Hasta Luego Part 2
Our recent trip to the UK, to spend time with family, all proved to be rather cathartic as I had time to come to terms with the sense of loss; the surreal experience of losing people you love at a time when you can’t physically be there to grieve with family and the trip gave us the opportunity to close this particular chapter.
On our visit, we were blessed with beautiful weather in the UK. We had an itinerary and it was very much a journey of reminiscence and I had an urge to see places that meant something to me and my family.
We night-stopped in London, and managed to find a special little place not far from St Pancras and King’s Cross, in a lush and leafy square in Bloomsbury. Dining out at a nearby pub, we both remarked how peaceful it was. The usually busy Gray’s Inn Road was like a backstreet, with very little traffic. The neighbourhood appeared to be full of trees and there was a calm about the way everyone was going about their low-key business. It was very clear that people were resolutely working from home, as this was a weekday so should have been buzzing. We were both rather glad it wasn’t.
Given the circumstances, we felt on edge the entire week were in the UK. It should not have been like that; for me, it had been intended as an important few days, and my opportunity to get my head around the fact that there were two people who had been taken out of my life. Even now, writing this, my Mother and Brother are still here; I can’t see how they can have possibly disappeared. I was annoyed that the decision to quarantine visitors arriving from Spain weighed too heavily in favour of a politically motivated action rather than something implemented to protect people. I was irritated that I couldn’t concentrate 100% on my family as I had missed them hugely during the lockdown period and I just wanted to be with them blocking out everything else.
Our first excursion was to Suffolk and the tiny hamlet of Fakenham Magna, on the Norfolk/Suffolk border. This was the location of the first house my parents bought and it is where I spent my teenage years. Whenever anyone asks where I’m from, I feel that Suffolk is as close as it gets to a family home. As my father was in the RAF, we had a peripatetic life but here, in this bucolic corner of East Anglia, I felt at home growing up.
The children met us here; a place they struggled to remember. James, my son, had spent time at the house with my parents, but he was very young, so I had to reshape that time for them both. We had lunch in what had been our local pub and it was comforting to discover that the current landlord is the son of the couple who used to run the pub when we frequented it many years ago. When places changes so quickly, there was a consistency to the fact that here, in this pub, not much had changed and I still recognised the lounge bar where we spent many a happy family get-together.
From Fakenham Magna, we were to drive to Cambridge and spend two nights there, catching up with my sister-in-law, niece and nephew: Kim’s fabulous family. We took a slight detour to call in to my brothers’ old school Culford, formerly the ancestral home of the Earls of Cadogan. This is the school that I, too, should have attended but for a slight blip in the relationship between Rutter family and school headmaster. The park in which the school is set is stunning, and there was something unifying and calming about taking a stroll through such a magnificent landscape and remembering the few times I came here with my parents to collect or drop off my older brothers. In the cemetery beside the pretty church, there is the grave of one of Kim’s best friends from school, tragically killed in an air accident aged just 19, an accident that claimed the lives of 18 people from the Bury St Edmunds Rugby Club killed in a plane crash in France. It was in this church that my nephew and niece were christened, so the place still has a relevance to us as a family.
Andrew and I stayed in what used to be the Garden House Hotel in Cambridge, currently going through a change of ownership, but a hotel that has the best location of any in this lovely city. The hotel sits on the junction of the Rivers Cam and Granta and the lovely gardens run alongside the River Granta and has been the location of many a cream tea or early evening drink with various members of the Rutter clan over the years. We dined with Kim’s family and all the time I had the desperate urge to pick up this beautiful group of people and bring them back to Spain with us and never let them leave. It’s very difficult to explain, but Kim played such a central role in my upbringing despite the 8 year age difference. He was there from the time I first went off to Prep School aged 9, supporting me with encouraging words and he never really left. Some of my strongest memories of the house in Fakenham Magna are of me standing at the living room windows waiting to see Kim and Lynn’s car appear over the brow of the hill as they came to visit; that sense of excitement never abated.
The Cambridge Hotel
We had a lovely time in Cambridge, a city I have visited many, many times, but the emotional gap that exists now is large.
Kent was the destination for the second part of our little journey of remembrance and, after another night-stop in London, we drove down to Woodchurch and the last house that my parents owned. We had collected my Mother’s ashes from my eldest brother on our way down from Cambridge, and we were going to reunite Mum with Dad in a place that was always special to them. In the height of the summer, when the trees are in full leaf, the sky is dazzlingly blue and the sun warm, there are very few places that are as beautiful as rural England. I couldn’t ever remember Suffolk looking so lush as it did on this visit and nor could I remember Kent looking so peaceful, as I always felt that this county was blighted by too much traffic and too many busy roads. Undoubtedly, Covid-19 played its part in keeping people and vehicles down to a more sedate level and it was very welcome.
We stayed in a recently restored inn in the heart of Tenterden, and I have seen The Woolpack go through various stages of transformation. A winery is the latest owner and they have done a fantastic job of creating a small boutique hotel and staying here really did feel like being at home. For the first time on this trip, our children were with us in the hotel and it felt complete having them so close in a place that we previously called home - it was here that the children were brought up, where they went to school and where many of their own memories were forged.
In Suffolk, my parents’ former home looked tired and ill-kempt and in some way this helped me to say goodbye. Had it been as immaculate as it was when my parents lived there, I may have been tempted to have knocked on the door, half-expecting my Mum to open it. In Kent, the house has changed slightly, but it is clearly in good hands and it looked loved, neat and tidy. That said, some of the trees in the garden had been removed to open up the view at the back, but it still looked like the home that my parents enjoyed.
As a family, we took a stroll up the hill on the walk that my parents would take almost daily, past orchards and hedgerows that have not changed in decades. Woodchurch is hugely picturesque and is one of those villages that best represents the idea that Kent is the Garden of England. It was here that we said a final goodbye to Mum, away from the care home in which she spent her final years and away from the grim incarceration of dementia. I think we all felt much happier that she was back home.
This was a week of conflict. We both wanted to be back in the safety of the home we have created in Spain, and where we have felt safe ever since we were initially locked down. Despite the often impossible beauty of Cambridge, Suffolk and Kent we felt strangely uneasy being back in the UK, where masks are not worn outside, and people gathered in numbers to enjoy the sunshine as if there was nothing to worry about. We felt a little as though we had been living as hermits suddenly to be thrust into one of the busiest corners of the planet, and this brings with it a huge sense of anxiety. Being with the family after such a grim and tumultuous time was beyond compare, but that also means that, eventually, we needed to leave them again until the next time. We will plan another trip as soon as we are able, as we want to be able to meet our first grandchild who will be with us at the end of September. I refuse to counter any idea that we will miss out on seeing this new little addition to the clan.
We are home now. I was able to draw something of a line, but I wouldn’t say it was definitive. I am happiest still believing that my Mum is still pottering around in her beautiful garden and my brother Kim will always be here, as he was when I first fearfully donned my school uniform and cap, or as I waited for him and Lynn to come tearing down the hill to visit our Suffolk home and create more wonderful memories.
We are home but how we wish our family were here with us.
