Mummy Dearest

When I was growing up, it was an indicator of toff-dom if someone still called their mother 'Mummy' after the age of around six or so. We all called ours 'Mum,' without exception (unless we were being sarcastic, when it was: 'Moth-errrr'). Although the transition to Mum-ing was self-conscious, it made us feel a little bit more grown-up, this small claiming of independence.

But for some reason my now-sixteen-year-old son never got around to making the switch, and now, he says, 'it's too late.' He is no toff, but for fear of being thought one by his friends, he finds creative ways to not address me directly in front of them. I don't hold it against him; in private I am still Mummy.

I admit I didn't suggest or encourage him to make the change, because it's lovely being a mummy, isn't it? Mummies feed and comfort, dress booboos and tell stories. It's much harder to be a mum, to be the filter for the dirt and glamour of the world, both armourer and medic against its blows. To share, and show, and teach the ways of the human heart so that love, and beauty, and kindness send down their deep roots, protection against darkness.

To be a shaper of men.

My ten-year-old son echoes his brother, blithely, 'It would sound weird. You're Mummy, not Mum,' but I've seen his friends look at him sidelong and I wonder how long it will be before he stops calling me anything at all. Perhaps I should take pity on them both, make them take this step away from me for their own sake.

Because I am their mum, of course I am, with all the glorious, terrifying responsibility that role carries, and it's my privilege to escort them into manhood.

But I will always be Mummy, too: stroker of brows, soother of hurts, maker of hot chocolate and cookies.

Portland Is Too An Island (Part 2)

Tales from the not-quite-Isle of Portland (Part 1 here)

The story that most captivated me, when I began researching for my novel, was that of Hiram Otter and Hallelujah Bay. The names alone are enough to make you prick up your, erm, eyes, am I right?

West Weares

The story goes that in 1890 or so Hiram, a powerfully-built ex-quarryman and Salvation Army stalwart, single-handedly created a path along the rock-jumbled West Weares to the beautiful cove which was visible from the cliff top, but at the time completely inaccessible on foot. 

Using his bare hands Hiram laboured to shift the boulders and rubble, quarry by-product carelessly tipped over the edge of the cliff in earlier times, and even shaped a few rudimentary steps down to the beach for the beskirted, or less nimble, picnickers he anticipated.

But the times were a-changing, and beaches meant not just picnics, but mixed bathing, revealing clothing, and inappropriate frolicking. Poor Hiram, having cleared the way to the tempting little cove, noted with increasing dismay the behaviour of the beach-goers, and decided to take matters again into his own powerful hands. 

Into the larger boulders that now lined the path to the cove he painted and carved Bible quotations and religious texts, and when these appeared to have no effect on the blithe Portlanders he took to patrolling the shore and the cliffside booming dire admonishments at those disporting themselves on the beach, punctuating each exhortation with a reverberating ‘HALLELUJAH!’

In spite of this, Hiram appears to be remembered fondly on the Island, the little beach he opened up for his neighbours named in his honour.

Sadly, little trace remains of the inscriptions that he carved into the rocks, save (possibly) on one particularly massive boulder, where some think the word that appears might once have been ‘Jessu,’ though it now reads ‘Jessica.’ If you look closely, you can see the little serif flourishes on the first four letters, that must surely have been made by someone skilled in the stonemason’s arts; whereas the last three letters appear to have been punched out by a drill.

Yes, it does look a little like wilful, pointless vandalism - but I prefer to think that Jessica too has a story to tell, about the lover who, in the absence of trees upon which to carve his beloved’s name, took a drill to the serendipitous rock that already bore the first four letters. I hope she appreciated it. But I expect we’ll never know.

Portland Is Too An Island (Part 1)

The Isle of Portland is not actually the home of a Moloch-worshipping blood-sacrifice cult (at least not the one I wrote about), but it is nevertheless a fascinating place. I have recently done a great deal of research on it which I am determined shall not be wasted, and hence I bring to you, patient reader, some of my learnings of interest.

We mock Islanders, don’t we, us Brits. We talk about being ‘on’ the Isle of Wight, the Isle of Man, the Isle of Portland, rather than ‘in’ them – but we never talk about being ‘on’ Britain. For some reason we forget that what we call the mainland is actually an island, too. There must be some kind of unwritten threshold for Island-ness, determined by – what? Size? Distance from another shore? Levels of mistrust between populations?

