Battlelines

"And that which caused the jackdaws to gather,

As they picked through the blood, and the flesh, and the soil,

Has now been tamed to three disciplines,

Epée, Saber, Foil."

from The Evolution of Modern Warfare by Holcroft Adams

My own body has been a battlefield of late. I have been unwell. I guess it is not surprising when one reaches the age I have to find yourself occasionally at war with the end. Thankfully this time I have proved victorious. I suppose I would have got well that much sooner if I had sought medical assistance more quickly but it is hard to shake the notion that these things can just be shaken off as they could be in my youth. When one spends a large part of ones life batting away poisonous spiders and malaria it is hard to adjust to needing two months to get over a touch of flu.

The out-of-focus lump of over-educated horse fat in the photo is Anthony LeBrette. LeBrette was an affectation, his family name being, I think, Brett or Bratt. He would insist on telling you the pronunciation was Le Brayt and we would insist on seeing how close we could get to Lab Rat before he took umbrage.

By we I mean myself and my mother as LeBrette was one of the many family members whose house became temporary shelter for us in an attempt to hide my mother's shame from the prying eyes of would-be gossipers. My mother's shame of course being me. A child born out of wedlock. A child of a low ranking father lost somewhere on a Belgian battlefield. My family saw no connection between heroism and honour but worshipped the link between status and society. The mighty, I am pleased to report, have long since fallen but back in the nineteen thirties men like Anthony LeBrette were little rural majesties who treated their villages like medieval kingdoms.

LeBrette saw himself as a modern day Erasmus Darwin. A scientific innovator. A literary magician. An expert amateur botanist. A daring adventurer. In reality he was, to use the well worn cliché, a jack of all trades and master of none. His only two real avenues of expertise were his scarily successful breeding of rose-ringed parakeets and his uncanny ability to 'accidentally' walk into the bathroom when I, his fourteen year old niece, was in the bath.

"Oh my dear, my dear Rosetta, how clumsy of me, I am so sorry!" he would exclaim after a good three minutes of jimmying with the bathroom door lock as quietly as he could muster. "Oh I had no idea you were in here my dear. Had I better leave!" Luckily his amateur breaking and entering skills usually gave me ample time to apply a robe and my agreement that perhaps he had better leave was always enough to send him packing.

Nor did he reserve his attentions to the bathroom. He was forever 'accidentally' bumping into me in tight corridors and among the nooks and crannies of the hedged gardens. Thomas, the gardeners boy, a sixteen year old cherub with a devils mind, was forever chasing me around the garden singing:

Mr LeBrette

Cannot wait

To snail his way

To your garden gate.

(This rhyme has always amused me, capturing as it does so wonderfully the sixteen year old boys expert knowledge of his own sex's biology and a flowery naivety of that of women)

LeBrette became increasingly adept at maneuvering my mother away from the house and increasingly persistent in his pursuit of me. I took to hiding at the far end of his grounds where the huge aviaries housed his huge collection of rose-ringed parakeets. Happily it was Thomas who found my hiding place first and we spent many hours together amongst the giant bird cages discussing why our pasts and present was so awful and how glorious our futures would be.

One day we decided to go swimming in the river that bordered my uncle's land. I watched with teenage lust as Thomas stripped to his shorts pretending not to notice the bulge he was trying his best to disguise with a mixture of bravado and an unusual posture but I was struck with embarrassment when it became my turn undress. I told Thomas to go down to the river and wait for me and I stepped into one the brick rooms that formed the end of each aviary and were used to store bird seed, brooms and the like. I could not find a lantern but there was light enough from a tiny window to see what I was doing if not to see what the room contained.

"You are a very well developed young lady Rosetta." My uncle's voice froze me to stone. "Perhaps one day you would permit me to sketch you like you are now. In all your elfin glory." I felt sick. I had one leg in my swimming costume but apart from that I was naked and clearly though I could not see LeBrette he could see me in full.

