Flash fiction Friday # 2

Less quick-as-a-flash this time, but purposely kept to 300 words.  An anecdote, mostly heard perhaps third or fourth hand, so must be considered fiction.

~

'It's astonishing how many people' she said 'don't know how to hem a pair of trousers.  But I don't mind, it means they pay me to do them.'

The man who often came to have his trousers hemmed certainly wasn't skilled like that.  He wasn't very skilled socially either, somewhere on the autistic spectrum, seldom speaking to her or to anyone.  She was easy and accepting round him, not trying too hard to draw him out. She got on well enough too with the young man with Downs syndrome, to whom she gave a regular lift into the town where she had her small business and he attended a day centre.  The few words they exchanged followed established patterns:

She: 'Which CD shall we play?'
He: 'This one.'

He: 'It's nearly the weekend!'
She: 'Yep.  Doing anything nice?'
He: 'Maybe.'

The man who came to have his trousers hemmed would stand silent in her downstairs sewing room as she moved quickly round his feet, pinning and tacking.  He looked away and wouldn't meet her eyes, answered her in monosyllables, paid his couple of dollars on collection and hurried off.

In the week following her sudden and unexpected death, her family - husband and just-grown children - decided to bring her body home for a time before the funeral, trying to give themselves something of the time with her they hadn't had, however little.  They laid her in the sewing room, it was her space, and on the ground floor was easier, looking out onto the garden.

The following day, people came and went, and outside the window of the sewing room, the man who had come to have his trousers hemmed stood, his face pressed to the glass, looking at her and talking non-stop.

Thursday 11th August

~ Yesterday I dug up an accidental potato plant which had planted itself by the compost bins, and which I had been rather whimsically earthing up with grass cuttings.  The yield was not large, but there were enough for a small bowl for my lunch, with chopped chives, some mayonnaise and a little tinned tuna.

~ Lately I have been succumbing to Tom's latest teatime (well, winetime really) television quiz indulgence, Pointless, I do like that Alexander Armstrong.  Tonight I knew, and the contestants didn't, that Skellig Michael was a UNESCO world heritage site in the Republic of Ireland.  This set me to dreaming of  that tiny cone of rock in the ocean, where a thousand years ago and more the monks sat out the Atlantic storms and held their precious texts and images to them, living with, and on, the sea birds at the edge of a darkening world, and of how I hope one day to visit it, and climb the long, tenuous stone stairs up to the beehive cells, before the world darkens again.

~ Straightened my blue room up completely at last after the children had been nesting in it, so it looks like this again,

I like seeing it being used to the full and covered in bedding and bears and books and all their junk too, but it's nice to get it back.  I took this photo before, in fact, to send to MH, my former student, who gave me the beautiful blue pot that has the fern in.  The patchwork quilt was made by my sister Alison, whom we lost last year, for my eighteenth birthday.  I only recently took it out of storage, I don't know why I left it so long.  My other sister made the small patchwork cushions.  The space on the wall above the fern is waiting for a print of Notre-Dame de la Belle Verrière which came from Chartres and which I've still not got around to having framed. (Thanks to Christopher for prompting me to post about the blue room in the last comments.) 

Christ keep the Hollow Land...

... Through the sweet spring tide,
When the apple blossoms bless
The lowly bent hillside.

One year on.  Sad, yes, but grateful.  Resolved.  Blessed.

...Though we may not understand

Where the waters glide.

Turning

Clementines, in a box made from shaved poplar wood, a blue stained band around its top, the leaves and stalks curling and growing matt and dull, that last-colour-in-the-paint-pots green.   Swearing off chocolate, just for today, but then for tomorrow too, and even, so far, for the next day, you pass the time gorging on them and on roasted chestnuts.  It was foggy and dank outside, the fire, which you didn't really need that much but which was to cheer the day, smoked and sulked.  Chestnuts are a chancey way to feast; split them with teeth and nails at the pointed end, and, with luck, you might see, and smell, if they're black and bad inside, but then there's always the risk they'll fall between the bars of the grate and into the ash pit, from where it is rarely possible to retrieve them, whether with the poker or the bamboo tongs. Then they may burn.

