Homage to a neighbour

I got up early for a Sunday; was glad I did so as I was in time to catch my nephew C, who'd come over to collect some of my mother's unwanted kitchen items for his new pad in Glasgow. 21 years old, Connor recently graduated from Uni and is now 'going out in the world to seek my fortune" as he puts it. I asked him for a picture, and he promptly popped on a badger mask! Lucky I'd snapped him earlier, and I've put this in as an extra shot. C's leaving today ties in with his arrival into the world, one stormy night in 1993. This in turn ties in with my blip subject: Mrs N''s house.

As we passed the next door neighbour's house later in the day, on the way to Archattan priory fete, my niece Jezzie remarked that the old-lady occupant, Mrs N, had died recently. I was saddened to hear that, for she'd lived a reclusive life, both before and after her husband, a naval commander, was killed in a car accident on Mull in the late 1970s. She seemed afraid of people and events: her house, rural in the extreme and located on a single-track road, had its gateways barricaded off with signs saying "No Turning". She she once complained to my mother that there was so much traffic on the road that "you can hardly call it countryside anymore: more like the middle of London". In 2010, my mother had her water supply disconnected for about 2 weeks following a flood and the refurbishing of her kitchen. Mrs N did not make it known until AFTER it was reconnected that they shared a water main, and she would have appreciated some notice. She'd put up with having no water for two whole weeks, rather than raise her voice. We felt very guilty, having had no idea about the shared main.

Mrs N was also known to buy vast quantities of tinned porridge in the delicatessen in town, saying that they were for her 'visitors'. No one ever saw any evidence of visitors. Certainly there were no cars or additional comings and goings.
This quiet, shy lady befriended my youngest sister M in the 1970s, when M was a child. Mrs C even amazed us all by coming around one Christmas in the 1980s with a present for M: a beatiful illustrated anthology of poetry for children. Perhaps M was the child she'd never had: I believe she'd had an routine operation that rendered her childless.

On the night of my nephew C's birth, just after Christmas 1993, my sister M (21 by then) was driven by my mother to Oban maternity hospital (they still had one then)! The team there sent her off to the district hospital (standard treatment for most primagravidas) at Balloch, near Loch Lomond. It was a wild, stormy night, and we heard no more progress reports after a rushed call from Oban at about midnight. We tried not to imagine a roadside delivery. Tanya (TMLHereandThere), Kate and I, M's three sisters, stayed up till about four in the morning, watching the waves boiling on the loch, and playing a spin-the-bottle game involving which of our extended family would be the next to reproduce. (We had nine cousins, and five siblings to choose from, and got the order hilariously wong).

We stumbled off to bed eventually, and at some point in the morning, I was awoken by a furious tapping on the front door. It was Mrs N.

"You have a nephew!" It's a little boy!"

she cried, and ushered Tanya and Kate over to her house to use the phone. Ours was out of order, it seemed. This was the only time any of us ever set foot in her house, apart from M. Kate was struck by the elegance, and the AGA, in her kitchen.

From the phone call they gathered that my mother only just managed to drive over the hill known as Rest and be Thankful before the blizzard closed in. They got to the hospital, and C was born at 8.45 am, a healthy boy. A few days later, he, his mother M and his father came home to our mother's house, next to Mrs N's.

Moving back to the present, we all went to the annual fete at the priory, and I did not disgrace myself at Bagatelle. In fact, I won top prize, a whole £5. Considering I've never played Bagatelle in my life, I was rather chuffed. Talking of chuffed, I've blipped an additional pic of my nephew H, (C's little brother), my niece Jezzie and the boy driver on a model engine ride. thought if was funny: it's so obvious that H is the only one who has his heart in it! He's 13 but looks a lot younger.

On the way back from the priory, I chatted with Kate about Mrs N. We decided to go and look around her garden, which had become distinctly overgrown, despite she the presence of an occasional gardener. We'd always wanted to look around, because it was so Out of Bounds. The children had gone on ahead of us, so we hopped over the fence, and trod the pathways. We admired the ruined driveway, and peered through the windows. A sight of gentle decline, both inside and out, met our eyes. I didn't want to linger, not around the house, despite catching a glimpse of a four-poster bed in one room, but I WAS interested in the architecture, because Mrs N's father had built that house, and then gone on to rebuild ours, extending it from a mere butt-and-ben (two-room dwelling) into a much larger property. Unfortunately it was the 1950s by then, and the building materials were shoddy. Nonetheless, TML (my sister) will recognise the similarity between this bay window (Mrs N's bedroom?) and my mother's living room bay. There are no lovely roses growing over there, and the chimney has recently been removed. The garden is not looking its best right now.

It is sobering to glimpse these two separate views of old-ladyhood: my mother's house, which I've been helping to clear, and Mrs N's, which is lying untended so far. We don't know who the heirs are. They could be in Texas or Townsville, for all I know. If the garden were tended, and the house cleared up, it could be a superb property with lochside views. But for now, It's the little things that are so poignant: the folding wheelchair in Mrs N's kitchen; the Lanacane ointment and talcum poweder in Mrs N's bathroom; the stockpile of Imperial Leather soap in my mother's. Mrs N''s piles of folded bedlinen; my mother's heap of bank deposit slips and old cheques dating back to1974.

Social historians would say that our lives are made up of such minutiae. They would not be wrong, but they do not show us the moments when we rise above the mundane: our hours in the full daylight, the times when we know we are in the acendancy, when nothing can go awry. Of course, it does,eventually, but those moments linger as memories, perhaps bittersweet.

I couldn't say when my mother's heyday was. She is moving to live with someone who's been close to her heart, as they say in romantic novels, for a long time. As for Mrs N''s moment in the sun, I cannot begin to imagine. Perhaps it was when she was newly wed to a dashing Commander. I realise that I have absolutely no idea how old she was. Over eighty, perhaps? How long since I last saw her riding her bicycle along the road by loch Etive? To me, she was eternally old, apart from the morning she turned into a flushed, excited girl: the day she broke the news of C's birth.

PS I am back blipping from a cafe in Cornwall, and the extra photos won't load