"Thomas and I were going swimming Uncle" I stammered. My eyes were becoming accustomed to the light and I could see that my uncle stood beneath the small window. He was fully dressed but his hand was inside his trousers and far from still. Amongst this growing horror I also noticed that the window was on a kind of tiny mezzanine level and presumably looked out over all of LeBrettes aviaries. A risky idea formed in my head. "Would you like to come swimming too Uncle Anthony? I'm sure Thomas won't stay for long and then you and I could spend the afternoon together in the river." I tried to sound inviting despite the revulsion that flowed through me and I must have been successful as his arm slowed and he said "Swimming Rosetta? I could teach you the butterfly. I was quite the athlete in my youth don't you know."

I doubted very much LeBrette had ever been an athlete or if he had even ever given himself as much exercise as he had during the last few minutes. I could hear him panting for breath and see the rhythm of his arm as it moved slowly backward and forward. I had never been so scared in my life. I had to get away and I had to ensure he did not follow. "Throw your clothes over Uncle Tony and I will put them in my bag. You don't want them getting dusty do you?" He briefly stopped his work-out to remove his tea-stained three-piece suit and musty shirt and socks.

"Oh Uncle! Thomas is swimming as nature intended. As I stand before you. Are you ashamed of your body?" "Not at all dear dear Rosetta" he all but choked as he removed his sweaty underpants and threw them toward me. Nude, I shot out of the door grasping the bag of his and my clothes and slamming it behind me slid the bolt across it and affixed the lock. I heard my uncle charge at the door and then swear as his fat naked form smashed against it. I very quickly got dressed. I could hear my uncle move up to the mezzanine and saw his pudgy red face squeeze up against the window.

I was not so naive to think that locked up or no my uncle's first priority would be to finish what he had started in front of me while I was still in reach but I decided that instead of running I would give him a different show of the kind he would never forget. Under his lecherous gaze I began to undo the doors of the aviaries and set free his precious birds. Hundreds of rose-ringed parakeets took to the sky. As he shouted and screamed for me to stop hundreds more left their cages. So many it was startling. Some flew only as far as the pear orchards but as the majority soared over the river these few stragglers became swept up in their excitement and very soon not a single bird was left. As I left the aviaries I glanced up once at LeBrette. It seemed that the fluid that sat cold in his lap had now been joined by another. Rivers of tears flooded his face and ran on to his shivering frame. He had not only lost the source of his lust but that of his love too, and now, as the sun set, he was trapped in a brick shed, naked, cold, and shamed, with his seed quickly drying on his leg.

My grandfather made sure that LeBrette spent the rest of his days in an institution at which, I doubt, he ever saw another woman as long as he lived. He didn't live long mind. My mother and grandfather reassured me he died of shame and neither of them ever speculated aloud how the six days I left him in the shed before raising the alarm would have affected his health.

As for the parakeets? Well it turns out that, unlike many tropical species, the rose-ringed parakeet is as happy in Europe as it is in its native South Asia and Central Africa. There are quite large colonies in London and Madrid and they are spreading throughout Britain with some occasionally even being seen in Manchester! I don't know how many of today's birds are the ancestors of LeBrette's birds but I'm sure that some of them are.

And Thomas? I couldn't say. I'm afraid I left him waiting at the river. The beginnings of desire I felt as I had shyly watched his swimming shorts involuntarily twitching with teenage lust had been polluted by LeBrette's leer and the piston-like motion of his right hand. Thomas was sixteen and old enough to move on to another house, which he did without a goodbye. I think he felt that I blamed him for what happened but in truth I just needed a while to separate LeBrette from other men.

I have met a few LeBrettes in my time. Luckily I have met a fair few good men too. Most people are good really. And although I am not quite as delicious as I was in the summers of the years a little way along from that awful day I still meet nice people today, men and women, who make my life a good one, and one (if I stop being so stubborn about the flu jab in future) I may enjoy for a few years yet.

Still down with the kids.

Recognise anyone?

