When it snows in England there is always a strange panicky excitement not easy to define. We love it and we loathe it. Some of us love it. Some of loathe it. Some of us love it and loathe it at the same time. Given our prediliction for talking inanely about the weather, no one is surprised to hear that we have plenty to say about the snow. It gives us a new topic of conversation, especially in February. It staves off the boredom. We have been talking about 'this bloody rain' for approximately ten months by the time we reach February. Twelve months if its been a 'bad' Summer.
You are unlikely to meet an English person who is indifferent to snow. "I like it... when I'm inside', is a common sentiment on the first day. "I think it is magical...until it turns to slush" on the second. "I'm bored with it now" on the third. "I hate this [expletive of choice] snow, its so [expletive of choice] cold" by the fourth. The "its so [expleteive of choice] cold" is said with a deadpan seriousness as though no one had ever noticed that before. When we declare that "its so [expletive of choice] cold" we look each other directly in the eye, shaking our heads in bewilderment, eyebrows frozen in shock. It is as though the great thermostat above the English Isle has 'packed up again'.
This year our weather people have started calling it 'The Snow Event'. It is as though it is a Government-funded experiment. Another one. 'The Snow Event' depending upon which end of the 'love it or 'loathe it' spectrum you are sitting will not escape you if you are English. In fairness to Gordon Brown, he is a Scot and a smattering of snow might not be seen by him as an event. On the other hand, he isn't well-known for his imagination. The £1.2 billion loss of income today resulting from The Snow Event should be proof, it isn't just a bit of fun for Gordon at this boring time.
But it is so beautiful and mesmorising. I think it is eventful, in a different way. It does disrupt normality for us in England. It makes us think and it changes our perspective. It also makes us remember. Snow, in England, is out-of-the-ordinary. Snow is a remarkable type of weather that is sporadic and unpredictable and forces us to lose control of our environment. Because it is relatively rare, compared to rain, we remember the times when it happens. Snow unsettles us as it settles, bringing back our own personal 'snow events'.
It unsettles me because Snow makes me nostalgic, even a little sentimental. Each snowflake dances another feeling into me from nowhere. A need to cry. A buzz of excitement. A feeling of joy. A sigh at the beauty a slick white lick of snow can create from a featureless urban landscape. The joy and the tears jumble, I don't know what they are, or why they are visting me now. But then the memories come. Now I am five and riding my new bike for Christmas, my brother lets go, there are no stabilisers, I fall into the soft white coldness. Now I am older, holding my white fluffy stray rabbit in the moonlight and the thick snowy landscape. The rabbit bites me and runs away and I am bleeding into the whiteness. Now I am with my friends thick icy lumps sticking to my gloves, we are soaked with thawed snow laughing helplessly on a sledge or a tea tray, racing down a slight incline over the bald spots where the grass shows through. We are thawing out, our hands looped around hot cups of home-made chocolate. We are treading delicately on thick ice and whacking each other with snow balls. We are standing in snowdrifts so big we can hide in them, dwarfed by the magnificent sculpture of nature. The days when overnight everything transformed into a wonderland of play.
Some of us can become children again when it snows. We remember the need for play, for fun and for laughter. There is that magic and we rediscover it, melting as soon as we catch it like a snow drop on our tongue. Poor old Gordon, I bet he wishes it was his idea.
Monday, 2 February 2009
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Divine threads
oh dear, lagging behind on my promise to write once a week, so it is a good thing I didn't promise a daily enterprise. I have sent some articles to the Guardian magazine because Graham nagged me into it.
Yesterday I heard a profound phrase, two actually,
'all, in the end, is harvest'
and
'they' (an Aunt and her neighbour) had 'vacancies' for one another'
I thought 'all, in the end, is harvest' was brilliant. I find 'everything happens for a reason' hard to swallow, though many of my friends believe this, but 'all in the end is harvest' makes for an easier way of making sense of trauma without it seeming divinely intended. The awful things in my life have been rich in 'harvest' and that 'harvest' has been of good things. I don't believe God gave them to me or intended them, simply that he has harvested my experience of a real human life.
Someone suggested I was 'the divine thread in lots of people's lives' which made me squirm because anybody's response would be 'oh, no, not me' and nervous laughter, which is of course what I said and what i did. But I think we under-use 'divine' as a term for God. It is a good 'catch-all' way of talking about Holy things without them becoming set apart qualities which belong to Saints. When I think about it I see 'divine threads' in all of the people I love. It set me off thinking about how we are all 'threaded together' like a big woven cloth. So being 'a divine thread in lots of lives' isn't so improbable, it is just a question of looking for those threads in each other.
This leads nicely on to the second quote, which is about the same aspect of life. Our relationships are the harvests of our lives and the idea of having 'vacancies for each other' flies in the face of some negative associations of being needy for unhealthy motives. It occurred to me that being needy for something lacking which might be met in another human being is what makes our woven fabric in life. A red thread is needed to compliment a yellow one and they need each other to create a whole. The absence in the yellow thread's life of the red thread is simply a matter of fact and for the yellow thread to take her whole life saying just because a red thread is missing doesn't mean I should look for a red thread seems a bit wasted when a red thread is out there looking for a home.
So...a post for this week, that wasn't too painful.
Yesterday I heard a profound phrase, two actually,
'all, in the end, is harvest'
and
'they' (an Aunt and her neighbour) had 'vacancies' for one another'
I thought 'all, in the end, is harvest' was brilliant. I find 'everything happens for a reason' hard to swallow, though many of my friends believe this, but 'all in the end is harvest' makes for an easier way of making sense of trauma without it seeming divinely intended. The awful things in my life have been rich in 'harvest' and that 'harvest' has been of good things. I don't believe God gave them to me or intended them, simply that he has harvested my experience of a real human life.
Someone suggested I was 'the divine thread in lots of people's lives' which made me squirm because anybody's response would be 'oh, no, not me' and nervous laughter, which is of course what I said and what i did. But I think we under-use 'divine' as a term for God. It is a good 'catch-all' way of talking about Holy things without them becoming set apart qualities which belong to Saints. When I think about it I see 'divine threads' in all of the people I love. It set me off thinking about how we are all 'threaded together' like a big woven cloth. So being 'a divine thread in lots of lives' isn't so improbable, it is just a question of looking for those threads in each other.
This leads nicely on to the second quote, which is about the same aspect of life. Our relationships are the harvests of our lives and the idea of having 'vacancies for each other' flies in the face of some negative associations of being needy for unhealthy motives. It occurred to me that being needy for something lacking which might be met in another human being is what makes our woven fabric in life. A red thread is needed to compliment a yellow one and they need each other to create a whole. The absence in the yellow thread's life of the red thread is simply a matter of fact and for the yellow thread to take her whole life saying just because a red thread is missing doesn't mean I should look for a red thread seems a bit wasted when a red thread is out there looking for a home.
So...a post for this week, that wasn't too painful.
Monday, 12 January 2009
If you can walk you can dance.
Well, I've run out of conditioner for my hair and lost my hairbrush and I look like a tramp and I crawled out of bed really late. Today was supposed to be my new routine morning and a blew it by ignoring Graham's advice to 'put that book down' and didn't sleep until 2.30am. The book is called 'If you can walk you can dance', but could more appropriately been called 'if you can pick this up you can also put it down'.
