Strawberries

There was a long dining room in our house. Tall windows to the south and the north. My mother favoured the south side. She was always to be found out there beyond the bevelled glass, in Spring, cardigan well buttoned, packages of seeds to hand, planting. Always planting.

I can still see her. Bent over. Lost in a reverie of what might be, if only.

Our house was very old. Haunted most likely. Old paths thick with roots ran down to the river and bamboo forests swayed my dreams and the bark of wise trees played host to my etchings as in ‘Mary… loves so and so and Mary …was here’.

I loved our old house. It had a breakfast room and an old utility room where my mother had a freezer installed to store the generous offerings of silver wild salmon my father regularly received as gifts and we were never short of company, my brothers’ friends would appear in the middle of the night ringing the doorbell saying they were guaranteed a bed and my parent’s were always entertaining and the fire was constantly lit and my mother, a supreme host never became daunted by any of it.

But the sad part in this story is the neighbouring house. The equally old, historic house attached to ours. The housekeeper who looked after our neighbour, the parish priest. The housekeeper who did all his ironing and cooking and answering of the doorbell and all the other incredibly demanding details of housekeeping I can’t imagine now because I am too anxious to tell the tale because this is how my mother befriended the housekeeper in the south facing patch of garden as she planted strawberries, or studied the length of bamboo canes that led to how they chatted over the hedge and then how my mother sensing her loneliness invited the housekeeper in for tea some day, a Wednesday maybe or a Saturday, who cares and she came and she was so happy to have someone to talk to.

It was lovely that. To know the housekeeper beyond the old wall was our friend. We were saying always lets have Mary over again. Lets incorporate her into our lives. She needs friends and someone to talk to.

And then one day as the strawberry plants were coming to fruition Mary plugged in an iron to iron out the million creases in the priest’s clothes and his elaborate cassocks when she was electrocuted due to the inferior wiring in the priest’s house and she died there and then. I thought there had to be a mistake. I remember thinking I had just seen her in the garden waving at me but no, there was a hush to the walls that joined the two houses that wasn’t there before.

To this day I still think about Mary and I choose to remember here especially as she sat in the breakfast room laughing freely as my mother brought a tray of hot scones out of the oven. At sixteen that is all I can recall. A small, modest housekeeper, cutting open a hot scone, a plume of steam rising in the air, pats of yellow butter melting all over it and a very careful dab of strawberrry jam, that my mother had painstakingly made, the gelling all that mattered, glorious in a china bowl. Blue flowers. A dash of cerise.