The Love of a Good Woman

All afternoon I have been curled up on the sofa reading the Letters of Penelope Fitzgerald and feeling overcome with admiration and sadness. Furious too that the Letters are so badly edited — but what can anyone expect from a fond but clueless son-in-law? Sad for the lost unproductive years treading water in that marriage to the lovable alcoholic Desmond, sad that so many letters went to the bottom of the Thames when her houseboat sank (twice), sad she had to scrabble so for money. But the asides and comments are priceless even at their most nattering and mundane, the mind of a genius given free expression. She was also an Englishwoman of a certain generation and cultivated temperament, and fond of trivia.

I don’t care, I mine those letters for the wry erudite sentences that could only come from the author of The Blue Flower. I loved her novels Innocence and At The Gate of Angels, but The Blue Flower is the elusive masterpiece.

She writes for the voiceless, not in the post-modern and political sense of those silenced by oppression or marginalised from the First World, but for those who are unable to articulate their understanding of the world, unable to make sense of their own lives. Those bullied and tormented by the knowing and sly and wilfully ignorant. The hapless innocents of the world who somehow come through despte all the odds. Just what one might expect from the niece of Ronald Knox, that great witty Catholic apologist who knew how common and garden miracles might be if you knew where to look.

So she lived in council flats and dyed her hair with teabags and was intimidated by her lunatic publishers and overlooked by the smarter literati. And just went on writing her brilliant novels. Showing all of us how little we really know about the historical novel or human motivations or, the great unmentionable, love.

Temper, temper

Feeling less fluey but woke in a bad temper. By nature I am, when sober, an optimist and easy-going much of the time. This morning I woke up with a clenched jaw and in a black thundercloud of a mood.

Noted as I brushed my teeth that I was whining to myself in my head in a very unpleasant manner, a host of complaints seething with resentment and self-pity.

When taken out of my head they amounted to nothing much at all. I looked at my miseries for a while, coldly, and then had some coffee and watched baby house martins being taught to fly off the low wall of the stope (porch). Each tiny bird an Orville or Wright, taking that first fledgling leap into naked space.

I feel miserable and angry and those are feelings which will pass. My immune system is down and I feel have limited resources with which to cope and that is something I must accept for now.

It could be worse and I just have to hold on until things get better.

All around me in this village are people, especially women and children, dying of HIV/Aids, cross-infected with resistant strains of tuberculosis. Most of them live in shacks of corrugated iron without clean water or electricity. The sewage runs down the alleys between the huts and from time to time there are outbreaks of cholera. Until I stayed overseas and experienced the ease and comfort of life in the First World, I didn’t realise how much it affects me to live with so much poverty and destitution, illness and death all around me. I do what I can, but I have few resources and the apathy of the homeless is exhausting to battle against. People just give up and seemingly refuse to do anything to help themselves or their children. The infant mortality figures go up and up. We have some of the highest statistics in the world for foetal alcohol syndrome. There may be no money for food but there is always, like an evil miracle, money for alcohol or drugs. Crack cocaine and crude crystal meths can be bought from the local police station. That is how underpaid constables earn enough money to keep their families.

This is what I came back to and I understand now why I wanted to escape this so badly. Just not have to deal with it every day. Sick children coughing blood in the supermarkets, the stream of people coming to the door looking for blankets, braed, money for cheap wine. The theft of blankets off the washing lines, the constant vigilance around intruders. Making soup for the church kitchens serving meals to people too sick to eat.

This is such a beautiful landscape, the mountains and valleys and the vineyards, the orchards of almond and apple trees. Everyone who lives here wants to have hope that things will get better. But it is a landscape ravaged by plague and scarred from the decades of apartheid. Sometimes I feel that I am living in a present that refuses to learn from the past. The corruption, the brutal violence, the suffering.

Another day, just letting the anger and despair out onto the page. Then I will go and make some lentil soup for the church social workers to collect, and get on with writing and editing. Learning to accept what cannot be changed, the reality of living here in South Africa.

The rain clouds gathering

Woke up shivering and fluey from a dream in which a group of us in an audience were watching a singing meditator prepare food with a small mat and a large steel knife, precise and balanced. The meditating singing chef was now lecturing at university in Berkeley and his CV proudly noted he had spent four years in prison. I went down to queue for a bowl of raw glistening vegatables, pared and sliced to transparent white and green and pink shavings, pristine and carved into sigils or runes. They spelled out any number of cryptic messages in the white bowl.

