March the first was a double birthday celebration for Joan Aiken, it originally belonged to her mother Jessie, and was celebrated with posies of Sussex primroses, a family favourite. But she also gave it to her almost family fictional heroine Dido Twite, who tells it to a London street urchin with some unexpected repercussions – it turns out there is a secret Birthday League of children, and sharing their birth dates is a badge of honour.
Jessie died in the spring of 1971, in fact only a couple of days before her eightieth birthday, and the last time Joan saw her she had been reading to her from the opening chapters of the new Dido novel, The Cuckoo Tree, set in the Sussex countryside, where Joan had been brought up, even educated at home by Jessie, which brings Dido back home in search of friends and family after many adventures abroad. The tree itself was a local landmark, up on the Sussex Downs above the village where they lived, and they often went there together, taking picnics, and books to read, as Joan describes in the little Puffin Books film made about her just a couple of years before.
In The Cuckoo Tree the tree itself is a meeting place for friends, visible and invisible, still together, or long lost but always remembered, and the Spring particularly brings back the smells and sounds, the flowers, and the Cuckoo of course, known for his famous song, but not always to be found in a nest!
And for Joan, and the family, even the fictional family in her stories this will always be a meeting place, and a place to remember and celebrate friends, as Joan does herself at the end of the film, as she climbs up and sits to start writing that very book.
So I can’t let March the first go by without thinking of primroses, Cuckoos, birthdays and secrets, long lost family members and invisible friends, and special reunions in favourite places, even if I have to go there in my memories, or imagination, or between the pages of favourite books.
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Joan and Jessie
Joan Aiken 