Snow and babies
Chapter 13
Snow visits us much more frequently than it had in Oxford. “Oh wow!” Unoriginal, but what else can you say when you wake and look out of the window and the landscape is unexpectedly blindingly white? Bob does not share my delight. “I’m got a meeting that I really can’t miss, and the road is going to be impossible.” Having said that he eats a bowl of cereal and thumps off to the garage for a shovel. Feeling obliged to offer moral support, I find a spade and walk up the road to join him.
A thick frosty silence fills the air, cut briefly by the estate children’s excited shouts as they, unable to get to school, slide down the steep slopes leading to the shared big lawns. They are using black plastic bin liners as toboggans. Bob and another neighbour work hard to dig out the drift across the steep camber where our lane leads onto the hill road. At first, I help, and it’s hot heavy work. “If all the neighbours helped, we could clear the road in an hour” I say crossly. Suddenly I get it! They are all having a day off work because of the snow, just like the children.
I take my spade home and unhook my yellow plastic sledge off the garage wall. The first trip down the slope is quite scary but exhilarating. A lot of envious eyes are upon me as I elegantly zoom down a second time. “Would someone else like a turn on my sledge?” I offer. They leap at the chance and quickly take it over. Eventually I hear myself whining “Can I have a go? It IS my sledge.”
Another snow memory is a year or two later. It’s our fourth winter here and our first grandchild, a millennium baby, is sleeping in his cot in our bedroom to give his mum and dad a peaceful night. The baby is about six months old and the family have come for the weekend. In the night while we sleep, it unexpectedly snows heavily. When it gets light the little one wakes and begins to cry. I pick him up quickly and without thinking, take him to the un-curtained window. His eyes become huge as he looks out. Slowly like an owl he swivels his gaze across the white fields with snow covered trees and a white sky. Then he looks at me. Then he gazes again. I almost stop breathing with the privilege of witnessing this little one’s first sight of snow.
In the snowy garden I never know what is the best way to look after the shrubs and plants. Especially when the snow begins to harden into solid ice. I look at a rhododendron which has bent right over under the weight of snow. “Do you want me to shake this stuff off?” I ask it, “Or is it keeping you warm, like an insulation blanket?”. No reply. As usual I compromise by brushing some of the snow off some of the plants. The floating frog house keeps a hole open in the pond ice, whilst providing a warmish refuge for frogs. Sometimes I see a slowly moving blur of orange as a fish swims under the ice.
In the same universe at the same time, a hard frost is supposedly good for getting rid of some garden pests. But a hard winter also sadly kills lots of birds and other predators of the garden “pests”. White fly and black fly and diseases like Black Spot, can be knocked back by a good freezing. Frost is also supposed to do something beneficial to the rhubarb if you dig it up and leave the roots upside down in the air to freeze. My rhubarb was even spindlier after a winter with its legs in the air. And who would blame it?
The soil is apparently kept warmer when it’s covered under a thick mulch. On our steep banks, the winter rains wash it off and it ends up in a soggy heap on the lawn below. I’m not sure why I say “Winter rains” as this suggests that it doesn’t pour down frequently in the summers. Under that same cosy mulch of dead leaves, the slugs are munching their way through the cold dark time, keeping their spirits up with a non-stop banquet of ground cover plants.
After a lot of pondering about how best to live with winter, I’ve reached a compromise. Everything is left covered in leaves and top growth until the end of February. Then if we get a bit of mild gentle sunshine, I clear lots of leaves off the flower beds and clip the dead top growth on everything from sedums to roses. This will hopefully give me the best of both worlds. At first some protection from harsh weather over two thirds of winter, and protection from frost. Followed later, by the benefit of a short late frost bumping off some garden pests. As the earth hopefully warms up, after clearing away some dead fibre, there will be an opportunity to see what the slugs are up to and curtail their numbers before the spring gets going.
“I’ve no idea how you do this stuff” says Bob kneeling on the floor trying to pin down the screaming baby and wrap a nappy round it. He’s been thrown into the deep end of grandparenting, without any swimming lessons. Being Bob, he’s determined to do it properly whilst being most unwilling to accept advice from me. Nothing new there. Arran, the baby with the owl eyes, is the first of a splendid crop of grandchildren. “I thought I’d banged on so much about the hardships of bringing them up that my kids had decided not to bother pro-creating” I tell Bob. One after another, as they reach their mid-thirties, they start growing babies. We’re now knee deep in grandchildren.