Had coffee and a hot bath. Shivering and low in spirits, The dream like a gift I can’t yet unwrap because I am not ready to appreciate it in my unwellness. (I felt this way a lot when I was drinking.)

Dark clouds are blowing up over the mountains from the north. I shall grate some raw ginger and squeeze fresh lemons, spoon honey into steaming cups of flu-cure elixir. I cannot afford antibiotics but at least I can stay in bed if necessary.

Thanks to everyone who wished me a happy birthday — I really loved seeing those messages come in!

The wind in the leafy trees

Sunday morning, my belly-button birthday, and the wind is tearing across the fields, shaking the trees and blowing up for rain this afternoon. I was woken by a neighbour’s burglar alarm at some unearthly hour. Dozed off again and then struggled out of sleep to get hugs and a kiss for my birthday, a large mug of coffee.

In a while we are going out for another birthday lunch at a local restaurant, no ambience but a new young chef who cooks lamb very well, with roast Mediterranean vegetables and a portion of sticky toffee pudding to follow. The place will be crowded with young famers and their wives having lunch after attending the Dutch Reformed Church, locals entertaining visitors from Cape Town. If it is cold or draughty in the dining area there will be a small fire. Tables with old-fashioned check tablecloths and probably paper napkins, no paintings on the walls, a heavily varnished bar counter in one corner. As I said, no ambience and only a view through French doors of cows trampling down young vines near a wire fence on the far side of a stream. But this is the reality of ungentrified country life here in the Cape and we shall all enjoy ourselves. The local grape juice is not bad, not too sweet or fizzy.

Friends call to wish me a happy birthday — Trish tells me she is happy in a new townhouse near Stellenbosch and I promise to visit. Gradually my friends are forgiving me for leaving them and running off to Wales, now that I am back and penitent. This kind of attitude is hard to explain, that any long stay overseas is regarded as defection. In part it dates back to the days when the Cape was on a trading route to India and at the far corner of the known world. Those who live here still feel we left Holland and Europe and the fog-shrouded shores of England behind centuries ago and we are now a different breed of person, with Africa in the blood. Our problems are our own, our solutions homegrown, we are a pioneering generation on a misunderstood continent. We are the post-apartheid rainbow nation, we are realists and dreamers and half-cracked optimists content to sit in the strong African sunshine and feel the red earth under our feet, listen to the cries of the go-away bird and think thoughts coloured by guava and hibiscus. We are all Ubuntu, essence of humanity, made human by one another.

So I sigh happily and get ready to go out and celebrate another year of life, another milestone sober and surviving.

Weekend break

My housemate had forgotten to tell me we would be dog-sitting this weekend for a friend who is moving house. So I came yawning into the kitchen and found two lively Jack Russells with custom-made Argyll knitted jackets, dog dishes and meals of ostrich mince, chopped beans and pumpkin in Tupperware dishes.

I am delighted to have dogs in the house again. Maxie and Tammy are running around the back garden and trotting in and out of my study. They have their own resting place with their duvet plumped and ready, but prefer to lie at my feet. Two alert and naughty Jack Russells with a water bowl just near the back door and a new place to explore, enclosed and safe. The neighbours’ cats are appalled that the grden doesn’t belong to them any longer, as are the hadeda birds who usually wander through flowerbeds at their leisure.

Freshly baked bread just out of the oven — Una made it before she went to bed — and I am about to begin a great salad of diced cucumbers, ripe avocado, tomatoes, sping onions, feta, olives, cos lettuce. Nothing unusual but perfect with grilled lamb. I might do a bowl of tzatziki as well, the yoghurt is thick and fresh.

Some days the next right thing just comes naturally. I shall pick flowers for the living room, branches of blossom. Clean the bathroom and make extra lunch for a housebound invalid. Play with the dogs. Go for a walk around the village in this thin spring sunshine. Invite friends over for tea.

The years of the ‘lost weekend’ seem to have happened in another lifetime. How I enjoy the simple and ordinary and uncomplicated in life, it is so rare and so often overlooked.

Our human delusions

Had a visit from a friend who lives in the village whom I shall call Karin. She should be in recovery but has no intention of stopping drinking.

