Around Eastertime years ago in the heart of the North
Norfolk countryside, the spring sunshine would glimmer pleasant warmth upon that
classic English perennial; the primrose. This was a time when wildflowers carpeted the
rural landscape like a floral patchwork quilt. Families of primroses assembled
round tree trunks in coppice woodland or freckled damp meadows.
On a somewhat overcast day in London, my fellow flatmates of
103C have dispersed like seeds in the wind, back to the Rhine, the Welsh
valleys or similar. I, however, am alone in my room, surrounded by a legion of formidable
library books. Paradise Lost and a yellowing copy of Beowulf from the fifties
lie abandoned as I endeavour to decipher meaning in old English lyrics. Outside
on the street a youth speeds past with ‘Soldier Boy’ thumping out of the
speakers.
Before wishing us a Happy Easter my tutors casually bestowed
five essays to complete in two weeks. I am frantically typing as well as worrying
about sitting two exams on Early Modern and Classical and Biblical literature a
week later-yes Biblical. Tears, tantrums and copious cups of tea have already
been spent fighting through the Book of Psalms. Needless to say, with the demanding
workload, I decided not to go home for Easter festivities as I know my work
will lie neglected.
Halfway through note-taking on Ars Moriendi, The Art of Dying (cheerful I know) the phone rings. It’s Mum. I have
to answer otherwise she’ll leave five voicemail messages before instructing the
security guards of halls to conduct a personal search and rescue mission.
‘Hello darling!’, Mum twinkles down the line, ‘just calling
to see how you’re doing’.
The secret is to never bemoan the workload, or actually, moan
in general. Usually I measure the mood of the voice on the line; if it’s
relentlessly chirpy, like today, I just say I’m fine. It’s so much easier. Mum was blessed with the amazing ability of
not appearing as if she’s listening to a word you say, ruthlessly ploughing
over you with anecdotes of Yorkshire pudding success stories and babysitting
triumphs. In fact, she skilfully files every scrap of information she hears; any deviation
from cheery optimism and she can craftily use it as ammunition the next time I
fall ill and then declare 'well that’s because you didn’t take those
multivitamins I sent you in the jiffy bag last Friday'.
‘Mum’, I warned, ‘I’m in the middle of writing an essay’, as
I displace a pile of papers with my elbow that cascade off the top of my desk
and mutinously drift about on the hideous nylon carpet.
Of course that was selectively filtered out.
‘Anyway darling, I was just remembering how you used to make
a Garden of Gethsemane for the Chuch display every year when you were little!
Do you remember?’
I pause, fountain pen hovering above the lyric “with the
precious river that runneth from his womb”, caught on the one hand between impulsively
decoding Mum’s possible motivations for this trip down memory lane, and mulling over the nostalgic memories flooding my mind on the other.
Every year, the children in our village would be asked
produce their own interpretation of a Garden of Gethsemane. The garden is located
by the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where it is said that Jesus and his
disciples prayed the night before his crucifixion. In Greek, ‘Gethsemane’ means
‘olive press’, and the garden in Jerusalem today is filled with gnarled olive
trees standing proudly like war veterans; adorned with silvery green foliage that glint like medals upon the lapel and clusters of white blossom.
Armed with little fruit baskets, my sister Annabelle and I
would go questing into the woodland for mats of velvety emerald moss, fragments
of lichen covered bark and ferns that nod their heads in the slight spring
breeze. These forest riches would beautify the little paper maché cave I
made with newspaper and that special concoction of flour and water. The cave would be positioned on an old cake board, decorated with greenery and perfected with a tiny gravel path winding through the garden up
to the cave entrance. I can’t remember ever using plastercine, reels of sellotape or
ready-made craft materials that children seem to require nowadays. We weren’t
the obsessive ‘living off the land’ type or bohemian children of nature; our
happiness was found in being instinctively artistic and making our own
entertainment.
Those memories never leave you. Of course I hadn’t forgotten. I thought we
were on track for a nice reflective conversation.
Cheerfully bludgeoning through my reverie , Mum swiftly
progressed onto asking whether I was going to nip out and get myself a chicken,
turkey or something equally as ridiculous to roast on Easter Sunday.
‘You’ll never be able to do any decent work if you don’t
feed yourself properly, next thing you’ll be having fainting fits, remember all
the trouble we had with you at school?’ she chastised. I rolled my eyed and
looked over at my sixteen-pack of brioche rolls from Lidl that I’ve steadily been
working my way through all afternoon.
The time for
mother-daughter chit-chat had unsurprisingly expired. My woefully incomplete essay sat
winking at me and I was losing the fight with my instinctive urge to run and
glug caffeine. Mercifully, Mum announced
that she couldn’t stay on the line (in standard subverted Mum-logic) and promised
she would ring to check how I was tomorrow morning, probably at the unsavoury
hour at 6am or similar.
There are times when we all wish everything were simpler. When we find ourselves wistfully reminiscing about those carefree childhood
days. When we long to drop whatever we’re doing and bask in the spring sunshine
just because we feel like it.
The photograph above is my two year old self doing just
that. Staring intently into the face of a wild primrose hoping to unlock some worldly
knowledge. I know I won’t be unearthing a woody glade stitched with these
little effervescent beauties tomorrow. But I can always sit on the square of
lawn at the back of our apartments to satisfy my countryside homesickness. There’s
always ways and means if we look hard enough. It might make reading medieval literature
a little easier.
Happy Easter.