But when they are good, and come through ...  The crack of the brown scorched shell, perhaps just caught alight in a thin, glowing red line, smouldering like incense, the furry paper inside husk and the steaming kernel, its hard raw starches turned to chewy sugars.  You roast them one at a time, alternating eating them with the clementines, so that your fingertips go from charcoal and ash and hot to the cool and fragrant oils and juices in the skin and flesh of the citrus fruit.  Then you burn the husks and shells, the peel and the crackled drying leaves with their scent of petitgrain on the fire.  An afternoon can pass this way, with a much-loved book, and tea, and nowhere much to go and no one much to see.

~~~

Yet for all this idyll of indolence, I am prey to anxiety at this time.  I look forward to the lull, to being momentarily free of obligations, I envision a time of timelessness and dreaming, of serene emptiness, but also that somehow I will accomplish many useful tasks of restoring order in neglected corners, and still do something original and creative, and that I'll catch up on all the worthy and serious reading I've been setting aside.  In addition I see us taking long and healthy walks, as well as having the odd bit of contact with other people now and then ...

It's a lot to ask of a week or so holiday, and at a low-ebb time of year, of course, and I am inevitably stalked by a sense of failure; that I have left undone those things which I ought to have done, and done those things which I ought not to have done and there is no health in me.  Even the well-loved book seems questionable in its familiarity - why am I still hanging out with Celia and Sir James and Mrs Cadwallader and Camden Farebrother (for they are the ones I really love, more than the rather tiresome idealists and their disappointments), shouldn't I be getting out more, meeting some new and more exotic and exacting literary company?   My own drive to make anything is hampered and beset by a creeping sense of its own pointlessness, by the numberless crowds of other things there are yet to learn about, and the knowledge that other people have made things so much better already; idleness and the presence of too much of the kind of food and drink I've been getting better at avoiding bring about a creeping heaviness of body - one of the six hard-worn-away kilos back already - and spirit.  Abundance confounds me, and the weather has been dismal for walking and taking photos.

I bewail all this to Tom. Heaven forfend, he agrees, that we should actually relax and please ourselves this week.

~~~

I take out the tin of pastel pencils I bought when I went to England, and make myself draw a clementine and a chestnut, though the tin contains no colour orange.

~~~

We go to visit my new friend.  She quizzes Tom on St John of the Cross; I don't know if he passes muster better than I do but they seem quite taken with each other.  She has set up her pottery figures with the paperwhite narcissus bulb I brought last time, so that I can take a photograph.

~~~

Today,  we walk in the fog, Molly and I, further than we have done lately.  The countryside is, as it so often seems to be at this time,  sodden and dull, reduced to earth and grey and grudging green, the last colours in the paint pots once again.  Sullen heaps of manure lowering  along the field edges provide some of the few discernible forms in the landscape. The fog has hung heavy water drops on the trees, which are almost bare except that the early cold seems to have prompted the oaks to hang on more stubbornly to their rust brown and ochre leaves.  There is an occasional breeze, despite the foggy pall, and walking under them, they throw water at me in a tetchy imitation of rain.

It is so difficult not to be affected by light, or its absence, but reason tells me that this milder, damp weather is really something I should be thankful for.  Crystalline wintry high pressure, beautiful as it is, is a worry when it comes to driving, and getting up on endlessly dark mornings to go to work, as I must again from Monday.  And the globules of dew which the fog leaves, while they don't glitter and sparkle and delight, have their own reluctant glow and grace.  For Molly too, the crushed and dampened earth, the broken vegetation and moisture laden air filled with the smells of the winter-driven wild creatures, are sweet delight, she is lively and especially interested in the world around her.  I realise that for her these days, the world as I perceive it today - visually obscure, colourless, its shapes unclear, with muffled sounds from uncertain quarters pressing on the outside of the foggy curtain - is perfectly normal.  So I enjoy the walk more through her eyes, or rather nose.

The light is always still there, it will be back.

~~~

I dreamed of my sister last night.  There were the usual incongruities and inexplicable elements of most dreams, but in essence we were back to a time before she died, but I knew what was going to happen.  There was a melée of distractions and problematical activity going on around us, but suddenly I knew the important thing was to go and put my arms round her and tell her I loved her, and I did.

I am not much for New Year, never have been.   The celebrations always seemed  forced, and usually left me feeling miserable; New  Year resolutions are a dubious tradition.  The change of date from one year to the next is necessary but arbitrary; time and change go their own way regardless of how we choose to mark them out.  But mark it we do, and that tends to lead to reflection and a taking of stock.  In a personal and family sense, 2010 will always be marked as a year of great  loss and sadness, but not one of darkness.  I resolved this year to live as well as I could, against timidity and sloth and my own limitations, as a promise to someone who showed me how.  As with any worthwhile resolve, making and keeping it is a work in progress, I fail over and over and have to renew the resolve time and again.  Resolutions, promises, commitments, aren't one-off events, announced therefore accomplished, but need perpetual review and maintenance, if they mean anything at all.

~~~

Tonight we'll watch Cate Blanchett Elizabeth the first the second and her amazing CGI Spanish Armada, and sundry other fibs and anomalies, in a spirit of why-not, which will take us past midnight here, otherwise we wouldn't bother staying up.  Lunch at friends' tomorrow, that's fine. 

Happy New Year.

Straw ear-rings # 2

There followed some weeks of application of Savlon antiseptic and turning the ear studs night and morning, and a certain amount of inflammation and oozing.  I wonder now if the anaerobic conditions created by the studs, rather than being more hygienic as was claimed, was more likely to provoke this than turning rings would have been. I still don’t know how people can bear piercings in more intimate, sensitive or moist areas.  Sometime after Christmas though, when we could think ahead to being able to wear other earrings, we took a walk along Hemel Old High Street.  

