I don’t usually go for  alternate realities in my own reading, but my imagination has been captured over the years by the triumverate of The Lord of the Rings, Mervyn Peake’s superb Gormenghast trilogy and the Harry Potter books. I so much loved the latter that I was quite keen to call my third child Harry, but my husband pointed out that Harry Otter is a rough name to live with. So he now has another, rather lovely, name which suits him perfectly, but there is a small part of me that mourns Harry.

I think part of Harry Potter’s universal appeal is that he is an orphan going it alone. Children respond to his ability to cope in an adult world and defeat a great evil. Personally, I just want to mother Harry. I really want to get him home, cook him a nice meal and talk about his day. I’d like to remind him to stop ignoring Ginny Weasley since she clearly is the girl for him and encourage him to listen to that nice Hermione and get on with his homework. I want him to open his eyes and see the good in Snape.

But I think it is more than that with Harry and me. You see, Harry Potter was my birth partner. Long-term blog readers may remember this, but for those who are new here, I’ll retell the story. One of my presents for my 32nd birthday, which is a week before Christmas, was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I wasn’t overly interested in the book, but I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Two days later, when I woke with birth pains and was directed by my doula to get straight into the bath and wait for her to arrive, I started to read it. Several cups of tea and some acute contractions later, I was hooked on Harry. The doula and my husband would pop their heads around the door now and then to check on me or bring me tea, and I’d wave them away, saying I was fine. I dived into Rowling’s world, subsumed myself in her detail, and came up occasionally to do some shallow panting. While I was going it alone in the bath with Harry, the doula gave everyone in the house foot massages.

When the pains finally grew more demanding than Hogwarts, I climbed out of the bath. By then – though we didn’t know it yet – it was far late to leave for hospital. My doula gave me a back massage, and I went to the loo. While I was there, baby coming down the birth canal, though I didn’t know that either, she sent my husband downstairs to put the suitcases in the boot and de-ice the windscreen. She knocked on the bathroom door and told me it was time to leave, and summoning the strength of Harry, I got off the loo, staggered to the door and croaked, “I can’t make it to the bloody DOOR, let alone the hospital!”

Reading my face for the first time, she said, “Put your hand in your pants and tell me what you feel.”

I followed instructions and replied, “I. can. feel. a. HEAD.”

Her surprise was not unlike that of Harry’s when Quirrell unwrapped his turban to reveal he was sharing head-space with Lord Voldemort. “Get on the bed!” she shrieked. Within seconds, my child was born. A few minutes later, my husband reappeared, ready to transport his pregnant wife to hospital, to be met with the news that he had a daughter.

Tucked up in bed with my gorgeous little baby, I finished Harry Potter and started the next one. My newborn’s nickname was Hufflepuff for her badger-like snuffling when she fed. After reading the series myself, I read it aloud to Hufflepuff’s big sister, and now that she is bigger I am reading it to her. Last night, we finished The Order of the Phoenix. Hufflepuff’s little brother sometimes listens in and he recently insulted his grandmother by telling her she was “as old as Neville Longbottom.” It wonderful to me that my kids love Harry as much as I do, since he is their literary uncle.

Maybe if we get a dog, we’ll call it Harry. As homage to our hero.

I first started working as a corporate journalist 15 years ago, at one of South Africa’s big mining houses. It was as hierarchical as a company could be, with levels and grades and people who had corner offices and important art and people who worked in cubicles, like me. As part of my job, I had to interact with the senior executives, some of whom were very pleasant and human, and others who were not. Every article I wrote had to be signed off by the relevant executive, so the coal guy signed off the coal articles, the diamond guy the diamond ones and the gold guy had his say on the gold articles.

Each article would be printed out and put, along with a polite note, into an inter-office memo envelope (yes, it was before email) and sent along to the person for checking. If I was up against deadline, I would run it along to their offices myself and plead with the secretary to get it through for me. If not, I posted and waited. The articles all came back, duly checked, with terse comments and, as per company style, the person’s initials. Very taut, very mining house, very 1990s.

