PERSONAL ESSAYS

Ukraine

On London Restaurants

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Annabel Chown thinks back to the restaurants of her youth and reflects on how things have changed since those vividly remembered meals with parents, friends or on first dates, in Soho.

The first-floor dining room was a cocoon of calm, floating above the bustle of Soho’s Old Compton Street. Soon after we sat down, a dish of plump, glossy green olives was placed on the white tablecloth. ‘Be sure not to swallow the stones,’ my mother would remind me. For lunch, I always had buttered plaice, served off the bone, with rice.

It was the first restaurant I remember, somewhere my family and I occasionally went on a Saturday. My mother would have booked the table. I picture her, standing in the hallway of our then home, holding the grey plastic receiver of the rotary phone, and inserting her index finger into one of the phone’s round holes, rotating the dial clockwise, then releasing. Repeating this six more times. If the number was engaged or no-one answered, she’d have to keep trying.

Across the street from this restaurant was an Italian café. In my mid-teens, I sometimes went there on a Saturday evening with friends from my all-girls’ school. Piccadilly Circus Tube, outside the Tower Records store, was usually our meeting point. If a friend didn’t show at the agreed time, our only option was to go into one of the red phone boxes, which often smelt of urine, and call their parents’ number, hoping someone would answer and have some idea of when they’d left home.

The café’s interior was warm and fuggy. Food was slapped down on the white Formica tables within minutes of being ordered. I usually had the £2.95 tagliatelle con spinachi, a huge plate of creamy, cheesy pasta, flecked with spinach. This was our haunt during those years boys were starting to infiltrate their way into our world. But we never brought them here; we’d meet them at parties or gatherings in people’s homes. They would, of course, make their way into our conversation. Who fancied who, who’d snogged who. While I went along to the parties, I preferred these evenings snuggled in one of the café’s ox-blood red booths with my girlfriends. At the parties, I was never sure what to say to the opposite sex. Sometimes, the friend I’d gone with would get chatted up. And I’d stand alone, clinging to a wall, Marlborough in my hand (which I’d not yet learnt to inhale), pretending to look like I didn’t care, and secretly wishing I could go home.

Pollo, on Old Compton Street, Soho: my teenage haunt in the 1980s, and which closed in 2015

A decade later, once my university friends and I had completed our architecture studies, we mostly ended up working in London. We regularly met up in the evenings, often in groups of eight or ten, a mix of men and women, couples and singles. We’d queue outside the new ramen bars, with their exposed steel kitchens and long wooden communal tables with benches. Or the industrial-chic Belgian restaurants, where Moules Frites and raspberry beers were served by waiters wearing monk’s robes. No-one was married yet, or had kids. And only a few had mobile phones. It was on a Friday night, in a Soho restaurant, that I saw a friend type out a text message for the first time. I was blown away that such a thing existed.

Within a few years, the group meet-ups faded. Young children, or an increased workload – several friends now had their own architecture practices – took up time. And perhaps we no longer had quite the same energy and enthusiasm for going out as we did in our twenties.

And Lonely Hearts, once a column lurking furtively at the back of the newspaper, had had a makeover: dating websites, with names like Soulmates and Dating Direct, were now considered a sensible, even cool, way to try and meet someone, especially if you were in your thirties and most of your friends were already settled.

Some of my first dates took place in restaurants. At first, I let the men choose where, believing their choice would reveal something about their suitability as a partner. But, as I soon discovered, there was little correlation. There was the chartered surveyor who booked a beautiful tenth-floor, glass-walled Chinese restaurant with views of the London skyline for our first (and last) date. He was rude to the waiter, insisted I order the duck (which I happen to love, but he wasn’t to know that), and rolled up my pancakes while telling me how his £1000 a month Pilates habit had transformed his body. There was the photographer who had work in the National Portrait Gallery. He chose a delicious Turkish restaurant in a disused railway arch near Borough Market. Within minutes of us sitting down, he was telling me about the depression he’d suffered since his wife left him.

I soon learnt it was a mistake to meet a stranger for dinner. A quick weekday drink, with the get-out clause of, ‘I have to be up super-early for work tomorrow’ tossed, if needed, into the conversation after sixty-minutes was far wiser. A couple of years into online dating, I was emailing back and forth with a guy who suggested a drink. ‘But,’ he added, ‘if we can still stand the sight of one another after an hour, perhaps we can have dinner, too?’

It’s thirteen years since that drink. And dinner. These days, he and I live with a four-year old who wakes at 5am most mornings. We don’t get out much. And when we do, it’s hard to agree where to eat. His idea of heaven is a burger and chips. Mine, more along the lines of Josper-roasted cauliflower with tahini and pomegranate.

Recently, I persuaded him to have a pre-theatre dinner at one of my kind of places. They take reservations a month in advance, so I put a reminder in my phone. Even so, when I clicked the Make A Reservation Button at 10am on the appointed day, our preferred time was already gone, and only 5pm available. An automated email informed me our table was for seventy-five minutes. I wanted to call the restaurant and say, surely it’s a bit off to charge your prices, then boot us out after barely an hour. Except there was no number to call.