Hemel Hempstead is best known as a post-war new town.  I don’t know what it’s like now, but in my childhood and early youth it was an array of fairly typical and generally unlovely 1950s and 1960s architecture.  It had a somewhat unusual covered pedestrian bridge over the main road, resplendent in citrus yellow fibreglass panelling (on the outside!), which led from one upstairs shopping arcade to another on the other side.  As I say, not really a place of beauty, though as youngsters we liked it.  For the grand opening of the bridge, Batman and Robin came and drove down the high street in the Batmobile, we watched them from above, though I was rather too small to see properly.

But if the New Town represented modernity, with its yellow bridge leading to the Wimpy bar and giving a glimpse of superheroes, there was what seemed like a half-forgotten tranquil fragment of another age just a few hundred yards away in the Old High Street, which always seemed quiet, leafy, almost rural, I remember it as looking something like a set for a film adaptation of Middlemarch or similar.  Unlike my older brothers and sisters I didn’t grow up in the town but a few miles away, and was barely aware of the existence of this quarter of it for a long time, even though one of its tall, white, foursquare and fine Georgian edifices was the House Where Dad Was Born.  It was handsome by then, restored and well-kept, but in truth when my father had been growing up there, it was, I gather, a rather poorer place, crowded with his numerous siblings, sometimes cheerful but more often dogged by the uncertainties and insecurities of poverty and the fragile physical and mental health of his parents.  Grandfather, it was said, was sometimes in trouble for watering the milk and putting sand in the sugar he sold, and he often kept a pig in the back yard, possibly against the by-laws. One of my father's most abidingly horrid recollections of early childhood was having to sit on the pig and hold it down while Grandfather castrated it (I sometimes think Dad had a touch of Jude the Obscure about him...). Grandmother struggled; she fed her large and hungry brood on brawn made from a sheep’s head, and her own fragile spirit with chapel religion.  They both died, broken and insane, long before I was born.

Yet with all the nasty and brutish aspects of its history, there was, as I say, a sense of stepping back into a quaint and gracious pocket of past times, which was affirmed by the presence of the only shop I can remember there, the Basket Shop.  This establishment sold nothing but  items made from wicker, and straw and cane and rattan.  It gave an impression of a world before plastics and machine tools, filled with light structures, fragrant and warm and sepia-toned.  There was every kind of basket, of course, cat baskets and shopping baskets, picnic hampers and fishing baskets, but also some wicker furniture, stools and ottomans, peacock chairs and rockers, and those egg-shaped swinging seats that hang from the ceiling, and also trefoil-shaped long-handled carpet beaters, which I still have a fancy for as objects, even though I would probably never beat a carpet.  And somewhere in a corner was a case of small, exquisite articles also made from straw like tiny corn dollies as jewellery, including ear-rings.  They caught our eye; Az bought a pair for herself and a pair for me.

Ear-rings are funny things.  You don’t always know which ones you’ll take to, which you’ll stay with, or which will stay with you.  They can look beautiful in the shop, indeed be beautiful objects, but they’ll never sit right on you.  They can be finely crafted and formed, but then have some snicky bit that will catch in your hair or scarf or coat collar, or else they have a fragility which causes them to break irreparably .  I have had other pairs which I have loved to wear but they have left me, gone when I took off a jumper, or taken off when they started to chafe of an evening and were put to one side then lost, knocked on the floor or dropped down the sofa or gone with the vacuum cleaner.  Sometimes one is left alone which languishes forever in a box or drawer, because I’ve felt a sense of guilt and responsibility towards it, having by my carelessness lost its partner so I don’t feel I can perform such an act of callous betrayal as throw the survivor away (for a time I thought I might have an extra asymmetrical hole made in one ear to give a home to these waifs and strays, but it didn’t happen...).

I’m more careful now, and I’ve a few pairs that have done well: a quirky little silver sun-in-splendour for the right ear, with a hey-diddle-diddle crescent moon with a profile smile for the left, that I bought from a roguish and very talented silversmith in a Somerset village twenty years ago; a pair of irridescent glass pebbles coloured like oil plumes with pewter rims which Tom gave me when we were first together; and the small amethyst teardrops she-who-calls-herself-Firebird sent me for my fortieth birthday, nearly nine years ago now. I love all of these and wear them frequently.  But the tiny straw corn-dollies from the Basket Shop are the longest-lived of all, the very first ear-rings I owned after the studs.  They are light as feathers, of course, and never drag on my ears.  Being organic material,  they have deepened agreeably in colour, and they go with any bead necklace or pendant - wood, ceramic, shell, glass,and with any clothing.  I fell back on them so often, and really didn’t give them much thought, or where they came from.

Now though, I’m afraid to wear them.

~~~

~~~

Straw ear-rings # 1

This was a piece I started writing a while back, and though it's about finished, it's getting rather long and digressive, so I think I'll make it into two parts.  Daily posting is demanding enough of you I think, without long meandering memoirs to read all at once.  Though I'm really very touched and pleasantly surprised when every morning I come down thinking 'Surely there won't be anything this time...' and find a clutch of comments on the night before's offering, even though with posting here more often, work and a plan for a Qarrtsiluni submission which is taking me some way out of my comfort zone (sorry, cliché alert but I can't think of a better expression) and exercising me quite a bit, I'm not getting round to all of you as much as your deserve.

