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Fire

As I said at the beginning, these are my memories. Others remember things differently. Remember things I have forgotten or buried. Here is one of Annie’s memories.

Where is the chapter on the fire?!

When Alan showed me the first draft of the book I couldn’t believe the fire wasn’t there! I remind him about what happened – ‘Oh, yes . . . we did . . . it was . . . I’d forgotten . . .’ – but it has been lost from his mind, beneath the clamour of other memories crying out for inclusion.

So he asks me to write about the fire. I agree because, although so many of our memories from that time are individual – we were so emotionally divorced from each other in the struggle to get through each day – this one was certainly shared. For me, as the main carrier of this memory, it shouts out loud. I couldn’t consent to the manuscript being sent off to the publisher without including it.

It is still early on in Tom’s illness – ‘BD’. ‘Before Diagnosis.’ A time before loss bit so savagely deep. Though we were already on the road. The Barnwell Road, where we only ever saw one solitary magpie.

It is the weekend of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee. The sun is shining. I am just back from two weeks working in Colombia and I have a couple of days’ leave, in addition to the bank holi­day. The plan is to go down to the narrowboat we keep on the River Cam, to do what we always do there – sleep long hours, eat, drink, walk, catch up with each other, make love, leave the demands of work and world behind and rediscover why we married each other in the first place.

Tom is in hospital, very poorly. I have no heart for the boat, but I have been away, a long way away. Alan has been here, in and out of hospital, living with the strain, the fear, trying to keep up with his work. He very much needs to go. So we go, for just two days, staying just one night away from home, while other family members accompany Tom.

We moor up on the left bank of the Cam, north of Cambridge, by a small grassy bank. A delightful place which we know of old. A well-used fishing ground and a place for boats to stop and stay. It is surrounded by trees and lush summer growth, with the towpath up a short slope, should you want to walk. A pleasant, lazy place in the middle of summer.

But, oh! The big tree, whose shade we have often enjoyed, has gone. The discarded branches are strewn around. We can clearly see the ravages of disease in the stump. It is still the place we know, but now changed for ever. The beautiful tree cut down. Felled beyond returning. No going back to the settled, familiar place it had been. No undoing the injury.

We stand for a while. I don’t remember how long. We roam over the ground, sighing, taking it in. In the centre, near the stump, are the remains of a small, recent fireplace, a black patch amid the green, drawing our eyes to it.

Did we say anything to each other? Exchange words? Did we make a plan? Decide what to do?

Slowly, gradually, we gather dry twigs and branches and build a fire. Somehow it is lit. A crackle of flames springs up, eating the old wood. A good fire on a dry day, with little smoke. Soon a roaring blaze.

This fire is not for cooking. In any case, I am indifferent to food, already in a tunnel of eating as a chore, the sour tastes and spiny textures to be chewed and swallowed down because I have to. A steamy portion of mashed potato giving no comfort or pleasure now. A lush, red plum no longer an invitation to a riot of juices to enjoy. This is no nourishing fire. Rather a consuming fire. Demanding of us to feed its devouring appetite. Which we do.

We stand watching it. Just watching and feeding it. There is no conversation, no reflecting on the past weeks, no laughter, no dreaming of the future. This is no comfortable, convivial fire.

We gather more and more branches. Each time the fire burns down we silently replenish it, feeding its hunger. The flames hold us mesmerized. We keep on burning. Burning. Burning. I do not know how long we stay there. An hour? Two? Maybe eternity.

I don’t ask what it means but we catch its power. I don’t know what it signifies, but we cannot stop. Compelled to burn. To watch. To burn. Especially to burn. There is no memory of leaving that place or when we cruised away.

The shadow of death is not yet articulated. No concrete questions: ‘What are we facing?’ ‘How long?’ It isn’t their time, yet. These questions are still in the queue, awaiting our arrival.

The curtain of flame deflects us from our worst fears. Not yet. Not yet. We are still BD. BD. Not yet the funeral pyre.

For now, just a fire.