The dear life deep within

Snow still falling on the mountains around the village.

 

I let out my small dogs at 5am and they escaped through a side gate blown open by the wind and ran barking up and down the road. I went out with Una, both of us in pyjamas and wearing  wellington boots, shaking a biscuit tin and calling. The whole street woken, my neighbour Terry also bellowing for the dogs in his pink dressing gown, a floral thing his wife used to wear. (Few secrets in a village like this.)

When we got back to the house, there were the dogs waiting for us, jumping with impatience to come in. A very cross blacksmith plover chased me across the road, annoyed to have been disturbed in the ditch.

It was quite 18th century, the torchlight of hurricane lamps and the wind blowing, birds waking in the great oak and camphor trees. When I got indoors and was making coffee, I realised I am feeling much better and more myself.  Delighted, reading Kilvert’s descriptions of the unspoilt Welsh countryside in 1870, the trout leaping in pools, the thatchers cutting reeds, children making nosegays and dancing, the old folk singing rounds: a gaiety we have long since lost.

I have had a poached egg for breakfast and am listening to Vivaldi, feeling like dancing around the house myself. But I must grind up cinnamon and nutmeg for my apple pie.

Interesting to see how illness throws me off balance — an odd mix of tiredness and anxiety. But as I kept reminding myself, no need for any contrived dramas — and the gentleness and routines of rest and regular meals have steadied me. That alcoholic lack of self-care is such a bad habit, a kind of hatred for the body’s needs and suffering.

 

And following Syd I have been thinking about six joys to be found in the full and unrestrained pleasures of a sober life:

1 Standing out in the garden and hearing the strains of Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi floating out through the living-room windows

2 Sitting down to supper with an elderly neighbour and watching her bow her head and say grace, a habit of thankfulness she has had for the last 70 years.

3 Planting out seedlings of thyme and coriander, tucking the plants into the damp loamy earth and getting black dirt under my finger nails.

4 Taking a heavy knife and chopping up leeks and celery and carrots for a buttery vegetable soup, ladling in chicken stock and smelling the earthy fragrance as it comes to the boil.

5 Laughing with my housemate as we remember how her mother would show us how she danced in the garden in a gingham frock the day World War II ended and the soldiers came back from North Africa and Egypt. She thought there would never be war again.

6 Singing Cole Porter songs in a hot bath, a sultry croaky sort of voice helped immeasurably by steam. Daydreaming about the day when there is a large sober AA family estblished in my village and we have meetings every other evening and potluck suppers with vegetable soup and hot rolls. Followed by the dreadful instant coffee or stewed tea unique to AA all around the world. Tra-la, C’est manifi—que!’

Snow on the mountains

The first snows of winter have fallen. We don’t get heavy snowfalls here in South Africa, the climate is Mediterranean and  our winters balmy. But there are cold days and nights from time to time. No central heating, so we feel it when temperatures drop.

 

I’m drinking Horlicks out of a large mug with my fingers wrapped around the mug for warmth. A friend has just given us a basket of apples, bright red crisp and crunchy apples, the last and best of the autumn pickings. I am thinking about apple pie.

 

The small dogs are curled up tightly, like cats, against the cold. I am wearing thermal vests and the cough seems to be easing. Strong snow-laden winds are driving down the dark clouds rimmed with silver, clouds streaming overhead from the north. Acorns are clattering onto tin roofs and the trees are shaking themselves free of leaves. It is bitterly cold and the mountain peaks are ribbed with snow.

I have been lying under the duvet reading Kilvert’s diary describing the Welsh Borders in the 1870s, countryside little changed from the way it looks today. I feel so nostalgic for that sweet river-green and gentle countryside, sparkling in the spring with dripping greens and mists and a grey almost solemn beauty on cloudy days.

And the calm of days such as these is all to do with steady and unbroken sobriety, the peace and quiet of life lived without reactivity and excess. I would have enjoyed life as an Victorian spinster in a small village, baking apple pies and visiting the sick, staying away from the gentlemen’s port. But maybe not. Only in recent decades have women enjoyed enough freedom and independence to be able to say and write what they like. And even then ony a minority.And only recently have women had the same opportunities as men to get sober — but that is another story. I must go out and shell pecan nuts for baking, a large bowl of fresh pecan nuts from a garden in Berg Street. Then I shall peel apples and come back to write another great whirlpool of fiction. Freedom opens a life to the power of mystery and personal challenge.