Blogging's like putting out lobster pots, I often think!  (Not that I've ever done that...)

By coincidence, the Nablo people earlier put up a prompt suggesting one write about a piece of jewellery and its associations, but I had already started to write about the straw ear-rings.

~~~

Straw earrings

There were only a few girls at school, mostly, I recall, those from the few black or Asian families, who wore small gold rings in their ears before their teenage years.  Other piercings were truly unheard of; the first nose studs began appearing about the time I went to university.  My friends and I would linger after school or on Saturday mornings looking in the windows of the jewellers on the corner of Lower Kings Road, whose name I now forget, not at the expensive and glittery dangling or jewelled ear-rings, but at the tiny studs with their discreet motifs of horseshoes and anchors, flowers and cats and, most wished for of all by me, a pair of miniature owls.  Could we wear them as keepers, we wondered, would they be allowed?  They would need to be gold for hygiene’s sake, we knew, though we hankered for silver.

No one in my immediate family had pierced ears.  I have a vague memory that my grandmother might have done, a vestige of  Edwardian femininity, luxurious and exotic as Brighton Pavilion and the Masonic ladies’ nights she went to  with my grandfather there, as remote as corsets and long hair swept up in tortoiseshell combs.  Between that and my girlhood lay two world wars and a depression, art deco, girl guides and girls on bicycles, the missing young men and the surplus women of my mother’s youth, utility and rationing, my five siblings and finally the 1960s, that decade of bold, bright and chunky clip-on experimentation.  Now though, tomboy from a no-frills tradition that I was,  I wanted real - that is pierced - ear-rings.

My sister Az, nine years my elder, was also looking at ear rings, and a lot more besides, and doubtless rather further and wider afield than the corner jewellers.  She would take me with her, she said, to Watford, to a proper place, for my 14th birthday, and we would have our ears pierced together.  I can’t really remember what kind of place this had to be 35 years ago - an optician’s comes to mind, or perhaps just a registered jeweller.  Whatever, we had a good afternoon window shopping in the town beforehand, then as the December evening fell, and the shop windows and street lights bloomed and glowed, we made our way up some stairs to a warm carpeted room somewhere.  Az had hers done first, then the bespectacled elderly man sprayed my earlobes with something cold before applying the piercing tool - like a light pair of pincers with a sharp point bent at a right angle on one part and a round bit on the other. This was in the days before the high speed guns which fired the studs directly into your ears.  I heard more than felt the metal go through the flesh, a slight, mildly sickening squelch.  

I have always been a pathological, spineless, squeamish wimp.  Honestly, it’s not the pain, it’s the thought (or in this case the sound).  Once when I was about six ( stop me if I’ve told you this before...)  I vomited in the doctor’s surgery merely because Az was having an injection.  Knowing what I was like, my mother shoved me behind her so I wouldn’t have to see, but it was too late, my imagination had done its worst.  The doctor, a rather severe woman, was unimpressed.  

‘When my children are sick ’ she harrumphed ‘I make them clear it up themselves.  That soon stops them.’

With a lot of work and willed detachment, I have got a little better; I was even complimented a few years ago by a dentist on how calm and collected I was about injections.  Even so, when I have a blood test I have to hope I can just make it to the car or back to bed before embarrassing myself and fainting.  Living in the UK during the years of BSE, mad cow disease, has spared me the humiliation of giving blood here - I have volunteered, truly.   It’s often a delayed reaction; on this occasion, I got down the stairs and into the street with adequate face saving bravado.

‘Come on,’ said Az ‘I’ll buy you a cake.’

We headed for the the warm, bright sweet-smelling space of the nearest baker’s, where I sunk down against the back wall of the shop in a woozy whirl with a black centre.  I can still remember biting into the fried sugary crust of the doughnut, and how it restored me to myself.

Three, and three, beautiful things from the week just gone, and another Finistère collage.

I have changed my screensaver.  Previously I had a Jacquie Lawson one of fish and waterlilies which was pretty, but which I suspected of using a lot of processor juice, as it made the fan go a lot while it was on, and contained music which I didn't get to hear anyway because we keep the computer volume on mute.  Now I have a Google photos slideshow, which takes all the pictures stored on my side of the computer - always a significant number, despite trying to be good and have regular clean-outs to the external drive, and including collages and those other people have sent me - and displays them randomly.  Part of its appeal is not only is the order in which they appear random, but also the method of transition, so sometimes they slide in from top or bottom or either side or diagonally, sometimes they come together in two halves like shutters, and sometimes they appear with an interesting pixellated fade-in.  I am transfixed, and often refrain from using the computer because I prefer to watch the slideshow.  Why haven't I done this before?

~

The first day of the hunting season is not a beautiful thing to us.  'Why can't they shoot some hornets?' asks Tom.  We doubt their aim is that good, but then light on the agreeable fantasy of the hunters' stumbling into a hornets' nest as they crash about the woods and hedgerows.

~

I remember Az, who as a girl, having the figure for it, liked to dress a bit skimpy, saying how she loved giving in in late September and putting on a woolly jumper for the first time.  I think of her as I pull on a fleecy again after many months, along with the thick soft, hand-knitted socks in unbleached wool which my other sister brought me back from Madeira.  My sisters are keeping me warm.

~

I wish I could paint abstracts from these poplar woods, rather as Joan Mitchell did from dying sunflowers: the austere lines of their trunks going upward forever, how the desaturated dullness of the day becomes them, the modest way they wear their spattered sheen of gold, the clotted masses of brambles and mistletoe at their feet and among their branches.  But most of all I'd need to find a colour or texture which would convey the rich and pungent, tanned-leather smell that comes from them just now.

~

J and D are going away in a few days for a long holiday.  They offload things onto me, and I leave with a wooden box of small hard brown pears, a leggy basil plant and a bundle of timber offcuts for firewood.  I eat three of the pears for lunch with a piece of Pyrenees cheese.

~

Go about ordinariness.  Fill the tall blue tin -the one with the strange gilded picture on it, exotic as a comedia del arte - which once held amaretti biscuits, with tea bags, and the square red plastic pot with brown sugar cubes.  Watch the thinning, faded yellow sun through the thinning faded yellow leaves.  Store it.  Try not to forget.

~

Birds of Finistère.  Curlews, oystercatchers, an egret and a gull, a sandwich tern and an albatross.
~

Being pure spirit

Tomorrow is my sister's birthday, she would have been fifty-eight.  It is now five months since she died.  I think of her most of the time; more, in truth, than I did when she was alive, perhaps I didn't need to do so then.  But that's fine, she ain't heavy.  The thought of her is there in more or less everything I do, but I don't have to keep making reference to it.  I've written bits and pieces about her, but I've mostly been content to let them sit and settle for a bit. However, perhaps now's the time to start going over some of them.  I've tinkered around with this one for a while, taking a bit in here and letting a bit out there... 

Someone who isn't conventionally religious, but who I suppose believes quite a number of things I can safely say I don't, wrote me a very kind message shortly after my sister died, in which she said she had become 'pure spirit'.  I usually mistrust that kind of thing, whether from mainstream religion or its alternatives, as rather glib and precious, but I found I was comfortable with this, perhaps partly because she also said a number of other things which were intelligent and not glib, but also it just felt OK.  My sister had little time for anything that might be called religious or spiritual.

Being pure spirit

Being pure spirit suits you, it's what you did so well.

Why must we get so heavy when we die?

What's mortal remains with a weighty horror, then

a dreadful gravity of absence.

But you would make light of even this, and,

if we chose, with nothing mystical, 

mysterious, spooky, kooky, 

fey or strange, and - heaven forbid! -

nothing religious, your spirit could continue  

with us.  If we chose.  You know,

the one which used to ask 'Well, in the end,

does it really matter?'  Which shrugged and said

'That kind of stuff - like God, and dogs,

and fussing over food - is just not something that I do.

I'll leave that to the rest of you!' And smiled.

The one which used so easily that well-worn phrase

that women - wives and mothers, sisters, aunts - 

will always say, but won't quite always mean - you did:

I want you to be happy.

