Frica

1985

Frica is a mother-of-three. A handsome woman in her mid-thirties, being a mother-of-three is her raison d’être, her chosen career. If asked (over the drinks-and-nibbles chit chat of a village social, for instance, or while sheltering from a sudden rainstorm in the local library’s lobby) what she does for a living she replies, “I’m a mother-of-three” and defiantly outstares the silent further question in the other’s eyes. The, “yes, yes but what else do you do, what is your profession?” question that arises through the pre-conceived notion that, as an obviously intelligent and well educated woman of the 1980’s, she must have a career outside of the home, a profession for which she has studied, qualified, graduated. She has, as it happens, but she does not like to mention it.

The “three” that Frica is a mother of are three small but boisterous boys, all now beyond the age of nappies (thank goodness, for that did, in all honesty, push at the limits of parental stoicism) but none yet in the throes of puberty, with all the joys and fears that that entails. To elaborate, Angus and Fergus are nine-year-old twins (the culmination of a healthy if enormous pregnancy during which Frica put on an impressive five stone and lost it again within the first three months of breast-feeding-for-two) and Lars is a cute five-year-old, named chiefly in honour of a storybook about a polar bear that the twins clamoured to have read to them on a nightly basis for the duration of Frica’s second pregnancy. Her full-on, full-time mother’s addled brain, hadn’t, at the time, been able to come up with anything else. She couldn’t even concentrate on perusing the baby-name book.

Non-identical twins (relying on genes rather than fate), run through both sides of Frica’s family. Her maternal great grandmother, an elegant and refined “lady-who-lunched” called Euphemia (never Effie), had, to her eternal embarrassment, a male twin, the notorious Jack Black, who emigrated to Australia (family rumour would have that this was not through choice) and was evermore remembered in the family as the crocodile hunter, thanks to a single, small and fuzzy sepia photograph he sent to his twin some fifteen years after his departure. 

Frica’s father is a twin, but his brother died at birth. Her father is an unsettled man who always looks slightly lost in the world, as if he lives mostly elsewhere.

Frica is, in fact, one herself. Her twin sister, Indie, is the cheese to her chalk. Named India and Africa by their well-travelled and bohemian parents, they grew up among the sun-drenched rosebushes and raspberry canes, the shady lawns and tennis courts of their Devonshire home, being expected to share everything and yet agreeing on nothing. Indie was the daredevil, the explorer, the experimenter, the pusher and the shouter. She was taller, stronger (first-born by ten minutes of course) more wilful and, at that stage of their lives, prettier. Frica was an angular child, hesitant, dreamy and, some thought, slightly fey (like her paternal grandmother). She was sandy-haired, freckled and nut-brown in the summer sun, somewhat pale and mousy through the winter, to Indie’s dark-haired olive-skinned appearance whatever the weather. She was tawny-eyed, inquisitive of the small details of life and, as became increasingly obvious over their school years, by far the more intelligent of the two.

But where does intelligence get one? Taking Frica and Indie as examples, one would have to doubt the benefits of intelligence as a life enhancing attribute. When the time came for these twins to leave the safety and comfort of their idyllic childhood home, Indie delightedly spread her wings and took off around the world, feasting on life’s pleasures in every respect. She was a doer rather than a thinker, a suck-it-and-see rather than a wait-and-see, a jump-right-in rather than a poke-it-with-a-stick. These characteristics can, of course, land one in trouble. But Indie’s happy-go-luckiness was accompanied by real, blessed luck, and she continued to lead an easygoing life, following her heart. Having travelled the world she settled to grow five blonde-haired, nut-brown children in the eternal heat of New Zealand’s Northlands where their beach-bum of a father now teaches them to body surf, drive beach buggies and horse ride while Indie acrylic-paints lavish landscapes for the local market from her beach-view verandah.

While Frica is pleased and not a little relieved that her wild sister has, by pure feckless luck, avoided the many dangers and pitfalls of life and landed on her suntanned feet rather than in jail or a mortuary, she cannot seem to relax enough to live her own life in the same way. Frica has always attended to detail to the point of pedantry, been thoughtful to the point of procrastinatory, intellectual to the point of extinction and wary to the point of fear. There it is. There’s the nub of their differences. Fear. Fear of flying, fear of failure, fear of misery or pain or embarrassment or merely of standing out in a crowd, has led Frica along one life path that is diametrically opposite that free and easy path of her sister’s. There’s the nub of it and there’s the rub of it. For Frica is intelligent enough (more than) to be well aware that she is missing out in many ways by being so tremulant. She looks on at Indie’s life with unashamed, bilious, envy. But, for all her intelligent awareness, Frica can never seem to make the leap of faith required to land on, and progress along, that path of risk, exploration and unfettered joy that her sister travels.

