Two Ladies Decades Apart.

I met the Ukrainian woman again today. I mentioned her in a post last summer, shortly after she’d moved here as a refugee. Today she was coming back from fetching her little girl from school, and was notably different from the last time we met. She was more open and communicative; she even smiled at me. The last time I saw her she looked scared of me. Isn’t that awful?

And I discovered what her daughter is called by the simple expedient of asking her mother. I didn’t ask for the mother’s name because here in the UK it’s considered perfectly proper to ask a parent for the child’s name, but verging on an intrusion of privacy to enquire after the parent’s. I do hope she understood that and wasn’t offended. And of course, I did tell her mine even though I doubt very much she’ll remember it, much less care.

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I’m over half way through Maddie’s Field Journals now, and have got to that point where I don’t really want it to end. Tonight’s Dig Day report included the finding of a teapot spout, and it brought back an old memory:

When I was seventeen and going through the flat period between ending school and entering the Britannia Royal Naval College as an officer cadet, I took a temporary job labouring for a pottery company called J&G Meakin. They made tableware, and I spent all day carrying heavy piles of unglazed plates from the conveyor belt and giving them to a fettler (to sand off the mould marks and any rough spots.)

And then I went off to college, and at the start of the second term of cadetship I joined a frigate which was part of the Dartmouth Training Squadron. We headed off on the bonny briny, eventually making landfall a week later at St Johns, Newfoundland. There I was taken in hand (voluntarily, I hasten to add) by a young woman who apparently decided I was worth taking home to meet the family and her sisters. ‘Mom, look what I found. It’s called Jeffrey, it’s a sailor, and it’s come all the way from England. Isn’t it cute?’

(I don’t remember what she actually said, but it probably wasn’t that. It was a long time ago.)

Anyway, the point is that the family immediately invited me to dinner, an offer I was delighted to accept so that I could show the colonials how to use table utensils properly – you know, knife in one hand, fork in the other, this finger goes here, the thumb is kept out of sight under there, the fork must be held with the pointy bits facing down, the elbows should be kept close to the chest… That sort of thing (and more.)

But when I’d finished my meal I did something which even colonials might have considered disreputable. I turned the plate over to look at the back stamp, and guess where it had been made. J&G Meakin. ‘Isn’t that interesting?’ I said. ‘I just spent six weeks working in the very factory where your dinner service was made.’

I don’t recall any of them replying because I doubt they found it quite as interesting as I did, but the daughter did give me a goodnight kiss when she drove me back to the ship so she couldn’t have been all that embarrassed. And the family took me on a trip in their big Yankee sedan to their holiday cottage at the coast the following day.

I wanted to marry their daughter, you know, because impetuosity has always been one of my most risk-inducing traits. I never did. And I can never decide whether memories actually matter.