Bear with me, Here

Picturebook Backstories : 11b Mr Bear to the Rescue

Mr Bear covers spanning two decades. Also, taken together, something of a spoiler alert. The Bunny survives. The tree? Not so much.

As promised, having left last week’s newsletter on something of a cliffhanger - well, maybe a sand-dune hanger, or possibly even a pebble-hang- oh, do get on with it, Gliori. Anyhoo. That. I’m just going to jump straight back in to the backstory of my book Mr Bear to the Rescue. Here’s where I left it last week:

So. I try to keep my promises. Even though, as you’ll see in approximately two paragraphs, I am also capable of breaking a really big one, but only under duress. Oh dear. As the title says - bear with me here.

Back home from hospital for the second time, I was going through the motions. Not, I hasten to add, with my sweet baby girl, but her daddy and I were not in a good place. Hardly surprisingly. Just before I’d been blue-lighted into hospital first time round, husband had begun the first stages of his plan to move to the States. To be fair, this ‘plan’ had been a longstanding ambition, but one to which I was fundamentally opposed. Every time we visited his relatives Stateside, he’d end up hauling me round various plots of land with a view to buying a parcel of remote weeds in somewhere that looked like it might be called Butthole, New Awful. We made endless trips into the backcountry with a series of interchangeable and impossibly white-toothed blonde realtors who couldn’t believe their luck to be gifted with these two rubes. The sites were remote, down bumpy tracks, places where I knew I’d die of homesickness, if the bears didn’t get me first. Under the appraising gaze of the assorted realtors, husband grew unusually expansive and uncharacteristically uxorial, whereas I withdrew into stunned fury. Having no economic power save for the ability to bear children meant that what skin I may have had in the game was largely discounted. I was without agency and utterly aghast at having voluntarily got myself into this position.

We’d fought about moving/not moving for years. Try as I might, I couldn’t see how I could ever leave Scotland. The prospect of uprooting and moving to America filled me with deep dismay. And yet, three months into this pregnancy, husband started the process of selling our house for real, setting out towards a grim future where he’d go across to the USA first, leaving me behind to have the baby ( free healthcare in the UK, right?) and then I could pack the house, finalise the house sale and bring the kids across to join him wherever the hell he’d found a site to build a house.

Great plan, NOT. It’s one of those weird bits of if not exactly serendipity perhaps its feral step-brother, dumb coincidence, that gifted me with an obstetric malady that completely derailed husband’s relocation plan. I’ve never been so relieved to nearly die in childbirth as I was, back then. JOKE. But you know what I mean.

When I added this backstory to the lack of care I’d seen during my three months in hospital, you can understand why I was unable to avoid the unforgiving light now illuminating every facet of our relationship. Trust me, when the scales fall off your eyes, you can actually hear them shatter at your feet. I crept into a metaphysical safe and secret place inside my heart and guarded my thoughts. I no longer felt as if I had anything in common with the man I’d promised to love, honour and etcetera.

We co-existed in our little hilly, chilly cottage, but our lives were inexorably pulling apart. I subsumed my lack of meaningful connection into writing an adult novel which never saw the light of day and, more importantly, making four little board books inspired by my newborn daughter ( asleep in a basket beside me in my studio while I wrote and painted these for her )

and trying to re-knit the tattered fabric of my pre-hospital life. All of which took up a lot of my days but still left an aching hole where an adult relationship used to exist.

I was beyond lonely. We’d had some colossal fights, husband and I, ghastly, wounding events which displayed all of the fire and passion so sorely lacking in our day-to-day discourtesies. We were no longer a ‘we’ but had mentally, physically and intellectually disengaged.

Enter Mr Bear to the Rescue. God knows, I needed rescued. Things came to a head one night when husband said - we have to talk, and I thought we were about to finally have a meaningful and painful discussion about our marriage where we’d both acknowledge that it was moribund and either try to fix it or decide to part company. Instead, husband wanted to talk about his ailing business and how he’d come up with A Plan whereby I could help him stay afloat by a deeply dodgy bit of financial legerdemain. Essentially fraud.

At which point I held up my hands and said Whoah- hold the bus. I’m done here. We’re done here. Our marriage is over. I’m leaving. I can’t remember the exact words I used but I’ll never forget what he said in reply.

Not - oh no, don’t leave me. Not - but we’re married. Not - I’ll change. And most importantly, not - but what about the children?

He said, what about the house?

Meaning, are you going to demand half of the house? Let’s focus on what’s important here, wife. Are you going to take me to court and demand your share of the value of our chilly, hilly little misery-pit? Which is really mine, wife. You do understand that?

