Last week I went to the dentist. I have been a patient of Dr. McCoach for many years. I trust him completely and never question any decisions he makes regarding my dental health.

I grew up in the 1960s, before they put fluoride in the water, before the days of electric toothbrushes and interdental products. I don’t recall ever seeing a hygienist. The drills that went into my mouth shuddered vigorously and felt like jackhammers on my teeth. Our local dentist, Dr. Wilberforce (or Will-by-force as my father called him), was bossy and gruff. Dr. Paine was the perfect business partner – an ideal match in both name and temperament.

My mother was a firm believer in good dental care. She had worked, for many years, as a dental assistant in Switzerland. One afternoon, a woman arrived at Dr. Guebeli’s surgery with excruciating toothache. She had come a long way, on foot, she explained, and was disheartened to learn that the doctor had been called away. Anxious to help the woman, my mother slipped a piece of cotton thread round the tooth and tied the other end to the handle of an open door. She then slammed the door shut. The woman was extremely grateful but a little puzzled that Dr. Guebeli’s colleague wanted no payment for her trouble.

Many years later, our daughter Polly had a wobbly front tooth which hung by a thread for days into weeks. Eventually, my mother-in-law tried the door knob trick. I envisioned a fountain of blood and high-pitched screams from our 7 year-old but no … the tooth was out in a jiffy. No blood. No pain. Amazing.

My mother-in-law, like my mother, knew a thing or two about teeth. At the turn of the last century, her parents, Otto and Leni, emigrated to rural Latvia where, legend has it, they became cheese-makers to the Tsar. Before they left Switzerland, Leni, who was in her early twenties, had her teeth pulled and replaced with a full set of dentures. It was a practical solution, intended to save her pain and money over the course of her long life. It always struck me as strange that Otto got to keep his teeth. My mother-in-law used to say that in her next life, she planned to return with hair on her teeth. The image made me think of werewolves. It also made me wonder how a young woman in her twenties might have felt as she sat down in the dentist’s chair, making ready to have 32 perfectly healthy teeth extracted.

Teeth, like fingerprints are unique and, unlike the bones in our bodies, they can’t heal if they are damaged. In the words of Dr. Seuss When you get your second set, that’s all the teeth you’ll ever get.

By the time I was 9 years old, my mother had given up on Drs. Wilberforce and Paine and registered me with a dental practice on Wimpole Street in London’s medical district. I enjoyed these days out with my mother. I would get a day off school and after my appointment, we always went to the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square for a slice of Engadiner Nusstorte – walnuts coated in caramel sauce and baked into a shortbread pie. Whenever Dr. Calvert asked me if I had anything nice planned for the rest of the day, I lied. I didn’t think he would approve of all that sugar.

When we went to Switzerland on holiday, my mother would take me to see her former employers – Dr. Guebeli and Dr Beguin because, well, you could never quite trust those English dentists, even those with fancy offices in London.

Last week, as I rose from the dental chair, Dr. McCoach (who is from New Zealand) asked me about Polly and Lucy who had been his patients when they were teenagers. I told him that, between them, they had just one filling, to which he replied You have given them a gift for life. I thought about Lea and all the time and money she had invested in my dental health. It’s thanks to my mother, really, I said. She taught me the importance of looking after my teeth.  

Switzerland is famous for its dairy products, its mountains and its high standard of living. For some people, however, this is pretty much all they know. The bank teller at our local Nat West had no idea that the official name for Switzerland was Confederation Helvetia and the country was, therefore, listed under C, rather than S on the table of foreign currencies. A friend once confessed to a long-held assumption that Zurich was the country’s capital and, at a party, many years ago, a young man wondered why I was so dark because  …  ‘Aren’t you all blonde in Sweden?’

There are many stereotypes associated with the country of my birth and it is certainly true that the chocolate is delicious, the scenery is gorgeous and all aspects of Swiss life, from trains to hospitals, run like clockwork. And yet, beneath and beyond these somewhat common clichés, Switzerland is a nation of considerable complexity and contradiction.

