Daisy: March 2020

That afternoon, a miracle occurs. A sudden pinging of phones and flashing of screens heralds the return of the Wi-Fi and all of us spend a few hours catching up with messages and news from the outside world. My joy at being able to communicate with my family again is tempered by a string of messages from Sorcha.

Are you there, Mum?

. . .

Where have you got to?

. . .

Can we talk?

. . .

Guess you’re out of reception or data or battery or something. Just wanted to let you know things haven’t worked out for Mara and me at Dad’s. We’re driving up to Granny’s. Going to be locking down at Ardtuath with her and Davy. All good. Hope you’re OK too and somewhere safe. Message us when you can xx

And then a brief and typically to-the-point one from Mara:

Dad’s a plonker. We love you, Mum.

While I have to admit to feeling a certain amount of grim satisfaction at that last one, I’m concerned that they have been hurt again by their father’s behaviour. I worry too whether they will be able to make the long drive north, presumably through a Britain that is rapidly shutting down, and I imagine roadblocks and police checks preventing people from travelling. I check the latest pandemic updates. The lockdown has taken effect as of today, so they should have made it just in time.

There’s a message from my mum too, which I read next:

Delighted to have the girls here with us. Don’t worry, will take good care of them. They were upset about their dad kicking them out, but it’s time they realised who he really is. Will be good to be locked down together and there’s plenty of space for them at the big house now it’s empty. It’s been way too quiet with the music school closed. They’re filling the rooms with their voices and their laughter. Hope you’re somewhere safe. Surely this lockdown can’t last more than a couple of weeks? Hugs from me, and Davy sends love too xx

I try calling Mum’s number and miraculously my call connects. Tears spring to my eyes at the sound of her voice. It feels extraordinary to be able to speak to her again at last, so effortlessly, at the touch of a button.

She reassures me she’s feeling much better now, only occasionally pausing when a tight-sounding cough forces her to do so. She answers my torrent of questions: yes, everyone else is fine; the girls are okay, don’t worry; they’re holed up in rooms at the music school while they, too, keep themselves separate for a period of quarantine to be on the safe side; she and Elspeth have been delivering food to them, leaving it at the door; they talk to each other from a safe distance; Davy’s been doing shopping runs in the Land Rover, not just for themselves but for anyone else in the community who can’t manage to get out; only one or two others seem to have the virus and they’re keeping themselves apart.

‘But now tell me your news,’ she says. ‘I can’t believe you’ve finally managed to get to Phortse! What’s it like?’

‘It’s everything we imagined it would be and more, Mum. I wish you were here too. I think I’ve found Violet’s family. We have so many Sherpa cousins! I’ll have to try to work out how we’re all connected and add it to the family tree. Best of all, her daughter’s still alive. Yes, Themi! She must be ninety now. She has a granddaughter called Pema living in the village too. I’m meeting them tomorrow. I’ll send you photos of everything. Don’t worry, I’m fine. You keep yourselves safe.’

‘That’s so exciting! And you sound good, Daisy,’ she says. ‘Your voice sounds stronger than it has done in ages. Listen,’ she continues, ‘I’m going to let you go. Call the girls while the internet’s working. I know they’d love to talk to you.’

After we hang up, I take a moment to breathe deeply and allow the feeling of relief at being able to speak to her – to reassure myself that they really are all right there – to sing through my veins. Then I call Sorcha’s number.

‘Mum? Are you there? Oh my God, I can’t believe it! Hang on a minute, I’ll call Mara. I’m putting you on speaker.’ I hear her shout for her sister, the sound of footsteps, a shriek when she tells her, ‘It’s Mum – on the phone from Nepal!’ And then I hear both my girls’ voices and this time the tears don’t just spring to my eyes but run down my cheeks as well.

‘I’m so glad you’re there safe and sound,’ I say. ‘Sorry it didn’t work out in London. Want to tell me what happened?’

‘Honestly, Mum, this is a much better place to be locked down,’ Sorcha replies. ‘Granny and Grandad are so cool, and we have fresh air and a whole country mansion to ourselves, filled with musical instruments. Couldn’t be better.’

‘Dad was a total pain,’ Mara chips in. ‘After about twenty-four hours of nagging us about not putting our things away because Sorcha dared to leave her laptop on the kitchen table and I was trying to charge my phone on his charger, he told us Claire needs space and we take up too much of it.’

‘That’s not exactly how he put it,’ Sorcha interjects, ever the voice of reason.

‘Yeah, I know, but it’s basically what he was saying. Honestly, Mum, they made us feel so unwelcome. He was acting so different.’