Through the 1970’s, while Indie was travelling, Frica excelled at Cambridge University, graduating in law and gaining a doctorate in family law. During her student years she raised her head from her books for long enough to be introduced, by her older brother Dane, to one of his Edinburgh medical student cronies. This fine upstanding young man, a Scotsman named Archie Campbell, was destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as GP in the Highland village in which he grew up on a hearty lifestyle of mince-and-tatties, walks in the hills, no appreciable house-heating and windows constantly open to let the pure air of the glens cleanse the house and fill the children’s lungs.

Frica understood immediately that this was the man for her. He was sensible and careful, healthy and wholesome. He liked a wee dram or even a couple of pints after a good day out in the hills, but he had never tainted his clean lungs with even so much as a teenage cigarette and certainly would not dream of trying anything more mind-altering. He was intelligent and focused on his career and, she could tell, would be a devoted husband and father. With the coolness of her analytical mind she could see that his rugged good looks would complement her finer features to a tee. They would surely produce a handsome brood.

A decade on and they have done just that: moved north to the harsh and bracing beauty of Glen Affric (funnily enough the original Scottish source of the names Africa and Euphemia), enjoyed the athletic, wholesome conjugal rights of two erstwhile virgins and conceived three bonnie bairns. Archie and Frica have proceeded to raise these boys with all the focused care, attention to detail, and love expected of such people. They have endured the sleepless nights, the loss of freedom (freedom to do what? they hardly know) the mess and the noise with pleasure – so grateful and proud are they to have created this delightful family. 

They have fitted out their old Scottish farmhouse with every available safety gate, child-deterrent latch, soft corner, golden glow night-light and two-way radio baby alarm known to modern, Western society. They have watched over these children with award-winning diligence through playtimes, mealtimes, bathtimes and sleeptimes. Indeed to date their care and attention to detail has been of great benefit to the boys, who have hardly suffered a grazed knee between them never mind the more hospital oriented bumps, scrapes and breaks of their five Kiwi cousins.

Through the boys’ babydom and toddlerdom Frica’s fear of life manifested itself in ways which benefited her dependants. Only now, as they grow beyond complete dependency and begin to need some freedom and space and independence does her intense mothering start to become cloying. And the irony of it all is that the more they need their independence to grow and discover life’s joys and pitfalls for themselves, the more Frica worries and frets and dreads and the more tightly she hangs on. For she is, as she says whenever asked, a mother-of-three, full-on, full-time, full-stop. What else can she do but hang on?

Frica’s fears have matured alongside her boys. When surrounded by babies her imagination would conjure up scaldings in the bath (despite the fact that her elbow always got in first), tumblings down the stairs (despite the stair-gate duo – top and bottom – lovingly installed by Archie when the twins were but a month old) or the inevitable stifling by a cat in the pram (despite the equally inevitable cat-proof pram netting, plus an ingenious device rigged up by Archie that set off a wee alarm in the farmhouse kitchen if the pram out in the garden was touched or moved in the slightest, plus the additional inevitability – although she never admitted this to Archie – that Frica never, ever left her babies alone in their pram, not even for the briefest of moments).

Through toddlerdom and beyond Frica’s fears focused themselves around the swings, chutes, slides and see-saws of the local village playground. In addition there were the sledges to fall off in winter, trees to tumble out of in summer, a trampoline (bought by Frica’s Bohemian, and somewhat thoughtless-of-the-consequences-of-granny-presents, mother) to bounce off – that alone could kill with a broken neck. Then there were the ever-present nightmares of her sweat-ridden nights: fires, floods, kidnappings and the like.

Somehow Archie was never around within these catastrophic dream-events and Frica had to manage alone, flinging herself heroically yet helplessly between the source of danger (water, fire, man with dagger) and her children.

