As I sit here , remnants of a late supper around me , the bells of the church have just struck 7pm. What a rotten job I always think to myself. Standing around at the top of the tower counting off fifteen minute intervals and then pulling on the rope ! My daughter tells me it is all electronic these days. Surely not ! This is Kopfing , after all.
The cats have re-appeared for supper ( kitten ragout this evening - lucky girls...) and, sound of feline crunching in the background, I have settled down to tap away on my keyboard. The other day I had to collect daughter-the-younger from a friends, where she had been staying overnight. I was welcomed into the family´s lovely home, and while standing in their entrance hall , I happened to notice the curtains on a staircase window. That's odd I thought , I recognise that pattern. And a cable began to move and connect itself into one of my brain boxes. Surely not ! But yes, it was one of my father´s fabrics...In Austria !
Now, my father and his before him had both worked for the rather distinguished English fabric company Arthur Sanderson, in London. My dad was a travelling salesman for the company. It was a very smart firm and included designs amongst its collection by the great William Morris. Each salesman was provided with not only a company car - a Rover - but also a driver complete with uniform and chauffeurs cap ! This struck me at the time as more than a little incongruous. We were a normal family , living in a normal semi-detached house in a Yorkshire market town... we named it Heathfield. When I was 5 I was sent to a primary school just half a kilometre away from our house. This was also a bit odd, as it was a private catholic convent school - St. Philomema´s , completely staffed by rosary bead swinging black clad nuns. I can remember my first day very clearly. I had hung my coat on a peg with a butterfly above it. Funny the little details that remain in the mind...
Life at this particular school was a formative experience for me. There were not many of us, I was very lucky to be there. I have many snapshots of this time stored in my mind and they connect with events later in my life in a number of different ways, as I look to cable them together.
I remember...
the first classroom with its open fire on winter days...the very young nun who played football with us , but didn't really understand the rules... being caught talking after break-time in the cloakroom and summoned to the head teachers room... taking part in a school performance of a children´s operetta ( a proper stage with a big audience for the first time in my life )… dreamy Friday afternoons listening to our teacher reading ´Wind in the Willows` while I gazed out of the window on a sunny summers day....sitting under a willow tree in the school garden...going with the class to the catholic church on Fridays, even though I was what they called a ´non-Catholic´...some really good friends... and one boy who used to regularly bully me, but was caught...interestingly much later he was to become a friend...having to stand at the blackboard and do arithmetical calculations on the spot... I failed...painting and drawing and being told by a classmate that I was very good at it...during the last week finally talking to a girl in my class , only to be told by her that she liked another boy... listening to one favourite teacher telling us that there were things we would learn in the future which we could not now understand...and wondering...enjoying reading the ` ladybird ` book of astronomy...my final day when the head teacher gave me a farewell card and a small bible...(I wish I still had it, sometimes)... the feeling when I knew I would have to leave and go on to the local secondary school, while all my friends went in different directions...( it was the time of the end of the grammar school system in England..)
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| (left) Sister Theresa c.1967 |
And the bells now ring 9 o´clock. Twelve must be hard on the arms, I think to myself. The two cats have disappeared off again, as I return to the present with a bump, and survey the mass of cables around me, some connected , others still in a tangled heap on my floor. But they are not going away, I think, as I decide to do some more tidying up in the morning...
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