Story

4th January 2022

I'm pottering, tutting at the crocuses' newly sprouted green shoots dug up ignominiously by the squirrel, sometimes I think I could love plants more than animals. Covering them back up, I wonder if perhaps I'm part plant because I do love soil. It's really one of the loveliest materials on this Earth. I remember how Ai Weiwei said his father had lived in a hole dug in the ground, but I can't start thinking about that now because the logistics of it will take me too far off at a tangent, so I'll just log that thought for later and go and get the vase with the Christmas flowers in.

As I tip the last of the withered roses, along with their water, over the fence onto the bank, I see that the Holly has spread much further along now and nearly made it to about a third of the way up which is amazing and wonderful, I hope. There's a lot of ivy and I suppose they go together. I don't think the elderberry or the oak will be troubled by their intrusion and the clematis is so huge and bushy it will surely survive. I think about nature journals and wonder about their usefulness.

I think about small things adding up and the idea that if we could all do some small things regularly, they could have a cumulative effect, a sort of confederacy of virtue which may amount to a kind of effusion and an appearance of miracles.

The late afternoon sun draws attention to the hillside. How bright it must be in the rooms of the houses whose windows are glinting. Last night's smattering of snow has melted from the fields behind them, but further up, it's still laying on the tops. A robin lands on one of the electricity power lines which run up the lane and sings its evensong. How I've missed hearing birdsong.

Looking up into the oak's bare canopy, I like to imagine I can feel its strength. Some of the small pieces which the wind pruned look wizened and completely covered in lichen. One had some ominous black substance oozing from it which I'll have to research. I hope there'll be some medicine if it's a sign of illness.

Last year I stood here banging a pan for the NHS. Conflicted, I wanted to join in and show that I do appreciate people who choose to care for a living, but at the time, I couldn't shake the feeling that we were being softened up for something and that mere applause was not going to compensate for the sacrifices made. It's a terrible thing to feel at the mercy of something, especially when one's trust has been steadily eroded over time.

Gazing at the outline of St Peter's against the sunset, I think about someone reading my words, which are, of course, my thoughts, and how, to some extent, that is why one might write, but that also, there is an alchemy at work in writing, in which words sometimes seem to arise from somewhere outside ourself. And I remember, as I go in, why I write.

Extract from CÉSAR AIRA: AN EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF A LANDSCAPE PAINTER

This is something that happens in everyday life, after all. When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. … What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else’s mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind.

Conversations Cesar Aira

I no longer know if I ever fall asleep. If I do, I remain outside of sleep itself, in that constantly moving ring of icy asteroids that circles the dark and immobile hollow of oblivion. It is as if I never enter that shadowy vacuum. I toss and turn, literally, in the zone around it, which is as vast as a world, and actually is the world. I do not lose consciousness. I remain within myself. Thought accompanies me. I don't know if this thought is different from that of full wakefulness; it is, at any rate, very similar.

This is how I spend my nights. To entertain myself, I remember conversations I've had with friends during the day: each night, those of the same day. Every day these conversations give me material for memory. Since I stopped working, I've had nothing better to do than get together with my friends and converse for whole afternoons. I've often wondered if my lack of employment is the reason for my sleep disturbance, because before, when I used to work, I slept normally, like everybody else.

The beginning of Conversations by Cesar Aira

A recommended read.

I cried a single tear,

My eye held it gently there

A lens through which to view the world

In which the world sees me.

Photography

Your touch

So delicate and deft,

How substance has always bent easily to your will,

But not words,

And not the world.

What were you thinking when you bought this piece,

Of freedom,

Of slavery,

How strange and cruel the world

we brought you into.

Each day you make it better.

Ghost Story CODA

Walking backwards has few merits. You're still going to bump into that same lamp-post.

This time, she should have been looking at the kerb, but she cannot take her eyes off the dark figure at the end of the road.

She freezes half way, not daring to look back.

Is God a man.

Is the Devil a man.

Is Death a man.

Sunshine hides the darkness. The face of the assassin is only revealed at the point of death.

He wanted to go back. He wanted to go back to that place and find a point. A point at which things could be made different from then onward.

Magical thinking kicks in.

He begins to voice his thoughts aloud.

Life is loss

Time is loss

We have this feeling of going forwards, but its really a question of undoing.

What we have at our end is no thing.

When things cease to respond to your touch, you begin to wonder.

Each time she wrote, she felt something had been lost. It was a kind of throwing away. Even if she

wrote about the future, the packaging of the dream up into a parcel of words would seem to isolate

it's emergence as a real thing.