On the day, my husband was delayed. The waitress offered to extend our booking by fifteen minutes, as a special favour. My husband was already grumpy when he walked in: his steamy, rush-hour Bakerloo line train was stuck in a tunnel for almost twenty minutes, then he got caught in a summer shower on his way from the Tube. The uncomfortable backless bar stool, along with his undersized lamb chop, only accentuated his grumpiness. Our dishes – all small plates – arrived randomly. By the time my flatbread appeared, my other ones were already cold.

‘London restaurants have become a joke,’ my husband said, when we left. ‘Why spend all that money to eat overpriced, small portions in an uncomfortable environment where it’s too noisy to talk properly.’

The London restaurant experience of 2023 is certainly a far cry from the one of my childhood. And if I’m honest, the anticipation of going out for dinner often exceeds the reality. Perhaps it’s because I love my city so much and I love food so much that I keep seeking out the place where the two come together in a perfect marriage.

‘I need something sweet,’ I said to my husband as we walked down Shaftesbury Avenue. In a newsagent’s, we bought two Magnums, then headed to Soho Square. I peeled off my ice cream wrapper, and leaned back into our bench, enjoying the warmth of the evening sun on my skin. My teeth crunched through the milk chocolate shell of the Magnum, and slid into its creamy vanilla interior. A moment I wanted to last forever.

Annabel Chown

November 2023

On Grandfathers

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Story book grandpas are always very, very old. So old that their white beards are never shaved – maybe because they’re too old and weak to pick up a razor and shaving brush? Their backs are bent and, if there are pictures in the book, the facial features of one grandfather are indistinguishable from any other – just a tangled web of wrinkles, out of which peep (usually blue) eyes, in a perpetual state of either twinkling, or grumpy frowning. The twinkly grandpas offer kindness and comfort. The grumpy ones are a bit frightening but then somehow, in the course of the story, they always turn into the twinkly ones, usually as a result of the winning ways of their delightful grand-children. Johanna Spyri’s grandfather in Heidi is a classic example. He starts out as the cantankerous kind who ends up providing love and refuge for Heidi and is finally reconciled with the villagers with whom he has fallen out, and the church that he has long spurned. Grumpy to twinkly, in a nutshell.

The other kind of grandfather, of course, is the dead or dying one. Again, very old, again very wrinkled but this time with twinkly eyes that are about to shut forever. This storybook grandfather offers children a way of processing sadness and coming to terms with death and grief.

There’s something about these storybook grandfathers that once didn’t make me squirm, but now does. It’s obvious why, really, isn’t it? As I grow older, I recognise more acutely the ways in which old people’s individuality and personalities are flattened out and forgotten. Old is a new, and simpler, category of being; the grandfather is a ‘type’, rather than a person. But the truth is, he’s nothing like the grandfathers I have known, and the ones I know now.

My grandfather – Adolf

My grandfather and grandmother, on my mother’s side, lived in South Africa. They were unreachable, except by airmail letter, the very rare treat of an expensive operator-connected phone call, or a telegram in case of dire emergencies or momentous events. After saying farewell to them at Cape Town’s Jan Smuts (now O.R. Tambo) airport at the age of five, I only saw them both twice in total during my childhood – a visit ‘home’ and a trip by them to London for my brother’s bar mitzvah. But they were very important in my mother’s inner world, her sense of herself and her, sometimes fragile, belief that things would turn out OK in the end. She relied on them, even though they weren’t there to be relied upon. We got to know them via their letters, as well as through the news we received of them from the many visiting South Africans who passed through London on their ‘European tour’.

My grandfather was my mother’s favourite. She adored and respected him above anyone else in the world. So, it was a hard thing for me to discover, reading between the lines of letters and messages passed on by visitors, that my grandfather did not favour me. My grandfather’s favourite was my brother. Visitors were full of how much my grandfather thought of my brother. All the talk was about him and how proud my grandfather was of his achievements, his cleverness, his success at school. And on the two occasions we saw my grandparents, my grandfather made this clear too. I was excluded from playing games of chess – too young, too babyish, I’d spoil the game, my grandfather said. I was on the periphery of his sphere of interest, and never allowed into the warm circle of his full grandfatherly adoration. It hurt.

Now, with two grandchildren of my own, both equally adored, neither a favourite, unable to even conceive of how there could be limits or quotas on how much love is available to dole out, I think of my grandfather with regret and sadness. I missed out on him. But I think he also missed out on me. He died before I left school, went to university and entered the world of work. He knew nothing of the woman I was to become.

My grandfather – Oupa

My father’s father, Oupa, also living in South Africa, died when I was three years old, so I have no direct memories of him, just photographs of a neat, diminutive, dapper man, with a hat rakishly positioned on his head, standing a good foot smaller than my rather less stylish and attractive grandmother. By all accounts he was quite fond of me and my brother but perhaps it was lucky that I didn’t get the chance to know him more intimately as a presence in my life. I’ve written about him in my novel Off the Voortrekker Road. Though a fiction, many of the stories about Oupa are rooted in truth – the fact that he kept my grandmother desperately short of money for the household, that he was a harsh and unyielding father (tying my father’s left hand behind his back to force him to use his right hand and refusing to pay out for a bar mitzvah for him, to my father’s lifelong shame.)  His tightness with money extended to not being willing to fund my father’s university education. He could go out and get a job and earn some money, couldn’t he? Luckily my father was exceptionally bright and won one of only two or three scholarships in the whole of the Cape, allowing him to continue his education. My father grew up and succeeded despite his father, not because of him.

