A small Highland clearance

August-November 2020

Watching Dad packing up his big VW truck with our 16 bags brought a bit of a lump to my throat. He and Mum had offered to drive me, Rashimi and the Pea all the way from Blair Atholl to Heathrow. 8 months after I had pinged back to the homestead with husband, children and pets; stacks of camera equipment and an enormous iMac; clothes for every season. I shared an office with my brother for the first time ever, and a house with my parents for the longest continuous time since I went off to school at 9. 

Each morning I'd stepped into the kitchen and had a cursory glance at their faces - just to check they hadn’t completely had it with their noisy squatters. But each morning there were bright smiles, porridge bubbling, radio 3 tinkling, the day beginning once again. When the history of 2020 comes to be written….it deserves an album all of its own.

I’m officially known as a ‘boomerang’: a grown up child who goes back to live with their parents for lockdown. The Lozenge put it his way: ‘‘Grandma, I feel Iike I’ve got to know you not just as a Grandma but as a person over this time in your house.’

 And the children wryly pointed out: ‘Mummy in this house you’re an adult and also you’re a child at the same time.’ As a Mum of three, there is no more comfortable place to be than one where you can be both adult and child at once. And I got into a status that I’ve been struggling to put into words, until I read someone else’s.

The writer Cal Flyn:  ‘After months of mute acceptance as our autonomy and freedom have been curtailed, our life plans stripped away, our life plans directed by greater forces, I have never flet more at the mercy of the currents. Like a jellyfish, I often feel that I’ve been floating blindly through the crisis. One can only keep on keeping on, beating on, against the current, and hoping not to be swept against the rocks.’

I will never use the U word (unprecedented) myself. Its overuse in the media has made my ears trip up on it every time I hear it. But the surreal and surprising months spent in the highlands surrounded by my siblings, parents and neices and nephews has been for us a surprise offering that will stay with us for the rest of time. 9 cousins weaving in and out of each others’ daily reality, and all the bits of rope and tapestry that come from this weaving is already looking strong and multicoloured. And without being able to make decisions, our grip and control on life was somewhat loosened which is maybe good for us all.

Covid lockdown enabled me to revisit my roots, a surprising journey that we never inteded to make. And with it the Covid-decisions which possibly 11 billion of us have made - some smaller, some larger - which we wouldn’t have made at all had it not been for this u…(no, I can’t write it) pandemic. 

A little way into the summer holidays, J and I noticed the Lozenge was not quite himself. Nothing to put our finger on exactly, just a general aura that maybe only a child's parents would notice. I’d read many accounts of lockdown and school closures being hardest on boys from 9 or so up. His online school had gone so well. He’d run up to his computer every morning, shut himself in, and emerged for lunch with not a complaint. But things were slipping and we knew it.  And when we heard that the school in Oman wasn’t going to open it was an even more sudden slump, seen physically in the level of the Lozenge's shoulders, and it was at that point that we arrived at the junction of a Covid-decision ourselves.

On a little recce to visit a friendly and characterful school in East Scotland, we checked in to a small hotel with children and Debbie the dog - the hotel chosen by the fact that Debbie could share the childrens’ bedroom. The Lozenge had decided for himself, aged 11, that he wanted to try out boarding school rather than face yet more days behind a computer on his own. Over a sticky breakfast buffet the Lozenge explained the idea of his own adventure to me: ‘An adventure isn’t necessarily an achievement. It’s just something you’re pushing yourself to do - to go over your limits. It’s not something you always truly want to do, but it’s rather that you need to do it. So Mummy, I like being abroad becuase it feels like an adventure, but it’s safe because you’re there. And in our own country it’s safe but it would also be an adventure for me to board. And I like feeling both things. I need to have an adventure and feel safe and this way I get both.’
While our hearts strained to imagine months in a row without him in the same house, after more than a decade of this boy, we were also excited for him. We’d been feeling that our collective toolkits had been lacking recently. He is inherently independent by nature. We saw this as we waved him off aged 3, on tiny yellow bus with a butterfly on the side to cross Amman to his nursery school, with no one on the bus that he knew, strapped in by a stern looking lady in a headscarf. But he gave barely a backward glance every morning - just a happy little wave.
‘And you know you might have to fly on your own, sometimes?’ I added. 

‘Yeah, I’m fine with that,’ he said. ‘I’ll probably lose my ticket once, and lose my money once in a slot machine trying to buy a fizzy drink. But I’ll only make those mistakes once, I’m sure.’
But in family life, each of our threads are inextricably linked, and Hamish’s crumpled face said everything our own hearts had been telling us. Rashimi was not ready for a decision like the Lozenge. But the flipside for him was: ‘What will life be like without Laurie?’  I know he’ll still be in the world, but who will rag with me?’’ ‘There’s the Pea,’ we reassured. ‘Yes, but that’s not the same.’