The rather spectral figure in the back is not some Victorian ghost manifesting onto a rather drab family portrait but is instead me going through, what I believe nowadays might be described as a difficult phase. Between the ages of thirteen and fifteen I was to be found dressed all in white sitting in the corner of the kitchen with my feet resting on the stove and my nose in a book. I remember a rather depressing dedication to Thomas Hardy which I am glad to say was cured by a particularly potent vodka martini administered on my sixteenth birthday which rather brought me to my senses on a number of matters, great literature of course not necessarily the most prominent or long-lasting amongst them.

I was struck when I visited Urbis a couple of weeks ago that if you swapped white clothes for black and dreary pastoral narrative for upbeat, angry, rock music then as a young teenager I would have fitted quite neatly into the little groups of beautiful young things that flit and flirt amongst the stone benches and crisp packets that are scattered round the green outside the museum. As I absent-mindedly stared at them I didn't notice a young lad approach me from behind and ask "got a light?" I looked him over. He was quite a handsome chap despite his best efforts. I suppose such misguided youth should bring out the mother in me but having never had children I'm afraid the vixen still rules the roost in my attitudes toward young men. Glancing at the packet of cheap cigarettes in his lily-white fingers I could not help myself purring "Oh I think we can do better than a light don't you" and offering him a café creme from the tin in the inside pocket of my coat.

I sat with Johnno on the edge of a council-designed water feature and we smoked our cigarillos. Seeing as he was a nice kind boy happy enough to spend twenty minutes chatting to an old lady I thought I would give him a few life lessons. I taught him that matches look more stylish than a lighter, that wax would work better than gel in his hair, that a girl is infinitely more likely to date a John than a Johnno, that an omlette cooked well is a cheap, and relatively simple, way to convince a girl you like that you can cook, and that a copy of Marcella Hazan's Classic Italian Food and one of Jane Grigson's Vegetable Book will allow him to bluff his way through subsequent dates. Most important of all, I told him that women are a lot more like men than he might have previously imagined. I think this is a stumbling block of information for most men, never mind young adults like John née Johnno.

He then walked me to the automatic doors of Urbis, planting the softest of kisses on my cheek as we reached the threshold. A quick learner - he will definitely go far. In the broad reception space of the museum I turned and watched him walk back to his friends. They were ribbing him of course but he seemed to be taking their teasing with good grace; one step further on the road to manhood.

I was visiting Urbis to see the exhibition on computer games. I have never had the slightest interest in them really but I thought a historical overview of the medium was a good place to see if I had missed anything. Not a lot I think. Most of the older games were too dull for me and most of the newer ones too complicated. There was a game called Bully that was a little morally dubious; you control a schoolyard tyrant whose raison d'etre seems to consist of little more than beating up smaller children. Oh how I loved that one! I'm not sure I was playing it correctly but it was certainly a lot of fun.

After I left the exhibition I popped round to The Modern, the restaurant at the top of Urbis, for a gin martini and a delicious leg of rabbit with one of my friends. A perfect end to a perfect day. My one regret being that I am now far too old to ravish the likes of the lovely young John and that over seventy years after my teenage years I am back to a position where I am much more likely to share a bed with the moribund Mister Hardy.

Flammable delicacies

I burnt my bra on the 13th of March, 1971. I was fifty-two years old.

It was not a political statement, more of a drunken prank. I'm not sure but I think most of the whole bra-burning legend is largely urban myth. It is fact that at the original protest, held outside the nineteen-sixty-eight Miss America beauty pageant, the 'freedom bin' of bra's, make-up, hairspray and the like were never set alight due to a lack of a fire permit. It is possible of course that the mythology of bra-burning stems from the fact that the removal and destruction of undergarments was an offshoot of the feminist movement that the largely male media felt that they could work with. It has certainly entered the folklore of the West and is seen by many as an important step in the history of the 'women's lib' movement. The same people almost always neatly ignore the fact that women are still routinely sexually harassed in the workplace and systematically receive less pay for doing the same work as men.