The conversation had turned to cutlery. She ran to a drawer and pulled out a set of knives; " These,

these are fish knives ", she exclaimed vehemently. The style was recognisable to anyone who'd

dined in a fine restaurant no doubt. And so it went on. Each object had to be sorted and each one had

a story. Even long after everything had been dealt with and the house packed up and sold, stories

would bring objects back to mind and they would lodge temporarily in the ether between their

their conversations, now ghostly memories, sometimes holding more power despite their

insubstantiality. What one pined for, another was glad to see the back of; a string of false pearls

masquerading as cultured, a set of pewter candlesticks, battered in a rather interesting way, that

cutlery hamper which sadly had inexplicably lost its legs, and the pure linen cloths, some

exquisitely embroidered.

For years, conversations would often turn to stories which in turn conjured the various objects which

must be dispensed with once and for all; the final tip filling with the absurdity of displacement,

a kind of lost property office but deep and dark like a well and hopefully not somewhere to

ever have to venture into.

The Beginning - Upstairs

The second floor of a house hovers. Whatever holds it up is mysterious. The connection between the ground and it is air.

The stairs in this house are steep. There is a sharp turn at the top to take you to the landing place. At the end of the long landing there is a small, patterned window with a mirror on a ledge. It is spotted black, corroding all along its edges. Mother stands before it and puts make-up on each day, looking into it. The face looking back is not Mother, it's someone who looks like her but her expression is wrong. It is slightly twisted and a bit frightening for her little girl.

The bathroom is stark and bright, a large silvered lightbulb gives off heat, but not enough. The toilet opposite is sometimes an office where the secretary hands out bills for payment on Izal paper. Further along, the back bedroom is stuffed with beds. Its door is closed during the day so she knocks and asks if the guest is comfortable today. By night, television broadcasts are given from there and she will present the news.

The airing cupboard opposite is voluminous and dark and not to be entered, except on a dare. Someone will arrive shortly and demand that you come out in a terrifying voice that requires you to hide until they depart.

The front bedroom has a large family living in it, and she would like to check the children aren't interfering with the precious articles collected by the exotic aunt and uncle who travel the world. These are stored in the large, dark, shiny wardrobe in straw baskets and wooden boxes and must not be disturbed.

In the box room next door, lives a very old, very thin lady who is always very pleased to see the little girl. Her face lights up as she comes in and stands by her bed, though she has been crying and as the child hands her a tissue, she whispers ' don't tell your Mam Aggie ' and though that is not her name, the child nods and takes the tissue from the old lady's frail hand. She gently pats the covers over her stomach and as the old lady's face forms a wince, the child's face falls into sadness. She blows the old lady a kiss as she walks out of the room backwards and carefully closes the door until tomorrow.

The Beginning

It was a post war mid terrace with a back entry between the two houses on one side and the two large bedrooms sharing a wall above it so that you were subjected to each others' noise if you made any.

A decent size for an average family - 3 beds with one a box room. They were larger than average, with 4 adults, two children and another adult who came and went on a fairly regular basis. It was the same for a lot of families round there. Musical beds and put-you-ups was a feature of most of their lives. You had to go where the work was.

So, a little on the small side for the grown-ups perhaps, but a vast playground for a small child and her imagination.

She decided it was a hotel, possibly after over-hearing some remark, and would enter each room as if. In the dining room was a table always covered with a green chenille table cloth whose dangling pom-poms tickled her permanently bruised knees as she would reach forward to dip her licked finger into the glass sugar bowl which sat in state in the middle next to the glass salt and pepper shakers and the jar of piccalilli. Quietly she would complain about the food and walk out with her head in the air just like she'd heard complaining people would do.

In the outside loo lived the Drake. He was a fine slender fellow dressed in bright red trousers, with a sleek black top, his head an elegant noble shape, long pointed nose, impeccable deportment. He greeted her with a silent nod from his place in the corner as she sat down on the toilet from where she would pour out her heart to him. He listened intently and then sometimes as a thank you she would take him out for a turn around the garden afterwards, but forgetting her manners, she might lean hard on him, pretending to limp like her uncle sometimes or even pretend he was a rifle gun as she'd seen her brother do. She would prop him back up in his corner with a sorry sigh and smooth his ruffled trousers before she left saying she'd see him again tomorrow and no messing then.

The pantry was a secret passage way. You stepped in through the back door, sideways to the left, and disappeared into its ethereal whiteness. Chicken wire covered a small, square window. Shelves held plates, one for butter, another for cheese and sometimes cooling pies. Sometimes there was a rabbit hanging on a hook. This was very mysterious. Sometimes the smells were nauseous.

