Back again after the storm

 

Torrential rains, flooding and power cuts out here in the mountains. Fortunately we have hurricane lamps and a woodburning stove, so it was not uncomfortable. I sat on the sofa with the puppies reading Peter Ackroyd on Charles Dickens, the opening chapters that describe a small boy looking back to the mannerisms and behaviours grounded in the 18th century, another historical epoch as distant to us now as a far-off  galaxy. There is the small boy toddling into a ground-floor room with a row of ladies and gentlemen sitting in a row of chairs against the wall, drinking from little glass cups with handles, like custard cups, their heads thrown back a little and all drinking at once. So formal, so strange, the  manners of the late 1700s now incomprehensible to us. Although Dickens was the child of a new and scientific century, his father and mother  and older adults were shaped by the 18th century, the England of open fields and drovers’ markets and maritime wars. I think sometimes of myself growing up as a child in a British colony in Africa where many grown-ups recalled the England before the War as if that still existed.

 

And it was a relief to be free of that old boredom linked to alcohol dependency, the terror of two days housebound wthout distractions, woe is me, what is there to do but drink? Self-pity is such a waste of time, the feeling one deserves something other, the indulgent pessimism. My neighbour came around in gumboots and a fishing jacket to say that his kitchen was underwater, muddy water gurgling through the floor boards and that he had stayed up all night  in order to save a fieldmouse that kept diving into the floodwaters near the pantry. Very Beatrix Potter.

 

My sister in New Zealand is very unhappy but there is not much I can do from this distance except send love and imaginary hugs. I too feel a little lost and assailed by unwelcome memories from my childhood. Nothing to do there either except to embrace them and make space for that particular sadness. And rejoice in the sight of a dusky pink Veltheimia bracteata succueant blooming in a shady corner of the garden, shimmering with raindrops like a pink  and grey pearl of great price.