Back to my bra; the burning took place at a house-party situated in a part of San Francisco that I probably wouldn't have ventured into had I not been mapping it. The area was what would now be referred to as being 'shabby chic'. Dogs paced it's backstreets and the green and yellow paint was peeling off the walls of the wooden buildings. The house belonged to an imposing hippy dropout called Fat Barb. The bra belonged to me and was of the English Rose range made by Daintifyt Brassiere Co. Ltd. A bloody awful thing that used to cut into my sides. Barb and I poured lighter fluid into her bath, popped my bra into the liquid, and then chucked a scented candle at it from a safe distance. "Now you're liberated Miss Limey" Barb cackled. I'm afraid we had both had a little too much Wild Turkey bourbon.

I spent the night in the arms of Chuck Mike, who claimed he shared a flat with Gregory Corso. The apartment he took me too was certainly covered with notebooks and odd scraps of paper all covered with hastily scrawled verse but I'm afraid Corso was a no show. Actually I was pretty sure at the time that Corso was living in New York but I had taken a shine to Chuck with his slate grey eyes and crow-black beard. Plus, to be brutally honest, with my bra gone my nipples were being rubbed to buggery by my starched blouse and I was glad of the opportunity to take it off.

I am well aware that compared to the kiss and tell stories one sees today my little confessions are rather charmingly small-fry but I still blush pink writing them. Not with embarrassment but with a joyful pride that I lived a life worth living and with a glimmer of silly excitement at 'spilling the beans' about myself at such a late date.

Delightfully it turned out that Chuck's tales of Corso were only an exaggeration of the truth. They were friends, and later that week he took me to see Corso read at a little bar behind a Chinese restaurant. The atmosphere was electric as he spoke:

"Think like a clock with no time to tell.
Hear the knell of your thoughts and wonder the bell.
Leave your sights of life nor comprehend fear.
-Death is not anywhere near."

After he finished he told us all that no one could leave until everyone had read something. Of course many of those there considered themselves writers and had their own little notebooks filled with meandering rhyme. I sat quietly, trying to blend into the background, rather hoping I could avoid saying anything, but to no avail. Reluctantly, and last of all, I was led to the stage where I stood nervously clutching my handbag (so very 'square'. I must have been the only woman there who even owned a handbag!) when I realised that in it was a booklet a friend had given me as a present a few weeks earlier. A few other people had read found poetry so I decided, in as matter-of-fact tone of voice as possible, to read the booklet - Supplement No. 3 to First Aid: Civil Defense.

And so I began:

Chapter 1

Nuclear Warfare

1 There are four main kinds of injury resulting from the detonation of nuclear weapons and casualties may suffer from any combination of the effects. They are:

(i) temporary blindness caused by the intense light;
(ii) burns from light and heat radiation or from fires:
(iii) blast injuries:
(iv) radiation sickness

At first there were a few whoops and jeers, the odd laugh at the ludicrous prose and inconceivable advice but the booklet eventually overpowered us all. The relentlessness of the horrors that we all knew we were in no way safe from could not help to subdue. There were chapters on the movement and labelling of casualties, trucks of anonymous sufferers with marks on their foreheads to ascertain quick sorting; a T for the application of a tourniquet, M for morphine, a C on those contaminated or suspected of having been contaminated with persistent gas... A chapter on "essential home nursing"; a futile list of treatment for the effected which preposterously assumes that there will be 'unaffected' available to provide the care.

As I finished the last paragraph (which includes perhaps histories most incredible understatement, the phrase "in the conditions of living that would follow the explosion of a hydrogen bomb a great deal of adjustment and improvisation would be necessary in all things") the crowd started to get up and, sometimes in pairs or small groups but mostly singly, we dispersed into the early morning most of lost in thought. Wondering exactly how far our newly fought freedoms would get us in the indiscriminate aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.

