Journeys

This was taken in B & C's back garden, before I set out to catch the train from Lee to London Bridge (that oddly ominous station wedged between red brick and the gargantuan smoky mirrors of The Shard, etc.) thence to the Northern Line and Waterloo, when I caught a proper train to Salisbury, when my uncle Dermot lives. As I said, I'd been meaning to make this journey for some time, and I wasn't at all sure what to expect other than I badly wanted to see Dermot, who has always been my favourite uncle, a man who understands how to love.

It was lovely to watch the English countryside roll past, feel those little tugs of ripening adventure in every changing aspect: the roof of a barge showing above a field, another garden with its requisite trampoline, another shimmery sea of rape... all made more marvelous for being past before one can do more than glimpse them, a reel of alternative lives, worlds.

I phoned him when nearing Salisbury, as he'd requested. And he was there to meet me, waving from his car. We drove back to his house, tucked in a tiny, orderly estate, around the corner from the town centre. His house is well-lived-in, a nest of papers and books, comfortably untidy (not as chaotic as our own cluttered home, and I don't have the excuse of nearing 94). He made tea and we sat and talked awhile, or rather Dermot talked, with a little encouragement, which he didn't really need. This is what I had come for, to listen, as I never really did with my grandfather, and not nearly often enough with my mother either: his sister whom he loved at least as much as I did.

I had been prepared for him not wanting to be photographed or filmed, but I really needn't have worried. If I knew how happy he was to be recorded, and how easily he talked about everything (mum, grandfather, grandmother, himself...) I'd have come better prepared. He deserves more filming, more listening. His voice was wonderfully clear and strong and sure. We took a break for tea and he insisted on treating me to fish and chips, but before that he drove around the area, Millford Hill, and gave me a little history lesson, tracing the path the Medieval kings and queens took from the castle to the nearby cathedral, over the little bridge that still forded the river.