The Swiss are immensely proud of their mountain roots. They are not, generally speaking, a nation of complainers. They knuckle down and make the best of often challenging circumstances. Every summer, my great-grandfather, like his ancestors before him, would lead his cows to high pasture. Between June and September he lived in an alpine hut, tending his animals and scything the meadow grass from hillsides too steep for cows to graze. The dried bales were sent back down into the valley on hay ropes to be stored for winter feed. Today farmers use lawnmowers and rely on helicopters but, other than this,  not much has changed, because, well …. you can’t move mountains and the Swiss Alps cover 65% of the country’s surface area.

Farmers have played an important role in the Swiss pharmaceutical industry, which today accounts for 45% of the country’s exports (higher than cheese, chocolate and watches combined). In 1921, Arthur Stoll, director of pharmaceutical research at Sandoz (which later combined with Ciba-Geigy to form Novartis), successfully isolated the toxic fungus known as ‘ergot’ that grew on rye seed. Bread made from this infected grain caused seizures, lesions, psychosis and dry gangrene, and spread quickly through local communities. Stoll was fascinated to learn that, since medieval times, the fungal seeds had been used in folk medicine. Ergot was administered to women in labour as a way of accelerating childbirth and was also used to induce abortions. This association gave rise to the name – ‘Mutterkorn/Mothercorn’.

In the late 1930s, Albert Hofmann, a chemist at Sandoz was tasked with growing small and highly controlled amounts of ergot in the Emmental Valley for use in the Sandoz laboratories. The most productive strains of the fungus were then returned to the Emmental rye fields. Local farmers and their families were recruited for the harvesting process. It was time-consuming and back-breaking work but they were paid 12 francs for every kilo of seed heads they delivered to Sandoz. It was hoped that the synthesized drug might provide a cure for migraines. In 1947 Stoll’s son, Werner, a trained psychiatrist, took a single dose of the drug and experienced unexpected euphoria and vivid hallucinations. He immediately recommended it for further clinical research in the field of psychiatric medicine. Lysergsaurediethylamid subsequently became known around the world as LSD.

In 1951 my father took LSD under medical supervision. My Swiss mother, however, refused to have anything to do with pharmaceutical drugs and warned me away from all medication, including paracetamol. For headaches she prescribed coffee and, for everything else, it was either a spoonful of honey or a swig of Fernet Branca. In 1958, when Lea’s doctor in London recommended she take Thalidomide for morning sickness, she declined. The GP told her that the drug was being prescribed to women all over the world with very successful results. It turned out that the powerful sedative qualities of Thalidomide helped nauseous mothers, but the drug also acted as a nerve poison on the unborn baby. This story filled me with profound gratitude as well as a subconscious fear of pills. During my teenage years, in spite of my father’s LSD trips,  I never experimented with anything stronger than marijuana.

I hated the taste of Fernet Branca and don’t recall that it ever cured me of anything. It was, my mother told me, an herbal medicine, developed long ago in Italy. The recipe, like Coca-Cola and Kentucky Fried Chicken, was a secret, but the bitter, black liquid was renowned for its healing herbs, roots and spices. First it would make me sick and then it would knock me out: Fernet Branca has an alcohol content of 39%.

It was honey, however, that held pride of place in my mother’s medicine cabinet. We would regularly drive deep into the Kent countryside and buy local honey from Mrs. Fitall in Smarden. It was not until I was in my early twenties that I asked my mother about her unusual devotion to honey, and she told me the following story:

In 1917, my grandmother, Rosa insisted on breaking quarantine to visit a family member who was near death with the Spanish flu. Twenty five thousand people died in Switzerland and more than 50 million worldwide.  Everyone advised against it, for her own safety but also for the sake of her unborn child. Rosa chose to ignore the warnings and within a few days, she too had developed all the symptoms. My great-grandmother asked the advice of the family doctor who said he had a possible remedy, although not one he had ever tried himself. He told her to go out into the countryside and buy as much local honey as she could find. She was then to spoon-feed her daughter until she became physically sick. She followed this advice, and Rosa coughed up streams of thick black liquid. My great-grandmother continued to administer the honey until her daughter’s lungs ran clear. Rosa survived and my mother was born on July 18^th, 1917. At birth, Mum told me, her body was covered in a black film which wiped off as easily as coal dust. I can find no recorded symptoms of the Spanish Flu that mention black liquid accumulating in the lungs, but perhaps no-one had ever tried the local honey cure?.

