Little Acorns
The little rosy fingers strayed over the older, denser ones, where they lay, inert, on the flowery duvet.
‘Your nail varnish’s still on, Gran: mine’s nearly off.’
She looked to where the child’s pearly nails were streaked down the edges with cyclamen. She was not sure she approved of all this permissiveness with children of tender years. It’s true that the dye was a harmless comestible and had been largely rubbed off and licked off in the course of the day, but nail colour would have been a cause of strong disapproval in her own mother’s day, even on an adult hand, not just a child’s. The faint remnants of colour, however, seemed to emphasise the healthy flow of young blood beneath the transparent skin. Under the slight fingers a more subdued vinous shade of pink, ‘Highland Mist’ according to the bottle, hid the ridges that the years had printed on her own nails.
Yesterday, at the lunch table, she had watched her own body language through the unfamiliar medium of jewel-bright nails; caught herself once in an expansive gesture of explanation, another time in a movement of repudiation and yet again in a gesture of soothing mime.
Last night – was it only last night? – in the subdued lighting of a village hall she had extended her hands to her partner and seen them restored to youthful pallor by the flattering dimness and the glowing colour of their tips. She had danced ‘Strip the Willow’, feeling excited and exciting and less than her age Now in the cold light of morning she saw it for the folly that it was.
‘Mine should be off as well,’ she said to the back of the earnest, bronze head still inspecting her hand.
‘Why, Gran? It’s lovely!’
‘Because I’m a fat old woman pretending to be young,’ she explained.
‘You’re not a fat old woman, Gran!’ The little hand gave hers a consoling pat. ‘Keep it on!’
‘It’ll be off as soon as I get home,’ she teased.
‘How d’you get it off, then?’
‘There’s a special stuff in a bottle.’
‘I know,’ said the child. ‘It’s called ‘nail varnish remover’. My mum told me.’
The busy hand was tugging at her ring finger, as she spoke, trying to remove the diamond ring. Wrestling with the impulse to bestow it on this child to whom she could deny nothing, she gave in to common sense and the need for a distraction ‘Ruthie, have you seen this?’ she asked, producing her little leather trinket box from the bedside table. (There were other things that glittered besides diamonds.)
The first thing to be tugged free of the box was a plaited chain ‘Oh, look!’ said the child, as her grandmother untangled it from a pearl drop earring. ‘It’s silver and gold.’
‘Looks that way,’ agreed the woman, ‘Playfully she looped it over the gleaming hair and laid it against the cotton tee-shirt, where the centre of each braided fold glistened with a soft, marcasite sparkle. Meantime the restless hand had lifted a vivid blue enamel brooch.
‘The sky’s this colour,’ she said, trying in vain to pin it onto her shirt in the space encircled by the necklace.
The woman glanced at the window. It was true. The sun was still climbing the sky, which was a faultless blue. Not a cloud in sight.
‘Here’s another one, Ruthie. Look, it’s got a lotus flower painted on it.’
‘Let’s see!’ said the child. ‘Oh yes! What’s inside it?’
‘Nothing inside this one’ said the woman, but once there was a king born on a lotus flower, as a little baby.’
‘What was his name?’ asked the child
‘Shiva. He was a god, really.’
‘Like the Lord Jesus, then?’
‘Yes, pretty much like that.’
‘The Lord Jesus was born in a manger. It says it in ‘Away in a Manger’. The energetic hand had darted forward and emerged clenched round something fairly large, warmly brown and filled with light. ‘What’s this called?’ she asked.
‘It’s a topaz brooch, Pet, but it’s not real.’
Ruth looked bewildered. ‘It is real, Gran,’ she said reprovingly. Look, there’s the pin.’ And she waggled it in demonstration.
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘The brooch is real, but it’s not a real stone.’
‘It’s not a stone at all,’ answered the child. ‘It’s more like glass.’
‘That’s exactly what it is,’ said her grandmother, ‘but a real topaz is a stone taken out of the earth and polished.’
It’s a magic stone then?’ asked Ruth.
‘Something like that,’ agreed the woman, relieved. She was enjoying the conversation, but her mind was racing ahead to the business of getting up and dressed and the disbanding of the family to their various destinations after the weekend’s celebration. It had been a good get-together and it was a perfect day for a journey. She thought with satisfaction of the new bonds forged and the old bonds reinforced over the recent two days. Even the children had agreed together – and that without the formality of best behaviour.
‘See, Gran, see!’ Ruth’s voice had risen by several decibels, as she pulled, from beneath another slithery gold chain, a brooch of great brilliance. It was a long-stemmed flower with silver leaves and a densely crowded chrysanthemum head made entirely of paste diamonds.
’Why is it magic, then?’ her grandmother asked.
‘Well, it must be,’ said the child. ‘It’s the same as my magic wand. The one I had in the play at play-group, when I was a fairy.’
‘I see,’ said the woman, reluctant to dash this child, so full of love and imagination. ‘What are these on the side?’ She pointed to the long, thin leaves.
‘These are the silver ribbons on my wand, Gran. They are!’
