“You never told me his name. Everyone calls him W.D.”
“It was Warren.”
“Now that’s a lovely name, isn’t it?” I looked at the baby, “Warren.”
“It’s all right then?”
“It’s better than that! I think it’s a brilliant name! He’ll have loads of friends with a name like Warren. ‘Look, Mates, here comes Warren Dickinson!’ No one will fear him and no one will make fun of him either, not like if we’d called him a sissy name like Patsy Dickinson.”
Oliver laughed and kissed me on the head. We were quiet again for a time. He was thoughtful when he spoke again, “It’s not all up to us this time. Have you thought about that?”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not on our own anymore. It’s not just us. This one’s got a brother and a sister older than him. And cousins, too. And he’s got his Auntie and his Uncle and his grandparents. It’s not just up to you and me to teach him.”
“But we will.”
“We will. We’ll teach him all we know.”
“There are things about the wood only you can show him. There are secrets there that only you know.”
“Well, you, too, Love! You’ll show him your tree and how to be friends with it.”
“I will. And you can teach him to skip rocks on the pond.”
“And what the difference is between a lake and a pond, too,” He told me and I giggled. “Cause you can’t teach him that since you don’t know.”
“We’ll teach him how to have fun. Oh, Warren, you have no idea how much fun we have and now we have you to chase, too!”
“He has no idea how happy he’s going to be.”
“He has no idea how much we love him.”
“But one day he’ll know.”
“Because we’ll show him.”
“Each and every day, Warren,” Oliver’s hand looked positively huge as he caressed the baby’s head, “We’ll show you how much we love you.”
“And we’ll love you always and forever…”
“To bits…”
“And that’s our promise, Little Muffin Man. That’s our very first and most unbreakable promise to you.”
“It is…”
I wanted to stay up and look at our new son for a while longer, but I was so tired my eyes were closing on their own.
“Sil,” Oliver whispered, “Stop fighting sleep.. We’ll both be here when you wake up.”
“Thank you, Oliver,” I nuzzled my head under his chin.
“No, thank you, Sweetheart.” He kissed my hair.
I closed my eyes and I fell asleep thinking about what a lonely child I had been growing up with a father who didn’t have enough love to pay me attention and then sent me off to boarding school where only my physical needs were met. None of my children would ever know that kind of life. They’d never know it because one happy day I ended up at a place called Bennington and a handsome, good natured, rebellious young man had hit me in the head with a rubber ball. He’d made all my dreams come true, that Oliver Dickinson had. Now I had him and his parents and his brother and my sister and seven fantastic children who had filled every inch of my life and every corner of my heart. My life was worth living because of all of them.
My last thought before I fell asleep was that it was Oliver who had made it all possible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
With the addition of our Warren, or “Little Renny” as he was soon to be called, since neither Gryffin nor Natalie could say his name, it seemed that our family was complete. Oliver and I brought him home as naturally as if he’d always been part of us and set about doing what we did each day with his welcome addition. In a way that the other children hadn’t seemed, Warren wasn’t new to us. We were experienced by then. We knew his sounds, we could discern the motions he made with his head and his little hands. Warren was a communicator, too, a noise maker from the moment go. He’d sit in his chair and smile, clicking his tongue and cooing. Or he’d bang his toys on plastic bowls like it was the greatest thing on Earth. Warren was a pretty baby, too. Long limbed and strong at birth, he had gorgeous brown eyes, but they weren’t like his dad’s. They were large and round, a polished topaz colour with odd flecks of green and gold. They were the kind of eyes that caught you when you least expected them to and kept you there, waiting, staring into them. Like his brother and sister before him, he was a happy little chap, except unlike either of them, he wasn’t the independent sort. Warren needed to be close, he needed touch. He was so glued to anybody who seemed to want to hold on to him that it was difficult to get anything done when I didn‘t have a willing volunteer available to relieve me of him. It was only a few weeks after he was born that Oliver bought me a sling contraption to wrap him in and I spent most of our first six months together with Ren strapped to my belly as I went about my business in the wood. I thought that Gryffin might be jealous about this, but if he was he never expressed it. His only concern was that his little brother wasn’t big enough to play with yet and that he wanted to know when he would be.
“He’s very boring, Mummy,” Gryff told me one day peering at his brother in the pram as we were strolling down the sidewalk in Newtown. “He can’t walk and he can’t talk. He’s not good for much.”
I didn’t stifle my laugh, “He’s just a wee bairn, Gryff! He’ll be on his feet in no time!”
“That’s your best friend there in that pram!” Oliver told him, “Honestly, he’s the one who’s going to have your back for the rest of your life!”
“Like you and Uncle Xan?”
“Just like me and Uncle Xan,” Ollie rubbed his son’s head, “When the chips are down, I’ll tell you, your brother’s the only one who’ll be there for you!”
“What about Carolena?” Gryff asked quite seriously.
“Oh, her, too,” I assured him, “Count on that as well.”
We raised them like that. Not just our three, but the seven of them. We raised them all with the belief that in the end it was only the seven of them and that they had a duty to take care of each other. There really was no differentiation between who was brother and sister and who was cousin. All of them were Dickinson’s. All of us were Dickinson’s. We were, in a very real sense, an army.
“Dickinson’s take care of Dickinson’s,” Alexander used to say, “Family is a holy obligation.”
Having not come from a true and right family, it was amazing to me how much to heart the children took that sentiment. With Carolena in school, it was just me and my two boys most of the time in the wood, except for the days when Lucy would come by with her three girls. Annie and Bess were still babies and spent most of their time toddling about and having kips, but Natalie was growing by leaps and bounds. She was small for her age, but her mind was keen, and she was curious about everything everyone did. Natalie was not afraid of anything large or small and she was full of a million questions. She had this special way of caring about the people she loved as well, almost an over-caring where she noticed little things and set about fixing them.
“Teach me to cook!” She told Lucy and I one afternoon when she was four, “The children all want eggs!“ and then there was the day she came in with the little ones after playing in the snow. She plopped down beside me on the sofa and said quite seriously, “Auntie Sil, show me how to make mittens! I want to knit so my sisters never have cold hands! They‘re freezing!“ She was quite the little nanny, taking on responsibility with them that worried Lucy a bit.
“I want her to be a child, but she acts like she’s twenty!” Lucy shook her head, watching Nattie pass out dry cereal in handfuls to the children, “I can’t get her to sit and play a game!”
“It’s just her way,” I told her, “She’s a bit serious minded, but she still giggles.”