Acts of Love

When I was eighteen, I went to work on a kibbutz for a year. My 'A' level results had turned out better than expected (‘Better than expected’ is a bit of a perennial theme and I must find a way to convince potential employers of this. Given the chance there is nothing much I can’t do but I could do way better at selling myself…) so I decided to take a year off and re-apply. At least I think that’s what happened. I’m amazed lately at the things I have started to forget.  I tried to list my class teachers through school for the fun of it the other night and couldn’t. Exciting evening, though.

I wanted to do something worthy, honourable, peace-loving and different! I was also quite good at copying in those days and two of my then best friends, a couple of boys from school, were going. So I went with them.

I can honestly say that I hated almost every minute of it. And left after four months. Four months that felt like four years. We were treated like scum of the earth from the off which, naïve school-leaver that I was, shocked me horribly. We were given the shittiest jobs to do, like stand on ladders in howling winds and pouring rain at 3 o’ clock in the morning to get the last fricking avocado that had been left hanging at the top of the tallest tree at the furthest end of the most remote avocado orchard. Or clearing sheds of dead, stomped-upon chickens the day after the night before when other volunteers had had to catch and crate up the live ones to go off to the slaughter house – as a vegetarian I objected to having to do this but my complaints fell on deaf ears. Our clothes were nicked from the communal laundry, the drains in our quarters were constantly blocked and over-flowing and one night all the sirens started wailing and the lights went out (we were right next to the Golan Heights) and no-one came to tell us what was going on so we ended up cowering under our beds like mice. Well, I did. It wasn’t long before we started to behave in entirely the manner it seemed that was expected of us, buying huge bottles of vodka with the few shekels pocket money we received each week, and getting off our faces in time for the weekly discos held in the bomb shelters. Coach-loads of billeted soldiers were brought in for these end of the week festivities so that their needs could be attended to by willing volunteers, so to speak.

I travelled home from the kibbutz with a friend I had made there, determined to see as many famous European sights as possible and then do something else worthier, more honourable, peace-loving and different etc for the rest of the year. In fact when I got back to England I spent a few days at a Max Factor factory from which I was sacked for incorrectly – and quite accidentally I can assure you, I just couldn’t believe the task was as simple as it had been described to me – placing the tops on the lipstick holders, thus creating several days’ work for someone else to undo, and then a few months working in a plating factory to get some money together to go off inter-railing in the summer. It was at that factory that I developed a lifelong hatred of Rod Stewart and Phil Collins, but that’s another story. In many ways, I feel my life never got properly back on track after this stupid wasted period of time. But that’s another story, too.

We started our journey from the kibbutz by taking a bus to Jerusalem, where we spent a few days before getting a flight to Athens, from where we intended to travel the rest of the way home over land. What a place! Having been brought up a Christian – baptized a Catholic, confirmed C of E and then lucky enough to go to a Quaker school thanks to reduced fees because my then-step-mother was the librarian – to see places of such significance that I’d heard spoken of for so long was simply amazing. And the tangible evidence of conflict dividing the city moved me even more. Approaching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a guide pointed out an old ladder stuck on a ledge many windows up, explaining that the Christian denominations present there could not decide whose right it was to clean the windows/remove the ladder/deal with the issue/whatever.

I guess it was partly my age but the beauty, sadness and the irony of the city hit me hard. And it felt very important to me to gather gifts of significance for all my nearest and dearest back home while I was in Jerusalem, so that I could take a piece of the place home with me for them. I did not want to purchase the usual tourist trash. No, I wanted to buy things that were really special.

For myself I bought a black rose pendant. I remember thinking it seemed like a good ironic metaphor! For my mum, a large painted vase from Bethlehem. Hmmm.  For my sister, little black sheepskin boots. I think I was thinking about the Christmas story and the shepherds or something. I have no idea what I bought my brothers. But when I saw long, wooden, curled-handled cedar of Lebanon walking sticks, I knew I had to get one each for my step-father, my dad and my grandad. Somehow romantic and religious and just perfect for when they got older and closer to death!

The purchase of these three walking sticks is probably not what you were expecting me to write about under the post title, acts of love. But you have no idea what a tortuous pain-in-the-arse piece of hand luggage they became. How many times lost and found, forgotten and returned for, space-stealers, time-takers, mischief-makers. Yet my (very patient, kind and lovely) friend and I brought them back with us, over land and sea, home. (They were also quite useful when having to beat back a couple of well dodgy Italian men near Naples but that is another story too.) Bringing them back for the then most important men in my life felt like a huge act of love.

