Tuesday: Mr Henderson took out his pen and said he would attempt the crossword in the newspaper. I was able to help with several cryptic clues. Sister Catherine’s postbag contained three greeting cards from well-wishers in St Boswells, Urmston and Peterborough. Sister Lucy pinned them up in the Harold Fry corner. It took me the rest of the day to reply to my Get Well cards.
Wednesday: Mr Henderson waved his newspaper in the air and said, ‘Good grief. Harold Fry has even hit the local news today.’ Whatever did he mean? asked a volunteer. With a look of confusion, Sister Lucy read out a short article about Harold Fry and the pluck of the baby-boomer generation. Later Sister Catherine showed me a peony in the Well-being Garden. I confess I wept.
Thursday: A woman visiting a new patient turned to me, and I swear she smiled. A tattooed man who was visiting his father gave me the thumbs-up and said, ‘God bless you, madam.’ We also received a gift delivery of a basket of muffins, brownies and cupcakes. (‘Bloody hell,’ said Finty. ‘Can you liquidize those things?’) Sister Lucy asked if anyone would like to help with her jigsaw and three patients said they would. They finished Wales and the south of England and are now racing towards the Midlands.
*
Friday: A woman tried to take a photograph on her mobile phone of Sister Catherine mixing me a milkshake, and Sister Philomena rushed in, calling, ‘No, no, not here. Please.’ Later, a man with a long-lens camera had to be escorted from the Well-being Garden. I received six further greeting cards from well-wishers, flowers from a cancer unit in Wales, homemade jams donated by the local WI, as well as olive oil, body cream, a head massager and three hot-water bottles. Mr Henderson said to me, ‘It will be a partridge in a pear tree next. Eh, Miss Hennessy?’
This morning, when the duty nurse changed my dressing, et cetera, she said, ‘The world is a crazy place.’
I wrote, What is going on?
‘Has no one told you?’
I shook my head.
‘Have you heard of Twitter?’
I knew about it, of course, because Simon, the volunteer who used to come to my beach house to help me, had talked about it. Sometimes he played on his phone while I sat in a tent of blankets in my garden. I wrote about the days when there were flowering topiaries and rose bowers, when people came to visit my garden and brought offerings, and sometimes he said, ‘Aw, cute,’ and sometimes he only nodded to his phone. I spent many hours sitting side by side with Simon in my garden.
The duty nurse dressed my face. She spoke close to my ear so that her voice was a tickle of words. She said, ‘Hashtag Harold Fry. Hashtag Queenie Hennessy. Hashtag unlikely pilgrimage. Hashtag hospice. Hashtag respect. Hashtag live forever. I don’t know. Your names seem to be all over the place.’
Finty spent the afternoon learning to tweet with one of the volunteers. She now has three hundred followers.
Concerning a beach house
THIS MORNING I lay very still and thought about my sea garden. I wasn’t ready for the dayroom. Instead I thought of the wind chimes, and the longer I pictured them, the more I remembered. When a breeze came outside, the green leaves of the tree all took it up with a rustle and I smiled because I swear I could hear the tinkle of shells and iron keys.
Sister Mary Inconnue sat in her chair, eating a packed lunch from a Tupperware box and reading her new magazine (Inside the Vatican. I can’t imagine it has many jokes but she seemed to find it hilarious).
‘Maybe you should write about your sea garden,’ she said at last, mopping her mouth with a paper napkin.
I want to tell you, Harold, how I made my home in Northumberland.
The sky was a turquoise blue with only pufflets of cloud; the sun lay on my neck and arms; far out, a flat sea shimmered like a blue cloth. There was nothing but the constant shuffle and flip and trickle of the tide lapping the shore.
That day, twenty years ago, when I walked out of the sea and back to land, I had no thought of building a garden. I had no thought of finding a house. I yanked my suitcase up the sand dunes at Embleton Bay and I had no idea where I was heading any more, I only knew I was searching for something, without knowing what that was. A little way out to sea, a stone outcrop made a perch for the birds, and as the waves met it, they threw themselves up in white curls. I could hear only the gulls and the waves.
