Malham Cove

Today we visited Malham Cove a 260 foot limestone cliff in the Yorkshire Dales. We climbed somewhere in the region of 400 natural steps to get to the top of the cliff face. Sam, Alice and I were much slower than the others, but then we tend to talk more too. One of the best things about hiking from my point of view is the opportunity it affords to actually speak to each other. There is no television and there are no Xboxes or DSis or PCs to interrupt and distract people; talking is the best and only form of entertainment. As we walked today I remembered some of the songs my dad used to sing with us in the car when I was little. There was the one about one man who went to mow a meadow. He took his dog, Spot and a bottle of pop with him and also gradually invited several other men to help with the job. There was another about a tiny house by a tiny stream where a lovely lass had a lovely dream, but I lost the tune somewhere much to everyone's amusement. The children had learned some songs on scout camps and school holidays which they in turn remembered and we walked along the limestone pavement at the top of the cliff singing a song about Tarzan being hit by a rubber band. I needed some sort of a distraction from the drop to the right of us and by trooping along like a platoon of soldiers the children avoided any panicked stay away from the edge shrieks from me.

It’s easy to imagine a huge waterfall cascading over the cliff, but the last time water was recorded flowing over the fall was in the early nineteenth century after a period of heavy rain. Nowadays the underlying cave systems have a large enough capacity to swallow any flood water before it reaches the fall. Divers have only explored about 1.6km of the cave network. There is a lovely story about a nineteenth century 'Spooky Parson' who claimed to have had 'visions' of the nature of the unexplored cave behind the Cove. He wrote down his predictions in a famous sealed letter, which was to be opened once the cave behind the Cove was discovered. The letter was actually opened by the Chairman of Malham Parish at a meeting in 1997, but most of the contents were undecipherable. Here is a site which describes some of the exploration which has taken place to date.
For me there is something magical about standing on structures that are thousands of years old and wondering who may have been there before. I tried to express this as we walked away from the waterfall at Gordale Scar, but everyone was busy chewing mentos and the words weren’t enough anyway, so the photographs will just have to speak for themselves.

A Kind of Intimacy

I blogged about listening to Jenn Ashworth read from her novel A Kind of Intimacy here. I started reading the book on Saturday morning and finished it by teatime: it was a book that I couldn’t put down. I watched Notes on a Scandal recently and the comparison that Alison Flood makes between the two stories is apt, although I found A Kind of Intimacy more terrifying, which probably had something to do with Annie’s size and age: twenty eight is very young to be so damaged and Annie’s obesity tends towards Stephen King's Misery (Anne Wilkes), rather than the jolly Father Christmas kind.
A Kind of Intimacy was especially disquieting because of Annie’s humanity – her nervousness in social situations, her desire to make friends, her faux pas and her reliance on the advice of self help books all engender empathy – the reader is torn between liking Annie and despising her, between understanding and disgust, between pity and anger. Jenn’s reading of the book was extremely entertaining and as a result I expected it to be much funnier than it was, however it was intriguing and intense and I didn’t feel in any way cheated when I reached the end.
After I finished the book I carried the residue of it with me for the rest of the evening. I was disquieted, uneasy; I felt stirred up and slightly jumbly. I like a book that does that to me; a book that makes me think, knocks me for six, picks me up and gives me a good shake.

True stories

Last night I went to watch Sam play his guitar in a concert. I had to take all four children with me as Neil was working late. In the past this would have given me palpations, but fortunately they are at an age now where they can enjoy a concert. Sam had to be at the concert early, so we arrived 40 minutes before it was due to start and were able to sit in the front row. Daniel and Jo played on their DSis while we waited. Alice had hoped to play on Jo’s old gameboy. Jo plugged it in to charge when he got home from school, but he didn’t have time to press the switch on the plug because he needed to go outside and practice free kicks (this explanation made perfect sense to him and he gave it straight faced when the gameboy battery ran out after just 10 seconds). Fortunately I had several pens in my bag and I handed the concert tickets to Alice and told her to draw on the back of them. She told me to sit very still because she was going to draw a picture of me.

I wasn’t allowed to look at the picture while she was drawing it, so I stared straight ahead and ended up tuning in to the conversation of a mother and daughter behind us. The daughter spoke in a loud, self-conscious voice, aware that people might be listening, striving it seemed, to humiliate her mother. The mother responded in flat, weary tones, making no comment as to her daughter’s rudeness. The mother ruined everything, was irritating and needed to just stop talking – doh. It was the mother’s fault that the daughter couldn’t see (they were in the second row) but when the mother offered to change seats the daughter refused. The daughter’s complaints were interspersed with look-at-me comments: I just LOVE these shoes, I need to lose half a stone, I don’t know how I’m going to dance in my prom dress.

