capturing a robin

The forest opposite my childhood home

I'm reading my favourite book for the third time. It is a buoy in an unsettled and uncertain moment in my life. The story so captures me I forget about this day, and am transported to an age before cars, before World War 1, when a passing bicycle would create such a stir that folk would run to their gates to gawp and wonder. The book is Lark Rise to Candleford by Flora Thompson. 

A memory was sparked as I read of a village woman catching birds for the sport of it. Hidden, patient, holding the end of a length of string in her hand, the string tied to a stick, which had a sieve propped upon it and a sprinkling of crumbs beneath as bait. When I was small my father taught me how to catch a bird using such a method, just once, crouched behind our honeysuckle hedge, capturing a robin red breast and letting it go. Now I understand, from the vantage point of passing years what he was teaching me. My father didn't give me much in the conventional sense of what fathers are meant to be for daughters but he taught me something beyond words that day, a childhood in rural Scotland, a childhood where he hunted to eat, a childhood of ingenuity, responsibility and patience, of soil, and rain, and cold. 

My dad drew a circle on our dust path once, explaining that the Earth was hot at its core, together we uprooted a dead tree for our fire, we caught a robin and then let it go and all these things cause this 47 year old woman's heart to ache. I was born a month before his 55th birthday. Sieve, stick, string, crumbs. My Dad was odd in Essex, always mistaken for my Granddad, rake thin, venturing into the forest to drag home trees to burn.

At school, I excitedly shared capturing a bird with my father, writing about it or telling the teacher. I remember my confusion and shame as the teacher told me it was a horrible story and cruel, with classmates pulling faces. As is the way of small children I wasn't able to ask why she said that and became withdrawn and quiet, realising something of otherness, oddness and unbelonging. 

robert

My father, Robert James Logan died on this day in 1990.

ruby

In the summer of 1990 I worked in a nursing home for a couple of months before heading off to university. My father had died in the June and I left home for Derby in September. 

My father spent the last months of his life in hospital, dying on the morning of June 2nd. Watching him slowly fade, gaunt, with bedsores and towards the end his oxygen starved brain leading to confusion, I was a teenager with a larger than most experience of ageing, and a teenager in deep, profound distress. Working in a care home was a strange choice looking back, like prising my eyes open with matchsticks and forcing myself to gaze unblinking at suffering, failing bodies, death. Was I numb? Did I feel some duty? I do not know.

There was a woman in the home who was dreadfully confused, behaving as a toddler. If left on the toilet for too long she would smear herself, her thighs, walking stick with excrement. I remember being on my hands and knees washing her, verbally scolding her. In some part of her brain she knew she had done wrong and whimpered a little. In her room was a black and white photograph taken in the 1930's of a stylish, smiling young woman with beautifully waved dark hair, she had on pencil pleat shorts, gorgeous legs and was perched on the back of a motorbike. Young, at ease, carefree, loved, our reality and the image at odds, and I've never forgotten that moment. She was a girl just like me. 

Just once I went into Rudy's room, the curtains were drawn and in the dim light I could make out a naked figure on the bed, she lay on her back and was so thin, I recall my shock at seeing the outline of her spine through her stomach. The room smelt of urine, and Ruby was conscious, eyes open, uncomfortable, my memories are vague, that we turned her, bed sores being present in many... Outside, I felt a shiver of enjoyment from a staff member who regarded my reaction, probably assuming that was my first encounter with death, having no understanding of my own recent trauma.

Death was in that room, and I hope it came soon. Over the years I've thought about Ruby, never forgetting her name, never seeing her girl self photograph. I also think of the other woman, the one who's name escapes me, but her image does not, the young creature, radiant at the beginning of her womanhood. Its been almost 26 years since these experiences, their families do not know they are with me, that I sing for their bones. 

Around this time I remember sitting at a bus stop, an old woman glancing at me turned to her friend and said loud enough for me to hear, Young people today don't know their born,  depressed, newly bereaved, working in a care home I vowed never to be that unseeing woman. 

1916

My dad was born on the 11th of March 1916. To commemorate this I traveled to Scotland, walked to the cottage he was born in and planted daffodils by the front door. Soft rain fell, garden birds chirruped in the hedgerows and squawked my approach from the treetops. Snowdrops in their prime lit the way, turning my thoughts towards hope and renewal. Standing in the garden of the derelict cottage I felt very at home, though my father left this home in his youth the place echoed him. A shed full of rusting nails, bare gnarly apple trees, a slab path running the length of the cottage. HE was palpable.

I knocked on the door and considered time, of my grandmother Alexina birthing her last born on this day 100 years before, of me peering in the windows, haunting ghosts. Crouching down to dig I found rich dark soil, the sword like spikes of the daffodils pleasingly green against this earth. I left a note written in green ink, knowing it would wash away as rain pattered down, spreading, erasing my heartfelt words. I think of these daffodils now, hoping they bloom brightly, a token of life lived now as I acknowledge my father, my roots.

 Elgin

 Plant associated with Clan Logan - Furze (Gorse)

 Road to Easter Calcots

 Joynters Cottages

 Falkland Islands penny

 Haunting the long dead and gone...

 Geese

Memorial

things my dad left

A scored ceiling tile that can never be disguised with paint. When I lay in the bath at my mum's house my eyes are always drawn to a particular spot on the ceiling. The tiles show my dad's thinking process and learning as he stuck them to the ceilings curve. The tile by the wall is scored deeply with a knife to bend along the curve, the next one is scored lightly and the next pressed into place with no scoring. The third looks best. If it was me I would have taken off the first two tiles and reapplied them, not my dad, he just kept going. In fact, he didn't keep going and the ceiling remained unfinished years before his death and I completed the job much later. My own learning still shows too as a couple of the tiles are cut too big and bow downwards. On reflection this may have been the only 'project' my dad and I worked on (unknowingly) together, a conversation in polystyrene tiles, he began and I finished.

A pear tree. 

An apple tree, an Epicure - very tasty.

A slab path and patio and brick planters for flowers. 

dad

A days walking ritual from Elgin to Lossiemouth and back in forgiveness and in honour of my father Robert Logan.