Like a Feather

 

He said

You're like a feather,

blown around by the wind.

And though surprised,

She hadn't questioned him.

These were the first words he'd had with her since the initial interview, in which he'd rudely asked outright whether she'd come to find a husband. Completely thrown by this idea, she hesitated,   it was awkward because although she'd been told her drawings were good, she was really running away from something, rather than towards anything

Taking my own hand and walking myself back there, I give myself voice;

Well if I seem like a feather, blown around by the wind, it's maybe just because I consider things deeply. I listen to people, try to understand them, sometimes even try their ideas out for a bit. 

But look around you. This is me.   I've worked hard and constantly. In a different institution, even a different department, I might have done better and you could have helped and guided me more in this one. Intervened, maybe even just had a couple of conversations, but you just watched me stew and struggle. You didn't do your job properly and that's the truth. I have produced a body of work here that reflects my inner struggle and here, after all these years of no helpful interventions by you, my teacher, that's all you have to say about me.

I suppose this is when he would say - you could have come to me. My door is always open.

Bitter ? 

My anger has been dissipated over the years. Life has a way of teaching you what's really important and worth losing sleep over. And I know that anyone who has been through the art mill is scarred by it. It's like being thrown to the lions every day, so when I look at people creating and producing stuff, I feel for them and I applaud them, whether they've been through the same mill as me or not.

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You have reached your destination

You have reached your destination 

The train spoke with friendly assurance and offered up the platform to the next stage 

And in that liminal moment, 

She feels it all;

The warmth and security of the journey in the train cocoon 

Travelling, you are taken somewhere

And for that short time,

You’re off the hook

Suspended in that time it takes,

Given over to only the immediate environment

It can be soothing,

If luck serves you

Here, she’s remembering,

Poised on the cusp

As the darkness of an unknown future greets her

Despite the billowing beauty of her turquoise skirt,

The grasp of uncertainty holds her tight 

For a moment

What she had been

 

I was a gate

on a path with no fences

either side,

A strange anomaly,

Anachronistic ?  perhaps a little,

A small inconvenience to some,

A bloody useless eyesore to others.

Get rid ! they cried.

Others just smiled and leaned a while,

Chatting o'er my top to friends.

I had a kind of function for them.

People think gates have no feelings, 

But between me, you and the well-chafed post -

They do. 

What she had become - a beginning

 

Her beating heart, so tired now, nerves worn thin with worrying,

Her legs, led her, running on empty, to the place

where she could rest ;

A clearing

The ground lay soft and welcoming,

Leaves would cover her.

She would look up through trees

to the heavens

what did Wilde say ?

" that little patch of blue

that prisoners call the sky "

He suffered.

My  how he must have suffered.

She offered up a prayer of thanks

for all the love

all the love and suffering

bravely borne and conveyed so beautifully

that brought her to this place  

Death and beginnings

 

I was stuck in my Nana's house, where I was born. In the front room, transfixed by the pink glass light shade painted with flowers and hanging from the ceiling by three chains. 

I've remembered what my fascination with it was now - the dead moths and flies lying in the bottom whose shadows blotted out some of the light. 

Every Friday and Saturday night, Teddy boys would fight in the back alley behind my auntie's flat. Broken glass would litter the ground so you didn't go that way til someone swept up, ready for the next bout. 

Once there were whispers in the house about a severed finger left wedged in-between the railings outside our school.

Another time my mother told me not to walk near the edge of the pavement lest someone was to grab me and pull me into a car

At home; my Nana's bedroom, small and pretty with its trinkets on the dressing table and a flowered silky counterpane, somewhere I would peep to see if Granny was still dying there. My mum had told me that she had died in my nana's bed, quietly, of stomach cancer.  " I'll dance at your wedding Aggie " she would say apparently. My mum loved her granny as I loved my nana and I thought I heard her sometimes, chuckling, sighing, once my fancy saw her shape, small and slender, stirring under the covers against the grey light of a foggy November day, and was not scared, but heard my mother's watch tick tock as it dangled on my wrist and ran to tell her that her granny was alive and the once broken watch had started tick tocking

Bad Dream 11.10.25

 

