Letting go
THE microwave and I have been itinerant for the past seven months around the house where I have lived for the past 50 years. We are renovating, reconfiguring, and extending it, using the same builders who — after the sudden death of my husband in 2011 — converted the garage into a study that looked companionably out on to the street. Catapulted into widowhood as I was, that lifeline enabled me to continue writing and to still feel part of the outside world.
What you do with a house over time defines the stages of life as clearly as Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, as pictorially as a height chart to be exclaimed over on a kitchen wall. Experiencing my sister’s death in 2024, and her crises in the years that preceded it led us to reflect on future-proofing generally, and to conclude that it was ideally something to be done way before any need arose. For dwelling alone as people got older seemed, from everyone’s point of view, the least desirable way to live. So, here I am, about to enter two-generational living, as my daughter, her partner, and their dog prepare to move from the city estate with which they have become jaded into space that we have been able to design for greener living, with — but not on top of — one another.
Pooling our resources and combining two households is an awfully big adventure. My mindset is already changing; for, as I contemplate unpacking the myriad boxes returned from storage, I reflect that — aside from the books, and some treasured bits and pieces — I have missed very little over the months of making do. So, what is in the boxes and do I really need it? My husband was fond of telling the children, as we piled up the car for departures to university, that he left home with just a single holdall (“Yes, Dad, you’ve told us. . .”). I think he’d approve of what we’re about.
Attentive audience
THE pictures of Archbishop Mullally’s meeting with Pope Leo in the Vatican earlier this month take me instantly back to October 2003 and the equivalent first meeting between Archbishop Rowan Williams and Pope John Paul II. They were operating a “pool” for the many journalists who had flocked to Rome for the occasion — a system whereby a small, representative group gets to be present to observe the meeting itself, responsible afterwards for relaying to the rest what it was like.
The nun in charge of the press operation gave me the news that I was to be one of the select bunch. I set three alarms in case, by some dreadful chance, I might oversleep; and, on my way to the Vatican Palace, I darted into a clothes shop — one that I’d normally hesitate to patronise — to buy a top more befitting the occasion than the one I’d packed.
I shall never forget the walk through the palace to the inner sanctum, the Pope’s private library. Chamber after chamber becomes more lavish, more ornate, more gilded, designed to impress and awe. The further you go, the smaller you feel. In the library, I remember the already frail Pope John Paul sitting stiff, upright, and immaculate in his chair. The sight of the two men greeting one another was a moving moment and felt truly historic.
It came to our turn. I don’t know about the other press members, but I had not expected to be personally introduced to the Pope. I have a close-up photograph of the moment that I am stooping to kiss his hand. And I’m thinking, “This is the Pope. For this one moment, it is just me and the Pope.”
The irony is that, while my mother’s family were Roman Catholics and my sister and I were duly baptised as such, our mother eventually left the Church. What prompted her decision remains a mystery, and, aside from being a bridesmaid at the Catholic wedding of an older cousin, I don‘t recall ever going to mass. We went, in fact, to a Methodist Sunday school.
When I was 11, our family was received into the Church of England. And I, the non-Catholic, am the one who gets to meet the Holy Father. Knowing heads would probably nod at the affinity I sometimes feel when walking into a Catholic church, and voices murmur about there being more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. The photograph is in one of the boxes — and I won’t be discarding that one.
Local hero
LATE autumn, winter, and early spring have passed me by while my life has been in flux. It has been a little like the time during lockdown: theatre projects waiting impatiently in the wings, a calendar of tightly controlled days (the builders start work at 7.30 a.m.), and not straying too far from home. It is just as well I’m tethered to my home ground, because, as the daffodils come in abundance and then the bluebells, there is much to do to prepare for a new season of visitors to the community heritage site of which I’m a trustee. My ears prick up when I hear a tribute to the late Sir Neil Cossons on Radio 4’s programme Last Word, because I had not long polished a plaque to him at our Old Church Tower.
The ancient tower survived wholesale destruction by Victorians needing a bigger, grander church. Sir Neil came to open it for us after we had secured funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to restore stonework, preserve key artefacts, and bring modest visitor facilities to the site.
On opening day, the man who had been director of the National Maritime Museum and the Science Museum, and who became chair of English Heritage, cut the ribbon with as much evident pleasure as he would have done at the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, of which he was the first director, and which went on to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as famous for its workers’ houses as its mighty bridge.
He was born and brought up just a couple of miles down the road, and was at school with one of our volunteers. It was a junior school where his father — who had a passion for industrial history and taught miners’ night classes — was head. Sir Neil went to a grammar school near by and never forgot his roots.
Choral foundation
SPRING has yielded to early summer while we have been up there serving coffee and homemade cakes. Now it’s May and Pentecost, and soon to be Trinity. The Church’s year has been, as always, a stabilising factor — the choral offering, in particular, a pivotal point as measurable as the depth of the trench dug in the garden.
We are doing a new anthem — Joanna Forbes L’Estrange’s “God the Holy Trinity”. “I chose to describe in music the three-in-one nature of the Trinity by restricting myself largely to three-part harmony, sung by S/A/Men, and by employing D-sharp within the harmonic framework of A major, which creates a tritone,” she writes in her composer’s note to the sheet music.
Ah, Joanna Forbes L’Estrange. You have no idea how refreshing all that sounds to me — how much that is music to my ears amid the language of screeding and tiling, roofing and plastering, and against the soundscape of hammering and drilling. “Above all, when singing the piece, please form the words as one would when reading the prayer aloud.” Amen to that.
Pat Ashworth is a journalist and playwright.