Like my mother, our kitchen cupboard is never without raw or locally-sourced honey. I eat honey every day. I gift it to friends. I still have one of Mrs. Fitall’s honey jars. As Friedrich Nietzsche said: It is the honey in my veins that makes my blood thicker, and my soul quieter.

The Christmas season in Switzerland begins, at least in my imagination, with the ‘Ziebelemaerit’ in Bern, which dates to the 15^th century and falls on the 4^th Monday in November. It is a unique market, dedicated entirely to onions. The narrow streets and the Old Town square are crowded with stalls from which hang braids of shallot, garlic and onion, woven through with dried purple flowers. From before dawn and into the night, an intoxicating smell hangs above the city – a combination of onion soup, garlic bread, caramelised nuts and mulled wine.

On the first Sunday of Advent the traditional evening meal is thick slices of gingerbread dipped in hot milk. This is followed by ‘Chlauser’, the feast of St. Nicholas on December 6^th when bakery windows are lined with small armies of ‘Grittibaenz’ – sweet, bread figures with currant eyes and pearl sugar sprinkles. The streets are busy with Father Christmases ringing hand bells, leading donkeys and handing out chocolate and tangerines. Our daughters once asked me why there were so many. I told a lie and explained that only one was the real Father Christmas. The others were his attendants.

St. Nicholas was a 4^th century bishop, born in Patara, Turkey, who secretly left food, small gifts and clothing on the doorsteps of the poor. Tangerines recall the purses of gold coins he anonymously gifted to destitute families and candy canes echo the crosier he carried.

In mid December, the girls and I would take the train to Bern for the unveiling of the Globus Christmas window. Founded in 1907, Globus was the grande dame of department stores, the Swiss equivalent of Harrods or Bloomingdales. Every year, the sheets of brown paper, which covered the storefront windows, were ceremoniously taken down to reveal exquisitely detailed storybook scenes: families of bears in hand-tailored outfits, toymakers in leather aprons and a tiny steam train that travelled through a snowy landscape. On our way home, we would buy a paper cone of hot chestnuts from the street vendor by the clock tower. In 2001 Globus was sold to a discount chain and, within a few years, the magical window displays were replaced by in-store merchandise.

When our daughters were still in Kindergarten, we came across a small ad in the local paper, offering home visits from Father Christmas. I called the number and was asked to send over some details about the girls, including what they wanted for Christmas. That year it was a bunk bed, and their dad was up until 2am the night before, assembling it for ‘Samichlaus’ to unveil on Christmas Eve. In Switzerland, Father Christmas comes not from the North Pole in a sleigh drawn by reindeer, but out of the forest, with a sledge, pulled by a donkey. He doesn’t come alone either but with a sinister companion known as ‘Schmutzli’ (‘Sooty’). Soon after nightfall we heard the ringing of a small bell and opened the door to a magnificent figure in a red velvet cape and a bishop’s mitre, emblazoned with a white cross. Beside him stood Schmutzli, dressed in a long, black, hooded robe. Only his eyes were visible beneath his black beard. In one hand he held an empty burlap sack and in the other, a birch broom. In the lowlands, Schmutzli has become a more benign figure but in the mountains of Switzerland he remains a menacing presence, one who threatens to beat and bundle naughty children into his sack as punishment for their bad behaviour during the year. The one standing in our living room was a doppelganger for the Grim Reaper. Years later, Polly recalled that it was his penetrating silence that she had found so frightening. Father Christmas opened his big leather bible and began to ask the girls questions, to which he seemingly already knew the answers. He was kindly but firm and warned them to stop biting their nails/sucking their thumbs and to always be gentle with each other. He asked them what they wanted for Christmas and listened earnestly to their almost inaudible replies. Finally, he led them along the corridor, opened the door to their new bedroom and there … tied up with a red ribbon, was a bunk bed.