Reading books is like different relationships. They can be warm and satisfying with potential to transform everything and everyone. They can be dull. They can be exciting. They can be dull and occasionally exciting. They can be exciting and occasionally dull. They can be wildly exciting and easily spent. They can also start well and end badly. The book I stupidly read until the early hours was being read simply so I could finally get to the end and be put out of my misery. Graham doesn't understand why, for me, even really irritating books need to be finished. If he gets bored with them he just dumps them. I think this is because he doesn't really believe you can have a relationship with a book.
So this book, was love at first site, a grand passion and I bored people to death with my enthusiasm to start with. Unfortunately this rapidly slid into dissillusionment.
The odd thing about it was that it was that I picked it up in our very limited library because was the only book in sight with a decent cover and title. I was amazed to find when I started reading it that it was not, as the title indicated, about dancing but largely about 'ethnomusicology'. This is odd because one of my Swedish relatives introduced me to this unheard of phenomena because he is coming to Goldsmiths university in London to study it. I thought this was weird because I had never heard of 'ethnomusicology' and neither had anyone else I knew.
This book started off with the most wonderful concept, a woman exploring her life through a radically new approach to music and music as a form of survival. It explored her development into emotional, psychological, sexual maturity through music. Half way through the book I realised that I really wouldn't blame her if she leapt off a cliff into the Niagra Falls. Then I realised that I thought the doomed and complicated relationship around which the story evolved was not really worth the perseverance. Then by the third 2am ordeal in Part Three I realised that this was the last time I was ever going to read a book that had a Part Three. Then by the fourth 2am reading I realised that I couldn't understand what she saw in him anyway. I decided that if he had treated me like that I like to believe I would have knocked him over the Viagara Falls first and put an end to the whole sorry business. Then by the fifth 2am endeavour I realised that for several days all my friends had been asking if I was alright because I kept blinking at them and rubbing my eyes because they were blurring at the edges. I had eye strain. Well last night was the final episode of all night reading vigils and the final revelation. I realised that the author should have just written a reference book. Then we would have been spared this ludicrous proposition with which she decided to showcase her enthusiasm for her specialism. If she had just written about it, albeit briefly, I would have found it fascinating.
I am well-known for my own propensity to analyse and de-construct my own emotional state and living with myself is boring enough. Having to suffer the additional burden of another woman's issues with every imaginable scenario she encounters was really tiring. Anyone can tell you that living with one person that you love for fourteen years can take its toll on conversation from time to time. These two hadn't spent more than a few hours at a time in each other's company until about a decade into their 'relationship'. The conversation centred almost entirely on their inability to have relationships, least of all their own. I had difficulty imagining what they would talk about when she finally moved in with him and his wife and step-son, her bereaved South African Mother and his senile Scottish one. The only vocabulary they had was littered with phrases like 'Jennie, I'm emotionally blocked at the moment', and 'Neil, you are retreating'. The only successful communication seemed to take place between his cello and her Viola. I had visions of his mother screaming out to be taken to the loo in a broad Glaswegian accent. I imagine the Chilean Political refugee 'marriage-of-convenience' cancer patient wife tending to the mother-in-law. I imagine the son of the Chilean Political refugee (not from the marriage of convenience but by a Political exile of unknown origin) walking in on his Composer step- Dad of convenience with his equally emotionally-blocked wife who he married in a strange African ritual in the Nyika Plateau. I imagine them making up for ten years of snatched sex by having sex (in an emotionally blocked way) with an oboe in the attic while the South African not-mother-in-law but Mother-in-law by strange African fertility ritual does the crossword in Afrikaans wondering what on earth she got herself into.
Reading books is like different relationships. They can be warm and satisfying with potential to transform everything and everyone. They can be dull. They can be exciting. They can be dull and occasionally exciting. They can be exciting and occasionally dull. They can be wildly exciting and easily spent. They can also start well and end badly. The book I stupidly read until the early hours was being read simply so I could finally get to the end and be put out of my misery. Graham doesn't understand why, for me, even really irritating books need to be finished. If he gets bored with them he just dumps them. I think this is because he doesn't really believe you can have a relationship with a book.
So this book, was love at first site, a grand passion and I bored people to death with my enthusiasm to start with. Unfortunately this rapidly slid into dissillusionment.
The odd thing about it was that it was that I picked it up in our very limited library because was the only book in sight with a decent cover and title. I was amazed to find when I started reading it that it was not, as the title indicated, about dancing but largely about 'ethnomusicology'. This is odd because one of my Swedish relatives introduced me to this unheard of phenomena because he is coming to Goldsmiths university in London to study it. I thought this was weird because I had never heard of 'ethnomusicology' and neither had anyone else I knew.
This book started off with the most wonderful concept, a woman exploring her life through a radically new approach to music and music as a form of survival. It explored her development into emotional, psychological, sexual maturity through music. Half way through the book I realised that I really wouldn't blame her if she leapt off a cliff into the Niagra Falls. Then I realised that I thought the doomed and complicated relationship around which the story evolved was not really worth the perseverance. Then by the third 2am ordeal in Part Three I realised that this was the last time I was ever going to read a book that had a Part Three. Then by the fourth 2am reading I realised that I couldn't understand what she saw in him anyway. I decided that if he had treated me like that I like to believe I would have knocked him over the Viagara Falls first and put an end to the whole sorry business. Then by the fifth 2am endeavour I realised that for several days all my friends had been asking if I was alright because I kept blinking at them and rubbing my eyes because they were blurring at the edges. I had eye strain. Well last night was the final episode of all night reading vigils and the final revelation. I realised that the author should have just written a reference book. Then we would have been spared this ludicrous proposition with which she decided to showcase her enthusiasm for her specialism. If she had just written about it, albeit briefly, I would have found it fascinating.
I am well-known for my own propensity to analyse and de-construct my own emotional state and living with myself is boring enough. Having to suffer the additional burden of another woman's issues with every imaginable scenario she encounters was really tiring. Anyone can tell you that living with one person that you love for fourteen years can take its toll on conversation from time to time. These two hadn't spent more than a few hours at a time in each other's company until about a decade into their 'relationship'. The conversation centred almost entirely on their inability to have relationships, least of all their own. I had difficulty imagining what they would talk about when she finally moved in with him and his wife and step-son, her bereaved South African Mother and his senile Scottish one. The only vocabulary they had was littered with phrases like 'Jennie, I'm emotionally blocked at the moment', and 'Neil, you are retreating'. The only successful communication seemed to take place between his cello and her Viola. I had visions of his mother screaming out to be taken to the loo in a broad Glaswegian accent. I imagine the Chilean Political refugee 'marriage-of-convenience' cancer patient wife tending to the mother-in-law. I imagine the son of the Chilean Political refugee (not from the marriage of convenience but by a Political exile of unknown origin) walking in on his Composer step- Dad of convenience with his equally emotionally-blocked wife who he married in a strange African ritual in the Nyika Plateau. I imagine them making up for ten years of snatched sex by having sex (in an emotionally blocked way) with an oboe in the attic while the South African not-mother-in-law but Mother-in-law by strange African fertility ritual does the crossword in Afrikaans wondering what on earth she got herself into.
Parrot-cat hybrid
Well
I don't think this counts as blog entries go, but when me and the cat have finished our morning ritual I will get going on something worthwhile.
She has been sitting on my shoulder like a parrot
I don't think this counts as blog entries go, but when me and the cat have finished our morning ritual I will get going on something worthwhile.
She has been sitting on my shoulder like a parrot
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
being not doing
Sometimes I think I have the weirdest vocation in the world. It seems to be that I constantly have to 'not do things'. This is why my calling in life is a difficult thing to label as 'work'. I am called to do little and listen a lot and plan really carefully so that I can do even less and we can all listen a lot more.