The washing machine was a robot who also knew all her complaints and delights and she would press his buttons and pull his levers each time she passed, occasionally giving him a sweet or a special stone she'd found in the garden, once the pink stoned ring she'd got in a cracker because she felt so sorry for him trapped in the kitchen all the time.

If her Nana's slippers walked past, she might sniff the air and say pooooo !!!!! for which she would get harsh words from Mama but you could always hear quiet chuckling as they walked away, pom poms giggling.

Mother seemed to be always in a different room, never where you wanted her to be and at mealtimes she stopped being Mother and was the Billy Goat Gruff trip-trapping back and forth from the kitchen to check on whether you were eating your chow and if you weren't you would get embroiled in an argument about why which would end with the small girl standing up tall and insisting she'd rather stand on the bucket than grow up to be a big girl.

Direction and destiny

We can flail around through years,

Feeling in the dark and dappled light

for a direction that appears right,

but the faerie thing evades us.

Until one day, it comes in a dream,

A recurring dream in which someone,

someone keeps calling our name,

and knocking at our door at night.

We keep opening that door,

Looking into that dark night

wiithout fear, the voice was friendly,

We yearn to greet it warmly,

But, the apparition never assembles itself

it never becomes a form we can greet as human,

So we forget the dream.

We sleep a dreamless sleep,

Until one day, late on, when the summer sun is waning,

Staring at some burgeoning poppy seeds,

or the promising bud of some stroppy sunflower,

It comes up behind us, like the sun's shadow,

and all the books we ever read start talking,

all the songs we ever heard start singing,

and what once may have sounded like a cacophony from hell,

now forms itself into a celestial harmony,

and we turn towards its lovely sound,

to greet our destiny with a smile that creeps

slowly deep within.

until we speak a long hello

from our own lips it forms a long 0

and we begin.

May

Spring arrived with the thud !

of Swifts returning to their nests,

and the haze of blue carpet

lining the wood floor

as we drive past.

Fear of frost and snow also passed,

Now the Clematis will bloom

all along the fence,

and promise bees a Summer long sun.

Not the average girl next door love story - #freewritinglimberingupmylimbicsystem#3

I've been wanting to write about the love story that is my Mum and Dad, but one essential word evades me. It's to do with getting rid of a ghost in someone's heart and mind, but it's not an exorcism, it's a much gentler process I'm remembering.

My Mum and Dad grew up on the same street. The war brought them together in this way because my Mum, Nana and three uncles were evacuated there from the centre of Liverpool after the blitz. They were sent to live with an elderly man and I used to have a few momentos from that time which I presume originally belonged to him; an ink well with a poem about the Boer War by Rudyard Kipling inscribed on it and a bracelet in the shape of a snake made out of bone and meant to be worn around the upper arm, which I suppose was from the twenties. I gave them away because after years of contemplating them, I decided they didn't belong with me. I've inherited alot of things like this. I can feel their specialness, but I don't exactly know their provenance, so it takes me a long time to part with them. I realise that in all truth though, wherever they end up is just another random place and I continue to worry about the spirit that lives in their material.

I assume my Dad was also evacuated to this not exactly sea-side town, more a small village near the sea, with his mother, I can't be sure because he didn't like talking about the past and Mum never told his story to me so I have very little to go on. I know he was born in Liverpool, I have his birth certificate, so I'm guessing they both arrived at a similar time. Both had elder brothers away from home, my Dad's was serving as batman to an officer in Australia, Mum's eldest brother spent the war serving in the Merchant Navy. Both of them had lost their father at an early age. There, the similarities ended.

Mum's early memories of the war are of deprivation, starvation and terror. Starvation because my widowed Nana couldn't afford to feed them properly. She worked nights sewing sugar bags at the Tate and Lyle warehouse in Liverpool docks, leaving her elder sister in charge of my mum and her other two brothers. According to family legend, she was cruel, starved them so that they would have to go round other houses begging for jam butties, refused to let them out of bed to go to the toilet at night which apparently caused some complication of Mum's bowel, rendering her unable to walk for a while, (pre-NHS days, the money could not be found for a doctor so she was wheeled around in a push chair until it rectified itself). The nights when my Nana was home didn't seem much better; apparently she refused to go down the road to the air-raid shelter if the air-raid siren sounded and the aunty would drag the crying children down without her.

I have to presume life got better when the family was evacuated out of the centre of Liverpool after the blitz, though I really don't know what they did for money then. Perhaps they depended on the ' Parish ' they often talked of, which I think was money from a poor fund handed out by the local authority, and the kindness of the old man they lodged with.