~~~

There will be a gathering in Sydney tomorrow of friends and family who are in that part of the world to mark her birthday, so I'm putting this up now as they are ten hours ahead of us there.  Tom, Molly and I are off tomorrow to our beautiful retreat on the Bay of Morlaix, which, by serendipitous, or whatever, grace, we happened on when we felt the need to get away back then in April.  We loved it so much we booked these few days for Tom's birthday, which is the day after my sister's, on Friday. I am intensely, deeply, quietly (fairly quietly anyway!), full of joy and delight at the thought of being there again.

See you next week.  

Saturday 10 July

~  In memory of my sister, her family and friends in New Zealand have set up a prize for 'wearable art' as part of a festival in their local town, which has just been awarded for the first time. My brother-in-law, H, forwards a letter from the prizewinner, who he didn't know before.  She tells how she too is grieving, for a husband still living but permanently hospitalized with early Alzheimer's disease, how touched she was by the sight and courage of H and his son together at the prize-giving, how thrilled she was by the prize money and how useful it will be as things have also been financially hard for her since her husband's diagnosis.  Once again I am struck by how people go on making and doing beautiful things even in sadness and difficult times.

~  We say we'll just make a start on the Radio Times crossword after lunch, and we get it finished, as we always have to once we've started.  Tom as the scribe does all the hard work while I just shout the answers.  We complain as usual about the badly done clues: anagrams of words not included only indicated, key-words like 'out' not properly used.  I get an alternate letter one which are usually my weak spot (I'm better at 'sounds like' ones), and we find we know more about the TV-based clues than we think we will, as usual.

~  Made a slideshow video at last of our walk at the Chaos de Gouette on Monday with Gillian and Barley, aka Rosie and Porridge, the bouleversantes, brilliant and beautiful Bitches about Brittany.  With music, which I don't know will be everyone's cup of tea. 

