I have not as yet decided on a name for my new soap opera character – at present I favour something on the lines of Pauline Butcher-Dingle - but for the first of my posts about my traumatic month I’m going to tackle the first promised element – Love.

Understanding how love fits into the picture will also give you, dear readers, essential background information to the main action packed elements of the story. (A sort of trailer before the first main episode, in the absence of photo-opportunities or being interviewed on Breakfast television).

And so it begins …

In 1891 in a small town in the North East of England was born a bairn of the female kind. She was tiny in body but strong and fierce in spirit and she was raised in one of the largest houses in the area. Her father was a greengrocer and local lay-preacher and her mother, who she must have taken after, is seen in our photograph as a tiny woman with a sweet heartshaped face, long black clothing and sensible boots, and a look of such determination that it really takes everyone aback. The wee baby girl in question was only one of the eleven children she bore, whilst running a pie shop, doing her share of preaching and acting when required as an extra midwife in the area.

As the bairn grew she was loved and nurtured on good food and the good book, and the family looked out for her interests and her virginity amidst the great incoming of the Irish and their families. They had come to build the great railway viaducts and when they were completed they stayed on to bring labour into the mines of the new coal field. Irish men and women with their laughing eyes, their drinking, singing and carousing ways, and of course their papacy and their irrististable charm.

So they tried to protect Margaret Ellen but they were unable.

The rogue in question was James. Born the third son in a family whose sons had been named Thomas, John and James in that order for as long as anyone could remember, he worked in the pits throughout the week and attended the Catholic church every Sunday with his family and looked out for a wife as soon as the urge took him. Margaret Ellen with her intoxicating mix of dark strength and firm fragility hit the mark and their first born Mary arrived amid a great furore before the marriage vows had been exchanged.

This of course sets the scene for everything which is to follow, and may in some part explain how these two families, joined in so many ways, found it so easy to engage in falling out on a regular basis, and usually over trivial or inexplicable things which could not be easily explained.

For Margaret and James were married in the Catholic church – such is the effect of love on young people that she was prepared to face the wrath of her parents, relatives and friends and pledge herself in this way. No matter what was to happen later, this fact should not be forgotten – it was a love match.

The following is posted as I frantically try to calm down enough to write up all the goings on of the past month! It is the first piece I ever submitted to Writelink.

RHYS

Before the chavvy-lads come, before their horses chew new hay and stamp their welcome to the day, I walk down to the river. On broad branches of old trees, owls - crops stuffed with mice to digest, hootless and sleepless - stand watching me. I am not afraid – we share the view - balsam lined river bends, reeds and marshes, shingly picnic beach, clipped allotment hedges and shining silver birch, detailed against a mile of wind-baffling willows.

July is not like icy January nor cobwebby November. Today already I can feel pale heat, sense the drying dew and hear the daisies opening amongst the close rabbit- cropped grass. Some may like April better - for the daffodils or May - for the hawthorn, but this is my favourite month when all the meadow flowers stand higher than the whitening grass and I imagine maids in cool sculleries wrapping butter in the giant rhubarb leaves on the banks.

Across my view walks Rhys – a man in his culture, just a boy in ours –nodding to me his curt and silent acknowledgement. I listen to his low gruff tender greeting thrown horsewards, hear the rhythmic brushing of its flank and the harness’ soft, dull wind chime jangling accompaniment. I cannot stay. I make the road double time as the snorting trotting mare gains the junction; a tug on the reins and the painted trap turns into line and off they gallop up the hill into town. And I know it’s going to be a beautiful day.

Note:
Ours is a town of many settled and travelling Romani and horses are still a common means of transport for many. Rhys is a boy I was teaching to read and write and who was so knowledgeable about the countryside that he taught me..

The crash of the blogs meshed neatly into the general confusion which has hit my life since the beginning of the month. When I have a moment to turn round I will post all - it includes that ripe mixture we call life - love, illness, hospitals, bereavement, spirituality, madness and the social services. Yes I have exchanged normal life for a part in a soap opera.