Walking Back Home 6: Autumn Leaves

IN THE two weeks since I took this photo of a tiny sumach tree – ‘Tiger’s Eyes’ – in my front garden, the multi-coloured leaves have all shrivelled to a crisp, and are now hanging by delicate threads, ready, at the next puff of a breeze, to drop and die. September’s stillness has shifted into a season of relentless change. The wind blew madly all last night. A sound I find haunting and comforting, all at the same time. It’s like being the last person alive, listening to that noise, pummelling through the neighbourhood. Very alone, but enlivened, too. I do love autumn. And, as an October baby – this is the month that resonates most deeply. It’s a thrillingly destructive time – when everything is being stripped away in a final blaze of colour. A creative time too: my source and new beginning. Even the word I find beautiful – round and symmetrical: October.

There haven’t been many Walks Back Home recently, as teaching work at the theatre has begun again in earnest, and several Big Ticket events – a beautiful family wedding, two birthdays within three days (mine and my daughter’s), and a couple of city festivals – have taken me away from any hope of quiet routine and restoring country rambles. The B12 anaemia and associated debilitations that triggered my need for a regular Walk Back to Health in the first place, still conspire to create a mountain of fatigue. Go walking, or sneak in a daytime kip instead? The latter has an undeniable sleepy charm…

But on Thursdays – today – I always look after Badger, a big and beautiful lolloping black hound. A great asset and source of doggy good cheer: and a welcome bounce, once a week, since the death of our dog Muffin in 2012 has left the house somewhat bereft of animal spirits. Because of Badger, a Thursday walk is always on the agenda. He would be happy to walk anywhere at all, he’s not fussy, so long as fetching-of-ball or chewing-of-stick is involved, ad infinitum. Finding someone else’s ball, moreover, is his greatest satisfaction. So today, we took with us a silly pink tennis ball – definitely not his in the first place, but certainly not fit for anyone else now, since it has been utterly destroyed by a set of monster jaws and paws. He runs and catches compulsively. Being a hybrid springer spaniel and golden retriever means he is hardwired to do nothing but that – retrieve, over and over and over again. It’s forever Groundhog Day with Badger. But very good fun.

Roundhay Park, a mile up the road in North East Leeds, is our usual stamping ground. (Here’s something I wrote about this splendid space in On: Yorkshire magazine). After last night’s winds there were huge piles of leaves – orange, red, yellow and russet – to dive into, head first (dog), and joyfully rustle around in (dog and human). We were, to quote John Updike, “Giving the mundane its beautiful due.” Sky. Earth. Leaves. Wind. With the colour of countless autumns falling about our feet, we traipsed along aimlessly, and happily enough. Taking a natural break from an over-busy mind (mine), and satisfying an animal need (his) to run and run and simply wave that wonderful tail. Just one blowy, ordinary, meandering October day. Enough.

For more on animal spirits and the delight of small things, read Old Dog by Barney Bardsley

Walking Back Home 5: A View from the Shed

AUGUST ALWAYS runs away from me. I find it such a curious – and rather downbeat – month: everyone is scattered to the four corners, the days are amorphous and sprawling, nothing conforms to a routine… And there is always a hint of melancholy. The whisper that summer will soon be over: time to get busy and go back to school. And oh, the slow, soft dying of the light.

Anyway, the “walk” this time is really no such thing. It is a view – from inside my tiny, scruffy shed, onto my equally scruffy and overgrown garden. What can I see? An elegant though rampant plum smokebush, Cotinus “Grace”, one of the first plants I grew in my very first garden – bought for me as a birthday gift from my mother, and so always reminding me of her. (I plant a new one, wherever I go.) And next to “Grace” is a tall Crocosmia “Firebird” – strong and scarlet and entirely splendid  – transplanted from my long-lost allotment and redolent of hot, sticky summers spent there, digging the heavy Yorkshire clay to exhaustion, then lounging  against the wall of another mighty shed, and forgetting myself in the cheerful chaos of a semi-wild urban space, away from home and reality and every grown-up chore.

Being in the garden always does this to me – reminds me of places, people, times gone by. As film maker and remarkable gardener Derek Jarman once wrote, “I walk in this garden, holding the hands of dead friends.” I do that too. And it doesn’t feel sad or regretful to me – rather, it gives me strength,  fills in the gaps of my life, and puts the beautiful solid ground back beneath my feet.