It opens in a shop, a really small pharmacy, I'm keeping one hand on my baby's pram, I don't want to wake them by picking them up, but I need some Ibuprofen. The pharmacist asks who is it for, me or the baby, but before I can answer, someone who I take to be his assistant distracts me. Next thing I see is that there's a box of Calpol in the pram and I don't want to ask for any for myself so I exit the shop, really worried now that the baby is so fast asleep and feeling anxious about the pharmacist's ' assistant ' did she give my baby Calpol ? and she's actually following me down the road but suddenly we're at some kind of tip or quarry and my toddler child is standing at the top of a huge slag heap or mountain of dust or something hideous and as I open my mouth to call him, he decides to slide down. The pharmacist's assistant is watching me as I stand, paralysed with overwhelming fear, tinged at its edges with admiration for the way my toddler boy launched himself with such gay abandon down the steep slope of the slag heap. 

Abrupt end to the dream. I wake with a gasp. 

 

To be or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die-to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end 

16 year old me is reading Hamlet's speech for the first time, a text we've been given as a test to apparently sort the wheat from the chaff because too many of us want to study English Literature for A level. 

I look around, everyone but me is scribbling something, no doubt they've been taken to see the play, perhaps they've been diligent enough to read it for themselves. 

I suddenly feel awfully sleepy. I don't sleep well and often walk around our estate in the early hours, listening to the owls, looking for the moon. It's surprisingly peaceful, but often, the next day, I can't concentrate very well. 

Surely I don't have to pass this test ? I did so well in my GCE English lit' and language and my teacher knows how I love it ..... I feel languid and lazy, almost not inclined to care, and not for the first time. I twiddle with my pen, hovering above the piece of paper.............

a little voice inside me says don't be stupid, don't be arrogant. You need to show willing. WRITE SOMETHING !!!! -- ANYTHING !!!!!   ( she's getting desperate )

I read the speech once more:

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: ' tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

Oh god, I say to myself, sudden realisation dawning like a big blooming bomb and write;

Hamlet is wondering whether to commit suicide. 

and that's it. 

I've procrastinated so long, that's all I've got time for and I have to hand it in, looking as though I don't care. 

Unfinished

 

Did you ever set out to make something beautiful and good or even just nice, only to give up when it was nearly completed ?

I've done this a lot and sometimes it distresses me, but mostly I just spend time thinking, with a kind of detached interest, about the reasons for it.

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She sits on the little bed with it's painted wooden arms that Dad made especially and attached to its sides so she wouldn't fall out. Mum's rampaging through her wardrobe, as if she's looking for something and suddenly pulls out a hotch potch collection of what looks like just bits of material but in and amongst are some little half stuffed toys that began as attempts for her brownie sewing badge.

She'd been to the lady's house, with another brownie, and the lady had shown them how to make a pattern with some paper, pin it to the material, cut it out and sew it, leaving a small hole, which you could stuff with special stuffing or some old tights if you didn't have any proper stuffing. 

There was the little felt Humpty Dumpty with his long loose legs which the lady had praised but had made some comments about making the stitches smaller or something and making sure the button eyes were secure which had felt slightly embarrassing, and she hadn't done that because she'd got the badge anyway and hadn't really liked the Humpty Dumpty toy anyway because 

she didn't know why

she sighs as she sees him

Mum places him on the bed beside her and pulls out the three other, aborted, attempts at different characters and places them beside him. 

They make a motley crew. 

Why don't you ever finish things ? she cries in frustration. The strength of feeling in the mother's voice is startling. The child is shocked into silence. She didn't know her mum felt that way about her. 

Paralysed in that moment, she can but look askance at the Motley Crew, thinking churlishly for a moment how they'd got her into trouble, but then the sight of the poor things with their flat heads and gaping holes, old tights peeping through, their lack of arms, their insufficient legs, the way their sometimes one eye gazed unblinkingly, unaware of the consternation they had caused in their incompleteness melts the small child's heart and she gathers them up and puts them in the fairy cot her mum and dad had made her one Christmas and turns around and says not sorry to her mum but that she will, she'll finish them 

but she doesn't. 

She attaches some bits of green wool to the flat head of the smallest, whose one black button eye is sewn on with a rather garish yellow thread, making her look a bit demonic and she hugs and kisses her and tells her she's beautiful she doesn't need another eye as she lays her back in the cot next to the hard bodied beautiful black baby doll with her sleeping eyes and her silky blue bonnet that the child thinks is absurd but doesn't remove because the soft black curls underneath are also wrong somehow she doesn't know why they just are. 

