Continuing my return to Greendene in the late 1970’s
I rang Mike up one evening and was told that Greendene had had a fire! Fortunately it was in the out houses and coal store. Denis was living on his own and now suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was frozen and unable to do anything, but managed in desperation to phone Mike who was living some miles away with his father. He alerted the fire brigade, but there was some confusion over the address and they were delayed getting there. As Mike drove up the land he spotted the fire engines and was then able to direct them to the fire. Thankfully, by a miracle it had not jumped the gap and started to burn the house as well!
As I wasn’t at that time working and suffering still from depression and lack of energy and motivation, my mother managed to push me into agreeing to go up there and help with any restoration and rebuilding that was necessary.
Shaking my self out of my torpor I agreed and arranged with Mike to come over and help build the new coals store. Thus began my new association with the pottery.
I returned now as the prodigal son to that green enclave. It was different now as Denis’s mother had died and poor Denis had aged and was very anxious about his disease that had prevented him from doing more pottery and it was left to Mike to continue on his own. It was sad as he had doted on his mother and pottery had become such an important part of his life, due to his involvement with the whole craft pottery movement. I missed his eccentric little grey haired mother with the bantams, who seemed to still haunt the old place.
In other ways things were the same, the garden was a little more overgrown with less vegetables, partly as pottery had taken over, but also rabbits and deer were invading the garden. These were not the only invasion, one memorable day I remember, we were both in the pottery and we heard Denis’s plaintive voice calling out. We ran up the path and to our astonishment there were cows munching contentedly on our brassicas! We spent some time trying to herd them off, but they took no notice and just moved off to other areas. Finally, I think Mike managed to find the farmers phone number, who lived over the back and got him to drive round. He turned up red faced and mumbling under his breath, moaning at us about poor fencing. Anyhow he set too and in no time had herded the cows away up the lane back to their rightful place in the top field.
We began, by building a new cover for the coal that supplied the stove, the hearts blood of the house. We cleared areas of dense undergrowth and trees. Mixture of elder, ash and brambles, plus in the middle of this jungle were growing a whole host of hellebores! They were beautiful and it felt like they were flowering just for us and to help us out of our feelings of loss and the trauma of the fire. Old man’s beard twine’d its way up the trunks and did its best to trip us up and refusing to be cut easily. I love its seed heads (rather like dandelion’s) laying in profusion over the trees like snowflakes.
The hard physical work acted on my slow and sluggish brain which had to climb out of its intense self aborption and conflicts. I felt my heart lift and a huge weight suddenly fell away.
Soon there was the smell of wood smoke, the bird song, woodpecker and pheasant. The sight of lush green on the larches that all congregated in my senses. I lost myself and began to breathe fresh air again.
Denis was deteriorating and his mood darkened, but he continued to make lunch and we talked at the table, chewing over the loss and other worldly things.
To be continued
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