J flew off to begin his job in Oman in late August - another pang of an absence. We wondered to each other: ‘What on earth are we doing? But after going round in conversational circles over a couple of drinks, we kept coming back to the fact there was nothing we would or could rather be doing. So that had to be a sign of something. The Lozenge skipped up the steps to his new school waving behind him, ‘Bye Mummy!’ And I was comforted by the presence of Rashimi and the Pea in the backseat, looking interestedly out of the window at the beginning of their elder sibling’s adventure.  Roots and wings they say you should give your children. I didn’t expect to see those wings so soon, and I’m not sure where the roots are exactly, but at least they are in us as a family - even if we're not static.

We hung back at the Steading for a couple of months, schooling with Mum and Dad as constant support cast, cousins next door and sister and brother within last minute dashing distance, again, for the first time since I was small. The eldest one, always spreading my wings, yet I've never been so grateful for these people. These bricks. My substitute home at a time when we were completely homeless. And as the Lozenge calls it: 'Our constant plan B'. 

October 28th, half term over, a crystal clear autumn evening, the moon building up to a full one. We swept over the sandy hillocks to North Berwick, the Lozenge being DJ with his hand on the music control. A bagpiped Highland Cathedral blaring with us all singing in a different key, and the Lozenge tapping out the new rhythm he’d learned in his pipe band drumming classes. We had fish and chips on a damp, dark beach wall with a wonderful friend and her children (a friend who I worked with in Kabul, no less…who has just settled there) I squeezed the Lozenge goodbye hoping he didn't feel the leaving was different this time as we were about to leave him here and fly to Oman in a few days time. Rashimi and P joined hands around his circumference and leant into their tall brother. 'You're our deposit you know,' I said. 'What do you mean?' 'Well, a deposit is something precious and valuable you leave behind in a shop or a car-hire place as a guarantee that you will come back.' He smirked - maybe his choices will end up affecting ours in this itinerant existence we've chosen. And the Lozenge went tumbling back into his own adventure which he has chosen for himself. As we prepared for ours.

So we arrived at LHR T2 in trademark piddling rain of the damp, misty, wetting kind .The drops that immediately permeate a woollen scarf, incongruously on its way to Oman. The residue sitting in glistening baubles under my chin, we scurried around finding trolleys for the 16 bags, including Debbie the dog - who required an entire trolley of her own in her cage. She was delivered by an amazing company in Colchester called Fetchapet to the sliding doors of the terminal, after all the relevant injections and vet checks. Mum and Dad were not able to come into Heathrow so we had a clunky, damp-hugged farewell by the safety barriers. The only good bit about this goodbye was the fact it was quick, and we were headed in J's direction after 2 months without him.

I thanked Mum for all her help and for being my eternal support and second version of myself in relation to mothering. ‘Darling don’t forget that I am also a beneficiary.’ I realise that her memories of me being 4 years old are probably quite clear. ‘Do you remember taking a big gulp of the sea loch and being so surprised it was salty?’ I didn’t. But I see Petra racing around in her own little life adventure and realise that when she’s my age, I’ll be 85 and I will remember this little girl as clearly as Mum remembers me, provided I still have life and marbles.

A Persian lady from Oman Air spent 1.5 hours with me, sorting out all our bags, knocking figures off the excess price, and being sweet and patient with the children and the dog. Pea and Rashimi went sprinting up and down the wrong way on every travellator they found. One of J's newly married colleagues and his wife were on same rather empty flight as us. I advised them to give us a wide berth which they sensibly did, I noticed. I think I would have given myself a wide berth too...It felt like a different era to the one when J and I were wandering through airport corridors on our own, en route to Afghanistan.
 
The Pea and Rashimi got settled straight away in their seats, ripped open their headphones and plugged into a film. I've been hermetically sealed to these two for the past 8 months - our schooling and eating and playing and almost sleeping laced together again as if they were still babies. I looked down at the grey snaking Thames under a blanket of fog. Here we were leaving the Lozenge and all our family on this chunk of enormous potential in a sea of change. I couldn't let my mind wander to when we would all meet. The certainty has been taken out of all planning to the point that we've stopped it. We took off and I spoke in my head: “Hang in there Britain. We are little but we can still be strong if we stick together and are kind to one another.” It felt almost disloyal leaving the country at a time like this. But then I remembered the words: One can only keep keeping on, beating against the current…avoiding the rocks if we can.’