I invited Father Christmas back the following year, but he had a medical condition, he told me and was hanging up his robe and mitre.

They err who think Santa Claus enters through the chimney. He enters through the heart.                                                         Charles Willis Howard  1896 – 1966

Every year, as November draws to a close, I ask my husband to tell me the story of his brief, but eventful career as a Father Christmas.

In 1970, Dan was hired by Kris Kringle and Associates to be the Sears Roebuck Santa Claus in Oak Brook, Illinois. Dan was eighteen, working the night shift at MacNeal Memorial Hospital in Berwyn and saving for a trip to Europe. Every afternoon he would hitch-hike to Sears, make his way to Santa’s Grotto and climb into his red suit. Kris Kringle and Associates paid their Santas an hourly rate of $2.50. The minimum wage at the time was $1.60. Today, a trip to see Father Christmas at a department store or the local garden centre can cost you between £15 and £50. In 1970, the visit and the candy canes were free.

Fifty two years ago, the gift most requested by girls was a ‘Dawn’ doll. Boys wanted a ‘GI Joe’. Popular children’s names that year were Todd and Heather and the Christmas hit was I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus by the Jackson 5.

Some of the nurses who worked with Dan on the psychiatry unit at MacNeal would bring their small children to visit Santa. On spotting them in the crowd Dan would call out, in his rich, deep voice: Well, well, well, if it isn’t Billy and Bobby Duryea. The fact that Santa knew their names would leave the little tots open-mouthed, wide-eyed and speechless. Dan learnt how to treat the older kids too, the ones who no longer entirely believed in Father Christmas, the ones who pulled his beard to see if it was real and studied him carefully for clues. Whenever he identified potential non-believers, he would snap the clasp on his grandmother’s French prayer book and begin leafing through its pages. He was searching, he told the children, for their names, in order to verify whether or not they were entitled to a gift. When the overly-inquisitive tried to sneak a peek at the pages, he would explain to them, with a steady but kindly gaze, that the words were written in Santa-Claus language.

Kris Kringle and Associates was founded by Earl Tegge, who had spent 25 years of his life as a professional clown in a travelling circus. I was tired of taking my children to see drunken Santa Clauses in dirty wardrobes with twisted whiskers he said in an article published in The Chicago Daily Herald in 1969. Santa Claus is a cross between a saint and a father confessor and I don’t think we can burst that bubble because businesses don’t want to take the time to properly screen, train and outfit the right person to play Santa Claus, Tegge explained.

Although the ideal Father Christmas is thick of beard and wide of girth, Tegge believed that personality was what counted most. Santa Clauses needed to like children and to be kind and patient with them. Another important skill was to know how to manage some of the more heartbreaking requests, such as Please Santa, will you bring my daddy home from Vietnam for Christmas?.

Kris Kringle and Associates is no more, but Earl’s son continues his father’s legacy, travelling across America with the Timothy Tegge Show, a unique combination of traditional vaudeville, magic and comedy.

www.timothytegge.com

An earlier version, titled ‘Kris Kringle Associates’ was published on December 6^th, 2020

Peter and Earl had been friends for many years. They lived 3000 miles apart and, because it was the 1970s, they communicated via letters and audio tapes. In 1978, Earl sent Peter the manuscript of his latest book on teacher development. Peter was shocked by some of his friend’s radical ideas on death and he questioned their relevance in a book about language teaching: Becker is rather like dialectical materialism and Marxism. Marxism is a very persuasive doctrine when confined to politics and economics. Becker’s ideas in The Denial of Death cannot be tested.

Peter believed that Power, not Death, was the strongest force on earth and he suggested  that Earl reference Adler instead. Arthur Adler’s book Understanding Life proposes that man’s guiding principle is his desire for superiority and domination.  I am very interested in power (philosophically I mean!). Having seen its effects in China and Bulgaria I cannot believe that its fascination, its rewards, its irreplaceability, needs any explanation or support from death or death denial. Power in one form or another brings everything – except immortality. And the way the rich and powerful throughout history have sought to slacken ‘time’s swift foot’ can be easily explained, I should have thought, by the natural desire to continue to enjoy the sweets of power as long as possible.