Oh dear, I seem to have ended on something of a bum note again. I would love to stick around and rewrite it all but I'm afraid I'm off to meet (Cynical) Ben for a late breakfast in Cup and a trip to the art gallery to watch a bit of Bach.

Two lives

My eldest cousins; the Deeds sisters. On the left the delicate Maggy. On the left the insatiable Victoria.

Apart from my life-long friendship with Holcroft Adams I have never moved in literary circles. My cousins most certainly did.

Fragile, almost brittle, Maggy spent a lot of her time in the Swiss Alps trying to slow down the effects of what was at the time referred to as consumption. Now you must forgive me if I sound sceptical but if Maggy ever had tuberculosis then I was one of the Andrews Sisters. What she had was anorexia or something very like it. She would often spend several months in the surrounding cities. Vienna, Bern, Geneva, Berlin. I'm afraid that she got rather swept up in the rampant nationalism that was taking hold of that part of the world at the time. She claims to have had a very nice chat one morning to a girl called Unity over lunch at the Osteria Bavaria in Munich in which the chatty blonde told her all about the "wonderful man" who she hoped would appear there as he oftentimes would. This may be true but Maggy was a frightful liar. Whether it is true or not she managed to spend a lot of the next decade combining her old love of poetry and her new found love of disgusting political ideas by mooning around Rapallo, Italy trying to catch the eye of Ezra Pound. Her plan that in that regard failed, but it was during the war, financially separated from her parents, destitute, and even thinner than normal, that she bumped in to Angelo who was hiding from the authorities in an abandoned farmhouse. Angelo was an absolute peach and he brought out the best in Maggy, and so, after his nursing her back to health, she smartened herself up and marched into Rapallo, reacquainted herself with her 'friends' in the local Faschist party and secured passage to the United States for herself and her fiancé Angelo, his sister and brother-in-law and their two children, his father and his grand-mother. Maggy died twenty years ago; the fat, healthy, happy matriarch of an English-Italian-Jewish-American family.

Victoria's story starts better but ends far worse I'm afraid. Engaged to the up-and-coming young poet Francis Yarth her head was turned by not one but three other poets of the time. Remarkably the identity of these three was never discovered. It is rumoured that Richard Aldington was among their number but I am not convinced. Nevertheless it was his wife, Hilda Doolittle who came up with the acid barb...

If what one wants,

Is back-and-front,

Then what one needs,

Is Vicky Deeds.

(To any American readers, I'm afraid the second line is a piece of rather vulgar rhyming slang)

I once caught Francis in a 'tired' and reflective mood at one of Holcroft's rare parties and he confessed to me that the letters and photos he had found and burnt before throwing Victoria from his door were "shockingly pornographic and almost illegally heartfelt and passionate" The poor fool really loved her and never really got over the betrayal.

Francis was a man of honour who would never ruin the reputations of those men who slept with his fiancée. This despite the fact that Victoria's body was discovered the morning after he threw her out lying in a lonely alleyway, beaten, bloodied and abused. He did not believe any of the men responsible but because he would not 'name names' the sordid investigation fell onto him and although the culprit was eventually brought to justice Francis' name was always linked with her death and no publisher would touch him. He said to me once "random act of violence or not Rosetta, if I had not abandoned her she would not have been there" he had forgiven her the second he had closed the door on her face but he could never forgive himself for doing so.

I'm sorry. I should have perhaps told those stories the other way around thereby having a happy ending. Instead perhaps I can end with this clip. I mentioned The Andrews Sisters earlier and here they are in all their glory. I had forgotten quite how shorn of sexuality they were. They dance about as alluringly as I do while I am washing up.

Thanks to Cynical Ben (Benjamin Judge to use his proper name) for showing me how to 'load the clip' onto the blog. Thanks too to his beautiful wife who makes an excellent cup of tea and has exquisite taste in biscuits.