 I've given up with Vimeo as all they do is put me in an endless queue to convert, or fail to do so telling me only that my compression rates are wrong, without telling me what that means or what I can do about it, even though they've successfully converted a video made in just the same way before, and anyway, I don't think I should have to have a degree in geekiness to upload something made using standard up-to-date Windows software to their site.  So I'm afraid it's back to Youtube, which is a shame, as I made it HD enough to view full-screen but with Youtube that goes all wibbly-wobbly.  Rant over.  Ranting is not a beautiful thing, but Gillian, Barley, Molly and the Chaos all are, so please find the time to give it a look! 

PS Just going over to check the link, I find Gillian/Rosie has posted her lovely pictures of the same outing, which are better yet and quicker to look at, so hurry on over to her place and see! (And she's spelled 'Gouët' right too.)

Monday 5 July

~  I wake, as I often do lately, from dreams of my sister.  They are not exactly happy dreams, often sad or troubling, or both, but they are sometimes beautiful, I think, and I welcome them all anyway.

~  A wonderful river walk at the chaos, with Rosie and Porridge.  The dogs are each intrepid in their own ways, and make us laugh, and the scenery is beautiful.  We lose each other, and find each other again, we take pictures and talk of important and less important things, we come back tired and relaxed and go our separate ways.  Molly is incredibly thirsty and drinks off two bowls of water striaght when we are back at our car; she forgot she could drink the river.  I look forward to going through the photos soon, meanwhile,

~ four lots of gear and tackle, ancient and modern, from my brother's place.

The Hollow Land

I rather like William Morris's poetry.  I've mentioned here before that I read part of 'Love is Enough' at our wedding, though I must say that I took some liberties and trimmed off some of the '-eth' suffixes and and changed 'ye' to 'you' a couple of times.  A dear friend once asked something along the lines of what was my desert island poem, the one I'd recite to myself alone at sunset on said island, and I had to admit that, although I have a headful of snippets and allusions, I don't have that many poems confidently held entire in the memory.  That was my mother's forte.  Indeed, I think I know three, (four with Keats' 'There was a naughty boy', but I don't really count that).  One is the archetypal desert island poem, in effect about sunset on a desert island,  'The Lake Isle of Innisfree', which I can remember my mother reciting, and really  for the first time being stopped in my tracks by the power of a poem.  When my sister was here last week she said something about going home to plant nine bean rows, but no hive for the honey bee, so I finished it off for her.  You can do that kind of self-indulgent show-off thing with those who love you, though I wasn't always that good about humouring my mum, I'm sorry to say. 

The other two are by William Morris.  One is the Bed at Kelmscott poem, which poor old May Morris embroidered around the valance of her parents four-poster at Kelmscott, impressing Bernard Shaw but not in the way May would have liked. It's presumably the only poem in English where the narrator is a piece of furniture.

The wind's on the wold

And the night is a-cold,

And Thames runs chill
'Twixt mead and hill.
But kind and dear
Is the old house here
And my heart is warm
'Midst winter's harm.
Rest then and rest,
And think of the best
'Twixt summer and spring,
When all birds sing
In the town of the tree,
And ye lie in me
And scarce dare move,
Lest earth and its love
Should fade away
Ere the full of the day.
I am old and have seen
Many things that have been;
Both grief and peace
And wane and increase
No tale I tell
Of ill or well,
But this I say:
Night treadeth on day,
And for worst or best
Right good is rest. 

I love that.  It's my insomnia poem, both to reassure and steady on the cold winter nights it describes, when the wind batters the trees and the rain rattles on slates and skylights, and for those precious early mornings we are having now, when the birds really do sing in 'the town of the tree', and awakening to the fleeting beauty of it all is indeed almost too much to bear.

The other is the song from  The Hollow Land, a prose romance which I haven't read.  (The only prose of Morris's that I've read is 'News from Nowhere', a copy of which was passed on to me from Az - my sister Alison -  and which I read when I was into Utopias, from Thomas More to Marge Piercy.  Utopia engaged me for a while, now I see the idea as at best blind and preposterous and at worst dangerous and pernicious.) This little song, however, which apparently intersperses the narrative one verse at a time,  haunts me.  It sounds like a prayer, with its opening of 'Christ keep...' which is odd, I think.  For although Morris loved and longed for his vision of the Middle Ages with intensity, it did not generally seem to include their Christian faith, which I suppose conflicted with his humanist socialism.  Also, it lacks the emblazoned Victorian mock-Mediaeval frills and furbelows of language that characterise much of his work and others of his time.  It is as limpid, remote and elusive as the waters it contains, mysterious and mystical in its simplicity.

Christ keep the Hollow Land
Through the sweet spring tide,
When the apple blossoms bless
The lowly bent hillside.

Christ keep the Hollow Land
All the summer tide,
Though we may not understand
Where the waters glide

Only dimly seeing them
Coldly slipping through
Many green-lipped cavern mouths
Where the hills are blue.