The beach houses took me by surprise. It was like coming across a party when you think you are alone. They were mainly boarded up, though a few were still open, with deck chairs set out on the grass. No two huts were alike. Some were no more than wooden sheds. Others were painted and had verandas, steps, circular windows. They were set apart from one another, without any sense of pattern or order, or indeed path, as though someone had taken a handful of beach houses and dropped them on a sandy clifftop. Mine was the last I found. A hand-painted sign read FOR SALE.
The exterior was clad in broken timber slats, and the roof, such as it was, was made of corrugated tin. The window frames were rotten and held no glass, so every time the wind came, the torn red curtains of the sea-facing windows spat out like tongues. Shutters hung loose. A stone chimney poked from one side of the beach house and an elder tree grew from the other. The place was surrounded by undergrowth.
I left my suitcase in the sunshine and kicked my way up to the porch, a sheet of plyboard supported by two paint-peeled wooden poles. When I pushed on the front door, I was met with resistance. Not a slider, though. I checked. The door was propped and tied to the frame with bootlaces. I had to loosen them and lift the door to one side.
Even before I entered, I was met with the dark smell of damp and rotting vegetation. Where the rain had come in, the floor joists were rotted away, and in the gaps sprouted clumps of pink-flowered thrift. Paint flaked from the wooden walls. I had to tread carefully. One wrong move and my foot might go straight through. I tried the tap that hung over a stone sink, and the thing snapped straight off in my hand.
The beach house was divided into four equal-size rooms, each with a window. The front two rooms looked towards the sea. The back two – one of which became my bathroom – overlooked the grassy cliffs. I peered out from each broken window, but there were no other beach houses in view. There was only the bed of nettles, which stopped at the edge of the cliff. Below, there was the sea, the ragged black-tipped shoreline fringed with white foam, the distant silhouette of the broken castle. The beach house gave the impression of being rooted neither on land nor at sea. I left my suitcase beside it and returned to the coastal path.
I asked down at the golf course but no one knew anything about the beach house. They suggested I tried the shop. I was halfway to the village when I realized I wasn’t walking any more, I was running. No, they told me at the village shop. No one lived there. It had been for sale a long time, both the house and the plot of land (half an acre) it stood on. The owners hadn’t spent a summer on the bay for many years. Who could blame them? The house was falling down. It probably wouldn’t survive another winter. I took the telephone number of the owners and I also bought a loaf of bread and a bottle of water.
I returned to the beach house. I sat in the sun with my suitcase, and while I ate the bread and drank the water I gazed out over the bay. The sun was high and threw stars at the sea. The air shimmered with heat, like a veil of water. Beyond it, I made out a cruise ship on the horizon and it was so still it seemed to be pasted there, until I looked again and found it had moved. Black-headed gulls circled the shoreline, and dropped hard as stones, for fish. People made their way along the coastal path, tiny specks, en route to the ruins of Dunstanburgh Castle. All of us, going about our lives. The guests on the cruise ship. The weekend walkers. The gulls. The fish. Me, with a suitcase. The nettles swayed.
The Northumberland coast was not like Devon after all, or if it was, it was a simplified version. The crumples and folds of the southern landscape were flattened here. Where the Devon lanes had been narrow and high with overhanging hedgerows, so that I could not know what was around a corner, in Embleton t
he land lay wide and open. I looked out over the bay, the golf course, the clifftops, the higgledy-piggledy castle, and it was like breathing again. I could see everything.
I will live here, I thought. I need to live here. And already I felt a flutter of tenderness for that broken-down place.
I rang the owners that same evening and offered to buy their beach house.
Further madness
Dear Queenie, There has been an unexpected turn of events. So many people ask after you. Best wishes, Harold Fry
PS A kind woman at the post office has not charged me for the stamp.
She also sends her regards.
Your latest postcard has arrived. This time the dayroom was so packed – so many volunteers, nurses, patients, family and friends had assembled to hear your news – that Finty made Sister Lucy stand on a dining chair to read it out. There followed a lively discussion about the kindness of the lady in the post office, the slowness of the postal service and acts of charity performed by various people in the room. One woman, for instance, who is the sister of a patient, told us she runs three marathons every year in aid of the local children’s home. Finty said, since the lady was so kind, could she lend her her mobile phone because Finty needed to check her Twitter account? Sister Lucy pinned up your postcard in the Harold Fry corner. I didn’t like to make a fuss and ask what the picture was.
‘We need to send him a message,’ announced Finty. ‘So that he knows about the developments here.’
‘What developments, exactly?’ asked Mr Henderson. He sat still while the duty nurse changed his syringe driver.
‘He needs to know that we’re all waiting,’ said Finty, pointing at the large group in the dayroom. ‘If he knows how many of us are waiting, he might get here quicker.’
‘If Harold Fry finds out how many of us are waiting,’ said Mr Henderson, ‘he might go straight home. And how exactly do you propose to send a message to a man who is walking the length of England?’
Finty ignored this. She addressed instead the table of volunteers. ‘We need to start making plans. Harold Fry could get here any day. We have to be prepared.’ Here she had to pause to cough something into a tissue.
While Sister Philomena and the duty nurse handed out nutritional drinks and pain relief, Finty began to outline her plans. They were surprisingly substantial. ‘First up, we need to make a WELCOME, HAROLD FRY banner. Anyone fancy that?’
Sister Catherine was appointed to head a team responsible for the making of a banner. She fetched the sticky shapes, as well as felt, scissors, glue and a long stretch of white canvas.
Finty also proposed that we write a song in music therapy to welcome you. ‘Maybe the local paper will take our photograph. Another thing; we need to think about fundraising.’
‘Please could I have my phone back now?’ whispered the marathon lady.
‘Do you mind?’ snapped Finty. ‘I’m tweeting here. I’m multitasking.’
‘Why do we need to think about fundraising?’ asked a new patient.
‘To subsidize a party. He’ll need a party when he arrives. He won’t just wanna get here and, like, and … sit down.’
I looked over the room of chairs. Apart from sitting, I couldn’t think what else you were going to do. I glanced to Mr Henderson and he frowned.
‘What about a sweepstake?’ growled the Pearly King.
‘Fab idea,’ said Finty. She asked someone to grab the pencil and notebook from my hands. She needed to make a list.
One of the volunteers offered to make gift cards in order to raise funds. Another suggested cupcakes.
‘I am not certain that we should be throwing a party,’ said Sister Philomena quietly. ‘This is a hospice. If you want to prepare for Harold Fry’s arrival, we might persuade Sister Lucy to bring out her blow-dryer.’
‘If you like,’ said Sister Lucy, warming to this theme, ‘I could even do haircuts.’
There were murmurs of assent. Finty went quiet briefly and tugged on her hat. (A brightly coloured wool Rastafarian hat. But we needn’t go into that now.) A few of the patients’ friends said they would like a haircut if Sister Lucy was offering. There had not been time recently, they agreed, to think about things like hairdressers when you’re making hospital trips every day and so on.
‘How short can you do mine, Sister Lucy?’ asked one of the volunteers. Her hair flew out like a static halo.
‘Oh, very short,’ said Sister Lucy brightly. ‘If you like, you can have a Brazilian.’
For the rest of the day, the activities continued. Sister Catherine supervised the banner. Sister Lucy’s face went pink from the heat of her blow-dryer. Finty put herself in charge of media relations. The Pearly King said he could contact a few people he knew for contributions to a raffle prize. I sat beside the window with my notebook.
‘I gather Finty has a thousand followers,’ said a soft voice beside me. I was surprised to discover Mr Henderson. I had been so absorbed in my writing, I had not noticed his approach. ‘What do you do with a thousand followers?’ He settled in the chair beside mine. ‘I had a wife and a best friend. That was all I needed.’
