The concert

Today I went to a lunchtime concert in the centre of Hastings, the last one rounding off a summer series that runs through June, July and August. Usually these 40-minute concerts are performances by a soloist or duo or small group, but today was a special, with the Sussex Concert Orchestra — a body of experienced and talented musicians.

It was a grand concert, a real treat — Bach, Handel, Purcell, Telemann; a gorgeous programme, brilliantly played —but, oh, my goodness, did it make me feel old!

I was at university with the conductor, Ken Roberts, and watching his conducting style took me right back to the music department at York University where I met my first husband, the father of my children. Both he and Ken learned conducting from Graham Treacher, a master of the art and a joy to see in action. Though Ken has evolved his own style, I could trace all the way back to York in the carefree 1970s, and Graham's finesse and precision, as I watched him today.

Ken was the soloist at the piano in one of the Bach concertos, and his wife of many years turned the pages for him. But I remember Ken's first wife, who iced the cake for my wedding to my first husband — the cake my grandmother made for us, and she died in the spring of 1984. Ken and his first wife Ruth drove down from York to Hertfordshire (about a three-hour journey), Ruth carrying the wedding cake carefully on her knee all the way. It was iced in pale blue with little sugar-work butterflies, and she took such pains to make sure nothing got broken and it all arrived intact. One butterfly was damaged on the way, and she rushed into the kitchen of my parents' home to mend it, so it would all be entirely beautiful. That memory came back to me so vividly today.

And then, watching the musicians coming one by one into the church where the concert took place — there was the gifted oboist, whose children were born when mine were born, and was part of the NCT branch we began in Hastings back in the day when Sheila Kitzinger and Ina May Gaskin and Frederick Leboyer and Michel Odent were revolutionising the way women gave birth in the Western world. At the same time, the same women who were in that group got together to share a whole food delivery from Infinity Foods in Brighton. On a regular basis the goods would come in to Sheila Rosewell's garage, and we'd all meet up to divi them out; and over the months and years, from that initiative was born a whole food co-operative which became a now long-established whole food shop in Hastings centre opposite the church where the concert took place today.

And I watched as the audience and musicians filtered in to the church, smiling and pleased to be there after so many months interrupted by pandemic regulations — and so many of the people there I have known since first I came to Hastings when I was twenty-one, and this summer I turned sixty-four. I have been to church with them, or watched them play in concerts, or they have taught my children to play musical instruments. 

When I first came to live here in Hastings, Ken Roberts (who conducted today) was the only person who lived here I already knew. He invited us to dinner, and I had my baby with me, a month or so old. She cried all through the evening. Today, at the concert, she sat beside me, now in her 40s and an accomplished brass musician and harpist herself.

I had such a sense of time passing, and all of us growing old. Like Ezra Pound said: "Life slips by like a field mouse, not shaking the grass."

I could feel that upwelling of grief; not for any regret, only for times gone and memories fading. Moments and relationships that were beautiful, and live only in my memory now.

Increasingly, I meet people in the street and either they clearly don't recognise me or for a moment I don't remember them — because we have grown old — and then there's that surprise and delight of recognition: "Oh! Hello!" Yes. My friend — it's you.

This last few weeks a friend of mine has been ill, and I have carried her in my heart but did not go to see her, because I stay well myself only by living quietly and not attempting too much. And today my husband's daughter has her 40th birthday with a glorious weekend of celebrations, and I have sat that dance out because I no longer have the stamina for parties.

Of course, I knew I would grow old. People talk about it in terms of wrinkles and sagging boobs — but that's the perspective of an onlooker only. There is so much more to it, a tangle of sadness and gratitude; a dear intensity of living, and the strangeness of watching it gradually drain out into the sand, as one by one they slip away into the world of light, leaving only the radiance of a smile and the echo of Gregorian chant, of laughter, of a penny whistle and a harpsichord, a sitar, a church organ, songs sung a cappella as the evening comes down.

However many years are left to me, and whatever they may hold, I have lived such a blessed and beautiful and joyous life; so full of gifts and treasure and surprises.