Earl responded: Showing my readers the power relationships (Adler) would take them deeper than most such books go. But Becker shows why the power games are so ‘deadly urgent’. As for the acceptability of Becker – the first 2 chapters of ‘A Way and Ways’, were presented as is to 100+ teachers in Honolulu. Most of them were in their 20s and 30s. The Becker element was welcomed, rather than being ignored or rejected. It was as though the audience was grateful that someone was willing to look at these ideas with them. Becker was only trying to describe how people do react to the knowledge, and was not urging people to deny it. I think that when you read the whole book you will find many more references to ‘life’ than to ‘death’

Peter wrote back: Becker claims the denial of death is ‘the unifying principle behind all that people do’ – not economic determinism or sex. Death interests me. However right you and Becker are or are not, I think that both health and wisdom demand ‘death acceptance’ after a certain age. The western pursuit of youth and dread of age is, I feel, amongst the most serious neuroses of our culture. The Buddhists do better. At 60 years of age, I should be taking my saffron robe and my begging bowl in order to start preparing for death.  

Meanwhile I am interested in the idea that many millions of years of predatory ancestors have given us even more powerful inherited urges – the desire for territory, dominance, an instinct for the small group. The death of the individual is of little importance compared with the survival of the clan, the family, one’s children. It wasn’t only the Kamikaze pilots who threw away their lives ‘as ‘twere the merest trifle’ during the last war. The concern for the individual is a very recent development. My arguments may be idle ones and Becker may prove right – but my point is that I am surely not unique in coming up with counter arguments to his thesis and so ‘taking my eye off the ball’.

Last month, I came across a copy of The Denial of Death in a second hand bookshop in Wisconsin. It was a rich and thought-provoking read. Becker describes our impulse towards immortality and the instinctive desire we all have to outlive death and decay. Our appetite for power and influence, our need to feel omnipotent and in control is a reflex against the terror of dying someday. We want to matter and we want to measure up better than everyone else and so we pursue symbolic definitions of our self-worth – through words and images in the mind and on paper. Few of us will enter the history books and yet many of us strive to do so.

My crown I am, but still my griefs are mine. You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those.    Richard III Act 4 Scene 1

There is no secure answer to the awesome mystery of being human. Whatever we can achieve, writes Becker, must be within our subjective energies, without deadening and with the full exercise of passion, vision, pain and sorrow.

Ernest Becker died in 1974, just two months before The Denial of Death was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He was 49 years old. Peter died in 1998 at the age of 79. Earl was 89 when he died in 2013.

A Way and Ways by Earl Stevick was published in 1980 by Longman.

Running alongside our house is an avenue of chestnut trees which, at this time of year, is a popular spot for conker hunters. Children arrive after school, often with their parents, to collect and extract the glossy brown nuts from their prickly capsules. Following windy nights, these lie, scattered and half-hidden beneath the autumn leaves, the equivalent I imagine of discovering the spilled contents of a pirate’s treasure chest.

When I was a child my mother made me Conkermen. She used matchsticks for limbs and match heads for eyes. I carried on the tradition with Polly and Lucy and last week I promised our granddaughter, who is approaching two, that I would make her a Conkerman. She listened, with interest and rolled the new word around in her mouth. The following morning, the figure was waiting for her at the breakfast table. Thea stared at him, picked him up and then put him down again. ‘No Conkerman’ she said politely.

In the 1970s we had conker fights at school. We would drive a nail or a small screwdriver into the heart of the conker, thread a piece of string through the hole and secure it with a knot. We then took turns hitting each other’s conkers until one of them broke open or got smashed. In 2004, conker fights were banned in school playgrounds in England, for reasons of health and safety and the possible risk of nut allergies. Some head teachers permitted them with the proviso that pupils wore protective goggles.

