Jane Metcalfe

Autumn is well and truly here and with it a time for reflection arises. There’s always something to look back on in the colourful history of ones life. The seasons act as prompts for varying periods of action, rest, reflection, and development, The outer leans into the inner as days grow shorter and the instinct to slow down and to ponder kicks in. At least it does for me, as I sit typing on a chilly mid-September morning, contemplating whether to brave a bracing sea swim or not. In the meantime a poem popped up, as they are wont to do, out of nowhere. It is a topic that arises a lot in my mind about the stages of man. Shakespeare wrote about it to perfection, but whether you’re mewling and puking or sans eyes and teeth, there’s always something to look back upon and forward to, which doesn’t necessarily mean not being present. Being present is catching what arises in mind and looking at it, which is different from getting lost in it. I don’t feel I have to dismiss it or argue with it, but just look at what arises with interest and curiosity. Out of this a poem about the inevitable gap between youth and older age arose:

Different Clothes

Youth looks at things
with the impudence of new eyes
You’ll regret it;
I told you so
not in their vocabulary.
They mock us
when we say
Been there done that
Look at you
witheringly.
You have a flash
of your mother
the tight lips
you inherited
a purse of disapproval.
You couldn’t see her young
in love
in thrall to life.
Yet she went there
did that,
just as I did,
as you will
crossing the same ocean
dressed
in different clothes.

First Real Memories: Ibstone 1951-54

My real memories begin when we moved house for the first time. I have a hazy image of the drive away from Bromley in a car packed with luggage, peeping through the gaps out of the back window at houses and countryside streaking past as the road behind us kept disappearing in a snaky curve. I have a vague memory of my hyperactive older brother thrashing around next to me. We were moving to our new home in Ibstone, Buckinghamshire. I was barely 4 years old. That’s really where my memories begin in earnest.

Ibstone was a rural village in those days. My mother had been appointed head teacher to the primary school, and we lived in the flint-stone house attached to the building. These are flashes of memory that come randomly from ages 4 – 7. My room was tiny but then so was I. There was an apple tree outside my window and the branches tapped on the diamond-leaded panes in the wind. The bough and branches were gnarled and covered with ancient, mossy bark. The sort you could peel off.  I was terrified of witches flying through my small window, but I clearly survived this potential threat.  Being an English teacher by training, my mother read me tales by Hans Christian Anderson, Grimm and others from picture books filled with old fashioned full-page coloured illustrations that I loved to gaze at.  There were woods to play in and a large garden where I’d dig for worms and ants. I was nicknamed Jenny Wren as my little squatting figure reminded my mother of a bird pecking around for insects!  I was fascinated by ants marching along and jumping on one another’s backs and the ones that seemed daft, turning round in aimless circles.  I often refer to these as my first and most important lesson about the human condition. It is strange how the flotsam and jetsam of early memory drift up into consciousness. Certain memories, not very important ones as such, are vividly recalled – somewhat akin to the illustrations in the story-books I loved: there’s a lot of text in between but the images, or scenes, remain starkly imprinted on the part of the brain devoted to remembering in pictures. I recall some very small things that must have made an impression on me. I remember my mother telling me that Peter Twiss, the first man to break the sound barrier in England, lived in a cottage across the road. I used to see him and wonder what it meant to break the sound barrier. It was a deep mystery to me. There was a girl called Linda whose mother cleaned at one of the grand houses. She was, I think, a year older than me, but shared my love of digging and we would have mud-pie tea parties with her dolls-set of tea cups and tiny plates; all very normal for a little girl discovering the wonders of the world. We were sometimes allowed to watch children’s television on a big mahogany box with a tiny curved screen in the grand house where her mother cleaned.  I remember the picture being faint and muzzy; “snowing” it was called. The lady of the house would come and fiddle with the knobs and hit it to get the picture back. Andy Pandy was the first children’s programme I saw. Not many people had TV sets at that time; only the well-to-do folk. How all of that has changed now.

As I write I find myself feeling saddened at the evolution of material life, of the time-wasting elements of modern technology that screen many from engaging in the natural wonders outside and all around them. I suspect each generation, looking back feels wistful for a time when they were more connected to real people, to nature, to all the things that feed us on a heart and soul level. The advent of television was a wonder at the time, the radio being hitherto the only medium of entertainment – other than live performances that is – but now… I am showing my age, like the little girl looking back through the car window at the snaking road behind her, moving away, moving on.

