The house was finished in 1958, when I was seven and Sandy just two. A year later, at the beginning of June, with the garden full of blossom, apple, pear, damson, flowering cherry and hawthorn, he collapsed behind the wooden counter of his shop in English Street, packets of seeds still in his large, square hands. He was dead before the ambulance got down the hill from the hospital.
Mother never forgave him.
And now the garden blossoms again. Another week and it will have reached the same point of growth he left behind that June morning. Some sprays of flowering cherry are out already, and the apple trees in the shelter of the house, and the hawthorn, the May blossom, blooming late in the very last week of the month.
That was one of the worst rows they ever had. If you can call it a row with someone as silently imperturbable as my father. Over the three ancient hawthorns on the right-hand side of the front garden and the broad damp area in front of them. Mother insisted the hawthorns were making the whole corner wet. Nothing would ever grow there, she said, and the gnarled roots were unsightly. Why didn’t he cut them down and clear the place up? He wasn’t surely going to let some ridiculous old superstition stop him. She’d never heard worse, a man with a bit of education talking about fairy-thorns.
But he didn’t cut them down. For a long time he searched around, hoping to discover the source of the spring he was sure was there. But all he found were two large pieces of worked stone that might once have fitted together. So he sank the two pieces in the bare ground among the hawthorn roots to make a sitting place for me. Then he created a small water garden, planting fern and marsh marigold, irises and kingcups.
I have one of those kingcups on my table in the window where I write my letters to Matthew and scribble notes for my work, a brilliant golden eye, looking at me, unblinking, bringing back memories long hidden away. All through my childhood, that small marsh garden with its two smooth, worn pieces of stone was where I played. I had almost completely forgotten the long hours I would spend there absorbed in conversation with one of my ‘friends’.
These friends were seldom actual children from my class at school, or from the cottages and farms nearby. My mother didn’t encourage Sandy or me to bring playmates home. But not having a real person never seemed to trouble me. I’d settle myself on one stone and talk to whichever friend had come to sit on the one opposite to me.
Once there was a little Red Indian girl. That must have been after I’d read the story of Pochahontas and her journey to England. Later, there was a girl who’d been with the children of the New Forest, but who didn’t get into the story. Then there was a Scottish lass who served in the kitchens of Dunluce Castle where my father had taken us on a summer outing.
The more I thought about my stones, the more I recalled the peaceful hours I’d spent sitting lost in reverie. How precious those solitary hours had been. As precious in their special way as the comfort and joy brought by those imaginary friends. Out of sight of the house and my mother’s critical eye I felt safe, yes, but there was more to it than that. There was a calmness about that small corner that made it seem quieter than the rest of the garden. It had, too, a feeling of security that enfolded me without any sense of enclosure. Certainly, I was never happier than when I was there, talking to my friend or just sitting dreaming, wandering through an inner world all of my own making, a world that grew and extended with everything I read or saw and with every story I ever chanced to hear.
And indeed, the slope where my stones rested in the shade of the old thorns was as special to my father as it was to me. He had little cause to go there, there being no grass to mow and no shrubs to prune, but he had done one thing that left me in no doubt at all about his feelings. He had named the dwelling he had long dreamed of building ‘Anacarrig’, and in the tongue of the olden days, ‘Anacarrig’ is ‘the small marsh of the stones’.
On the night Mother died, I phoned my dear friend Joan to tell her the news. Joan lives in the ground floor flat below us – a sturdy, silver-haired lady who has lived through eight decades, but only owns up to the fact on rare occasions because she says people treat you as if you have lost your wits if they find out you are over eighty. And Joan is most certainly in full possession of hers. She is more shrewd and wise in her judgement of people and what happens to them than anyone I have ever known.
Matthew and I carried down all our houseplants for her to look after while we were away. We found her waiting for us by her door, a freshly opened bottle of whiskey in her hand.
‘Drink up, my dears, it’ll help you sleep,’ she insisted, pouring generous measures for us both. ‘The most important thing to do in the face of death is to celebrate life,’ she pronounced, as she eased her stiff limbs into her special upright armchair. ‘You must be willing to accept how you feel. There’s no use pretending you’re coping if you’re not. If misery is inevitable, relax and get on with it. It will pass. All things pass, however ghastly.’
With her strong voice and Cheltenham Ladies’ College accent, Joan could strike you as quite overbearing when she holds forth, but I had long ago grasped the true character of what lay behind the briskness of manner. Joan’s life had been full of difficulties and her struggles had left their mark, but she was a musician of great talent and when she played for you she revealed herself, a woman of deep sensitivity and compassion.
‘You’ll ring me, won’t you, Deirdre, if I can be any use whatever. Going through your mother’s things won’t be easy. You never know what’s going to come upon you, my dear, especially if it’s someone close. Things you’ve forgotten, or things you never knew, just pop up. You may find it very trying, especially as you’ll be on your own,’ she said firmly, as we stepped out into the hallway and said our goodbyes.
A week later, four hundred miles away, kneeling on a pink bedroom carpet, tears trickling down my face, I heard her words echo in my ears and longed for the comfort of her overcrowded sitting room and the hiss and bubble of its antiquated gas fire.
Armagh Gazette, it said, in Gothic script on the paper bag I held in my hands. ‘Newspaper and General Printing Offices, Office Requisites and Stationery Stockists, Largest stock of books in the City.’
At the bottom of the deepest drawer in Mother’s dressing table, hidden underneath a leather handbag full of receipts and the spare parts for her heated rollers, I’d found this paper bag: it contained two unused hardbacked notebooks. I had bought them with my prize money from the ‘Living in Armagh’ essay competition. The same paper bag the assistant slid them into, fresh and shiny as the day I bought them.
I wiped my eyes crossly and counted on my fingers. Yes, 1969. That would have been it. The Easter holiday before my A level. I could almost feel the chill of the early April day when I cycled into Armagh to see what I could find to spend my prize money on. I went into the Gazette office and at first I just couldn’t make up my mind. I was so confused by the array of exercise books, notebooks, files and folders laid out on the broad counters, I turned away and went and looked at the books instead.
I walked up and down the tall display cases where I had spent my tokens and chosen my prizes since I was old enough to read. And then, on a counter right at the furthest end of the shop, I saw the pile of blue notebooks. ‘Challenge’, they said, in gold lettering on the spine.
‘That’s what I want,’ I said out loud, and a woman buying paper doilies stared at me, as I pounced on one of them to find out how much they were. To my delight the prize money would pay for two.
My joy was unbounded. Those two shiny notebooks, full of smooth, unwritten pages, were a hope and a dream. I had such plans for filling all the space they offered me. As I cycled back to Anacarrig with the blustering east wind behind me, my jacket billowing, thinking of what I might write in them, my spirits soared so high that I felt I might take off into the dazzling sky and make a circuit of the city.
‘What kept you?’
I could see the anger in her