I had made a very simple triumph of a supper — canneloni tubes stuffed with cream cheese mixed with chopped baby spinach, topped with a homemade sauce of tomato puree and basil. According to the Italian cucina purists, I should have made a bechamel to cover that, but it was fine as it was. I set out a bowl of finely grated Parmesan for sprinkling.

Karin, slumped on the sofa and tetchy at not smoking, had that pouchy look. Some women alcoholics while drinking get flushed and develop damaging little threaded networks of spider veins on their cheeks, along with nasy open pores on the nose and a daunting purplish hue as time progresses. Others have a sickly pallor and get to look emaciated with that Miss Haversham look of the mouldering bride, a greenish tinge and haggard, perpetually shocked and corpse-like. Yet others go yellow and bloated and pouchy, eyes puffed into slits, with a bulging stomach and swollen ankles, and you look at them and think ‘jaundice!’. This last is Karin.

She drinks alone until the small hours of the morning. Then gets up at noon to feed her pissed-off howling dogs and repair the damage. Black coffee and greasy carbohydrates. A snifter of brandy at noon. Then she gets through the day drinkless until early evening when the wine regains its allure. While I was overseas, she went off to the doctor and told him she was depressed and had no idea why. My, those SSI anti-depressants get confused by the odd litre or three of wine! She has developed a scorching heartburn and has fits of hiccups now. She says the meds aren’t working.

Do I try to point out the obvious? Yes I do because ignoring this particular elephant in the living room is too tedious. But she says she should go on a diet. Get a new doctor. Try different meds.

Alcoholism is insanity, pure and simple. At some point the nightly binge drinking is going to spiral out of control and her health may deteriorate very suddenly. But unfortunately many alcoholics have the constitution of a great dumb fucking ox and we can go on drinking to excess until we literally keel over and drop dead.

So the conversation wasn’t lively or amusing. Active alcoholics have all kinds of ‘no go’ topics in conversation. They don’t like to recall the geopgraphic escapes. They don’t remember the late-night phone calls, they don’t find anything very much to be of interest. Family is better forgotten. Oh the guilt! And health is such a lousy topic. The spiritual only appeals during a certain stage of drunkeness. Alcohol is a major depressant so they are genuinely depressed and miserable. Only when sufficiently drunk do they want to go over the lost loves of their lives, the failed opportunities and the vengeful desires to get even, the sparkling dreams of success and happiness that lie ahead in the future.

I had some more of my divine canneloni and sipped more grape juice as I watched this gloomy woman eat lifelessly and sit like a discoloured sack of potatoes in front of me. Outside in the early evening the birds were singing loudly and sweetly, the spring evening was scented with jasmine and the garden white with flowers.

I don’t know if I can call her a friend. I care about her but she doesn’t care much about me and she certainly doesn’t care about that small hidden self within who wants to live. I was once there too, sodden with drink, flushed and irrational and vomiting at dawn, dreading each day and wishing I could die without having to endure the process of dying. (Alcoholics are fond of shortcuts.)

It is such a sad disease. And the truth is that we don’t stop until we have to stop. After she left, eager to get home to the boxed wine in the kitchen cupboard, impatient for that sensation of giddy drunkenness and not caring what comes after, I washed up and played some Shostakovitch, the sweet lively music drifting out into the garden, hints of wild Polish mazurkas. Life all there to be celebrated.

Incorrigible optimism

Gardening makes me happy. I get black dirt under my fingernails and a crick in my lower back and I am no expert, but many of the plants I put in grow and flourish and almost anywhere I have lived has bay trees left behind, apricot trees, olives, bushes of cistus, lavender and rosemary left to the mercies of the next owner. Indigenous beauties of plumbago, tecomaria, the tree fuschia, confetti bushes, restio grasses. I don’t regret planting trees or shrubs and then having to leave them behind when I move on. It is my paltry offering to a world in need of greening.

So my tomatoes and basil and little silver thyme are all in the right places and watered. I have my old blue enamel pot with sliced baby leeks simmering on the stove and I have spent hours trying to write, getting a little further than I got yesterday.

Oddly, as I chopped leeks nd minced garlic, I found myself thinking about my Scottish grandparents, William from Linlithgow and Jean Hamilton (her maiden name) from Lanark and wishing I had known them. But my grandfather died in a car accident in France as a young man, an amateur golfer, and his widow went back to raise her three children in Edinburgh. I don’t know if she remarried. I don’t know why my father chose never to contact her again after leaving home and emigrating to Africa.

