There were weird and sometimes poignant coincidences in her
arrival. Her father likewise weighed in at well above 8lbs, was over a week late and ‘super-chilled’ -
giving Cherry and me very few disturbed nights. She was born in the North
Middlesex hospital, while I was born in the Middlesex hospital, but I guess not quite the same one.
The fact that Cherry (who would have been over the moon at the
whole thing) was not there to see it
made the event a touch bitter-sweet for me. In fact Simon and Ruth were only in
a position to announce that a baby was on the way a few hours after Cherry’s
funeral and she arrived the day before what would have been our Golden Wedding
anniversary. Violet Sarah’s appearance plus a number of unexpected messages of condolence from
family and friends (including from one Peruvian admiral who I thought spot on
with his comment ‘We saw in her a very enthusiastic woman with great inner
strength.’) quite took the edge off what could otherwise been a very sad day
for me.
Strangely, I am still
not wholly reconciled to the simple fact that I've lost Cherry. It's as though my mind has refused to
accommodate so painful a reality and I have somehow shifted into a parallel
reality in which I am getting on with things, generally making the best of it,
still enjoying life as I'm sure Cherry would have wanted, but deep down wondering, all the time, if I'm not in a kind
of dream and that one day I will wake up to find everything as it was. It's a
kind of protective mechanism, I suppose,
but one that is quite often outflanked by all manner of reminders of reality. These
can be the most mundane and trivial of things, such as coming across the last bag
of mixed nuts that Cherry ever bought at the Duty Free in Qatar airport .
Dream world or not, things have progressed. As expected, the
gloriously hot weather stopped a couple of days before the Powell tribe and I
went to Clovelly for a week.
The first day was fine, and everything that a day
on a Cornish beach should be, surfing, a bit of sunburn, a pinch of sand in the
sandwiches, pasties etc etc. After that things got rather more challenging, although we did have quite a lot more beach time all the same . But we did some cliffwalking, enriched some local potteries, tried out my ghillie-kettle on the beach, visited churches, had a cream tea and all except Philippa and I enjoyed a watery assault course in driving rain near the "Big Sheep."
On the going-home day,
Christopher and I walked the length of the Doone valley on Exmoor in
unrelenting drizzle and strong winds. I showed him the rock where in the past Cherry used to sit waiting for me, allegedly bird-watching !
Christopher had joined
us at Clovelly half-way through having done a good section of the North
Cornwall Coastal Path. With a heavy pack, this was a real achievement, but even
our ‘iron man’ became a touch discomposed when discovering he’d picked up some
50 loathsome little ticks that jump on you from the long grass, stick their
heads in your flesh and start sucking your blood. Back at Wansdyke after the holiday
he managed to locate the BBC Countryfile on Exmoor for us to watch, only to
find that virtually the only item of interest in a singularly disappointing
programme was one on ticks and the dangers of unrecognised Lyme disease. Just
what he needed to round things off nicely.
The Powells recovered from Clovelly by fleeing to the sun
and blue sky of Greece while I got on with things at home in a period dominated
by attending to Minnie the cat (who needs a special diet to counteract a
failing liver), getting in as much harvest as the wild animals that frequent
our vegetable patch would allow and wondering if I would ever hear enough from
the various branches of the US bureaucracy that I am currently engaged with in
order to make some definite plans for the fast approaching Autumn. I met some
of my prospective colleagues from Newport at a naval conference in Peru shortly
afterwards.
Optimistically and forgetting that it was their ‘winter’ I
had taken along a swimming costume ready for some productive lounging by the
hotel pool, only to encounter the chill grey skies that usually cover Lima at
this time of the year.
Still, we were all looked after extremely well throughout
– fed much too much, had recourse to far too many of their delightful but
deadly ‘pisco sours’ and when not in conference were shown the sites. The
highlight has to be the famous ‘stepping horses’ of Peru in an evening show at
an ancient Hacienda outside Lima. Apparently they are the only horses which set
down each hoof separately, rather than two by two. The result is a weird
form of locomotion where their legs
whirr round like wheels while the rider stays exactly level. They are
impossible to photograph properly, especially on a phone but I have a great video, complete with the local
silver band providing enthusiastic encouragement. Lima has lots of 16th
and 17th Century buildings and loads of Spanish colonial art of the
period, plus an extraordinary gold and weapons museum I asked to be taken to,
which has everything from sumptuous pre-Inca gold-ware, (including their God of the Sea),
suits of armour,
the biggest display of spurs I've ever seen, Herman Goering’s paperknife and General von Runstedt’s revolver.
Also, following
Philippa’s example in Greece, while visiting the magnificent Convent of Santa Dominica, I entreated the aid of Santa Rosa del Lima for
Cherry who enjoyed all this tremendously the last time we were here.