‘Well then,’ said her grandmother, pinning the brooch in place ‘let’s put it on and see if it works some magic.’ She was just about to direct the child to look in the mirror when the little fingers shot into the nearly empty box and brought out two small button shapes. ‘What are these, Gran?’ she asked.
The woman rolled them in the palm of her hand. With her glasses newly in place she could see the chequered markings in a broad band round the edges and the central, densely dotted boss. She could feel the slight roughness below, where the ‘button’ had parted from the parent twig. She remembered picking them up from the ground in Kew Gardens.
‘Now those,’ she said, ‘really are magic!.’ Ruth waited for her to go on. ‘They are so small,’ went on the woman, yet they will grow into something so big that it will tower over this whole house and shade all the garden outside.’
Ruthie was awed, almost frightened.
‘They’re acorns,’ she explained.
Ruth looked no less mystified.
‘You know the big trees that grow in the park?’ she offered. The ones by the bandstand?’ The child nodded. ‘They have babies like this.’ Ruth looked unconvinced. ‘Feel!’ her grandmother said. ‘This is the place where they were joined to the tree.’ and she passed the soft, chubby finger beneath the button shape.
‘The tree had it in its tummy?’ The voice was uncertain.
‘No,’ said the woman. ‘They do it a different way. Think of the twigs as fingers. The tree stretches its fingers and the fingers suddenly grow acorns - like diamond rings.’ She was warming to her subject. ‘Then when the acorns are ready they drop onto the ground and the ground feeds them until they turn into trees.’
‘What with, Gran?’
‘Rain and sunshine, Sweetheart.’
‘But the rain goes down the drain.’ The woman failed to detect a note of hesitation in the child’s voice.
‘Not all of it, Pet. Some soaks into the ground and the trees suck it up for food.’
‘But what about the sun? Trees can’t see, can they?’
‘Well I’m not sure, Ruthie. Once they have leaves they turn towards the sun to soak up the warmth, so I’m not sure they can’t see.’
The child had started to fidget, but her grandmother would not be deflected. ‘Oaks last for centuries,’ she said. ‘If :you planted these now, the trees would still be here long after we’re gone.’
But Ruthie had got up and was halfway from the room before the message was complete.
She went downstairs and into the garden, still clutching the acorns. She found herself in a suddenly bewildering world, where trees drank from the earth and spread their fingers to display their acorns. And the acorns sucked the earth and grew into trees big enough to shade the whole garden. And trees had eyes. There must be eyes everywhere. And trees would be there when she was no longer there.
No more daisies. No more baby snails. No ladybirds. No buzzy-bees. No sun.
Suddenly her arm arched back and the acorns left her hand in a perfect curve to land in the garden next door. As they flew through the air, her world splintered into a rainbow of colour and settled back into a fuzzy, brick wall with Thomas the cat sitting on it like two balls of wool and a rhododendron bush whose colour had seeped everywhere she looked.
She drew the heel of her hand across her eyes. They were wet. She couldn’t understand it. Why was she crying?
There was nothing to cry for.
Was there?
Isabel Gillard
The Born-again Book
After years of award-winning short stories, poems, articles, a couple of novels and the odd (but successful) play, Isabel Gillard has entered the publishing scene again with something outside her usual repertoire and with an important appeal to a wide range of people. ‘Circe’s Island’, Isabel’s memoir of surviving tuberculosis in 1950-51, began as a challenge that she had side-stepped for years, the challenge to say something worthwhile about a serious struggle with a killing disease. It was a struggle shared by thousands in the UK at that time, but over the experience of the sufferers hung an unnatural silence. TB was a taboo subject. All she had to do was tell the story of her sixteen-month suspension from student life, (spent largely in an Edinburgh sanatorium) the three cures she was subjected to, the cold, the knife and the chemo-therapy and the privations and heartaches, as well as the laughs, along the way. It was in doing this that her perception changed. She became aware of the measureless havoc caused globally by the disease, its pedigree stretching back to prehistory, the ignorant and misguided attempts at treatment, all of which had failed, and the cruel misjudgements and resulting stigma attaching to the sufferers. She also found that her own experience of this ‘incurable’ disease; was right on the cusp of change. Before the 1950s almost every sufferer died of TB: after the 1950s almost no-one did. The long-awaited cure had been found. A fortnight on the new, powerful antibiotics could clear the infection.
But this joyful event turned out to be only partial. Things had improved out of recognition in the west, but the developing world lacked easy tools of diagnosis, roads to reach sufferers, education to spread the good news, and money to buy the medicine. One third of the world population is currently thought to be infected with TB. There are eight million new cases every year.
Common humanity shouts for this to be changed and so the Stop TB campaign and a many-pronged attack by the World Health Organization were launched and are now internationally supported. The only stumbling block is the usual one; more money is needed.
It was at this point that Isabel found a new sense of purpose; Tuberculosis was the world’s story, not just hers. ‘Circe’s Island’ could help. It really is time for us all to be aware of the problem of TB on a global scale, so a dedicated percentage of profits from sales is to go to the World Health Organization to support the aim of stopping TB. The ball is at the reader’s foot. As for the author – a sense of purpose – at eighty? Isabel Gillard is having the time of her life.
Click here for a taster of ‘Circe’s Island’ – READ Chapter 1.