I don't know how my father's mother managed either. There was some talk of her being a housekeeper to someone who ran a golf club but I really can't see that any golf would be being played while the war was on. Maybe they too had to suffer the ignominy of accepting charity.

Amidst all the chaos and unhappiness, my Dad was doing well at school. School can often be a respite for children in dire circumstances, if the teachers are good. He was identified as someone who could take the scholarship exam for grammar school instead of leaving education and entering the world of work at 14.

I don't know how many times he failed this exam and was allowed to resit it. It's testimony to the good heartedness of his teachers that I know he stayed on at least 18 months longer at school than my mum who left to pursue a training as a nanny aged 14. She got a uniform and always talked with pride about this work, though I'm not entirely convinced she was very good at it at that time. Some of the tales she would tell about her routines and the children she looked after were supposedly funny, but made me uneasy even as a child myself. These were the days when strapping children into and onto things was deemed good practice.

Training works at a really superficial level I think. If you have a very young woman, albeit bright and competent, from a severely deprived background, choosing and being chosen to look after other peoples' children, even with training, even with some psychological input ( Dr Spock in my Mum's case ) can it truly translate into optimum care for the children involved ?

There was a tale to tell about my Nana not paying my mum's ' stamp ' from the money she handed over for her keep each week and this resulting in mum having to leave that line of work. Perhaps she was sacked, who knows, but then began some interesting years of working in a variety of different places including the Penicillin factory, Dunlops, and RAF kitchens. This last job seemed to be her favourite and she used to recall happy memories of dancing with soldiers on Friday nights. Thankfully, she didn't become a G.I. bride, or I wouldn't be me.

Apparently, my Dad wasn't partial to dancing, so he and my Mum didn't ever date each other during their teens. Something happened and Mum became engaged to a Scottish fellow who for many years I thought was called Jimmy Stewart, but it dawned on me eventually that was probably a family nickname for the man who broke her heart.

Whilst Mum's heart was being broken, Dad went from his first job as a runner for the export office at Liverpool dock to an apprentice coach builder, I think making buses, but later going on to make aeroplanes at Hawker Siddeley. There's a huge missing chunk of the story here because somehow, Mum returned to Liverpool from a visit to meet her future in-laws in Scotland single again, having given Jimmy Stewart his ring back and Dad returned from where to where I have no idea but I know that they met in the middle, where Dad proposed to her, famously swearing to stop drinking and to rid Mum of the ghost of Jimmy Stewart.

But now I come to write it, I realise that for all these years I thought they meant Andy Stewart, the Scottish entertainer who would host the New Years' eve show we all watched on tv for years. Two quite different characters indeed.

As indeed my parents were. In fact, they were like chalk and cheese. Dad was tall, blond, quiet, bookish. Mum was small, dark, extravert, an ardent film lover. Dad would listen and quietly tap his fingers to classical music, enjoying composers such as Beethoven and Liszt through to Holst and Vaughan Williams. Mum would sing and dance along to popular songs on the radio ranging from This is My lovely Day and Let's Twist Again to anything by Tom Jones and Neil Diamond. Dad read science fiction and historical novels. Mum read women's magazines and recipe books.

I did them all.

I have this photo. What used to fascinate me was their hair. I always thought they both looked smashing, but wondered at their hair, if it was the style or the wind perhaps, a sudden gust had impossibly lifted their fringes and carried them upwards ? Having accompanied my Mum for weeks on shopping trips to find just the right clothes and accessories for my brother's wedding, I know that she will have spent months planning her own wedding outfit. I love her hat and I really wish I'd got the chance to ask her what colour her suit was. I'm imagining it as cream. I know the spray in her lapel would have been freesias because they were her favourite flower. Dad managed to look dapper whatever he wore. Something to do with the way he carried himself, even when he reached eighteen stones. I feel very proud of them both when I look at this photo', despite them being stood in front of the shed wall.

So, the handsome, quiet man who'd more or less brought himself up and worked hard to get on, rescued the feisty, capable dreamer whose heart needed putting back together again and together they built a fine life, mum no doubt emulating role models she idolised in films along with following the prolific advice offered to women in women's magazines, Dad becoming the father he never had, literally making the home he'd always wanted. His steady, dependable caring ways were the salve my mother had always sought and she called him her rock. As they spurred each other on - each one learining and honing homely skills like woodworking, knitting and clothes-making, gardening and cooking, the bond between them grew and you sort of knew, they were making and mending a soft yet impenetrable veil over the pains of their past. A kind of gradual burial perhaps.