A Human Love Story: Journeys to the Heart
104
A Human Love Story: Journeys to the Heart
104eBook
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Overview
Matt Hopwood set off with just a small bag and a walking stick, no possessions and an open mind to walk many hundreds of miles the length and breadth of the country. He relied entirely on the generosity of strangers for shelter and asked people to tell him their transforming stories. They did. All of these deeply enthralling, profoundly honest stories weave a web of tenderness, connection, compassion and community.
For some people their love story will span decades and tell a tale of romantic love evolving through the passing years. Others’ stories express fleeting moments of connection, care, concern. Most love stories are marked by sadness and loss. Some stories are concerned with maternal and paternal love, others with a love of place, a visceral connection with spirit through landscape. Love stories also connect deeply with our identities, in how we belong and how we are welcomed in society. Each story is different. Each beautiful. Each valuable.
“A delicately woven tapestry of human life, collected by a stranger who offered an ear to listen without judgment and who has the depth of soul to interpret the complicated layers of love.” —from the foreword by Clare Balding
“This thoughtfully presented lexicon of love contains honest accounts from men and women of all ages and offers an antidote to a life where it can be surprisingly hard to say ‘I love you.’”—The Wee Review
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780857909909 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Birlinn, Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/12/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 104 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
It Wasn't a Fleeting Thing
The journey begins, through the sea and the mud, as the tide ebbs and the land emerges from the wash. After walking some time I come to a standstill by the water's edge in Berwick-upon-Tweed. Further on, a day from here, perhaps, I will cross that invisible line into a different land, into Scotland. The path stretches out before me. The light loosens its grip. The harbour moves restlessly.
* * *
We met when I went to work in a kibbutz in Israel. I'd been working in London, working as a waitress in a café, and I was waiting to go to university in London. And I didn't have anything to do for the summer and I thought I'd go to a kibbutz. I didn't even know where Israel was and I didn't know what a kibbutz was, but it was somewhere for me to go because I had no one to go on holiday with. I thought, 'That sounds nice – it'll be warm, something to do.' I arrived in Tel Aviv airport – I didn't know what I was doing. I spoke to a guy at the airport who looked like he knew what he was doing and he told me what buses to take. It was all quite random, really. I had to take a bus and get off at a junction and then walk and wait for a lift. And it was back in the early eighties, when many young people, and also the soldiers, travelled around by hitching. So that's what I did. Eventually this guy rolled by. I was just standing there with my thumb out and he was going to the kibbutz, so he took me along.
So I arrived at this kibbutz. I got to speak to the volunteer leader and he said, 'You can stay in the volunteer houses and we'll speak to you tomorrow morning.' There was a kind of club place that people would go to and meet, so that evening I went with some of the other volunteers up to this club and I met Uzi. He and his friend were sitting outside. His friend said, 'Hello, who are you?' It was a small community and I was a different face, I guess. We spoke for a while, but I'd got up early that day so I didn't stay long. The following evening there was a disco. There was always a disco in the same club – and it was a pyjama party! So I had these pyjamas on – fabulous old men's striped pyjamas – and I got to the party and I saw Uzi again. I was kind of dancing with different people and then I saw him leave and I didn't know if he'd noticed that I was there – we didn't speak! So I went and sat on the wall outside and Uzi came by. And he looked like he was leaving. He said, 'Hello, how are you doing? What are you doing here? I have to go and water the cotton fields. Do you want to come with me?' And I just thought, 'Yeah.' So the next minute we're driving out into the fields, driving through sweetcorn – I'd never seen sweetcorn. Driving out and then parking up and looking out at the view. And Uzi was showing me that the closest place to us was actually an Arab village and that they lived very peacefully together with the kibbutz. And I just was really touched by that. It was abroad, it was warm. We had the music and the stars.
Great music. Just the whole scene was like bliss with this lovely guy, with these beautiful eyes.
Wow!
And I had this pyjama top on and this pair of shorts, and I was thinking, 'I can't believe it.' I've just been waitressing, doing these mad shifts up until two days ago, and here I am in the middle of this field. You know, I hadn't known what to expect but I hadn't expected anything like that.