I don't want to read the book; it is apparently fussy, rather aimless in plot, and difficult for a modern reader, and in any case, I don't want to have the poem placed in any other context.

I found both poems in a 'Viking Portable Poets - Tennyson to Yeats', edited and with an intro by Auden, a treasure of an anthology which I love and have always kept with me.  I think my mother bought it somewhere, and I claimed it.  Books were like that, they drifted in and out, became the possessions of whoever fancied them, occasionally being misappropriated or regrettably lost.  At one of Az's particularly prolific periods of learning new things to make and do, when she and my brother-in-law lived in Bath and I was at university in Cardiff, she studied calligraphy.  Both of my sisters and one of my brothers always had very attractive italic handwriting, my elder sister's twin daughters too, almost indistinguishable  from their mother's.  My writing is a passable italic, but less fine, deteriorating into a mongrel scribble of round schoolgirl cursive if I'm not careful.  ( Interestingly, one of Morris's less preposterous notions in 'News from Nowhere' was that in that future children would learn to write using portable printing machines, since there was no point in teaching them to write by hand badly, and later calligraphy could be taught as an art.)

For calligraphy practice, I think at her request, I asked Az to write the two William Morris poems out for me.  The Bed at Kelmscott she wrote in Indian ink on cream paper, in a fair imitation of Morris's own pseudo-Mediaeval uncials.  The Song from the Hollow Land she looked at a while, then said she could see colours running through it, from the pink of the apple blossoms, through the gold of summer to the greens and blues of the waters disappearing into the caverns of the hills.  She wrote it in an elegantly wild version of her own italic hand, but must somehow have puddled or blended the ink so that it changed colour in a rainbow through the lines of the poem. 

I no longer have either of them.  The Bed  I know where I left and why, The Hollow Land song I kept for a long time, but lost at some point I don't remember.  There have been a few floods it could have gone down in, mostly I don't mind about such lightening of the load of clutter one goes through life accumulating, but I rather wish I still had that.

The night after I learned she had died, I dreaded sleeping.  I feared that waking in the night that comes innocent and then remembers.  Yet it wasn't like that.  I woke many times, but the knowledge was there already, deeply sad but not crushing, and flowing through my head, pretty much unbidden, I think, was the Song from the Hollow Land, and the colours she put it into.  It was a comfort, an admonition, a promise, though who or what was making it I don't know, and I have the feeling I'm not supposed to.

So, I thought I'd write it out again myself.  I don't have any dip pens, and I don't really know anything about calligraphy, or indeed have the necessary skills or precision to make much of a job of it. I used the Inktense pencils for their clear bright colours, but made numerous attempts which frustrated me as either crude or prissy.  In the end I settled for a spiky kind of primitive italic rather than trying to imitate the way I remember the original.  It's OK; it served its purpose.

 

Fire and Rain

What to say about my sister? Much, too much, but so much of it radiating from the central fact that she was one of the most intensely, ceaselessly, effortlessly creative people I have ever known.

She was always making things, from the time of my earliest memory.

To recall and describe all the different things she turned her hands to - always done with beauty and flair and originality, and always to completion, not for her the over-reached, unfinished fragments in cupboards and attics - in the vivid, associative detail in which it has been returning to since last week, would fill a year's worth of posts here: paints and pens and pencils ('sit down, I need to draw you...') , scraperboard and ink, Conte pencils and oil pastels, charcoal and cowgum and drymount; books of fonts - she was a graphic designer for much of her working life and had a good degree in typography with history of art - a film SLR with which she took lovely portraits, for people were another thing she was good at; stained glass - there is a school chapel somewhere in Leicestershire which has a set of windows she made; pictures and the forms of letters; things knitted and patched and woven and stitched; a sweater in finest four-ply covered with rows of tiny, exquisite three dimensional bunches of purple grapes and dark red cherry bobs; remnants of fabric from drawers and boxes turned into original clothes - in New Zealand she had the leading costume hire shop on the bustling main town of their area (Kiwis like to party and they like to dress up), some stock came with the business, some accessories she ordered, but much of it she made herself. As well as the shop she also provided costumes for the various plays and drama projects she and my brother-in-law, a drama teacher, were involved in producing all over the country; sometimes she put one on herself and became a mean Macbeth witch or an impressive Lady Capulet, since whe was no slouch at that either.

She liked to be out there, and she liked to be doing. Sometimes in her adolescence, my childhood, constraint goaded and frustrated her; she could be stormy and distant, though never unkind. She was not necessarily motherly or even always a confidant to me, but she was a fine, fine friend. She handed me down art materials,curiosities, clothes and records, she took me to places and showed me things. She taught me to draw, the rules of perspective ( I wasn't quite cognitively ready, I did the house smaller than the person, but put them both on the horizon...) and the conventions of the human face ('your people will have noses like pigs if you draw them like that, I know that's how you see them, but...'), and to sew - I remember pushing the painfully threaded needle in and out of the scraps of slightly glazed green and yellow 1960s print, and, 'look, the two pieces are joined together!' Such creativity as I have was, in its early stages and after, largely fostered by her.

