Wild Geese: How Did I Get to Here?

By Marjorie Wynn

This is the story of my life from the war years living a modest and pretty uneventful life in Lancashire to marrying an artist/rock climber which opened up a world I had never known. Our first home was in the bleak Peak District and eventually (as befits a rock climber) to the delights of the Welsh hills with a splendid view of mountains.

I have spent the majority of my years in this ‘other’ country with all its wonders and delights, but I am mortified that I never learnt to speak or read the language. Nevertheless, I can turn my pen to extolling on the many delights that have come my way from settling into this land of Wales.

We restored a 400 year old cottage with a tremendous view of Snowdonia (it was the view that clinched the deal) and the ‘Wild Geese’ of the title refers to our flight from our familiar world and all our relations to this Welsh wonderland.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press UK
• Release date: Nov 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781982286699

Marjorie Wynn

Marjorie Wynn was born and educated in south Manchester. In 1959 she married and subsequently moved to live in North Wales. She had her first success as a writer with the publication of several book for children in conjunction with her artist/illustrator husband. After a career in Adult Education she took up writing again and her successes include articles for local and nations magazines including Period House, Country Quest, Active Life, Eva and Together with Children. Since her retirement from full-time teaching Marjorie has run Creative Writing classes for several local groups and produces articles on local history, travel, country life, humorous pieces and biography. She has a keen interest in music and the theatre and occasionally sings with a traditional jazz band. She has also taken part in many amateur dramatic productions.

Book preview

Prologue

We had been discussing birthdays – my partner, my eldest son and I. The pity is that all my immediate family celebrate their birthdays in the latter part of the year – mine is in November when the weather is, to say the least, dull, grey and chill. But now that we are in the height of summer and in the middle of a heat wave, the idea of conceiving babies at a time when they will always have to celebrate their birth in the depths of those sunless days seems at worst like bad planning, or at best just carelessness.

It would be lovely to stage a summer birthday in a garden filled with flowers, sunlight and warmth and perhaps a marquee and a band. Then my son came up with both an incredible and obvious idea – ‘Let’s have your party now and call it In Case I Don’t Make It Birthday! At first I met this with consternation at the cheek of it and then realised its potential. It would mean that on my real celebration day we could go away for a few days before the joys of Christmas loomed. Now it’s beginning to sound like a good idea and being a Very Special Birthday (I’ll leave you, dear reader, to work it out for yourself) all the planning and organisation will be done by my family and this will leave me to think back over all those years and work out how I have arrived at this stage in my life.

Chapter 1

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We did have the party entitled In Case I Don’t Make It – a lunch party for 24 in September, in a local hostelry, delightful, successful and very memorable, surrounded by some of my closest friends. I had a large square cake for the occasion with the words Happy 80th Birthday - Well almost, not quite, well not yet! This was a line from a couple of poems of mine and which fitted admirably with the early party. Most of the guests could not understand the logic of this early celebration and made me promise not to open my birthday presents until the correct date. So the gifts lay on the dining room table untouched, begging to be opened. My thank-you letters must have come as a surprise two months later.

September brings warm and misty days - the drone of wasps in the orchard feasting on the blood red juice of currant and bramble, a spider weaving a magic thread of gossamer and clouds of midges which dance and sparkle in the sun. At this time when shortening days and lengthening shadows signal the onset of winter, I watch the blaze of colour that is Autumn before the trees are stripped bare and become skeletal, awaiting the first frosts.

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I HAVE BEEN CONTEMPLATING HOW MY life has evolved, how much the course of events was destined to happen and what part did my own aspirations mould the person that I am. In my mind’s eye I see the girl I always was, more learned now, perhaps, certainly more experienced, more sure of myself and my role in life; but otherwise exactly as I always have been. But if I take a good hard look in the mirror, examine what I SEE, what do I find? The image is of an ageing woman with the ghost of the girl she was, peering through. How can this be? When I am dressing for an outing and looking in the glass in order to check if I look presentable, I still see a flattering view of myself, smiling attractively, no hint of the ageing person I have so obviously become. So there appear to be two differing images – the one I have always recognised and the one as others see me now.

The mirror reveals the truth - crinkly eyes with too much laughing, (or crying), flesh around the mouth no longer firm, hanging down where it used to smile in a happy curve; the neck wrinkled in folds, arms dry and often itchy with liver spots making their appearance, and standing back for more horrors, I see breasts and hips heavy with age, legs perhaps my best feature, still shapely if you disregard the raised veins tunnelling down the calves. I can just about take the honesty of this standing-still front view, but checking out a passing glimpse in another mirror reveals rounded shoulders, balanced out by protruding belly, no waist to speak of, with a facial profile showing a heavy nose and jowls, hair grey/bleached blond, scraped back in a ponytail for convenience – not a charismatic view at all. And this is as others see me! Until pensionable age, growing old gracefully (or otherwise!) was never a consideration. It was not a choice we had to make - it just happened. For most of our lives it is a stage far away in the future, well over the horizon, and then it is suddenly upon us. And it comes as a shock, as inevitable as day following night.