Oupa lacked basic decency in his family life – what Jews would call menshlichkeit. He was definitely no mensh! But this extended beyond the family too. His nefarious business exploits became the stuff of family legend. When times were tough, on two separate occasions, Oupa managed to successfully burn down his hardware stores, pocketing a large amount of insurance money, allowing him to set up afresh. In the process, he also burnt down my father’s treasured matchbox collection, a crime for which my father never forgave him.

Despite all this, Oupa may have also had a softer side and my mother tells a few stories of his kindness to her. Unlike my father, she was a practical young woman, quick to pick up new skills such as those needed in the hardware store –  cutting, chopping, sorting, fixing, weighing, measuring, dealing with customers. He clearly respected her for this. Perhaps Oupa’s antipathy towards my father stemmed from the fact that he just couldn’t understand a son whose intellectual achievements so far surpassed his own, while he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in the practical skills that Oupa so valued.

While it was probably no bad thing that I was protected from Oupa the man and all that went with his tempestuous relationship with my grandmother (Ouma), and my father, the stories I was told about him became a rich and important part of my childhood. Grandparents live on in memories, and this grandfather lived on in a particularly vivid – one might even say lurid – way. Grandfathers have value and significance, alive or dead. In my case, his larger-than-life character and exploits gave him a starring role in my first novel.

My father – the grandfather

My father was a loving parent, but not a hands-on one. Preoccupied with making (or sometimes failing to make) a living, and doing what was expected of him in those days, he didn’t change nappies, make dinner, do bath-time, put us to bed, read to us. On weekends, exhausted, and sometimes quite depressed, he took a ‘schluff’, a long sleep, in the afternoon, waking angrily when my brother and my arguments grew loud enough to rouse him. Practical care fell to my mother. When she was so sick she couldn’t leave her bed – just once in my memory – we discovered that he couldn’t crack an egg successfully. The kitchen floor was awash with slippery broken yoke and white and my father, a child himself, cried in shame and frustration and looked to us for assistance.

By the time my second child was born, my father had resolved his work problems, was much happier and on the verge of retirement. Suddenly Pappy Jack came into his own as a grandfather. He changed a nappy for the first time in his life, played with, and was adored by my son.

‘Why does he love me so much?’ my father asked, bashfully perplexed, yet basking in the pleasure of his grandson’s affection.

My mother came straight back, ‘Because you know who Mrs Goggins is.’

I saw my father become someone else. A grandfather. It was a route to the kind of connection that he’d missed out on with us.

My Grandpa Husband and Me

Googling grandfathers, I find a wonderful site called ‘Famous Grandfathers: A List of Bad Boys Who Are Now Grandfathers’, and they include hell-raisers Ozzie Osbourne and Alice Cooper, rock god Mick Jagger and actors Robert de Niro and Jack Nicholson. In among the stories are delightful photographs, including one of Osbourne pulling cross-eyed, goofy faces with his grand-daughter. How did this remarkable transformation happen?

My husband wasn’t a rock god nor was he a hell-raiser in his youth, and yet the transformation is, nonetheless, a big one. Yesterday – it was only a blink away, not a life time surely? – he was a long-blond-haired, hippyish student, in a leather airman’s jacket, desert boots and loons. He’d hitch-hiked across Europe, seen The Grateful Dead at the Bickershaw Festival, marched against racism and cuts and then gone on to a marriage with me, a demanding, serious job, and bringing up two children. And now here he is, ‘grandpa’.

The roles we played as parents, back in the 80s and 90s, wound up being quite stereotypical, much as we tried to break down the gender boundaries. I took a long maternity leave first time round and then gave up full-time work with our second child; my husband’s long hours and work responsibilities meant that, on weekdays at least, I took on more of the caring role, becoming the ‘expert’ in day-to-day minutiae, keeping track of who needed what, dealing with school traumas, preparing their food. But this time round, with a new batch of little ones, my husband has much more time to revel in minutiae. The one thing I’ve found hard to give up control of though, to be honest, is the role of food-giver. Whether it’s the ‘Jewish mamma’ syndrome, or something else, the pleasure of making food for the children – and now the grandchildren – is something I’ve struggled to be able to share and fought hard to retain. It seems that only I know whether a fishfinger, a sausage, or a plate of pasta is what is really needed and how to cook these culinary delights, despite my husband being an exceptional cook, generally acknowledged to be much better than me. The careful preparation of fishfingers and peas? That’s for me – not grandpa!

Grandpa (and Granny) are not really different from the complex, individual, complicated individuals we always were and always have been – quite good at some things and not others, cheerful sometimes but not always, full of our own quirks and preferences and interests. My husband hasn’t changed fundamentally,  the grandpa-ness being just a new, (very precious and important) add-on, a new layer of experience, enriching but not essentially changing who he is. This grandpa – the one who once went to the Bickershaw Rock Festival `– is not the grandfather ‘type’ but a unique individual.

