Grace shining through

Gentleness is everywhere in daily life, a sign that faith rules through ordinary things: through cooking and small talk, through storytelling, making love, fishing, tending animals and sweet corn and flowers, through sports, music and books, raising kids - all the places where the gravy soaks in and grace shines through. 

Garrison Keillor

Edward

Sometimes I worried about the kids I taught. Really worried about them. Not because they did not learn, but because they seemed so vulnerable in such an unforgiving environment. It was these kids who kept me awake at night.

Just one day home from the maternity hospital, Edward was crying uncontrollably.

His mum went round to see Maggie next door, and Maggie, knowing the family well, came right away. Had Edward been fed ? No. Had Edward been changed ? No. Did they have any nappies ? Yes, but not sure when to use them. Or how.

Changed and fed, Edward quietened down, and began the arduous and chancy road to survival.

His parents were characters, well known in the community, and supported by it. But they were not easy and often did not even realise that they needed a little help.

Maggie, elderly and endlessly loving, was some kind of over-worked voluntary guardian angel. Everyone called her Auntie Maggie.

Edward was in my class. At 10 he was unique in my experience. He had an unfinished look about him, and slightly crazy Boris Johnson hair which he continually swept back with surprisingly delicate fingers. He appeared to have been built from blueprints drawn using a confusion of scales.

He spoke in an unlikely falsetto monotone which was slightly unnerving. He was eager, so eager, to please, and worked very hard to make sure he gave satisfaction. He would be the first to volunteer for any job, and occasionally I would give him one, knowing that it would need a team to rectify the damage afterwards.

Edward was always jumpy, nervous, on edge. He jiggled a lot, as if something was trying to get out. He was forever glancing round when he was talking to me, looking for unseen attack. It was as if he was being pursued by an invisible swarm of angry bees. 

Edward was an unguided missile. His clumsiness was legendary. He would trip over chalk lines, dust-bunnies, contours. Negotiating even flat surfaces could leave him ambushed and prone. But he would be vertical again in a second, with profuse falsetto apologies, and he would be breathlessly away on his mission to please. 

Safelty was always a concern, and in his hands the most docile of everyday objects could suddenly become unpredictable. During a Christmas pageant in church, Edward carried the candle snuffer, a sort of narrow brass cone on a pole which had been entrusted to him by the vicar. Placed gently over a candle, the little cone would extinguish the flame, leaving a wisp of meditative smoke twisting languidly to the rafters. We had no actual candles, and the candle snuffer was merely ornamental. What could possibly go wrong ? 

Edward processed up the aisle with an odd mixture of pride and nervousness, glancing side to side at the audience. Looking ahead, he missed his footing, fell over a small step, and lunged at the vicar, the candle snuffer, now a sort of spear, held before him. The vicar, seized with unexpected agility, leapt out of Edward's path and the candle snuffer, now airborne, thwacked into the woodwork where the vicar had been only nano-seconds before. Without missing a beat, and ignoring the gasps of the assembled, he helped Edward to his feet and the show went on, with Edward glancing anxiously over both shoulders.

In class, Edward loved work. As he saw it, the main idea was to fill as many exercise books as possible, some with maths, some with writing. And with that unswerving mission he set to number and stories as a child possessed. No matter that he wrote nonsense, or that none of his maths ever came close to a right answer. He eagerly took work home and returned with page after relentless page of diligent drivel. He could not be deterred. This was what he felt school was about, and he was determined to make a good job of it, to do his level best.

Every child in my class had a tree. We had been given some land, and we planted trees there. Everyone had their own, and tended it from sapling onwards. We went down now and then to weed and to check the stakes. The kids were very proprietorial about their trees. 

Kneeling one cold day to hack away weeds too stubborn for the kids, Edward's falsetto appeared behind me. "Mr Hepworth, there is something wrong with my tree." 

Without turning round, I assured him that I would be over in a minute and would check his tree. There was a silence, and then the falsetto repeated. "Mr Hepworth, there is something wrong with my tree." Impatiently I repeated my answer, and the line went dead for a minute as Edward went away.

Then the voice came again, and I was ready for it.... "Mr Hepworth... " I turned and saw Edward standing still, holding his tree in both hands. He had brought it over to save me the walk.