I felt a kind of 'at home-ness' with him. And I remember Uzi putting his head on my legs. There was a kind of, I want to use the word comfort, if you know what I mean, in a kind of 'home' way. I thought, 'This is a really nice feeling.' Rather than being overcome by some passion – it was bigger, it was more than that. It wasn't a fleeting kind of thing. This was a kind of 'Oh, I feel totally fine with this.'
But I was only there for that weekend. I wasn't allowed to stay in the kibbutz. So when I left on Sunday morning he gave me the keys to his flat and the address and he said, 'If you don't find anything, you can stay in this flat.' But I got into Tel Aviv and I sorted out another place, so I took his key back to the kibbutz organisation and I went to a kibbutz up north near Acre. A couple of weekends later there was a phone call one night – it was Uzi. He said, 'There's a beach trip planned and I wondered if you wanted to come along and join us.' So I went and spent a bit of time with him before I travelled down to the south of Israel.
What I remember is that Uzi gave me this photo of himself. I couldn't believe that someone that handsome thought I was attractive. Honestly. I really didn't. I just used to think I could never find a photo of myself as nice as that. Oh, I think I was completely lovelorn. Do you know that expression? I don't think I could concentrate on anything. I returned to the UK and started my first year at university in London. I went to university as a mature student and I worked. But really I couldn't think. My heart wasn't in it because all I could think about was him.
And the next summer I went back as a guest and I stayed with Uzi for that summer. Worked on the kibbutz and I was Uzi's guest? girlfriend? I spent a few months there and then I came back to Britain – I think I had a re-sit or something. But I decided I would just go back to live in Israel with him. So I just left London. I came home first to Scotland. My parents were living in Gullane. I thought, 'That's it, I'm going back!' And I had this friend who said, 'Mand, if you love him, then you've got to go after him.'
And we have been together ever since.
Yeah. It's a bit about knowing somebody. Accepting. It's about giving space to someone and it's also about what you share. And still being interested. You know.
And do you know something? If I had to capture an image it would be this – I'm sitting in the dining room and it's late lunchtime and then I see Uzi coming in. And he comes in and he's got these woollen socks and his work boots on and he's kind of tripping into the dining room. And he's picking up his tray and he's looking round the dining room and then he sees me. And he does this kind of double blink.
He does this double blink, with this beautiful smile, and he sees me. He sees me. I would capture that, just that.
CHAPTER 2
How I Met Harry
Each weary footstep carries me further – along miles of coastline, scoured beaches and cliff-top promontories. England gives way to Scotland. I cross that cultural, political and national divide – the sun shines the same on either side, the marram grass gently beckons me onwards, into the strong air.
* * *
This story of how I met Harry is so ridiculous. I was volunteering with Greenpeace. I was working on a ship with them and we had made port in Stornoway, in the Outer Hebrides. Long story short, we had to do this flight over to Ireland to find fishing trawlers to do an action on. So we chartered this plane to Ireland. They said, 'Lily, we're going to send you to use the equipment and figure it out, and you're going to have to go to Ireland for five days and just wait there until the ship comes and makes port in Galway and we come pick you up.' They said, 'Here's some money, find a hostel there, whatever, there you go!' I was like eighteen at the time and thought, 'This is really cool.' And so we fly over to Ireland. We land and this pilot says, 'Where am I bringing you?' And I said, 'The closest hotel or whatever works.' He said, 'Oh well, I live on this farm with my family, and I have a son that's your age and a daughter that's a year older and another daughter that's younger, and you should come stay with us if you want.'
So I just show up on this farm in Ireland with like beautiful, green, verdant fields. And they raise cows – it's this organic cow farm! Jerry, who's the father, is a pilot and his son, Harry, is also a pilot, so when they're back here they have this hangar with these teeny little planes. And they were like, 'Oh, do you wanna go up for a spin in the plane?' They're just the most genuine people. I don't even know how to describe it – just the most real people, just kind, unapologetic. They just welcomed me in. I was this Greenpeace person. I was all pierced and vegetarian and eighteen and I was like 'I know everything about the world!' but, actually, in reality, I know nothing! But they just said, 'Come.' They wouldn't take my money, they wouldn't take anything, and it was just like this respite, having been on a ship for about two and a half months at this point, having this family to be part of.