So, let’s remember the real ones – my father who discovered the pleasures of being with a young child, my one grandfather who was only able to perform the role fully for one grandchild, not two, my other one who I only knew through the myth-making of family memories, my husband who hasn’t had a beard since his hippy days, who arrives for his babysitting duties on his motorbike, and has eyes that twinkle as much or as little as anyone else’s, young or old.

Barbara Bleiman

September 2023

On Hollyhocks

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August is peak hollyhock. Particularly so in the seaside town of Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where I spend most of the month and where hollyhocks even grow on the beach. My passion for the plant started with a jigsaw.

Hollyhocks still blooming on Aldeburgh beach, 6 November 2017

I don’t remember completing the puzzle but the picture on the box remains vivid to me: a thatched cottage surrounded by a cottage garden; that style of planting that crams together as many flowery specimens as will fit the space and allows them to spread and self-seed. Glorious on the back row, pink and yellow hollyhocks rise against the cottage wall, as tall as the door. I must have been about ten. I wished our garden could be filled with such flowers. We had shrubs, a rockery, a few lupins and an apple tree but the main bed was given over to Dad growing vegetables.

Around the same time there was a song in the Hit Parade, English Country Garden, a pop version of an 18th century folk song; a song that has been much parodied.  Here’s the first verse

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow in an English country garden?
I’ll tell you now, of some that I know, and those I miss you’ll surely pardon.
Daffodils, hearts-ease and flocks, meadow sweet and lilies, stocks,
Gentle lupins and tall hollyhocks,
Roses, fox-gloves, snowdrops, forget-me-knots in an English country garden.

I didn’t much care for the song but the last two lines of that verse stuck in my head. Since we already had ‘gentle lupins’ surely space could be found for some ‘tall hollyhocks?’ But Dad was more concerned with cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts. Also, our garden wasn’t as described in the song. It did not surround a thatched cottage but rather a 1930s semi-detached house in a suburb of a northern industrial town.

Tall hollyhocks – can grown to 2-3 m high

Anyway, how ‘English’ were the plants listed in the song?  Lupins, apparently, are from the Andes and the hollyhock took a while to migrate here from China via the Middle East.

The botanical name for hollyhocks is alcea rosea, derived from the Greek word, alceos, to cure.  Originally, the plant was valued for medicinal qualities, providing relief for many ailments – tuberculosis, bladder inflammations and the soothing of the swollen hocks of horses, that joint on the hind leg, sort of equivalent to the human ankle, much prone to damage. It is said the name hollyhock emerged because it was brought to these islands from Palestine where it had arrived from China by the time of the Crusades. Those Mediaeval horsemen used the plant to treat the sore legs of their mounts. Hence holy-hocks.

The Garden Trust blog notes that Hollyhocks must have been growing in England by around 1440 as they are mentioned in The Feate of Gardening by John Gardener. However, Henry Philips in Flora Historica, 1824, downplays the plant’s significance, as if they are not much more than weeds or a least just a cottage garden plant, “it is not adapted for the small parterre.”  He saw them being assigned to grow in hedgerows and field boundaries.

Conversely, Paul Laurence Dunbar, acclaimed African-American poet, in his poem, ‘Common Things’ lists the hollyhock along with the bumblebee and sparrow as being as worthy of our attention as the gold of El Dorado. The poem ends:

We like the man who soars and sings
With high and lofty inspiration;
But he who sings of common things
Shall always share our admiration.

Back in England, from the mid 19th century attempts were made to ‘improve’ the common hollyhock and new varieties emerged. Charles Darwin took an in interest in their evolution.  

However, the tall hollyhocks of Aldeburgh have no need for horticulturalists. Any plant that can grow on Aldeburgh’s famous shingle beach can look after itself. Around the town they are everywhere, stems rising two metres high, displaying many coloured blooms from vibrant reds, to the palest pinks, soft peachy shades to a dark burgundy. They fill gardens and sway against brick walls along the road. It’s hard not to smile at this generous trail everywhere you turn. It starts in July when the first blooms appear towards the bottom of the stem. Flowers keep on coming up those tall stems right through summer, often into autumn. Though they are subjected to strong, salt laden East winds they return year after year.

In our Aldeburgh garden hollyhocks have gathered over the 14 years we’ve spent there, my childhood jigsaw dream come true.  They have arrived and arranged themselves with no help from me. I’ve sometimes collected seeds in autumn and scattered them but they seem to find their own preferred spot, most notably in the margin between the front wall and the pavement. The soil is poor, sandy, holding little moisture. They die back in late autumn then from late February new shoots and leaves begin to emerge in all the familiar places.

In April this year, I was dismayed to see that the several fresh plants emerging against our front wall were dying. It was clear they had been sprayed with weed killer. Who would do that? Back in Aldeburgh again in May the reason was clear – the council had resurfaced the pavement. That margin against the wall, which had allowed the plants to grow, was now sealed.

