A foreign land

MARCH 24th, 2020

Everyone will have their lockdown story, just as they have their Princess Diana story, and their 9/11 story. We will all remember where we were when we heard, saw, or when it happened.
For J and I, it's 5am on Tuesday March 24th. Exactly 8 months ago. 'Pickfords are never going to come and pack up your house now we're in lockdown,' the little monkey voice in my head tells me. That nagging tone that wakes you up at weird hours, that you want to flick away. But a couple of hours later the phone rings, 'The van will be there in an hour.' It will probably be the first and last time we move to not-quite-sure where. 

''Ave you 'eard we's in lockdown,' says Keith the handy man who is coming to fill the holes in the walls after we take our pictures down. 'Well, I shouldn't be coming, but I will anyway. Got to get you on your way, 'aven't we.'

I've started to feel an itch to write this blog again because lockdown feels like we've arrived in a foreign land. And not being an illustrator or a journal-er, it's a way of trying to make sense of what is going on around us, like brush strokes on a canvas. And also because we are all cut off from each other - we are all living in our separate lands. There is a sense of connection to others when you write to them. 

Sitting around our kitchen table having one of our last breakfasts at Dagnall Farm, the Lozenge chooses ‘Yesterday’ by the Beatles on Spotify. The sunlight winking through a wafting curtain, the news pauses on its cycle of what feels extraordinary. Yet now already becoming ordinary. Yesterday - I think. I have nostalgia for yesterday. Nostalgia for 1 week ago. Everything looks different. Whenever I’ve been in dicey places, I’ve wondered if I was kidnapped, what I would I most miss about life. I would miss the small things - my child’s warm breath on my face, walking down the stairs in the morning to make a cup of tea, the phone ringing and seeing it's J calling. And it’s the same now.  Meeting a friend for a quick cup of coffee, looking up a play or a film and booking tickets. 

We cancel a nerf gun farewell party with all the boys' friends, and I ask the lady in the Co-op if she'll allow me 6 packets of Jammy Dodgers for their replacement leaving party in their class rooms. '3 Jammy Dodgers and then you'll have to get something else like Custard Creams,' she says. 

The Pea wanders past us in the kitchen, with one of her dollies wrapped life-threateningly in a shawl. ‘She is hot, Mummy. Dolly has the Cowona Viruth.’ The Pea's school teacher was crying as we all left. ‘This could be it for the year - this year of little children that I’ve taught for the first time - I won’t see again now,’ she sniffed, wiping her eyes and looking out onto the playground. Red jumper-ed small creatures squeaking with excitement and swinging on bars and running up climbing frames. 

For us it's even stranger because we're meant to be moving house, moving country. But already, Oman seems like a distant dream. We still think we might get there on April 15th, but nothing is certain. The certainty that we have all been accustomed to in our planning, seems like an apparition. Something unreal. And as we start to organise our house, I think to myself that we’ve never packed up to nowhere before. We don't know where the enormous lorry load of stuff would be headed. Or how long in the UK we need to pack for.

J and I laugh because one lot will be headed back to Blair Atholl, as will we, while we wait to see when the passage to Oman is open. We were living in Blair Atholl for 3 months, 2 years ago after we got back from Jerusalem. And J and I met in Blair Atholl. Being the oldest in the family and the one with more of a tendency to spread my wings, I have often ironically ended up back here when trying to go on an adventure. And Blair Atholl was certainly the very last place I’d expected to meet my future husband. It's an anchor which keeps pulling me back. A place where everything muddled in my mind gains perspective again, surrounded by family and the habits and rhythms of my own childhood.

We start a tentative routine: every day, Petra’s devoted schoolteacher records herself reading a story for her pupils which the P and I watch before bed and remember the love with which dear Mrs Watson tended the youngest pupils in the school. 

The Pea comes back from her final day at school with drawings of J and I. ‘The happy couple’ 

The Lozenge and Rashimi are working through bulging back packs of schoolwork, and lessons begin online. ‘How are you finding home schooling and me being your teacher?’ I joke to Rashimi. ‘You’re a really bad teacher’ he says. Through my laughter I say, ‘Well it’s very lucky for the world that I’m not a teacher, then.’ He nods enthusiastically in agreement. The boys' computer has come down with a suspicious virus. ‘Maybe it's got Covid-19 too’ says Rashimi. I find talking to the IT man in Milton Keynes before dropping the computer on his doorstep near his closed front door, a comforting thing, the tones of our voices are different from how they would have been a couple of weeks ago - more caring perhaps, and less rushed. We ask after each other and how we're finding this new normal. Of supermarket orders 2 weeks in advance, and meeting friends through a screen.

