Constant Soldier
by Tris Kerslake
Too young to know the sorrow of her younger days I watch the old girl worry at the weeds that crowd her clifftop garden, chivvying the daisies with a wrinkled grip. Her stockings slipping unconcerned, she mutters ancient charms to drive the devil out of nature, she does not care for modern sprays: instant answers do not please her kind. Druidic rites of sacrifice patrol her roses and her Love Lies Bleeding.
My mother’s mother wipes the trickled sweat that oils her cheek, returning to the tumbled soil a part of life, begetting life with every motion of her hand, she is the earth. She rises like a child and smiles at me, not quite a child, the years between us matter nothing in the sun. We share the hidden hopes of daffodils and phlox. The stones she throws aside mere echoes of the ones she loves.
Her empire claimed, she relishes the sky and estimates an early rain with practiced eye, politely questions me of homework and of lifeless things that pale beside the mettle that she is. Soft steps between the lily and the vetch, her current life a gentle ebb that leads to lilies more enduring and weeds that grow unseen. She balances upon my hand and takes me into early thoughts of autumn which slows all things.
I see her as she will become, not frail, not quiet in a hospice bed but reckless in the spirit of my greener hours, connected by the line, the careless issue of her clay ignores the closer view. With memories of times before there was a time for me she ranks her days with flowers, a poor bloom that, and more, a bitter winter then. Enacting country life as farmers would, dismissive tags on bovine ears, she’s no good for man nor beast, she scans the sky.
My mother’s mother hoists her stockings to half-mast and reconciles the bygones with emphatic hands that rub the steady earth to shades of drab along her arms, she licks a palm. We move away to clinking china from the house below bereft of blooms, the granite fort of home, my father’s house, seems gloomy in the damping day; like veterans we shoulder arms. The budding night will hold no joy for us, no light within my father’s house.
Called into tea, my mother pours the acrid Assam herb that soothes and thins the bitterness inside and plans her stratagem on plates of cake and scone, the two her infantry of war. She is the constant soldier of my life, whose every task is numbered, regimented by the book my father writes. A luckless private she, duty-struck, consigned forever to a lowly post. My mother, reticent supreme, awaits the words of drill.
Surviving war, a land-girl of the north, who made a life along the edge of storm and rock surviving now the spiteful squalls and tempests of my father that threaten to engulf. Strong she is with a soldier’s thickened crust for scorn, she braves her general, her gardener and child and lets the angry words slide free, slides them away to places deep within her northern bones. She never cries.
Alerted by the merest hint of day she mans the kitchen with a watchful eye malingerers are not encouraged here, take an aspirin and see her tomorrow. But for the restless child there is an obscure care she would deny point-blank. Though broken bones soon mend, the aching core of youth attracts a softer hand, she is my confidante, my confessor.
And I, the child who took her favoured name, who recognised the stiffer lip of pride through studied smiles though child-like, I could not defray the dark for her: the dark was home. And darkness would have been the soldier’s lot, precise, constructed like a prison cell before a military end. My father took his ending to the sea, and I, the child, could give him no salute, not quite a child. The years between us.
Too soon the soldier stood upon another hill and marched in slow-time all the gardens by, with friends she gave her gardener a single rose, red rose, to last for all the seasons long.
Too young to know the sadness of her younger years I watch the old girl worry at the weeds and proudly send her gardens full of sun, of ancient charms. The stones she throws aside mere echoes of the ones she loves.