Something to Celebrate

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With our daughter and me both safely out of the house, my husband Gordon fearlessly pursues his mission to plaster the kitchen ceiling.  He’s under strict instructions to remove everything portable before the plaster dust begins to fly, so he takes down the kitchen noticeboard which hasn’t been moved this century.

Leaning the functional side of the noticeboard against the wall in the lounge, he discovers something hidden on the flipside: an invitation to my tenth wedding anniversary party.  I say “my” because it is in fact a relic of my previous marriage. Neatly pinned below it is a yellowing newspaper cutting, headlined “Will you make it to 10 years?”  In 1999, the average length of a marriage was slightly under a decade.  I’d put this proudly on display with the invitation to demonstrate that we’d beaten the odds.

The discovery draws us both up short – Gordon because it’s a reminder that he still has a year to go before he can claim the title of my longest-serving husband, me because it reminds me of the premonition I had that the 10th would be the last anniversary that John and I would share. Although we never discussed it, I think John knew it too.

A month or two before the actual event, we  decided to celebrate in style with a party in the garden with all our favourite people.  Everyone entered into the spirit of things. Our frail nonegarian neighbours, James and Hester, presented us with a framed  poem they’d written specially for the occasion:

“Debbie and John, Debbie and John,

Ten years of your marriage have come and gone.

May the years that lie ahead

Be as good as when you wed.”

We’d recently helped them mark their own silver wedding (their elopement in old age is a story I shall tell another time). It seemed they were passing on to us the baton of romance, assuming we’d outlive them.

But just three months after the party, John was in hospital, newly diagnosed with leukaemia and five months later he died, a week before my 40th birthday. Hester died four days later, at which  James declared “I’ll decide this week whether I’m going to carry on living or not,” and hung on just until the spring.

I went through many sadder anniversaries after that  - not just his birthday and our wedding, but the date of his diagnosis, the date of his death, the date of the funeral, and so on.  Each was a wrenchingly painful milestone.

But don’t feel too sorry for me.  On our eleventh anniversary, my racking sobs resounded around a rented room on a Greek island, where my new boyfriend, Gordon, explained away to the concerned landlady that “she is sad because her baby died a year ago today”.  We’d already had to tell her we were married to be allowed to rent the room, so he could hardly tell her the truth.  I was overawed by his quick thinking – and by his compassion.  Maybe that moment sealed our future as a couple.

There have been other difficult anniversaries since: as any parent of a child with a serious lifelong  illness will understand, there is “D-Day” – the date of diagnosis.  We spent 10th May 2007 in hospital when my daughter Laura, now 8, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes.  It was 10 days before her 4th birthday.

But rediscovering that old anniversary party invitation has given me a change of direction.  In future I’ll be disregarding these dates.  What are anniversaries anyway but occasions artificially contrived using a bizarre number base of 365?  Next year it’ll be 366 – even dafter. Why wait for another 365 day cycle to be completed before we can celebrate our marriage – or the birth of our daughter 13 months later?  If I want to buy Laura a present, I will – I won’t need it to be her birthday to give me permission.  After all, I long ago realised that every day can be pancake day if you take the trouble to mix up the pancake batter.

So happy unanniversary, darling.  It’s been a great 9 years, 7 months and 4 days.

Reliving History in Northern France

La Coupole, the war museum near St Omer, France (Image by Charles D P Miller via Flickr)

Pottering southwards from Dunkerque on our French odyssey this summer, we take the opportunity to revisit a memorable tourist attraction near St Omer.

La Couple is a remarkable structure: a domed, semi-underground cavern that would serve well as a film set for the lair for a James Bond villain.  But it was the real life setting of a far greater horror.  It’s a Nazi military bunker, built to house and launch the revolutionary V2 bombs on London.

The museum has a particular significance for me.  The London suburb in which I spent my childhood was a target for V2 bombs. I remember my grandma telling me that the most frightening thing about them was when they went silent: that meant they were about to hit the ground.

My eight year old daughter Laura has just finished a school topic about World War II.  She and her classmates enjoyed it so much that they did not want the term to end.  We’re hoping the museum will complement her topic nicely, but I quickly realise that  its displays are more horrific than I had remembered.

Fortunately some of the significance goes over Laura’s head.  She laughs at the spectacle of a slide show projected on a pocked and pitted rough brick wall, thinking it makes a funny cinema screen.  It’s actually a reconstruction of a squad’s wall against which many French citizens met their death.  She looks askance at a coarse stripey suit in a glass case: it offends her developing sense of fashion.  I don’t want to explain that someone may have died in this suit: it’s the uniform of a concentration camp prisoner.

Watching films of French refugees heading south on foot, pushing sparse possessions in handcarts and wheelbarrows, I wonder what  it would have been like if we’d been part of that procession.  What would Laura have wanted to take with her? She’s not good at travelling light. Seven cuddly toys have somehow stowed away in the camper van this holiday, although I’d told her to bring only two.

Then I remember an assignment she did at school.  Her class had to plan what they’d have taken in their suitcases,had they been evacuees.  No doubt many of them will have included modern luxuries such as ipods and XBoxes.  Not so Laura.  She thoughtfully showed her favourite cuddly toy (so she’d have something to comfort her at night), a notebook and pen (in case she got bored), and her diabetes test kit.  She drew a neat and accurate illustration of the lancets, test strips and a blood glucose monitor that we use many times a day to manage her Type 1 diabetes.

I realise with a start that to be among those French refugees would almost certainly have sentenced Laura to death, not from Nazi atrocities, but from her diabetes. Her complex medical needs, such as refrigeration for her insulin, and supplies for her high-tech insulin pump, could never have been met on such a journey.

Suddenly Gordon and I find ourselves making excuses to leave the museum before  she is ready to go.  As we march across the car park back to the safety of our camper van, I hug my daughter a little tighter, patting the test kit in my handbag for reassurance.  La Coupole is indeed an extraordinary monument, but as it recedes into the shadows behind us, I do not for a moment glance back.