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I was 11. We'd just moved to the Peak District. The city school I'd left behind was practically a free school: not so, surprisingly, in the country! I was not adapting well to the stricter, dumbed-down regime so found solace in wandering the nature on my own.
Limestone country means crumbly outcrops and lukewarm springs. A Catholic child, I would find a grotto and pray to the Virgin Mary that God would take my soul before school on Monday.
That day, I caught a glint of blue from a neighbour's garden. Virgin Mary blue. I bent down. And borage, the herb of happiness and courage, burst upon me:
I'd never seen anything like that flower in the city. I gazed for long minutes before running home for my Pocketbook of Wild Flowers.
I ran into our small terraced garden. It was damp. The mountain winds were cold around my ears. I could smell soil and wild garlic. I called my mum out from the kitchen.
I was going to grow herbs.
I didn't even know what herbs were, other than the obvious (Paxo sage and onion stuffing mix; Parsley the Lion; Scarborough Fair) but from that borage moment I knew I had to grow them.
My mum's friend was growing a few in pots. It was a mile up the hill but I'd have walked ten. I picked up marjoram, tarragon and a book and took to the hedgerows and fields with a trowel.
School was more bearable knowing there were herbs. Herbs filled lonely lunch breaks and weekends. I liked medicinal ones so made a cardboard filing system covered in wrapping paper, even though no one in my family was ever ill. But they did enjoy my nettle soup.
By age 13 I was even more unhappy at another school. I was taken to doctors, who found "nothing wrong". Age 14, my parents tried homeschooling. We made it for a year before the local Education Authority put its foot down.
But in that year off, I had my freedom back and was happier than ever. With the borage.
We were by then living in green belt: the garden was a long and narrow strip behind a miner's cottage. I dug out clay, cleared patches and set paths. By then I had 80 different varieties (hedgerows were richer in those days). It was a bit of a mess: the neighbours called it a "weed garden" and not everything thrived (like coastal samphire in Potteries clay - that's how you learn I guess) but as long there were herbs then everything was OK.
School never got any better; I skipped lessons in the hedgerows. When it came to 16, I was asked about careers. Of course I said "herbalist". But there was no internet and no one knew how to advise a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be whatever it was a herbalist did. I was directed to the Weleda herbal cosmetics factory. But no one thought to mention the herb garden and I didn't ask so I missed it; besides, I had my own garden and didn't want to work in the factory - I wanted to be a herbalist!
Like my school friends: Nicholas Culpeper and John Gerard.
By 16, though, boyfriends were arriving. School never got any better but then there was punk and another variety of herb and university and you know how it is.
But that little blue star flower had triggered a paradigm shift to somehow support a young person maladjusted through the systematic assaults on her freedom that were called state schools. So John Gerard was right when he wrote:
"Ego Borago, Gaudia semper ago (I, Borage, bring always courage*)....
Those of our time do use the flowers in sallads to exhilerate and make the mind glad. There be also many things made of these used everywhere for the comfort of the heart, for the driving away of sorrow and increasing the joy of the minde."
Which is what, is it not, education and schools are supposed to do?
Thank you, home schoolers.
(Nearly all images in this post were taken from Pixabay or Wikipedia, and credited.)
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