This week I had an article back, via email, from a chief executive. It said, “I am happy with the article.” And then there was a smiley.

I’m not really a fan of the smiley or any kind of emoticon. I like words to convey how I am feeling. But that smiley, from that 21st century executive, was a good one.

And in mining house terms, it was practically a proposal of marriage.

I’m going to be absent for a brief while from Charlotte’s Web. Yet another school holiday, some paid freelance work, an impending maternal visit and the screams of pain from my unattended manuscript mean that I won’t be blogging for a bit.

While I’m gone, you could feast your eyes upon my son’s ingenuity.

Or you could visit the Little Travellers and read about women living in the epicentre of KwaZulu-Natal’s AIDS pandemic who are beading dolls to save their families’ lives.

See you soon!

Being a girl was about aching for something that was always just out of reach. I existed in a state of longing for something indefinable, of permanent languid dissatisfaction. I was always stretching out, grabbing, then discarding what I had touched. I wanted the next best thing, not the thing I had.

Girlhood was about never being happy in my skin. My body was all wrong. I longed for longer legs, better skin, a smaller bum. I longed for slow, rapturous kisses that would make me forget myself. I longed to melt.

Girlhood was about waiting for the right boy to come along. I ached for a soul-mate and found him in all the wrong places. When boys did turn up, I longed for someone cooler, older, more mature. I longed for a man.

Girlhood was about never finding the right food to eat. I longed for ice-cream, then tuna, then bread and butter, then chocolate, then roast chicken, then milk with Milo. Food came and went, but never in satisfying combinations.

Girlhood was about always dreaming about being somewhere else. If I was at school, I longed to be at home. At home, I ached for my friends. With my friends, I wanted to be with a certain boy. With that boy, I wished I were at home with a book. While reading, I thought of my father.

It was a time of extremes, of being too hot, too cold, too lazy, too over-excited, too silly, too irritable, too focused, too pent-up.

I thought a lot about clothes, but they were always wrong. Whatever I wore was never as good as what that girl wore. I flipped through magazines, ached for Farah hair, Christy legs, Jodie eyes. The clothes I finally bought were dissatisfying: too tight, too loose, too short, too long, too preppy, too Gothic, too old, too new. I longed for one perfect dress.

I felt as if I couldn’t talk very well. I never seemed to say what I meant, hard though I tried. Words blocked in my throat so I stayed silent. There was so much to say. I longed to say it well. I felt as if I couldn’t. I inhibited myself.

When I was a girl, I wanted to please. So badly. I wanted to please so badly that I did things I regretted. I put others before myself, their needs before mine. I pushed my own needs down until I exploded.

To girls, I say:

Find your voice and be proud to use it.

Put your needs first.

Please yourself, not boys.

Love your body.

Live in the moment.

Find and do the thing that makes you forget yourself, that makes your heart sing.

Never stop looking for one perfect dress.

Married fifteen years on 1 October 2009

Tomorrow we celebrate 15 years of marriage and to celebrate, I’m breaking with the memoir theme to give you Fifteen Things I Love About My Husband.

He:

1. Makes me laugh, and finds me funny.

2. Buys cleaning products, and uses them.

3. Is co-dependent in the book habit.

4. Not scared of the gory jobs – anything to do with toilets, vomit, dead animals, he’s the one.

5. Let me win at Scrabble twice this week.

6. Cherishes our family life.

7. Loves and keeps up with his friends.

8. Found me at least eight of my best girlfriends.

9. Enjoys answering questions like “What makes an aeroplane fly?” and “How many seconds are there in a week?”

10. Makes a salad with as much flair as he cooks a steak.

11. Does all the crafting so that I don’t have to.

12. Is a wonderful mixture of dreamy and practical.

13. Recovered our dining-room chairs in three hours last weekend.

14. Has to leave the room during key scenes of The Office.

15. Is more hot and handsome than he was when we got married.

I love you my darling. Thanks for all the years. You are my one and only.

