ㅤㅤㅤㅤLoubella Fitzroy + John McC, 1984.
ㅤㅤSometimes a memory, of a time or a place or a person, hooks into your mind like a barb and you can go through your whole life never recalling it. But there it remains, and all it takes for the barb to be pulled is a familiar image, or an overheard word, or a name carved into a tree. That is how it was for me when I saw the name of my aunt Belle and her then-boyfriend John McClean, who had died in a car crash in Canada in the early eighties, back when I was just a boy.
ㅤㅤI had never really known Belle, and tracing my memories I can bring forth a face but whether it belonged to her or was just a composite of my own creation, I could not say. Belle was my aunt on my father’s side, the “Canadian side of the family”. My father met my mother, native to these shores, while she was travelling through North America in the 1970’s, and eventually they moved back to England where they raised a family. What left me feeling at odds, there by the wych elm, was that father’s siblings and parents rarely visited the UK. As far as I knew, Belle never left Toronto and yet here was her name carved into a tree in the heart of the Dales.
ㅤㅤIn a strange way I was morbidly excited. My mother and father moved from Toronto to London, where they raised my brother and my sister and I. It seemed that Belle had visited us when I would have been three years old, and by chance she had happened to travel to the part of the country in which I now lived. It was an incredible coincidence. I rushed home and gave Splash a bath, and once I had cleaned the mud splatter from the bathroom tiles I called my mum and asked her about it.
ㅤㅤ“Oh I haven’t heard that name in a while!” she said when I told her of my discovery. “But that can’t be her. Belle never came to the UK. The only time you two met was when we spent Christmas there in what was it 1982? Or 1981? When you were only two or three I think. How old are you again?”
ㅤㅤSometimes a memory, of a time or a place or a person, hooks into your mind like a barb and you can go through your whole life never recalling it. But there it remains, and all it takes for the barb to be pulled is a familiar image, or an overheard word, or a name carved into a tree. That is how it was for me when I saw the name of my aunt Belle and her then-boyfriend John McClean, who had died in a car crash in Canada in the early eighties, back when I was just a boy.
ㅤㅤI had never really known Belle, and tracing my memories I can bring forth a face but whether it belonged to her or was just a composite of my own creation, I could not say. Belle was my aunt on my father’s side, the “Canadian side of the family”. My father met my mother, native to these shores, while she was travelling through North America in the 1970’s, and eventually they moved back to England where they raised a family. What left me feeling at odds, there by the wych elm, was that father’s siblings and parents rarely visited the UK. As far as I knew, Belle never left Toronto and yet here was her name carved into a tree in the heart of the Dales.
ㅤㅤIn a strange way I was morbidly excited. My mother and father moved from Toronto to London, where they raised my brother and my sister and I. It seemed that Belle had visited us when I would have been three years old, and by chance she had happened to travel to the part of the country in which I now lived. It was an incredible coincidence. I rushed home and gave Splash a bath, and once I had cleaned the mud splatter from the bathroom tiles I called my mum and asked her about it.
ㅤㅤ“Oh I haven’t heard that name in a while!” she said when I told her of my discovery. “But that can’t be her. Belle never came to the UK. The only time you two met was when we spent Christmas there in what was it 1982? Or 1981? When you were only two or three I think. How old are you again?”