A little thing I wrote a few years ago for the Cabin Pressure Christmas exchange:
Let me tell you about my uncle Arthur.
I had loads of aunts and uncles, of course. My Dad had a brother and a sister, and my mum was the eldest of eight. Arthur was not a real uncle, technically - but being my Dad’s closest friend, and pretty much the kindest man in the world, arguably he was the unclest uncle we ever had.
When we were young, he’d come to our house every summer for a week or two and we looked forward to that more than Christmas or the end of school. He’d always bring an extra suitcase full of books and nothing else - having his own airline meant he wasn’t bound by the same weight restrictions as the average traveller. His pilots would drop him off at the airstrip and we’d drive out to pick him up. Then every evening he’d read us stories and do all the voices. Paddington and Pooh were his favourites and became ours too, so much that we can’t think of Arthur without thinking of bears. My sister even had a teddy she called Arthur… he’s still around somewhere. I think her granddaughter has him now.
And the games! He knew such marvellous games. Apparently, he and Dad and Douglas - you’ve heard me mention Douglas? He was the other pilot at the airline when it was just starting out; he visited us often, sometimes at the same time as Arthur - and so, apparently, they played these extraordinary games when they were flying. You know, to beat the boredom on long trips; word games and trivia games and guessing games...
Our favourite was the Travelling Lemon. Arthur always had a lemon on him, somewhere. He said he kept it in his special ‘citrus pocket’, which was an in-joke with Dad. He’d bring tangerines if he came at Christmas. So how the game works is that, on the plane, Arthur or one of the pilots would go out and hide a lemon somewhere in plain sight - it had to be in plain sight - then one of the others would go out and have to find it and re-hide it. When we played it at home: as you can imagine, in the castle, sometimes the hunts would last for days. Once we found it lined up with a set of Russian dolls, and once in a huge bunch of yellow roses Dad bought Mama for her birthday. Arthur had stuck it on a rose stem and everything.
At the end of his visit every summer, the lemon would be squeezed into gin-and-tonics for Mama, Dad, and Arthur, and the husk given to us to whack about with a cricket bat until it fell to pieces. But one year, we still hadn’t found it by the time Arthur left for England, and he wouldn’t tell us where it was. We searched for the rest of the holidays, but still nothing. Finally, after we’d been back at school for over a month, Mama found it behind the washing machine - it had fallen out of a decorative basket up above - and it was completely black and mouldy and almost too squishy to pick up in one piece.
We called Uncle Arthur to ask, “What should we do with it now?”
“Put it in the ground and see if the seeds will grow,” he said, so we did. We weren’t very hopeful, of course. I mean, a lemon tree in Lichtenstein! But lo and behold, it actually came up! And it kept growing and growing and in a few years it even had a lemon on it in time for Arthur’s visit.
All through our childhoods, our teens, our early adulthoods, we drew on the thought of our steadfast little lemon tree whenever things were uncertain or difficult. “Lemons grow in Lichtenstein,” we’d tell each other, so anything was possible. It was Uncle Arthur’s philosophy entirely, and although I’ve inherited more than a few of my Dad’s neuroses, I think I’ve lived my life by it: be playful, be kind, enjoy the little things, and have faith through the big ones.
And every time I have a lemon from that tree, I remember Uncle Arthur and his visits, and his stories and games and his kindness. Because it’s still there. It must be, what? Fifty or sixty years since we planted it. It’s still there and it still grows lemons. And it makes me think of that silly old saying, too. What is it?
Ah, that’s it. When life gives you lemons... plant them.
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