Playing rounders or stool-ball Edward was as ineffectually determined as ever, and never tired of trying to hit the ball. Though he had no friends as such, and seemed unconcerend by the fact, the kids were enlessly patient and supportive. When he failed to hit the ball, they were always keen for him to have another try. One day when he accidentally hit it, they all cheered warmly, genuinely. 

The candle snuffer incident opened doors for Edward. He decided that he liked the church, and wanted to take an enthusiastic part. The vicar was happy to give Edward a safe haven and I suppose he continued in much the same incorrigible spirit as when he had been in my class.

One evening, when walking home to his parents' house, Edward stumbled in front of a car. He was 25.

Today, and every day, he rests, all nervousness gone, on the soft hillside overlooking his tree and just 50 metres from his home.

A girl from his class wrote to tell me the news. She knew I would want to know.

Do not go gentle into that good night

My father died today, late in the evening, after work, three days short of his 57th birthday.

He closed the shop at 10 o'clock, sat a while in the sitting room, and then went to make a cup of tea in the kitchen. My mother heard him fall, and rushed in to find him already dead. He had had a heart attack, though whether before or after falling, nobody knows.

His own father had died just three months earlier, in the dark days of January. He had had to go into a home as my mother, who had had a mastectomy that month, was unable to look after him at home.

I was living in Nottingham, newly married and with a baby, and doing a post-grad course.

In those days, calling home involved waiting at a phone box, and my mother had no way to get in touch with me quickly. A policeman came in the early hours of the morning, woke us, and gave me the news. He had it written down on a scrap of paper.

I remember howling. Not crying, but howling: a single, visceral, feral howl. 

His birthday was the 22nd April. To celebrate his becoming a grandfather, we had bought him a grandfather clock. He had always wanted one, but rarely spent money on himself. We had little money at the time, but it seemed like the right moment. 

By chance, the clock had to be delivered early, and it came around the 13th. When it arrived I had to keep my father away from the surprise while it was being set up. He heard the bell tinkle and guessed.

He had the clock for a week before he died, and I have been so pleased down the years that a confusion of dates had such a happy outcome.

The last time I saw him was at Sheffield station, when he took me down to the train after the clock incident. We shook hands over the roof the car, left hand to left hand: he had lost his right arm to polio as a child.

I went onto the platform and he was gone.

He died in 1971, when I was 20. 

There were signs, and I did not read them. In the exuberant myopia of my life beginning, I had not noticed that his was ending.  

My mother had written to me early in March 1971:

It does seem a difficult time, at the moment, but once the treatment is over, I shall feel better, and Dad won’t worry so much. I try very hard to keep bright for him, to cause him as little anxiety as possible.

Dad is not worse because he is having a day in bed, but I think a rest from the shop will do him good both mentally and physically.

Somehow, somehow, I did not recognise their pain, did not feel their distress.

Now 65, I feel that I never really knew him. Certainly not as an adult anyway. And he never saw his grandchildren grow, though he did meet my daughter briefly. I wish I could somehow have repaid his gentle kindnesses, or at least let him know that I would think of him so very often. Let him know that eventually I might show promise.

Until quite recently I carried his voice in my head, and could hear it clearly. A couple of years ago, it faded from memory, and though I can remember the funny things he said, I can't hear the intonation. 

I always remember him this week, remember his birth and his death, and the happy part in between that was my childhood.

Wood

I love wood. Trees, too, and I am sorry when I see them come down.

Most of my wood comes from windfall. Living in the country and having log burners, you need to be ready to get out there and start sawing at a moment's notice, before the crowds arrive with chainsaws.

 

Yesterday's evening sun caught the logs I cut on Saturday. The picture doesn't quite catch them. They were gleaming like medals as the sun struck low across the grass.

They are beech and were affected by fungus.

The fungus gets into the grain of the wood and  the result is spalted beech, which is quite hard to get hold of. When it is worked it looks like this:

Spalted beech makes me gasp. You just want to touch the grain.

Yes, I love wood.

 

 

Facts of life

George Bernard Shaw was one of those writers that school ruined for me by insisting on teaching his work to kids who were much too young to understand it.

But I loved some of the things that only-very-slightly irascible GBS said, including this:

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

This always seemed to me to be an incitement to unreasonableness, a rallying cry for all those who can't find happiness or peace in acceptance of the status quo. This was all the permission I needed.

T E Lawrence specialised in the ill-disciplined impossible, and his actions seemed to be founded on the key concept that nothing is written, that there are no immutable circumstances.

