What Is Love? , livre ebook

What Is Love?
Marigold
Austin Macauley Publishers
2019-12-12
What Is Love? What Is Love? Dedication Copyright Information ©
What Is Love?
Front and back cover photographs are of my father.
Dedication
Dedicated to my father, sister and her husband.
Copyright Information ©
Marigold (2019)
The right of Marigold to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781528906586 (Paperback)
ISBN 9781528958318 (ePub e-book)
www.austinmacauley.com
First Published (2019)
Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd
25 Canada Square
Canary Wharf
London
E14 5LQ

My daughter asked me as we were walking down a shopping street, “What is love?”
I carried on walking not knowing quite what to reply. I could answer there are different kinds of love (sensible reply), or I could describe what I would call the big love of my life and how it felt from my own first-hand experience (insensible perhaps), confusing for her, painful for me. So I answered as honestly as I could, “I don’t think that I am quite the right person to ask this question.”
We laughed. Was it really a laughing matter?
You decide.
My mother once said to me that a friend of hers had shown her photos of two men.
The friend said quite simply, “That’s the man I married, this is the man I loved.” It seemed so sad to me at the time my mother told me, after my experiences I am not quite so sure.
My experiences with love, Mother’s, Father’s, Husband’s, family’s and children’s etc.
I was born in March of ’52 as a very respectable Pisces, this horoscope shows two fish swimming in opposite directions and as I understand it, a water sign. Therefore like the sea and the fish I am restless, always on the move physically and mentally.
My brain goes from here to there very quickly, from one thought to another and after all these years (I am now 65) my brain amazes me and also tires me out… Where do all these mixed thoughts come from? I have read many self-help books and know that ‘one should control one’s thoughts’ but, I am learning. I explain this because this is how this book is written no pattern, no structure, no preface, no chapters and no end. It purifies me with God’s help about love turned my life upside down and that’s putting it mildly!
I apologise if the sentences are not quite English, my excuse, I have lived in Germany for the last twenty-four years (having left my first husband and my two children at the ages of three and five for, what I thought was, my big love) and this has influenced my spoken and written structures. You may be thinking how did she do that? I really do love my children, unconditionally, and I still do not know how I possibly managed to leave them. It is something that I have tried to live with and put into perspective, not very successfully. I might add more on this subject later.
A bit of background information!
I was born on a small farm in Warwickshire, UK, which my paternal grandfather had bought and in the beginning ran as a pub with overnight accommodation for the horses that pulled the longboats on the canal, which arched around our farmhouse. We had pigs, cows, hens, dogs, cats, rabbits and two ornamental geese, which chased my sister over the canal bridge in front of our house everyday she went to school. She would be screaming her head off much to my delight. (She was two and a half years older than me and of course, sibling rivalry was at large.) They never chased me! My mother would run up to the offensive geese and swing them round by the neck and throw them in the air! It amazed me how long they lived following this treatment. Just to say Mum cared very much about the animals on the farm and was loving to them all, but as my sister once said, “She loves the cows more than me!” Mum loved the farm life, she moved from the town during the war to be a land army girl, when she met and married my father, who turned the small pub into a farm.
I don’t remember much about my young years but I am sure they were fun and exciting. My sister has memories from the age of two and a half, when I was born…what does that mean? In later years, my mother would say to me that my sister was never quite the same after I was born…what did I do wrong? She also told me that our grandmother was present for my sister’s birth but missed mine. Apparently, grandmother was not happy…she had not been present; my birth had already upset two people…how does one do that at one day of age, I ask myself – I was already exhausted from my travels into the big, wide world. My mother’s love for the farm life was to feel; she was happiest outside and perhaps this is why I felt I should have been born a boy so that I could run the farm and she could stay there for her my whole life. My father was happy with two daughters as he suffered with asthma and thought that it would have been passed on to a son. My mother never said to me that she wished I was a boy, so perhaps this feeling was just in my mind, but again I felt I had failed another person with my birth.
Mixed up with these thoughts later came the words from Mum, “Your grandmother (her mother) says your sister is normal, you are different.”
Today, I have learnt to take this as a compliment but at the time it was said, I certainly didn’t. The mirror was regularly questioned, “Why are you different? How are you different? What does different mean?”
When I was around fifteen, my mother said that as a child my grandfather called me cheeky-face and that I was always laughing and happy but all that changed when I went to senior school (aged eleven)… How did I change? I don’t know, I only know that I didn’t like the school.
I was a tomboy, no doubt about that, I was always outside with my father, so I have been told, always getting into mischief and getting dirty. Although, I don’t really remember much of this, sometimes certain memories do pop up in my mind.
The occasion when I could just walk and decided to walk up some tidily stacked piping, of course I upset the pile and ended up in hospital with a broken finger. I remember a nurse carrying me and I unclipped the safety pins attached to her apron, which then dropped down. Perhaps I remember this because she didn’t tell me off, she just laughed… What fun, I had thought, somebody laughed when I had done something naughty!
Another memory I remember is from the canal, in front of our house, a hill stretched upwards with a windmill and a church on the crest and the fields coming down were great for sledging in winter. Of course, I was the only person who sledged down the hill through the hedge at the bottom and into the ice-covered canal.
Mum was not pleased and the handmade sledge was gone forever.
The little brook that ran by the side of the house was great for making dams and getting dirty and wet wellies were no help when one kneeled in the water, I soon discovered. I was always wet and dirty, my mother must have been continually washing my clothes!
I was a hunter of newborn kittens, mainly found in between stacks of hay in our large barns (we had about ten somewhat outdoor wild cats) until I found out that my mother drowned them. I suppose we couldn’t have sixty cats rushing around and money was not available to ‘have the females sorted’, but I never looked for a kitten again.
I decided one day that my grandfather’s grandfather clock would be a good hiding place. I was caught as the whole clock was about to fall over.
Mum was the rescuer. Out came her stick and I was duly given one on the bottom and the clock never chimed on the hour again, much to my delight.
The stick was often used, never hard, and always on the bottom and mainly deserved when me and my sister would be fighting.
Mum never tried to find out who had started the fighting, (an impossible job I now realise, having two children of my own) we both received punishment short and sharp.
Bonfire night was the highlight of my younger years. Dad would cut hedges and we would have a massive fire. My sister and I would make a fixture of Guy Fawkes using dad’s old clothes, stuffed with straw. Fireworks were bought and local friends joined the party. Baked potatoes, hotdogs, sausage rolls and other goodies were available with lemonade for us and beer and Mum’s homemade wine for the adults. We never found out the percent of alcohol in the wine but seeing the adults trying to walk home suggested that it was much more than eleven percent. Bonfire night was a special event for me until the year I dropped (by accident) a sparkler in our box of fireworks, dangerous as they were flying all over the place, but funny to see people trying to avoid bangers and jack in the boxes. Of course, I was never allowed to forget this night and bonfire night was no more the high spot of my year.
We were the first family in our village to own a television set. How this was achieved, I do not know… but Saturday nights became a real treat. My family always watched cowboy films sharing one large block of chocolate between us, while I rode the arm of the sofa. It was my horse! Occasionally, I fell off much to the delight of everyone else!
Christmas was always a happy time with my maternal grandmother staying for a week. Every morning, they would drink tea with rum in and Mum was a happy soul. I remember being left with Grandma one evening; she drank and smoked heavily and proceeded to sing until she fell asleep snoring. I wasn’t allowed any al