Bluebell Archive

2nd May 2011 Bank Holiday Monday

This afternoon our walk through The Glen in Honiton takes us close to the church where my mother is buried. It has been raining and the oak cross which marks her grave is almost black. I wipe away some white splodges of seagull shit on the top and throw away the dead minature rose in it’s plastic pot. I imagine bunches of bluebells there instead.

I plan to bring my father up here on their bluebell anniversary in a few weeks time but they are so early this year. My sister and I have already taken him to Blackberry Camp where they carpet the ground like fields of lavender under giant tenderleaf beech trees. But with their own sweet perfume. We took photos of him knee deep in shining blue, sat on a broad upturned log, ate banana flapjacks, turned his cap the wrong way round and laughed and laughed. And remembered our mother.

This morning on the phone my father says that no one except his brother is still alive who knew him then - seventy three years ago - when he and my mother heard a chaffinch in a bluebell wood in Kent. Only they knew what happened then but their romantic moment has filtered into our family history and is filed there, a bluebell archive. A story to tell the great grandchildren, a story to keep them alive.