I pick up a hand drawn card, it has a red heart on the front – I turn it over, it reads
“You are loved”
Ella puts her arms around me, kisses my mouth, the red from her crayon rubs onto my T shirt. She is the first of my granddaughters.
Our tribe of female warriors stretch back to a world where woman ruled the British Isles. The first, Boudicca (Boadicea), Chieftainess of the Iceni took up her mantle to lead a famous rebellion victoriously. These Warrior Queen’s were many. Ethelfleda of Mercia, Gwenllian who raised an army to fight the Anglo-Norman settlers in Wales. Queen Maeve of Connaught, and perhaps even Gwenwhvawr of the Cornovii.
I close my book – Artur, Gwenwhyvawr and Myrddin – Ancient Brythons of the North by Alexander and William McCall. These brothers, offspring of my great-grandmother, siblings to my grandmother, uncle’s to my mother – all born in the womb of an old, old land – Scotland. I think about these people who are my family, descendants of the warrior queen’s whose fate turned out differently through some inexplicable events in their lives.
She remembers seeing her mother for the last time, standing at the front door of their cottage in Carmunnock, Ayrshire. From the back window of her father’s car she remembers passing the bull on the farm next door, she remembers her baby brother crying, her sisters tears leaving dark marks on the leather seats. Those moments were tightly stitched in the fabric of her memory.
The road to the terraced houses where her grandfather lived cut through the woods. Glasgow – What wonderment the place aroused in her, soaked as it was in her mind with sounds and smells of her childhood: armfuls of bluebells in springtime and foxgloves flowering; walking through the woods to school; the silence of the snow; the stiffness of the cooks uniform; Miss Walker, the fat little housekeeper who smelled of mothballs. The times before her grandmother left: getting into her big feather bed, burying herself between her breasts, listening to tales passed down through the generations of grandmothers. Afterwards, when they took her grandmother away, she would touch the long golden plait on her dressing table, wrap it around her head; pin the glass encased bumblebee broach onto her dress, run her fingers through the sequined, embroidered silks in her cupboard. Her grandmother, the second woman to be taken from her – put into an institution while the fat little housekeeper spread her duties to her master’s bedroom.
And there is the memory of seeing her grandfather for the last time. She stood on the deck of the steamship at Southampton, waving goodbye to him hunched under his umbrella in the rain. As the ship left the dock, grinding it’s way through the swells, she could see him getting smaller and smaller until he was the size of the seagulls wailing in the cold, grey sky. She felt as if her ten-year-old body was tied up with pieces of string.
She had not been told much, as the ship approached Cape Town she remembered seeing the mountain. She clasped her suitcase tightly as though it carried her life, neatly folded inside it. Aunt Molly held onto the two younger children, Hannah and Barry: little suitcases dangling from their hands as they walked towards a figure waiting for them. She handed them over to a man whose face they no longer remembered. Aunt Molly left them at the station where they caught a train to Johannesburg with the man they were told was their father. That little girl was my mother and wrapped inside that suitcase were the fragments of her life.
I followed the path from the tube station to my grandmothers house at 89 Littleton Road, East Finchley: the path that her offspring followed as though pilgrims – back to the shrine of their matriarchal roots – Her son, her daughters, scattered about on the shores of the southernmost tip of Africa unaware until a strange turn of fate revealed that their mother still lived. How strong can the maternal instinct be to draw back children abandoned so many years before?
The thing I remembered most vividly about that visit was the smell of roses as I walked up the garden path. The air was sweet with fragrance. Full blooms dropped crimson petals onto the lawn. I pressed my finger on the doorbell, Nan opened the door. She stood in the light with her arms outstretched, tall and elegant and groomed as though she was a person of great importance, like the Queen. She wasn’t wearing a hat, but she had on a tweed suit and a string of pearls. Nan’s skin – the colour of Arum lilies and her eyes were what I imagined bluebells to look like – the bluebells Mom had told us about, the ones that grew wild in the Scottish woods.
When she spoke I could hardly understand her.
Why did my grandmother sound so different to us?