I started to feel a bit queasy – how long before I get to enjoy the pleasure of being spoken to like that? I thought.

I broke Alice's rules and looked down at her just as she was waving the pen at me, counting.

‘What are you counting?’ I asked.

‘Your spots,’ she said.

‘Oh,’ I replied. I watched as she began to draw spots on the picture of me. ‘Do you have to draw the spots?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is a proper picture. But I’ve only drawn five and you’ve actually got thirteen spots. Stop looking.’

I was happy to stop looking at the picture and tuned back in to the conversation behind me which was progressing nicely. The mother had the temerity to smooth a piece of the daughter’s hair down and was told to get off. Some boys sat down next to the daughter: her volume increased accordingly. There’s no way I’d let you chaperone me at the prom mum, no way. You’re too embarrassing. The mother didn’t reply: if such an offer had been made it hadn’t been made at the concert.

I hazarded another glance at Alice’s picture. It seemed to be almost finished, however I noticed that she had only drawn the top part of my glasses frame in two thick lines just above my eyebrows. ‘There’s no eye bits in my glasses,’ I said.

‘They’re not glasses,’ she replied. ‘They’re lines. You’ve got lots of them on your forehead, but I’ve just drawn two.’

‘Oh.’ I took the pen off her and drew a circle around each eye to connect with the lines, making them into glasses. ‘That’s better,’ I said.

‘You’ve spoilt it now,’ she moaned.

A tiny part of me wanted to explain that the spots and the lines on my forehead are new to me, that I wasn’t expecting them, that they have snuck up on me since her birth and I was hoping that she wouldn’t notice. A small part of me felt irritated by the smooth, thick plain of her forehead and the scrutinising eyes underneath, determined to observe the truth of my appearance. Another part of me wanted to laugh at both of us.

I thanked her for the picture, put it in my bag and asked her to draw another one. She drew a picture of us standing next to each other. This time she didn’t look at me. There weren’t any spots or lines, but I seemed to be missing an eye.

She knelt on her chair and held up the picture. ‘Look,’ she said.
The people behind us could see the picture. ‘It’s me and mum,’ she said.

I glanced back over my shoulder and smiled at the mother and daughter. The mother’s face was scrubbed shiny with tiredness, her hair unruly and frizzed. The daughter slouched in her seat, angled away from her mother; beautiful, but awkward, fidgeting with her cardigan. They smiled back.

Not long after the lights went down, Alice crept onto my lap, leaving her seat empty, improving the view for the girl behind us. As Sam serenaded the hall with his classical guitar music, Alice planted a warm kiss on the back of one of my hands and perhaps the girl behind us inched a little closer to her mother too – if this was one of my stories that’s how I would end it.

The Invention of Solitude

The first section of Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude is a moving meditation on fatherhood. Portrait of an Invisible Man gives expression to Auster’s feelings following the death of his father. Auster’s memories of his father are fragmentary. Auster writes to save his elusive father’s life from vanishing with him. The account is a brief scrap-book like collection of miniature essays, incomplete thoughts and even lists of unconnected memories. There is a strong emphasis throughout both parts of the book on coincidence. There are dramatic coincidences, such as a family album that is totally blank inside (Auster’s father also appears to be somewhat empty on the inside) and incredible coincidences such as the odometer of his father’s car reading 67, the age at which his father died. However, what interests me most about the first section of this book is the urgency of Auster’s writing and his response to death itself.
Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death explains that our insides are foreign to us. ‘(Man) doesn’t know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect.’ I have often thought how strange it is that our insides are a mystery to us. Not being one for televised surgery, I expect my insides to remain something of a mystery, but I have very clear memories of attempting to position myself in the hollow of my body as a child. I came to the conclusion that the part of me that was actually me lived on a platform behind my eyes and controlled my body like a forklift truck driver. Auster remarks that following death we say ‘this is the body of X, as if this body which had once been the man himself, not something that represented him or belonged to him, but the very man called X, were suddenly of no importance. When a man walks into a room and you shake hands with him, you do not feel that you are shaking hands with his hand, or shaking hands with his body, you are shaking hands with him.’
I’m trying to organise my response to Auster’s thoughts. I’m writing a story about a child who is fascinated with death. The story has been simmering ever since I stumbled across a slide show during some research for another story. The slide show contained post-mortem photographs (as in after death, not surgical procedures). I found it fascinating. The photographs reminded me of Auster’s Portrait of an Invisible Man: they were created to make loved ones visible after death. Many of the children were photographed with favourite toys and living siblings; the things that shaped their lives. The families of those in the photographs probably shared Auster’s fear: ‘If I do not act quickly, his entire life will vanish along with him.’ Maybe that is one of the reasons why people write things down, as a way to remain visible and never entirely vanish.