Unrequited! I have no idea where they are now. My dear grandfather died before he ever needed a walking stick and neither my dad nor step-dad are in need of one yet.  And I suspect these things need to be made to measure anyway?! 

Perhaps it is because yesterday was Valentine’s Day that I am thinking about these things today. For the first time in nineteen years of Valentine’s Days, both OH and I ignored it. Helped by the fact that I was at my mum’s.

Our first was at a flat I had rented in Athens. A rooftop flat where we had giddy parties on very hot summer nights. He had never ‘celebrated’ Valentine’s Day before. I was his first girlfriend. His first and only. Back in Albania, people didn’t get to celebrate things like Valentine’s or Christmas or even birthdays other than the dictator’s. Or have lots of girlfriends, I think. OH has told me that his brothers tried to lock him up when they suspected his involvement, age 17, with a girl visiting from East Germany. Because they knew that if they didn't, the police would.

OH was determined to pull out all the stops for me. I returned home from work in the evening to a massive heart-shaped cake. On it were two candles (I still have them in fact, and used both the ‘2’ and the ’5’ on Babe’s birthday cakes) with the numbers 25 on them, because I was 25! Sparklers galore. Flowers. Several cards. He always sends several cards per occasion and I have never got to the bottom of this but it might be so that he can copy the rubbish poem from one into another and hope it goes un-noticed. Even after years of living here his written English is terrible. If memory serves me correctly, he also sent my mum a card on that occasion. I’m not sure why. With a very respectful loving message inside, albeit very poorly-spelt. And somewhat undermined by the very naff picture of a bare-topped man in jeans snogging a hot young lady seated on a motorbike by the sea on the front. My mum still has the card, having rescued it recently from a garage of junk that had to be disposed of. It will probably become a family heirloom, kept for the boys.

I think one of my earliest acts of love was buying a small porcelain mouse at a pottery in Tintagel, where we went on holiday when I was about 13. I was asked out for the first time there, by a friend of the boy staying in the next caravan, on whom I had the most terrific crush. I think he asked me out because his friend had told him that I had a crush on him and because he wanted me to give him 20p to play on the space invaders. Untouched as I was, by male hand – and it stayed that way for a long time as one or two readers will be able to testify – I could only scream ‘no!’ in response and rush out crying. It was all too much. Anyway, the mouse was bought in memory of that day. And actually I know bloody well it was 1983 because it sits on a flat stone I collected from the beach there and on the bottom of which I wrote in silver pen – metallic pens were new and all the rage back then – ‘Cornwall, ’83.

Another act of love I remember carrying out (is that the right verb to use?) was also in my teens, when I had a crush on the brother of a girl who went to my school and whose family attended our church. I posted him a passion fruit tea bag one Valentine’s Day with the message ‘think of me when you drink tea’ on the label. I still think that was good. What romance! What mystery!  The perfunctory nature of the way Valentine’s Day is celebrated by so many seems pointless to me. But the thrill of receiving a missive when you are not sure who it is from… now that is cool!

I have one or two treasures – no more – that I have kept for many years. A very sweet message left on my desk from a boy at school, ‘Sophie S, I love you!’ that I carefully wrapped in sticky-backed plastic and carried in my bag for the months that we were together. And then kept. And a map drawn for me by someone special from my university days, who wrote his name on a bit of torn Silk Cut packet at the same time. I'm not sure why he wrote it down, I wouldn't have forgotten it.

I also have a Peruvian vase which was given to me by a Latin lover from my Barcelona days. The only thing belonging to that scumbag that I have kept, and only because I quite like it. And strangely, because I know it mattered to him and at the time he had nothing else to give me and throwing it away doesn’t seem quite the right thing to do. I must relocate it, perhaps to a charity shop.

Sigh. I think OH would consider coming to live with me here in the UK as an act of love. He always had his sights set on moving from Greece to the United States and I am quite sure he would have, had it not been for me. I suppose I consider marrying him, at Hackney registry office in 1997, for immigration purposes, an act of love. I had no dream of marriage or respect for the institution and continue to hold that view. And would have much preferred not to do it. But I couldn't bear to be parted from him and that left me no choice. I sometimes think that letting me move outside London yet keeping me on as an employee was an act of love bestowed upon me by my previous employer. An act that arguably gave me a lifeline that would have been better off severed years before I was made redundant. But who knows?

Perhaps some acts that we think of as loving, are not loving at all. They simply perpetuate an already-unhealthy dynamic. But how easy it is to say that with the benefit of hind-sight! I hope that any future acts of love I am party to can be made with eyes wide open, and from a position of honesty with myself that I know I can struggle to occupy.