That’s when it struck me: We were different, foreign to the land where our ancestry was mixed in the melting pot of Celtic culture. Our traceable family tree began in the early eighteen hundreds where two brothers, cattle drovers in Dornoch, spawned sons – David, James, Robert, William – herd boy, herd meadow head, shepherd boys. In eighteen seventy-two the McCall connection was established when Elizabeth Gilchrist married Thomas McCall and produced three children. Alexander, their only son, married Marion Samson in 1903. They had seven children, one of whom was Margaret, my grandmother, who’s secret drove her husband to sleep with a gun under his pillow. Another was my Aunt Betsy who had her own secrets. Bobby, the boy raised by maiden aunts, the boy she saw every day, opening the gate of the house next door – was he Betsy’s child?
His grandfather told him when he was fourteen and yet never once during her lifetime did Aunt Betsy acknowledge him as her child.
Had the court not awarded custody of her children to our grandfather, our existence would have been very different. We may have spent our childhood exploring the landscapes of Scotland: playing in heather covered knolls, hiding in little glens, jumping from boulder to boulder across burns and walking on ground choppy with peat. I will never know the real truth, but on that day, standing at her front door, I felt like one of the salmon leaping up the falls of the river Earn or Tay, the Braan or the Garry or the Tilt, finding their way back to the place of their birth.
Although I stood on a doorstep in the north of London, neither my grandmothers birthplace nor mine, we were both in the United Kingdom of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In my seventeen-year-old head I was home and the words from my favorite school poem came back to me
| Up the airy mountain,
Down the rushy glen, We daren’t go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl’s feather! Down along the rocky shore, Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide-foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain-lake, With frogs for their watch-dogs, All night awake. And yet my childhood was spent exploring landscapes – landscapes of a different kind, more wild, gritty, arthritic; the earth’s acid eating into focalized rock, leeching out dust of gold into rivers bereft of fish. At least where I came from; those mudbrown watercourses tasseled with willows, chocked with hyacinth, giving little relief to the dry earth tattooed by drought. |
And those whiskery, knobbly, misshapen barbel – can one call those fish?
The women I knew as a child were not warrior women fighting wars, they were women fighting for seeds to sprout, for rain, for fertile soil. Mrs Harrison – every Sunday she grabbed a chicken in each hand, swung them around until their necks snapped, plucked them, pulled out their guts, stuffed them and served them for lunch
It is precisely these contrasts that I love – my ancestral land, the feeling that I know it so well – deep inside me the wellspring of my being.
My birth land – gripping my existence like a strangler fig – intoxicatingly suffocating and I must gasp for air.
When I look at Biba I see the warrior women of my ancient past in her eyes, I feel my blood flowing back to the mist of time, pumping through the veins of the earliest Britonic Celts, the Gaelic Celts, the Gaulish Celts. I feel my blood spilling on the lands of South-west of England, south Wales, southern Ireland, place of her paternal lineage, southern Scotland, all these the places of her ancestry She, my last born grandchild, hair red with locks, as true as any Celt. At three she has the legendary temperament described by Ammianus Marcellinus
“…a whole band
of foreigners will be unable to cope with
one in a fight, if he calls in his
wife, stronger than he by far and with
flashing eyes; least of all when she
swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks,
like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult”
and then I feel in Ella’s heart her connection to nature, as connected as ancient Celtic spirituality where every aspect of life was nature revering -placing shrines in natural sanctuaries – at springs, lakes, rivers and woodlands. She, like the Bards, Vates and Druids has an integrated relationship with the natural world.
Through my matriarchal ascendancy of endurance, suffering, courage, humiliation, abandonment I look at my descendants – my daughters daughter’s – a pure mixture of boldness, determination independence, braveness and warrior instincts in the one and the intergratedness with nature in the other, all these qualities combined together in my daughter Justine, each expressing themselves through the multiple possibilities of life itself.
We search the cemetery for a rose garden where Betsy wanted her ashes to be scattered. The graveyard attendant digs a hole under a white rosebush, takes the top off the urn, mixes her pale ashes with the dark, rich soil, I remember her words when I asked her to tell me about Nan’s secret.
“ I cannot tell you, that secret I will take with me to my grave.”
She was the last living relative who knew the answer
.
I only now begin to understand. Nan did not have a dark secret,
she made a choice.
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