‘Well, it’s a stressful time for everyone,’ I say. ‘Claire’s shows will be cancelled and there’ll be no work for him either. They’ll be worried about your brother Max as well. It won’t be good for a wee one being shut away from friends and fun now.’

‘Yeah, yeah, we know, Max is his son. But we’re his daughters. Honestly, we were talking about it in the car driving north – ’cause we just loaded up our things and headed for Granny’s as soon as she said we could come – and we were saying how we saw a completely different side to him. We can totally understand now why you split up from him. He’s such a control freak!’

Mara’s indignation makes me smile. It sounds a lot healthier than being hurt, even though my twins must be smarting a bit. ‘Well, I’m just glad you’re at Ardtuath now. It’s a good place to be locked down.’

‘Anyway,’ says Sorcha, ‘tell us all about where you are. Have you tracked down Violet?’

‘I have! Well, some of her family, anyway.’ I fill them in.

‘That’s, like, so bizarre that we have cousins who are Sherpas, living in the Himalayas,’ says Mara.

‘Actually, they’re called the Himalaya,’ Sorcha corrects her.

‘Whatever,’ her sister replies. ‘The Himalaya then. Anyhow, it’s totally cool, Mum.’

‘Send us photos when you can.’

‘We love you . . .’

My girls’ voices chime together as they talk over one another.

‘I love you too. Take care ...’ And then I realise I’m talking into thin air as the connection has dropped and they’ve gone.

I notice a new message from Jack has arrived as well while I’ve been on the phone.

Made it to the Azores. Moored off Sao Miguel. Still not allowed to land, but food delivery (at a distance) and refuelling possible. Are you in the mountains now?

And then there’s a photograph of whitewashed houses with red roofs set against a backdrop of lush greenery. He’s captioned it with another of his anagrams:

THE EYES – THEY SEE.

I prepare a message to send him later too, Wi-Fi permitting. It’s a picture of the pure blue sky outside the window of the teahouse, with Khumbila’s snow-capped summit standing tall against it and not a cloud in sight. I add a caption too. CORONAVIRUS: O, ’AV’ NO CIRRUS . It’s the best I can come up with.

I’d set the alarm on my phone, not wanting to waste time asleep when new-found freedom beckons with the opportunity to get outside and explore Phortse. But when I come downstairs to the dining room next morning, the sounds of chattering voices interspersed by great gusts of laughter are already coming from the kitchen. I tap on the door and push it open. Several smiling faces turn my way. A woman about my mum’s age gets to her feet and hurries over to envelop me in a hug. ‘Daisy Didi ,’ she says. ‘I’m your cousin Pema. Violet’s great-granddaughter.’

The word ‘ Didi ’ seems to be added to the name of anyone close enough to count as a sister-cousin (and ‘ Dai ’ is added for a brother-cousin), so I feel a flush of gratification and pride when Pema – my third cousin, if I’ve worked it out correctly – refers to me as Daisy Didi .

I take both her hands in mine. ‘Pema,’ I repeat. And then, in a very British manner, I say, ‘It’s lovely to meet you.’ The words don’t even begin to cover my emotions. How can it be that I feel so at home, so welcomed and accepted, in a place that couldn’t be more foreign and a world that’s been turned upside down?

Several others come forward to hug me too. I try to take in their names but am too overwhelmed by it all for now. Dipa herds us through into the dining room where there’s far more space and we won’t be under her feet as she prepares gallons of tea and piles of pancakes for everyone by way of breakfast. The stove hasn’t been lit yet, but the room quickly heats up with smiles and excited chatter, as well as the steaming teacups and warmth of so many bodies, filling the teahouse with life after the quietness and emptiness of quarantine.

My long-lost, new-found family crowds round the table when I pull out the sketchy family tree and several new branches are soon added. There’s much discussion and debate as to where each of them fits in and I have to resort to starting a new page to accommodate everyone. It’s not so much a tree as a web now, and when it comes to adding Dipa’s sister’s husband’s brother who is married to Pema, thereby connecting in a whole new strand of the family, Tashi brings out a roll of sticky tape so I can add another page out to one side.

Filling in the spaces gives me the chance to ask questions about what family means to the Sherpa people. ‘When the rest of the world talks about Sherpas, they think it means the guides who lead expeditions to the top of Mount Everest,’ says Pema. ‘But that’s wrong. Sherpas are a distinct people. They were from Tibet originally, but they brought their yaks, their language, their faith and their traditions over the mountains from the east to settle here in Nepal. And because they’re so well adapted to living and working at high altitudes, they’ve gained a reputation for being the best guides to lead climbers wanting to reach the summits.’

‘Number one best guides, like I told you,’ Tashi interjects. ‘This not something Sherpas very comfortable with though. Standing on heads of our mountain gods and goddesses disrespectful. Brings bad karma .’