The simple beauty of conkers reminds me of the simplicity of the Crackerjack pencil. Crackerjack was a popular children’s television programme, broadcast on the BBC between 1955 and 1984. The live audience was comprised almost entirely of children, all dressed in their school uniforms. There were games, sketches, quizzes and music. Winners would receive prizes. Losers would be given a Crackerjack pencil. Supplies of the marbled, branded, propelling pencils were tightly controlled and, before each new season, the programme producers would order in the exact number required. They were kept under lock and key and no-one, not even the presenters or the backstage crew could access them. Only one exception was ever made when, in 1961, Her Majesty the Queen visited the set of Crackerjack and requested two pencils for Prince Charles and Princess Anne.

In 2022 children no longer play with conkers. Nor do they have much interest in pencils. Our culture’s ability to project preciousness onto something ordinary appears to be diminishing. And yet, every year, armies of small children return to the grass verge opposite our house to seek out something as common and as beautiful as an Autumn conker.

There are moments in life that anchor you to a time and a place. Yesterday afternoon, when I heard the news that the Queen had died, I was at Blain’s Farm and Fleet in Baraboo. Family-owned since 1955, the store has been part of people’s lives here in Wisconsin for almost as many years as Queen Elizabeth II was a part of our lives. Suddenly I felt very far from home. I hoped, unrealistically perhaps, that someone might hear my English accent and offer condolences, express regret and tell me how sad they felt that Her Majesty had died. On February 6^th, 1952, my father himself had been here in America when news of the death of King George VI was announced. In Peter’s diary, he expresses appreciation that several of the masters at Groton School chose to wear black ties in Chapel that morning.

Later in the day, I received an email from Doug, one of the ‘boys’ my father had taught at Groton 70 years ago. He told me how very sad he felt that the Queen was dead.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in 1945, my mother-in-law felt bereft – FDR was the only President she had ever known. At his funeral a man, openly weeping, was asked Did you know the President? No, he replied, but he knew me. For most people alive in the UK today, Queen Elizabeth II is the only monarch we have ever known.

As Henry James said when Queen Victoria died in 1901. Today we all feel a bit motherless. And a bit grandmotherless too.

Last year I decided to donate the royalties from The Absent Prince: In search of missing men to a charity and I asked my friend, Kate for advice. Her son, Arthur is an aid worker and had recently returned from the Calais refugee camps. Having worked with Alice Corrigan in Serbia, Arthur immediately recommended The Free Shop Lebanon. Alice does incredible work. The funds will go where they are most needed and not be eaten up in bureaucracy and pay cheques as they often are in larger, more established charities. The Free Shop Lebanon also employs local people, which is the ideal way to make it sustainable in the long term. 

During the pandemic, I wrote I Have Come to Say You Goodbye, A History of The School of English Studies, Folkestone, 1959 – 2017 and had 100 copies printed to gift to former teachers, staff, students and host families. With Alice’s help, I also set up a Crowdfunding page and we raised over fifteen hundred pounds for The Free Shop Lebanon. Some people expressed an interest in making an annual donation. Others thanked me for drawing their attention to a charity they might never have discovered on their own. I decided to interview Alice, The Free Shop’s founder and Khaled, who now manages the project in Bar Elias in the Bekaa Valley.

Alice Corrigan is 28 years old, the youngest of four children from rural Lincolnshire. After university she taught English in Japan before moving to Serbia where she volunteered for a charity. When her money ran out, she moved to Lebanon and took a job working for an NGO in the Bekaa Valley. In March 2020, she returned to England on one of the last planes out of Beirut before Lebanon went into lockdown. She flew back as soon as the airport re-opened in July.

I would love to create systemic change, Alice said, to make the world equal for everyone but I recognise that this needs to be done in community and over a long period of time, hundreds of years, even. But there are things we can do as individuals, small things that can make a big difference in a person’s life. Providing someone with new underwear for example or giving them something useful for their kitchen.

