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.”

And she did giggle, especially when she was with her dad and Oliver. Oh, she adored them both and they loved her back with gorgeous abandon. Oliver would pick her up and swing her around like she was nothing. Toss her up over his shoulder, catch her, swing her around his back, catch her, then send her flying at Alex, who would do the same. They’d hold her by her arms and let her walk upside down across the ceiling until her little face would turn bright red. Having been so betrayed as a child, it amazed me the trust she had in them. There was no question in her mind that they’d never hurt her, no thought that they could just let her go and she might come crashing to the floor. It was perfect trust, never let down.

Alex had said the first time he held her that she was the girl who would teach him what love was all about and it had been the truth. Natalie brought out gentleness in him that I don’t think he ever knew he had. I never saw Alexander become cross with Nattie, not cross enough to ever say more than something like, “Not now, Nattie! Quiet down!" and he certainly never raised a hand to her. Alexander was a wonderful, patient father and he adored all of his children, but Natalie was his little angel.

“Nattie, my love," He’d say, “You’re so pretty. Pretty like your Mummy, but you’re mine through and through, yeah? “He’d hold her close, “I don’t know what I did to deserve a daughter like you, but I got you and I love you to bits! “

She adored him as well and she took any opportunity she could find to steal a moment with him, especially if it was away from the older children. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen, Natalie at five years old, sitting with Alexander in the garden, yellow balls of yarn lying in the grass, instructing him on how to knit.

“Oh, blimey!” Alexander held his work out in front of him, “Is it knit one, purl two? Or the other way around?”

“It’s knit one, purl one for three rows, Daddy. You’re working on a ribbing.”

“Oh, bugger it all to hell!” He dropped his project to his lap, “I’m doing it all wrong!”

“Don’t give up! You can do this!”

“You think so?”

“I know so!”

“OK, if you say so! Let me start over then. Knit one, purl one…for three rows…”

They were fascinating, every single one of them. Nigel, the oldest, was always the first and usually the best at everything. He had the restless nature and good looks of his father as well as Alex‘s zeal for having a good time. He was a bit more sociable than his dad, however, and found himself from an early age the centre of attention most everywhere he went. I have to admit that it did go to his head at times, but the other Dickinson’s made it a point to bring him back to Earth. Nigel, through all his hot headedness and tantrums, in the core of his being, was a good soul. He was clever and needed occupied, however, or he could be borderline evil. He did stupid things as well, though, like trying to take his bicycle down a slide at the city park and breaking his leg in three places. He drove Lucy up the wall with his antics, but I realized early on that Nigel was as easily entertained as he was bored. The trick with him was to keep him busy. Clever as he was, if left to his own devices all he could usually come up with to do was to make something explode or beat up his mates. Thus, we were always looking for something to keep him busy and over the years we found many, many things.