Nomad

NOMAD

I make it up backwards.

FOREWORD

The Very Worst Mistakes I Ever Made

People ask, 'Why do they live so far away?'

I live in the middle of the UK, as far as you can get from the sea in every direction. Locked in. My son lives 7,087 miles from me; my daughter, her husband and my grandchildren live 6,090 miles from me. My two children live 3,000 miles from each other. Family reunions are expensive, emotive and rare.

It’s not what I’d dreamt of. I’d envied my friend whose parents had a house in our road; it was next door but one to her own. Her daughter and grandaughter lived in the new close built by the Housing Association, for extending village families. I’d hoped my children would plant themselves in the long garden behind our ex-council house, hidden from the ‘pretty’ huddled round the pond in the thatched-village down the hill. I’d dreamt they’d each add an annexe, a cabin or a yurt, and I thought it might just work, if they’d stick around with partners and my grandchildren. My therapist reminds me of my wanting to keep my children in small trunks and feed them cheese and pineapple cubes on sticks through the bars, rather than let then face the torturous inhumanities of Secondary School.

I don’t envy UK grandparents at half term; they age fifteen yearrs in a week but I do miss the day to day sweeping, pot-boiling, passing the salt and argument.

People go on, not listening,  'and anyway, why did you move to Buckingham? Weren't you out in one of the villages? Or Milton Keynes wasn't it?'

'All of the above; I've moved a bit. Not far, but edging back towards, you know; that river.'

I’d left the village dream behind in 2017, its ghosts remaindered to the view from the window upstairs, at the back, from the big room where my children and I had watched my mother die. I moved into a three-storey palace, bang in the middle of the pale-brown town where I’ve been now for seven years, feeling guilty for making holes in the wall, pretending I don’t feel as if I am living in someone else’s life.

I think I’ve always drifted.

I accidentally moved in with Brian in 1982 not long after I’d returned from India. He's the charismatic therapist who had broken my heart once of twice already before I left England in 1980 when I’d decided to live in Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh’s Ashram in Pune forever. He’s the one who later became father of my two children, my first husband and the one I divorced.

We lived together then with two children from his first marriage and a third who came and went to and from Australia; we filled a two-bed terrace on the edge of Milton Keynes, which grew as we grew. I felt amoebic. I didn't dare associate with my family, who I craved, in case I seemed childish. His friends were older than me, a clique, and related to each other’s children through divorce and reshufflings.

I was a bit behind the curve when it came to our musical tastes. I'd never even heard of Queen and he hadn't got any time for Pink Floyd. He was 36. I was 25 and I felt about twelve and utterly at sea. To save myself from detection, I adopted the role of Super Woman advocated in Shirley Conran's book of the same name. My 2024 self is horrified by this admission. But it's true. I'd read her bible and I followed her rules. I was, without an organising external structure, prone to flounder.

When I moved in with Brian and his children in Milton Keynes, I had only recently left the infamous Rajneesh Ashram, which had itself just left Pune. I was between cities, I imagined. I'd flown into London but I had been hoping and expecting to go on to Oregon, where Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, or at least his team, was setting up the new Ashram.

Mysteriously, after seven years’ devoted discipleship, as soon as I found myself alone, on the plane out of Mumbai, I felt set free, as if let out of prison. Landing at Heathrow, being in the country my body-memory instantly recognised as Home, I found myself bombarded with signals pulling me back in time to the point at which I’d ‘dropped out’ - what of, I still don’t know. A customs officer, who knew the address in my passport stopped riffling through my suitcase as soon as he saw the name of the village: he said I should remind my father of him; his name; he’d laugh, he said. The airport’s mid-summer pulse and the stark shock of seeing a bent figure, sari-wrapped in tourquoise and pinks, bending over pristine marbled floors here, with a soft brush; later, a London bus; and the growing sense of relief that came with it being cool enough to need a warm wrap, and being drenched in the scent of a misty evening's earthy dankness emboldened me. I heard a silenced voice cry.

