Early Harvest

I am not worried about my son getting his five a day. He picks and eats so many blackberries and finds apples, pears and plums under so many trees that he is getting plenty. We make very slow progress going anywhere because there are so many to gather. So I doubt we're getting our recommended cardio vascular. I am also going to be making puddings soon to put all the fruit in, so it's not all good news for our health.
He was going to start picking some mushrooms poking out from the grass so I had to tell him, no, they might be poisonous, stop. Then I saw the carton they'd tumbled out of: Tesco's closed cup, grown in Poland apparently. I didn't tell him that some litter is edible, nutritious even, and that it is a mystery why it is litter at all. But still don't eat mushrooms and berries without asking first. Ever.

A couple of autumns ago when I was picking blackberries and apples I found a candle by the side of the road, purple and in its wrapper: Primark's atmospheric blackberry and apple, made in China but uncannily, there among brambles of Britain. It smelt of a Chinese factory's interpretation of blackberries and apples and that year formed the centrepiece of my harvest festival ritual, lit in gratitude for the fruit of the hedgerows, the things that are made in China and the things that grow in Poland.

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Amina has invited us to have tea with her. She welcomes us in and my son wants to go out. Her garden is everything he loves: wheelbarrows, mud piles, broken toys, little houses for birds and fruit trees. "She is giving us too many fruit this year," she says of her friend Pear Tree. "Too many! Birds is eating, pears are falling on the grass and are too messy everywhere. Wasps wasps is too many!" She brings us a shopping bag and stuffs pears in. "Only take the big big ones." Next she introduces us to Miss Plum Tree. She is 14 years old and her husband, he does not like. Always cutting, cut cut cutting. But look at her plums! She too, is giving many. Another bag and another greedy grab for fruit.

Tea is served on the plastic table outside. Amina opens an angel cake and cuts big slices for me, my son and my daughter, who at 7 months, is new to things like cake. There is a paper tray of doughnuts and she gives us each one. And figs. Fresh and sweet and pink. Sister Fig Tree is having a wonderful year. I make sure my baby gets big mouthfuls and tell her to relish this, you are tasting something wonderful, my daughter, you are tasting something from another home that I want you to know.

With figs spilling out their seeds on her plate, Amina begins to tell us about her childhood. Listen daughter, these are memories to deepen our souls. There was butter from the cows; wool from sheep that her mother spun, dyed and wove into carpets; flour from their wheat stored in barns. They only ate the vegetables and fruit they grew.  It was good to live with chickens and goats.

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It was raining today, everywhere except in the underpass we went down for echoes. Abijah wanted to know what the bubbles on a puddle are called and now I want to know too. I had never noticed how a raindrop bounces and lands with a splat and bubble. 'Go in one?' he asked, wanting to be a tiny boatman, sailing this puddle. My son is trying to teach me the wonder of small things. 'It's called?' he asks as he picks up a pink-veined pebble off a driveway. 'Don't throw stones,' I tell him before I notice its translucent beauty, heightened by the shine of rain. I am sad I have no words. Some days it's easier: 'It's called it's called it's called?' just needs me to keep saying what I see: wall, fence, hedge, wall, hedge, fence. (This is a small town.) I must not lose focus. Stay with the walls, look at the drives, note the colour of cars. Do not, oh my self, remember the past nor dream of the future. Here is a van, here is a postman and this boy needs names. Now.

We go to the ant and consider her ways and are wise. She gathers her food in harvest.
7 

Story Time

I have not been to this familiar place before. It is the first time I have been beckoned by these rows of summer trees, telling me to walk between them to Faygate and not stray from the firm path beneath my feet. If a tree were to fall with no one present, (and lost in the green light with the baby asleep, I feel like we are not) would it make a sound? If a clock were to tick, would time pass? The birds are singing and insects are buzzing but time is not passing.

This countryside I know so well is new to me. Here is Beau Peep House: red door, four windows, chimney, symmetry; here is a leafy den: smoothed ground, a plank for a bench and a tree for climbing; here is a lane sickly sweet with elderflower and venomous with nettles. This is England's countryside in summer. I am sharing childhood memories with my baby in a place I have never been. I wonder if, one day far away, in a dustier, drier land, my son will know, as I once knew in India, that there was once also this place.

For a moment, trees part and allow us to see a cottage: green gables, a pond with a duck, a swing hung from a tree and I know what the time is. I have suddenly walked to childhood, to the settings of story-time. I have visited before. Indeed, I have lived here for many stories.

Cherry Tree Playing Fields

The baby isn't sleeping so I take him for a walk past Cherry Tree Playing Fields to the bmx track. Some boys are grouped at the start of the course - thirteen, fourteen and fifteen year olds - straddling their bikes, helmets on, but straps hanging limp. Apparently the brother of someone they know goes to mosque. "Did you call him a baby?" one of them asks another. "No, man, Albanian." And having confirmed that, he swoops down and leans low over his handle bars to take the high incline. He is determined; lean and mean. When he comes back his mates are watching another group of boys, slow pedestrians and, it has to be noted, of darker skin. The bmx boys call out in mock Arabic and then, pumped for a fight, take on the course with kick-butt wheelies and sharp swerves. Back at the base, "What does qasm illahi  mean anyway?"
"I told you, I don't know Albanian."
I swear to God I want to tell them. And some other things too.

