Castle Cary is a market town in southern Somerset but I only know it as the train stop for Butleigh where my cousins live in a stone house with five cats and a rabbit hutch used now for pegging up the washing. Sue met me at Castle Cary; David, her neighbor had driven her. I could hardly believe I was there but then again it felt like I had never left: 95/96 Chapel Lane, the rabbit hutch, the cats (Seamus, Misty, Tabsy, Lizzy and Izzy), the pots of flowers and Wendy looking so familiar, kind and calm.

Lizzy on the rabbit hutch roof, one

Two

Three

And now Pam. When I was here three years ago, Pam (Wendy’s mum) had had a stroke and was in a care home in Glastonbury. In the intervening years, Pam’s house in Burnam-On-Sea was sold and she is now in the little mother-in-law apartment in the house on Chapel Lane. Her hair looked smart though Pam was somewhat crumpled into a chair.  She’s quite voluble except she doesn’t say any actual words. Wendy can usually figure out what she’s trying to say. A lot of the garble sounds like “cuppa tea” and a lot of it probably is. She knew me and still had associations with having stayed with me (twice) in Seattle.

After a welcome dinner of salmon I had the first of 5478 cups of tea and embarked on a three day sugar spree, which came to an abrupt halt when I realized my joints would not support such a diet, but that’s a story for later.

Wendy played a video that became the basis of a week’s worth of laughs. I had to watch it at least once a day and I finally transcribed it. A Scottish comic named Janey Godley who does voice-overs of political figures just about shut down YouTube with this one of Theresa May giving her last speech to Parliament. You can read the transcription below the link.

“Well, and so I face the final curtain. I got my special Margaret Thatcher jacket on for the job today and the good news is I won’t have to look at that bastard Corbyn and his gloomy face across the table one more time.  My menopause has been up to fucking high dose since I started. Between the debacle in the Brexit, the mess that Boris Johnson’s goin’ to take this country in, good luck the fuckin’ lot of you, that’s goin’ to be a pile of shite and I’ll tell you somethin’ for nothin’: I am goin’ to get ‘n a caravan, pud on me sandals and I’m goin’ pud me toes in the water, so aye. Fuck the lot of you.

(She sits down. Applause. She gets up and starts to leave.)

“Aye, whatever. Move. I’m outa here. Move. Move yer arseholes. Move. In my way. Move ya dick. Move. Don’t touch me. I fuckin’ told you not to touch me. Open that door, Frank! Frank, open the door. I’m outa here. Bunch of fuckin’ arseholes.”

All week, one or the other of us came out with the periodic “Aye, whatever” or “Frank, open that door.”  Simply saying “move” would set us snickering.

I had only one full day in Butleigh and I used it in part to visit all the parts I remembered from my last visit: the drain, the wooded path off the drain where I could sometimes see sheep grazing, St Leonard’s church, the High St at the top of which is now a cafe. I took videos and narrated as openly as I dared.

Over and again I passed a man in the drain who was either painting a green fence or sanding away the drips from his painting.

“Are you smoothing it off?” I asked

“No, I’m taking off the drips because well, it’s dripping. Is that a North American accent I hear?”

I stopped and we chatted about his daughters who both live in the states.

I popped in to see Marian, David’s wife from next door. Her mother died since I was last there and like me when my mother died, her creative life began to flourish and her world had opened up. She gave me a handcrafted wooden heart and one of her aromatherapy oil blends. I toured David’s garden of dahlias, tomatoes and huge pumpkins.

Sue had to work –she runs the village post office-shop–and I was down to the shop several times to watch people come in and out. They all thought I was ahead of them in line and I kept saying, “No go ahead, I’m loitering,” and Sue would call out, “She’s with me.”

In the afternoon Pam, Wendy and I looked at old photographs and pieced together what we knew of the family connections. I had a great Aunt Ann who corresponded with the Cornish side of the family;  I found the addresses in her address book after she died and wrote to a Miss Hazel White. Hazel was in her 70s at the time and I was in my 20s. A few years later I traveled to Harrowbarrow, Cornwall to meet this elder. Hazel showed me the cottage of my great grandfather, James Knott who emigrated as a young man to Walla Walla, Washington. She made me a family tree showing James Knott as the brother of Elizabeth who married William White. The Whites and the Knotts became family in the late 1800s.

I visited Hazel several times before she died. By then I had met her niece, Pam, the granddaughter of Elizabeth White (Are you getting all this?) and Pam’s husband, Mervyn. They came twice to Seattle and stayed with me and I made several more trips to Cornwall to visit them. Mervyn died about five years ago and Pam had the stroke. By then I had met the next generation, Pam’s daughter, Wendy and her longtime, friend, Sue. Wendy and Sue are closer in age to me than the other generations and they more like family to me than almost anyone left on earth even though the genealogical connection is distant.

The next morning I walked to the shop with Sue. I could seriously spend a week in Butleigh just going to the shop. There’s always something interesting happening. On this morning a woman was sitting in a motorized cart on the sidewalk.

“Has anyone seen you yet, Caroline?” Sue asked

She leaned into her bunched up shopping bag. “Not yet.”

“Give me your list. I’ll do it.”

Caroline handed over a list, a shopping bag and her purse. Sue collected her items and Julie at the register totted it up and took the money out of the purse. I took the bag and the purse out to Caroline and got all the credit.

I found several more reasons to go back to the shop: stamps, then cash. Only my card wouldn’t work for cash so the postmaster did a kind of voodoo whereby I could get 70 GBP.

“I expect you don’t want me to tell anyone about this,” I said.

“That’s right. No one.”

“Not even Sue.”

“No.”

“Or write about it in my journal?”

“Not that either.”

“Will do.”

Back home I sorted a box of Sue’s cards–she’s a talented photographer--and bought a stack. Then I read aloud all the synopsis on the backs of Pam’s E.V. Thompson novels while holding the book covers for her to look at. When I’d had enough of Cornish bodice rippers, we watched “Dad’s Army.” Finally Wendy’s sister, Joy arrived to stay with Pam and the three of us left for Cornwall.