They come in many colours and bees love them

But at the beginning of August I noticed the shoots of six plants had found their way back through to the sun. It seemed unlikely they would bloom this year but clearly their rootstock had survived the poison. I had underestimated this determined plant. On 29 August one of the six produced a bloom.

blooming on 29 August 2023

The hollyhock, this early migrant to our gardens and margins, adapts to wherever it finds itself. It requires not much soil, of any kind, in order to put down a root. It will then thrive on little water and few nutrients. It withstands floods, winds and even a plague of poison.

As the planet heats up this amazing plant is, for me, a symbol of the pure joy of being alive in this world but also a reminder of the need to develop resilience, flexibility and to take care of vital resources, to reflect on what it might mean to have just enough.

Pamela Johnson, August, 2023

On a Change of View

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We’ve arrived in Prague after several months in London, stayed a couple of nights in the flat and are now driving west along Radlicka to the cottage.

This road is ugly. It’s too wide to cross safely, pedestrians use the infrequent traffic lights; a quick check is essential before braving the tram tracks, trams hold no mercy; cars speed towards the tunnel under Strahov.

Behind us are family and London, ahead is the Bohemian countryside. The present is this wide road with its hotels, no trees, a bus station, train tracks and sun beating down on the emptiness. It would be a good road for tanks.

We’ve just left the flat in Ostrovskeho. This is where Ales’ grandparents lived before the Bolshevics took over in 1948 and the State claimed the building with its cinema downstairs. We are surrounded by demolition squads and an ever-expanding construction site.

We first came to the flat twenty three years ago and the view from the windows hasn’t changed. Until now. Workmen, diggers, cranes, hover over the land behind the bus station, constructing a vast development Smichov City.

They are building on the land where soldiers, the Vlasovci, camped in 1945. The men were recovering after helping the Czech Resistance fight the Germans.

The view from this flat at that time was fixed in a watercolour by Ales’ mother, Marta. We’ve hung it beside the sitting room windows but I took it down to check what if anything of the view was left. Her watercolour has only buildings. The houses she painted along Nadrazni on the other side from the bus station, parallel to Radlicka, still look the same.

The soldiers followed General Vlasov and seem more real now that the news is full of war; Russian troops trying to eliminate someone else’s country and refugees trying to find safety. There is nothing in her picture of the exhausted soldiers. Vlasov sounds rather like Prigozhin. He had an eventful war, changed sides, was with the Germans and then swapped, setting up the Russian Liberation Army. Many of his soldiers were Soviet prisoners who faced the sadism of the Nazis. His Vlasovci ended up in Prague to fight with the Czech Uprising. He and his men wanted to escape to the West but most of those who did reach the Americans were handed back and ended up being executed by the Soviets.

Ales’ mother said she would stand at the window and watch. She was about to be pregnant with Ales, or was already. She conceived him that May as she saw the arrival of those men who had saved Prague, saw them camped opposite on the waste ground, waiting.

They lived – Vladimir, Marta, their two small daughters – on the fifth floor. Marta worked in the cinema, in the box office and she painted the posters.

The view from the flat has been the same since I first witnessed it. Except the drunks – the men hauling scrap, stripping copper, sharing beer, arguing – now prop their amputations, bandaged limbs, against a bench opposite Sushi Central, near El Mundo.

The government prescribes austerity. Pensions are frozen. Was she painting that view in May? Did she look out at the exhausted soldiers while you settled in her womb, got a grip, took a tight hold? Did she decide then that if you were a boy they’d name you after her brother? Hadn’t she just heard that he’d died in Ravensbruck?

Those soldiers were mainly Ukrainians. Prague is now full of Ukranians and not just the war-wounded, apparently they are one in seven of the population. There are complaints from the locals about poverty and the price of bread and cost of health care, refugees getting privileged treatment. But to complain or be ambivalent might be risky. It is a criminal offence to be sympathetic, let alone pro-Putin.

We are driving along Radlicka and will turn towards the motorway. Was this the same road the soldiers took to reclaim Prague? The construction site is demolishing the train station, the bus station, all evidence of those soldiers. War brings change and destruction and it has to be covered up. The name of this road resembles the Czech word radlice whichrefers to the part of a plough that digs down and rotates the earth.

We are driving to the cottage and will listen to the radio and Ales will shell walnuts from last Autumn. And the news will be of tragedy. This time we’re with the Germans and are helping the Ukrainians. The Russians are the enemy. Roads in Prague have been renamed, statues of Russian generals removed.

In 1945 Russia claimed they had conquered Prague, but the first troops to join the Czech resistance and succeed in getting rid of the Germans were the men Marta watched from her window.

The new President, Pavel, likes NATO, the present head of NATO has just warned the Russians that they can’t win a nuclear war. That’s good.

The government has announced tax rises and is sending tanks to Zelensky. The people don’t seem convinced; many of the refugees have serious needs, some have TB. Many are homeless, their children need schools. They need help. But how long for?

When we return we’ll put Marta’s watercolour back on the wall. Do not go carelessly, they say. Keep it simple, remember who is the enemy. One view is going, others have almost gone.

Jane Kirwan, July 2023

ON RECONSTRUCTION

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1.