Hang on, you’re going to say, but Portland isn’t actually an island like those others, is it? It’s connected to the mainland by Chesil Beach. Well, yes, but what you have to realise is that you can’t actually walk from Weymouth to Portland across Chesil – not unless you have calves of titanium, and insteps of bronze, at any rate. The steeply banked pebbles roll and shift under you with every step, the incessant North Atlantic wind batters you, and the waves crashing to your right might seize you at any moment and drag you back to Nova Scotia whence they came.

This means that for most of its history, access to Portland has been by sea only  (as good a definition of an island as any) and its communities as tight-knit and insular as you might expect. Before the wooden bridge was built in the 19^th century, a horse-powered chain ferry across Small Mouth was the only way to get on to the Island – unless you could hitch a lift on a local fisherman’s double-prowed oared lerret – and even King George III made the passage in this way.

So yes, perhaps there developed some ‘mistrust between populations’ – Islanders and what they referred to as ‘England’ giving each other the old narrow-eye. Taking opposing sides even in the Civil War, suspicion, grievance and bigotry has characterised much of the history between them. On Portland, two or three generations’ Island ancestry is required to be rid of the epithet ‘kimberlin’; and on the mainland, inbreeding jibes and casual denigration continue to this day. 

Church Ope Cove. Ouch.

We used to go blackberry-picking on Portland on a Sunday afternoon. Once we lost my sister on the cliffs, two hours of windmilling frenzy, calling and peering over precipices. (She was found, fast asleep, on a ledge that had caught her like a cupped palm when she fell). In the summer we would hunt for fossils at Church Ope Cove, bruise our feet paddling at the rocky shore. Later, my first boyfriend, a Portlander, and I would follow bunny (‘don’t say it!’) trails into abandoned quarries and overgrown Victorian gun batteries, looking for privacy and respite from the relentless wind.

It felt like a wild place, and dangerous - the bare cliffs, the hidden sink-holes opening hundreds of feet to sea-caves under the rock, the MOD range and the sudden sound of gunfire, the looming fortress of the Verne prison. There are few trees on Portland – even three hundred years ago its inhabitants were burning dung for lack of timber – and together with the dreary, huddled stone cottages, it can seem barren and austere to the casual visitor.

Deadman's Cove

But there are riches here, if you care to look, and not just the golden ducats that still occasionally wash up from the ancient wrecks submerged off Deadman’s Cove (now soothingly renamed Chesil Cove). Stories, legends, characters and intrigue veritably drip from the fossil-crusted rocks.

Of which more in Part 2.

Messages From My Wedding Ring

I turned my back on flummery after my first child was born. I was furious: he had presented against all expectation as a boy. Whaaa?? BUT THE RING SAID IT WAS A GIRL!

Suspend the Ring from a chain, or a hair
from your head, over a woman's hand
to discover the sex of her babies

Admittedly, the Ring had form in this regard, having two weeks earlier inaccurately diagnosed my friend Tracey’s baby as male. But I had failed to take heed. I’d assumed there was something the Ring knew that we did not (an earlier pregnancy, concealed or forgotten). Because in my family, where babies were concerned, the Ring was the Oracle. It had correctly predicted the gender of my sister’s baby (boy), and never failed to tell the same story for my mother – girl, girl, boy, boy, boy – or my grandmother – girl, girl, boy, boy.

If you are unfamiliar with the Ring, it works like this: you suspend a gold ring (ideally from a happy marriage) on a chain, or a hair from your head, over a woman’s hand or pregnant belly, and wait until it begins to swing either back-and-forth or in a circle, in order to determine the gender of her children, whether she has already had, or is yet to have them. The ring will report each child one by one, and then be still – circles for a girl and back-and-forth for a boy. Try it, if you haven’t before. You don’t need magic powers; it works for anyone. It’s the kind of thing you think must be a fake, that the person suspending the ring must be somehow influencing the ring’s motion, until you take hold of it yourself. Then you watch as, eerily, the Ring takes on a life of its own, moving at first so minutely you can’t tell the direction, but gradually swinging more strongly until it feels as though it will pull from your fingers. Then it slows, sometimes changing direction, sometimes stopping altogether before beginning again. It is most definitely Weird.

Sonography back then was not what it is now, but still, I could have had confirmation of the baby’s gender at the scan had I wanted it. I didn’t, though – it was more fun to trust the Ring. Because, of course, it didn’t really matter: we ‘just wanted it to be healthy.’ But the shock I experienced when the baby was born the ‘wrong’ gender forced me to acknowledge how much faith I’d actually put in this bizarre ritual.

