A few days before Christmas my friend’s daughter had a devastating mental health crisis. On the phone with my beloved friend on Christmas Day, we speak of motherhood. The conversation takes me into liminal space; makes me deeply appreciate all that follows.
As we talk, my brood is still asleep – my young daughter and the Ukrainian couple that I have adopted as if they were my own. We had spent Christmas Eve together chopping vegetables and making a nut roast and lemon cake. On Christmas morning, all three have yet to awaken and find presents stuffed into big socks at the ends of their beds. The young Ukrainian woman will be returning to Kiev on Boxing Day to see her mum for the first time since the war started nine months ago. Her mum is a paramedic in the Ukrainian army, serving at the brutal eastern front. The air in our house is thick with peril and poignancy.
My own mother feels so close to the surface at this time of year. Where I move, she bustles with me, preparing the carrots and gravy, counting plates and forks and calculating how long it will take to roast the potatoes and what to feed my father in the meantime in the vain attempt to stop him from losing his temper. She set such great store by Christmas, indeed stored up food and presents compulsively all year. Every outing or holiday was a chance to squirrel away a nice jar of something comestible or a little remembrance to share with others.
As I wrapped presents, my hands moved with hers, folding paper deftly into hospital corners around gifts that I too have squirrelled all year. I wrapped handwarmers for our Ukrainian friend to help her through the sub-zero temperatures of Kiev. I wrapped a special present for my daughter’s toy monkey, just as my mother would have done – banana-shaped fairy lights. When I set up the Christmas tree, my mother’s decorations were mingled with mine, going back three generations to glittering family celebrations of her childhood, and her own mother’s youth, back to a time when German grannies welcomed hordes of cousins and lit real candles for the tree. I wonder what I am passing on to my daughter – what she will squirrel and fold, forty years hence. I help her to set up a miniature table on our full-size dining table so that she can invite her rabbits and bears to join our feast.
This is the first Christmas that I can really call my own. Extricated from a difficult non-marriage, and free of the decades-long responsibility of visiting my parents in lieu of their absentee sons, I can devote myself to lights and food and sellotape. I can do thoughtful presents. I can spend simple golden time chopping potatoes and parsnips with my daughter and our Ukrainian friends. I can – with a precariously curated show of equilibrium – invite my ex to come over for Christmas dinner so that our daughter can have both her mother and father present, without her feeling divided in two.
There is a big box under the tree, wrapped in shining silver paper with hospital corners. Acting as Santa, my daughter somehow knows instinctively to leave it to last. It is unveiled as a Japanese dolls house – a kit with perhaps six hundred tiny wooden pieces and accessories that will need to be painstakingly glued together over the coming weeks. She climbs onto my knee and leans against me whilst poring through the instruction manual. I breathe in her pleasure. She loves it all, as I knew in my heart that she would.
The Japanese dolls house conjures memories of a beloved childhood book by Rumer Godden. A shy refugee girl called Nona gradually becomes part of a family by making a traditional Japanese house for two Japanese dolls. Only the reader knows that the dolls themselves, Miss Happiness and Miss Flower, are urging the girl on with their silent wishes, yearning – like her – for a home.
My young Ukrainian friend looks at the dolls-house kit and tells me that her mum loved making miniature scenes when she was a girl. Using her phone, she sends her mum a photo of our tiny Christmas dining table, with inch-long crackers and model cake, dwarfed by full-size bowls of vegetables and bottles of wine. Replying from Kiev, her mum asks if her daughter might possibly bring back a dolls-house treasure.
Touched by the chance to contribute in a tiny way, I go to the cabinet where my own dolls-house collection is stored, each miniature item a window into child time. What can I offer to this other mother whose daughter I hold so dear, whose very presence has helped make my disrupted household feel more like a home? I find two tiny porcelain teddy bears that my mother put in my stocking when I was a child – a mamma bear and a baby bear. I find a realistic little plate of eggs, beans and chips, a golden knife and fork, and a cup of tea. I can send her a teeny tiny English breakfast.
Yet what will protect them on their journey? A matchbox? A tin? My mother’s hand guides mine and my fingers close around her little pink box made of hard 1950s plastic. I tip out the contents and find that the tiny porcelain bears and breakfast fit inside. The box has been among my things for years, part of an inheritance of ephemera. Yet when I give it to my young Ukrainian friend, it is she who first notices the raised translucent letters on the lid, unread for perhaps seventy years and hard to see until she turns it to the light, spelling out a single word: ‘Peace’.
Peace. Peace in Europe. The treasure that we barely acknowledged as holding us in her palm, and never imagined that in our lifetime would be so savagely ripped asunder. Missiles are raining on Kiev.
I find myself telling my young Ukrainian friend a story told to me by my mother about a time just after the Second World War. She was then a teenager. A film came to her home town of Watford, made by Quakers and screened in church halls across the country. It showed a time-lapse sequence of a seed thrusting up a stem, putting out leaves and bursting into flower – a heart-stopping miracle of modern movie-making. My mother took in a little sip of air when she recounted it and clasped her hands in excitement, as if reliving the thrill of the flower and its message of post-war peace and rebirth. As I speak, my young Ukrainian friend clasps my hand. We embrace, and she says that she will tell her mum the story that goes with the box that has ‘Peace’ on the lid and holds the hope of time beyond war.
Three days later, I receive a photo message from Ukraine. The miniature bears and breakfast have arrived. What a homecoming. There they are on the shelf beside empty missile shells painted with flowers and the badges and army memorabilia of a Ukrainian paramedic who is also a mother.
Ten days later, my young Ukrainian friend returns from Kiev, exhausted by travel and by close proximity to blackouts, war and so much loss, yet elated to have seen her mother, recently returned from Bakhmut in the Donbas region with tales of weaponry and destruction too shocking to repeat.
She brought me a gift from her mother to thank me for looking after her daughter. It fits in my hand. It is a picture of a rose tree worked in glass beads on ivory silk in a gilded picture frame. My Ukrainian friend’s mother bought it from a girl in Bakhmut, selling her embroideries among the rubble.
The bears, the breakfast, the box and the beads have travelled between worlds. They arrive as a quiet expression of understanding, picking their way between the violence and the peril. They speak a pledge of motherhood, across time and troubled lands.