Evening light spills through the south-facing bay window, beyond which my neighbour’s wild garden sprawls, in its May exuberance. In front of the bay, and in what will become my living space, sits a lone toilet, surrounded by piles of rubble, ripped-out bits of plasterboard and studwork.

‘Goodness,’ says my friend, surveying the building site. She wanted to see my new flat  before we went out to dinner. And the look on her face says, you must be mad to do this.

But I am not mad. I am an architect, used to refurbishing old buildings. Who knows demolition must precede reconstruction; that it has to get worse before it gets better.

I wanted this flat as soon as I spotted its photos and floorplan on the estate agent’s blurb, which arrived while I was on holiday. By the time I returned, someone had already made an offer. Week after week, I called the agent to check progress on the sale. ‘Going great’ he always said. Until one week, it no longer was.

I was the first one in when it was put back on the market. A diagonal partition wall divided its 4-metre high south-facing room into two awkward bedrooms. In one, a used condom lay discarded on the floor. A couple of young DJs were living there, the agent told me.

I made an offer within minutes. It would be perfect for my new life; a freelance one where I worked from home. The tiny kitchen off the hallway could become my office. A cancer diagnosis, three springs ago, had put an abrupt end to my forty-five minute commute to an architect’s practice in Clerkenwell for twelve-hour days. Life was too short for that. Ever since, I’d been living with and working from my parents’. Now it was time to recreate my own home. And, hopefully, one day, find someone to share it with.   

2.

The news arrives by telephone on a Wednesday morning in late winter, eight years after I have moved into my flat. It’s not exactly unexpected. Still, I have to sit down to digest it.

A woman from the genetics team at The Royal Marsden Hospital informs me I have tested positive for the BRCA1 gene. A genetic mutation that has, in recent years, killed two of my first cousins, only in their forties. And puts me at an up to 80% lifetime risk of a new breast cancer, not to mention a 40% one of ovarian cancer.

I sit on the sofa shivering, unsure whether it’s from the news or from the chill of the March day. The heating is on, but the single-glazed, tall bay window is a poor buffer against the weather. To my husband-to-be’s horror, I refuse to put up curtains. I don’t want to conceal the window’s panelled surrounds.     

The hospital recommend a risk-reducing double mastectomy with optional reconstruction. Alternatively, I can continue with annual MRI screening, until I’m ready for surgery. I am not ready. Even though I ought to be. I am also busy planning my September wedding and trying to conceive a child. Plus, I’ve remained cancer-free for over a decade, so surely I can risk postponing surgery for a bit? 

3.

‘You could go on the beach today in a tiny bikini, and no-one would guess a thing, says Ana, a Spanish doctor at The Royal Marsden, when I see my reconstructed breasts for the first time, on a December morning, two years after my wedding. It is ten days since the four-hour operation in which my breast tissue was cut away and silicon implants inserted.

I was scared I might hate these new breasts of mine. Even though my skin is still bruised yellow from surgery, I have to admit they look good. A little bigger. More uplift. And perfectly symmetrical.

My body recovers fast. But by spring, I am crumbling. I should be happy, I reason. My lifetime risk of breast cancer has been slashed to less than 5%. But inside there’s disquiet. Is it from four years trying and failing to conceive? From having had part of my body chopped off? A part from which I’d hoped to feed the child I am increasingly uncertain I will ever have.

I can’t be sure. But what I do know is I’ve lost my ability to take pleasure in life’s small delights: a movie and sushi with my husband; brunch with my girlfriends; a good novel. Even a holiday to Venice and Croatia doesn’t quite hit the spot.

Anxiety pulses through me. Soon, I’m barely sleeping. An hour here, an hour there. Similar to the new mother I may never become. I try everything. Meditation. Medication. More yoga. Less yoga. More greens and fish. Cake. Even jogging. None of it makes much difference.

I get to the point where I think, thank God I’ll probably never become a mother. What kind of a mother would I be in this state?

4.

Everyone tells me it gets easier after the first year. And what a year: my sister’s sudden death nine days before my son arrived; my ovaries ripped out six months after his birth (another risk-reducing surgery) and the ensuing plunge into surgical menopause.

And it does get easier. For a while. I adapt to a life in which my sister no longer exists and my son does. He starts sleeping through the night. I start HRT and the hot flashes melt away.

Then come the stories: a strange virus from China, whole cities there being locked down. Never in London, I reassure myself.

A few weeks later, I walk through Regent’s Park to Marylebone High Street. On this mid-week morning, it is deserted, most of its shops closed. A premonition of what is to come.

The following Monday, we go into lockdown. Building work is, however, allowed to continue. And our downstairs neighbours have just started a six-month refurbishment of their flat.

Clank, clank, clank all day long. Three of us marooned at home, my husband attempting to work from a makeshift desk in our bedroom. My son failing to nap in the tiny room that was once my office, as drills grate and angle grinders shriek.

I ask the builders if they’ll consider timing their lunchbreak with his nap, a blessed pause in the day for me, too. Or at least only do quiet work then. A resolute no comes back. Very busy. Must get on. Many jobs lined up.

So I take the pram out and walk and walk, mostly through the local parks, which smell so fragrant this spring. In the distance, I see City towers and picture its ghost town, buildings and streets emptied out. What will become of us all? Will London ever return to her former self?