Pema nods. ‘Violet saw many changes here in her lifetime, and my grandmother, Themi, can tell you more.’

‘And Themi is Scottish, like me?’ I ask, pointing at the family tree. ‘The daughter of Violet and Callum.’

‘Yes, but she honorary Sherpa. Grew up at Phortse. And she marry Sherpa too,’ says Tashi. ‘She our sister-cousin, Themi Didi . Granny to us all.’

‘It was rare in those days for the Sherpa people to marry anyone outside their own community,’ Pema explains. ‘But it’s a bit more common now. We’ve become integrated, haven’t we, Dipa? Dipa is a member of the Rai tribe,’ she explains, ‘so we’re both outsiders in a way.’ She smiles across at her sister-cousin, who is busily piling more pancakes on to my plate. Then she pushes a jar of honey towards me, urging me to eat. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to be the hallucinogenic variety.

‘But you both make good choice, marry Sherpa men,’ Tashi beams, reaching across the table to drizzle some more honey over the pile of pancakes on his own plate.

Luckily for me, everyone speaks at least a little English here. Pema’s is particularly good, I suppose because Violet and Themi must have spoken it at home. When I ask her about it, she smiles. ‘You’re right, my great-granny, my grandmother and my mother made sure I learned English as well as Sherpa and Nepali when I was growing up. They wanted me to be able to choose where I lived. Somehow, though, we’ve all chosen to stay here. It has its challenges, as you’ve already seen, living at the limits of human endurance. But the world is a crazy place, and here, it seems to me, we are more concerned with the things that really matter. I guess having to work hard just to survive tends to focus the mind.’

‘Is your mother still living here in the village?’ I ask, pulling the family tree towards us and pointing at the name ‘Poppy’ that sits beneath Themi’s name.

She shakes her head. ‘No, she and my dad died many years ago,’ she says softly. ‘And once someone has gone, we don’t say their names. Or if we do, we then say Om mani padme hum , as a blessing for their departed souls.’

I want to ask her more about her parents, but Dipa and Tashi begin to clear away the plates and teacups and Pema stands up, pulling on her quilted jacket. ‘Are you ready, Didi ?’ she asks. ‘Come and meet your cousin Themi.’

The others remain in the teahouse, catching up with the rest of the news from the outside world that Tashi and Soman have brought from Kathmandu, while I follow Pema up the path that runs to one side of the teahouse. The morning sunshine has melted most of the snow from the fields now and the people working yak dung into the soil to replenish it ready for this season’s crops call out a greeting of Tashi delek as we pass. It’s the Sherpa equivalent of Namaste , Pema tells me.

I’m quickly out of breath, and Pema slows her pace a little as we climb the path towards the monastery at the highest point of the village. A baby yak watches us with big eyes, its mother busily cropping the longer grass along the edge of the stone wall as we pass. We stop to watch a helicopter fly up the valley below us. ‘They’re running an emergency service only now,’ Pema says. ‘Just rescues and delivery of essential supplies. All the climbing expeditions have been cancelled.’

A series of stone steps continues upwards past a brightly painted prayer wheel towards the monastery, where giant prayer flags wave against the backdrop of the mountains, but instead of climbing them, Pema leads me on to a left-hand fork of the path, which follows the contour of the hill. We’re above most of the other houses now. Up here there are just a few low-built stone cottages. Several look uninhabited, judging by their closed-up windows and doors. One, however, has a wisp of smoke issuing from a hole in its roof. Pema walks over to it and calls out, announcing our arrival.

And then she appears, drawing aside the traditional cloth curtain, with its appliquéd geometric design, that serves as a door covering: Violet’s daughter, Themi. She’s small and stooped, the years having bent and gnarled her slight figure like a rhododendron branch, and she wears the traditional Sherpa dress and apron. Her pure-white hair is twisted into a braid and a pair of coral and turquoise earrings dangle against her wind-reddened cheeks. My throat constricts so tightly I can’t speak as she takes my hands in hers. Her smile crinkles her beautiful face into a thousand creases as she gazes at me with a pair of clear hazel eyes.

Without a word, she leads me inside and pats the brightly striped blanket on the bench, gesturing to me to sit down. She stands back, scrutinising me again for a long moment, and then says, in an accent that still carries a faint Scottish lilt, her voice soft with age, ‘So you came to find us at last. You are very welcome, Daisy Didi .’