It is good to be a solitary, I think. Time to gaze and wonder – floating away from the worrisome world and back to the centre of the self. To stillness. The garden is a real aid to this dreaming.From my perch in the shed, I watch masses of bumblebees working the pollen on a shaggy lavender bush. And look up at the skyline to see the trees of the little local wood, where I walked my dog, day in, day out, for 13 years – the dog whose ashes are now scattered there under  a big old holly tree. (Although in my mind her spirit still dances a jig of freedom –  scrabbling through the undergrowth and leaping over fallen tree branches –  always in pursuit of the squirrel-that-got-away.) Sometimes, I just look at the sky itself, and that is enough. Shape-shifting clouds in a vault of blue. Or grey, as the case has often been, this particular August. No matter. Sky is sky.

I do love to be among people – but it’s always such a relief to return to being alone. Perhaps that’s the writer in me, naturally introspective, with a teeming and unruly inner life.  There’s so much going on in my head, being exposed to the contents of other people’s for too long is tiring and overwhelming. The garden provides a useful corrective to this – wordless, mute.

Last weekend I broke the rule of a life time (which is never to talk to more than one writer at a time – it makes me far too nervous!) and spent two days mixing with a huge gaggle of writers at Swanwick Writers Summer School in Derbyshire, England – a kind of holiday camp for would-be novelists, crime writers, travel journalists and essayists of all ages and temperaments. The food consumed, the pints downed, the heated conversations had, were prodigious, dizzying. By the end of Day Two, I could feel my head begin to burst with the relentless over-stimulation.

But put me in a room, as a tutor with a particular subject to teach, and a bunch of people ready to write, and I am in my element again. The short course I taught this time was “Diving for Pearls: Writing about Loss and Recovery”. Circumstance has made this a recurring theme for me – with rather too much personal experience of it for my liking. But everyone, young and old, brings with them their shadows and griefs. And they have a light to shine. The people at Swanwick were particularly generous and courageous with their contributions. Making pearls from plenty of hard grit.

Meditation is a natural thing for me – I practise a sitting and walking form of it almost every day. And then, when I am outside with the flowers (and the weeds), the garden practises it back on me. But there is a particular stillness that falls, I find, when people sit in a shared space and write together. “You have ten minutes to write something about ‘A Pleasurable Thing’…” I say. “And now ten minutes on ‘A Moment of Loss’.” The heads go down. The pens – or laptops – spring into action. A perfect silence settles in the room. And magic happens. Always.

People are endlessly inventive, fascinating, surprising….And yet it is so lovely to leave them and return to the shelter of my rickety little shed. To some solitary wondering. To the strange disorientation of August: summer’s last quiet breathing out, before the busy, busy breezes of September put a different juice in my veins altogether.

A Handful of Earth/Barney Bardsley, is still available here:

http://amzn.to/1LaWt8Z

Old Dog/Barney Bardsley, is published by Simon and Schuster:

http://bit.ly/1MsD3zF

Walking Back Home 4: Water

I LOVE water. Rivers. The sea. And even that miniature pond on my long-lost allotment, which was only a finger deep, but teemed with plants and wildlife – frogspawn, dragonflies, water boatmen – and gave me such drifting, timeless pleasure, as I sat on my shed step and gazed over its murky little surfaces… So my walk today definitely had water in mind. Meanwood Park in North East Leeds is a bountiful stretch of land, encompassing both park and play area – and a wilder, stiller terrain beyond, all hung about with rocky outcrops, shaded woods and a deep valley, with a river running through it. To be honest, the water didn’t look too happy on this particular bright June morning. It was sluggish and dark. There seemed to be problems of drainage, a block to its free flow of movement. But still it was lovely to be beside it again: to cross the tiny bridge near the ‘Hustlers’ Row’ of cottages, to stand for a while with friends and chat, and to let memories surface, as inevitably they do, when you return to familiar territory after a little time away.

Back in the days when my husband Tim was still alive, when our dog still leapt and ran, with scant regard for caution or good sense, and when our daughter  Molly – now fully grown and graduated – was only little, we used to come to Meanwood and wander through the trees, and play. That time feels almost prehistoric now  – ‘the past is a foreign country’, as L.P.Hartley tells us in ‘The Go-Between’. But yesterday, as I walked the same tracks and river banks, echoes of those old times still seemed to linger in the trees, under the surface of the water: joining the past, rather sweetly, with the present moment. Bringing it all back home.