Remember when

The cold winter rain is bucketing down. The gardens and fields shimmer and dissolve. I am beginning to wonder if I will have bronchitis for the rest of my natural life. Housebound with two badly behaved puppies. They have forgotten all their house manners and I am going to give them away to the first person who rings the doorbell.

Nevertheless, it is always good to be sober. Always.

One of my neighbours is going to see a Spiritualist because she thinks there is a ghost in her garage causing her car to stall each morning. A ghost messing with the starter mechanism. Some mechanical booby from the Other Side.

I didn’t tell her about my one and only Spiritualist meeting. A story revolving around demon drink, of course.

In the early 1990s I was doing legal editing in the city. My hours were reasonably flexible, which helped me cope with hangovers. One winter morning I was walking up through the beautiful city that overlooks the bay, when I saw a large glossy BMW collide with a Range Rover several blocks away from me. Nobody was hurt and the drivers got out and exchanged contact numbers.

 

But I felt shaken, and it came to me that a small drink would settle my nerves. I went into an almost deserted coffee bar, an old mirrored dining room in the Vienneses tradition. I explained to the head waiter that I had just witnessed a very frightening motor accident and needed a shot of brandy to settle my nerves.

I looked neat and demure in a pretty sweater and with my hair loose and shining on my shoulders. Not your Average Alcoholic with raincoat and bottle in brown paper bag, oh no. The head waiter nodded sympathetically and brought me an aged brandy and told me to ‘toss it back like  a man’. Then he brought me another, together with an espresso. I felt calmer, lighter, more philosophical.

But as I stepped out of the charming Vienneses coffee bar, I realised I could not arrive at work smelling of neat brandy at 10 am. What made perfect sense to both the headwaiter and myself would sound fishy in an office crowded with diligent lawyers and editors. I needed an hour or so to sober up. I had a large box of double-strength mints in my bag, but that was not enough.

Right next to the coffee bar there was a door with a poster detailing the times of a Spiritualist meeting. What better place to kill time?  In a burst of euphoria, I opened the door and climbed a flight of stairs and joined a large group of Wednesday morning spiritualists in a room lined with bookshelves and the odd pencil sketch of Red Indian spirit guides. How quaint! I apologised for interrupting and sat down a few rows back.

It was very mundane with prayers being offered and long thoughtful silences. I sucked on my mint.

Then a small woman in a green overcoat addressed me and said she had a message for me.

My ‘dear old grandfather’ wanted me to know I was ‘an old soul possessed of many gifts’.

‘My grandfather,’ I said, in a loud and brandy-enriched voice, ‘was a tyrannical racist and I doubt he had a soul to speak of.’

 

Everyone sat up straighter and peered at me with curiosity. The green coat subsided. A few more prayers for world peace were offered. Then a collection bowl was passed around. More prayers for those who had passed over and messages sent back to them. 

Just as people were bundling up their knitting and yawning, rewrapping scarves, geting ready to go out into the street again, the green-coated woman looked across at me and said there was another message.

I cheered up and a glint may well have come into my eye. Nothing like a chance to be sarcastic and cut through all this hooey.

“Nobody was hurt in that accient,’ she said in her whispery old voice. ‘Both drivers had insurance. The only one harmed by it was you.’

Then she smiled at me, but coldly.

I felt more than a little shaken by that experience. From then on I took another route up through the city to reach my work place. I didn’t want to hear that kind of message ever again. And I did  not want to meet that strange little woman in her green coat anywhere in the city, her way of seeing what nobody but myself could know. I wanted no more messages  like that. sober or drunk.

When I finally admitted I was alcoholic and began to retrace my long tawdry love affair with drink, this little incident came to mind. Self-harm was very much on my mind. And only then did this strange message impinge on me as a gift, a warning I had not heeded. Somebody out there watching over me.

Myth piercing the human

Sick again, coughing and feverish, watching a cold front storm in from the Atlantic. I am too tired for visitors, people enervate where usually they enliven. No money for doctors so I am taking Coltsfoot and hot sweet tea. I have survived much worse.

