3 July 2016
After about 3 hours on the coach, I concluded that there are only three positions that make sleep possible on an overnight coach, and all of them require the luxury of 2 seats. Thankfully, our bus was not very full, and so I did have two seat to myself, and I curled up and managed to catch shred of sleep. We were woken up twice in the night, once to get our passports checked at Calais, and another time to board the ferry from Calais to Dover. We both felt a bit like refugees, especially since when one is tired, or just surfaced from sleep, one feels extra vulnerable somehow. However, the sudden awakenings were worth it for the glorious sunrise we saw on the ferry, somewhere on the Channel, the sun a big orange ball clearly defined against the pearly sky.
When we arrived at Dover and got back onto the coach, we had the famous white cliffs on our right, and to our left, a vast tsunami of cloud, pinioning us in a valley of white.
We arrived in London in good time and got onto our other coach to Cambridge. On that second coach was a girl who was terrified of the experience of coach travel, who sobbed and gasped softly and asked her Mum ‘Can you sing me the song like last time?’
It felt surreal to be back in Cambridge – so much is the same and also so much is different. Students have all gone back for summer and tourists flood the streets, scaffolding has popped up where it previously wasn’t and disappeared in areas it previously was. We walked up to my college, and put our suitcases with the Porters who joked with us that it would require a bribe, or payment in chocolate. We laughed along with them, but inwardly promised to truly get them chocolate - they are such sweethearts!
Both of us were starving – our breakfast on the ferry had been hours ago and quite makeshift – and so we headed down to the market. But before we got food we were distracted by a dramatic palm reading machine that belched smoke and then told Nat (who was getting her palm read) to please come back in 168 hours! We also smelled the incense sticks at the scent stall, and found one strikingly familiar – the sandalwood stick smelled exactly like what Vera burned in her toilet! We bought wraps from a Caribbean stall that I had been to once before – and the man remembered me! He calls his wraps the ‘best vegan wraps in town’, and though I must disagree with that because the falafel stall is hands down the best vegan wrap in town, I love his joyful service and jokes.
Still hungry, we bought a salad each from Sainsburys, and walked down to Trinity punts. I took a little while to remember how to punt, and because I had trouble turning, we went down in the direction opposite to where I usually go, towards Magdalene rather than Queens and Darwin. The sun made everyone good natured, and my bumpy start was met with smiles, laughter and joking shouts of ‘don’t fall in!’ We listened to the script of the professional punters and their tour groups as they went past us, learning probably a much as the average tourist, and moored against a wall near Magdalene, which had handy creepers to pull ourselves back in when we begun to drift. Our salads taste incredible, we ward off an over-curious swan and see another punter lose his pole, which remains sticking up in the river, like Excalibur, until another punter returns it to the damsels in distress. The sun was perfect, life was good, and when we decide to turn back I handed the pole to Nat. She is a natural at punting, and a passing punter teaches her to stand with both feet facing forwards and the stick under one’s arm, which makes things a lot easier!
We bought chocolate cookies for the Porter, and looked around some of the colleges, peeking into Trinity and strolling through Pembroke (which I think is the prettiest college) before we went back to college, collected our suitcases and then walked to the train station. On the way to the station we met Tim and Liz – I’m always bumping into Tim at the oddest moments! We didn’t have much time to talk though, because we had a train to catch! On the train, I watched the clouds roll by, silver tinted by the sun, and listened to The Black Atlantic and Gregory Alan Isakov and tried to settle the rising ball of fear and joy and tremble-y excitement in my heart at the prospect of seeing Mum again after 9 months of absence. I’d imagined this moment for ages, but always it had played out in the airport in Singapore, and always I’d cried.
‘I see my Mum,’ I choked to Nat as we pulled in – she was there, just as she always is, but now in the flesh. We got off the train, onto the platform and then all was tears and arms and my cheek on her shoulder and my head where it still fits into its old spot against her neck.
We drove to Bury and looked around Abbey Gardens which is beautiful as always, but its beauty was sharpened in the golden light of the evening. Then we drove to the hospital to see Grandma. She was sitting up in bed in pink night clothes when we entered, looking at the menus that the hospital gives to her for her to choose her food (which includes her favourite porridge and prunes combination) She told us all her favourite stories, about how she recited Das Veilchen to the German examiner, about her friend Margaret Endersby who became Margaret Bendor-Samuel when she married and became a missionary to the Guajajara tribe, and how the hospital socks they’d given her were a little too tight. She kept telling us how privileged she felt to have the ward all to herself and for the kindness of the nurses. I love my beautiful, gentle grandma who notices colours, like the ‘clover’ of the ward wall.
Back in Ixworth, we head over to Auntie Sarah’s house, where Uncle John is making risotto. Ellie from next door caught a beautiful frog with a bright red belly, which she let me hold, and as I stroked its warty, dewy back, it escaped! We caught it again, and set it free in the pond, where it swum away with a perfect breaststroke.
Ellie and Auntie Sarah also take a swim in the big inflatable pool Auntie Sarah had set up and filled with salt water. Since it is evening, the water is already very cold, but the two of them wade about undeterred!
