This week, a nice couple from Tiverton are coming to buy our climbing frame. Putting it together was one of the last things that Charlie and I ever did together, and therefore you might assume that I wouldn’t want to get rid of it because of all the associated memories, but to me it’s just a big collection of metal bars, lying on the barn floor awaiting collection.

I have no sentimental attachment to the climbing frame, but the memory of the day we got it is firmly stored away. It was a blustery spring day and there was a slight drizzle, which made handling the large metal posts and tiny nuts quite awkward, but we worked at it together, and in a couple of hours it was up. It was a long, fiddly job, but the morning passed without a single cross word. When it was finished, Charlie sat and rested with Rosie and I came out with a pot of tea and some home made ginger cake; and then we all watched in horror as a giggling Alice fell from the top platform of her new plaything and bounced onto the grass below. Luckily she was unhurt, and so we gave her a cuddle, fed her some cake and sat and admired the fruits of our labours. I have a picture of my girls on the glider swing soon afterwards, laughing in the sunshine of an Easter weekend; Charlie isn’t in the photograph because he’d died a week earlier, but my girls were happily swinging; swinging and laughing in the warm spring sun.

The climbing frame brings back lots of memories, and now it’s in bits, but I am not. I will not hold onto things just because they have an association with Charlie, and for my girls, seeing that I’m not upset about letting things go helps them to understand that life has moved forward, and that I have too. They are happy to see the climbing frame go; Rosie helped me to take it apart, just as her daddy had helped me to put it together, and there was a beautiful symmetry in that for me. And if I needed any further evidence that my girls have accepted the loss of their father, I got it yesterday, when they asked if we could make a collage of photographs. I assumed it would include pictures of Charlie, but Rosie said, ‘No, Mummy, I want it to be just the three of us - our family as it is now.’ She is only ten years old, but somehow her understanding of life and loss goes way beyond her years, and I am grateful for that, and for the fact that we are a happy family, despite everything that we’ve had to endure.

Yesterday we went for a walk to Blackdown rings. The rings are the remains of an Iron Age settlement perched on a hill near our village. They have stunning views, and at this time of year, swathes of bluebells carpet the ditches and battlements.

The air was heady with the rich coconut scent of gorse flowers, and filled our lungs as we raced and tumbled through the glistening bluebells. We chased sheep, chased each other and laughed until we were hoarse; and as we stood to catch our breath and looked out across the patchwork of fields to the sea beyond, I thought how wonderful it was that I have two little girls who are so happy and so resolute. They know their daddy is with them, in their hearts and in their heads; he’s not in a metal ladder or on a swing, he’s not tied to a jumble of bars and bolts, he’s part of them and part of me, and he always will be.

And when the nice man comes to take away the climbing frame, he’ll never know that Charlie was the man who built it; he’ll take it home and his two little boys will be able to laugh and swing in the warm spring sunshine. And that climbing frame will begin to take on a whole new host of associated memories, which is just as it should be, because things do not hold the memories of people; people do.



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