 

And last night, wrapped in blankets on the sofa I watched the film Pan’s Labyrinth, already seen and acclaimed by most. It was late at night and the house swam in lamplight, with creaking floorboards, creaking ceiling beams and a rustling loft overhead. Next to me on the sofa, thumb in mouth, sat myself as a child watching the faun constructed of moss, earth, tree bark and tendril vines. Guillermo del Toro’s El labirinto del faun is disturbing, potent magic. A child trapped in an mountain encampment during the Spanish civil war discovers how imagination and fantasy opens the door to a vision of another world pierced through and through by the sacred. Brutality and violence is countered by enchantment. The spirals of an ancient labyrinth, the dying fig tree , the music of the forest, the lullaby sung to a dying child wrapped in moonlight.

Myth makes us human. Del Toro says that, but it has been said  many times. before. Imagination, like faith, opens the door to a deeper and more wondrous reality. We may choose to call ourselves agnostic but never philistine. Myth is necessary.

What stays after the froth has dispersed

 

 

As I was drinking orange juice and eating my guavas this morning, watching my housemate spatchcock a free-range chicken with a heavy sharp cleaver I dare not use in my clumsiness, I heard a radio talk show host interviewing the US-based counsellor at a local rehab centre.

The rehab man was a very smooth talker.

‘You see, y’all, he said genially, ‘the real hurdle is just that awful detox and we can ease you into nirvana and untangle all the knots in the psyche that put you there is the first place. Addiction is not where you want to be. I lost a really good wie and three kids to my addiction and I owe my happiness with my new wife to going to a really professional rehab centre and letting the experts take over. After that I was a butter fly out of a cocoon, free at last. Like Nelson Mandela.’

 

This metaphor appealed hugely to the radio interviewer. ‘Free as a butterfly! That is wonderful news!’

‘You see Rethabile,’ explained the genial rehab man whom I was starting to detest with a bitter bronchial antipathy. ‘Why suffer? If the drugs or booze aren’t working for you any more you need a new high, and we can give you that! We can infuse you with renewed passion for your life. One of our clients has just become a tennis coach in Palm Beach, teaching the celebs how to ace those serves! Nothing to it!’

I could have taken the little meat cleaver away from my housemate and shown the rehab promotions expert something about suffering. But instead I just sighed and put myself back to bed with a copy of the BB.

The Doctor’s Opinion has a good comment on communicating with the still suffering alcoholic.

”Frothy emotional appeal seldom suffices. The message which can interest and hold these alcoholic people must have depth and weight. In nearly all cases, their ideals must be grounded in a power greater than themselves, if they are to re-create their lives’

I am lucky in that after drinking myself to the point of death over the course of nearly 30 years, I did not think it would be a cinch to sober up. I did not believe it could be done painlessly. I did not believe anyone else could do it all for me with a little rehab pampering. I was fortunate in that I did not have to detox or sit in rehab for months while the debts mounted. I was able to walk into an AA meeting and never drink again.

But I had to live with myself and that was quite a challenge. I could not have stayed sober or embarked on a new way of living without AA. That solidity of being grounded in the Rooms has held me in place despite my geographical isolation and mistakes, poor judgment calls, setbacks and crises. The depth and weight of what AA has to offer drunks like me has enabled me to trust in a higher power and recreate my life in trust and togetherness.

 

This is what stays after the frothy emotional appeals have dispersed like foam on a beach.

What I love is one foot in front of another

 

 

I’ve been sitting in the sun coughing and reading a newspaper article about how the Brits don’t like poetry. Although up to 60% of them can recite this: 

 

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat

They took some honey and plenty of money

wrapped up in a five pound note.

 

I have always loved Edward Lear and thrilled to the magic of They sailed away/For a year and a day/To the land where the Bong Tree grows.  All I ever needed to learn, I learned from nursery rhymes and nonsense poems. And I imagine the Brits feel the same way as they walk to work alongside the rainy Thames and sway together in the Tube each weekday morning. They dined on mince and slices of quince/Which they ate with a runcible spoon./And hand in hand on the edge of the sand/They danced by the light of the moon. That is daydreaming made art. I have a battered Apostle teaspoon I use for measuring crushed coriander and ground nutmeg which I call my ‘runcible spoon’ and it has never failed me yet. Dancing hand in hand  with a loved one by the light of the moon is about as good as it gets.

My housemate the hurse is fed up to see me still bronchial. Like most nurses, she has no sympathy for the sick. She has sympathy for the seriously ill and loves her Aids patients with all her heart but it annoys her to see me wandeing around in crumpled yelow pyjamas and sheepskin slippers all peely-wally as the Scots say, pulling faces over cherry-red cough syrup and reciting  poems to cheer myself up. She refuses to talk about the Goose.

