Memories

The house is back to normal again now - no Christmas tree, no cards, no red berries and no Swedish candolier lights in the windows. The latter are packed away in their boxes and stored for next year, the tree is awaiting a very dry spell so it can be incinerated on a bonfire, and the rest have been binned. I've hoovered up all the needles and picked some out of my clothes. Only a couple of tupperware boxes filled with turkey breast remain in the freezer, and a dwindling chunk of Christmas cake. I've polished off the leftovers, spag bol, fish pie, buttterbean cassoulet, and am back to cooking from scratch again. That's it for another year then.

I'm reading a fascinating book that's really gripped my imagination. It's called A Woman on the Edge of Time by Jeremy Gavron, and describes his search for the mother who killed herself after taking him to a Christmas party at his nursery school when he was three. She was never mentioned again in the family, but now in his 40s he tries to find out who she was, why she took her own life, leaving him and his brother bereft. His research takes him to the people who knew her, and who each offer him something of her personality, a memory, letters, photos, diary entries, so that he can build up a picture of who she was, and crucially why she did what she did when he was three. Another book over 20 years ago had the same powerful effect on me, and that was Possession by A S Byatt. I can hardly put the Gavron book down, but I don't want it to end either. His scholarship and sharp, immediate writing are near faultless.

Thinking about memory, as both this book and my very recent discoveries about my much earlier associations with this village have provoked, I recall yet another stay not half a mile as the crow flies from my door. On one of our regular house-hunting trips we stayed at a beautiful old house in Bruisyard, run by a tyrant of a woman who I often see in Waitrose. I became very ill on this trip which began three days earlier in the west of the county, and by the time we arrived at the B&B for a four night stay I immediately took to my bed and stayed there with a handy basin beside me. I couldn't view any of the properties but had to stay behind and hear about them afterwards. The lady of the house was not happy with this arrangement, and suggested that I be taken home. She had an abhorrence of illness, especially sickness. We refused, naturally, but she remained slightly hostile until we left. Friends who know her more intimately than I do confirm that this was all perfectly in character. So now I have three positions marking my visits to this village. I really have no idea why we chose this small spot. We often stayed at other Suffolk places for long weekends away before we ever thought of moving here: Aldeburgh and Southwold for example, two beautiful towns on the coast that attract a lot of tourists because they are quite unspoilt and unchanged. But Cransford and Bruisyard? Three separate visits which I have only just connected together. Each time we returned I had no idea we'd been before. There's no dead mother. But is there a story?