]]> http://charlotteotter.wordpress.com/2009/09/30/f-is-for-fifteen/feed/ 31 charlotteotter IMG_4181 http://charlotteotter.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/e-is-for-ellie/ http://charlotteotter.wordpress.com/2009/09/26/e-is-for-ellie/#comments Sat, 26 Sep 2009 20:34:25 +0000 charlotteotter http://charlotteotter.wordpress.com/?p=1941 ]]>

My beloved grandmother. Someone with a huge heart in a tiny body. Although she died in 1997, I feel a spiritual connection with her that is so strong, I can barely separate myself from it in order to write about her. We have no distance. I have to pull at the ties that bind us in order to write her story. It is physically uncomfortable to do so.

Ellie was born Elsie Margaret Hinds. She was the third child in a family of six, following a brilliant older sister and a brother who was reputedly not the brightest light in the bushel. In their wisdom, Elsie’s parents kept her back at school every time her brother failed a year, causing her to resent both him and them. She was not sent to university as her older sister was, and quickly escaped the suffocating country life of Kingswilliamstown in South Africa’s Eastern Cape by marrying the glamorous Englishman David Cooper.

Their marriage lasted not more than eight years, six of which encompassed World War Two, and after their swift divorce, she found herself unqualified, jobless and with two small children to look after. My mother always says she went to ten schools before she was ten, and I think this indicates a period of huge chaos as Ellie tried and failed to find work that suited her and a place in which to settle her family. Eventually she followed her sister, then a journalist, to Pietermaritzburg, got a job at the university library and began her course of study in librarianship. She changed her name from Elsie to Elise – an act of selfhood that said “I have arrived”.

A vivacious woman, she quickly became the centre of a group of mature students, all of whom were deeply against South Africa’s increasingly racist governmental policies. They became founder members of the Liberal Party, of which the novelist Alan Paton was vice-president. While she was passionately against the Nationalists or “Boets”, as she called them, Ellie’s heart was taken up by a new course of study which was to inform the rest of her life: the esoteric writings of Alice A Bailey. Ellie became a New Age adherent long before the term came into current use. She meditated daily, was vegetarian, attended Full Moon meetings and developed friendships with like-minded people. She was in her forties, and had found her path.

What a glorious grandmother she was! Her ability to be in the moment meant she was able to share our child-like pleasures and never rise to grown-up distance. She taught us to dream, to believe in fairies, to shape clouds, to paint, to relish an egg and parsley sandwich. She would lie in the grass with us, tell stories and encourage our wildest dreams. When I was 12, she gave me the 1982 copy of the Writer’s and Artist’s Yearbook and encouraged me to write. She taught my brother to garden: something he does to this day, for a living. She loved us unconditionally, which is the best possible thing a parent or grandparent can do.

Ellie was never completely stable. She had two nervous breakdowns that I know of, and today would be medicated to the gills. Despite finding her base in Pietermaritzburg, she moved frequently, and we were often visiting her in new homes. Every time she moved, she gave more of her possessions away, shuffling off those objects that were binding her to this physical dimension. I think she ached for heaven.

In her last years, she had Alzheimer’s, which she bore lightly, with none of the aggression that sometimes accompanies the disease, and there were always funny stories to tell. Her younger brother – also under attack from Alzheimer’s though no-one knew at the time – and his wife were detailed to drive Ellie to my wedding, a good half an hour’s journey into the Midlands, but not a journey that was unfamiliar to them. Dear Uncle Ross got horribly lost and they missed the service, but were perfectly cheerful, having forgotten why they needed to be there. She also forgot that she was vegetarian and used to tuck in when there was meat on the table, causing us children vast hilarity.

I visited her in her old-age home two weeks before she died. We sat outside in the garden, holding hands and enjoying the sunshine. Our conversation was mostly nonsensical, but it was amicable. Three hours later, we heard that she had fallen and was in hospital. My mother and I hurried to her bed-side. I held her hand. She looked at me, smiled exquisitely, and said, “Hello my darling”. She never recognised anyone again.

Ellie always said, “When I die, don’t bury me, burn me. And please don’t make a big fuss about my ashes. Just put them in the bin.” We didn’t put her ashes in the bin. We scattered them on the hills of the Midlands, the blue hills that she loved with her painterly eye, the same hills that Alan Peyton writes of in Cry, the Beloved Country.