I hope the man washing his car in the drive doesn't think I'm smiling at him simply because his house bears the sticker, 'Smile, You're on CCTV'. No, I'm smiling because I love his family. I have not met them, it has to be said, but Janice next door told me all about them. Once, after drinking a cuppa soup, she described the festival food they used to bring round: meat biriyani, phulke and gulab jamuns, the words filling her mouth, popping like pakore. In the white of her room, she loved the colours they wore and whenever she talked about them, she took thin air between her fingers and thumb to stroke georgettes, chiffons and silks. One scarf she mentioned on several occasions: dark blue velvet embroidered with silver sequins. Perhaps she saw the heavens in it.
I wonder if his family takes trays round to whoever lives next door now.

The cricketers who had been marking out the field when we passed them earlier are now all kneeling in a row, in a line that springs from the neat parallels of their pitch at a quirky tangent. It is as if they have abandoned their wickets and stumps for a different game altogether. But they are serious as they gaze beyond Cherry Tree Playing Fields, beyond Crawley to far away Mecca before lowering their heads, humble, to the ground.

The baby stirs and wakes. With bmx bikes, birds and boughs of blossom swooping around like this; with millions of men rising and falling; with whole universes spangled on scarves, there is such a lot of world to see.

An Equal Light

These blue skies of spring, tempered by a dusty softness where they meet the earth, are the skies of everywhere. At these middle times when we all face the sun the same, Crawley is Anywhereabad. Every town and village catches its breath, balanced briefly with equal days and equal nights, before the earth tilts them headlong into summer, or, I hear but hardly believe, winter in the south. And so, this West Sussex sky with with a greyed and dusky light glowing on the rendering and brickwork takes me everywhere I've ever been in spring under this same sun. Though I am not yet in Donne's New Heaven and New Earth, with 'neither darkness nor dazzling', there are at times glimpses of his 'equal light'. I am a mid-semester school girl faraway; I am at altitude and I am in cities; I am north, I am south and now I am here. This is Crawley, England, the World.

Our son knows Crawley best by these skies he looks up at laid in his buggy as well as by the minute topography of its streets: the tree roots jutting out of baked mud paths that bump his wheels; the flint chips mixed into concrete that jiggle him like a rattle; tarmac he glides over like a VIP or flagstones laid with precision and post-war civic pride. Travelling over these his buggy becomes the sleeper train - juggedy jug, juggedy jug - that lulled me to sleep as a child. And if a baby dreams his mother's memories, he is carried through the Shivalik Hills, into jungles, over the Yamuna bridge into the Old City and then out across the Deccan.

First Spring

Our son has traveled a lot. He has gone up and down the lengths of Langley Walk and
Langley Lane several times and crossed Ifield and West Green and Southgate. We have taken him even further in the car on occasion. Although yesterday his new hat, too big for him yet, covered his eyes, mainly when he goes out he sees skies and branches - black lines splitting the greys and blues and clouds that canopy his buggy. And then he sleeps.
Having lived only through a winter, he has yet to see leaves. How surprised he will be when he beholds how these twigs and branches sprout and put forth buds and produce blossoms.

Unlimited Travel Across our Network

I buy a Metro Voyager Ticket and board the bus. We're off, and upstairs in the prow we rise and fall with the undulations of the road.
I'm reading a novel, Half a Life. Willy Chandran, Indian, has moved from London to Mozambique with a Portuguese lover. Signs along our course welcome us into Surrey and then into West Sussex again as we weave across the border.

"My parents are in India." Course mates are talking on the seat behind me.
"So you're Indian?"
"Well, part. My mum's part Polish. I'm half Indian."
"Why don't you just say 'part'?"
"I'm four-eighths Ukranian." Her voice goes quiet as she continues to divide in her head.
"Nice houses," says her friend, looking out at new builds made to look old. We sail past bus-stops at which people neither board nor disembark. No one seems to live here.
"Three-eighths Polish"
"Why don't you just say 'part'?"
"I like working it out."

 Willy on the page is also trying to work it out.

Beyond the estates, the bus throws itself forward into forest. We are pounded by boughs like rocks on an unsafe coast-line. There is an almighty battering every time we pass these wild branches. We wince and duck. This is the voyage home to Crawley.

Flight Path

There is a moment when
she keeps pace with the plane,
taxiing parallel behind the car park,
its tail fin slicing past the hedgerows
of her path.

Goaded by flight she pedals faster
then is lost
as the plane rears and rises
then is aloft.

She cycles far -
out of Sussex into Surrey
past fields, over two hills
and down long lanes

so that by the time the passengers
are winding through passport control
and exiting to board
left hand drive buses
on foreign tarmacs

she is at work.
She pours coffee,
cleans and dates the whiteboard, cursive,
logs-on with chunky keys of kids' computers,
sets out books on tiny tables
and opens the door to outside.

She aligns trikes
so the children too can learn
the joys of the world
and of going round and round
in circles.