One of my strongest memories from my childhood is the summer before my brother Robin was born. It seemed always to be summer when I was young, winter served only to give us Yule gifts and snowball fights and autumn was not so different from spring excepting shade and hue, and those seasons were simply bookends to the real heart of the year.

My younger sister Primrose was called Prim by most people, but she was as far from prim as a child can be. If soil was dusty or sandy, she would build towers with it, and if it was muddy she would dig trenches and toss in motley handfuls of seeds.

Prim and I had no especial friends amongst the brothers and sisters of our family, though we were always a close-knit rabble as a whole. There was too much of a gulf between me and my closest elder sister, Rose, and Daisy - who fell after me but before Prim - was fast and firm with our brother Samlad. Ruby, who would in later years tag along with whichever sibling was having the best adventure, was too young then to have an interest in our doings.

Anyway, the summer when our mother was preparing for another babe to care for, I was entrusted with the task of keeping Prim out of trouble.

Not that she caused much, that was Daisy and Sammie's particular talent. But Prim could make a stir when the fancy took her, and our parents decided that I was old enough to keep an eye where an eye was needed.

Before I go further, I must explain a little of the time and place I grew up in, or readers in later ages will not understand.

I wasn't, of course, the Lady Goldberry and wife of Thain Faramir in those days. I was little Goldilocks Gardner, Goldy when my usual nickname felt too long. I had hair as yellow as you'd expect a child of that name to have, and I was a little too vain and slightly too dramatical for my own good. My eventual husband was just stupid Farry Took with the biggest ears in the world and I thought him dreadfully stuck up ('Blue blood bleeds red as any other', my uncle Frodo would say as if it were an important lesson to learn. I did not consider it to be such at the time). Sometimes I dared, behind a giggling smile, to call him Farty Farry and then run away. Back then he chased me only to pull at my thick flaxen plaits.

I lived in Bag End, which is an old smial atop a hill in Hobbiton. Hobbiton was, and still is to some degree, a place where nobody wants anything strange to happen. Nothing odd or unique is allowed if it can be helped; most families did not even hold with indoor water pumps in those days.

Here, now, we would not seem so odd a family, but Hobbiton is a long way from Tuckborough in more than simple distance, and this was many many years ago.

The Gardner clan were called queer folk by the more polite members of local society, and many other less charitable names besides. But we were as happy as we were strange, and loved our family dearly.

Hobbits habitually distrust outsiders, and though Bag End received letters from far-off countries and long-lost kings we perhaps had even more wariness than less outlandish hobbits, for we feared even our neighbours for their cutting words.

The power of words was much respected in my childhood home - my uncle Frodo ('uncle' was used as a title of respect, for save one notable exception he was blood kin to none of us and more a father than uncle in role and function) wrote tales and stories in his smoke-hazed study, and my father had learned his letters in that very room as a boy. My mother could read when she needed to, with a careful finger tracing her route across the map of ideas, but she preferred the stories that lived in voices and tellings.

My eldest sister, Elanor, was quite the scholar herself, and my nephews and nieces still preserve her writings now. When this sheaf of my own papers is completed, I will ask them for copies of her words to put beside my own, so that more of the story may shape itself from the memories therein.

I didn't care much for paper and ink then, though this record stands as proof that I learned the art of spelling and grammar as well as any children of that age did.

But I knew the way words could become weapons better than most children ever have reason to discover.


One story of that childhood summer I wish to tell loses something in the transcribing, for languages grow as gardens do and old words are pruned from time to time. I will explain the meaning of such words as they appear but like any joke the humour is dulled with explanation.

Prim wanted our father to make her a swing, for the closest we had to one was a rope by the riverbank put there by our elder brother Merry, who charmed sweet-faced tweens into illicit swimming excursions on balmy nights. Prim did not like the water, for she'd decided that if even one sturdy foot was submerged then Gollum would drag her down and eat her up.

Gollum may seem like a fairy story to the children of today, but despite assurances that he was dead and gone he seemed very real to us.