Three weeks later, I was gone. An even smaller, chillier, hillier little cottage had come up for rent on a nearby hill farm, and one day I packed up my drawing stuff, my children’s basic essentials, some cooking things, some clothes and I left. I had to tell my little son that I was leaving, which was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. He’d only just got his Mummin back from three unscheduled months in hospital, and here she was, a scant year and a bit later, vanishing over the horizon in yet another drama.

My dad and stepmother turned up at the cottage a few days later, no doubt alerted by husband’s cries of she’s left us, poor us, the faithless wretch, she’s run off with another man. Dad was full of uninformed rage. Get your coat, Deborah, you’re going back to your husband kind of bollocks. Stepmother pulled her face into a squinch and fired off the odd poisoned barb in support of her raging husband. It was beyond grim. And made all the worse by the presence of my children who’d been through a few mum-free days with their Dad and were coming to spend the next few days with me. We were, as a family, in complete freefall.

Here’s what I was painting during the first days after leaving.

Mr Bear tries to mend the nest...

It’s quite the subtext, isn’t it?

A house blown apart in the storm. The forest is littered with domestic items.

The new chilly little cottage was a bit of a nightmare when it came to trying to paint finished artwork. I’d left a purpose-built garden studio with running water and north light ( the watercolourist’s dream ) for a rickety picnic table perched at the top of a staircase, with my fax machine ( it was a long time ago, before email) balanced on top of a laundry hamper. At night, it was too cold to remain at the top of the stairs, so I decamped downstairs to the main room where there was an open fire but very little in the way of decent light.

But I had a deadline. Mr Bear to the Rescue artwork was due at the Bologna Book Fair, and I was on a tight schedule which hadn’t left any room for manoeuvre or, specifically, a marriage breakdown. So, I worked. When the children were with their dad, I worked flat out. When the children were with me, I didn’t. One day, driving my little daughter away from her dad’s ( ie our old house) I skidded on hard-packed snow on a downhill s-bend and found myself sliding full-tilt onto the business end of the oncoming snow plough. Two gigantic metal tusks impaled my car and brought it to a hissing, shrieking standstill. I can still see the face of the driver of the snow plough, frozen in a rictus of disbelief. I crawled into the back seat to comfort my sobbing baby daughter, safe ( thank heavens) in her car seat ( I couldn’t get out the driver’s door, it had completely buckled ) but understandably terrified by the loud bang and the violence of the impact. We huddled together, sobbing, noting absently that everything that had been in the back of the car - her sooky cup, her picturebooks, her Mummy Dolly, had all been flung forwards onto the dashboard and driver’s seat. The car was utterly destroyed, so much so that hours later, my g.p , heading into the hills to visit a dying patient, had stopped in the snow and got out to check if the driver’s seat was covered in gore.

When I stopped shaking, I phoned the only person I could think of to come and help. My very own Mr Bear, if you will. He arrived in an ancient Land Rover, a rusty, noisy, marvellous get-you-out-of-anything vehicle into which he tucked baby daughter and I, turned the heater on full bore, spoke to the traumatised snow plough driver, arranged insurance stuff and then drove us both back home.

He’d offered to look after us in his Bear House, but deadlines were deadlines. Back in my chilly, tiny cottage, I tended to baby daughter, waited till she finally went to bed that evening, and got on with painting the last spread needed for the Bologna Book Fair. Here, for your viewing pleasure, served with a side order of whiplash.

Mr Bear makes nests for all of the refugees from the storm. I stayed up ALL NIGHT, drinking coffee and the occasional dram to Get This Done.

But look - the details in the corner. How many bees can you fit in a cafetière? And check out the matchbox. Burning the candle at both ends? Hell, yes.

Cozy. Safe from the storm. Everyone can stay. Everyone is welcome.

Fortunately for me, a real Mr Bear had appeared in my life. My longstanding friendship with a fellow parent from our son’s nursery years was deepening into something that felt like coming home at last. Something that felt miraculously like the ‘and then they lived happily ever after’ conclusion to a bedtime story.

What is Mrs Bear doing? Ah. She’s knitting that nest back together again.

We began to build a life together. A life that has brought us to the present day, two elderly veterans of several decades of symbiosis, melding, intertwining, planting, harvesting and helping things grow. Beloved is a plantsman and the best human being I know. We’ve grown a family, Beloved and I. And now that our family have outgrown the nest, we are growing into our next stage, whatever that might entail. Truly, the happiest of happy ever afters.

This one’s for you, darling. I love you.