I left but we remained in touch. They said, 'Cool, whenever you wanna come back, then please do.' And it turns out that I've gone back almost every year for Christmas. They're like a second family to me now. That family unit is so unlike what my family unit was like because my parents are no longer together, so we never really had that space that we all had together and were present for each other. So to be welcomed into that was such a blessing. Yeah, I have a lot of love for them. I think there's definitely sadness that comes from needing to work through some of what my own family situation was like. But then that beauty as well, I guess, from being so welcomed. Sometimes it's crazy how they can be so close together – that feeling of sadness but also of joy.
It's almost surreal because the story itself is sort of like serendipity. And it's almost hard to accept sometimes – if you are used to this conditionality of love, this expectation of something else that isn't just that pure 'release', that giving without anything in return. I'm kind of like, 'Woh, I don't know what to do with this.' And then to have maintained that relationship and still have that connection and resonance, and then the growth everyone in that family has gone through that you've been able to witness, and them of me too. Yeah, it's just been this huge teacher in my life, a really wonderful example of love.
I've definitely always said that they're my second family, but I think really delving into what that means shows the dimensionality of love. It by no means illegitimises the love that you have with your own family, it just shows you that there is this spectrum, this depth and width to it that's so nuanced and so complex but basic as well.
CHAPTER 3
Shrapnel and Flowers
Just above the beach, facing out to sea, stands a row of park benches that frame the elegant grass lawns. Here, walkers walk dogs and folk huddle together, like cardboard cut-outs swaying stiffly in the sea breeze. I pause to take in the scene and am confronted by an energetic women armed with a ball, a retrieving dog, a wonderful sense of humour, and a gregariously told love story.
* * *
When we were young, my mother and father were original Independent Labour Party people, you know. We went to an organisation called the Socialist Sunday School. We lived in Glasgow, and during the war my father was a RollsRoyce engineer who built Spitfires. As a result of the working conditions during the war he took TB and he died when we were all quite young. Anyway, that's by the by! In the Socialist Sunday School we learned the basics of what socialism meant, and that was where we also learned our love of the outdoors – we went camping, rambling and we went hostelling. We met every Sunday all through the year and then, on May Day, we had a big celebration. But when we got to become teenagers, we were looking for a little more than this. The Labour Party had a youth movement called the Young Socialists. They got a bit too leftwing so they got disbanded. So what did we all do, young budding socialists? We all joined the Young Communist League. It was 1955. I was seventeen. I lived in Glasgow, I was a Young Communist and I sang in the Young Communist Choir. And we went to Warsaw to a World Youth Peace Festival – and Warsaw was interesting because when you walked through the town every building either had shrapnel or flowers in it because it was just ten years after the war.
And there was an obvious generation, particularly the men, who were just not there. The Poles suffered horrendously in the war. At the festival, I was one of the Scottish dancers in this group. We arrived there and we met a group of Polish folk dancers and I fell madly in love with one of them. He was called Leszek – Leszek Kalinowski – who I've now found out is some sort of professor in Krakow or somewhere. I'm pleased to say he has stayed and not left Poland because there's a lot to be said for the old system! We stayed in touch for a while but it wasn't really practical, so it fizzled out. I've been married twice since then. I've lived all over the world, and wherever I've been I've got involved with teaching kids to dance. I had this international school group in Dar es Salaam and I had another group of these silly boys in Sri Lanka. Wherever I've been, I've always done dancing, and it's just lovely, you know. And all these kids get a wee bit of Scotland in them, wherever they go. It's good. It's good, you know. For me, love is socialism, it's common ownership and control. I'll start quoting the precepts, you know: 'It's common ownership and control of these things we need in order to live happily and well.'
CHAPTER 4
Love Is Just Being
Each part of me aches now. Each step seems to jar my body. I shudder along the road, tripping past villages, bumbling through golf courses. I long to be still, I yearn for silence. I miss the sea – that wide expanse of sky and ether. I am only sixty miles into a 500-mile journey west and then north. I am a stranger here, a foreigner seeking connection. I am a revolving door of arrivals and departures, a brief encounter on the path.