It's not as if I'd even especially wanted a girl – I'd just wanted to be able to plan and dream and prepare. I had a name and a fond diminutive for my baby, I talked to her constantly in my mind, imagining dresses and dolls and makeup and shopping. Had the Ring said it was going to be a boy, I would have visualised ball games, climbing frames and Lego instead – but the truth is, it was very difficult to imagine a male creature coming from my female body. It felt right that the baby inside me would be a girl, and so I gladly accepted the Ring’s prediction, sparing not a thought for the alternative.

I wasn’t proud of my reaction when the surprise son turned up, in fact I was completely mortified that I’d been so foolish; but nonetheless it took a while for me to accept that the stranger I’d been preparing to receive into my life had turned out to be somebody else entirely – and the shock meant that it took longer than it should have done to bond with my baby.

The second time around, I knew I had to know for certain, and even paid for a second scan when the first one didn’t yield a conclusive result. I wasn’t really surprised to hear that it was – yes, another boy.

That afternoon, I made a little time to grieve for the daughter I would now never meet – I knew there would be no more children after this one. My husband caught me crying and was upset – why wasn’t I rejoicing about the baby I was having, the fact he was healthy and whole, our luck in conceiving him? It was difficult to explain that I needed to let go of the hope-daughter, the little girl I had carried in my heart for six years, before I could truly rejoice.

And I was so glad I had a chance to do this before my gorgeous son was born, because it meant that this time around the joy was completely unalloyed.

Recently there’s been some grumbling in the press about the latest craze for baby-gender-cake parties, and the modern preference against ‘being surprised.’ Speaking for myself, I was hugely grateful for the advance notice, although I probably wouldn’t have chosen to find out my baby’s gender through the medium of cake. 

I’m not criticising anyone who does. After all, I was the one taking messages from a wedding ring. Seriously, though, try it yourself. And then explain it to me….

In the Service of the Demon

In Memoriam: Zahra Bani-Yaghoub 16 October 1980-13 October 2007.

Tongue removed from cheek today, to share the inspiration behind my story 'In the Service of the Demon', recently published in the Willesden Herald anthology 'New Short Stories 6.'

It wasn't Zahra's story I wrote. I do not know it; I did not know her. But reading about her tragic death gave me a reason to persevere with a story I had lost faith in my ability to tell, and the confidence to send it out into the world.

Like a tree in spring, my life is full of blossom
I have a lap full of flowers-who should I give them to?
Oh breeze of life, come to me tonight
As otherwise I will not last so full of flowers until dawn.

I had been writing about the Iran I remembered from 1978-79, the time just before the bloody people's Revolution which drove out the Shah along with a whole tier of Iranian society, including ex-pat families like my own. I knew I needed a contemporary perspective, but I was already struggling with issues of cultural legitimacy and ownership, and I was afraid. Who was I to claim insight into the struggles of Iran's women under the Islamic regime? I was a child when I lived in Iran, and although I experienced directly the early throes of the uprising, and sympathised with the exiles' painful nostalgia for the vanished beauties of this ancient land, my family had fled as the barricades drew in, and the reforms I suffered growing up were Thatcher's, not Khomeini's.

Zahra Bani-Yaghoub was a young doctor practising medicine in a poverty-stricken, remote Iranian town prior to selecting a speciality and completing her studies back in Tehran. She and her fiancé were strolling in a public park on a warm autumn day when they were arrested by a 'morality squad'. Her fiancé was quickly released, but Zahra was kept overnight until her parents could arrive to claim her. They were presented two days later with her lifeless, battered corpse.

I'd read book after book, mostly harrowing first-person memoirs, of lives that began in innocence and happiness and ended in oppression, humiliation and brutality. But I'd had no idea how I might begin to condense a narrative thread that was respectful and authentic, until I came across the news piece about Zahra's death. It was at the back of the paper, almost an afterthought, and it snagged me, would not leave my mind for days. The journalist's sorrow and passion, the resignation with which he appeared to accept that interest from the West in the story would be limited, and action non-existent, awoke in me an answering anger, and finally I began to see how I might stand witness.

What struck me was not what I shared with Zahra, the things we had in common - gender, education, a loving family - but a key difference. She was a devout Muslim. At the time of her arrest, her head was fully covered as the law required. There had been no kissing, no hand-holding, no touching at all - she and her fiancé strolled a respectful foot or so apart. The two of them were able to prove that they were engaged to be married, indeed had actually contracted a legal 'temporary marriage,' and were therefore permitted to be alone in each other's company. SHE FOLLOWED ALL THE RULES. Despite this, so her friends and family believe, she was raped and beaten to death.