I slept in Grandma’s bed that night, sinking into the soft layers of multiple duvets, mattress covers and pillows, and reaching up to Mum for my first goodnight kiss since September.
4 July 2016
I woke up just as Mum bent down to wake me up. Nat and I had
breakfast (Mum had bought us hazelnut milk, which tastes like all the good
things in life made into a smooth silky drink) and then after a short while we
got the bicycles out, got them as workable as possible, and begun the cycle to
Pakenham watermill. The fields were different to how I remembered them from the
summer of 2015, but still equally gorgeous – with the blue sky and wispy
clouds, and the bright fields of barley, wheat and oat, it looked as
beautifully unreal as the Windows Desktop Background.
We had a little crisis when one of the bicycle’s chain wouldn’t work, and so Nat and I continued while Mum wheeled the injured bicycle back to Grandma’s house, and told us she would drive over to meet us there.
We cycled past the 5 stones that mark where a farmer buried
his dog, and past the poplars that remind me of a Monet painting, then across
one road and up another, past the windmill and to the watermill. Mum was
already there, and I peeled off my shoes and socks and stepped into the cold
millpond, being careful to avoid a crayfish with very large claws that we
spotted before going in. The riverbed rocks pricked my feet painfully and my
arches ached with cold, but there was a certain pleasure in the paddling too, a
feeling of healing, like the pain you feel when you step on the Chinese Reflexology
Walking Paths. But stepping out of the cold water and onto the warm, grassy
bank was another sort of healing too, and I lay down, with my head cushioned on
Mum’s tummy, and watched the sky pass by over us. Erholung.
We drove to Great Barton after that to get the sweet
strawberries they sell there, and then back home, where we cooked lunch for
Mum, had strawberry and peanut butter on toast (a new favourite), packed,
showered, and left, all too soon.
We got onto the train at Thurston and left Mum having a conversation with an elderly gentleman who she later dubbed St Anthony, who told her about how he came there to watch the trains while he ate his lunch. I decided to save writing in my journal for the longer train ride after we changed at Ipswich, but that didn’t happen because of a happy intervention at the Ipswich train station.
The big suitcase of books that I’d brought from Cambridge
was too heavy for me, and my heart sunk a little as I saw the steps we had to
take to cross over to the platform where our second train was waiting.
Thankfully, a young man asked ‘Do you need help?’ I was very grateful. His name
is Ollie, and he decided to sit in our carriage across from us. He actually
wasn’t meant to be on our train at all, but he’d left his wallet at Elmswell,
and had to go back to retrieve it, and then come back to Ipswich later, which
happened to be when we were there too.
Having found out in our brief conversation on the platform
that he’d studied in York (history and archaeology) and that he was heading to
London, coupled with the fact that he’d been so helpful and kind in carrying my
(really monstrous) suitcase, I felt compelled to carry on the conversation with
him on the train. However, Nat and I had sat so that I was on the inside while
she was on the aisle seat nearer him, and Nat thought it would be best if I
didn’t have to lean over her in order to speak to him. And so, after much
whispering in which Nat devised a genius plan, she pretended to go get something
from our suitcases, and called for me to ‘help’ her find the non-existent
thing, and when we swapped seats when we got back to our places.
‘So, what are you doing in London?’ I turned to Ollie and asked,
trying not to blush because truly our ruse had been so obvious.
He was smiling as well – he knew, help –but we talked all
the way to London, about his family’s property company (they breathe new life
into old, beautiful historical buildings), and travelling, and illness, and Brexit,
and what having two home felt like. We also discovered that incredibly he lives
in Woolpit, which is very close to Ixworth. I kept wondering throughout the conversation
why someone so interesting and accomplished and intelligent and (truthfully)
gorgeous would speak to me.
We got off at Liverpool Street, said goodbye, and exchanged Facebook
details (‘Yes, that one’s me, that one, holding the strawberry’) and then I
heaved my monster suitcase out and he went ahead. Nat and I figured out that
she, being stronger, would fare better with my monster case while I took care
of the two smaller pull-alongs. Ollie was waiting near the turnstiles, and we
exchanged and last smile before Nat and I were engulfed by the organised
madness that is the London tube.
Thankfully, more angels were stationed along the way to help
with the suitcase, and on the train itself our cases became a little fort as we
swayed and lurched our way to Highgate, where 3 more people helped us with
directions to Auntie Fiona’s house, where Hannah opened the door for us and let
us in.
Reshem came in soon after, and so did Nic who was joining us
for dinner, and we all sat round the table and ate and laughed and talked. The
conversation drifted into politics and Hannah and Nic were going back and forth
and neither Reshem, Nat nor I could get a word in edgeways (although I don’t think
we knew much about what they were speaking about in any case) until Nat broke
in with, ‘So, what movie shall we watch later?’
We ended up watching Begin Again, which Nic rated an 11/10
but Nat, Hannah and I rate about a 6/10 – we probably laughed more at Reshem’s
wry humour during the film than the film itself.
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