I used to play Pooh Sticks on the bridge with Tim and Molly. And I remember a whole afternoon spent in the steep and densely green Hollies, on the other side of the Meanwood Trail, building a tiny intricate dam of sticks and pebbles across a trickle of stream. Splashing in, splashing out. Sticks, stones, damp moss – and lots of dirt. We paused to eat our packed lunch on a big old rock – that felt as if it had been there since the beginning of time, so triumphant and still and sturdy did it feel beneath our bony bums. We were four adults that day. One child. One dog. And it’s hard to say who enjoyed it most. Just messing about by the river. Like countless others, before and since, doing the simplest of things with the deepest pleasure.

There is a purpose for me to these sporadic walks and meanderings (see ‘Walking Back Home 1’). They are as much for the spirit as the body. A walking cure. My convalescence from illness in 2014 is taking longer than I imagined. I am not used to being so debilitated for so long and it’s vexing my patience, to say the least. Although now on an even keel after struggling with B12 anaemia, a new challenge has emerged, of a Frozen Shoulder, which has stopped me in my dancing tracks, and plays havoc with my sleep during the night, and many activities during the day. I am doing most things one-armed –  since the other one, as my Alexander Technique teacher put it, with uncharacteristic bluntness, is currently “like a piece of rusty old metal” hanging at my side. Chronic pain is horrible. It is also humbling. It triggers in me a new compassion for my late husband – whose breathtaking, intransigent shoulder convulsions concealed a problem (cancer) far more sinister than my own; and for my new neighbour, who suffered a stroke in her forties, and now struggles both to walk and to speak. Yet her smile is always radiant and warm. So a little perspective is a helpful  thing. And walking brings a lightness of spirit. Just being outside  does the trick.

Underneath the action, meanwhile, is a necessary stillness. When I was a very small child, before I could even walk, my mother used to sit me on a blanket in the back garden with a little book, one just big enough to fit my miniature grasp, called ‘Progress and Poverty’ – a Victorian hardback brought from my grandfather’s extensive library of self improving edicts. (He was a pious man.) I couldn’t yet read, but already I felt the power and pull of literature, sensed it, through the physical manifestation of words – the beauty and solace of The Book itself. What I think I loved most, well before the magic of literacy was revealed to me, was the self-containment, the silence and focus, that the book-as-object seemed to signify. I’ve always been a dreamer, a natural contemplative. Born into a family of energetic ‘do-ers'(with the exception of my father, whom I take after in many ways) I always seemed to fade to the edges of our busy household, desperate for my own space, for a quiet moment. Breathing space. (See  ‘A Breathing Space’)

These days that powerful inward pull is channelled and assuaged by regular meditation. On most Sundays, I cross another little bridge – the original Leeds Bridge in the city centre – and gaze at a different body of water, the River Aire, on my way to Leeds Buddhist Centre, where I sit with a diverse group of people in total silence for up to three separate sessions in the space of a morning. The simplicity and serenity of this practise – sitting, waiting, breathing – is utterly compelling to me. And whilst I would not dignify myself with the description ‘Buddhist’ ( too flawed, too secular, too hectic for that, I fear), I am certainly drawn to its philosophy of compassion and calm. And I am more than happy to embrace a discipline whose figurehead – the Buddha – is often embodied as a chubby, smiling, earthy figure – someone who died at a healthy old age, and in peace, as opposed to the tortured, youthful, bleeding Christ, hoisted up on a cross to remind us perpetually of our suffering and guilt.

Listening to your own thoughts can be deafening and bewildering, of course. The mind teems with its own madness. And ‘just breathing’ in stillness is a process far more arduous than my hyperactive friends and family might ever imagine. But it’s a little like exercising – for the mind. When you go running, you just want it to STOP. But the afterglow is rewarding and gorgeous. When you sit in meditation – your brain batters you with wave after wave of obsessive thought, or even mind-numbing trivia. But when you finish: the refreshment blows, like cool spring breezes, through body and soul. Don’t just do something: sit there. A lot to be said for it, I reckon.

To read one of my Guardian pieces – about my dear dog Muffin – go to:

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/sep/06/family.cancer

Walking Back Home 3

There is something almost obscene about a rhododendron in full flower. With their massive blooms and brash, bright colours, they come on like some brassy, bosomy madam – only too eager to share their fulsome wares with anyone who’s around. It took a while for me to love them, as a gardener with a preference for the softer, more muted members of the garden family: but I do love them now. They are so…unabashed. So frankly loud. So gorgeously vulgar.

My walk this week, with two singing friends, Mary and Eileen, was in the grounds of Temple Newsam in East Leeds, a fantastic 1500 acre estate in East Leeds, which was first owned in 1520 by Lord Darcy, but is now in the gift of Leeds City Council. Power to the people – even if it took 400 years!  There is everything to enchant here, really, with the elegant Tudor buildings, a little farm for the children, walled gardens, a lake, and beyond that, miles and miles of rambling woodland. Also, most importantly, there is a tea room.