In a shape of home, my sister’s London flat, I started to question why I should continue to swear obeisance to a surrendered life.  Aspects of commune life in India had become sketchy.  I had found myself challenging things which felt wrong. My challenges had led to a form of isolation - a rejection and freezing out. Those who questioned or resisted the freedoms surrender promised were shunned. Later, finally, when I announced that I had decided to 'drop Sannyas' and to 'give up' the philosophy-free-philosophy that had guided my life for seven-years, my friends, all faithful devotees, dropped me.

I had no friends; I had no ideas of my own about what I thought or who I might be.  I was terrified and I was rudderless.

I drifted through an English Summer, unhinged, trying to follow leads the future forwarded to me. I felt like a child, playing with a dolls-house but actually I was living in a flat in leafy West Hampstead, working in Nottingham Place as 'the little darling' to three nice men, 'in clothing - classics'. (It’s not what you know or at least, it wasn’t then.) I reconnected with Richard who I had had wild sex with, once, when I was 17 and after a fancy village do. I can't remember how or why we were in touch again that summer. He was all any one might wish of a boy-next-door and for five weeks, perhaps five months, the sliding doors opened on the sustainable future advertised to housewives in the 1950s, and later during Thatcher’s revival of a woman’s place. Hot Richard drove a swish Alfa Romeo and he wore a very expensive leather jacket. As in any good Mills and Boom romance, he was also tall, broad, had sparkling blue eyes and fabulously sun-streaked blonde hair. He used to come for supper with me, praise my skills in the kitchen, sleep with me and tell me he was overwhelmed by my sensuality, stay for breakfast and complain about my smoking.

I was mad for Richard but finally he had a thing for the editor of The Evening Standard who had pubic lice and so I did too. At least I think that's the way it happened. He doesn't. I met him again quite recently at a funeral. He was sniffy about it; he said I'd dumped him and chosen to go and live in Milton Keynes with Brian. 'I told you then it'd be the worst mistake you ever made in your life' he said. Some of my worst mistakes are my best bits.

When I dropped out of the Rajneesh movement in the early 80’s I made real attempts to pick up the pieces I'd dropped when I'd 'dropped out' of dropping-in, in 1975. I applied to and was accepted by CSSD for a BEd (Hons) in English & Drama with Speech Therapy. After four years I’d be something. A drama teacher or/and a speech therapist. This was a plan.

I gave up working in the office in Nottingham Place for the three nice men, and I gave up living in leafy West Hampstead and cooking Richard supper.  (I can still smell that expensive jacket and I can still feel him standing behind me, tall; I can still see him stooping to stir porridge on the stove beneath the eaves. I can still feel the wobble of cups in saucers as I ferry coffee to the three nice men in the office. I can still feel the thrill of Friday nights in Hampstead, or on Primrose Hill waiting for dawn) 

I moved in with Brian in Milton Keynes soon after the incident involving the pubic lice. That summer was a collage of picnics, bicycle races and smoking-out-insects with joints during the day, and barbecues as dusk stetched on. When I became a student, in the week of father's death on October 2nd 1982, I found commuting between Milton Keynes and London's Swiss Cottage tricky. After a while, I gave up being a student; I gave up smoking and ate biscuits all day and night; but still, in June, in 1983, I lived for the sound of skylarks high above the path between the two flat fields on the way into the woods. I’d like to go back in time, just once, and listen to the roar of the M1 beside Newport Pagnell Services, and to look back from the bed of mossy grass felting the banks of the balancing lakes, towards the motel that kept watch over the field day and night.

My two children were born three years apart, in March; the first in 1984, less than two years after my father's death and half way through my intended education and training.  I was an aggressively competent earth mother; I breastfed non-stop for about five years, the second child more or less moving the first on to cups. I could conjure vats of hearty stews from nothing but a lentil and a bone. I swept, scrubbed, scraped, washed, wrung, hung, folded, dried, dug, hugged, and roared; the toil was incessant. I rarely slept and when I left with my two children, abandoning the other kids, my departure was fuelled by a fierce identity rage as he roared, 'Who the fuck do you think you are?' I really had no idea.

