Tuesday March 12 1991 - a meeting on the train
On the train back from London , I met a guy, daughter at Cambridge, son at Sussex. He had a fabulous, gentle face, small, neat, a small felt hat, glasses. His right eye was oozing a thick, viscous fluid. It was closed. He asked me how to get to the university. I said, take the train to Falmer.
We got talking. He had worked at Fort Dunlop in Birmingham.
I told him there was a Health Centre at the University, if his eye was troubling him, he became embarrassed and said he had lost his eye.
I told him I didn’t mind about his eye and not to worry.
My attitude to him varied between fear, patronisation, distrust. I saw myself as powerful because I would listen to him, though we conversed more than some people who talk on trains.
He lost his embarrassment and talked more. He told me that when he was little, his father was beating his sister and she was bleeding under her dress. So he thought if he talked to his father, he could calm him, he could draw his fire.
His father hit him across his face with a bare fist and badly hurt his eye. Afterwards, his father always said his son had been born with one eye.
Years later, he was in in hospital awaiting an operation to remove the eye. His father came and stood by his bed and began to weep, and the tears splashed on the son.
The boy said, you cross me? Why are you crying?
His father said, with a broken heart, Come here and live with me. And the boy said, No, what is done is done.
Later, he said, Look at what Lincoln, Luther King, the Kennedys, all assassinated, had tried to do, and look at what Bush has done. He’s brought people together. He denied there’s much racial prejudice in London. He loves Cambridge, very proud of sitting at centre table when his daughter graduated.
To thine own self be true, he said, Don’t try to be smart. Take the chip off your shoulder.
I told him about smacking my daughters. I could see his wise and accepting understanding. He said, Shakespeare had said how the subconscious can take over sometimes and we become not men. Then when we recover, we realise what we’ve done. Talk to the children, he said, and get them to talk.
He felt like a messenger someone had sent on my path. Old one eyed Woden.
Tuesday March 12 1991 [continued] - meeting Lee Harwood
Later, after going to Thomas Cook to try and book a holiday with Air Miles, (don’t bother) and getting my hair cut. I’m walking along Western road, and I bump into Lee Harwood.
Lee tells me that on the 28th of January, climbing in Snowdonia, his friend of 30 years climbing – father of a two and a half year old daughter, husband of a young wife, mid 40s – his friend had missed his grip and fallen to his death from a chimney on the second highest ridge. Lee was very distressed. Lee had been climbing with his friend when it happened. Lee had done the climb again with an instructor to see what they could have done wrong.
The inquest exonerated them both and said it was just bad luck.
Then a taxi driver on the way home telling me a girl of three and a half had been run over in a car park at the university.
The mother had left no address, gone for three weeks in France, the child had been left with another couple.
My goodness, 12th March is a day full of inspirational writing material.