So, the Dear Demented Sister (DDS), insisted that the first “port of call” after disembarking from the overnight transatlantic flying sardine can, otherwise known as BA steerage, would be her new barge anchored in the Solent. Remembrance of her previous vessel “Marge the Flatulent Barge” that basked on an idyllic mooring in the Thames belching forth foul odors with every opening of the bathroom door, precipitated a battery of panicked excuses: age, decrepitude, the logic of unidirectional travel from Heathrow “TO THE SHIRES”. Last, I came clean and pointed out the compelling need for civilization in the form of FLUSHING TOILETS. At this, DDS dug in her heels and threatened to take umbrage if sisterly dues were not paid at the point of entry. Once provoked, DDS is, though nine years my junior, as the French would say, formidable. She dispatched THE BLOKE to sally forth and take hostage. Captured at the customs exit, I steeled myself for 48 hours of jet-lagged constipation.
DDS and I do not share the allele for “love of watery places and living in cramped holds”. I do not blame her. As The Bloke would say, and often does, “I blame the parents”. She inherited this trait from both sides: our paternal Evans clan built boats in Bangor and the maternal Holdens plied the Mersey on Barges since the days of yore. She can’t help it. The pleasure of living in squalor, beached on a mud flat, is etched deep in her genes. I, in contrast, was handed down the landlubber allele; I cannot even swim.
The Bloke and I discussed DDS, and how she got to be that way, for two hours along the faceless motorway from Heathrow to Hampshire until we reached Winchester. There, at last, the road became familiar and I realized it was forty years since I had driven along it. All that 18-year-old student’s angst flooded back. Fifty-eight! How did that come to be!
DDS was waiting in the garden. She piped us aboard the mighty “Salvador” and proceeded to the tour: a blow by blow account of sweat and toil poured fore and aft to transform the rusting hulk into a two-story edifice complete with sun deck, floating garden and an enormous yellow river room. As we approached the stern, I braced myself for foul odors. DDS flung open the door and, triumphantly, flushed the toilet – the air was cool and pleasant. Bliss -- not only was human sewage dispatched from Salvador in modern style but even the four felines who contributed liberally to the stench on Marge had been tamed by a magnificent feat of modern engineering that automatically sensed, scraped sterilized and spat reconstituted cat poop down a shoot, out the port hole and into the Itchen.
Impressed but in a jet-lagged daze I failed to pay due credit to these heroic endeavors. Reaching the bows I came to my senses and, leaping to make amends, proceeded to expound on the amazing beauty of guest quarters within the wheelhouse. And beautiful it was, with windows all around, a place that reminded me of Dylan Thomas:
“Captain Cat, the retired blind sea-captain, asleep in his bunk in the seashelled, ship-in-bottled, shipshape best cabin of Schooner House dreams of never such seas as any that swamped the decks of his S. S. Kidwelly bellying over the bedclothes and jellyfish-slippery sucking him down salt deep into the Davy dark where the fish come biting out and nibble him down to his wishbone, and the long drowned nuzzle up to him”.
Despite her water loving genes, DDS seemed unappreciative of these ruminations of the Welsh Bard. She looked dismayed. I realized too late I had unwittingly made the BIG FAUX PAS of the trip by lavishing praise the only part of the boat she hadn't yet renovated.
Still DDS is a generous spirit. Triumphant from her plumbing successes, she set aside the wound (at least for the time being – no doubt to be nursed as ammunition for future family feuding) and coerced The Bloke to take us on a drive down memory lane in search of all my old abodes and haunts. We tracked down the Victorian hovel in Tennyson Rd, Portswood, took the Bevois Valley dive to St. Marys, still a den of sailoring iniquity after all these years, then set out for the dump I lived in at the back of Shirley High Street, the so-called longest high street in the UK, where the sausage factory wafted odors that could outcompete Marges’s flatulence. Mercifully roadworks diverted us. So after glimpsing the Tenovus Labs at the General Hospital where the “career” began we struck out for Romsey, my first real home.
The sun shone on Romsey, as it does always in my memory. The corn market bustled, the bread shop still baked, and the Abbey, with my children’s school all set in stone at the side, stood solid. The Women’s Institute Hall, where we mothers would surge through the Abbey gateway when the door opened to scoop up beautiful branches and preserves, was still there. 
The white cottage, nestled in the Abbey buttresses, the one “I want to buy when I am rich” was being renovated for some other dreamer.
But alas, the Convent, site where my daughter played the stoutest little three year-old Virgin Mary that ever trod the boards in a dark blue sari, was being torn down, the sacred heart of La Saggesse ripped out and its facade repurposed as a New Age spiritual healing center. New Age Spirituality seems to have taken off in Romsey in a big way. Soon it will look like Glastonbury, full of candle shops and spas and healing crystals – it must be the proximity of Stone Henge.
We dallied in the Tenovus charity shop and bought a Panama hat for The Bloke, then walked along the salmon leap, and wound among the little shops. There, in a cul-de-sac squeezed behind the Corn Market, we stumbled upon a gem: Greenhill patchwork and quilting shop. In my pre-career Romsey days, part of staying sane through the babies and isolation was to quilt a cover for my treasured Habitat floor cushion. The same that was rescued from the attic of my divorce, the one that travelled with me over three countries and two continents and is now, though in irreparable tatters, stashed in a box where we “find a place to keep what we have lost”. Oblivious to the fact that we had somehow also lost The Bloke in our meanderings, DDS and I dived in. We emerged an hour later, purses emptied, with enough fabric to require a new suitcase or generate a large fine at the BA counter. Only then, did we remember The Bloke, who will henceforth be referred to as “The Soul of Patience”.
The Soul of Patience, accustomed to these things, and thinking to himself “we’ll have to feed the Old Bag at some point… and she’ll never go to bed when she gets over her jet lag” had gone off to the local supermarket to solve the problem of dinner. We loaded up the provisions, but as we started to wend our way back, subliminally but acting in unison we subtlely diverted The Soul of Patience down a route that took in Hilliers. DDS and I share the allele for “Love of Hilliers” -- the greatest garden center in the world. We need to dig, just as the “Soul of Patience” needs the local pub, for our souls to be at peace. Hilliers -- all those bike rides, all those years ago -- with two small children, a baby in the seat on the handlebars and a three year old perched on the carrier at the back, or standing on the cross bar displaced by the purchase of one too many plants. All that twenty-three year-olds drive and energy -- that had to be dissipated peddling and digging -- where did it all go?
I asked “The Soul of Patience” what he thought about this need to dig in the most unlikely of places, to live in Manhattan yet subscribe to garden magazines, to construct ridiculously perilous gardens on the 53rd floor of a New York City apartment. And DDS -- the same -- her need to create floating vegetable patches on boats in the middle of rivers. He was silent for a moment, kept his eyes on the road ahead, weighed his words, and then replied, “I blame the parents”.
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