Here are the words of Alice A Bailey, which Ellie meditated on daily:

From the point of Light within the Mind of God

Let Light stream forth into the minds of men.

Let Light descend on Earth.

From the point of Love within the Heart of God

Let love stream forth into the heart of men.

May Christ return to Earth.

From the centre where the Will of God is known

Let purpose guide the little wills of men -

The purpose which the Masters know and serve.

From the centre which we call the race of men

Let the Plan of Love and Light work out

And may it seal the door where evil dwells.

Let Light and Love and Power restore the Plan on Earth.

(Alice A Bailey and Djwhal Khul, 1945)

I started to write a post about why Hilary Mantel absolutely has to win the Booker Prize because her novel Wolf Hall is the best thing I’ve read all year, and she deserves it and I once used to live in the same block as her but never met her only her husband in the parking lot with the Sainbury’s bags, but I have run out of the words. I can only say this:

Wolf Hall is great.

Mantel deserves to win.

Now that I have lured you in with promise of literary explication you will be dazed/angry/amused to find that this post is in fact a meme. All my brain cells are being used to write my novel at the moment, and while I plan to write book reviews and many other things, all I am really up for is a little narcissistic Internet sport. Muchos gracias to Dad Who Writes who supplied me with the material only this morning. Had he not, this post would have had to wither on the vine, and the dust bunnies would continue to blow through the wasteland of this blog (see? I’m doing lit-er-rary).

Here’s the deal:

OK, the rules of this award are that I now have to say 10 honest things about myself, and then tag 7 bloggy friends who I think are honest and true with what they have to say.  Sigh.  The hard part.  OK, first things first.  10 honest things.  This might be difficult, because I think you all know everything already.  I mean, isn’t that what the award is about, being honest and spilling my guts?

Here are the 10 honest things:

1. I am looking for a full-time job.

2. I really don’t want to live in the Burg anymore.

3. For the last two years, all I wanted to do was live in Berlin. Now I am happy with the idea of Heidelberg.

4. I am really tired of random “mummy talk” except with people I really like and whose children I care about. Tell me about your new boots, for God’s sake, or a great book you just read.

5. When my daughter plays songs from High School Musical on her recorder, it makes me cry. With happiness.

6. I am eight days into a two-week no-coffee, no-alcohol liver detox. I think it is making me grumpy. And affecting my brain cells.

7. I get squeaks of panic when I think about all the books I’ve read that I have not entered in my Books 2009 page nor reviewed here.

8. My children are trying to persuade me that we need a pet. The line, “But I already have three pets” is no longer working.

9. I am a covert low-carber. You cannot believe how many green vegetables I have to eat. I even have salad for breakfast.

10. I believe that Hilary Mantel should, must and will win the Booker Prize this year. If she doesn’t, I will eat a potato.

I’m wimping out and not tagging. Please feel free – if you believe yourself to be honest and true, or, if like me, you are in need of some not overly challenging blog material – to tag yourself.

And remember: vote Hilary!

I came across my diary from July 1999, when I was expecting my first child. Never mind gestating a baby, I think I was a blogger waiting to be born:

“Waiting in the Tesco’s car park for Thomas to do the groceries. I went in with him, but after a couple of minutes of retching, gave up and on his suggestion came and sat outside. I am having much better days generally, but now and then am assailed by smells, combined with not having enough food in my stomach, and start to feel grim. The answer is constant eating (grazing).”

…

“Thomas must be buying the whole shop: he’s still in there! I wonder what he’s getting for supper. Food is a major focus at the moment: how does it look, how does it smell, do I feel like it, what do I feel like, I felt like that yesterday but don’t today. My main desire is for very bland nursery-style food, so things like mashed potatoes rank really high.”

…

“STILL no sign of Thomas. Could he be lost among the dairy products? He’s bought a lot of cheese lately, so maybe we’re getting some more. LONG PAUSE. There he is, looking dapper in his blue suit.”