This is only the outward appearance I tell myself. Inside I am the same as I was at 20 or 30 or 60 and through all the changes of life, except that those changes have added to the SELF that is me now, and so I conclude that I cannot be the same. Frowns, crow’s feet, whatever, are the results of life, of living, and make up the character that is now ME. I am of an age to do as I please. As Jenny Jones declares in her ‘WARNING’ poem -

"When I am old I shall wear purple ...

And run my stick along the public railings ... and learn to spit."

My reply to that is (without any remorse) -

"Now that I’m old I don’t give a damn, I’ll cough across the table and sneeze into your gin!

And be a soddin’ nuisance to all my kith and kin."

But inside I feel the same as I always did. Should I feel different now that I am older - that dreaded word that sets us apart? I still live and love my life. I enjoy things I have always enjoyed – my home gives me great pleasure still, my garden and woodland. What do I find has changed? I do everything more slowly. I have time to think and I appreciate more because of this. I don’t think of myself as wrinkly or even ageing which means losing some of your faculties. There is a stubbornness about me that says never mind what others think. As I ended a recent verse –

"...I’ve not found any wealth

So now it’s time to break the mould

And please me bloomin’ self".

I am the product of a working class background of cotton mills and poverty which is still apparent in the make-up of my psyche. I know that I am still a product of the folks of Lancashire, share their humours and resentments, always being aware that what I am now hails from what I was then. I was never exactly an ugly duckling, but flying away from my roots and taking on a new persona and settling in a different country aligns me more with wild geese fleeing the nest. At bottom I am a shy soul- yes, yes. Our sort usually are. We come into our own when we are centre stage or the centre of attraction. I never wanted to be in a choir or to join a group unless I had a leading role. Knowing this and being confident, I still squirm inside at the audacity of it. Confidence – what an elusive concept! When faced with opposition or lack of support I crumble with embarrassment.

I am older than my parents were when they died. I am older than they ever were. What a shocking discovery this is to me now at my advanced age. It still feels unreal that my parents are no longer here to share my latter years. In fact in this early part of the 21st century people are living longer. I have several friends well into their 80s. Only a few weeks’ ago a 93 year old woman, aided and abetted by her family, went on the Zip Wire adventure trip in North Wales – a new branch of outdoor activity aimed at the young and obviously appealing to the old. The zip wire was installed in an old slate quarry. North Wales now has the first Wave Machine built on the land where once stood an aluminium works; you can now go trampolening underground in a disused and ancient slate mine. Who would have thought it? Certainly not the miners nor the aluminium workers of old toiling endlessly in desperate and unhealthy conditions. I can understand that turning disused industrial sites into modern activity centres is a great way of bringing in more tourists. Not for me though! I do not possess that love of spills and thrills, of experiencing a sporting activity so outlandish and scary it is likely to make you vomit. The nearest I will get to that is a bout of vertigo I have recently experienced and in no way would I count that as thrilling. In fact I am hoping that it will soon go away. A case of keep taking the tablets!

I have had bits of me removed over the years – a hysterechtomy at 50 left me without my baby-making machinery; 6 years ago a benign tumour led to the removal of an adrenal gland rendering me unable to climb mountains in the foreseeable future, said the surgeon. The best advice after this type of operation, he continued, was not to lift anything larger than a kettle, and keep the ironing to a minimum! I wallowed in my post-op leisure, conducting domestic operations from a comfy seat.

Let’s start at the very beginning then. I was born on Sunday, 20 November (I always quote the child that is born on the Sabbath day is happy and wise and good and gay). Be that as it may. Apparently my father cried at the suffering my mother had to go through to bring me into the world (or maybe it was the sight of this horrible little newborn). Enough to say it was a difficult birth and my father vowed never to put her through this same agony again. Perhaps he had not envisaged all the screaming and crying, pushing and shoving that birth entails.

I was a pre-war baby (just). No sooner had I arrived in the world than my father was whisked away to fight the Germans and I was six years old when I finally got to meet him properly and get to know him. Who was this handsome fella? Up until then it had been just me and mi Mam. Granted this stranger had appeared briefly now and then ‘on leave’ but no sooner had he arrived than he was gone again and I didn’t take much notice. Now it would seem he was here for good, taking over the household and wearing his demob suit (whatever that was). I thought the two of us had been managing very well on our own. Anyway Mum seemed