Spanning three generations, 'Share The Moon' is the family saga of one girl, one moon and three lives; one Spanish, one English and one Finnish. Blended together into a captivating life journey and infused with tenderness and humor, each post can be read as an individual stand-alone piece. To read the complete adventure start from the very first post, 'Share The Moon', and simply work your way upwards. Welcome to my journey on the first Sunday of every month!

Sunday 25 March 2018

Canada







It is the English summer of 1988, and in that faraway place called America Ronald Reagan is into the final stretch of his tenure as President of The United States Of America. Within the space of a few short years, the world that he and I now preside over will dramatically alter, as The Great Eastern Power disintegrates  and along with it tumbles the division of Europe into East and West. But this unimaginable future is still waiting to happen as each of us live out the last familiar years of the 1980's. I have just graduated from the University of Surrey in Guildford with a Batchelor of Science Honours degree in Modern Mathematics. Nineteen-year-old Sis in turn has just begun her first year of studies in Psychology at The University of Cardiff in Wales. Amongst my accumulated life skills, I can now calculate the trajectory needed to send a satellite into space and maintain it on an eliptical orbit around our planet; for medical applications I can evolve equations that ensure a dialysis machine exactly recreates the functions of the very human organ that it replaces; and in the field of military applications I can apply advanced mathematical models to show that under certain conditions one can predict the outcome of military conflicts.




 Papa's dream of educating his daughters to a level not possible in the Spain of his childhood has indeed been realized. Indeed, aged twenty-four I have far superceded Papa's expectations, yet one unattainable prize still evades me and that is to be English; to have that inner tranquility, the feeling that finally I belong. I may talk like them, dress like them and outwardly behave like them, but deep down in the inner recess of my soul, I comprehend that I am not one of them. This country that I now inhabit, beautiful as it may be, is not and never will be my permanent home. But neither is it Spain. Eighteen long years have elapsed since I first stepped on the plane taking me away from my island with its sandy black volcanic beaches to this new emerald-green island they called England (see post Share The Moon), but the unremitting passage of time stops for nobody and gradually that six-year-old girl and her island have been consigned to all but a distant and faded memory. Now I find myself neither English nor Spanish. Yet I am at peace, because I now know with certainty that this home I am searching for has a name and a place and this is called Canada. The Roma fortune teller that came knocking on our door last Autumn told me so and I must assume that Roma fortune tellers know their stuff.





Just before I return to Guildford to complete my last year of University studies, she knocks on the door of our home at 51 Crescent Road, and I answer. After showing no interest in purchasing her small sprig of flowers, our Roma caller decides to change sales tactics, tosses aside the flowers and grabs my hand. Without seeking further consent, she examines the palm of my hand in detail and proceeds to share with me the glorious future she sees awaiting me. And what a future! She sees me marrying a mysterious foreign man, she sees me moving with him far away, she sees Mama very sad to see me go, and finally she sees Canada. Needless to say, I am thrilled to hear all this. Mama standing behind me by the door is not. She has heard every word and is not at all happy with the prediction that her daughter will up and leave in the near future with a mystery man that the family, let alone the daughter has yet to meet. ‘What stuff and nonsense!’ she declared, ‘As if anyone really believes that a person can predict the future!' And with this withering pronouncement our Roma caller is sent packing. I do not even remember if she was paid; if not, my deepest apologies wherever you may be Madame Fortune Teller. 



Enter into my life at Surrey University, a few weeks later when I return to resume my studies, fourth year exchange student of Mechanical Engineering, Christopher. Now Christopher is from Vancouver, Canada and we begin to date, but after a while it becomes very evident that if I am indeed going to move to Canada it will not be with him. And for the rest of my year at university, whilst Sweden, Norway and Germany all cross my path in plentiful abundance, Canada does not. So here I am now; graduated from University with a degree certificate in Modern Mathematics under my arm, back home at 51 Crescent Road with Mama, Papa and Sis, pondering the meaning of life, and along with it trying to work out how I will eventually find Canada. Whilst I am waiting for Canada to emerge, I receive a letter from Axel in Helsinki, Finland: Axel and I are old acquaintances, we have already met three years earlier on a ferry crossing between England and Sweden, and ever since have sporadically written to one another. Now, Axel is strange and so are his letters. 






When we meet for the first time in the ship’s only cafeteria, it is late afternoon and the premises is still full of empty tables, yet he chooses to sit next to me and then even more bizarrely says absolutely nothing. After I can no longer tolerate this inarticulation, I decide to initiate the conversation. Axel proudly tells me that he is Finnish. Now all I know about Finland is that it is somewhere up north, next door to The Soviet Union and very cold. With Axel I also find out that they are very comfortable with silence. On our twenty-four-hour ferry journey to Gothenburg he obligingly fills me in on the rest as I unsuccessfully try my hardest to evade him. However, unless I am ready to swim alongside the vessel into harbor, on this small ferry there is nowhere to run. Axel is an eighteen-year-old teenager, and I consider myself a mature woman of twenty-one and cannot believe that he would even entertain the thought that I would be interested in a post-pubescent adolescent that has just acquired the right to vote. But he most certainly entertains the thought and never gives up. It must be tied up to the Finnish quality called sisu, loosely meaning to be determination or perseverance, that he keeps telling me about and I do not know how he manages it, but by the end of the ferry crossing he has managed to extract from me an address. What an annoying individual. I pray that he never writes. Of course he does, and I am too polite to ignore his letters so I write back after a suitable amount of time has elapsed. About three to four months usually does the trick.




