MARY'S BIT or BUDGIE IN A BOX
One of my brothers in law once remarked he kept changing his locks, but his grown children still managed to get back in.
Doubtless this is not quite what Thomas Wolfe had in mind when he opined we can't go home again.
Sometimes it's just not possible for reasons other than different locks. On one occasion after some years away, I returned to Gateshead to see family and while there went to visit our old street. Imagine my consternation when I turned the corner and the street had disappeared. There was only an asphalted space where it had been, and -- even more sinister, in my opinion -- the streets framing it were still there and still inhabited.
What was also remarkable was the space originally occupied by a row of terraced houses facing another across the narrow street looked so tiny it seemed impossible fifty or so families had lived in that street at one time.
Another street where the Reeds lived across the river in Newcastle had also disappeared some years before, but its passing was not unexpected given at the time we left the city the wrecking ball had almost reached it as slum clearance efforts got under way. My spies tell me new housing was built on the site, set horizontally to the river rather than at right angles to it as the original street had been. Unfortunately, after storms water rushing down the very steep slope caused flooding so the new housing had to be taken down and rebuilt in the same configuration as the old.
Of course, when you can't go home again you're usually either living in, or on your way to, your next dwelling, which reminds me of one of my mother's more eventful moves, which involved a journey from Oxfordshire back up north to Gateshead not that far around the corner and down the main road from the street mentioned earlier. Various of the family assisted, loading up a large van with furniture and rolled up carpet and other household goods, including
four wardrobes from a three-bedroomed house -- they are so useful for storage was one of my mother's mantras. A large box was punched with for transporting the budgie north, the reasoning being if he perched on the swing in his cage during the journey the continual wild oscillations caused by the vehicle's movement would not be good to the little fellow and so far as we knew no avian tranquilizers were available.
The last items to be put aboard were two sacks holding mother's remaining stock of coal, for she was determined not to leave it behind.
It was almost midnight and everything was in the van except the budgie, leaving only these two sacks of coal to be loaded. The ladies were in the kitchen making tea when all of a sudden two family gents rushed in, one with blood running down his face and both chanting a registration plate number. They'd been loading the sacks when a car stopped, a man leapt out, assaulted one because he thought a sack of coal lying on the shadowed pavement by the garden hedge was a body -- or so he claimed -- and then raced off.
With the aid of the number, the police tracked down the car and were round at the owner's house within a short time. He claimed he hadn't set foot out the door all night but, as we later learned, his car bonnet was still warm when the police arrived. But there was nothing to be done.
In any event, tea gulped, mother, a couple of family members going north, and the budgie left for the journey, driving past numerous illuminated windows from which peered neighbours who had got out of bed on hearing the police car siren howling.
To this day I am convinced they thought a moonlight flit was in progress and we had been caught in the act.
Happily the budgie suffered no ill effects and not long after she settled in mother purchased another wardrobe, making six in a two bedroom flat. But then they are so useful for storage.
AND FINALLY
As Tennyson pointed out, seasons too flower and fade and although this newsletter arrives in high summer, autumn will beginning when the next issue of Orphan Scrivener escapes from the wardrobe of time and manages to get into subscribers' inboxes on September 15th.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit our home page, hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, the Doom Cat interactive game written by Eric, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Intrepid subscribers may also wish to pop over to Eric's blog at http://www.journalscape.com/ericmayer/ or visit M. E. Mayer's blog at
http://memayer.blogspot.com/