It's around this time that I have my revelation in the bath. “I was lying in the bath last night”, I say to Bob, over our cereal, “And I surprised myself”. “Oh yes”, says Bob. “Always thought I’d be a cartoonist until I died, but when I was letting the water out, I decided I’d had enough.” “Okay”, says Bob. “So, if we can afford to do without my income, I’d like to just muck about and have laughs, without thinking about how to work them into saleable cartoons.” “Sounds fine to me”, says Bob. It’s so brilliant. When people ask me “And what do you do?” I tell them that I just muck about. And it turns out that grandchildren are perfect companions when you want to have a laugh.
Some people regard children as pests in a garden. I didn’t care enough about the garden when my kids were small, to try and protect it from them. One child, which will remain unnamed, was discovered dreamily eating a worm when he was a toddler. Hopefully, that was a one-off experiment and the worm count in our soil was not permanently affected.
“Shall we go and have a look in the compost?” I ask five year old Ben, one of my younger son’s offspring. The leaf mould bay is very quiet, not even a toad. He lifts the carpet off the rotting horse manure, and as well as the usual scuttling critters, “Issa snake Granny!” “It’s a slow worm”, I say. “You can hold it, they won’t hurt you”. I put the arching creature into his hands and have a look in the next bay. “Ow! It’s just bit me!” He assures me that he wasn’t seeing if he could tie it into a knot. I didn’t even know that they had teeth.
“Ben has the large watering can because he’s bigger than you” I sooth Ruby who is two years younger than her brother, and not pleased to be filling a toy can whose spout stupidly pours out as fast as she fills it. Now they both have the adult sized cans and are equally soaked. The trench for the seed potatoes is turning into a third pond. “Try not to tread on the ones Ruby’s thrown in the trench” I shout to Ben as he chucks more potatoes in on top. Naturally, their efforts produce the best crop of potatoes ever.
On a warm summer’s day Arran and his little sister Rae, are sitting swinging their legs at the big pond. “Keep that stick down Arran,” I say for the fifth time, “You don’t want to take Rae’s eye out do you?” “Look!” says Rae. A large emperor dragonfly is hovering nosily right in front of her face. I tell her what it’s called, and she says firmly that she’s going to call it Eldorado. When it circles off around the pond she softly calls “Eldorado” and it comes back. The next time it goes, I call “Eldorado” too, and it returns, hovering in front of her little face again. It definitely prefers her voice, but when she has gone back to London, Bob and I still call, “Eldorado”.
Because we’ve needed to watch the little ones carefully to keep them safe from steep falls and deep ponds, I’ve had the pleasure of being with them and seeing their interest and wonder. If I’d left them alone to explore, I’d have missed sharing their curiosity about where paths lead, what we might turn up in the compost heaps, how far you can bend a slow worm before it nips you.
As they get to the football age we’re able to send them to the big communal lawns where there is lots of space to kick a ball and someone has donated some goal posts. They like being able to go on their own through the little copse to the communal lawns.
“Would you like to choose some Shubunkins for the pond?” I ask Glen. “Shubumpkins!” he exclaims and collapses laughing about fish having such daft names. He’s eight and easily entertained as long as it’s fun or a competition, or both. He and his little sister Linn are Swedish speaking Finns. Our Middle child is married to a lovely Finnish woman from a predominantly Swedish speaking part of Finland. Gardening there involves a short fast summer with lots of light. And a long hard winter with lots of dark, until the snow comes and turns everything white..
Linn is our genuine snow baby. She’s born a few days before Christmas. Bob and I go to Finland to meet her, help out, and celebrate Christmas. We do the last two with varying degrees of efficiency. At first it’s minus 19 C so not safe to take the baby out. Glen and I play football with a lump of ice which gets smaller and smaller until one of us jumps on it. Then we start again. The temperature rises and with Christel wrapped up warmly after hospital, and being indoors at home for so long, we introduce Linn to winter. The pram is piled high with quilts and fluffy fake fur to keep the biting cold out.
The seasons and years gently pass. Daughter and family move to New Zealand and on visits I work in their garden. Rae grows a cactus collection. Younger son and his wife split up and he brings Ben and Ruby on more frequent visits for a while. One summer the small pond is a dense mass of slimy blanket weed. Whilst Ruby shudders, teenage Ben pulls out one sheet of weed after another, gently making holes in the green veil for the newts and dragon fly nymphs to escape and plop back into the water. “This is even better than playing on the iPad” he says. Ruby paints wooden posts in bright colours to warn the strimmer off electric cables.
The grandchildren are growing up in leaps and bounds. And I have to stop gardening.