The oddest experience is realising that I am active in my 'not doing'. I do actually work really hard at saying and doing very little so that other people around me can do and say a lot.
I have a realisation that I still need to be there, not doing but listening and planning for more not doing but listening so that profound moments then have opportunity to happen. I am aware now that this curious experience of feeling that I have no need to be somewhere is not the truth. People I trust tell me that it is vital for me to be there...doing nothing and saying nothing. But it is still a bit hard to accept a role in life which is all about encouraging others and just humbles me every time I am moved to tears by someone else's offering of themselves.
If you were at Candlelit Church tonight you will know what I am talking about. If you are not religious and you got to the end of this blog entry then you are charitable or amused.
I am personally completely bemused because although I am not actively doing... I know that my actively being and specifically actively being in that place at that time allows others to do the same. It is the most rewarding work in the world, as you can see it isn't really work at all. It is just fab.
Not doing stuff and not saying stuff all the time so that other people have a chance to give us all extraordinary gifts of kindness and healing is very powerful. The hard part is constantly trying to bite my lip and sit on my hands...or put bluntly to sit down and shut up.
The oddest experience is realising that I am active in my 'not doing'. I do actually work really hard at saying and doing very little so that other people around me can do and say a lot.
I have a realisation that I still need to be there, not doing but listening and planning for more not doing but listening so that profound moments then have opportunity to happen. I am aware now that this curious experience of feeling that I have no need to be somewhere is not the truth. People I trust tell me that it is vital for me to be there...doing nothing and saying nothing. But it is still a bit hard to accept a role in life which is all about encouraging others and just humbles me every time I am moved to tears by someone else's offering of themselves.
If you were at Candlelit Church tonight you will know what I am talking about. If you are not religious and you got to the end of this blog entry then you are charitable or amused.
I am personally completely bemused because although I am not actively doing... I know that my actively being and specifically actively being in that place at that time allows others to do the same. It is the most rewarding work in the world, as you can see it isn't really work at all. It is just fab.
Not doing stuff and not saying stuff all the time so that other people have a chance to give us all extraordinary gifts of kindness and healing is very powerful. The hard part is constantly trying to bite my lip and sit on my hands...or put bluntly to sit down and shut up.
the other one
It is the other cat tonight. She is playing 'over-familiar' and drooling all over the laptop on the kitchen table. But she is more polite than the other one and knows I that I am now working so she is sitting neatly with her paws together like a doorstop.
Cat
You know those 'Mystery Shoppers'...they are paid by large Shops to visit and pretend they are shopping. They take notes and tick boxes on a sheet of paper which say things like 'did the shop assitant come and 'ask if you were alright' within the three minute deadline?' Did the assistant return to you within the next two minute deadline and 'ask if you were alright' again (in case the customer is stupid I assume). They have a list which evaluates the qualities of the poor unsuspecting Shop Assistant.
Well...I believe my cat is concerned that I might be a 'mystery cat visitor'. She appears to be over-doing her role. I think she belongs to a Secret Society who have workshops on 'being a senile cat' and is trying to be as authentic as possible as an 'elderly' feline.
She appears to have her own standards. They seem to involve a relentless routine of squawking at me. There is a distinctly choreographed 'walking in front of the person who feeds you and loves you and tripping them up as they go down the stairs' dance. There is the 'screech for food for several hours and then take one look at it with disgust and walk away' task. There is the 'sit on the dining table while friends are visiting putting your bum in their faces and knocking over their drinks with your tail' game. This morning she is being over-zealous with the squawking and tripping up tasks. I wish I could explain that she has already passed her 'Being a Cat exams' and can now relax a bit. She is not being scrutinised to check her authenticity as a cat. I KNOW she is a cat.
Got to go...the cat...
Well...I believe my cat is concerned that I might be a 'mystery cat visitor'. She appears to be over-doing her role. I think she belongs to a Secret Society who have workshops on 'being a senile cat' and is trying to be as authentic as possible as an 'elderly' feline.
She appears to have her own standards. They seem to involve a relentless routine of squawking at me. There is a distinctly choreographed 'walking in front of the person who feeds you and loves you and tripping them up as they go down the stairs' dance. There is the 'screech for food for several hours and then take one look at it with disgust and walk away' task. There is the 'sit on the dining table while friends are visiting putting your bum in their faces and knocking over their drinks with your tail' game. This morning she is being over-zealous with the squawking and tripping up tasks. I wish I could explain that she has already passed her 'Being a Cat exams' and can now relax a bit. She is not being scrutinised to check her authenticity as a cat. I KNOW she is a cat.
Got to go...the cat...
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Swedes
The first thing I am inspired to write about is my Swedish relatives. We had largely lost touch and then my cousin Fredrik got in touch via Facebook. He has been completely brilliant putting all of us cousins together and linking us all up with e-mails.
I had already decided that I needed to do something in Mum's memory. I felt absolutely sure that I needed to go to visit Mum's two remaining sisters. One lives in Aberdeen and one in Sweden. I am planning Sweden first and then Aberdeen second.
We are going to Sweden this June in my Mum's memory to visit her sister, because it is the most appropriate way I can think of to honour her on her birthday. While we are there I am planning to meet with some of my cousins. None of us know each other really, but we are starting to get to know each other by e-mail. We have various random memories of each other and of our respective parents. One cousin remembers me when I was one year old and she was 16. I have a horrible feeling that there is a picture of me in a yellow bucket and her being 'Miss Elstead' in the carnival.
The exciting thing about it is that it is about Mum's family and about new relationships and possiblities. She always loved new possiblities and was a person of relationships, but most of all she loved these sisters. She was particularly close to her sisters Barbara, and Betty and also to Jennifer. Betty also lived in Sweden, but she died from Motor Neurone disease. Mum was heart-broken about this and although the three of them had some really good times together in Sweden I know Mum missed her terribly and was devastated by the suffering she endured. Jennifer is in Aberdeen and that is another planned visit.
My Mum came from a family of eight. I never met her parents Lavinia and Robert Swanston, or her brother Bobby who died in a drowning accident aged 14. They had a childhood fragmented by the war. They were Londoners and nearly all evacuated to various places around the country. They would all laugh, I am sure, to think that they are now the subject of the English school curriculum in history lessons about World War II. Initially I think Barbara, Betty and Mum were moved to Brighton together, but were later separated. So they went on some formative journeys together and were closest in age within the family. Large families seem to develop clusters of intimacy within them. Presumably this is because it would be hard to have such close relationships with all eight of you across the age range. Mum's family consisted of Pearl, Irene, Betty, Barbara, June, Bobby, Anne and Jennifer. I understand that Betty, Barbara and June (my Mum) were much older than Jennifer and effectively adopted her and felt responsible for her after their parents died. Jennifer was very young at the time, possibly as young as 15. She and Barbara are now the only survivors.
The reason for all this detail is to explain my motivations for developing the connections with my remaining aunts. Mum always loved her visits to Sweden.She associated them with joy and fun and friendship. She married into the May family. They are a very loud family. Her own family seems to have been somewhat drowned out. My Dad's Mum had 'delusions of grandeur'. She was convinced that Mum was 'not good enough' for the May family. In England at the time, the class system remained highly significant. It still is highly significant but it has become unpopular to talk about it and its powerful impact upon us. People could be persecuted all their lives for their 'background' or 'upbringing'. For reasons known only to herself, my Paternal Grandmother thought she was classy and was a therefore a terrible snob, particularly with regard to Mum and by implication her family. The truth was that Mum came from a poor family in the East End of London. Winifred May only recovered from the shock of her son marrying someone of this background towards the end of her life. But as my Mum was always quick to point out "Darling...there are two different types of East End...there's East End and there is 'East End'...and we were a respectable family".
