The house is very quiet

Sad news, the house is very quiet. China, a retired racing greyhound, friend and companion of the last five years, had been losing condition since June but continued to enjoy life to the full till Monday evening. By eleven o'clock on Tuesday morning she was very weak and had lost all interest in life. The vet came and while I held her he gave her a lethal injection. We could not prove it without a post mortem but everything pointed to a tumour in the upper gut.
China was our third greyhound, Freya was our first -

Epitaph for Freya - 1988

Shall I forget –
Forget your silhouette
In the broken shade beneath the towering beech?
Shall I forget your cold wet nose
Your trusting gaze depending on mankind
To set you free
I know not where.

I loved you and I laid you down
Curling you nose to tail the way you used to lie,
Your joyful speed now a cold stillness
Under two spits of earth.
I must pick up my burdens and walk on
But, maybe as the evening shadows lengthen I shall see
Beside my own upon the wayside grass
Another shadow thin and elegant
No longer old and weary
Following me home.

The House is very Quiet
13 November 20007

Where has love gone
Now she that I loved is dead?
I heard a voice reply
'Love does not die,
When all the tears are shed
Love will be found
Among the living
Not the dead.

We are already looking for another long dog, probably not a pure bred greyhound this time, but a lurcher; not a replacement but a new friend.

Unseen Reality

What is a ghost?
A thought – a song – a sigh
Upon the wings of time
That echoes down the passages
Where you and I first met
And others who pass by
Will wonder why they pause and smile
Unknowing that the peace they feel
Was born in our content.

I wouldn’t call my self psychic although half a century ago I could be persuaded to read palms and I do own a crystal ball. You can read so much about personality in a palm but I found that casting the future is dangerous, especially when it turns out to be right and I soon gave it up. The problems of today are quite enough.
I inherited the crystal ball from my mother and keep it in a silk drawstring purse beside my desk. It has already featured in a novel I wrote for younger readers which lies unpublished waiting for a final editing. It will appear again in a historical novel which so far exists only in my head.
Psychic or not, I have found that many people claim to sense good or bad atmospheres when they are house hunting although they would deny any ghostly presence as nonsense.

A rolling stone gathers no moss? I began my life in central China, I’ve made my home in Australia, New Zealand and Italy as well as in the UK and packed up all my belongings at least twenty nine times but I have still managed to gather plenty of moss. Among my treasures are a sea washed shell from the Gulf of Carpentaria, a paeu shell I found on a beach in New Zealand, a small piece of knotted tree root that rises up like a sea serpant. On my shelves are four generations of children’s books some belonged to my great grandmother, one dated 1829. Over a door into our garden is the head of a green Chinese devil which came back from China with me in 1937, it is his responsibility to prevent any other devil from entering our home. A velvet frog belonging to my father’s childhood sits in a basket on my bedroom floor together with a tiny and almost hairless koala bear, a faded blue rabbit with only one ear, a moth eaten panda and Eyore, all of them companions of my childhood and watching over them all is my great grandmother's rag doll.

Forgotten

Climbing the attic stairs I found a child
Head in hands weeping among the cobwebs.
She had found a long forgotten trunk
Iron bound, its leather rubbed and worn.
Within were dolls no longer loved
For those who loved them are long gone
A teddy bear, a rabbit with one ear
Still waiting to be remembered.

Where are they now
The children who once dreamed of days to come?
Their days are gone
We never knew them and we never will.