My mother used to tell a lovely little story about the day the second world war was declared, seventy years ago today. She was in the garden hanging out some washing and chatting over the fence to our neighbour. ”Just so long as they don’t come before my washing is dry,” she reported herself as saying.
I smiled when she first told it me. I’ve smiled over the years since when I came to remember it. It’s so perfectly, exactly, her.
Then, just now, I came to wonder if the day was a Monday–the traditional London laundry day, so I checked. It wasn’t. It was a Sunday.
My first reaction was shock and disbelief. Good, respectable women did not hang washing out on a Sunday back then. Not even if they had a three week old baby to wash for day after tedious nappy-filled day. It wasn’t so much as a rule as a law
And then I smiled again. Good for her. She wasn’t one for slavishly following rules, not then and not at any time in my remembrance of her. That may be where my refusal slavishly to follow the ‘rules’ of haiku began and if so then, as for so many other things, I’m grateful to her.
Everyone alive at the time had a story of the day that war broke out, and there is a detectable similarity between many of them. So it may be that my mother’s story was embroidered a little here and there over the years of telling and retelling. That’s a characteristic of almost all folk stories. It’s most certainly a characteristic of my own. If she wanted to remember the day like that then so be it. It doesn’t spoil the story for me, in fact it makes me love it all the more.
Hey ho.
Graham has been struggling with an increasingly faulty mobile phone for weeks now, to give in finally yesterday with the acquisition of a brand new rec0nditioned one. We don’t buy ‘new’ phones on principle.
It functions perfectly and after such a long time of scratchy, intermittently failing calls, we luxuriated this morning in a long, clear chat. It was so good we actually pulled out our calendars and worked out the date of Graham’s return. It’ll be Monday October 5. Oh, it may slip a day or so if he needs a little more time to close the bars down, but… we have a date. How’s about that for a touch of the blissfuls?
He’s much engaged with his trip tomorrow to see Muse in concert, in Teignmouth. I don’t share the depth of his enthusiasm for Muse but even so I would so dearly like to be there to witness his excitement and enjoyment. We used to do Bowie concerts together and as the performance started up I’d habitually say: ”Right, let it rip. I’ll see you when it’s done.”
Because when Graham does a concert he really does it. Flat out. Leaping and dancing, and singing along at the top of his voice, with a distinct clearing of the people around him. Not me, though. I stuck with him right through to the end.
That’s one of my little folk stories, I suppose.
~~+~~
on the wet pavement
a fallen leaf
yellow in the sun
~~+~~