‘Go back to bed and don’t move until you are fully recovered,’ she says in a bossy impatient voice.

‘Dear pig are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring? Said the Piggy I will.’

 

‘Just. Go. Back. To Bed.’ says the Nurse.

 

‘Pussy said to the Owl, ‘You elegant fowl

How charmingly sweet you sing.!

 

And so another day of sober but insalubrious bedrest. No doubt the embattled professors of poetry at Oxford, accused of sexual misdemeanors and plotting against one another are also taking comfort in The Owl and the Pussycat as they pen letters of resignation and scheme to chase one another out of those cloistered quads. So undignified.

 

So they took it away and were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill

 

And one day I shall be able to dance under the Bong Tree by the light of the moon or sail away in a pea -green boat while eating quinces with my runcible spoon. But for now I am just a fluey nuisance.

 

 

 

The smell of guavas

 

Penetrating. The smell of guavas is penetrating, which is why I can smell it at all. I can scarcely breathe through my clogged sinuses and am smell-derived right now.

Guavas are I suppose exotic if you live in a rainy south of England country town and only get to see apple orchards behind sheets of rain, but out here guavas are fairly commonplace and taste like they look, yellow and bubblegum pink and seedy. I have guavas ripening by the hour on a small tree in the garden and each afternoon I go out and eat a guava or two because they are crammed full of vitamin A and good for me. Besides which, I can smell them and that is a treat.

 

The goose ran off and hid from its killers and now I would rather have a live goose strolling around in the sun than a roast goose dinner. Why aren’t we all humane and vegetarian I wonder? The goose killer phoned me to apologise.

‘I am so very sorry not to have your goose,’ he said with clacking dentures. ‘But it is the fault of the goose who ran away when we got out the axe.’

‘Oh help,’ I said feebly. ‘Spare that goose. Let the goose live.’

‘No, no, the goose must die,’ said the axe-murderer. ‘My wife has already spent the money you will give us for the goose.’

‘Would you let me have the goose alive then?” I asked plaintively. That smart goose hiding out in the woods.

 

‘No, no,’that goose is no good. A naughty goose,’ said the killer. ’I will bring you nine baby gooses for R80, perhaps. Or more.’

‘Goslings,’ I said. ‘No I don’t want a goose farm I just hate having the goose killed.’

‘You are talking nonsense,’ said my friend on the phone. ‘Everything must die.’

Then I went back to bed and read from my battered copy of Animal Farm and thought about George Orwell and the goose. My bronchitis is racketing about like a tin can full of metal bits. I cough and cough.

 

And my temper has grumped down again. I have been reading reviews of a new biography of Jean Rhys which describes her as volatile and a woman of changeable moods. As in this description: “the blue hour was also the hour when the lap dog she saw herself as being during the day turned into a wolf.”

 

Oh tra-la, well yes indeed, the mysterious blue hour when our personalities inexplicably alter in the gloaming. When the vulpine scavenger emerges out of the forests.

Jean Rhys was severely alcoholic and would hit the gin at six in the evening. That was what turned her inner lapdog into  into a wolf. She wasn’t enigmatic, moody, a victim of the men who used and left her. She was an alcoholic who could not take care of herself. She worked as a prostitute because she couldn’t hold down a job. She battered two of her husbands, stole from friends, was thrown into prison for using foul language and assaulting people  in the streets. She bit a constable, smashed milk bottles against fences, chucked a brick through the neighbours’ window. She was not haunted by displacement from her Caribbean childhood. She was not neurasthenic and sensitive. I doubt she was a ‘borderine personality’  She was a drunk, an untreated active alcoholic.

 

And despite that tragic life of  active alcoholism she managed to write one of the most startling and revealing novels of the 20th century, Wide Sargasso Sea with its terrifying depiction of the first Mrs Rochester, the archetypal Victorian madwoman in the attic. Imagine what else she might have written if she had been able to stay sober.

The geese are getting fat

 

I woke up feeling euphoric and light-headed with a squeezing pain in my chest.

‘How interesting,’ I thought. ‘Perhaps I am dying.’

Then I tried to sit up and began coughing and realised with great trepidation that I was not having a blissful deathbed moment but that I was going to live and endure more bronchitis.

 

My housemate came into the room, fit as a fiddle and rosy-cheeked.

