The Maules

Why write this blog entry;-
I have been reading Miracles of Life, an autobiography of sorts, of JG Ballard. I've been reading JG Ballard since secondary school, and even wrote a dissertation on him when I was in sixth year. Needless to say, that was either right at the start of the eighties or even at the end of the seventies, so he was not as well known in those days. Having read so much of his fiction, reading now about his life, is strangely informing.

However, despite these digressions my point is, he has written about the people that he came across and their impact on him. I suppose, looking back on your life, this is an incredibly natural thing to do. But in our hurry we seldom do look back, or think about the people we have come across and the positive impact they have had on us. He describes a family he knew and their relaxed approach to family life, combined with a decency and a love for each other, and others more widely. This family was in part a model for how he chose to bring up his own children later in life.

Of course, I could write at vast lengthy about all the people who have made a positive impact on my life, but thinking of my life as a young child, I was particularly struck by an elderly couple that moved in across from us, the Maules. It was so long ago that I don't remember much, in terms of appearance, I really don't know, they were probably grey or white haired, certainly not broad Scots, in my minds eye just a stereotypical elderly couple who smiled and made people happy. They must have enjoyed the attention of children, I was one of four, and we certainly were not the only young children in the street, but they would make us tablet with peanuts in it. We were too shy to mention that we all disliked peanuts, so we patiently took them out. I must have had some conversation where the word Lauriston came up, for they gave me a postcard and a page torn from a book, with a poem Lock the gate Lauriston. Tearing a page from a book is something that still shocks me now. Where we were, you might find brown red stones on the beach, well worn, but with some sort of whirl of other material across a face. Pretty and unusual. They had collected such stones, and set then in cement, in a little corner.

They struck me as the kindest of neighbours, but it was also their curiosity and creativeness. Here were adults that could be whimsically creative, who took a gentle interest in the buzz of no doubt tiresome children, people with a real interest in things and a love of sharing it.

When it is our very memories that shape our sense of reality, it is disconcerting just how partial and fallible they are. But I'm sitting here now, thinking of the Maules all those years ago, of their contentment and the pleasure they took in the things around them. I suppose that amidst the rather conventional, and aspirational neighbours, who were by and large too busy for us children, they were rather eccentric, but they were kind and gentle. With luck, when we see something we admire, it might sow the seed of something similar in ourselves.