She and Pema build up the fire to make tea, giving me time to take in my surroundings. There’s no stove in Themi’s one-room home, just a low fireplace at one end, built from stones and mud. There’s no chimney either, just a hole in the roof to let the smoke out, and I wonder how bitterly cold it must get in the depths of winter. The walls and ceiling of the simple stone dwelling are completely blackened with soot. In one corner is a low sleeping platform made of rough wooden planks, upon which sits a lumpy mattress covered in a pile of quilts and blankets. A small table stands beside the bench on which I sit, but there’s no other furniture apart from a battered trunk and a large plastic drum, which, I imagine, must hold Themi’s clothes. Everything else she owns is arranged on shelves lining the walls. I notice how, in the dim light entering through the age-frosted windows, every pot, pan and plate gleams, spotlessly clean against the soot-blackened stones.

Pema has begun stoking the fire with juniper twigs to rekindle it, but Themi waves her aside and sets about making tea the Sherpa way, her movements a fluid dance of familiarity. She pours water from a jerrycan into a pot and places it above the flames, then throws in a handful of tea leaves, some sugar and a good glug of milk. The whole lot is boiled up together and then she decants it into a tin kettle before pouring it through a strainer into cups. It’s nothing like the tea I’m used to, but the strong, sweet concoction warms and energises. I feel the chill in my bones begin to ease, and the heavy tightness in my cold muscles lifts a little, as if someone has switched on my internal central heating.

I spread the newly extended family tree on the table before us and Themi asks about my mum and Davy, about my brother, Stuart, and his family, and about my girls. I pull out my phone and show her pictures of her long-lost relations in Scotland and she nods her approval at each one, her face crinkling in delight. ‘We thought we must still have a Scottish family, didn’t we, Pema? Although Violet didn’t talk about them much. She always said her life was here in Nepal.’

I wonder, fleetingly, about saying Violet’s name. Maybe it’s okay if she wasn’t born a Sherpa, or perhaps it’s all right to say Om mani padme hum in our heads, because it seems to be acceptable to talk about her. There are so many questions I want to ask, I hardly know where to begin. So I start by pulling the tiny shoe from my pocket and placing it alongside the family tree. ‘This was in the chest where I found Violet’s journals and letters.’

Themi picks it up, a look of wonder spreading across her features. She gets to her feet and crosses the room to the fireplace. I hadn’t noticed it before, but there’s a little niche set into the stones forming the back wall of the house, camouflaged by the years of accumulated soot. She reaches into it. Then she returns to the table and sets the shoe’s twin down beside it. The leather is cracked and blackened with age, but it’s unmistakeably the other half of the pair.

‘These shoes were mine,’ she says. ‘My mother told me my Aunt Hetty sent them out to us when I was born. I wore them when I learned to walk, but quickly outgrew them. So my mother put the single shoe in the wall. She said it was a Scottish tradition, to protect us from evil spirits and keep us safe. I never knew what happened to the other shoe. But now here it is. You have reunited us with it, just as you’ve reunited us with our Scottish family, Daisy Didi . Thank you.’

‘I guess Violet must have sent it back to Hetty for safekeeping. There were envelopes of seeds in the box with all the papers, too. And some of her paintings of wildflowers.’

‘Did you bring them with you as well?’ asks Themi, her eyes bright with curiosity.

I shake my head. ‘No, the seeds were ruined and the pictures are still in the library at Ardtuath. But we can send them to you if you like.’

She smiles. ‘You will bring them next time you come, maybe?’

Her words take me by surprise. I’d always thought of this trip as a one-off, the holiday of a lifetime. It hadn’t occurred to me that finding family here has set in place new connections, like strings of prayer flags stretching across the miles, linking us forever. ‘Next time,’ I say. And I grin, thinking how Mum and my girls would love to meet their Sherpa cousins.

‘Now,’ Themi says. ‘Pema will make us some more tea and I will tell you what I know of my mother’s life here in Phortse.’

I pull out a pen and a pad of paper to take notes so that I can transcribe them later and send them to Mum. And then, in that little one-roomed house, as the flames dance and leap in the fireplace and the mountain wind whispers outside against the stones, carrying upon it the voices of long-departed souls, she begins to tell me the rest of Violet’s story.

When it’s time to go, she holds up a hand and says, ‘Wait.’ She goes over to the large plastic drum in the corner and begins to unscrew the top. Her arthritic hands can’t get a proper grip, though, so Pema helps her.

‘These drums were once used by climbing expeditions to transport food and equipment up to Everest Base Camp,’ Pema explains. ‘Nowadays, though, they use weatherproof bags. So we’ve recycled the bins. You’ll find one in just about every house in Phortse. They make good storage, stop the damp getting in.’

Themi reaches into the drum and brings out a plastic bag. ‘Here,’ she says. ‘Take these away and read them.’

She and Pema smile as I look up at them in wonder. Because the bag contains a small pile of notebooks, made from lokta paper. And I realise I’m holding in my hands the next instalment of Violet’s journals.