Back to hiking

This weekend it was finally warm enough for us to begin hiking again. We started off gently and did what actually amounted to a short walk from Hightown to Blundellsands along the coastal path.

There weren’t any killer hills to climb or rivers to cross, no boggy fields to negotiate – I thought that the children would be pleased, but they were actually a bit grumpy: it’s been a long and sedentary winter for them, even Jo hasn’t done as much exercise as usual because so many of his football games have been cancelled due to frozen/snow-covered pitches.

Jo resorted to his customary coping mechanism for boredom and began to give everyone a football quiz.

Jo: ‘How many goals did Wayne Rooney score last season?’

Me: ‘I don’t know – do you actually know that, Jo?’

Jo: ‘No, but it was probably about a hundred.’

The quiz got boring pretty quickly, so we had to think of something else to do and we started making up jokes about footballers. The jokes weren’t really very funny, but as we walked past the sea with all the other Sunday walkers – families, teenagers, old people, dog-walkers – enjoying the pleasant breeze and chocolate chip cookies (they always help), the jokes seemed hilarious.

Occasionally, when you haven’t laughed for a while, it’s as if all the laughter has been stored up and is just waiting for the slightest opportunity to burst out – that was me on Sunday. Here are a couple of the jokes that were on offer:-

Which football player swoops around the field like a Jurassic animal?

John Terry-dactyl.

Which footballer plays for Manchester United in the nude?

Wayne Mooney.

Who is the grumpiest footballer in the premiership?

Peter Grouch.

Just as we were heading down onto Crosby beach to visit the iron men, a man thrust a piece of paper at us. It was a religious pamphlet, entitled ‘Take Warning.’ 'You may die this year,' it began. 'I wonder that you can sleep quietly in your bed.' Neil read it aloud: ‘What have you really got after all? Any hope? Any peace? Any joy? Any comfort? Nothing, literally nothing!’


As these words floated around the beach, the children all raced off to find an iron man to climb on and giggle at, and Neil and I were left standing on the treacly wet sand. The lyrics to I got life were humming around my head: I got my hair, I got my head, I got my brains, I got my eyes, I got my ears, I got my eyes, I got my nose, I got my mouth, I got my teeth....We followed the children across the beach and took photographs of them wrapped around an iron man. As we headed back up to the footpath I thought about what I’d got: a beautiful view of the Irish Sea, four rambunctious kids, a rucksack with treats in, wet trainers, Neil holding my hand, dinner with my Gran to look forward to and lots of clothes to wash when we got home – a fair slab of peace, comfort and joy, I think. And as we left the beach behind and headed home to the washing machine, there was one last joke:

Which footballer gets his muddy kit the cleanest?

Robin Van Persil.

Reading ~ A Kind of Imtimacy

Last night I went to see Jenn Ashworth read at the Rose Theatre (Edge Hill University). She read from her novel A Kind of Intimacy. The chapters which she read to us were both funny and touching and it was fabulous to hear the opening of the novel in the voice of its author. Jenn is only 27 and has just completed her second novel which she also read from last night. I was simultaneously inspired and depressed by her brilliance! I bought a copy of A Kind of Intimacy this morning, along with a couple of collections of Helen Simpson’s short stories. It will be very quiet in our house after that particular parcel arrives.

Having 'a couple of children' at 14 is not a good idea.

For me, 1990 was a year spent humming Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares to You and Maria McKee’s Show Me Heaven. It was a year of homework and daydreaming about an as yet hard to imagine adulthood. More significantly, it was the year that Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the year of poll-tax demonstrations. It was the year that Iraq invaded Kuwait and the year Margaret Thatcher resigned. It was also the year that I first fell in love. In 1990 I was fourteen and according to Hilary Mantel’s comments in the telegraph, ready to have a baby. Mantel insists: ‘I was perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought “Now is the time to have a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD.”’