Another day she sews an arm onto the turtle shaped toy but she doesn't have enough of the same material for any more and anyway she isn't really sure what a turtle looks like she just liked the word, so she pops him in the cot on the other side of the baby doll, next to nearly complete Humpty, whispering one day she'll fix him when she's found a picture and the right stuff.

The biggest one is like a sun she thinks, but worries that the sun shouldn't be fat, nor have limbs, so she simply sews the buttons on with some pleasing red thread, so pleasing she doesnt notice immediately that they're placed rather strangely close to the edge and when she does she simply sighs and puts them with their friends in the cot.  

The child covers The Motley Crew with the pink frilly edged counterpane that mum had sewn by hand because at that point they had no sewing machine then sat on her bed to read. 

The mother never mentions them again and the child never finishes them, but often tells them that they're good enough for her and she'll protect them from the mum if she should ever uncover them. 

                                                                    *

It's not as if blame can be attached to anyone, nor a direct cause and effect cited because, after all, these tiny incidents are just part of growing up and learning are they not. Sure, the mother could have been less emotional about the Motley Crew. In a different mood she might have been. A different person might have not mentioned them at all, or maybe taken one out, sat down next to the child and asked her if she'd like some help - they could look through the button box together and find some more and this other person would help the child sew them on securely ?

The child doesn't even know of a different way because she is a child and lacking in experience. There are other people in her life but no-one yet to help with projects such as these. 

And these facts are also the reasons for the Two Lost Summers. 

The first was one following the rather surprising event of the child winning an art competition with a rather psychedelic picture of a sunflower. Each seed was a different colour, meticulously drawn and coloured in with wax crayons. The somewhat ominous dark blue powder colour wash her teacher had shown her how to paint over it was a strange and striking foil to the flower's gargantuan brightly coloured head. Everyone seemed impressed, most of all, her class teacher whose response was to give her a cutting from a magazine with a photo of a waterlily pond and suggest she could make another picture based on this over the summer holidays. 

As the 6 weeks dragged by, the weight of the task of drawing something for the teacher sat heavily on the child's shoulders and the usual dread of returning to school after the long break was inflated further by her inability to do something with it. Paralysed by her lack of familiarity with water lilies (she'd never seen one, and really had no idea what they were) the child found herself unable to enjoy any of the usual summer holiday activities. The swings at the local park didn't make her feel ecstatic as they usually did, she was too listless at the beach to clamber over the line of stones, shells and seaweed to paddle at the sea's edge as she longed to. Ice cream was allowed to drip down the cornet her Dad kindly brought her along the difficult path between the dunes. Her skates, once her favourite things to don and roll precariously down the drive's slight incline and come to a stop at the bottom with a skilfully executed extravagantly sweeping turn, lay forlorn and abandoned in a dark corner of the garage.

September crept up like impending doom. The kindly, wise teacher never mentioned the water lily task and as Christmas approached, the feeling of dread lifted but never quite left entirely, hovering around her head and shoulders, ready to descend whenever it wanted. 

The following summer was not quite as bad. The task presented was prompted by her Dad who thought she might become a weather girl, so, smilingly, the lovely teacher gave the child some equipment; an exercise book, some sharpened pencils, a rubber, an outdoor thermometer and a small book on clouds for children like her who could learn their names and meaning. 

Nobody had accounted for the lack of variety of clouds or variance in outdoor temperature in a child's life should they be wanting them. The diary was religiously kept for a long-enough period to see the monotony of the weather in those parts during those days and the ensuing blank pages testimony to the stability of the climate, or perhaps she just couldn't be bothered to recount the drizzly summer rain that occasionally fell or try to name the drab grey covering from which it fell. The cloud book promised great variety, but couldn't teach the child that only time and travel could fill her exercise book diary with that.

Maybe lost was a misnomer for these two summers; maybe they were merely markers for the pain of change. As she made her transition into adulthood, the child resisted many of the changes that was to bring. 

Later she would realise this and the two summers would sit together like a double hyphen in her story, following The Motley Crew and delineating a break 

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     I've added a bit more to this rambling ' think piece ' if you will, over on my Taste Blog, partly because I want to give a fuller picture of my mother and to think through myself how she influenced me in so many positive ways. 

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