Demonstrations in the City, more Building Society woes... why isn't anyone talking about the insurance companies? Or is the truth being suppressed because the insurers represent the last stones still apparently standing in the collapsing building of our global financial systems. Whilst I'm in town I take advantage of the mobile phone coverage to listen to my voice messages. Quite a few. Friends asking where I am. It hurts to listen to people I care about, who yet I do not trust with the truth of my situation. Or do not want to involve. If they have not heard from me they can truthful. Nothing from my family - well, no change there. I suspect that some of my siblings are enjoying the huge party that is the G20 demonstrations. The rest? Well, they live in their own worlds, which only tangentially touch ours.
Did I mention that I have eight siblings? There's us seven sisters which is rather a special number, and then the identical twins - the boys. I use the words siblings and sisters loosely because it is not at all clear how we relate to each other.
My mothers were 1960s hippy chicks who have never moved on. Willow and Sky. They look extraordinarily alike - they could be sisters, but I don't think they are. Between them they have raised 9 children but none of us kids are sure which, if indeed either, of them is our biological mother. The space on my birth certificate for Mother reads Catherine, which I share with all my siblings but neither Willow nor Sky will answer to Catherine. There's no father implicated on our birth certificates though there have been men trailing through our complicated caravan of life who have been pointed out to one or other of us as 'father'.
Willow and Sky dragged us through a childhood of fantastical invention. We lived on isolated farms by the goodwill of the farmer or on rented fields and waste ground, at constant battle with planners, social workers and the suspicious. Oft times we were described as gipsies or tinkers yet Willow and Sky both speak with educated and upper class accents and instilled in us formal manners and behaviours worthy of a finishing school. Indeed, that's probably where they met. We seem to have no genetic grandparents, uncles or aunts and yet our early years were filled with eccentric individuals casually introduced as relatives with a vagueness that forestalled further enquiry.
The Willow and Sky menage must have been frustrating for the social workers to deal with. The girls may have cultivated an aura of otherworldliness but they were formidable opponents to those whose tidy-mindedness would had had us placed under permanent roofs - whether home or school.
Willow has a comprehensive grasp of the benefits and legal system and we have never been obviously short of money, not that she and Sky find much to spend it on apart from mysterious packages of seeds that arrive by mail order and are planted with the waxing moon, or occasionally and more sinisterly, on moonless nights. Sky was and is an inveterate attender of auctions and farm clearance sales. Sometimes we were pressed into going with her to carry home the results of her meticulous bidding. Bantams in a box, a frame for making hazel hurdles, old horse harness, pretty old crockery and small household items which Willow often sold on at a profit to local antiques shops.
Willow is the commercial one; she has a website now selling the herbal cures she makes and a range of benignly occult products - the kind of things that are artlessly attractive rather than threatening, such as the Witch Ball that Sky found at the clearing sale of a remote Northumberland farm. It's a beautiful object, a mirrored sphere of the soft, blotched silver of ancient looking glass. It's hard to imagine what technology made it - it's clearly very old. It looks as fragile as a blown bubble but my brother Adam dropped it once and instead of shattering into minute shards of glass, it rolled slowly back to Sky's feet and she hung it up out of reach above the doorway. Those were the horse-drawn caravan days before my younger siblings arrived.
As children we were evidently well-fed and cared for. Our clothes were no more scruffy than the average active country-living child; we had footwear appropriate to our environment; our mothers were punctual attenders at the local GP surgery for our vaccinations. We did not suffer lice or rickets and our injuries were largely of the 'fell out of a tree' variety.
The authorities would dearly have loved to get us all into school. Periodically Willow would come back from town, where she had a PO Box for our mail, brandishing another letter requiring an inspection by the local education authority. This usually resulted in a trip into the local town's library where we would be lined up with our exercise books to demonstrate our grasp of maths or natural sciences. For us maths came in the guise of astro-navigation taught by Willow who'd sailed round the world on a Tall Ship; and natural sciences was a rather loose term for what Sky taught us about horticulture, botany and wild animals. Now my siblings are scattered to the winds, armed with these curious skills. Oenone makes award winning wild life documentaries, her skill at observing the intimate lives of shy animals honed by our mosquito-ridden badger watchings. Mithuna is the most obviously whacky. She's a fashionable astrologer and sooth sayer though she admits to me that most of what she 'predicts' to her rich and restless clientele is reassuring nonsense. Her sight does not penetrate the brittle shells of self-regard and self-obsession enrobing her most famous celebrity clients. Phoebe is the Head Gardener at a glorious National Trust property whose gardens are rightly famous.
After years of scepticism, I now accept that Willow and Sky are a pair of modestly successful white witches, who have enthusiastically embraced those aspects of modern life which make their lives more fun and (by their own standards only), effective. For example, Willow has a mobile phone for conducting her business. But regardless of her telephonic availability, just as many people turn up as expected or unforeseen to buy or trade with her as did in her telephone-free past when she relied solely on a sense of an imminent visit.
I'd like to know who I am. Does my upbringing direct my destiny?
So good i read it twice... marred only by the fact that I, foolishly, read your blogs in reverse order so only at the end were you a city dweller!!
ReplyDeleteFree WiFi, my faith in society has been restored!