After I’d finished laughing, I had the following thoughts. In order to begin a PhD aged 30, Mantel’s 14 year old self would need to complete GCSEs, A Levels, an undergraduate degree and a postgraduate degree. That’s 8 years of education to catch up on while simultaneously raising a child/children. Fortunately, when I started having my children aged 21, I already had GCSEs and A Levels, leaving me with just 4 years of education to catch up on before beginning the PhD: lucky me, I had a head start on Mantel’s 14 year old -easy peasy then - NOT (as 14 year olds like to say).

The first decade of motherhood rattled my brain into a wibbly jelly of tiredness, a sort of mummy miasma that made it difficult to read and even think at times: dividing myself into four (see left) was tricky at best. No author that I have come across portrays the stultifying effects of motherhood better than Helen Simpson. Perhaps Mantel might benefit from reading some of Simpson’s short fiction. Simpson’s collection of stories entitled ‘Hey Yeah Right Get a Life’ captures all the frustration and demands of motherhood in beautiful, observant prose. Simpson also captures the wonderful moments: 'he climbed into bed and curled into her…gazed into her eyes and heaved a happy sigh. They lay looking at each other, breathing in each other’s sleepy scent; his eyes were guileless, unguarded and intent, and he gave a little occasional beatific smile'.

Aside from the personal cost of early motherhood and the resultant juggling of aspirations and familial responsibilities, there is often a physical cost associated with early child bearing. USAID works to provide education and contraception to adolescents in the developing world. Research shows that: ‘Increasing the age at first birth for a woman will increase her chances of survival. Currently, pregnancy and childbirth complications are the leading cause of death for women 15 to 19 years old in developing countries. Children born to mothers in their twenties are fifty percent lower risk of dying by their first birthday than children born to teenaged mothers. Young mothers are not often physically mature enough to deliver a baby, leaving her and her child at risk for death or disabilities from obstructed labor, fistula, premature birth, or low birthweight.’

In addition to these dangers, teenage mothers are more likely to face a life of poverty than older mothers. In a BBC news article, Hilary Pannack of the sex education charity Straight Talking said that, ‘Teenage parents statistically are much more likely to become parents of children who themselves become teenage parents. That means generations of child poverty, which we need desperately to tackle.’

1990 was the year I selected my GCSE options, it was the year that hurricane force winds killed 39 people in England and Wales and fortunately, it was not the year that I gave birth to my first child – in 1990 I was too busy being a child, which is how I believe it should be.

(Here is a short story by Helen Simpson.)

Hurrah for Tomboys!

Sometimes life isn’t funny the first time around, that’s why it helps to write about it. In the story that I was working on last week I wrote about a little girl who wore swimming trunks to a swimming lesson and then wished that she hadn’t. The swimming trunk part of the story was actually true. Alice did wear a pair of her brother’s trunks to a swimming lesson.

With three older brothers it is probably not surprising that Alice has turned into something of a tomboy. She steadfastly refuses to wear skirts or dresses and given half a chance she would have her hair cut like a boy – if it wasn’t so wispy and fine I might just let her. It seems that she is part of a dying breed. Stephanie Theobald pays tribute to tomboys in her piece in the Guardian, ‘Hurrah for Tomboys!’ Theobald laments the fact that ‘Nickelodeon recently redesigned the Dora doll to make her more "feminine" (read "profitable"). Instead of being equipped with tools, map and backpack, her new accessories include halter-tops, tiaras and glittery hairbrushes.’ This article discusses the trend towards accessories and clothes like those now worn by Dora and takes a look at the clothes that famous little girls are wearing. It made me feel pretty good about the tracksuits, jeans, t-shirts and hoodies that Alice chooses to spend her weekends and holidays wearing.

Once she was standing on the poolside, Alice changed her mind about wearing her brother’s trunks. As a parent I hate situations in which I can’t make things better. We had to settle for an experience that probably comes under the ‘learning a lesson’ category: it’s okay to wear your brother’s trunks at the beach where you don’t know anyone, but in the pool with all the other girls wearing their pink frilly stuff you might feel a bit daft was probably the lesson learned. And yet if she wants to wear the blasted trunks again I’ll let her. I'll just remember to pack her (blue, frill-less) costume as well.

Connected by cake

I made two birthday cakes this week. As I made them I wondered about the tradition of birthday cakes. It’s thought that the history of birthday cakes can be traced back to the ancient Greeks who took round or moon shaped honey cakes and bread to the temple of Artemis. Artemis was the goddess of the moon. Candles were placed on the cakes to make them glow like the moon. I thought about this as we turned off the lights and waited for the candles to be blown out; it was pleasant to think that there was a connection between us and the humans of a couple of thousand years ago .

