large black iron pot and an equally large black iron kettle were the two most used utensils in the kitchen. Often the only way one could distinguish the stew from the brew was that tea always came in large cups and stew was put on plates. Here the difference ended, for the brew often had as much solid matter in it as did the stew.
Mum was a great believer in the saying that ‘Nature grows cures for everything’. There wasn’t a weed, or a flower, or a leaf that wasn’t a specific cure for some ailment or other. Even the outside shed was pressed into use for growing cobwebs. Some people have sacred cows or sacred cats, Mum had sacred spiders. I never quite understood the reasoning concerning spiders’ webs, but all cuts and abrasions were plastered with spiders’ webs. If spiders’ webs were not available there were always fag papers under the clock in the kitchen. These were well licked and stuck over the cut. Our house was littered with bottles of juices, dried leaves and bunches of this, that and the other, hanging from the ceiling. All ailments were treated the same way – rub it, lick it, or if you can’t lick it, spit on it, or ‘Drink this, it’ll do you good’.
Whatever the value of these things, one thing was certain, nobody was ever ill. The only time the doctor entered our house was when something was suspected of being broken, and when Stan was born. No matter that the brew, or to give it its full title, ‘the darlin’ brew’, and the stew looked the same, they tasted wonderful and meals were certainly man-sized.
Mum and Anna shared many likes and dislikes; perhaps the simplest and the most beautiful sharing was their attitude towards Mister God. Most people I knew used God as an excuse for their failure. ‘He should have done this’, or ‘Why has God done this to me?’, but with Mum and Anna difficulties and adversities were merely occasions for doing something. Ugliness was the chance to make beautiful. Sadness was the chance to make glad. Mister God was always available to them. A stranger would have been excused for believing that Mister God lived with us, but then Mum and Anna believed he did. Very rarely did any conversation exclude Mister God in some way or other.
After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting and by and large fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:
‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what God is?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is God then?’
‘He’s God!’
‘Do you go to church?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I know it all!’
‘What do you know?’
‘I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees’, and the catalogue went on, ‘– with all of me.’
Carol grinned at me and Stan made a face and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There’s nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that’s what it amounted to. (‘Out of the mouths of babes …’) Anna had bypassed all the non-essentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence – ‘And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.’
The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere. For her, church-going and ‘Mister God’ talks had no necessary connection. For her the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message, or didn’t understand it, or it was ‘just for swank’.
After the evening meal I always read to Anna, books on all manner of subjects from poetry to astronomy. After a year of reading, she ended up with three favourite books. The first was a large picture-book with nothing in it but photographs of snowflakes and frost patterns. The second book was Cruden’s Complete Concordance, and the third, of all the strange books to choose, was Manning’s Geometry of Four Dimensions. Each of these books had a catalytic effect on Anna. She devoured them utterly, and out of their digestion she produced her own philosophy.
One of her pleasures was my reading to her that part of the concordance given over to the meaning of proper names. Each name was read in strict alphabetical order and the meaning given. After each name had been tasted and thought over she made her decision as to its rightness. Most times she shook her head sadly and disappointedly; it wasn’t good enough. Sometimes it was just right; the name, the person, the meaning, all fitted perfectly for her and, with a burst of excitement, she would bounce up and down on my lap and say, ‘Put it down, put it down.’ This meant writing the name in large block capitals on a slip of paper, which she would stare at with complete concentration for a minute or two and then place in one of her many boxes. A moment to compose herself, and, ‘Next one, please.’ So we would go on. Some names took all of fifteen minutes or more to decide one way or the other. The decision was made in complete silence. On the occasions when I moved to a more comfortable position, or started to speak, I was reprimanded with a tilt of the head, a full-blooded stare and a small finger placed gently but firmly on my lips. I learned to wait patiently. It took us about four months to work through the section on proper names, moments of high excitement and moments of low disappointment, none of which I understood at that time. Later I was let into the secret.
Since our first meeting God had been given the title Mister God; the Holy Spirit, for some reason only known to her, was given the name Vrach. I rarely heard her use the name Jesus. Whenever she referred to Jesus it was as Mister God’s boy. One evening we were working our way through the J’s and came eventually to Jesus. I had hardly got the name out before I was stopped by a ‘No!’, a wagging finger and ‘Next one, please.’ Who was I to argue? I pressed on. The next name on the list was JETHER. I had to pronounce this three times, and then turning to me she said, ‘Read what it says.’ So I read:
‘JETHER meaning he that excels or remains, or that examines, searches, or a line or string.’
The effect of this was electric, catastrophic. With a blur of movement she had slipped off my lap, twisted about to face me and stood crouched with hands clenched, the whole of her being shaking with excitement. For one horrifying moment I thought she was ill or having a fit, but that wasn’t the explanation. Whatever the explanation was it went deeper than anything I could understand. She was filled with joy. She kept saying, ‘It’s true. I know it. It’s true. It’s true. I know it.’ With that she fled out into the yard. I made to go out after her but Mum put out a hand and held me