We moved first into a tiny terraced house in vibrant Stony Stratford, a small town which clings to its individuality and sits on the edge of Milton Keynes. Stony is visited (inhabited) by Morris Dancers, Historical Re-enactment Societies, Story Tellers, Poets, and Musicians.  As early Summer's breathless shades of green dress trees, and hot-road-rage dresses men in vests which don't quite cover beer-pots, a festival of music draws all folk to Horsefair Green, for 'Folk on the Green' on the second Sunday of every June, rain or shine. My famous hot-honeyed-sausages with steaming cheese and potatoe pies assured our picnic blanket pride of place and I felt I had finally found my English home in 90’s Stony Strafford. I had found a separate self. I could paint the walls in our home the colours I chose without asking anyone’s permission. I flooded the place with friends; I cooked, danced, wrote, worked, found a car, switched jobs, catered for England, raved and found myself overwhelmed by men and freedom. 

I lived in tidy chaos. From the outside, it looked like I was mantaining some form of order designed to meet the needs of growing kids with ambitions and social lives. I’d have a stab at balancing one’s being in training with swimming-clubs against the other’s need for ease, and sleep; I’d try to meet all the schools’ demands, not least in the form of high numbers of calls for fancy dress each term, which was a mission bound to fail. I’d get into and spend time getting out of tussles with other people. I'‘d pull it round, unscarred on the outside. Inside chaotic thinking and extreme emotional sensitivities governed my apparently instinctual tendency to self-destruct.

People talk about planning a family.  In my imaginary other life, the one on the other side of the sliding doors and the one I should and didn’t live, second husband, R. for Right and I have two chiildren besides the two I had (very gladly but pretty much by mistake) with my first husband. He adores all four children equally and has no favourites. Money is no issue. Instead, in real life, I underwent a sterilisation just before I married for the second time.

Looking back it's quite easy to spot those 'sliding-doors' moments peppered through my life, which I might try to pass off as 'bad luck'. In truth, my internal saboteur and I had a thing going on. I'd say, 'this is a really bad idea.' And she'd say 'fuck it, why not, eh?' and I'd submit, willingly, watching my sense of integrity and worth soak away.

My ordinary face, the one that took after Dr Jekyll, collected every other bugger’s kids from school and fed them pasta; washed, cooked, scraped & scrubbed; fought with schools; studied; worked for not enough money and complained like all other school gate mothers about being: invisible; under valued; nothing but a taxi-driver/housekeeper/tutor at home, which they wouldn’t have if not for … and so it went on. Only one man told his wife over the end of a meal, across my kitchen table, screwing his napkin into a fist, savouring an amuse bouche, that I was every man’s dream. We all were and we tended to agree, our performance as Dr Jekyll was exemplary; we excelled in these under-valued roles and so it was reasonable, justifiable, forgivable should we find ourselves being a bit Mr Hyde now and then. Looking back is like watching a car crash in slow motion and wanting to but being unable to scream.

What mattered then still matters now. The stain behind the pictures on the wall; the stories about the day before the day photographs were taken. The facts of life are mucky. My friends now talk of death-clearing.  All they mean is that they have started to give everything they’ve decided to keep some form of story. It has to have meaning . Other than that, they are throwing away all their junk now (along with their private diaries) so their kids don't find themselves raking through detrius once they’re dead. Life’s reduced to some form of archive, sealed in a glass capsule, on exhibition. Sanitised.

Last time I moved house, I felt traitorous; my Grandchild had spent her earliest months pottering about with me in her mum's family home. I dismantled her sandpit; restored dens to shrubs; I stole hidden treasure from secret outside spaces which she would now forget all about, and she’d feel strange when she visited me from thousands of miles away, next. She wouldn’t feel at home in my new place, in the house that feels like someone else’s.

I moved house once while my son was away travelling for a year. I felt as if I was betraying his right to have a map co-ordinate to call home. Are mothers supposed to stay in one place? Biology would propose so, largely, except of course there are those very big penguins that seem to swap roles about.  The generic female does seem to do a fair bit of guarding the nest while the male ferrets about for sustenance. The men in my life, across time, seem to have done a fair bit less ferreting about for sustenance than I have. But we do have it all now and I have moved house a lot.

