Goodbyes

The bit of this journey I was rather dreading was returning to Malvern, the place Mum lived for 35 years and where for at least a decade I’d visited her every year for about four weeks. Her cottage was (and still is) high on the side of Old Wyche Hill and commands a view of four counties.  When there are floods they glitter silver on the horizon.  On a cloudy day the valley below is full of cotton wool with the pale sky above.  The sun rises plumb  in the middle of her living room window which mum in her day would toss  open with energy and joy. She was a London girl through and through but she found peace and satisfaction in the Malvern Hills with her various dogs, Norman, Hattie, Jeannie and Polly, all of whom had their trying little ways.  Norman hated anyone in uniform and Polly had a thing about cars and thunder.

After Mum's funeral two years ago, Grant and I shot off to eastern Turkey where we'd arranged to be before Mum died and we had our curtailed holiday there.  There hadn’t been time to say goodbye to the hills that had been friends to me through the thick and thin of Mum’s aging and before that too. I hadn’t gone to the Holy Well either, an annual ritual visit to the curious little chapel you could only find if you concentrated and took the right forks in the paths. I’d walked those hills like a ship in full sail when pregnant with Finn. Once I’d brought the children back to Mum’s cottage on a night train when we’d been in Cambridge on Grant’s sabbatical and he and I had had a blood curdling row.  He came to make peace next day and we stayed on with Mum.

 There was a winter visit where a perfectly constructed igloo had been built at the little school at the bottom of the road.  Winter had its challenges.  The road up to mum’s cottage is steep enough to make the fittest person stop and puff and in winter requires snow shoes to navigate.  Day care people who minister to the needs of the aged residents too obstinate to move on to the level, regularly have small accidents in the snow and ice and are unsung heroes.  Stupid delivery trucks taking short cuts do it at their peril.

It was Grant who made me go up there again.  His questing soul was driving him to get some Malvern Water from one of the many wells that perforate the hills.  At these places water runs willy nilly from spouts into drains and it troubles my now Australian spirit.  So much waste.  I wish I could turn off the taps.  On the other hand it bespeaks a great earthy generosity and interesting things happen at these springs.  I heard tell, while saying at our B and B in Malvern of a group of Muslims who once undressed and ritually purified themselves, perhaps for some feast day.  Other people swear that any other water with whisky is sacrilege. As for me, though, I had said my goodbyes and was ready for the next staging post in our long journey. A can of Sprite would have done the trick but it was not to be.

Despite all my fears, my goodbyes were not too difficult.  I realised that my friend Judy and fairly new friend Kevin and his son Alex had their own tomorrows, their own lives and there was the internet anyway.  My brother Michael and his wife Olya were on their own paths and while it was good to cross ways – ultimately we each had our own.

What I hadn’t bargained for was the heart squeezing nostalgia and memory soaked scent of the hills themselves and most of all Mum’s absence from them.  Is grief for the dead just selfish reluctance to accept mortality?  I don’t know.  All I do know is some part of me was calling out “Where are you Mum?”  I knew there was no answer. She seemed everywhere and nowhere.  I wasn’t sure she was OK and yet I knew that was a silly worry. It is so much harder to say goodbye to the dead than the living.