Stoke Poges
5th May 2021
Recently, I went to Stoke Poges.
I heaved a fabric carrier bag filled with an old, large stone set with a weathered and blackened plaque down a gravelled avenue, transferring the bag from arm to arm, sometimes trying to clutch it to me with both hands. I had to stop often because the bag was bloody heavy.
Stoke Poges is a pretty little village near Gerrards Cross. But deep in my DNA, it had only ever meant the Memorial Gardens, where my father’s ashes are.
From my earliest childhood, I experienced the place and its name as a dark grey/mauve colour, a gloomy foundation laid as my story began. There was quiet and cold stone; the long, straight avenue; sombre silence - and my father, that mysterious absence behind everything.
My father died before I was born, and occasional visits to his plaque in the gardens had taken place ever since I can remember. I suppose my mother would take us there after she had been to the hairdresser’s in Gerrards Cross on a Saturday morning.
My father died on March 6th 1954, just before I, April Fool, was born. He was in a hospital in Germany and died and was cremated there. My mother, heavily pregnant and not allowed to fly after a certain stage, had flown back to England on February 10th. My father was a German Jew and an anglophile. I was to be born in this country.
So, my mother boarded the plane, knowing that she would never see my father again and that the child she was carrying would be hers alone. God knows how she felt. To use a football analogy (which I don’t often) it must have felt as though the game was going well when suddenly the star player got injured and was sent off, and up from the subs bench comes this unknown player, ‘helpless, naked, piping loud.’ It wasn’t in the slightest what my mother had signed up for when she’d married her true love less than two years earlier.
My mother survived my father by long decades and, when she died, I scattered her ashes around my father’s plaque in Stoke Poges. I began to feel, rather than just know, that this sad, sad story was now over. And a story is only a story. We craft them, we make new ones or, if we’re canny, we resist the temptation to make any at all. Stories have a place in fiction; they are not real. Life is what happens while you’re telling yourself - and anyone else who’ll listen – your story. Over and over again.
I had always imagined that the heavy stone and its plaque laid in grief sixty-seven years ago was somehow screwed into the earth, with an urn lying deep underneath. I was wrong. When I was scattering my mother’s ashes, my husband lifted the stone so I could scatter them beneath. That was a shock – and a revelation: the stone and its heavy, dark plaque commissioned in wretchedness could be moved, shifted, rolled away.
I’ve had a new plaque made to honour both my father and my mother and I laid it on my recent visit. The old one I heaved into that strong fabric carrier bag Reception had lent me, and I lugged it back down the sunny (and not so very long after all) avenue until eventually, biceps truly worked out, I delivered it back to friendly, chatty Yvonne in the office.
The plaque will be recycled, melted down and reused. I love to think of that coldness softening in a furnace. What was rigid with misery will be warmed through and run, molten, until it is made into something bright and new.
My childhood story had one foot, as it were, mired in a dark place of stony loss. But when I went to Stoke Poges the other day, I could see that the gardens are beautiful: peaceful, gracious and tended with great love. The long gravel sweep of a path is not the endless wide avenue of my childhood. The sun shines, the flowers bloom, birds sing in the trees.