My mother was a woman who liked nothing better than being in charge and looking after things. Her particular and ongoing project was Getting Our Dear Mister Frodo Out In The Fresh Air, and we could all hear the capitalised letters when she said it. So when our father took a plank of wood and two lengths of rope up to an old oak tree to make a swing, Uncle Frodo came along too.

Soon enough the swing was made, and Prim clapped in delight and took first turn. I considered myself far above such games, and to tease my haughtiness both my distinguished mayoral father and my learned writer uncle tried the newly-made toy themselves.

A few days later, Primrose and I happened to be in the butcher shop, as buying sausages for our family's dinner was a job for two. In the shop with us were Mrs Cotton, who was our aunt Marigold and sister to our father, and Mrs Rusher-Overhill, and the widow Belldown.

"Your mother's confined again, ain't she?" the butcher asked. It was common knowledge that our twelve would soon be thirteen, and our mother had never been 'confined' for a day of her life save for the occasional bout of vague illness and before the birth of little Sam. The question was idle small talk, as any shopkeeper will make.

"My Rom never knew what to do with himself when I was in a family way," the widow Belldown said. "He'd feel 'confined' in his own sense, if you take my meaning. He never knew what to do with himself."

If I had not been well brought up, I might have said something terrible. Prim was too young to understand, of course, but I thought that it was utterly vulgar to speak in such a way with a child nearby. As I said before, those were different times.

"Your Tom's lucky, Marigold, that you've never been in that position." Mrs Rusher-Overhill's comment seemed like nothing on the surface, but my aunt flinched and left the store quickly. I was not fond of my aunt, but loyalty made my fists clench nonetheless.

"What does your father... oh, and your, er, 'uncle'... what do they do while your mother is in a delicate condition?" the widow Belldown asked Prim and me in a voice so cloyingly sweet it was sickly. I knew that the two old busybodies wanted some idle reply rich with gossip-fodder, and I wished that I had my sister Daisy's clever tongue to retort scathingly with.

Before I could say a word, though, Prim answered the query.

"They swing!" she said merrily, picking up one of the baskets of sausages and walking to the door.

It took all my strength of will to follow her outside without crying with laughter, for the expressions on the faces of those two ridiculous biddies was cool wind on my fury. In those days, you see, a 'swinger' was... well, let me simply say it was one of the uglier words used about my mother, father, and uncle. I still hear the term from time to time now, but the meaning is freer, more relaxed in tone and without the cruel edge to the meaning. Back then, though, there was little freedom and tolerance outside our easy little home, and the word was one no properly-bred child would utter in the context of that meaning.

Primrose was as well-bred as any mayor's daughter could be, to such an extent that she did not even know the crude and salacious translation her words would have. I, on the other hand, found a curious release in the situation, the horrid cast those bitter souls would put over the pure and joyful truth of the answer my sister had offered. Truth and meaning are, in the end, the choice of the audience.

That is why I write these words down now, to share with the readers of other ages: so that you may each find the lessons you require, the meanings you wish to read into words. There are many things I have not outright explained about the way we lived and the reason those gossips first began to whisper, but I have not kept them secret either.

Those truths are there for those who have need of them, for love is not bound to any time or place.

I am an old woman now, and have lived many other tales and stories since that summer. Perhaps, some day, I may share them with you, for my inkwell and quill have life enough yet for that.

But for now I feel I am that girl in that far-off endless summer, racing her little sister up the path with a basket of sausages hanging off one wrist.

There were warm, friendly smells on the air, and shouts hello and goodbye from inside our never-bolted door. Doorways have much in common with the covers of books, and both will close upon this last picture from my recollection: my sister's face flushed from our run, kissed by our uncle's dry lips as he paused in his own ink-crafted quest to bid us good evening.

I think I knew for the first time that day how wonderful my family was, and in that knowledge I stepped one small remove away from my childhood. Awareness costs us innocence, that's the beauty and ache of it.

Winter and summer, you see, are things defined by each other.

But - as my uncle knew that afternoon and I know now, and now and then are not so far apart as all that - the cost of a thing is a measure of its value, and experience casts a particular kind of sweet light over the small good things a life can hold.

~

Pretty Good Year | email Mary