…

“Right now, I’m making my second attempt to read Salman Rushdie’s “The Ground Beneath her Feet”, which I am finding intensely irritating. He is so intent on being clever. It is very tedious: laboured classical and literary references dropped in like bricks to spoil the narrative. I keep wanting to throw it across the room.”

…

“I have lost interest in work completely. While I am happy to earn money (furniture for the new home, minature Baby Gap items), I no longer find what I am doing particularly interesting or exciting. Baby Otter, you have taken over my life. I can’t wait to meet you, little darling. We are so excited that you have chosen to share our lives. Bless you, our little angel.”

Children, food, books. Not much has changed in ten years.

There are many people whose names begin with “D” whom I know far better than I know David Cooper, but I have decided to leave the living alone. David Cooper is a mystery man. He is unknown. I apparently met him once at the age of three and have no recall of that encounter, apart from eating boiled eggs in a strange kitchen. I was celebrating my tenth birthday when the news came from Port Elizabeth that David Cooper had died and I felt, oddly, given that he was my grandfather, nothing.

I have studied my mother’s wedding photos, trying to imagine who he was and what he was thinking, giving away a daughter he had last seen five years before. Apparently, he dutifully paid for the wedding, appeared to be proud of her, talked pleasantly to the in-laws, looked dapper, and danced so wonderfully with my grandmother that she began to entertain hopes.

David Cooper was a charmer. Appearances were important to him. He was always nattily dressed, and had beautifully tailored clothes. Though untrained, he was a talented pianist and could play any tune. He sang well, loved amateur dramatics and was an accomplished painter. His talents he apparently inherited from his mother who, according to family legend, once sang in the Royal Albert Hall. He loved a party and a drink, and told a good story. David followed his brother and sister to South Africa from London when he was in his twenties, all running from a cold, possibly cruel, father. When he breezed into Kingwilliamstown, handsome, accomplished, funny and charming, Elsie Hinds fell for him. They shared a love of painting and the arts, and for her, he represented a way out – from a dominating, stifling mother and her somewhat dull small-town life.

War came shortly afterwards. David enlisted and Elsie camp-followed while he was training in Pretoria. She had her first child, a son, and then he went off to become one of South Africa’s Desert Rats. During the war, their daughter was born, and afterwards they settled in Johannesburg where David looked for work. He was not happy – the charming, gregarious man she had married was gone. Everyone said the war had changed him.

He decided to sell everything and move to Scotland, where his beloved younger brother Anthony lived. The family docked on one of the Union Castle liners at Port Elizabeth and spent three weeks on the boat. They were met at Southampton by David’s father, meeting his son’s family for the first time. He had a white Father Christmas beard and, in my mother’s words, “the coldest blue eyes I’d ever seen”. After a couple of months in Devon, the family joined Anthony and his wife Ursula in Scotland, but the time there was unsuccessful and the brothers fell out, over money or an inheritance. After a year’s experiment, David once again packed up his family, bought boat tickets and they headed back for South Africa, sad and disillusioned. It was the end of the marriage.

After the divorce, my mother and her brother saw David Cooper every couple of years. He diligently sent Elsie a monthly allowance, one that was not enough for the family to live on, but he never forgot Christmas or birthdays. My mother says he sent wonderful presents, always of the best quality. “If he sent a writing-set, it was leather; if he sent a train-set, the trains would actually work.”

In his fifties, David Cooper developed cataracts. He was working in shipping insurance, and he had married his secretary, who also functioned as his guide. They were sitting on a bench on the Robberg in Plettenburg Bay, when he slid off and died. He was sixty-four. The last time he had seen my mother was seven years before. She, like me, felt almost nothing when she received the news of his death.

********************

This is what I know about my grandfather. There is a blankness in his story, an emptiness at the heart of it, a big zero. I think the reason is that he was hiding from himself. What if he had left London as a young man because of a secret? What if he was running? He found himself in South Africa, met the lovely Elsie and married her as an attempt to escape from that secret self. War came and he was able to run from his marriage, to a world of soldiers, and camaraderie and suffering. On his return, he found himself part of a family that he couldn’t love. He ran, again, to Scotland and when that didn’t work, ran back to South Africa, where the marriage was over.