There were reasons for the moves which fall under several headings:  self assertion; divorce; disappointment; optimistic blindfolded misplaced trust; dreadful debt; great landlords and finally, I needed to be in the right place in order to look after my Mother, who, as chance would have it came with a whole house full of signifiers of dependable stability.

Throughout the sustained period of my nomadic life (coincident with copious disastrous relationship-experiments) while I was also lone-parenting and hoping to establish a firm base for my children (coincident with not knowing 'who the fuck' I thought I was) my Mother had held on to 'stuff'. There was the hall table, and reliably, there were still screwdrivers in the left-hand drawer, string in the one on the right and keys in the middle. Here was my grandfather Pip's large bronze Buddha and the echo of his insistence that I 'rub his tummy for luck'; and here are albums stuffed with photographs of my children taken by their generous Granny, as well as vases which now gloom on the top of my kitchen cabinets; and there are the pictures I had professed to despise but which now jostle for space on my kitchen wall, looking down on me and reminding me who I am when I fall into their scapes.

My Mother’s aunts each left her fancy mahoganny tables and fine chests. Usurped by fine marquetry, the sturdy kitchen table which I had played beaneath as a child was made redundant in my teens when I had claimed it as my own. The kitchen table and I are in a relationship which has adapted through the decades. A toddler’s retreat first, it matured and became my partner, shouldering the weight of play-dough, shepherds’ pies and play dates. It stood firm, guardian-like, between me and each unsuitable Other and it bears the marks of glasses, thumped, and the carelessness of beer spilt on rusting tins. It is my double; resilient but lined; neglected; in need of a decent moisturiser. This year, it’s my confidante. I lean here to celebrate and mourn the past’s heaving parties’ pots of chillie, toppling pots of Christmas mull and people leaning here. My oak table and I have lived through several lives together. Now we are resigned to hosting play-readers with their raised voices; refereeing disagreements about soup and the best coffee shop in town whle furthering a movement committed to the ritual brewing of solace-tea in blue and white striped pots.

The heavy oak of my kitchen table is indelibly marked in the centre by Violet and Sid's hot pot.  The Shears lived next door to my Mother with her fancy woods and were happy to look after the table for me for twenty years and when the last of them died, the table came home to me. My children were small and played on the cross bar under the table, riding the imaginary ponies I had ridden too but never spoken of.

Slips, spills and cup marks, burns and scrapes, like scars or commemorative tattoos, shape the table-top-landscape of my extending family's living archive. Shared histories are elbow worn into the softened edge of the old-oak board. This table, like my father's metal nail file, my Mother's grapefruit spoons and the faded Guinness ‘Tug of War’ Christmas-Cake tin, such disparate objects, are the signifiers of a primal home which I have clung to through time.

People tell me that, 'wherever you live, it always looks the same' and I admit, that in just seven years I have made one, hot off the press, brand new home look tatty and makeshift: it is as ready for an incoming tide of family from far, far away as it is also, trunk stacked, book-boxed and you can see, if you look closely enough, arranged as if ready for an emergecy. Shiftable fast. I brouse RightMove compulsively and struggle to admit, it’s not about the place is it? Wherever I go, I go too. I’m never left behind.    

'What happened then? Why do both your kids live so far away?' they ask.

'And so far away from each other?' I add.

'And that. You must want to go and live near them,' they tell me.

'Which?'

'Well, couldn't you just; wouldn't you like to sort of split your year, make a home, sort of, I don't know. Nearer?'

'No.'

I sound resolute enough and I can convince myself I have a life that is concerned with more than a compulsion to find, make and sustain connections. I spend my days stretching one tea-bag across seven cups, continents apart, poured from a blue and white striped pot.

I make it up backwards.

And this forms the foreword of a memoir in progress

‘The Very Worst Mistakes I Ever Made.’

Cherry Coombe

15 May 2024