At 65, there is still enough of the idealist whimpering in my head to make me proudly unreasonable in the Shavian sense. (People who know me would say in EVERY sense.)

But there is a conflict here.

It seems to me that a lot of unhappiness is rooted in trying to solve problems which turn out to be not problems, but facts of life. 

The most troubling conundrums, the Gordian knots of living, can be solved by quirky determination, by the sheer unreasonable willpower that characterised Lawrence. What seems impossible can be overcome.

But there is a line. Some things are beyond our capacity to change, and no end of concerted unreasonableness will make the slightest difference. 

Better to ensure that holy unreasonableness is directed at problems and not facts of life. Being unable to distinguish between them is a basic category error that can seriously damage your morale.

The EU referendum

I believe in Europe. Passionately. It feels to me that the future lies in Europe, as an integral and whole-hearted part of Europe.

This week the Government's little booklet arrived, stating their case for a vote to remain in Europe. As an enthusiast, I wish it had not arrived, that I had never seen it.

The leaflet 'sets out the facts'. If only it did. 

Instead it bristles with opinions and 'judgements' disguised as facts:

"Voting to leave would create years of uncertainty and potential economic disruption"

"The Government's judgement is that [striking a deal] would be much harder than that"

"Our EU membership magnifies the UK's ability to get its way on the issues we care about"

The leaflet tells us breezily that the UK has secured a special status in 'a reformed EU'. A reformed EU ? Did I miss a meeting ?  This must be a reference to David Cameron's rather tepid negotiations in which he managed to prove that EU membership gives little leverage to 'get its way' even within the EU.

The booklet illustrates the reason the political elite is so richly distrusted. It's glib dishonesty and verbal legerdemain is staggering.

If there will be ten years of uncertainty, it is because the politicians have created it. Uncertainty, and snake oil remedies, are the stock-in-trade of our political classes. 

Each side of the debate about the EU is vying with the other to find the ultimate knock-out problem, the clinching demerit which will make the voters flock to the polls. Nobody feels uplifted by a catalogue of potential disasters. At work, I hated people who saw only problems. What I enjoyed was the people who saw a problem, and brought me some ideas about creative solutions.

Whatever the outcome of the EU referendum on 23 June, in 150 years time our republic will be part of the United States of Europe, and with any luck there will be a federal government.

And we will all be citizens at last, and no longer subjects. 

I will not live to see it, but the thought glows warmly inside.

Mosaic floor

Sometimes crazy ideas work out really well.

And sometimes they don't.

Oh dear.

As I like all things Roman and needed a new bathroom floor, what could be more obvious than doing a mosaic ? Find a suitable Roman pattern, do a bit of jiggling, get tiling. Simples.

Finding the right pattern was a doddle. It came from a Roman villa and needed only slight tweaking to fit the bathroom. The key part of the design was original.

Finding suitable tiles was a bit tricky, and a lot of the 7 000 or so used were hand cut. The actual choice of time was a huge mistake - a hole below the waterline - in that they had a slight dip towards the edges.

This is the process quite close to the beginning, with the key design element laid out but not filled in yet.

The main problem was getting all the tiles dead level. This isn't easy when there are so many. The Roman technique was to lay the floor, and then grind the whole thing flat. But then they had lots of slaves to do the donkey work. It must have taken forever, but the finished results were great. 

This is the key design laid out: the first of two panels. You can just see some edging.

And this is the first panel almost completed, with two areas left to fill.

And here is the finished floor.

As a design, it's easy to see that the two adjacent panels don't work. They are two argumentative horses yoked to the same chariot. It would have been good to spot this at the design stage. Or get the slaves to start again. But as it was only me and the floor, I just felt disappointed.

In terms of design, it was a failure.

The laying was a success technically, in that the floor was level. The difficulty was that the slight dip at the edge of the tiles resulted in very small valleys that your feet could feel. It was like walking on the surface of a giant brain. My feet were disconcerted, and I suppose everybody else's feet felt the same.

The valleys made it harder to clean than it should have been.

It took a long time to arrive at the design, and a whole lot longer to lay and to complete.

I did not love it enough, though, and it did not tale long to remove.

The heroic failure has been replaced by valley-free, very plain yellow linoleum and my feet are in heaven.

I tell myself that if you never fail, you are not really trying.

It could be true.