I think that her Mother-in-Law put further distance between June Swanston and her immediate relatives in addition to the already significant chasm of geographical distance and death. I knew that their bonds were stronger than she admitted. She always knew when one of her relatives was in pain or trouble. This happened on the day that Bobby died. She cried all day on a 'day out' until she drove my Dad crazy and they came home. She couldn't explain her behaviour but kept saying 'something terrible has happened, something terrible'. There were no phones and there was no way of contacting her with the bad news. When they were at home someone called or visited and she simply said 'its Bobby, isn't it? Its Bobby, and he's dead', before they had even opened their mouths to speak.
My point is not that she was psychic, though I think she might have been, it is that she never lost that deep connection to her family. I am not trying to romanticise her family or over-sentimentalise them. This isn't an exercise in sickly-sweet nostalgia. She wasn't close to all of her sisters, it wasn't an idyllic family but my Mother always remembered every single one of her siblings birthdays. She knew the names of all their children and their partners and their children too. She remembered the details of Bobby's death with deep sadness with vivid clarity 'as though it were yesterday'. I don't know whether, in the end, she ever forgave God, because at that time a 'boy' was a very important thing to have in a family comprising so many girls. She thought it was grossly unfair of God to take their only boy. She used to say 'we used to say to each other...why couldn't he take one of us, there are loads of us, it should have been one of us girls'. Even in the last years of her life talking about their collective loss as a family would make her cry. She showed me a picture of my Grandmother (her Mother) shortly before she died. She was deeply disturbed by it and cried even though she was well into her seventies by then. She felt that she had allowed Dad's family to 'take over'. She said that she wished she had made more time for her blood relatives and her parents. She said that she felt very sorry for her Mum and wondered what on earth she must have felt seeing her daughter moving on into a new society trying to impress this new family by giving them everything she had.
She had lists and lists of extended family, and she also traced her ancestry. Being an evacuee has subsequently been extensively researched. That research demonstrates that being wrenched away from home and family to live with strangers in an equally strange geography during wartime certainly had a dramatic impact upon these children. Apart from the practical implications of living miles away from one another and starting new lives apart, it also significantly altered how these children formed as adults. I came to think that her interest in her ancestry and her sister's lives lived out as far apart as Sweden and Australia and her interst in all her extended family stemmed from that sense of dislocation. She kept contact with many of them, some more than others. With her closest sisters in particular there was a bond there which was treasured. I think it would be sad for her and for us if that connection was completely lost. The family she married into has no greater claim on her. Neither did they have a lesser or greater claim on her affections. Her birth family and the shared trauma they endured were very dear to her, even though some of those relationships were more significant than others. She did treasure these relationships and I want to honour that. Even if realistically that honouring only takes the form of sending a Christmas card once a year or chatting on Facebook periodically, it will be 'something', which Mum always said was ...'better than nothing'.
Many of my cousins are a generation older than me and I am nearer in age to my second-cousins, apart from Fredrik who is younger than the others. I get a real buzz from having this contact with them. I intend to make more of an effort to discover the English cousins and what is going on for them.
I hope to compile a family tree developed from her existing list. I know Fredrik is also interested in this, so I will take her work with me when I go to visit them. I don't know all her sister's grandchildren's names. But if you are one of them...she had you on a list, and she knew all about your life. I became acutely aware when we were preparing Mum's funeral of the way in which our relationships vary. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend, I am a Pastor and a cousin and I am also an Aunt. My nieces and nephews are important to me. When we thought about Mum we realised that she was all of these things and a Grandmother and a Mother to many more than just her own children. I thought then about her role as an Aunt and thought of her nephews and nieces, and felt the need to acknowledge the importance some of them held in her life, simply by virtue of being the children of her closest sisters.
Since she died I have been quite alarmed at the long list of relatives as well of friends who seem somehow through distance and time to have become a bit forgotten and their relationships and the nature of them somewhat overlooked.
Hopefully if you are reading this and you are one of these people you will find this consoling. She would have.
I had already decided that I needed to do something in Mum's memory. I felt absolutely sure that I needed to go to visit Mum's two remaining sisters. One lives in Aberdeen and one in Sweden. I am planning Sweden first and then Aberdeen second.
We are going to Sweden this June in my Mum's memory to visit her sister, because it is the most appropriate way I can think of to honour her on her birthday. While we are there I am planning to meet with some of my cousins. None of us know each other really, but we are starting to get to know each other by e-mail. We have various random memories of each other and of our respective parents. One cousin remembers me when I was one year old and she was 16. I have a horrible feeling that there is a picture of me in a yellow bucket and her being 'Miss Elstead' in the carnival.
The exciting thing about it is that it is about Mum's family and about new relationships and possiblities. She always loved new possiblities and was a person of relationships, but most of all she loved these sisters. She was particularly close to her sisters Barbara, and Betty and also to Jennifer. Betty also lived in Sweden, but she died from Motor Neurone disease. Mum was heart-broken about this and although the three of them had some really good times together in Sweden I know Mum missed her terribly and was devastated by the suffering she endured. Jennifer is in Aberdeen and that is another planned visit.
My Mum came from a family of eight. I never met her parents Lavinia and Robert Swanston, or her brother Bobby who died in a drowning accident aged 14. They had a childhood fragmented by the war. They were Londoners and nearly all evacuated to various places around the country. They would all laugh, I am sure, to think that they are now the subject of the English school curriculum in history lessons about World War II. Initially I think Barbara, Betty and Mum were moved to Brighton together, but were later separated. So they went on some formative journeys together and were closest in age within the family. Large families seem to develop clusters of intimacy within them. Presumably this is because it would be hard to have such close relationships with all eight of you across the age range. Mum's family consisted of Pearl, Irene, Betty, Barbara, June, Bobby, Anne and Jennifer. I understand that Betty, Barbara and June (my Mum) were much older than Jennifer and effectively adopted her and felt responsible for her after their parents died. Jennifer was very young at the time, possibly as young as 15. She and Barbara are now the only survivors.
The reason for all this detail is to explain my motivations for developing the connections with my remaining aunts. Mum always loved her visits to Sweden.She associated them with joy and fun and friendship. She married into the May family. They are a very loud family. Her own family seems to have been somewhat drowned out. My Dad's Mum had 'delusions of grandeur'. She was convinced that Mum was 'not good enough' for the May family. In England at the time, the class system remained highly significant. It still is highly significant but it has become unpopular to talk about it and its powerful impact upon us. People could be persecuted all their lives for their 'background' or 'upbringing'. For reasons known only to herself, my Paternal Grandmother thought she was classy and was a therefore a terrible snob, particularly with regard to Mum and by implication her family. The truth was that Mum came from a poor family in the East End of London. Winifred May only recovered from the shock of her son marrying someone of this background towards the end of her life. But as my Mum was always quick to point out "Darling...there are two different types of East End...there's East End and there is 'East End'...and we were a respectable family".