I have heard the rumours about David Cooper. One cousin, who was spiteful and untrustworthy, told me rather gleefully over her third glass of wine. When I asked her sister, she said, “I’m afraid that she was right.” I took the information and buried it, just as David Cooper tried to bury his true self, because I didn’t want to hurt my mother by asking. Then yesterday, when talking to my mother about her father she confirmed that she knew the rumours. Out of respect for her, I am not going to say what his secret was, but you can probably piece it together.

So there are secrets and lies, as in every family. How sad for David Cooper that he could never be his true self, how sad for my grandmother that to him she never came first; how sad for my mother and her brother that their charming father remained forever distant. My mother told me a story yesterday. She said, “My parents were going out for the evening and came to say goodnight to us. I was in my cot and my brother was in his little bed. My mother came into the room and talked to us a little, then hugged us and kissed us goodnight. My father stood in the doorway, and all I could see was his shadow. I realise now that that was what he always was to me: a shadow.”

********************

I’m working through the alphabet in a series of short, memoir-like pieces. My compadres are: Jadepark, Courtney, City Wendy and Life is Just One Big Adventure.

Saturday, dawn: Husband and father-in-law depart for a weekend of bonding and looking at history in Berlin.

Saturday, 9am: Arise, having read book and enjoyed coffee in bed while the children watch some morning TV and get themselves breakfast (I warmly recommend the over-fours).

Saturday, 10am: Raining, so we proceed to the usually hideously over-crowded indoor playground, where I bury myself in my book (Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos, which is so beautifully, poetically written that I cry into my coffee) while the children leap about on the trampolines. When not reading, I check out the fathers, ranging from hot to not but all of whom appear to be actually enjoying spending time with their children and think about how the father species has improved in my generation; drink the world’s most disgusting latte; and try out the trampolines.

(Note to self: trampolining after three natural births is dicing with public humiliation.)

Saturday, 3pm: Return from playground and have burning urge to bake peanut butter biscuits. Eat biscuits and lie on bed while finishing book.

Saturday, 7pm: Have marathon Harry Potter reading session (six chapters of the Prisoner of Azkaban) on my bed, which is declared the girls’ dormitory for the weekend, broken by philosophical discussions on why Snape is mean, why the Weasleys are so funny, and which further HP story includes the unlikeable and ratty Peter Pettigrew.

Saturday, 9pm: Tell the girls to sleep and start Tatiana de Rosnay’s Sarah’s Key.

Sunday, 7.30am: Smallest child wakes at record late hour. Oldest sister takes him down for breakfast and telly. Read more of the excellent Sarah’s Key, washed down by two cups of coffee and thank the universe for my coffee machine.

Sunday, 9am: Children return to the dorm for more HP.

Sunday, 11am: Persuade family to get dressed.

Sunday, 1pm: Eat lunch and head for the cinema to watch Up (Oben, auf Deutsch). Eat peanut M&Ms during movie. Suffer regret.

Sunday, 4pm: Visit ice-cream parlour. Drink the best Milchkaffee in the Burg while the kids have ice-cream.

Sunday, 4.30 to 6pm: Attend a formal Lego and puzzle session. “You will play with me, Mummy,” says smallest child firmly.

Sunday, 7pm: Bath and return to dorm for climactic finish to the P of A. Sirius Black is a goodie! And Harry’s godfather! Harry conjures his first Patronus! It is almost too much for us all to bear – even those of us who have read it all before.

Sunday, 9pm: Off to bath to finish Sarah’s Key. Husband and father-in-law due back shortly.

Round-up:

Number of books read: 3

Number of coffees drank: 7

Number of cute dads discreetly admired: 2

Number of peanut butter biscuits: 3

Number of peanut M&Ms: whole packet

Number of meals I actually consumed at a table: 1

Number of feelings of overwhelming love for children: too many to mention

How much I am looking forward to husband coming back: a lot