Sex and the City

Proof, if proof is needed, that really bad haircuts were not invented in the nineteen seventies. This is my niece Mathilde with her unnaturally coiffured husband Carish Barringford and their two, frankly, awful children, one of whom is now something of a success in the import of sex toys from China, and the other, the last I heard, was running a brothel in Indonesia which specialised in what was described (in an attempt I suppose to preserve an old ladies innocence!) as 'a very particular clientele'. One of the pities of there not being a heaven is that I will not be able to discuss the careers of her two 'golden boys' with Mathilde although I suppose that sort of schadenfreude would probably single me out for the other place anyhow.

I have never before or since ever met anyone called Carish. I'd love to be able to give you some sort of ethnological origin for the name but his stock have resided in Bermondsey for many a generation and so the trail goes rather cold almost straight away. It is possible his mother, who was a fearsomely silly woman, just made it up, presumably as some sort of punishment for his forcing his way out of her over such a protracted period of time. A fifty-six hour labour involving three broken ribs and a mightily disjointed pelvis are even less of a laughing matter if we remember this all happened the best part of a century ago. You may say that the child could not control the manner of his birth and that naming him Carish is an unfair punishment. You may even be right. I would however offer two arguments for the defense. Firstly his surname is Barringford. Almost any first name, however sober it's intentions, will almost certainly become ridiculous when in combination with Barringford. Secondly, and more importantly, the nine-and-a-half pounds of forelock precariously balanced on the front of that man's head is evidence enough that he was more than capable of creating his own social handicaps far in advance of any received at his christening. If ever a man needed to be roached, that man was Carish Barringford.

Of his two sons (neither of whom, to his credit, became Carish Jr) Jeremy, the vibrator freighter, is the one I had the most dealings with. Not, I hasten to add, as a customer, but rather as a sort of financial backer. There is quite a lot of money to be made out of lonely people placing lubricated pieces of plastic into various bits of their anatomy and I am quite happy to keep receiving my cheques in the post for ten percent of the annual profits of Happy Corp. I bet the little sod didn't think I would live this long when he signed that contract! I am repeatedly, pleasantly, surprised that he has never had me bumped off to save himself a few pounds.

Personally I have never seen the appeal of rubber bits and bobs. Sex itself has had little interest to me for some time now though I admit I do still love to flirt. It has been twenty years since I had a 'good seeing to', though the fact that on that occasion it was with a man forty three years my junior and that no money changed hands, and that actually I broke up with him, is a source of great smugness to this day. I'm sure many of you think that sex was invented in nineteen fifty-nine but I can assure you that when I see episodes of Sex and the City I don't really see much that I wasn't doing myself at that age. One thing I didn't do mind you was look like a small child dressing up in my mother's clothes. That is one aspect of that program, a kind of paedophillic gaze, that I have always found perplexing. They look like girls badly dressed by men ignorant of women to look like what they think women might look like don't you think? But then who am I to throw stones? An old woman sitting in a glass house talking about sex that's who.

Holcroft Adams

I suppose Holcroft Adams is the most famous man I have known. Of course I imagine you have never heard of him. His star shone bright and fast as they say. His poetry has been long out of print, is all but forgotten, but for a year or so in the early forties his was the name on every book-lovers lips. His three books (The Awakening, Puck's Pontoon, and An Alphabet of Flying Whimsy) came out in quick succession and each was seen by the critics as a masterpiece.

So why did he fall from sight so quickly? It is a tragic story. Although Holcroft due to a brush with what was then called consumption, an illness that led to him spending a lot of his youth in Patagonia savouring the mountain air, avoided service in the Second World War his brother was not so lucky. Doubly so as not only did Clarence fight for his country he also died for it. What is left of him lies in an untended graveyard somewhere in North Africa. The news of his brother's death broke Holcroft. He never wrote another word.

Then, as if from nowhere, a rumour started circulating that the reason that Holcroft was not producing new work was that he was not the writer but a front for his less glamorous, and now departed brother. Rumours tend to grow more spiteful as they travel along and soon it was being said that Holcroft had faked his illness, that he was a drunk, a homosexual, a fake. God it all seems so petty now doesn't it? A homosexual. What on earth did that matter? Anyone who tells you that "things were better in the old days" is a bloody fool or a bloody liar.