She blazed with creative energy; time and again as we have been speaking of her this past couple of weeks the word 'bright' has come to us. And she was fearless, or so it seemed to me. No doubt she wasn't always - who is? - but fear never stopped her. Though we have always been different characters, in my later life, if I needed to become brisk, competent, extrovert, I found myself using her internalised voice and manner, which pleased and surprised me.

I have been thinking about making this video for a week or so. Since the day after the morning when I put down my tea and ran downstairs to catch the ringing 'phone, and clattered up them again a few minutes later, giddy with grief and disbelief. The song came into my head then and it has stayed there as a recurring theme throughout. When I was sixteen, after my 'O' levels, my sister and brother-in-law (who called me on last Monday morning), married just a year, took off to Italy for a while, to soak up art and history, and savour a period of freedom before taking on new home and career responsibilities. They left me a tiny stereo and their combined record collection. As well as the Beatles records I'd persistently tried to beg, steal or borrow for years were a number of Bob Dylan albums (bliss), and many more things many of which I have forgotten or perhaps didn't take a lot of notice of, and also some James Taylor. I gather he's a bit looked down on now as MoR, or whatever, I don't know, music is an area where I've often been happy to be led by others anyway. But, despite the naming of the 'you' in the first lines, and other references to his own personal circumstances, and a million cover versions later, 'Fire and Rain' remains for me the song of heartbreaking, unexpected, untimely loss of someone dear at a distance, and that remorseful, remorseless lament that cannot be put away: that I thought, assumed, mistakenly, that we had more time.

Yet to me it seems more than that. It carries also the sense that time, the creative flame, love, cannot be taken for granted, must not be wasted. That to be fixed on one's own failure and disappointments, the things that fell to earth or never got off the ground, is wrong, a squandering of potential, that dishonours the ones we have loved and who have loved and cared for us. And that in the dark times, when we feel all done-in and cry out in despair, grief can be the crack that lets the light in, that out of darkness and pain can come a renewed force of generative energy. Not a bland and anodyne happiness, not getting over it or getting back to normal, but a knowledge of blessing at what has been given.

The video is one small attempt at a memorial, but it won't be the only one. I shall always miss my sister. At so many turns of the memory she is there. Her loss is the first that has really hit me like this, with such a weight of shock and outrage, so close to home. It hurts terribly to think that her husband and children must go on without her warm, bright, steady physical presence in their lives. Of all the beautiful things she made, her three children were the most beautiful of all.

But she has left me with a heap of treasure, and I am beholden to use it. I shall write and speak, and make more things about her, but even when I don't do so directly, each time I step up and claim my own creativity, each time I see and act on the possibility of colour and form and texture, the vivid or the subtle image, each time I succeed in seeing the human clothed in something wondrous or funny or transforming, each time I face down my doubts and demons, fears and apathy, or I see someone else shining out brightly, or doing something with excellence, and aspire to emulate them rather than simply falling back discouraged and bitter, each time I stop agonising and just do, I'll be living her legacy. I'll think of her and I'll thank her. It'll be a work in progress, always, and it won't always be easy, but it will be my way of remembering. She deserves nothing less.

Fire and Rain from Lucy Kempton on Vimeo.

~~~

I downloaded the Windows Movie Maker to make this, for which tip I must thank Zephyr, I wanted to do a better job than the scratchy jumpy Picasa things I've done before. And I'm using Vimeo instead of Youtube because they are an altogether nicer outfit.  As well as the older scans - in the early black and whites, the first baby and toddler are me, the curly chap is my youngest brother, between Alison and myself in age, the other youngsters are her children - I have used some pictures from our trip to New Zealand three years ago, and a couple that my niece - my brother Chris's girl - sent of a trip that their family and my other sister Helen took to meet up with Alison, her husband and son in Santiago in northern Spain last year. Sadly, I seem to have few photos of her and her husband together, except for the daft one of them dressed as a Christmas cracker and Santa's elf, which I include in the necessity of wholeness .

Thanks to everyone for the kind words and comments, thoughts, prayers, e-mails, marks of respect, expressions of fellow-feeling and concern, 'phone calls, walks on the beach etc.  Not everyone chooses to air private grief in what is essentially a public place, I know, but I think we know each other well enough now, and I value the friendship that I find here.

We're going away for a couple of days now, to the Bay of Morlaix, whose wide blue tranquillity I have held in my mind's eye since we drove around it on the way back from Finistere a couple of years ago. It's a spur-of-the-moment trip; I felt the need of a hiatus before going back to work next week, and within a short time of searching an inexpensive dog-friendly B&B with a sea view and vacancies presented itself. I have a strong wish to be by the sea at the moment.

Bye for now, and thanks again.

Time out

I learned this morning that my beautiful and beloved sister Alison Turner died suddenly today, at the age of 57, in New Zealand, where she lived.

I can't really do this in words just now.  Using the past tense is more than I can cope with.  So I'll be away for a bit.  Thanks.