The Free Shop began as a pop up and was trialled in late 2020. Khaled was a volunteer on the project and Alice was so impressed by how hard he worked and how well he engaged with the refugee families that she asked him to join her in providing physical aid to refugees. According to the UN Refugee Agency, there are more than 340,000 registered Syrian refugees in the Bekaa Valley. Most live in tented settlements in remote locations with limited access to public transport, relying on mobile trucks to fill their water tanks. Some families have been living in these conditions for six years. Similar to those currently fleeing the war in Ukraine, many refugees choose to remain close to the Syrian border in the hope of one day returning home. Some have crossed back into Syria only to discover that their homes have been destroyed as a result of the ongoing war.

Refugees are permitted to work in agriculture, construction and waste management. Many work in the fields but pay is poor and the work is seasonal. The focus now is on providing a better life for the next generation. Syrian children have the right to go to school in Lebanon but many families cannot afford the 10c one way bus journey between the settlement and the school. The Free Shop Lebanon is looking to contract 20 minibuses to ferry them for free.

Once registered with The Free Shop, each family member receives three free tokens which can be used in the shop in exchange for clothes, shoes, children’s toys, nappies, menstrual pads, reusable water bottles, blankets and small household items. It costs the charity approximately £2 for each person who visits the shop so a donation of just £10 enables five people to go home with three items each.

The Free Shop Lebanon was registered on November 11^th, 2020 and served 12,000 people in its first year.

Those who run The Free Shop are all Syrian nationals. Khaled, the team manager, is himself a Syrian refugee with a Masters in Economics. He grew up 40km south of Damascus with his parents and two siblings. Khaled was arrested on three separate occasions, jailed without charge and tortured during his time in prison. Eventually he left his family and crossed the border into Lebanon. On the day he and I spoke on the phone, his brother had just arrived for a 10 day visit. It was the first time they had seen each other in 4 years.

Khaled volunteered with an NGO and worked as a tuk-tuk driver before meeting Alice. I love my work with The Free Shop, he told me and when I see the smiling faces of mothers and children, I feel very happy. I know that what I am doing is good. He stressed the importance of offering people choice and giving them time to make that choice. Refugees are often just handed a bag of clothes whereas at The Free Shop, people can choose colours and styles from racks and shelves. They can ask for something in a different size or another colour. Families are referred to as customers not beneficiaries because that is how we treat people inside our store, regardless of nationality. We are here to serve them. We help families find that perfect baby dress or the right sized kids’ shoes. As Khaled so succinctly described it: A woman can say to herself – I live in a refugee camp but, today I am just a normal person,  going shopping.

All in all, our work is a simple activity, says Alice, for which not much praise need be given: we are proud of it enough ourselves. When a mother cries in the shop because she has just realised that she can give her children clothes they need but cannot afford, it stays with us. We know that families in Lebanon are living in poverty (the rate has doubled from 42% in 2019 to 82% in 2021) and we will work to reduce that poverty, family by family for as long as action is needed and our presence is wanted.

I asked Alice and Khaled about their dreams for the future. A Free Mall, they said, where we can provide appliances, heating fuel, tarpaulins, rugs, furniture and whatever else people might need.

Today, perhaps more than ever before, charities are in desperate need of support and funding. I can feel both overwhelmed and guilty at my inability to choose among them. I am grateful to Arthur for his recommendation, grateful for my conversations with Alice and Khaled and grateful to all those who donated to The Free Shop Lebanon.

If you would like to know more about the work they do and/or make a donation, please follow the link below. There are a number of collection points across the UK. Shoes and children’s clothes are especially appreciated. Thank you.

https://www.thefreeshoplb.org/ or follow them on Instagram (@thefreeshoplebanon)

I confess to a peculiar and long-standing fascination with cemeteries. I find them neither creepy nor depressing. Walking around a graveyard offers me a sense of consolation. My future, at least in this respect, is guaranteed. There is no possibility of an exemption. By the close of this century, most of the 7 billion travellers with whom I currently share the planet will, like me, have returned to ashes and dust. When you reach a certain age, a friend once said to me, it is helpful to spend a little time with death each day. It offers you the opportunity to reflect on what lies ahead.