In the sunshine we run out with a ball, or go for a jog with Debbie the dog, our feet rustling through the new lurid-green grass, making discoveries which are more exciting than before - a patch of bright pink rhubarb, clumps of mint already coming up from the earth, and the sage and thyme from last year already revitalised. 

For most of my life I’ve loathed ‘home economics’ - seeing them like a downhill slope towards housewifery in my school days - and for that reason I always struggled with too much time on a sewing machine or doing washing. I now look at our washing line flapping with sail-sized white sheets with a feeling of deep contentment. And I dust down the sewing machine and make two dog beds to go into the shipment for Debbie with some old duvets covered with two bits of cloth from Mali that I’ve been hanging onto for decades. The washing machine plays Shubert’s ‘The Trout’ when it finished a cycle, which it now plays about 5 times a day in its little tinny voice and I I think this will be a soundtrack of this time in the English countryside.

The children are around all day, all evening. When they aren't calling for IT help with online school, they have questions after questions. Mummy: ‘What happens if you lose your eyelids? Can you still sleep?’ So then we talk in depth about the purpose of eyelids and how your eyes would not survive for very long without them.

Gweno, our lovely French Manny au pair departs reluctantly back to France - his mother’s instructions sounding ever more urgent down the phone until he feels he has no choice and takes one of the last trains home. 'Votre premier minister est completement FOU. Imbecile!' These are the last words I hear his Mum shriek to me down the phone. The rapport Gweno and the Pea built - a 19 year old french guy and a 4 year old British girl, was a very sweet thing to witness. ‘Gweno - I will miss you. Merci' the Pea writes in her new cursive writing taught painstakingly by Mrs Watson. I remembered the moment when we had some friends over, and I peeped into P's room where Gweno was reading her 'Mr Bump' in a thick French accent, her head on his shoulder.  

Everywhere I go, putting cushions and duvets into Lakeland hoover vacuum bags, or whipping a frozen morsel from the empty freezer to cook, Debbie the dog is right there, between me and what I want to do - looking at me. 

Rashimi announced yesterday ‘I am a vegetarian’ and I hadn’t taken much notice. But as I was foraging for a frozen pheasant dad left in our freezer to cook for lunch, he told me again. ‘But Mummy, you know we’re having pheasant for lunch. Well, I’m a vegetarian.’ I laid the pheasant in a tray and said, ‘Look Rasheem, I know you have every right to become one, and I have no problem at all with that - in fact I think we should all be almost veggie if we can, it’s just that there isn’t an enormous choice in the supermarket right now, and sometimes we might need to eat meat at a meal, particularly as we're trying to eat our way through the freezer. Is there any way you could postpone your vegetarianism until after the Corona crisis?’ He nodded.

But in the midst of global chaos it's the small things that initially give solace. Watching J paint the Pea's nails painstakingly neatly. Going for a run and having a bath and trying to keep the educational show on the road. Blossom on the trees and washing on the line. It’s all how it might look if we knew that this was about to be it. We drink in the juice of it.

I have been filming Leslie, a wonderful 96 year old in the village who translated all the Tintin books into English, and was also a secretary at the Nuremberg Trials and I’m not going to be able to finish the filming with her for fear of spreading something. She said to me: ‘I expect to go to sleep one night, and wake up to find a cross painted on my door and all will have passed over.’ When I asked if she needed anything she said: ‘Well my weekly trip to Budgeons is normally a bit of  a non-event, but Budgeons will be looking even more Russian than ever. So I think I'm fine at home, dear.'

As I stretch a big white duvet cover along the line so it will dry un-crumpled and go into a Pickford's box, I feel two cold little hands and some breath on my leg…:’Are we coming back to this land, Mummy?’ the Pea asks. I love how she calls it a land. It sounds more dreamy and romantic than the word country. 

‘Well, we will always be from here, so it will always be our land, but we’re going to use it as a springboard for adventures until we don’t want to do that anymore.’ 

She seems to buy that and carries on busying with the small plastic wheelbarrow which she has rescued from the toy recycling pile. ‘My wheeeeelbaroooooow!!’ she squealed protectively, and whipped it out of the bag. It has busied with the Lozenge, then Rashimi and now the Pea - from Camden to Amman to Jerusalem, to Dagnall Farm...seems like it will also be scooping up sand in Oman, if we ever make it.