Since ‘walking back home’ is all about gaining strength and good humour, in recovery from a debilitating anaemia, I am not very interested in long hikes: at least, not yet. I still struggle with muscle aches – and the recent agonising addition of a Frozen Shoulder – which are all legacy of last year’s illness – and so short bursts of fresh air suit me better than the demanding rigours of “proper walking”.

Consequently we didn’t go far. We ambled. We took our time. Much like the cattle, and new calves, who came forward to meet us and say a lazy hello, after lifting their heads from their grazing, on the broad sweeping uplands in front of  the main house. The newborn of spring – birds, lambs, calves – are everywhere right now. And they bring a lift to the heart: all shiny, new and guileless. An absolute poem to the new and the hopeful in life.

Anyway, the undisputed stars today were certainly in evidence, by the walled garden, through towards the woods, and down by the lake. Rhododendrons. In all their gaudy glory. Shocking pink, sherbet orange, deep vermilion, thick, painterly white – with huge blossoms, and fat, gnarled branches and trunks, showing the strength and tenacity that supports all that technicolour showing off. (The picture I’ve included is of one of the quieter specimens, for sure.) All rhododendrons love the acid soil of Leeds, and are popping up in gardens – and in wilder spaces like Temple Newsam, Meanwood, the Hollies – with absolute gay abandon now. Go see them, if you are anywhere near. And take your sunglasses. You’ll need protection.

Here’s a longer feature from me on Temple Newsam, written a few years back –  exploring the wilder edges of the estate:

Temple Newsam- The People’s House

P.S. Apparently the rhododendron is the national flower of Nepal. Given the horror of their recent earthquakes, how much those people are in need of flowers: and of huge amounts of aid, and of healing. I dedicate this little post to them. 

Walking Back Home 2

I love trains. In particular, steam trains. So atmospheric. So ponderous and noisy and smelly – so labour intensive and gloriously pointless – going nowhere, slowly. Full of days-gone-by. Of dreamy ‘what if’s’ and ‘maybes’. The ghost of “Brief Encounter”, wafting poignantly into the twenty first century. They remind me of my childhood – most of which, as the only girl to two older,  railway-obsessed brothers, I spent, cold and wet, waiting on some god forsaken station for a magical train (with a coveted number plate) to finally arrive, so we could all, mercifully, go back home again. Nostalgia makes me dewy eyed. What bored me rigid then, enchants me now.

So my latest walk, last weekend, was a particular treat. It was preceded by a ride – with my friend Geoff, who likes a dreamy little, going-nowhere adventure quite as much as I do – on a tiny heritage railway, from Bolton Abbey, in the Yorkshire Dales, to Embsay. The journey was all of four miles. Then, after a twenty minute wait on Embsay station, whilst the little engine chuntered back and forth, to the click click clicking of the points and the busy, coal-faced scurryings of the volunteer drivers and guards… we went all the way back again, through the bluebell and primrose banks, to where we began. Into the station cafe for a cup of tea and a cake. Then, finally, off for a walk down the lane and into the hedgerows towards Bolton Abbey itself, a 12th century ruin now developed into a vast and glorious estate.

Everywhere the birds were singing fit to bust. And the lambs were picture book plump and curious, coming up close to peer at us through the brambles, occasionally breaking into a little skip and jump, but mostly lolling about by their mums, or snoozing in the impossibly juicy, grassy – quintessentially English – heartbreakingly beautiful, countryside green.

The combination of a very slow train and a very quiet walk to follow, was both mesmerising and reviving, all at the same time. Reverie is an essential tool in anyone’s life, and particularly that of a writer. We do need to dream. To enter a protected space in our heads. To let some kind of alchemy take place. And nature always helps that happen. Miraculously. Without fail. If you want something to change, to transform – get outside, take a journey, and walk.

The memory of  trains has stayed with me since I’ve come back to my city house and daily routine. I remember iconic railway journeys I took long ago – like the train I rode from Budapest back through Europe on my honeymoon in 1996, seeing everything through a miasma of heat and happiness and a huge, pálinka induced hangover.