"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" Well who doesn't might be a more pertinent question. We are a wicked people en masse are we not? Have you ever watched a man drink himself to death? It takes so much longer than you imagine. Holcroft died, in my arms, on the fourteenth of August, nineteen eighty four. He was the sweetest man I ever knew. I miss him terribly.

I'm sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't get maudlin about it all.

Imagine my surprise when a few hours ago I came across, via Cynical Ben's blog, a blog by a rather clever young lady who calls herself Abacus. It seems Holcroft is not forgotten as Abacus seems to have read a copy of An Alphabet of Flying Whimsy and has been inspired to start her own alphabet of bird poems. If I could work out how to do one of those link thingamajigs I would. It is thealphabeticalbirdpoemproject.blogspot.com

Holcroft would, I think, be amazed to have resurfaced after all these years. He would also be overwhelmed that he could speak across the generations to inspire someone free from the constraints of nineteen-forties Britain.

A toast then. To Holcroft, and to Abacus.

Love birds

Ah Colonel Shaw. I don't mind saying I was a little bit in love with him when I was about nine years old. He gave the impression of having walked straight out of the pages of a H. Rider Haggard novel with his unsurprisable manner, his sword stick with which he would attack the lupins when he knew only I was watching and then blame the foxes for the mess, and his collection of weird and wonderful bits and pieces he had collected on, what it now occurs to me were probably rather unsavoury, excursions around the world as part of his majesties armed forces.

We didn't stay with him long, my mother fell out with him over a Sunday luncheon. On Sundays he would insist on all of us walking into the gardens so he could cook for us outside. I suppose now you would call it a barbecue and think nothing of it but to my mother and I, in the nineteen twenties, it was a wonderful adventure.

Well, one Sunday my mother complimented the Colonel on the quail, saying it was the best she had ever had, and asked him if it was the cooking method that stopped them drying out as they so often do. My uncle laughed and said that it wasn't quail that she was eating but mistle thrush! Apparently he had learnt all about catching songbirds for food in central Spain and that the information had been incredibly useful during his service. On islands especially the diet can get a bit monotonous and a quick cook-up of the local flying fauna can add a little variety. He pointed to the food on the platter and counted the victims of his nets, blackbird, robin, song thrush, blackbird, sparrow, green finch, robin, blackbird. To my nine-year-old ears this was the funniest thing I had ever heard, all those silly, noisy birds that woke me up every morning finally getting their comeuppance (I'm afraid I wasn't the most sentimental of children) but my mother was far from amused.

Within the week my mother and I were living with my uncle Theodore, a frightful man who collected silverware and preached at the local chapel, and the marvellous Colonel Shaw had walked back into the pages of an adventure novel.

It's my party

I suppose you know that song. It's my party and I'll cry if I want to. Well I feel a bit like that today. The more observant of you will have noticed that the age-ticker on my profile has clicked one numeral closer to the end. Yes it is my birthday, I am ninety one today. The picture is of my father. I never saw him. I have nothing of his, not even his surname, except this photo. Every year on my birthday I take this photo out of the box, I turn it over, and I cry.

Don't worry...

...I'm not dead. Not yet anyway. That is a problem though isn't it? That if I don't write anything for a week or so people will think I have died.

The man in the picture is Joseph Angel. "Pronounced with a hard G like God" he used to say. I always wanted to say to him in return "any resemblance to God in you Joseph is purely accidental, we should even take the bit about creating man in his image with a pinch of salt in your case." Not that there is a God of course, but that is neither here nor there. Nor did I ever say it because he was my senior and it was largely his decision as to which part of the world I would be mapping. I remember in particular a six month residence in and around Jasper, Alabama resulting from a disagreement about contour lines in residential areas. I think the politest thing I can say about Jasper, Alabama in nineteen fifty-five is that it was undergoing a period of social change. I'm sure it is a happier place now.