5.

I wake early and walk through the cool of the elderflower-scented park to Marylebone High Street. I arrive at the café in time to avoid the queue, which builds even on a weekday.

No traces of Patisserie Valerie’s chandeliers, green walls and gilt-framed mirrors remain. It closed a couple of years ago, sometime during 2021, and the new café, with its terrazzo floor, giant skylight, and Aussie-inspired menu is more to my architectural and culinary tastes.

Still, I miss the Continental comfort of the old place, its glass display case filled with eclairs, strawberry tarts and mille-feuille. It was where I came, twenty-one years ago today, on the day my life as I knew it was bulldozed by three simple words: you have cancer. My best friends and I drank Earl Grey and ate scones with clotted cream and jam. In my shock, I thought it was quite nice to be spending a Monday afternoon in a café with them, rather than at the office, drafting construction details.  

Today, I’m alone. I sit near the window and look out over the high street. The sun is starting to come out, the shops are unlocking their doors. Just a few units remain boarded up.

I drink a flat white and eat toasted coconut bread and contemplate what I’ll do with myself today. A rare Saturday to myself, as my husband and son are away. I want to do it all. The movies. An exhibition. A spa. Go shopping. Lie in the park and read. Go to yoga. See friends.

In the end, I decide to walk back through the park and savour the rare peace of my home, without a four-year-old running around and strewing the floor with toy trains, diggers and cars.

I sit at the smooth white desk in the living room, from which I can see my neighbour’s lush May garden. I bought the desk when I was seven months pregnant and had transformed my office into a white-painted nursery. In this reconstructed life, which I could never have dared dream of twenty-one years ago, I now use my desk to construct stories, not buildings.

Annabel Chown, June 2023

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On the Pleasure of Literary Picnics

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I’ve changed my life because of a picnic I once read about in a book so it’s fair to say that I take literary picnics seriously.

I first fell in love with the 1930s writer, Denton Welch, because of his exact accounts of picnics taken in the countryside around Kent. In our twenties and living in London, my husband and I would copy Denton’s picnics and cycle round the countryside, trying to stop in exactly the same spots Denton had.

So, several decades later, when we wanted to move back South from Edinburgh, we remembered those country lanes and moved to live in Kent, largely because of how we’d grown to love it through Denton’s picnics.

Here’s his diary entry for 26th October 1944: There were cows in the field opposite, in the misty atmosphere, and beyond on the opposite hill Tudorized houses lost in the soft mist. We ate cheese, fruit cake, biscuits, toast, drank coffee and I ate the only orange in pigs.

            Then we smoked the Dunhill cigarettes that I had bought, and an old lady came behind us and said over the fence, ‘Excuse me, but would you like any boiling water? Can I get you any boiling water?’ I told her we had just drunk our thermos of coffee and she went away immediately to her house saying, “I see, quite, quite.’

Perhaps because he insisted on having picnics through the year, his best were ones that involved a thermos and four squares of dark chocolate. Four squares exactly, not a bar, or even ‘some chocolate’.

Be exact, writers, because your readers will be eating along with you.

Or nearly always. I tried to find the earliest account of a literary picnic and came up with Anthony Trollope in Can You Forgive Her (1864):

‘There are servants to wait, there is champagne, there is dancing, and instead of a ruined priory, an old upturned boat to be converted into a dining room.’

Hmmm.

But if the Trollope account is a little too aspirational for most of us, then what exactly is a picnic? Maybe it’s a breakfast of bananas and sweet corn cooked on a static barbecue in a full car park? Our annual summer holiday treat has now gone into family myth, not least because of the sight of our normally office-bound father struggling to feel at home in the great outdoors. And what could be more British than seeing picnickers sitting right next to their cars as they watch the traffic go by?

At least Patricia Highsmith took her characters off the motorway in The Price of Salt (which became the film, Carol):

Then they drove into a little road off the highway and stopped, and opened the box of sandwiches Richard’s mother had put up. There was also a dill pickle, a mozzarella cheese, and a couple of hard boiled eggs. Therese had forgotten to ask for an opener, so she couldn’t open the beer, but there was coffee in the thermos. She put the beer can on the floor in the back of the car.

            ‘Caviar. How very, very nice of them,’ Carol said, looking inside a sandwich. ‘Do you like caviar?’

At the other extreme, there was the time I went to play with a new school friend, and her mother threw jam sandwiches out of the window at us so we wouldn’t disturb her at lunchtime. That didn’t feel like much of a picnic so, while there should be an illusion of ‘roughing it’, perhaps there also needs some care involved.

 ‘You English,’ my Dutch neighbour says about the way her British husband fusses with filling the thermos, preparing fruit and yes, why not, a rug to sit on. ‘Why can’t you take some bread with you and be done with it?’

Perhaps our classic children’s literature is to blame. The lashings of ginger pop enjoyed by the Famous Five, or Ratty’s famous “cold-tongue-cold-ham-cold-beef-pickled-onions-salad-french-bread-cress-and-widge-spotted-meat-ginger-beer-lemonade — ” from the Wind in the Willows.

