When Mum met Dad (95th Birthday edition)

JOURNAL ENTRY

1st December, Friday

“Short sections of the canal
 Are covered in a frosted skim of ice.
 Wafer thin
 But firm enough to bear a moorhen’s weight.

She walks parallel to the offside bank
 Left foot raised in a high arc
 Then place it flat upon the ice
 Slide it forwards half an inch or so.

Pivot

Right foot raised in a high arc
 Then place it flat upon the ice
 Slide it forwards half an inch or so.

Pivot

And so on.
 This is how to adapt
 When your environment
 Is suddenly changed
 Beyond recognition.

Skating slowly
 With an assured deliberation.
 The canal is still
 Your home.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It's a viciously inhospitable night tonight. As the sun fell, the temperature dipped to two degrees below zero, but now low cloud has descended, wrapping us in a blanket of penetrating cold. Freezing fog. It flows in a stream of silver droplets on a northerly breeze in the beam of my torchlight. It is a night to be beside the fire.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the frozen and fog-bound darkness of a December night to you wherever you are.

Outside, any lights left shining are shrouded, each a dim halo glowing palely in the raw cold. It's so lovely to see you on such a wicked night. It is too nasty to stand around outside so make your way down the stern steps, find a place next to the stove. The kettle is on, the welcome is warm. Welcome aboard.      

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

This week Dad had his 95th birthday and I was thinking about the best way to celebrate it. We tend to be rather laid back in our family and never really go in for parties and things like that, but I did want to do something, particularly as he has not been feeling the best recently. It’s nothing serious, but sometimes it’s the coughs and sniffles that can get you down the most, and so I wanted to do something that would bring a bit of light and warmth up there on the edges of the cold Norfolk marshes. We were up there last weekend (hence no podcast) and I can assure you it was VERY cold… and wild!!

So, what I thought Dad, was to take you back to a time when you were young and the world, although still filled with its challenges and complexities was young to you. We’re going to come with you, back in time to share in the moment that you and Mum met for the first time and, through Mum’s eyes listen again to her recollections of those months that eventually led up to your wedding. Next week I want to read about your honeymoon on the Norfolk Broads – a watery and boaty theme that I think fits nicely with this podcast.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT (BIRTHDAY GREETINGS)

[MUSIC]

WHEN MUM MET DAD

An abiding memory that I have of Mum and Dad and one that I think epitomises their relationship and life together, is from a summer of 2014. They were both in their mid 80s and they had come with us, a little further up the North Norfolk coast to Old Hunstanton Beach. It’s a favourite beach of mine, wide sandy beaches that, at low tide, stretch to the horizon, huge skies, piling soft-sanded dunes embroidered with tufts of tough marram grass spikes, and the smell of sun-warmed conifers.

After a little walk, Mum and Dad suggested Donna and I go off and give Penny a good run on the sand, while they rested in the sunshine. We later returned to the dunes with one tired but happy dog. At first, we couldn’t find them, and then Donna spotted them, lying together, holding hands fast asleep among the sand dunes.

It was a relationship that had started over 60 years earlier. However, we need to go back a little earlier than even that to set the scene. We join Mum at the beginning of the 1950s. She was in her early twenties. She had partially left home and was working in Human Resources at Nestles. It was a role she loved. It seems a far cry from the modern more desk-based HR of today. She was also completing an extra-mural degree level programme on Social Science and Social Psychology at London University, that was run from an old school building near St James tube station. Although Mum used to commute back to her parents’ house in Rickmansworth at the weekends, during the week she was living in digs in a hostel run by the YWCA. It was a time where she formed close friendships with others staying at the hostel which lasted all through her life. In many ways, this time of independence acted as her university years, a time when she could cut the strings that held her to her younger life and grow into the person she would become.

We start her story at the point where she is about to buy her first car – a very unusual thing for a young woman (or any woman) at that time. Mum had passed her Driving Test earlier, but had done very little driving since them, apart from when one of her friends, Joan Hay, suggested she might borrow her Austin 7 to help her with some of her work which involved driving. It wasn’t a success. Mum wrote:

“I went out with Joan for a trial run in her car, but I was horribly disappointed, her car, the Austin Seven, was nothing like those that I had been driving. One thing that terrified me was that the steering wheel had to be turned several times before the front wheels reacted. Joan was very used to it but I found it impossible to drive, so very sadly I had to give up the idea.”

However, as we are about to see, cars – or a very particular car (Jo) was to become a central feature in the next stage of Mum’s life and, in many ways appropriately, was instrumental Mum meeting Dad.          

[READING]

SIGNING OFF

 
This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very peaceful and restful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG