The perennial question asked by little children of their parents is ‘Why?’
(Back row, second from left, me aged 4, Takoradi Primary school, reception class, Ghana.
Ankle-biter me: “Mam, why can’t I see God?”
This, after being bollocked for drinking bath water and persuading my pal, Alan to do the same. Innocent? Not in Ghana, where Typhoid Fever and Dysentry were rife. I desperately wanted to travel to Heaven to see God, by train preferably.
Mam, “Henkje (little Henk in Dutch) – you see your shadow? Pick it up.”
I bent down in the blistering African sun to grasp my shadow … “I can’t….”
Mam, “Well God is like your shadow, he is there all the time but you can’t pick him up”
Blinding logic – thus totally satisfied for the time being I stopped trying kill myself and Alan.
Today is the anniversary of my mother’s birthday in Leiden, Holland, 1931 (deceased 7th January 2015). She would have been 85.
I was moved to find a bridge to her departed spirit, so I drove in my truck to Darley Dale in the Peak District. The place where my brother Tim and I grew up.
One of her favourite walks from her home – appropriately named Avalon Cottage – was a meander up to an old lead mine. This place she referred to as the ‘Grand Deadery’. As she put it “An ideal spot for disposing of annoying old people – like parents, boys!”
For at the top of the mine workings is a shaft so deep that it takes 7 seconds from the release of a lump of foraged Galena to the ‘bang’ on the first landing floor.
Why did I go there today? Well grief is a funny thing, it hits you sideways when you least expect it.
The bond between the parent and this child is always fresh, like the spring daffodils my wife gave me today for my little wander. The Welsh do understand loss so well.
The Bridge over the River ‘Why’ is kindness and love, to ourselves, to our dear friends and to fellow humans in need. Build.
Happy Valentine’s Day dear reader.
Note: All that is known of Saint Valentine is that he was martyred and buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia close to the Milvian bridge to the north of Rome on this very day.