MARTIN FLANAGAN: Love in the time of lockdown

Jenny and Alan Chinn, the love that lived next door to the Flanagan family for more than 30 years.

Jenny lived next door to us for over 30 years.
Had this flashing vitality and a smile to match.
Had enthusiasms and opinions.
I didn’t go along with all her opinions but we never clashed.
We’d yarn at the fence when she was gardening.
She was on for the frank exchange,
I loved making her laugh.
Her laugh’s like a wave on a good day at the beach,
Fun energy heading for a common shore.
One day, when I’d known her 25 years,
She casually advised me she’d hitch-hiked through Libya in her 20s.
I did a lot of hitching in my 20s, some in other countries.
For a woman who hitch-hiked through Libya in her 20s,
Even with another woman her age as a companion,
I can only express respect.
Then she told me she’d hitched through Morocco and Algeria too.

A primary school teacher, she married in her mid-30s.
That was forty years ago.
He was a Londoner, pencil-thin with a moustache,
and that understated wit you get in English police shows.
We called him Big Al.
A wise man, one you could go to for a word of advice.
He’d grown up during the Blitz,
Saw a kitchen wall blown out by a Luftwaffe bomb while hiding under a table,
Went to Stamford Bridge with his Dad to watch Chelsea.
For years, we watched the FA Cup together.
His other passions have been wooden boats and Dixieland jazz.
I have an African American friend to whom I said,
“When I die, I want to come back as a New Orleans jazzman”.
He said, “Why?”, I said, “Because they make a happy sound”.
Well, that was Big Al’s sound.
Weekends it would float over the fence from his workshop,
the same fence he lowered chocolates over on a fishing line
for our kids when they were little.

He got Parkinson’s disease the year before we left Melbourne.
Then dementia’s long evening settled in
As he became more haggard, I saw a hint of fear in his eyes.
I also saw a private love, hers for him, reveal itself like the rising sun.

He’s in an aged care facility now.
During the lockdown, she was shut out.
I rang her a couple of times, expecting her
to be down, but she wasn’t.
She said, “I just want to be with my mate”.
I made her laugh with a story about a Londoner I met in Launceston,
Same sense of humour as Big Al’s.
I was carrying a book I was given leaving Melbourne,
“Facing the Fifties” by Peter O’Connor. I’m 65.
The Londoner looked at my face, looked at the book title,
looked at my face again and said, “Slow reader, are we?”
That set her laugh in motion like it would never stop.
I said, “How come you’re doing so well?”
She said, “I live in the now”, and told me a story:
The first time she was let back in to see Big Al,
she met him with the words, “It’s me, your old girlfriend”,
And danced around him.
She’s a helluva dancer.
In the old days, when she had parties,
Our floorboards hummed along.
He hadn’t spoken in a year,
Now he made it to the front door
of the dark house that is his mind,
smiled and said, “ ’Ello, beautiful”.

That’s the love next door.