I
watched you pave the yard with bricks you found half buried in the soil. I watched you toil and pick them out And clear and clean until, You'd made a garden. Then, when the grass had grown, I spread a cloth upon the lawn, And we had tea, You, my bears and me.
I needed some words,
Something to soothe my poor head,
To stop the spinning
roundelay that played each day.
I found poetry.
Peter’s mum brought me a basket of fruit when I’d been off school for seven weeks with whooping cough. Peter hated school when I wasn’t there apparently. 6 year old me didn’t really like him wanting to sit next to me all the time, but, of course, I still let him.
Mum came in wielding a basket of fruit. Who's Peter she demanded. A boy in my class; I said, avoiding her eyes but gazing instead at the huge bananas. You're too young for boyfriends she admonished. It's ok I don't like him, he's silly, I replied, idly eating a grape.
______
Above are two little vignettes wot I wrote for a hashtag prompt on Twitter to write something on unrequited love.
My first thought was about an incident in my junior school days when I was off school with whooping cough, and, in the spirit of Allen Ginsberg, I went with that. As I was struggling to remember what it was, I wrote the second tale, in retrospect, a rather lame attempt at humour and to convey how one can sometimes be disinterested in matters of the heart, which feels childish, or perhaps childlike, to me.
The first attempt was me trying to make sense of it, trying, as an adult, to understand and justify the only things which remain of the incident; feelings and atmosphere. As a child, and as an adult too sometimes, I often feel quite remote from the effect I may have on others. Even as I try hard to imagine what it might be, it takes effort, and time, for it to percolate through sometimes.
The actual or factual memory I have is very hazy and probably mostly inaccurate as I think they mostly are ; sitting at my desk - a copy of an old school desk with a lift up lid, an ink well and bent metal legs - outside in the yard each day and every day for most of the day if it was fine, I think because my mum thought the fresh air would help me, in a similar way to the way TB patients had been helped by the fresh air cure, taking my own class register - I'd made up all the names on it, goodness knows where they came from, they often used to pop into my head even until just recently, - and enjoying planning and marking lessons for my imaginary class. I seem to remember they were all rather bad at maths, like me.
I don't remember being too bothered by the illness itself, though I do remember the whoop, most vividly when I have a winter cough, when mum frog marching me to the tap to stick my head firmly under running cold water which seemed to pull me out of it comes rushing back to me on some occasions and my cough becomes a little asthmatic.
I know my mum felt guilty about not having me vaccinated against this horrible disease and the reasons were similar to those which prevent some parents taking their children for the MMR vaccines. I don't remember my brother being around during that time and I think perhaps he was sent away to stay with someone so as not to catch it too.
So it was that my poor mum was no doubt very fraught during the ten or so weeks it took me to recover, hence my depicting her response to what was rather a touching gesture from a little boy in my class, as somewhat testy and ungracious.
In truth, I can't imagine she would have been bothered, or surprised, by anyone enjoying my company. My dear mum thought the sun shone from me when I was small. Or so I felt. However, I can imagine and vaguely remember her being bothered by the rather, I think she thought, extravagant, gift of a basket of fruit, brought to the doorstep.
And I think that for my mum, what was particularly troubling about this incident was not that someone was pining for me particularly, thinking back, it could have been partly because fruit was an expensive luxury to most ordinary people at that time, or certainly, to our family. I went to the shops with mum at least twice a week when I was on holiday and she had a very strict budget. If fruit was bought, it was to be eaten. I could rarely finish a whole apple as a small girl, and so was reticent to embark on one for fear of retribution. I can imagine having a whole basket of fresh fruit to be eaten before it went off would have been quite an annoyance for my mum, and come to think of it, possibly slightly intimidating for me as a child.
Thinking about Peter, although I can remember his name, and his second name too, but I can't remember him in actuality. Our tables were arranged in sets at school and I was, on the ' top table ' with five other girls, all destined for grammar school, though we didn't know it at the time. It's a sad fact that the boys in my class did not register my attention unless they were a) very naughty ( I was sometimes asked to mind the class when our teacher left the room for some reason so I got to know the naughty ones ) or b) I was tasked with showing them how to do something, like tell the time. I don't know quite why I was considered adept at telling the time from an early age. Something else for me to ponder on another occasion perhaps.
I do remember where Peter lived and that's because my mum went to call on his mum at some point. I remember her saying it was to ask that they stop sending me gifts. Since I can only remember the fruit, I presume the other gifts were either refused or returned. Mum told me where their house was; quite close to school, alongside a busy duel carriageway she said and she was at pains to point out that it wasn't such a nice house as ours, and that Peter's dad might not be at home very often, which I related to because my dad was often at work and since he worked shifts, I sometimes didn't see him until the weekend.
In reality, I hadn't been aware of Peter much in my day to day life at school before I contracted whooping cough and had to stay at home and nor do I remember him featuring any more on my return after about ten weeks. To me, he's someone I feel I should have noticed and I'll never know what I truly was to him because of the fact that I didn't.
Well I have a funny theory, that we meet everyone at least twice. Recently I started wondering if I'd met Peter again since I left the town we grew up in and whether he recognised me and whether I had a feeling of recognition when I met him and what he had become.
__________
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
&
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.