Of course I wonder if she was alcoholic. I wonder too about that fatal car accident near Hyeres and if my paternal grandfather was drunk behind the wheel. Alcoholism seems to have a strong genetic run in my family. The Scottish Jekyll and Hyde split like a defect reaching back generations. I have a small heretical theory that Calvinism emerged as a puritanical control mechanism for alcoholic Scots, those drunk men contemplating the thistle.

But today I am just an ordinary sober gardener, tucking my new herbs into old half-barrels and eyeing the cloudy skies to figure out if it is likely to rain tonight. Somebody I thought was lost in alcoholism and back out there drifting through bars and bottlestores and lost weekends emailed me and I feel very happy to know she is still trying to get sober. So long as we keep trying, there is hope.

Planting tomatoes and basil

One of those prosaic days. Yesterday was fun: sitting in the old farmhouse transformed into the Cuban African restaurant Buena Vists Social Club, all blues and ochres and the famous portrait of Che Guevara, old photos of downtown Havana, Spanish chandeliers, fires lit to warm the diners and too many jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese.

Driving home, dense mist on Sir Lowry’s Pass, we stopped at a plant nursery and I saw a bonsai wisteria smothered in deep blue panicles of blossom, the panicles almost larger than the tiny creeper. Bought silver thyme (a girl can never get enough thyme so long as there is Mediterranean cooking to be done!) and a tray of ‘Roma’ tomato seedlings. I want bushes of ripe tomatoes, juicy and ready to eat by Christmas. Companion-planted with basil, the makings of classic Italian pasta dishes right at hand.

So I shall be gardening this morning, enjoying the spring blossom and trying to detach the ripe yellow lemons from the top of my lemon tree.

Taking each day as it comes. This afternoon, a bout of editing work. This evening supper wth friends. Leaving the past and the future to serendipity. Just dealing with what is happening now, what I can do to hold the balance steady now, live as fully as I can on this particular day. Sober and grateful and keeping the focus on the here and now.

Kicking up Havana heels!

Threatening clouds but I am dressing for spring, plus a rncoat. Some friends are taking me out to the Cuban-African restaurant Buena Vista Social Cafe in Somerset West because it is my belly-button birthday on Sunday.

I haven’t had a chance to PLAY since I came back to South Africa and this Cuban restaurant apparently has great ambience and a killer paella stuffed with local seafood and chillies.

Storm clouds banished and time to party! I am hoping for great slow jazz and a frappe drink with fresh lime juice and sugar frosting. Plenty of laughter and perhaps even a dash of sunshine over the green and blossoming Helderberg valley.

More later!

Spring thaw

The greening of the oaks continues and there are two fluffed-up baby owls scowling in an old oak tree just down the road. Although a cold wind blows across the fields, spring is slowly moving in.

Excited to read about medical research testing a new gene to help those with macular degeneration (I lost the sight of my right eye through a rare glaucoma and have only 40 percent vision in the left eye). The researchers, from Pennsylvania University, the University of Florida and Cornell University, suggested that the function of “cones” in the retina, which are used in daytime and colour vision, could be boosted up to 50-fold – a “dramatic” improvement in function.

Still musing on that very tough but profoundly moving vipassana retreat. I’m glad I went because I rediscovered my capacity to cope with severe physical discomfort and heightened levels of fear. And living sober has shown me that lucid awareness plus persistence means everything when enduring hard times — that thrill of knowing one is learning a skill to live by, that there is growth and change where once there was just stasis and repetition.

This morning I am going down to have a cup of coffee with my friend Sheila who is battling depression as the first anniversary of her partner’s death approaches. She and Willie, who was a woodcarver, had lived together for 26 years and she is now in her late 70s and lost without that loving companionship.

Then back to work, the solitary grind of editing, and a break while I experiment with vipassana vegan recipes, beans and mushrooms and toasted sesame seeds, crushed cardamom for fragrance, chopped cashew nuts. Eggplant and zucchini and cumin, very light and delicate flavouring, not my usual lime and chilli infusions. My housemate continues to stuff the deep freeze cabinets with venison and eisbein and steaks as I steam grains — quinoa, lentils, buckwheat — and mince ginger with lemongrass.

Staying in the moment, a little chilly but hopeful of asparagus arriving at the farm stalls any day now, along with artichokes and broad beans. My second spring of the year…