I am aware of wanting to make these sorts of connections for my children. I tell them about things I used to enjoy, things their grandparents used to enjoy and I hope that they will enjoy them too. Invariably though, they aren’t especially interested. Alice had a party today. I had a large bag of prizes and a long list of games to play. Within five minutes of arriving the children were playing Let’s Dance on the wii and nobody wanted to pin a tail on a donkey or sleep like a lion (quietly, apparently). When it was time for the children to go home the prize bag was still full and I wondered if they had really enjoyed themselves. Then I remembered my Dad telling me the story of how he used to buy a bag of sweets with his pocket money and make it last all week. He probably told me the story one day as I was scoffing a whole bag of sweets at once. His story was like a pill, remonstration coated in reminiscence. I found myself doing the same thing this afternoon: when I was your age we used to play games at parties...

The search for connections is likely a symptom of my age; an effort to make the children’s relatives three-dimensional, to give them a back-story, to search for common ground that links us together. It’s quite likely that at some time in the future one of my children, as a grown up, will stand at a birthday party and announce that when grandma was younger she used to play a game where everyone had to sleep like lions. And the observation may well be perceived as remonstration disguised as reminiscence. But when the lights are switched off and small faces are lit like lanterns in the glow of the candles, the children will echo the humans of thousands of years ago in an unintended connection that seems unlikely to ever be broken.

Who do you think you are?

Yesterday was my daughter’s 6th birthday. Without being too sentimental about it, I think that my daughter is fabulous. I alternately feel overjoyed and overwhelmed by her fabulousness (I think I may have made that word up, but it’s been a long week, so I don’t care). I always imagined myself with daughters. Sometimes I imagine things because I want them to happen but other times I imagine things as a way of warding them off, as a form of vaccination. My imaginings about daughters have been largely hopeful: after my daughter Libby’s death I thought I would never get to see a daughter grow up.

Libby’s life exhausted my imagination for some time. There was a moment following her birth when I revelled in my good fortune. I can still see the view out of the hospital window, the back of the midwife as she wrote Elizabeth on the hospital tags – a name Libby was supposed to grow into. Until recently, if it was possible, I would have chosen to press pause at that moment, that I’m the luckiest person in the world moment and keep everything as it was right then, before the day was split by sirens, before unfamiliar imaginings crept around new words: brain damage, cataracts, lumbar puncture, ventilation, transfusion, critical...


All of my recent writing seems to be about mothers and daughters, I don’t know why, it’s just coming out that way. After Alice was born I was determined to snatch my second chance and make something wonderful of it. When I write about mothers and daughters I often use the writing as a way of discarding my pessimistic imaginings. Three recent stories contain alternate versions of my real life experience with daughters and I’m itching to write more.

This week I read Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? Munro’s exploration of mother/daughter relationships is wonderful. I took the book with me on the morning of Alice's birthday when my Gran asked me to drive her to the doctor’s. I took it with me as I drove her straight to the hospital after the doctor had listened to her heart. I clutched the book on my lap all morning and afternoon as I watched her shrink into the hospital bed. I read it as I waited outside the x-ray room. I folded the corner of a page over as I told the hospital porter of course she is fine on her feet, you should see her on a bike, but even I doubted the truth of my words as my imagination crept around her silence and smallness. Her, I don’t want to die yet was met with assurances that I was unqualified to give, but gave anyway, sliding into mother mode.

We spent the evening at the hospital, Alice blew out her candles at home then off we went, armed with knitting magazines, chocolate éclairs and jelly babies. After visiting time was over, I dashed off to university to catch the end of a reading by visiting author Nicholas Royle. When I arrived, he was describing a story that his mother told him about women searching for amber on the beach. I thought about the stories my mother told me and the stories I tell in turn. I took my Gran home from the hospital this afternoon; that she didn’t tell any stories is a mark of how tired she was. When I said goodnight to Alice last night I told her the story of when she was born, it is one of her favourites: it is one of my favourites.

The urge to press pause at a perfect moment in life has passed, the present is too absorbing to countenance it. Before I went to bed I finished Who Do You Think You Are? In typical Munro fashion, the ending of the book takes the reader back to Rose’s childhood before catapulting her into the future. This technique allows the reader to see that Rose is many things – daughter, mother, lover, sister, child – all at once: she is an accumulation of her experiences. Tomorrow I’m hoping to start work on a story about a violin and an aging relative: it will be a case of examining my accumulated experiences and employing the vaccinating kind of imagination: describing things that I hope never happen. However, I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a hopeful interlude at some point involving the appearance of an utterly fabulous daughter.