And now I have a new unopened letter from him in front of me. What does he want now? I think to myself. Axel tells me that he is coming to England for the summer to work at an Engineering Company in a town called Leamington Spa. Do I want to meet with him? My immediate reaction is, ‘No thank you’. There is something strange about him and I cannot put my finger on it. What on the earth would we have to say to one another? We barely interacted on that twenty-four-hour ferry crossing three years ago, and when we did most of it was done in silence. Somewhere along the elapsed three years he has managed to promote himself from pimply teenager to student of Electrical Engineering at the Helsinki University of Technology, and his long and rambling letters are punctuated with updates on how cold it is, how far he has skied and how much alcohol he has consumed at his latest party. Frankly, I am not that interested. Then for Christmas he sends me books about an obscure topic that I know absolutely nothing about: Finnish military history. Besides, if I were to meet him I would have to uncomfortably admit that The Unknown Soldier is still languishing unread on my bookshelf, its virgin pages still untouched. Absolutely no meeting. 




After a few days have elapsed, I recant. My studies are over, I have a lot of free time on my hands before I begin my post-graduate career in the Autumn. Well, why not? I guess that there can be no harm in meeting up. Besides, it will help to while away the days until Canada finally emerges. And accordingly, I inform Axel that yes, I will drive to Leamington Spa for a weekend visit to meet with him. Just one weekend, after which I will hopefully never have to see him again.




Next post: Sunday 08.04.2018:  A Finn Named Axel




Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.

Sunday 11 March 2018

A Girl Named Audrey








It’s early morning as I wake up at Mama’s home in San Juan Tenerife, and for an instant I am the nine-year-old girl that fell into a fitful sleep all those years ago, exhausted by the minefield that is The English Christmas (see post Little Bird). I am now A Girl Named Audrey, for this is the name I go by in this newest stage of my life. Audrey is indeed still that same child, only the unremitting passage of time spanning a seemingly endless journey of forty-five years separate us. Simplier put, I grew up; as well as daughter to Mama and Papa and Sister to Sis, I am now also mother to Hugo and Sofia, aunt to Zara and Alicia, and friend to many; along that seemingly endless forty-five-year journey, the desert of loneliness mercifully ended. Once-upon-a-time, before The Tsunami unleashed its colossal walls of water radiating out across oceans and wreaking devastation on everything that stood in its path, I was also once a wife. 






Across from me, still fast asleep in the bed on the other side of the room is my soon-to-be twenty-year-old English niece, Zara. Drained by the adventurous drive of the previous day across the island with her beloved Mummy-Aunt as I am known, alongside the exhausting adventures of her ever-youthful and energetic Spanish Grandma (see post The Beach Club), she recovers on this day off work at nearby The Blue Lagoon Hotel. Soon two years will have elapsed since she arrived on the island, exchanging London for Tenerife and her Mama for mine. I gaze at this young explorer beside me, and detect the same lust for adventure which propelled Papa in the prime of youth to take his young family to England (see post Share The Moon) and in doing so began the dispersion of its members to the far-flung corners of Europe that we today call Home.









Mama is now seventy four and pottering in the kitchen, busying herself with breakfast for her daughter and granddaughter. It helps to take away the pain of Papa’s passing soon two years ago (see post Share The Sorrow.) The family years spent in England now feel like a distant dream, for in old age Mama and Papa indeed made the return journey back to our Island, where the majestic Teide Volcano silent watched over them in old age just as it watched over me on the day I was born. Sis did not join Mama and Papa, for she had already met the English man who would eventually become Zara’s Papa. As for myself, I had already long left England heeding Great Grandma Celia’s advice the night she visited me in my dreams  to spread my wings and learn to fly (see post Little Bird)







I do not have long left with Mama and Zara, for this is the last day and the last morning of my vacation. The time has now come for me to begin the long return journey to that other place that I now also call Home. Mama and Zara may be living on my island, but I am still just another visitor, always destined to leave. My prayers as a nine-year-old were eventually answered: I indeed flew away to a place where Papa no longer scared me, and to where I was no longer ashamed to say that my name was Maria del Carmen. But I did not return back to my island home of Tenerife as expected, rather I carried on flying further north, up towards the Arctic Circle to a yet another new land and yet another new adventure







The plane has just taken off from the southern airport of Reina Sofia and begins its steep ascent into the clouds. Soon only the exposed peak of the Teide volcano portrudes out from between the clouds, serving also as a reminder of the Spanish fragment of me which stubbornly refuses to vanish. The seat belt sign is soon switched off and I take the opportunity to make myself comfortable; it's going to be a long journey of nearly seven hours. As I recline back in my seat, I shut my eyes and reminisce on those early years of the late nineteen-eighties preceeding the move to the place that would become my new Home and the time when fate destined that Axel and I should cross paths. 








Next post : 25.3.2018 :  Canada


Note: All written content is the intellectual property of this Author. Image material is drawn largely from Pixabay with some additions from private family archives.