Allan Cash Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo - Used under licence
Last year I went to the Beamish Open Air Museum in the North East of England, and in their newly opened 1950s village, I had a remarkable flashback to a moment that has shaped my entire life, though I have no direct memory of it as I was only just coming to life within my mother’s womb.
I was an only child, and a posthumous one. To add to the strange irony of the situation, my father was an RAF Officer but died suddenly, in peacetime, of natural causes. He was interred with full military honours and his grave is in a quiet country churchyard in Bedfordshire, England, which happens to be close to a large RAF base.
The moment described below took place in their married quarters there, on 9th July, 1958.
NOSTALGIA
Sometimes I feel nostalgia for everything I didn’t have
the mother with an unflappable smile
serenely serving up pancakes for everyone
at the kitchen stove
****
the father sweating as he mowed the lawn
on a hot day in summer
coming in to wipe his forehead
and to fill a glass of water at the kitchen tap
*****
I never considered that flat square of grass
the tidying of it among his final act
the bright yellow curtains
the draining board and stretching cat
*****
I never imagined the home I’d have known
if things had turned out differently
I thought I’d come to a living museum
but hadn’t realised it was living in me
*****
in some time unremembered,
that moment, my barely-there mother
looking out of that window
*****
waiting for him to come out of the bathroom,
wondering why he was taking so long,
and the very first breath of a chillier breeze
bidding farewell to all certainties
as her short summer slipped below
an inaccessible horizon.