I think that her Mother-in-Law put further distance between June Swanston and her immediate relatives in addition to the already significant chasm of geographical distance and death. I knew that their bonds were stronger than she admitted. She always knew when one of her relatives was in pain or trouble. This happened on the day that Bobby died. She cried all day on a 'day out' until she drove my Dad crazy and they came home. She couldn't explain her behaviour but kept saying 'something terrible has happened, something terrible'. There were no phones and there was no way of contacting her with the bad news. When they were at home someone called or visited and she simply said 'its Bobby, isn't it? Its Bobby, and he's dead', before they had even opened their mouths to speak.
My point is not that she was psychic, though I think she might have been, it is that she never lost that deep connection to her family. I am not trying to romanticise her family or over-sentimentalise them. This isn't an exercise in sickly-sweet nostalgia. She wasn't close to all of her sisters, it wasn't an idyllic family but my Mother always remembered every single one of her siblings birthdays. She knew the names of all their children and their partners and their children too. She remembered the details of Bobby's death with deep sadness with vivid clarity 'as though it were yesterday'. I don't know whether, in the end, she ever forgave God, because at that time a 'boy' was a very important thing to have in a family comprising so many girls. She thought it was grossly unfair of God to take their only boy. She used to say 'we used to say to each other...why couldn't he take one of us, there are loads of us, it should have been one of us girls'. Even in the last years of her life talking about their collective loss as a family would make her cry. She showed me a picture of my Grandmother (her Mother) shortly before she died. She was deeply disturbed by it and cried even though she was well into her seventies by then. She felt that she had allowed Dad's family to 'take over'. She said that she wished she had made more time for her blood relatives and her parents. She said that she felt very sorry for her Mum and wondered what on earth she must have felt seeing her daughter moving on into a new society trying to impress this new family by giving them everything she had.
She had lists and lists of extended family, and she also traced her ancestry. Being an evacuee has subsequently been extensively researched. That research demonstrates that being wrenched away from home and family to live with strangers in an equally strange geography during wartime certainly had a dramatic impact upon these children. Apart from the practical implications of living miles away from one another and starting new lives apart, it also significantly altered how these children formed as adults. I came to think that her interest in her ancestry and her sister's lives lived out as far apart as Sweden and Australia and her interst in all her extended family stemmed from that sense of dislocation. She kept contact with many of them, some more than others. With her closest sisters in particular there was a bond there which was treasured. I think it would be sad for her and for us if that connection was completely lost. The family she married into has no greater claim on her. Neither did they have a lesser or greater claim on her affections. Her birth family and the shared trauma they endured were very dear to her, even though some of those relationships were more significant than others. She did treasure these relationships and I want to honour that. Even if realistically that honouring only takes the form of sending a Christmas card once a year or chatting on Facebook periodically, it will be 'something', which Mum always said was ...'better than nothing'.
Many of my cousins are a generation older than me and I am nearer in age to my second-cousins, apart from Fredrik who is younger than the others. I get a real buzz from having this contact with them. I intend to make more of an effort to discover the English cousins and what is going on for them.
I hope to compile a family tree developed from her existing list. I know Fredrik is also interested in this, so I will take her work with me when I go to visit them. I don't know all her sister's grandchildren's names. But if you are one of them...she had you on a list, and she knew all about your life. I became acutely aware when we were preparing Mum's funeral of the way in which our relationships vary. I am a wife, a sister, a daughter, and a friend, I am a Pastor and a cousin and I am also an Aunt. My nieces and nephews are important to me. When we thought about Mum we realised that she was all of these things and a Grandmother and a Mother to many more than just her own children. I thought then about her role as an Aunt and thought of her nephews and nieces, and felt the need to acknowledge the importance some of them held in her life, simply by virtue of being the children of her closest sisters.
Since she died I have been quite alarmed at the long list of relatives as well of friends who seem somehow through distance and time to have become a bit forgotten and their relationships and the nature of them somewhat overlooked.
Hopefully if you are reading this and you are one of these people you will find this consoling. She would have.
TERROR
So
I have now put my blog link onto my Facebook page and made it public knowledge. It has been a relatively well-kept and slightly embarrassing secret until now. If you have decided to have a glance at it, be gentle with me. I am determined not to start apologising for it, but it is intensely personal. Some articles have been removed to protect those I love but otherwise it is fairly raw material. Don't expect anything 'polished'. Most of the time when you read my material you are seeing it as it is created. You are entering into the creative process with me and it will mostly have an immediacy about it. There are exceptions. Some of my work has been created on retreat and then typed up on my return. Some has been developed online, taken off and re-worked and put back on. Some is hand-written and added.
This blog is part-journal, part stream-of-consciousness, but mostly confidence building and motivating. I needed to start being more public with my writing. I have been writing all my life, but only recently listened to people I trusted who have relentlessly encouraged me to let more people enjoy it. If you enjoy it, please keep logging in and reading it.
I have now put my blog link onto my Facebook page and made it public knowledge. It has been a relatively well-kept and slightly embarrassing secret until now. If you have decided to have a glance at it, be gentle with me. I am determined not to start apologising for it, but it is intensely personal. Some articles have been removed to protect those I love but otherwise it is fairly raw material. Don't expect anything 'polished'. Most of the time when you read my material you are seeing it as it is created. You are entering into the creative process with me and it will mostly have an immediacy about it. There are exceptions. Some of my work has been created on retreat and then typed up on my return. Some has been developed online, taken off and re-worked and put back on. Some is hand-written and added.
This blog is part-journal, part stream-of-consciousness, but mostly confidence building and motivating. I needed to start being more public with my writing. I have been writing all my life, but only recently listened to people I trusted who have relentlessly encouraged me to let more people enjoy it. If you enjoy it, please keep logging in and reading it.
New Look
So, at last the cat allowed me to work. It was more like play actually. I have given the blog a fresh look for a fresh start. I plan to re-vamp it every year. This is symbolic of new beginnings, fresh stages on a journey. I hope you like it.
at last...
Well, with the cat ritual out of the way and her settled with her sister on the bed, and with two door stoppers wedging the sliding keyboard and the heating back on and a freshly re-heated coffee and a cement-encrusted bowl soaking I might be able to do some blogging....and then the phone rang!
no...that doesn't work either
and don't suggest shutting her downstairs because then she scratches at the door indefinitely. The only way that works is if she is allowed in the front roon where the sun is, but she isn't allowed unless we are in there because she shreds the sofa covers using them instead of her redundant scratch post.
Cat
Every morning the cat goes ballistic at me until I pick her up. Nothing else works. She must be picked up. She also goes crazy with rage in the morning if I'm not up by 9am, which these days, sometimes I'm not, especially during the holidays. The annoying thing is that she will leave Graham asleep but thinks it is out of order if I am not up, feeding her or putting her on my lap. Currently I am touch typing and the cat is nudging my hands and knocking them off the keyboard. She just can't help herself, so now I have a wet nose lodged between my thumbs, drooling and sniffing and nudging at me and purring. This is better than putting up with her yelling at me non-stop. Now she has decided to rest her head on my left hand like a pillow. I am readying myself to move the hand so I can eat my porridge (New Years resolution).
She knows what she wants and nothing, no porridge or computer or housework will stand in her way. She is so clingy that she would sit on my shoulder while I mop the floor if I found her a harness.
Moving the hand was unsuccessful, so I am eating my porridge with one hand and the bowl on the ironing board, leaning across her with my right hand and balancing her head on the left which is making it slow progress.
On top of it all, since my laptop died I have been using Graham's which means that I am using his computer cabinet with the slide out key board rest and it keeps sliding in taking my hand and the cat's head with it. I think I will give up for now and take the cat to a psychiatrist.
