Homesickness

Having chatted to Miff the other day he encouraged me to open a blog well here we go. Whilst talking about books we were reading I mentioned that I was trying a new author Suzannah Dunn. I'm really enjoying  it,it's a historical novel set during the reign of Mary Tudor, just after her disasterous marriage to Phillip of Spain. By the way this took place in Winchester Cathedral. Many Spaniards joined Phillip when he came to England amongst them a sundial maker? He was not very happy and obviously missing home his wife and three year old son.

I have not been so moved by a piece of writting for a very long time, it brought back to my mind a situation that I had experienced myself - I'll explain later anyway here is the piece  of writing.

`These past thirteen days, he'd been shaken to the core by how homesick he felt: the savagery of it, its relentlessness. Dizzied by it, was how he felt. About to buckle. Hollowed, as if something  had been ripped from him. His chest sang with the pain and he was confused and ashamed because he saw no sign that other men felt like this. Antonio certainly didn't. But,then, other men too would hide it, wouldn't they, so there'd be no knowing. He hadn't anticipated  feeling like this. He'd often been away from home - sometimes for a couple of weeks - and had never enjoyed it, but nothing had prepared him for this. And because he hadn't  anticipated it, he felt tripped up, tricked by it, taken unawares and thereby enslaved by it. He couldn't see how he'd get from under it, or how he was going to cope, to continue, from day to day. Common sense told him that he would, that it would lessen, but he didn't believe it. This homesickness was going to hunt him down.

  He missed his little Francisco - God, how he missed him - and in six weeks there'd  be so much more to miss, because he was growing so fast. A head taller at a time, he seemed. Rafael felt that his son's head came up to his chest  now, even though he knew it couldn't be so - but that's where he felt the lack of him, that's where the hollowness was. That little head. Rafael longed to cup the back of it as he had when Francisco was a baby; take the weight of it, enjoy the fit and solidness of it in one hand. His little boy's hair, too; his silly blond hair, as Rafael thought affectionately of it. He longed to touch it, to relish its abundance. Not much of it was there when he was newborn, most of it had grown since - which Rafael found almost comical, and touching; all that busy, vigorous but gloriously oblivious growing that Francisco had done for himself.................`

That is the particular passage that I understood so well, but would not be able to write so eloquently. It reminded me of the time that Matthew went away to a Chorister training course in Haileybury. I never to this day know how Matthew felt about going away from home, he appeared to be totally relaxed about it, it was me that wasn't coping. He must have been about eight, he had gone with friends all should have been well, but I felt bereft. That hollowness described in that passage sums up how I felt. I could not sleep for worry, I'm sure that I must have driven Pete mad. I remember driving back to see him and watching him unobserved  skipping about the place once had had prossesed angelically from the chapel after a service. Oh the joys of parenthood they never leave you not matter how old you or your children are.