Strange life

Well I had better fess up. In a short while, we are travelling to Hong Kong. So I seriously must find Tiger some shoes, because she is not wearing those disgusting brown boots with the soles dropping off.

The horror of taking Tiger to the shoe shop in preparation for new travel is not the only thing which has distracted me. I've been sitting here staring through the window, even though I have too much to do for that.

Really, I have amputated a large part of my memory. It is too much for my head.

Dig's adventures took him around the world. And often, I travelled with him. The first time I visited China was many years ago. Our first stop was Beijing. It was freezing cold, snow was piled high on the streets, I wore thermals to protect me against the biting winds. Foreign Exchange Currency was still in use and the Friendship Stores were the recommended places to shop. What would happen? was the future and we chatted about how Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics would envelop Hong Kong.

I had a wonderful introduction to China, and I loved it. We were banqueted, I was introduced to the translator to Chairman Mao, we were toured round Beijing's sights with the help of a British diplomat who did it all with a determined smile. He was approaching retirement, sometimes walked with difficulty over the ice and had a streaming cold. He took us to see the wall at Badaling and extricated us from a difficult situation when we were stopped by army staff. He maintained a calm I am British bearing throughout and I felt utterly safe and remarkably fortunate.

Throughout, I probably hindered Dig as much as I helped. I smiled, hopefully and politely at the right times, but insulted one of the wealthiest and influential men in Beijing when I could not bear to eat four snails in soup that cost, apparently, the monthly wages of one man.

It was, throughout, an exceptional life. And really, I should be happy at these memories, but they only make me sad, which is why I mostly try and forget them.

Travel like this made me different from many people back home in England. It was not a difference I could easily surmount. I guess I was foolish in assuming this life would continue.

When the children were born, that life stopped. Now I could no longer travel with Dig. He went round the world, leaving a wife and triplets behind him.

But at home, left alone, I couldn't tell anyone how my life had changed. I said nothing because I thought few people would care, understand or sympathise in riches to rags. No one was interested anyhow; they saw three babies and wanted news of the children. So what. A privileged and separated lifestyle was swapped for another one, lived apart. A strange, unreal, unknown one; a 'mum of triplets'. Now I was different from everyone else in a different way.

Then Dig flew back to China and his first stop was Beijing. Squirrel, Shark and Tiger were about eighteen months old and happily staggering around bumping into tables and chairs, bruising their foreheads and falling over toys. In determination to be out of the house everyday, come rain or shine, to force myself to fit this life as much as to protect my mind, I took the triplets to a nearby Church hall, to a mums and toddlers meeting.

Now the area where we live in our falling down house isn't wealthy. It's made up of people who work hard, make ends meet, do what they think is right. I like it. Out on our streets it is robust and earthy, it is not cosseted and gated. And at the meeting the young mums sat round in a circle and I joined them. Their children fought over access to wheeled vehicles, dancing toys and the play teapots, and the mums discussed how difficult it was to make ends meet. There was the electricity bill to pay, said one. It's just gone up again! said another. And food. And clothes for the babies. They looked at their children and worried about those things.

These things were true for me too, and I was dealing with much of it alone, but I could not express this, because to say well look! how would you like to buy three sets of clothes! seemed cruelly like oneupmanship to their problems, a hijacking of their concerns and a dismissal of their fears. I could say at a stroke how my difficulties were so much worse, and by comparison, yours pales. So I said nothing.

And then one mum said Isn't it difficult to go shopping? I would like another pair of shoes. But it is so hard to go to the shops with the little one! And I said nothing. Because I am shallow and apart the thought that popped into my mind, with Dig gone not a day before back to China, I thought, But going to the shops is nothing! I didn't get to go to Beijing!

Strangely, I can't ever forget that thought and my own horror at hearing this inside my head, because at that moment it not only showed me how apart I had lived my life. It showed how, even with such an overwhelming change in my life's fortunes, and what a deep struggle that was to me every single day, I simply could not share any of it with anyone.

Well don't feel any sympathy for me. We are deeply fortunate. I am not now quite so alone, but I am more reconciled and the children are growing. I'll take the children to the shoe shop and sort out shoes and sandals and hide away Tiger's old boots all in preparation for their first trip to Hong Kong. It will be like my first trip too, for so many many years. And for that I am deeply grateful and happy.