The absence of poetry in oneself
denotes a time of incubation.
The mystical has rested for a while
laying its head down
in the green, turf
or mud, or sand
whichever prompts the weary muse
to sleep to dream;
words suspended
in a place where inspiration cannot go.
And yet the moist incubation
of seeded words
pushes upwards to the light,
grows green shoots and later
rainbow heads
that speak of riches in the dark
of dreams that never end
of life that holds them up
like mirrors to the sun.

We may think it’s strange how Life takes us unwittingly down endless diversions. Just when we think we’re all set, on the path, ok where we are, headed in the right direction etc;  or the opposite, forever pushing to get ourselves better placed, for material security, to find the love of our life and so forth, we find ourselves thwarted in our goals time and again.  But either way, there’s a constant – albeit covert – striving to get Life to align with what we think we want. Life, in the meantime, is sublimely unaware of this. It is just doing its flowing thing. It is we who do the diverting.

When we start to look at what is, rather than simply living reactively, we begin to see that Life is like a great river simply flowing on towards its final destination. We may discover that we’ve been clinging to the bank or trying to swim upstream. Neither of these positions lead anywhere. Flowing means being flexible as the current dictates – hence the popular saying, “going with the flow”. If the flow leads you to an obstacle, a seeming interruption in the flow – a dragon to slay, or a monster to wrestle with – then you deal with it. Dramatic analogies? Not really. I find the “creatures” that loom up in my life always provide challenges of a positive kind. To stick with the river analogy, no amount of treading water helps. Deal with it; face it out; do what you have to do with eyes fully open. Avoidance is the way to mediocrity, foiled expectations and disappointment at death. Be like an action hero in your own personal story. Learning to go with what is brings its own particular rewards. A master of Martial Arts goes with the natural flow and overcomes all obstacles.  We can be secret masters of our own lives – never arriving, always in the process: arriving in one moment, to flow with the next. 

Life, with a capital L, has been somewhat chaotic in the past year – as indeed it will have been for many of us. We – as in globally, country-wise, personally – are in a period of extreme change, such as has perhaps not been seen since WW2. Certainly not in the West. It reminds me of a great giant turning in his 100 year sleep. We who built our dreams on his sleeping body tumble as he turns, clutching at anything we can hold onto as we fall.  But the new, the unknown, beckons us on to perch, fall and grasp again, on and on. It is part of the unfurling thread of time.

Enough of whimsicality. Much has changed for me personally. I have lost a long-term friend on a seeming whim. She spat me out like a wad of flavourless gum. What did I do “wrong”? Nothing that would seem to warrant the termination of twenty years of a deeply rich friendship. Perhaps  I was part of her own fall, let go of in the emergency of no-man’s land. Nonetheless I miss the person I was once so close to. I have been given notice by my landlord and find myself entering the arena of inflated rental prices beyond most averagely-waged people’s means: desperately looking outside of the box for somewhere to rent that will leave more than a few quid to spare for a pauper’s meal. So I live in limbo at the moment waiting for the next piece of magic to appear left field. Don’t get me wrong, I am not flakily lazing about in cloud-cuckoo land. I am seeking  a solution to an equation for which an answer is currently unavailable – as the term goes for faults on the line, or a temporary disconnection from the internet. My definition of being poor is in the process of being rebooted.

In the world of consciousness-raising, self-improvement, spiritual seeking, we are invited to “live in the present,” the meaning of which evades us until we are simply forced out of some mental idea we have of what living in the present means, as in, how to strive for it. In short we attempt to make living in the “now” another valuable asset to notch up on the post of psycho-human achievements. When seeking the present moment in the vaults of the past fails, as it inevitably will; when all the mental gymnastics cease, then we discover that everything occurs on one level, like a moving walkway at an airport.  Just by taking a step Life opens the next door and the next.  There is no arriving. No destination. Now is always and ever just what it is, now! Clever words? No. simply stating the impossible in as clear a way as possible! Tautology no doubt…

In the meantime I work, write, plan, laugh with friends, swim in the sea and wait for the new version of my book to come out any moment now. Life in the present is not all bad!