by LJ Sedgwick

 

Cirrocumulus. Cumulonimbus. Altocumulus.

Up the Dell Road, through St Fintan’s estate. Past the gallery in the white house and down onto Carrickbrack Road. My mother tells me the names of plants we pass, of trees, stories from her past.

In sun or wind and rain, she names the clouds.

Cirrus. Cumulus.

It is 1942. My mother is in the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), based in a camp in Millom in the Lake District. When news comes through that they are recruiting officers, she is encouraged to put herself forward. Reluctantly, she does, with one job in her sights. It’s a top-secret job that looks glamorous on screen — where slim WAAF officers push planes and boats and troops into place across a map of the war spread across an enormous table.

It is to this room that news comes of troop movements, the success or failure of strategies almost in real time, where the theatre of the war can be seen. This, she feels, is the beating heart of the war effort – but also safely distant from the individual, the personal, the visible cost.

Some days, especially those when I feel an urgent need to fill the pages with words and don’t know where to start, my keyboard becomes an adversary. Rows of tombs for words beginning with C, V, B, N; the shift key for upwards, the caps lock to condemn them to hell.

Hell, Dell.

Couldn’t be farther from a leafy glade.

A smoky basement room. Cigarettes, unfiltered. Cigars, perhaps. The musky smell of sweat. No natural light. The tension builds while they wait and as news filters in, piece by piece, jackets are removed. Caps are taken off. Sleeves rolled up. Shirts remain crisp, buttoned to the top.

News is deciphered and decanted onto the board.

Caps are replaced at a jaunty angle when some manoeuvre has gone well. Relief overflows into hugs, whistles, sighs. Arms linger on waists a fraction longer.

A drink in the mess, perhaps? After all, nobody knows what is to come, not even them.

For this job, my mother needs perfect sight.  Instead, she has a photographic memory and memorises the optician’s eye charts when the room is free. She aces the test and passes the interview. One snag – they only need officers in meteorology now.

We weave homewards through graveyards, my mother and I. The oldest and highest has the ruin of a 13th Century chapel, moss and plants inhaling and exhaling as they crawl across stones made porous by age. Inscriptions have vanished into stone – but these were important people to someone.

Tread softly.

Do not forget.

Remember us.

My mother arrives in London for training in the deepest of the most necessary blackout at the worst of times. She can’t see her hand in front of her face. How is she to get to where she is to go?

Out of the gloam, a stranger offers help.

Taking her hand, he leads her across a city so different from the one she visited last. There are craters where roads and gardens and buildings have been. A heightened atmosphere in which anything could happen. They catch, savour the sound of a party when a door opens to let someone out for a smoke.

“He could have taken me anywhere,” she says. “I never even saw his face.”

As a child, I am wary of graves that have fallen in. Half in flight at the thought of seeing something in the depths I’m not ready to see. We cross down to the middle graveyard and read inscriptions that have not been worn away. Quotes from scripture, poets, novelists. Finally, we pass through the wall into the healthiest graveyard in Dublin.

With its sea-heavy air.

Under the clear blue sky of the Peak District, a squadron salutes the officer as she crosses the camp. My mother, who hates being the centre of attention, returns the salute. She can tell from their cheeky grins that they know she’s mortified.

A regulation, but a sort of flirtation, in its way.

My sister Jill is that third graveyard. Far side.

Under the trees.

Clouds in a sky scarred with jet-burst. Is it because of my mother that I put clouds into my stories? A hippo on roller skates morphing into a rabbit, no – a hen, a bunch of oddly shaped roses with tongues.

They are not my mother’s clouds.

I use them for their agitation, their speed, their omniscience. For the fact that they constantly change, and yet, on another level, remain the same.

Silence. Attention.

The first time my mother steps in front of the air crew to give them the weather report, her mouth feels dry. The commanding RAF officer gives her a nod before he calls for silence, and she nods back. Her stomach is in knots, but her uniform is spotless and shoes polished. She will not dishonour the men by appearing sloppy.

They need to believe in her. The facts she has to offer are life and death today.

Others love these men.

Or will love them tomorrow.

If they make it back.  

A decade after she has joined my sister, I make a belated attempt to master what she knew, I fill pages with pictures of the different clouds and try to memorise their meaning.

Stratus/strato: flat/layered and smooth.

Cumulus/cumulo: heaped up/puffy, like a cauliflower perhaps or a fluffy sheep, unsheared.

Cirrus/cirro: high up/wispy.

Nimbus/Nimbo: rain-bearing cloud.

Alto: medium level.

To remember which cloud is which should be simple but, unlike my mother, my memory has a slippery built-in device that slides everything I do not need right now down to the nether reaches. Into a file on a shelf in a dusty room that has no door.

Or maybe only a hatch, and it is rusted shut.

So it makes no odds.

When I put my hand over the page, even half an hour later, I cannot tell you which cloud is which.

 

A former journalist, LJ Sedgwick is a playwright, screenwriter and author of seven books, fiction, non-fiction and children’s, based in Dublin, Ireland. Her first book of flash fiction, Glimpses Beneath, is due out this Spring with Silver Locust Press.