And so the saga, the life and times of one particular woman, continues through the late 20^th century and beyond. Frica slips into her forties, increasingly handsome in a wrinkly-at-the-edges, elegantly greying sort of way and kept slim by the exhaustion of worry. The boys reach their teenage years and inexorably make their own way into their own lives, despite their mother’s constant attempt to pull them back into the fog of childhood. As they begin to experiment with drink, cigarettes and other mind-altering substances her fears focus on pushbike, then motorbike accidents, rugby injuries, falls from the mountain tops Archie insists they conquer and, as the twins vanish on a jumbo jet to explore the world, terrorism. 

The boys survive to adulthood and forge lives for themselves despite their mother’s worst fears. They spread their wings, fly the nest, explore life’s dangers, enjoy them, reject them and settle down to be the respected, upstanding members of the next generation that their parents have taught them to be. Through the three decades that this takes, an increasingly white haired and frayed-at-the-edges Frica does not cease her worrying, not one jot. She worries for their lives, their health, their marriages (or lack of marriage, in Lars’ case) and their careers (a doctor, an engineer and a violinist – not what she had hoped for Lars, but she could only blame herself; she had, after all, been the one to insist on music lessons). 

Meanwhile Archie, though ever loving and devoted, has grown a wee bit tired of his wife’s constant fretting. While he wants to spend his retirement out in his beloved hills and glens and perhaps even travel abroad, she is too fearful to leave home much. Fearful of all sorts of every day things, but secretly – and she definitely can’t admit this to Archie who would pooh-pooh it – fearful of missing a phone call, the phone call that she has waited for all her life, that will tell her that one of her children is hurt, or worse. So Archie wends his lonesome way into the hills, secretly enjoying his solitude and a rest from the hand-wringing and fidgeting of his now underemployed wife and her spotless, over-hoovered and not-a-thing-out-of-place house (for hers it most definitely is). Archie goes for longer and longer hikes, takes on bigger mountains and eventually, just when he is most enjoying his sense of freedom, space, peace and spirituality, falls off a craggy peak and tumbles to his death.

Frica, to her own shock, is not, deep down, much affected by this tragedy. Truth to tell Archie himself would have said he wanted to go in just this manner and after a long and fulfilling life what better way to leave the world than to, quite literally, jump off? Frica sells the farmhouse in the hills that Archie loved so much and moves further north to be near Angus, who is a GP in Golspie. She imagines this to be her final move and, at 68, settles to end her life in granny-dom and half-pints of milk from the corner shop. Two years later Angus takes up a new post – in New Zealand – for this is where he met his wife, whilst visiting his cousins, and she wants to go home.

Frica looks around her. One son in New Zealand, one in London (the best place to get work as a musician, says Lars, and indeed he does seem to have become a rather famous fiddle player) and one, Fergus, across the Pentland Firth in Stromness. She studies her tatty old school atlas and knows she could survive neither the cultural leap of London nor the geographical leap to the Antipodes. So, taking a big deep breath, she moves north yet again, to Orkney.

Orkney’s green and pleasant landscape both surprises and soothes her. There’s a gentleness in the maritime climate and a delicate beauty in the ever changing colours of the huge dome of the sky here that gives her more courage than she ever found in the well-to-do, clotted-cream gardens of Devon, the intellectual quads of Cambridge or the rugged mountains of the Highlands. The Orcadians themselves are a gentle and friendly people, egalitarian, non-judgemental and laid-back, with a pleasingly dry sense of humour. A fit and wiry seventy-year-old, Frica begins to forget her fears and open, incrementally, out. She belatedly flowers, blossoms, makes friends, joins book clubs, attends evening classes to learn about birdlife, painting and sculpture. Her clay sculptures of children are so good that, before long she is being commissioned to sculpt pieces throughout the county. For hours every day her stoutly booted feet explore the sandy beaches and rocky coastlines of Orkney’s fine islands while her mind explores her life and is saddened to find it regrettably wanting. Confined by fear for so much of it, she cannot now say she has lived her life as she would have wished. Has she run out of time to put that right?

At ninety-seven Frica is as light and brittle and fragile as a bird, as free and joyful as a lark. Two, going on three, decades of island life have finally been the making of her. One day she gets that phone call. Aged sixty-seven her beloved Lars, her baby, has fallen down the stairs of his London home and broken his neck. Even in the middle of the 21^st century no medical miracles can mend a broken neck.

Ah, she was right all along. But, as well as confirming all her fears, his death confirms her new found wisdom. She whispers into her Orcadian great-grandchildren’s ears to live life to the full, follow their hearts, never waste a precious moment. Life is too short, she tells them, which, at her age, is quite a statement.

©Julia Welstead