plan would have changed if we’d managed to meet – this wasn’t a night for climbing up hills and marvelling at what we could see below us.  I knew, though, I still needed to see her.  Beyond how it would seem if I let her down by not turning up, I wanted to pick up from the night before.  I wanted, with Peggy’s help, to talk Artie back into existence.

So with the relentless rain beating down on the car and the cha cha cha of Eddie Calvert’s Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White barely covering the noise it made, I turned the corner.

By the time I saw her, it was already too late.  The feeling of impact and the sense of moving over something soft and yielding was terrible.  I felt these things at the same time as I replayed the sight a second before of a small child, dressed in white, long, blonde hair streaming behind her, running out in front of the car.  I stopped the car dead where it was and I looked back into the road in my wing mirror.  In the rain and the gathering dusk, I saw the same small, white figure crumpled in the road.  Like a broken doll.

Then, I didn’t look any more.  I switched on the engine, stared straight ahead of me and I carried on driving, without looking back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TcLdJlA0Nc

***

Stories we tell our Children

When my grandson, Thomas, was much younger and Peggy was still alive, he would spend every Wednesday afternoon with us while his mom went to work in Halesowen.  We loved that time together – he was ours only then and we could play and sing and tell stories in the absorbing ways you can with small children.

 When he started school, he’d still come to us on a Wednesday, but he was often tired when we picked him and so we got in to the habit of getting to our house and settling down in the living room with a snack and a story.  The story he loved most of all was the story of Kenelm, the boy king of Mercia.

“Grandad, tell me the story about Saint Kenelm again.”

“Well, Thomas, a long, long time ago, King Coenwulf died, leaving his two daughters and his young son, Kenelm who was going to become king.  Kenelm was only seven years old.”

“The same age as me!”

“Yes, the same age as you, Thomas.  Anyway, Coenwolf’s daughter, Quendryda was jealous of her little brother and thought if she had him killed, she could be queen.  She talked to her lover, Askobert, who was also Kenelm’s tutor and she asked him if he would kill Kenelm when they went hunting next in the Forests of Worcestershire.”

“Tell me more, Grandad.  What happened next?”

“The night before they went hunting, Kenelm had a dream. In the dream, he climbed a large tree which was full of flowers and lanterns. From the top of the tree, he could see all four corners of his kingdom. Three of the corners bowed down to him because he was the king, but all the people in the fourth corner began to chop away at the tree until it fell down. Then Kenelm changed into a white bird and flew away to safety.

When he woke up, Kenelm told his nanny about his dream.  She was a wise old woman and knew how to read dreams. When Kenelm told her what he dreamt, she began to cry as she knew his dream meant he was going to die. “

“Did Kenelm’s dream come true Grandad?”

“Well, Kenelm went on the hunt with Askobert and he was tired and hot, so he decided to lie down under a tree to rest. When he fell asleep, Askobert began to dig a grave, ready to bury Kenelm in after he’d murdered him.

But suddenly Kenelm woke up and he said to Askobert, “This isn’t where I’m meant to die.  I’ll die somewhere else.  Now see how my walking stick can blossom.”  So Kenelm put his stick into the ground and it began to flower.  It grew and grew into a huge ash tree, known as Saint Kenelm’s ash.”

“So he wasn’t killed?”

“That’s not the end of the story.  They continued their hunt until they got to the Clent Hills.  As they stopped to rest and Kenelm started singing hymns, Askobert chopped off his head and buried him where he fell.

 And where that place is, is the churchyard of Saint Kenelm’s.  In the village we live in.”

“That’s so sad.  Was Askobert punished for what he did?”

“Kenelm’s soul changed into a dove and it flew to Rome, dropping a scroll it was carrying at the feet of the Pope.  The message on the scroll read: ‘Low in a mead of kine under a thorn, of hed bereft, lieth poor Kenelm king-born’”

“What happened next?”

“The Pope sent a group of men to Worcestershire to look for Kenelm’s body.  As they walked through the hills, they saw a pillar of light shining over a thicket of trees and in the ground under the trees, they found Kenelm’s body.

As they took his body out of the hole it was in, a rushing fountain of water burst out of the ground and flowed away into a stream.  This stream is meant to be the beginning of the river Stour and people believe if you drink from its starting point in Saint Kenelm’s churchyard, you will be cured of everything that is wrong with you.”

“Did Kenelm’s sister become queen, Grandad?”

“After they found Kenelm’s body, it was brought to the abbey in a place called Winchcombe and when Quendryda was told about this she said, “If it’s true that they’ve found Kenelm, make my eyes fall out on this book I’m reading,” At that very second, both her eyes did fall out of her head and on to the prayer book she had in her hand.”

“Yuk, that’s horrible, Grandad, although I think she deserved it.  Tell me it again.  I want to hear the story again!”

Sometimes when I told Thomas the story for the second time in a row, I’d think about what could be learned from it.  But try as I might, the only things I could ever see that it showed were that no one is ever quite what they seem and things that are buried, don’t always stay buried.  Once in a while, they crawl out of whichever dark, deep place they are in and they search for us with eyes that are crusted with earth.

When they find us, they reach out with their bony fingers and they tap us on the shoulder.

***

http://www.abctales.com/story/philipsidneynoo/bear-and-tree-part-3