On top of it all...if I were to relinquish the hand, which I just tried, so I could pick up the bowl, she then nudges the bowl out of my hand. Countless outfits have been ruined in this way with cups of tea and coffee and food ending up all down my front because she got jealous of them and knocked them out of my hand
She knows what she wants and nothing, no porridge or computer or housework will stand in her way. She is so clingy that she would sit on my shoulder while I mop the floor if I found her a harness.
Moving the hand was unsuccessful, so I am eating my porridge with one hand and the bowl on the ironing board, leaning across her with my right hand and balancing her head on the left which is making it slow progress.
On top of it all, since my laptop died I have been using Graham's which means that I am using his computer cabinet with the slide out key board rest and it keeps sliding in taking my hand and the cat's head with it. I think I will give up for now and take the cat to a psychiatrist.
On top of it all...if I were to relinquish the hand, which I just tried, so I could pick up the bowl, she then nudges the bowl out of my hand. Countless outfits have been ruined in this way with cups of tea and coffee and food ending up all down my front because she got jealous of them and knocked them out of my hand
Monday, 5 January 2009
using this blog
From time to time as you read this blog you will see chapters of stories developing which will then be removed and replaced by a fully developed story. So you are watching the process of its construction. This is what happened with Nameless, parts of the story when it is finally pieced together will be familiar to you but probably altered. With Nameless I experienced that rare phenomenon where the story writes itself and I heard one author talk about this quite well-known experience as 'like being visited'. That is why it felt like sacrilege to alter it once it had been completed. I was just a vessel for its development. Apparently not all writers have this experience but when they do it is the exception to the rule, so I was lucky it happened to me at all. The rest is likely to be discipline alone.
Not Bad for a first attempt
Resurgence Magazine actually liked my short story and this is what they said: I'm quite proud of it because it is my first rejection letter!
Dear Jess,
Unfortunately this piece is not quite right for us. We had the feeling that the story was ended rather abruptly, and almost violently – the narrative was also a little unclear in places. However, our short story editor very much enjoyed reading the piece though, as did I – the language you use is almost musical, very eloquent and we an interesting turn of phrase.
I am sorry to disappoint you, in the sense that we won’t be publishing it, but please rest assured that we all enjoyed reading it. We hope this has not put you off sending submissions in to us in the future.
With kind regards.
Dear Jess,
Unfortunately this piece is not quite right for us. We had the feeling that the story was ended rather abruptly, and almost violently – the narrative was also a little unclear in places. However, our short story editor very much enjoyed reading the piece though, as did I – the language you use is almost musical, very eloquent and we an interesting turn of phrase.
I am sorry to disappoint you, in the sense that we won’t be publishing it, but please rest assured that we all enjoyed reading it. We hope this has not put you off sending submissions in to us in the future.
With kind regards.
Nameless: A Short Story developed for Resurgence Magazine
He turns. He stares. It is the flat-eyed stare of the startled. There is fear in the brown flecks of his grey eyes. There is a hint of confused panic in his frown. There is the beginning of a smile. It grows wider on only one side of his mouth. The other fixed in a dreadful resentful grimace.
She waits. She grows impatient for a word, stands frozen on the flagstones. He stares and she waits.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is"
"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.
The effort to bring the tap into full song is the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers show no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tries persuasion. She finds him serenading the tap's silver neck.
"A l-little w-water, a l-little w-water, sing to m-me the river's m-melody"
"W-wet m-my lips and s-sing like a s-stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. He is thin in a way that wounds. He has a hungry kind of thin, an alarming stark quality. The hollowness and the paralysis are framed by a tight silver mesh of curls. His smashed nose leaves little room for breath. His ears are disproportionate. He has a mythical outline. His gigantic stature reduces him still further. The remnants of his resolve to live are engulfed by his redundant frame.
The flagstones absorb the ensuing silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. As she walks past him she can feel his fear in her chest bone and it lodges next to hers. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches, bewilderment descending. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip, grapples shakily with the smooth surface of a clear glass. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out. The glass seems to glide across the air alone. The water is moving at its own pace. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"W-why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it. If it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because "she breathes sharply upwards, her shoulders lift.
“…cause why?”
The clock taps out his rhythm until her shoulders drop, her head lifts and she sees her own reflection in the glass of his eyes. She says simply
“I have lost all of my rage”.
He nods with the slowness of retirement. He is resigned to the time it takes for each vertebra to creep into action. He finds his eyes suddenly reluctant. The lids close without him, reptilian in their lethargy. These eyelids capture something he has not known in sixty years.
He cannot name the constriction in his throat, the sharp pain in his eye sockets. It reminds him of the scars of his sport. The lids enclose him, there is darkness. He cannot look at what it might contain for fear that it might captivate him. A cough erupts, and another and another, he hears gasping noises. Someone is wailing deeply the notes of a song sung within the depths of a barrel. His face wet, his shoulders shifting up and down, up and down. His body convulsed by a primal involuntary repetitive shrug. Slowly his body loses its construction. An unseen weight presses him downwards. He is weak and he is trembling. He feels like a bird. He finds himself seated. He is in a hard, waxed chair. It is rigid against his tender flesh. As mucous streams he is not self-conscious and no one wipes away his disgrace.
“How”, he gasps, “How d-did you l- lose your rage?”
“I forgave and I turned away”.
“W-what-t ‘appen? Howw? B-beginning…” he tries again to ask the biggest question. “W- where beginning?” and again: “H-How did it b-egin?”
The morning had been fragmentary. Piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart. Her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate.
"Hurry up, they have come, they are coming in, hurry!" her mother's voice penetrating the present moment.
She packs the strange grey textured suitcase. It is striped along the centre of its crocodile-skin back. She clicks the small metal buckles, checks the torn leather trim. She piles random patterned skirts, crumpled and ironed together. Squeezes the red Moroccan slippers and still thrills at their glitter and pointed toes even now, even here.
She scans the room. Apricots, peaches and ragged oatcake carpet. She calls out.
"Mum, Mum, I'm ready".
As she turns she goes to speak and opens her mouth to breathe. She pushes the hollow door. She finds herself standing on the edge of an open French sliding door. The metal cuts into her tender feet. The plump soles flush with pain without her Moroccan slippers. She raises her eyes. No corridor, no bathroom, no spare room.
She is on the edge of a vast expanse of water. It is edgeless, mirrored in the glass door, permutations in the sheer gossamer surface. The wide and inky watery darkness merges with the wide and inky absent sky. Where one ends and the other begins she cannot tell. It is a lightless box. It could be glass. It could be frameless and infinite or mirrored and complex but limited. There is no one on the edge of the precipice but her in her tender naked feet clutching a battered suitcase full of ageing photographs.
It happens sometimes, the nameless stuff. It happened in childhood too.
Her life along with the lives of everyone she knew had not turned out as she planned it or as she imagined it. There is no name for that either, the way it all changes shape, all the ideas that weren't and the surprises that were. As children they were all 'going to be' when they grew up. As if 'being' was a thing for the future. Here on the edge of this infinite expanse she wondered if there was any distinction between the past and the future. She couldn’t be sure there was a beginning or an end. In the ice sharp air in her night dress she stood, feet throbbing, shaking violently with cold. Here in this moment she was a young woman of twelve. Her journey had started with an imperative to flee. She had responded to her Mother’s call, packed her memories and started out only to find herself at an apparent end. Now her only hope is the invitation of the water.