* * *
At that time I felt so far away from my home. I felt so far away from everybody that, I guess, I'd ever been close to. And I think I was trying to reach out to them, hoping that in the time I was away I would be able to somehow resolve it. To rebuild that connection that had been broken. And then it was funny because, in being away, that didn't actually happen – I wasn't able to resolve it at all. It made me really sad and it made me cry because we've been through a lot.
I'd always longed to travel, and I'd got to an age and a stage where I hadn't gone to the places I thought I was going to. I wanted to see new things. I wanted to get outside and be outside with nature and walk mountains and just be elevated and have something that wasn't here, like the UK, or things that I already knew, or even Europe. I wanted to leave the safety-net of Europe because I'd never left before. I left to try and get some equilibrium back, to try and get some balance, and that space was incredible. To be away and have that sense of perspective and look back. And especially 'cause I'd gone to the other side of the planet. You see your life completely differently, and you see the things you do have and you see the people that you love and the things that you're from and the things that make you up and the things that make sense. At the time it didn't make any difference that there were literally countries and oceans between me and the things I'd left. Those bonds are still really strong.
I'd run away and I still loved somebody. But I couldn't make it work. I tried – we tried – and we couldn't seem to work it through. So it was really painful. I completely hadn't expected it at all and I came apart.
I was thinking generally about love and what love is – whether it's with people, places, things. And I realised I think I struggle to talk about it because, for me, sadly, my association with love now, very specifically with other people and my ex, is so much bound up with grief as well. With grief and loss. And that's so painful – I wouldn't know how to begin that dialogue. There's so much loss there that I'm trying to heal from.
I think it was love in its brightest sense – I think?
I don't know because I haven't really loved that much. I've not been in love much. Like I spent a lot of my life loving people or having a fondness of people from afar, and then, when I actually finally fell in love, I really, really fell. I almost fell too deeply, to the point that when I needed to find a way out I couldn't! It's hard because I struggle to remember the brightness and the loveliness of that time – because there's such an association now with a period of being not OK. So it's almost like the journey's kind of gone and I'm somewhere, somewhere beyond that. I don't know where I am on the journey. I feel like a smaller version of myself.
The journey I'm on, I think, is about learning to embrace the good things about yourself. Rather than seeing sensitivity and feeling things strongly as a bad thing, to see it as a good thing, definitely. I think there's a healing in being in the elements and being in nature. And in a way, although it's frightening at times, just being stood on a cliff-top, being buffeted by the wind, to the point that you're being blown off – it's great because it awakens your senses, it makes you feel alive. Yeah, it brings you back to the now.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "A Human Love Story"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Matt Hopwood.
Excerpted by permission of Birlinn Limited.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Clare Balding,
The Journey – Five Hundred Miles on Foot through Scotland Listening,
1 It Wasn't a Fleeting Thing,
2 How I Met Harry,
3 Shrapnel and Flowers,
4 Love Is Just Being,
5 We Don't Like to Say, 'I Love You',
6 You've Been Dumped!,
7 It's the First Forever Thing,
8 She Was Checking Out My Ass,
9 I Never Said, 'I Love You',
10 We're Just Humans on This Rock,
11 'I Love You, But I'm Scared',
12 After a Wee While, We Started To Notice Each Other,
13 I'm Not the Most Eloquent,
14 It's Starting To Come Together,
15 What's the Problem?,
16 Nothing Short of Love,
17 There's More Amour in It,
18 Who Are You Waiting For?,
19 Let's Keep It Brief,
20 Everything's Fine,
21 Dashing Good Looks,
22 And the Music Went, and the Music Went, and the Music Went!,
23 I Love the Bones of Them,
24 He Was Dancing to Right Said Fred,
25 A Cake on the Doorstep,
26 That's the Deal,
27 I'm Worth Loving,
28 Are We Just Worm Food?,
29 To Be Part of Something,
30 Don't I Know You from Somewhere?,
31 We're Definitely Coming Home,
32 Being of Service,
33 My Place To Be,
34 I Didn't Believe in Love,
Epilogue,
Footnote,
Blessing,
Acknowledgements,
Share Your Story,