Book review: Names and Addresses by Diana Gruffydd Williams

Jon Gower

Megan Roberts is one of those redoubtable women who has strength enough to share around.

Now that she shares accommodation with assorted folk who live in a sheltered housing project the demands on her time and wisdom are legion. Not everyone gets on in the place.

Friendships can turn sour and she is often the slighted person’s confidante. But she always rises to the occasion, does her bit to help, in part because it seems to help her slowly deal with the loss of her husband Hugo.

Caring

So it’s one of the more surprising turns in this debut novel that Megan – both its central character and lynchpin of the community – starts to spend time with Albert, one of her neighbours in the complex and quietly falls in love with him.

What makes it surprising is the fact that Albert is very unwell with cancer and so it seems as if Megan is going to re-live the experience of caring for someone in their final time on earth. It’s something she known and feels most keenly, especially as they both lie in bed one night:

In the darkened room, she realised that she would soon have to let all this go. Was she strong enough to deal with it? Should she have kept her distance? But no, the felt the warm glow inside. The relationship was so precious – more so because it was destined to be brief. All this pass in this life. She wouldn’t have missed out on this intimacy with Albert. Not for all the tea in China.

            Not for all the tea in China.

Kindness

Megan’s kindness to other extends well beyond the unstinting care she offers Albert as he worsens, goes to hospital and thence to a hospice. She mends family rifts and the problems of some individual members such as her granddaughter Bella and helps sort out the problems of many, including some of her former pupils from the days when she taught for a living.

In all this she is shored up and supported by gifts from the Spirit, expressions of what can seem like unorthodox faith, but one that keeps her going as surely as the light from a candle flame. Some of the Biblical texts she sometimes brings to mind could easily apply to herself: ‘Come to Me. All you who are weary and heavy-laden and I will give you rest for your souls. Learn from Me for I am gentle and humble of heart.’ Megan is most certainly humble of heart and ever so gentle, as she amply demonstrates when she looks after Albert. Some of the passages involving the two of them – especially as he edges towards the end of his days – are impossibly tender, very human and very moving.

Doing good

Megan is conjured to life very deftly by the author, who locates her lovingly and with judicious detail in the Cardiff suburb of Pontcanna. People who know the area will recognise many of its  shops and eateries, although some of them have changed since the book was written. And Megan’s own life is told in some detail, from her love of art and art books through her gifts for cooking, listening to others and filling her days in the most positive way.

In part it’s how she is learning to live on her own after Hugo’s passing, but also because she has a quiet zest for life, enjoying solo visits to cafes and to see the paintings in the National Museum, reading the Guardian or making scrapbooks for her grandchildren. She takes pleasure from simple things, such as scuffling through patchy carpets of fallen leaves after the rain or going to the cinema, although she is not that keen on a commercialised Christmas or factory farmed eggs. She is seemingly always busy and busily doing good. As a reader it’s heartening to be in her company, especially in these times when society is riven and so many people are splenetic and sour.

Endearing

In Megan Diana Gruffydd Williams has created a believable and endearingly enduring character, who can see the magic and even the immensity contained within a raindrop. ‘The dewdrop against the mightiness of a mature tree. The drop of rain that is nothing in the grandeur of the ocean, but it was Mother Teresa who said that the ocean is made up of drops.’ Just as one raindrop merges with another, her life is one of connecting and growing as she does so. Here’s to her and to her continuing, quiet campaign of striving to do some good.

Names and Addresses by Diana Gruffydd Williams is published by Opening Chapter. It is available here.