Entering the room at Walburton, I knew there would not be many chances left to visit her.
It is always strange to think how a life shrinks in the 'tract of time': - one day a woman is the wife of a blind man, an energetic mother of four, a co-owner of a relatively large estate with a vegetable patch, chickens, fields, woods, owls, wildlife, a world in a world; a later day, the same woman is sitting in bed, can hardly leave it; people visit her and then disappear from her recent memory, even if one hopes, somehow, your presence was remembered. And then, at last, shrinks altogether, becomes less than a full human being. The trace of her spirit lingers in the memory of the living, in the expression of her personality inherited by her descendants, in whatever way she is recorded in the life of objects, and possibly no more than that.
It was with this prospect in mind that I wanted to hear from granny about her life, what she could remember of it.
We began by discussing her success at vegetable and gardening contests. How it was unfair on her competitors really; because granny always had the garden space and the resources to outgrow their vegetables. She showed a benevolent look of glee, because she had won; and because life was an uneven playing field in which to win.
Thoughts of the vegetable patch couldn't help take me back to my childhood when I had enjoyed Southwood Lodge (my grandparents' place). Grimmard, an odd job man who helped out, built a treehouse with a swing in the woods [above ordinary ground]; where my brothers used to play and I used to watch and observe, for I was a little bit afraid of thrusting myself into the world.
So I spoke to her about the treehouse and the swing. And she said she remembered ..
"and wasn't there a stream, and sometimes you'd make it across and sometimes you wouldn't. And if you didn't make it across, well you'd take a splash and just get completely soaked through.
But that was half the fun of it! If you didn't sometimes fall in, it wouldn't have been nearly so exciting. Oooh yes my brothers and I used to swing across the stream....
Of course, It was a great advantage being a girl in a family of boys. It made you tough."
This is not a wholly accurate memory. There was more dialogue perhaps, and the conversation certainly continued (discussing how 'wet' she found the other girls at school, going forward to the her schooling in Switzerland, to being a nurse, not much beyond because that was too close to remembering my grandfather).
But that was the most significant part of the conversation to me. It seemed to me that swing was a very physical metaphor for something that enters every part of our experience as agents in the world. In order to take an action, we must have ordinary faith that we have the capacity to do what we are at that moment doing. A loss of faith in our ability to act is a loss of will altogether. And it may be that we are going to make it. It's the risk that makes it worthwhile. Without the risk, the act would be pointless.
So it makes me think - I must build my ordinary faith;
even if, for me, faith in the divine seems likely to be untrue to the actual state of affairs in this world.
