Bluebell Anniversary

Yesterday was my parents Bluebell Anniversary which I've written about in this blog before when my father was alive. I took these photos in Blackberry Camp outside Honiton where my husband and I walked with friends and their happy dog on Friday. It will always be associated now in my mind with my parents and their bluebell story which is forever woven into our family history.

I don't know how to make a link to it so I'm reprinting the blog here that I wrote in 2010.

WEDNESDAY, 12 MAY 2010

Wednesday 12th May

Day 23

Bluebell Day

We sit in the car, my father and I, balancing plastic plates on our laps. Two thermos cups of leek and potato soup create little streaks of steam on the windscreen. Our picnic is round corn cake sandwiches - mashed up smoked mackerel and lemony avocado. A box of salad bits rests lopsidedly against the gear stick. By my feet is a foil parcel of Mejoul dates and flapjacks. Our view is a steep bank of bluebells and a sandy path disappearing over a mound into a clearing ringed by huge trees. It’s so still and cool - it feels like an open air cathedral for birds.

Later we walk slowly into this magic circle where the bluebells stretch in wide silken scarves under the new, new leaves of beech and oak. It looks like some of the low sweeping branches are bowing in homage to this surprise gift below them. When the sun comes out briefly they shine like a one colour indigo rainbow.

We are here in honour of a moment in our parents’ lives that occurred in another bluebell wood in another place 70 years ago. With a chaffinch and an oak tree too. Only they know the secret of what happened then but we know it changed everything. Started something. And so a family history is born which curls like smoke into the next generation rekindling memory whenever bluebells are mentioned.

I felt my mother was walking with us today, deep in the bluebells. She would have laughed too when we lost the hat. I stop to take photos, drop my father’s herringbone cloth cap from under my arm. We retrace our steps, searching on the path. And give up.

“I never liked that hat anyway”, he says. “Lets leave it here. For Ma.”

But in the car park someone has picked up his hat and left it on a post by the entrance.

He puts it in his pocket.

“ You don’t have to wear it,” I say. “Just because you found it.”

And I don’t think he will. Ma wouldn’t have liked it either.