He looked out over the Well-being Garden. Swifts were swooping between the trees and the wooden pagoda threw a long shadow over the grass. Mr Henderson and I watched. I did not write. The leaves of the garden have become one gentle green.
Finty gave a yelp from the other side of the room. ‘Yay!’ she squawked. ‘I’m fucking trending!’ There were cheers and wolf whistles.
Mr Henderson smiled to the swifts. ‘How oft,’ he murmured, ‘when men are at the point of death, Have they been merry!’
In which I make a home and a garden
I WALKED out of my new beach house and put my foot straight through a fruitcake.
Placed also among the nettles were a casserole dish, a pint of milk, a packet of Craster smoked kippers and a flask.
When I bought the beach house and the plot of land where nothing much grew, local people watched with curiosity as if I were not quite in my senses and therefore might need looking after. Initially there were rumours that I had bought the plot in order to develop it, and even though no one wished to live in the beach house, neither did anyone want to see it demolished and replaced. A protest meeting was called in the Castle Hotel. Aside from the protester and two of his friends (a plumber and his wife), I was the only person who turned up. We drank cider, and the plumber and his wife ended up offering to help me renovate my beach house. In exchange, I agreed to look at their account books. And although it hurt me, the work, because it took me back to Kingsbridge and you and David, I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.
The protester lent me a tent and a tarpaulin until my roof was fixed. He helped me to pitch it inside my beach house. He said there was nothing I could do to pay him except possibly re-word his campaign to save the ozone layer.
I slept on a wooden pallet, an old mattress and a sleeping bag given to me by a neighbour of the plumber and his wife. In exchange the neighbour asked me to coach her son in O-level Latin. So now I had three jobs. The accounts, the teaching and the protest. I slept fully clothed.
The food offerings continued. Sometimes they made a small edible path through the nettles. Cake tins and Tupperware containers and ovenproof dishes wrapped in foil to keep them warm. If I was desperate, I walked down to the golf course and ordered a hot dish in the clubhouse. When I spoke to the kitchen staff our subject was the weather and in time that became our language, just as you and I had a language in your car. Nice day. Rotten day. We described our emotions in terms of the temperature. And sometimes one of them would ask, ‘You all right up there, pet? Had enough?’
The plumber and his wife and I made supports for the roof in order to prevent it from collapsing. We had to push them up the path on wheelbarrows. We cleared the roof of moss and debris so that the rainwater would no longer form stagnant pools in the corrugated roof and leak through it down i
nto the rooms. Another friend of the plumber installed gutters and replaced the rotted window frames. Perspex sheets were glued where there had been only broken glass. As payment I agreed to take on the friend’s accounts and also to help him once a week in confidence skills. He felt his shyness held him back in life, and even though I had never thought of myself as a particularly forthright woman, I found that my dealings with Napier had a use.
The timber floor was replaced by three builders I met on the golf course. In exchange I barbecued fish and sausages for their families and carried bottles of cider from the pub. The door was rehung with new hinges. I paid for those with what my mother would have called ready money. Just before my first Christmas in the beach house, I was given a second-hand woodburner by a couple I met in the post office. I learned their marriage was on the verge of collapse. In return for the woodburner, I offered them dance lessons every Sunday afternoon in their kitchen. Slow, slow, quick quick slow, slow. I thought of my mother shelling peas, my shoes resting on my father’s boots. And I don’t know whether it was the dancing or the festive season, but either way that couple stayed together. In later years, they’d come down to my garden and foxtrot on the shingle paths. We’d set up their cassette player by the window and if one of them asked, What about you, Queenie? What happened to your dancing partner? I might light a lamp in the garden and think of you.
I spent most of my first winter trying to work out how to keep a woodburner going. I lay in bed at night shivering, even though I was dressed in fisherman’s socks, a knitted jumper and a wool hat (all donated by a woman from the hotel; in exchange I helped her write a weekly letter to her daughter in Australia). The beach house swayed in the wind, and the wooden boards cracked. The sea threw up waves like walls. But I was safe. I had done what no one said I could. I had spent a winter alone on Embleton Bay.