Forty years ago I lived in Paris. In spite of my great affection for graveyards and my devotion to The Doors, I never went to Pere Lachaise and so, when I was visiting the city in May, I decided to go, arriving early in the morning in order to avoid the coach crowds, the guided tours and the pilgrims in search of the shrine to Jim Morrison. The main entrance to the cemetery is guarded by a row of stone tombs, reminiscent of vaulted telephone boxes. The tiny chapels, which date from the early 1800s, reveal crosses and candlesticks on cracked altars, faded photographs and exquisite, largely intact, stained glass windows. Creeping carpets of ivy obscure the names of the long dead and towering mausoleums stand in memory to the great and the good who lived and died in the city – Balzac, Chopin, Moliere, Piaf, Proust, Wilde …… There are ordinary citizens too, including the 19 year-old Suzon Garrigues, one of the 130 people killed in the November 2015 terrorist attacks on Paris. The graves at Pere Lachaise are densely packed and huge crows stand guard on the tombs, their lacquered feathers catching the sunlight through the maple trees.

In 2016, on the morning I visited the Forest Cemetery in Davos, there were no other visitors. The graveyard was built outside the town in order to protect the sensibilities of dying TB patients who filled the alpine sanatoria between the two World Wars. The wooden crosses are all alike. None are permitted to be taller than the prescribed 85cms and each one has a small, chalet roof. The Waldfriedhof is a place of quiet serenity, lying in a mature forest of larch trees with views to the Matterhorn.

My favourite cemetery is Bonaventure near Savannah, Georgia, made famous by John Berendt’s novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Spanish moss drapes the branches of the one hundred year old live oaks which, together with the magnificent stone-carved angels create an ethereal, dream-like space. I don’t have a clear sense of the after-life but in my imagination Bonaventure comes close to it.

In Switzerland, where my mother was born, cemeteries are tightly controlled and rigorously supervised. You would be hard-pressed to find a toppling, crumbling, moss-stained headstone anywhere and the main reason is that, with the exception of family plots, Swiss graves are rarely more than 25 years old. After a quarter of a century, the burial ground is dug up and leased to a new tenant, a practice my father referred to as a barbaric tradition. He died in England, two years after my mother and, following the funeral service, I took his ashes to Switzerland to be buried alongside hers. In 1998, this was a comparatively straightforward process. As I passed through security at Heathrow, the official questioned me: What’s in the package? My father’s ashes. I replied. I’m sorry for your loss, he said. Please continue.

As the twenty five year period is calculated from the death of the first spouse, I decided, in 2018 to move my parents’ place of temporary rest to England, where I have lived for the past 20 years. I lodged my request with the Swiss cemetery authorities who scratched their heads, unsure of how to proceed. This was most unorthodox, they said. It would require special paperwork, they said. It might not even be possible. OK, I said. I’ll wait. And I did …  until it was eventually agreed that the ossuaries could be disinterred and taken out of the country. My parents’ ashes were sealed in plastic tureens. No awkward questions were asked as we crossed the border back into England, possibly because the undertaker had thoughtfully placed the urns in two cardboard wine boxes.

On September 5^th, which marked the 20^th anniversary of my father’s death, our small family gathered to witness the re-burial of my parents’ ashes. My paternal grandfather’s remains also lie at Barham Cemetery, on land that had once been part of Lord Kitchener’s estate. Polly, Lucy and I laid yellow roses on my parents, their grandparents’ grave and I read aloud the unsourced obituary Mum had chosen for herself twenty-five years earlier: Do not be sad at my passing for I have gone to those I loved in order to wait for those I love. My husband, Dan recited The Lord is my Shepherd, one of my father’s favourite psalms.

A few weeks ago I returned to Switzerland for the first time since 2019 and I visited the cemetery where my parents had spent twenty years. Their old plot, which lies under a weeping willow tree, offers no indication of previous occupancy. The headstone is long gone, recycled or possibly broken up to serve as gravel chips. Carefully controlled ivy grows over the still vacant plot which, sooner or later, will serve as the temporary burial ground of a new resident.

* taken from Song of Myself, 6 by Walt Whitman