"Now people see that even an ordinary person does not have basic security; and a person simply can get arrested on a street and, instead of returning home, their bodies are buried in a cemetery." - journalist Isa Saharkhiz.

This comment haunted me. I had been trying to understand Iran's problems from my own place of safety, but suddenly it clicked: it was not people like me the zealots hated, but people not like them - as it always is. What's more, it was clear that to be female in Iran was to be both dangerous, and in danger.

The two female characters in 'In the Service of the Demon' are ordinary Iranian girls. They are not rebels, activists or feminists. They are getting on with their lives in a place where simply wearing sandals without socks can earn you a whipping. And while the regime claims a divine mandate, Roya and Pari understand that the path to God does not require State mediation.

I will not submit, Roya says in the story. She is echoing the many brave Iranians kicking against a regime that would deny them their very being.

The authorities continue to insist Zahra's  death was suicide, and to date there has still been no judicial investigation into the circumstances behind it.

Arsing About

I am eyeing up the narrow gap between wardrobe and wall for bookshelf-potential, and feeling sheepish. I have tried to love my Kindle, honestly I have - it's the future! Printed books are such old-tech! But the novels I've downloaded to it have been languishing there for months, and the truth is, I just don't fancy them in their virtual, space-saving incarnations. So more shelves it is.

BENNO shelf units, if you're interested

It feels a bit retro, putting in shelves for books. Shelving, the serious, devoting-entire-walls-to-IKEA-Billy-combos kind, is for your DVDs and your X-Box games, these days. Is it that people don't read any more, or do they just not hang on to their books? I'm pretty sure it's not that e-readers are winning. But I have to confess to a degree of involuntary intellectual snobbery when I discover that people have plastic boxes, rather than books, on their shelves. I know, how condescending. Those boxes could be filled with art-house film, noir classics and international cinema - but all I can see is a whole lot of arse-time.

Meaning, unproductive arse-time, for of course reading is also entirely arse-based. But reading requires active participation in a way that cinema or gaming do not - a working imagination isn't a pre-requisite for either, because they do all the work for you - and perhaps that's how I came to feel, without really thinking about it, that reading [the reader] is superior to watching [the arser].

I realise it's ridiculous to judge people by what they have on their shelves. Especially now, when the means of mediating the wide world are so multifarious. Novels are my bridge-of-choice, but ultimately it's entertainment I seek from them, and in that I'm no different from gamer or sofa-slumper. The difference, I suppose, is what one takes away, the degree to which the experience is actively processed, one's worldview adjusted or expanded. And shelved titles, whether books, games or DVDs, are no guide at all when it comes to gauging that.

We Just Borrow Them

My baby is leaving home. 

Not for another ten years - he's only eight - but today it began, the leaving.

On Saturdays I wake up early (nine, but it feels early because everyone except Small is still in bed) and creep downstairs to make breakfast for Small and me: our Saturday Toast Together. During the week everyone breakfasts separately, shoveling cereal in between getting dressed and hunting down PE kits, but Saturday breakfasts are sacred, a weekly ritual my youngest son and I have shared for years. Even if his dad gets up before I do, Small defers his breakfast until I come down to share it with him. I make us a big pile of jammy, buttery toast, and we snuggle up on the sofa and watch Spongebob while we scoff it.

Except this morning we didn't. I'd thought it would be something else that would go first - the cuddle in bed in the morning, perhaps, the hug at the school gates, the spontaneous kisses. I hadn't expected it to be this innocuous rite. And I knew it would hurt - I've been through it once already, with Tall - but I had forgotten how brutal it feels, how lonely, this casual but so necessary sloughing.

'Toast please, Mummy. But not Together, okay?' He sees my face. 'It doesn't really matter, does it? It's not important.' There seems to be something in my throat. I can't make a reply, and I bend my head to the toaster.

Unreasonably, I am angry, and I slam the plate of toast on to the table, leaving him on his own with Spongebob.

I spend all day feeling aggrieved and resentful, and do not respond when he tries to hug me.

Later, eating pizza all together on the sofa, he takes my arm and drapes it around his shoulders. 'Oh, I love being home,' he says. 'I love telly. I love the sofa. I love my family.' I kiss the top of his head, and his hair smells of cherries and autumn leaves.