Joseph Angel does though have a Manchester connection. He was born in Bury and he attended Manchester Grammar. Apparently he was a class-mate of Harold Lever though whether or not there is an ounce of truth in that I couldn't say. I never trusted Joseph Angel at all. He was a stoat of a man: active by day and night, characteristic bounding gait, often stands bolt upright, solitary except in breeding season. Petty lies were far from being beneath him so perhaps we should give the late Baron Lever the benefit of the doubt in regards to his acquaintances.

I shan't of course be visiting the school anytime soon to find out. Where I would really like to go is onto the hills around his home of Bury. I managed to buy a flat that is quite high above the most of the city centre and from my window while I pick at a garibaldi and sip my chamomile I can see the moors north of the conurbation of Greater Manchester and wish I still had the legs to explore them. Maybe I should by a telescope to get a better view of them. I could watch the stars too. There aren't so many here in the city as there were in Wiltshire mind. There is a damn sight more of everything else mind you.

I went to Go Sushi yesterday. I have had sushi before of course but I must admit having my food delivered by conveyor belt was a first. I don't eat a lot nowadays but I had a fine time with a miso soup watching the young and the marvelous eat their fish. I got chatting to a lovely young man from of all places Peru who told me all about Paititi, the lost city of the Incas. He wants to raise enough money to try to map a region of the rain forest that may or may not include the remains of a settlement. He was quick to assuage any thoughts I may have of cities of gold or unlimited riches the sweetly serious little thing. "It is a matter of history that is all" he must have said about eight times. I'm afraid I did tease him a little, his grasp of cartography was pretty basic at best, not really up to the standard we were expected to have attained before we even started training in my day, and I think it was treasure he dreamed of, not archaeology. Good luck to him. A lost horde of gold will see you much happier than a knowledge of long dead people in this life. You can't buy champagne with memories!

Well this is exciting

That's me. Or at least that was me. When I was a little less fat and not so old. I can't remember for the life of me what all those plants are supposed to represent but the dress was the one that my mother was supposed to marry in. The war changed those plans somewhat but she kept the dress and of course she kept me. What she couldn't keep was her address (war or no it was not the done thing to have children out of wedlock) I suppose the fact that my father was left behind in Belgium would have awakened some sympathies with our neighbours but my Grand-father still thought it best to ferry my mother and I from uncle to uncle across the length and breadth of the country. Ugthorpe, Kidwelly, Cornwood, Ravenscar, Norwich, Northwich, Elford, Radley... the curious anonymity of most of these towns suited my childhood situation well. My mother and I too were curiously anonymous. We were always just visiting for the season. My father was always 'in the services'. Appearances were always kept up.

My interest in maps stems from this time of course. With my pencils I would sketch crude versions of our travels across the land wondering if our journey would map out a shape, a heart maybe, or a letter, a huge capital G for my father. As an adult I would return to some of these towns and villages to map them. To draw lines on paper to show the presence of the pylons, the buildings, the roads, motorways, railways, airports. Lines on paper that represent those objects that can alter the destinies of both men and mankind.

I have lived my whole life travelling from town to town. I think the longest I have lived anywhere was three years with my second husband in the south of France in the late nineteen-forties. Usually six months has seen me eager to move on. Had Carrington asked me to follow him to New York after he had taken this photo of me and helped me out of that awful dress (or rather if I had let him ask me to follow him) then I might have stopped my wandering years ago, but then I might not. Even hindsight has it's blind spots.

I may have stopped now though. I decided last year to return to Manchester despite the fact that I had never even stepped foot in the place since I was a baby. All journeys must return to their origins. So here I am. I have been here for a couple of months. I think I might stay.

I thought I would write this as a kind of journal of my winding down. Which is not to suggest I am past it, just that I do things in my own time nowadays. I may not be as delicious as I once was, but I still have a lot of life to live.