And before that, when I was a student of Russian, in 1976 – there I was, setting off, on a Soviet boat, with a huge hammer and sickle on the top, from Tilbury docks for Leningrad (now St Petersburg), navigating the choppy North Sea, via most of Scandinavia: only to find that the boat was overbooked, so a few of us were dumped in Finland, and had to go the rest of the way by train. I got the top bunk, with about three inches to spare between me and the ceiling. When we reached the border in the middle of the night, and a Soviet guard came bursting through the door demanding passports and visas and shouting “Stand Up!” like the rattle of a machine gun in full, merciless fire, I sat up so fast and banged my head so hard, I don’t think I’ve ever been in my right mind since. Which explains everything  really. But doesn’t make me love trains – whether big and foreign and slightly scary, or little and local and charming – any the less.

Walking Back Home 1

This worn-out, regal, fin-de-siecle staircase, pictured above, is one I have tramped up and down many times over the past few years. It is the entrance to  my dear friend István’s top floor flat, in the VIIIth district of Józsefváros, in downtown Budapest. In 1988 and 1989, I spent a lot of time in Hungary, working in two of their big country theatres as a movement coach. It was still a communist country, very hidden and mysterious, and utterly beautiful. I fell in love with the place in an instant. But after returning home in the summer of ’89, just before the Berlin Wall came down – and when Hungary was already secretly opening its gates to neighbouring Austria, for the East Germans to pour quietly through in peaceful defection – I met my future husband Tim, and domestic life took over.

It took another 20 years for me to return to Hungary. But when I did, in 2009, I fell in love with the place all over again. So much had changed, in the meantime, with international capital (and now a determinedly rightwing government) having marched in, with chaotic gusto… But underneath the concrete, the new highways, the Mcdonalds and the Tescos – the smell of the earth, the passion and character of the people, the glorious musical cadences of the language, and the intricacies of its native culture – remained the same. It is a singular place.

Over the past five years, I have returned again and again to visit István, and the rest of the theatre community in Budapest, and to travel down to the south west country town of Kaposvár, where I used to work and live. I am grappling with the (fiendishly difficult) language, inching my way forward in conversations, plotting and planning, both to return for longer periods – and maybe to bring some of the Hungarian artists over to the UK, too: to showcase their astonishing, visceral, physical theatre.

Hungary, for all its foreignness, has somehow always felt like a second home to me. When I returned after such a long absence, I was welcomed so warmly, was folded in such a familiar, invisible embrace, that it felt hard to leave again.

But the “walking home” I am doing this year is much closer to home. After travelling so much – in my head, through such intensive language learning, and in reality, hopping on and off the plane to Budapest –  what I need to do now is feel the ground beneath my feet, here, in my own back garden, in  Yorkshire, in England.

Part of my plan, throughout 2015, is to simply walk myself back to health. Last year, in 2014, I started to feel very unwell. The symptoms slowly accrued, until a diagnosis finally came, of B12 anaemia (pernicious anaemia), and I crashed to the floor in a mighty tumble. For the first time, after years of caring for other people – my husband, through his ten years of cancer, my daughter, through her childhood and adolescence; and then, seeing both sets of parents, and several dear friends, fall ill and die – I succumbed myself to physical incapacitation.

B12 vitamin deficiency is dramatic. It makes your muscles ache and spasm, creates pins and needles in hands and feet, causes you to lose balance and strength. I am a dancer: but suddenly all movement tired me out. B12 also affects the nervous system, cognition. I am a writer: I couldn’t think clearly, let alone form coherent thoughts and patterns upon the page. And then there were my ears – inflamed and deafened from repeated infections, and painfully sore. I couldn’t sleep. I was anxious. Work, health, energy…Everything leaked slowly away.

But “in every winter’s heart there lies the seed of spring.” So it says in my meditation book. And nature indeed points the way forward. When my husband Tim died in 2004, I started digging in my garden and allotment – and wrote about that process in ‘A Handful of Earth’, a gardening diary of bereavement and recovery.

Now something similar is at work. I am no longer ill – simple injections can regulate the anaemia – but still feel in some kind of slow convalescence. The garden again provides a welcome haven. And the simple act of walking – in the park, in the countryside – offers strength and well being.

I’ll be writing about some of these walks – waxing lyrical about the garden – on this site, as the year progresses. Meanwhile, “home’ in Hungary remains a strong beating heart within. And “home’ in Leeds is a beautiful green landscape of new possibilities, new discoveries, new freedom.

“A Handful of Earth” (John Murray) is available on Amazon and elsewhere.

And here’s a link to a little piece I wrote about my garden a couple of years ago….

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/gardenprojects/8547176/Gardening-Against-the-Odds-awards-2011-Barney-Bardsley.html