She Cried for Five Years
After a two-week hiatus I’m back, writing to you from the other side.
We moved. House, city. Life.
The whole thing was awful, as these things often are. The chain broke. We had no internet, intermittent childcare and the emotional heaviness affected everyone - and I’m including the cat in that statement.
I know it is in my nature to make seismic work of the things that other people seem to move through quite naturally, but even by my standards, it was emotionally brutalising. I haven’t been unable to unpack quite why yet. It was all so sad but with a vagueness to it. It wasn’t the thought of leaving the house or the street or the city, not exactly. I’m not sure what it was. All I can say is that on the actual moving day I cried an ocean, wiping surfaces and carrying bags, with salty trails on my cheeks. The removals men moved silently, reverently around me. Everyone was bummed out.
The sense of hiraeth was intense. Are you familiar?
Hiraeth is a Welsh word with no direct English translation but it refers to a strong sense of nostalgia, longing or homesickness, not for any one place. When I learned the word, I at once knew exactly what it meant.
Each day we settle a little more. We can walk to the beach. Aren’t the girls friendly in the new nursery? Hadn’t noticed those under-cabinet spotlights! But at night time, my courage shrinks and I go to bed with a shivery feeling. I want to go home. I fantasise about a Mary Poppins-esque scene where all the furniture and pots swirl up into the air and the room blurs and then we all whirl gently back down in our old house in magical perfection. Poof! We’re back.
And yet - even I know that still wouldn’t take me home.
“The past is a different country,” my mother advised sagely. “You can never go back.” I mused on that for a while. She texted me an hour later. “I didn’t make that up! It was L.P. Hartley. I think. You could Google it.” I did Google it, and she didn’t make it up, and it was L.P. Hartley. But the quote is actually: “The past is another country, they do things differently there.” I prefer hers.
In 1951, my grandmother boarded a train in Belfast, accompanied by her young sons, my baby mother in a pram and several suitcases. She had hardly ever left Belfast at that point and never been more than a few miles anywhere. She travelled 38 miles south to Newry, in the countryside, and led this sad caravan up an unfinished road with no streetlights, to a newly-built house with no furniture. My grandfather had secured an important job at the local creamery, one that would elevate the family, to this day. This was to be her family home for many years to come. She had never lived away from her 11 siblings before, and she would never live near them again.
Early the following morning, she marched the boys down the ‘road’ until she reached the centre of town where she spotted men collecting waste in a bin lorry. “Where is the nearest primary school?” she asked. Bemused but kind, they pointed her towards a school on Edward Street. She went straight there and enrolled the boys. People endure, don’t they? (Or rather, women endure. Particularly in those days, I think. Women absorbed the hard spiritual knocks for their families.)
In later years she would relay this story uproariously, but not without admitting that she cried every day for the first five years.
Our moves are different. I made this move with my own free will, and she didn’t. I have all modern conveniences to hand and she didn’t. I have family nearby and she didn’t. And yet I feel that deep loss that she must have felt. The job was important and the house was new and I have her sacrifice to thank for the life I’m living today but none of that soothes a bad case of hiraeth.
Can it be soothed? I think all we can do is move through it, not cure it. I keep cleaning, emptying the boxes and taking time to observe the unfamiliar sky and the sound of the seagulls. I have a new mania for weeding the garden, with an old trowel I found in the corner. I spent 45 minutes yesterday hacking and digging, panting like an animal. It was the most perfectly zen I have felt in about five months. You don’t need a psychology degree to see I am attempting to salve a sense of interior disorder. You should see my paving stones though. Gleaming.
As we make tentative moves towards life out in the open, you might be feeling a little hiraeth yourself. There is no going back, or new normal, or whatever we’re calling it now. Everyone always told us the future wasn’t promised but only now do we really understand what that means. If, like me, the nostalgia is too much and creeping out from indoors feels too strange, then you don’t have to go big. Go little, instead. Weed your paving stones, bring order around you. Take a walk to the nearest, newly-opened shop and practice saying hello to real human beings. But go, because nothing waits. Time doesn’t wait, karma doesn’t wait. Life doesn’t wait.
The train is waiting for you to board and tears or not, your destiny can’t be avoided.
