THE ALPINE HUT

For no reason at all I was rifling through some old photographs when I came upon this black and white postcard from my grandfather. Unfortunately someone has torn off the stamps which might have given a clue as to the date, stuck the card into an album, and torn it out again. ‘Vandal!’ remarked my husband as I sat hoping that it had not been my younger self who was the culprit. However, various clues have established a rough date of 1958 as a reasonable estimate.

The little alpine hut was Turtmann-Hutte, located deep in the Swiss Alps , in a remote corner of the Turtmann valley. If, like me, you are still none the wiser, here is a link to the Wikipedia information: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtmann.

But it’s not the location about which I write. Rather, it is the message on the card, written diagonally in his beautiful handwriting, which comes from the heart:

I have had the occasion to go into the Alps probably for the last time, the climbing was a bit too much, but I managed it!! I spent the night in this Alpine Hut. Love to you all, Grand’pa

Scrawled on the top edge, upside down, is the signature of his younger brother Oncle Georges who accompanied him on the trip.
My grandfather was French Swiss, a clever man whose job brought him to London in the early part of the twentieth century, where he married an Englishwoman and made his home. He seldom went back to the place of his birth in the Jura Mountains, declaring that it had changed too much. Perhaps this trip felt like a final journey? Certainly the words recognise his own limitations. He had a bad heart which eventually failed him ten years later.

He was not a man to dwell on achievements, but his pleasure in having succeeded in his climb to the Alpine Hut is clearly revealed by those two exclamation marks.
Climbing mountains has been a metaphor for surmounting life’s difficulties since the beginning of time. To me, the message on this card reinforces my own philosophy of ‘expect the unexpected’ by rephrasing it as: ‘take an unexpected opportunity and your struggle may reward you with an achievement’. Or so I hope! The challenge is both physical and mental. In battling the growing limitations on the ageing human body, we continue to tease it with the occasional push, whilst being rewarded with the aches and pains of disgruntled muscles for whom such exercise was becoming a memory. 

The Alpine Hut has completely changed now, of course, as the present owners’ website shows: http://www.turtmannhuette.ch/. It hasn't gone, but has been considerably expanded, accommodating many more people than at the time my grandfather and his brother stayed there.

The mountains, though, are eternal...

 

ALL CHANGE... AS YOU WERE!

This is a picture of schoolgirls about to begin a race. The event is a school sports day. The year? About 1936. Can you remember what you felt like, as a child, to be in such a line-up? These girls’ faces reflect several different attitudes to the race. Bizarrely each child has a bucket at her feet, for what purpose I have no idea. But two or three are so keen for the race to begin that they stand poised, each with one foot forward, eyes on the starter. One is hesitant, her finger on her lips, whilst another taller girl looks slightly puzzled. There is one child for whom the race is hardly happening at all. More interested in the bucket, number 10 stands with her feet neatly together, apparently unaware that the start is imminent. She is the girl who won the race, and that girl became my mother.

I am always keen to explore the idea that nothing in life ever turns out the way you expect it to. ‘It’s character-forming’, my mother would tell me at the end of a school day when everything had gone wrong. There are those who plan everything, even down to the number of children they will have, and for whom life never appears to be as harsh – until they are dealt a body blow by a whimsy of fate. For others it is enough to muddle along, attempting to ride the storm.

In the latter part of (to me) a rather sad life, my mother has become withdrawn and lives a reclusive life in which she is often angry. She is very crippled and pain plays a huge part in her grumpy attitude. You can see from her whole stance in the photograph that she was never one to be dictated to. Her home and family mean everything to her, and woe betide anyone who suggests anything which might change the status quo.

So a life-threatening bout of a severe flu virus which resulted in her being driven away from her beloved home in an ambulance seemed like the end of her world. And, for those of us close to her, the end of ours too! I count myself fortunate to have known my mother for such a long time, when others lose theirs at a much younger age. Yet however prepared you are for the death of a parent, the reality of it is most certainly one of those body blows from which you do not recover, exactly, but learn to adapt. We were all convinced that her time was up, but we had to consider all options. We held many and various discussions about how things would have to change should she survive, what should and what must happen, and how on earth would we achieve those changes.

She has surprised us yet again. After a roller-coaster ride in the hospital, where the nursing staff all deserve individual medals for putting up with such a difficult patient, she finally stopped fighting them and allowed herself to be – not cured, exactly, but made better. And now, suddenly, she is back at home again, while we are all recovering – totally exhausted from two weeks of long, difficult travelling to visit, to comfort and to reassure her that we would not leave her in hospital or forget her.