‘I wonder if you have pneumonia, ‘ she said. ‘Remember that Eben is arriving some time this morning with a freshly killed goose and you must haggle over the price with him. And then take care of the goose. Don’t forget to singe the feathers you can’t pluck. And drain excess blood, cut offf fatty bits, the whole tootie.’

‘I don’t feel up to dealing with a freshly killed feathered goose,’ I whimpered.

 

‘Anyone would think you lived in fat-cat America,’ said Una nastily. ‘You are in Africa now and we need to be able to feed 30 people with TB for lunch next week. Do your green apple stuffing.’

 

In my next life I am going to come back as somebody who just goes into the supermarket and buys pre-packaged and shrinkwrapped factory-farmed meat crammed with carcinogens. Or maybe not.

And I also need to crawl into the kitchen and bake dog biscuits for my greedy puppies. They are easily bribed to behave well while I am in bed sick, but I am running out of biscuits and want to bake biscuits or them that are cheaper and more nutritious than the expensive bone-shaped things we buy.

 

But right now I am lying in bed sick and spluttering and wondering how on earth I coped with decades of stomach-turning alcoholism when I can’t deal with a touch of bronchitis. I could call my neighbour to help with the duck but if I clean the feathers of a young goose I can stuff a crewel-embroidered silk pillow for my study.  And I do want to try my green apple stuffing and see if a fine fat goose will fit into my favourite roasting dish,

 

For so many years I turned my back on life. Now I cannot bear to waste a minute of it.

Cheerful but awful

Which title is a quote taken completely out of context from alcoholic poet Elizabeth Bishop but describes my state of mind very aptly. The bronchitis is worse, I am cheerful and longing to get up and make korma curry or repot a small spiky aloe or play with puppies. I’d like to get up and dance around the house or practise t’ai chi.  So nice to have recovered my temper.

The horrible thing about being sick is that it makes me feel vulnerable. The good thing about that vulnerability is that I can look at it and just stay with the feelings, let myself become more open-hearted.

 

I learned something very valuable when I fell in love (aged 14) with a red-headed guitar-playing boy named Rusty. He was so in love with me that he failed all his year-end exams and his parents sent him away to boarding school on the other side of the country.We planned to run away together.  But then he broke up with me because I laughed at him in a football jersey that was too big for him. Silly me, I didn’t yet realise men are invariably vainer than women. So off he went and I was left brokenhearted.

 

After a few weeks of feeling abandoned and hurt and rejected and missing him, I discovered something else was going on. My emotions seemed to have deepened. I wrote a poem about  irresponsible laughter and hidden cruelty that won a prize. I was beginning to grow up, the smart-alecky schoolgirl was finding that a broken heart opens us  to the possibility of compassion. Hurting is what keeps us human.

So I sit up in bed with a dog-chewed spiral note book and let the vulnerabilities stream through me. The fears of failure, of insecurity, of dying, of losing those I love — as they come up I note them and let them go. The feelings that make the heart swell and ache are growth, growing pains.

I’d rather be chopping fresh fenugreek leaves and tossing a rubber ball for my dancing pups but I am staying in bed and resting, letting the body heal and the heart open to the world. Pass over the soggy tissues…

Notes from a sickbed

Despite having taken in enough honey, lemons, limes, cinnaon quills, cassia, mint, cloves and grated ginger to restock the Spice Islands, I have bronchitis.

So I am staying in bed with the 12×12 and a PD James detective novel, plenty of sweet tea and waiting out the fevers and misery. This too shall pass. In time I hope I shall get better at surrendering gracefully and learning to trust. I am curled up like a snouty bad-tempered hedgehog, all prickles and no grace. My eyes feel slitty and mean and I have ordered my small dogs to stay on a pillow in the corner of the room. My housemate has fled in search of more pleasant company. My cell phone is switched off so I cannot whine or snap at well-meaning friends. I found myself wanting to log onto forums and bicker, so I am giving the Internet a wide berth. There are enough crazies out there without my adding to their number.

 

Feeling ill is a trigger for self-pity and resentment. That is possibly why I enjoy reading about murder most foul while my sinuses leak and my head thumps and my chest congests. Somebody is to blame.

But my pilllows are plumped up, the window looks out on a green and blossoming garden, my quilted duvet is goosedown, there is a large glass of iced water and a pot of Earl Grey tea on my bedside table, and Mozart is playing  in the living room. Gratitude, damn it, I tell the snuffly beast, show some gratitude!