In this inarticulate moment, the silences stretching out across the spaces where nothing can be said speak so loudly to her confusion. Loudly they sulk, loudly they swear, loud the whisper into the hush. The tongue sticks, the throat gasps and the teeth clench. Gridlocked the words, louder the whisper, silence speaks to the silent. The silence yells of the future, it sighs, breathes and dreams of poetry, and of the capacity of this silence, the power of the things we never say. The silence is saturated by all the images she cannot paint. She feels her toe dipping into the liquid. It shimmers outwards with the disturbance. She looks up and her eyes adjust to the darkness.
“H-how d-did it b-egin?”
Frustrated and grimacing with the effort of speech and the exhaustion of waiting and the shock of her appearance the contorted man bellows into her strange detachment.
“H-how d-did you l-lose your rage?”
He is flashing with the effort to suppress a rage all his own through gritted teeth and spitting features.
“H-how c-could you? H-how c-ould you? After all they d-did to us?”
“I had a vision.”
Stillness
“…of water”
He tries to create a dismissive expression.
They plunge together at the word
“W-water”
“Water” nodding, calming.
He is captivated and she is tranquil. She is still as she describes.
“In my vision the water’s melody captures me. I find myself moving with it. The river flows through our lives. I see us bleeding, pleading. The machetes mash flesh. The severed heads slung sideways. The sound of our sisters being torn apart penetrates louder than their screaming.”
She breathes deeply, swallows and begins again.
“The water is red with blood Benedict. It is innocent blood. It is your blood. It is my blood. It is our sisters’ blood. Our rage colours the water bleeding into the current. The water carries crimson fury.”
Her eyes are liquid now and different water spills.
“The water sings to me.”
He nods less slowly, his movement more lyrical.
She grips her mouth together with the effort of the word she must name.
“Forgiveness”
The silence is followed by a sigh.
“Forgiveness… is what the water sings.”
She fills her lungs.
“I hear the word and the disgust drowns me.”
He catches her hand and pulls it to the scars of his resentment.
“But under the water there is light. It shines through crystal waters. There is warmth and something nameless.”
The sun stuns them with a final dance before it leaves for sleep. He weeps and she does too. “Let the water sing to you”.
Jessica Boulton
Page 1 of 6
She waits. She grows impatient for a word, stands frozen on the flagstones. He stares and she waits.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is"
"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.
The effort to bring the tap into full song is the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers show no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tries persuasion. She finds him serenading the tap's silver neck.
"A l-little w-water, a l-little w-water, sing to m-me the river's m-melody"
"W-wet m-my lips and s-sing like a s-stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. He is thin in a way that wounds. He has a hungry kind of thin, an alarming stark quality. The hollowness and the paralysis are framed by a tight silver mesh of curls. His smashed nose leaves little room for breath. His ears are disproportionate. He has a mythical outline. His gigantic stature reduces him still further. The remnants of his resolve to live are engulfed by his redundant frame.
The flagstones absorb the ensuing silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. As she walks past him she can feel his fear in her chest bone and it lodges next to hers. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches, bewilderment descending. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip, grapples shakily with the smooth surface of a clear glass. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out. The glass seems to glide across the air alone. The water is moving at its own pace. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"W-why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it. If it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because "she breathes sharply upwards, her shoulders lift.
“…cause why?”
The clock taps out his rhythm until her shoulders drop, her head lifts and she sees her own reflection in the glass of his eyes. She says simply
“I have lost all of my rage”.
He nods with the slowness of retirement. He is resigned to the time it takes for each vertebra to creep into action. He finds his eyes suddenly reluctant. The lids close without him, reptilian in their lethargy. These eyelids capture something he has not known in sixty years.
He cannot name the constriction in his throat, the sharp pain in his eye sockets. It reminds him of the scars of his sport. The lids enclose him, there is darkness. He cannot look at what it might contain for fear that it might captivate him. A cough erupts, and another and another, he hears gasping noises. Someone is wailing deeply the notes of a song sung within the depths of a barrel. His face wet, his shoulders shifting up and down, up and down. His body convulsed by a primal involuntary repetitive shrug. Slowly his body loses its construction. An unseen weight presses him downwards. He is weak and he is trembling. He feels like a bird. He finds himself seated. He is in a hard, waxed chair. It is rigid against his tender flesh. As mucous streams he is not self-conscious and no one wipes away his disgrace.
“How”, he gasps, “How d-did you l- lose your rage?”
“I forgave and I turned away”.
“W-what-t ‘appen? Howw? B-beginning…” he tries again to ask the biggest question. “W- where beginning?” and again: “H-How did it b-egin?”
The morning had been fragmentary. Piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart. Her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate.
"Hurry up, they have come, they are coming in, hurry!" her mother's voice penetrating the present moment.
She packs the strange grey textured suitcase. It is striped along the centre of its crocodile-skin back. She clicks the small metal buckles, checks the torn leather trim. She piles random patterned skirts, crumpled and ironed together. Squeezes the red Moroccan slippers and still thrills at their glitter and pointed toes even now, even here.
She scans the room. Apricots, peaches and ragged oatcake carpet. She calls out.
"Mum, Mum, I'm ready".
As she turns she goes to speak and opens her mouth to breathe. She pushes the hollow door. She finds herself standing on the edge of an open French sliding door. The metal cuts into her tender feet. The plump soles flush with pain without her Moroccan slippers. She raises her eyes. No corridor, no bathroom, no spare room.
She is on the edge of a vast expanse of water. It is edgeless, mirrored in the glass door, permutations in the sheer gossamer surface. The wide and inky watery darkness merges with the wide and inky absent sky. Where one ends and the other begins she cannot tell. It is a lightless box. It could be glass. It could be frameless and infinite or mirrored and complex but limited. There is no one on the edge of the precipice but her in her tender naked feet clutching a battered suitcase full of ageing photographs.
It happens sometimes, the nameless stuff. It happened in childhood too.
Her life along with the lives of everyone she knew had not turned out as she planned it or as she imagined it. There is no name for that either, the way it all changes shape, all the ideas that weren't and the surprises that were. As children they were all 'going to be' when they grew up. As if 'being' was a thing for the future. Here on the edge of this infinite expanse she wondered if there was any distinction between the past and the future. She couldn’t be sure there was a beginning or an end. In the ice sharp air in her night dress she stood, feet throbbing, shaking violently with cold. Here in this moment she was a young woman of twelve. Her journey had started with an imperative to flee. She had responded to her Mother’s call, packed her memories and started out only to find herself at an apparent end. Now her only hope is the invitation of the water.
In this inarticulate moment, the silences stretching out across the spaces where nothing can be said speak so loudly to her confusion. Loudly they sulk, loudly they swear, loud the whisper into the hush. The tongue sticks, the throat gasps and the teeth clench. Gridlocked the words, louder the whisper, silence speaks to the silent. The silence yells of the future, it sighs, breathes and dreams of poetry, and of the capacity of this silence, the power of the things we never say. The silence is saturated by all the images she cannot paint. She feels her toe dipping into the liquid. It shimmers outwards with the disturbance. She looks up and her eyes adjust to the darkness.
“H-how d-did it b-egin?”
Frustrated and grimacing with the effort of speech and the exhaustion of waiting and the shock of her appearance the contorted man bellows into her strange detachment.
“H-how d-did you l-lose your rage?”
He is flashing with the effort to suppress a rage all his own through gritted teeth and spitting features.
“H-how c-could you? H-how c-ould you? After all they d-did to us?”
“I had a vision.”