And so we gradually return to normal. Or do we? Should we allow things to go back to how they were, or should we try to make those changes of which we spoke in hurried, whispered, worried tones? She has no idea how devastated some of us were, or how difficult our journey through this has been. How can we possibly disturb her frailty at this stage? Of course we can’t. We’ll do it all again, I have no doubt. It is enough that for now she is still here, and we love her!

NO ACCOUNTING FOR TIME

In my other life as an accountant – now receding into the past where I am more than happy to let it remain, I was accountable for my time. In effect, time was what we sold. As each valuable minute ticked by, it had to be recorded; who was the client, what was the work done, etc. I was lucky enough to be accounting in six-minute units – in some cases single minutes were used. So if, after a day of solid grind, you had forgotten to write down exactly what you were doing and for whom, it was a question of thinking back through the hours and occasionally being inventive.

After decades of this practice, my new ‘career’ as a writer is a blissful experience where time becomes a complete irrelevance in the rush to record my ideas. I can write for hours, pausing as the view outside the window grows dark, and only then realising that hours have passed.

But… it’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime.

                “Have you phoned the garage?” my husband will ask innocently after being out for the morning. I experience a kind of panic, realising that I haven’t. 

                “I’ve been doing other things,” I snap back and begin to list them, consulting the clock in an automatic return to ‘time costing’ mode.

Luckily my husband has begun to understand my curious mindset about this, and a simple reassurance that he is not trying to find out what I’ve been doing seems to work, although it’s taken a couple of years to reach this point. I sometimes wonder if I will ever shake the habit.

I often think we are too much taken up with time in modern life. Travel back a few hundred years and people seldom knew exactly what the time was at various points in their day, neither did it concern them unduly. Seasons and weather were probably more important. Now, time ticks mercilessly on – as it always has, but it seems we do not allow ourselves to ignore it.

In contrast, one of the characters in my current work-in-progress has been dragged into a world where, as he tells a visitor, ‘…to answer one of your other questions, I really don’t know how old I am now. I’ve been here for some time, but time is… not the same here as it is where you live. As it is at home.’ This situation, at the opposite side to our daily lives, could be equally stressful. 

I think we need to be more relaxed about time. There are moments of great importance in life, where conversations or events take place which should be treasured, as we will remember them for the rest of our lives. During these we should allow time to slow down, revel in the moment and not allow ourselves to be swept away from them.

Enjoy every single moment of your life, because it only happens once.

As the poet William Henry Davies so aptly stated:

 

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

THE DECISION ABOUT THE CHAIR

Sometimes in life there are monumental decisions, and sometimes there are simply decisions.

Faced with a huge bill for car repairs, the decision about whether or not to sell this little chair becomes more and more one of head rather than heart.

Let me tell you about the chair, because it’s more unusual than you might think. This is a Campaign Chair, Victorian in era, and it comes apart – for taking with you to the battlefield. Truly! It was lovingly restored and re-covered a few years ago, the red leather seat adding to its quality. But it’s a little worrying having something like this around. We treat it with great respect, but as such it doesn’t easily fit into our everyday lives, and we haven’t really got room for it.

Why am I hesitating? It depresses me to think that I will miss it if it goes. We have sold many and various items in the last few years, either to raise money or to create space. You have to harden your heart, and I find this difficult. At times when life is depressing, one clings on to those familiar and loved objects which have been collected over the years. And who isn’t feeling even slightly depressed at the moment? My wonderful cousin with Parkinson’s Disease strives to maintain a positive outlook, and so should I – who have so much to be grateful for. This winter, though, has stretched my optimism to its limits. Am I alone in feeling conspired against by all of those establishments who strive to control our lives? Open any newspaper, switch on a radio or television, or consult your computer or phone, and you will be attacked by all things depressing. This is not good for anyone.

How important it is in life to maintain one’s sense of humour and hopefulness, and keep a cheerful spirit. This is my philosophy, but it is being sorely tried at the moment!

If anyone reading this is feeling run down, exhausted and depressed, then you are not alone. In fact there are thousands of us struggling to keep going, to maintain some kind of equilibrium and to feel that we are needed, appreciated and respected.

So I would like you to imagine, if you will, a Victorian soldier taking his chair with him to the 

battlefield, setting it up in his tent and using it in an entirely unsafe, hostile environment – because it maintains his dignity. This chair is a little reminder, perhaps, of his home and his family. It enables him to keep up the pretence that life is normal – when all around him are the brutal sounds of battle and the smells of death and disease. The picture of peaceful civilised life embodied in this piece of furniture is what gives him hope that he will go home. We all need something to give us hope.

The more I think about it, the more difficult the decision becomes…