Stillness
“…of water”
He tries to create a dismissive expression.
They plunge together at the word
“W-water”
“Water” nodding, calming.
He is captivated and she is tranquil. She is still as she describes.
“In my vision the water’s melody captures me. I find myself moving with it. The river flows through our lives. I see us bleeding, pleading. The machetes mash flesh. The severed heads slung sideways. The sound of our sisters being torn apart penetrates louder than their screaming.”
She breathes deeply, swallows and begins again.
“The water is red with blood Benedict. It is innocent blood. It is your blood. It is my blood. It is our sisters’ blood. Our rage colours the water bleeding into the current. The water carries crimson fury.”
Her eyes are liquid now and different water spills.
“The water sings to me.”
He nods less slowly, his movement more lyrical.
She grips her mouth together with the effort of the word she must name.
“Forgiveness”
The silence is followed by a sigh.
“Forgiveness… is what the water sings.”
She fills her lungs.
“I hear the word and the disgust drowns me.”
He catches her hand and pulls it to the scars of his resentment.
“But under the water there is light. It shines through crystal waters. There is warmth and something nameless.”
The sun stuns them with a final dance before it leaves for sleep. He weeps and she does too. “Let the water sing to you”.
Jessica Boulton
Page 1 of 6
2009
So here we are, 5th of January and one of my resolutions is to be realistic and only set a target of one blog entry a week. It is ok for that entry to be one sentence if it has to be.
The first Monday back at normal routine after any kind of holiday has to be among the most awful days of the year.
I realise there are a few things that make it better. Other friends who are also struggling. Drinking tea with these friends. Eating scrambeld egg. Going to a library and going for a walk. But most importantly of all...making a list! The secret to life's mysteries lies in The List.
The first Monday back at normal routine after any kind of holiday has to be among the most awful days of the year.
I realise there are a few things that make it better. Other friends who are also struggling. Drinking tea with these friends. Eating scrambeld egg. Going to a library and going for a walk. But most importantly of all...making a list! The secret to life's mysteries lies in The List.
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Chapter Three
He is frail, crumpling, curled and greying, a fragile relic of parchment inside his tired stature. If he were in a scrum now his head would snap off. In his old age a game of rugger would leave him shaken out like a Russian doll. Inside and inside and inside again there would be a small foetus-like creation. There he would be, vulnerable without his skin. The effort to bring the tap into full song was the cause of his current exhaustion. Since his sculptural fingers showed no real enthusiasm in coaxing the torrent out of the drip he tried persuasion. She finds him crooning to the tap's silver neck. "A little water, a little water, sing to me the river's melody" he hums. No more rugby chants she thinks. "Wet my lips and sing like a stream" he mumbles and his voice rumbles like stones in a leather barrel.
"Benedict" she sings out, adding notes of music to her voice, joining in with the spirit of things. "Benedict".
He turns. He stares. It is the flat-eyed stare of the startled. There is fear in the brown flecks of his grey eyes. There is a hint of confused panic in his frown. There is the beginning of a smile. It grows wider on only one side of his mouth. The other fixed in a dreadful resentful grimace. She waits. She grows impatient for a word. She waits. She stands frozen on the flagstones. She cannot tell if she is giving herself away. He stares and She waits.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"Is you", paralysed speech.
"It is", paralysed response.
"How di you kno where do find m-me?"
A paralysed answer.
The flagstones absorb the silence and the evening light is sheening everything up. The tap is in its best light and still isn't singing to his melody. Benedict turns his resentment away from her towards the tap. She is waiting now for a her own answers.
She moves away from the flagstone which seems as though it might lift suddenly and topple her over. She waltzes oddly to the tap. The anxiety is making her unsteady. Each step takes another two to sustain it. He watches. She turns with strong and dignified hands the cold metal grip. She is on the wrong side of his resentment now.
She drinks and he is thirsty. He waits and she stares. Her hand reaches out, the glass seems to glide across the air alone, the water is moving at its own pace. She tries to pull back the sustenance from his lips but it is done. He is drinking. She is shaking.
"Why?" Benedict speaks.
Her heart beats too many times. She can't sustain it, if it carries on beating so fast something will crack apart.
"Because" She breathes sharply upwards, shoulders lifting.
Monday, 8 December 2008
long time no write
Well it has been some time since I have been able to write and really I don't know which comes first the lack of time or the lack of inclination. I have had lots of encouragement recently, unexpected and very healing. I lost my nerve I'm afraid. There is so much I have to write about but I'm not sure where to start, so tomorrow, having dealt with the first step here tonight, I will start at the beginning again.
Saturday, 25 October 2008
Chapter Two (the chapters are tiny)
She creeps into the cottage in darkness as usual, savouring the anonymity of it, leaving off the light until the last possible moment. Keys are flung down, the fridge pours light onto the sheet metal worksurface and shimmers upwards onto the brickwork. The cat opens his mouth wide enough for his head to snap off and squeaks by mistake with the effort of it. "hello Audrey" she croons.
The morning had been fragmentary, piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart, her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate. There was a tiny grave inside her mind on a hillside, lush green in another place, sea close, cottage nestling. The tiny stone had a name she couldn't read and it asked her not to forget it, to remember. There was something useful in this place she didn't know, this dead infant that wasn't hers and a tragedy she didn't own that was claiming her imagination for reasons she didn'tyet understand. The cottage near the grave was beamed and smoky with woodsmoke and there was a friendly presence, and elderly woman. She watched the scene with interest, surprised by its clarity. It was as familiar as that white Church on the hill she visited sometimes in her sleep. It had a particular feeling, nameless of course.
Audrey was yet another victim of an absent-minded vet and had been lumbered with a sexual identity crisis in his early kittenhood. He was quite 'Hepburn' in fact but he was in denial, like most cats, about his true identity. She had given him a diamante collar anyway. Perhaps he had regarded this as a final act of cruelty against his vulnerable psyche and had developed into an adolescent phase of sulking and stropping whenever his biscuits ran out. Crunchies are poured, diamante clicks against crockery, the purring begins. Legs are circled, marmalade hairs on black tights. She wonders why it all broke into her head today, the nameless stuff, but it had, and Audrey certainly couldn't care less.
The morning had been fragmentary, piercing winter light, particles dancing like Parisian Spring. Everything had started to come apart, her mind disintegrating as she tried to concentrate. There was a tiny grave inside her mind on a hillside, lush green in another place, sea close, cottage nestling. The tiny stone had a name she couldn't read and it asked her not to forget it, to remember. There was something useful in this place she didn't know, this dead infant that wasn't hers and a tragedy she didn't own that was claiming her imagination for reasons she didn'tyet understand. The cottage near the grave was beamed and smoky with woodsmoke and there was a friendly presence, and elderly woman. She watched the scene with interest, surprised by its clarity. It was as familiar as that white Church on the hill she visited sometimes in her sleep. It had a particular feeling, nameless of course.
Audrey was yet another victim of an absent-minded vet and had been lumbered with a sexual identity crisis in his early kittenhood. He was quite 'Hepburn' in fact but he was in denial, like most cats, about his true identity. She had given him a diamante collar anyway. Perhaps he had regarded this as a final act of cruelty against his vulnerable psyche and had developed into an adolescent phase of sulking and stropping whenever his biscuits ran out. Crunchies are poured, diamante clicks against crockery, the purring begins. Legs are circled, marmalade hairs on black tights. She wonders why it all broke into her head today, the nameless stuff, but it had, and Audrey certainly couldn't care less.
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