If Ratty had just said he’d got a picnic, even a large one, then who would have been interested? Not me. And I certainly wouldn’t have begged Mum to take pickled onions with us next time we went on a picnic.

I know I’m not alone in loving detailed food descriptions laid out on the page. Recently I had a brain freeze and couldn’t remember the name of a favourite children’s book, so I asked on social media, ‘What’s the name of the book where they have those little sugar biscuits with iced flowers?’

The Little White Horse, several people answered in minutes. And there then followed an animated discussion of all the food Marmaduke Scarlet cooked for Maria Merryweather. So perhaps it’s not surprising that Harry Potter eats well at times too, given that J K Rowling has admitted how Elizabeth Goudge has influenced her.

Among the classics, Jane Austen is the mistress of the niceties and challenges of a picnic – perhaps because she gets so well how it could all go horribly wrong. Her deliciously snobbish Mrs Elton in Emma, has all the important details planned in advance, as she explains to Mr Knightley. ‘I shall wear a large bonnet and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm…. Nothing can be more simple you see… There is to be no form or parade – a sort of gipsy party. We are to walk about your gardens, and gather the strawberries ourselves, and sit under trees; and whatever else you may like to provide, it is to be all out of doors, a table spread in the shade, you know. Everything as natural and simple as possible.’

But Mr Knightley is a man I could never fall in love with. He insisted on having the meal inside with servants and furniture, large bonnets optional.

Perhaps he was feeling under siege like the poor oysters flattered into joining the walrus and the carpenter on their sea-side picnic until:

‘A loaf of bread,’ the Walrus said,

‘Is what we chiefly need:

Pepper and vinegar besides

are very good indeed –

Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,

We can begin to feed.

I used to love this poem until I’d realised exactly what was going on. Perhaps the best literary picnics – like many in real life – are those that teeter on the verge of disaster, such as the glorious beach picnic in Gerald Durrell’s short story ‘The Picnic’, where the family settled on what they thought was a rock but turned out to be the side of a dead horse.

I wonder too if the weather is another reason why the British love eating outside? Because we can never really plan ahead for a sunny day, we don’t let a ‘spot of weather’ put us off. As Edwin Morgan writes:

In a little rainy mist of white and grey

we sat under an old tree,

drank tea toasts to the powdery mountain,

undrunk got merry, played catch

with the empty flask…

In her wartime diaries, Love is Blue, Joan Wyndham writes about one definitely un-Blyton picnic: ‘We lay under a tree in the wind and the rain eating peaches while Zoltan kissed my thighs with his usual air of grave, sad absorption. He undid his shirt so I could put my hand over his heart, and the wind roared in the trees and whipped back my hair.’

Can’t you just taste those peaches?

Oh, your attention went elsewhere? Back to the food, people.

Although not perhaps PG Wodehouse’s picnic in Very Good Jeeves:

I met a fellow the other day who told me he unpacked his basket and found the champagne had burst and together with the salad dressing had soaked into the ham, which in turn had got mixed up with the gorgonzola cheese forming a kind of pasta … Oh, he ate the mixture but he said he could taste it even now.

Well, if the food isn’t that good, at least a picnic can offer the chance to explore. Not just a geographical place, but to escape the routine of day-to-day. A packed lunch made at home to take to the office every day is NOT a picnic. However, the same food brought by someone coming to surprise you with a lunch to take outside in the park is definitely a picnic in my book.

So a picnic can help us try something new. Escaping the routine of day-to-day. Which is, after all, very much what reading for pleasure can be.

‘O stop, stop,’ cried the Mole in ecstasies: ‘This is too much.’

            ‘Do you really think so?’ inquired the Rat seriously. ‘It’s only what I always take on these little excursions, and the other animals are always telling me that I’m a mean beast and cut it very fine!’

            The Mole never heard a word he was saying. Absorbed in the new life he was entering upon, intoxicated with the sparkle, the ripple, the scents and the sounds and the sunlight, he trailed a paw in the water and dreamed long waking dreams.’

Sarah Salway, May 2023

On the Essay

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So, here I am writing an essay. An essaie. A trying out of thoughts and ideas. I’m nervous. Is that obvious? Perhaps the blunt Hemingwayesque short sentences are a giveaway. It’s not my usual genre. An escape into fiction is easier. There, I can hide behind another voice, another life, a different kind of truth. There, it’s a truth that sidles up, unannounced, or leaves chasm-like gaps for the reader to leap over – or plunge into – and it comes from somewhere only half-understood or consciously planned.

Essays should be planned, shouldn’t they? That’s what you’re told at school. You make a list of points, you think through your arguments, you construct a logical sequence and decide where to place your strongest points, your knock-out quotation, your rhetorical flourishes. You follow your plan through. The problem is planning’s not my thing. I like to just get started and see where that takes me. I write to think, and think as I write. Open-endedness, an uncertain path, the lack of a map, the thrill of the unknown, the change of route along the way all seem to get me there in one way or another (eventually) and the journey has usually been an adventure. Writers differ hugely on this, I know, but for me the thoroughly planned writing route is a dull, wearisome plod.  My freshest thoughts appear on the trail, unexpectedly, as if from nowhere. The fog lifts, I reach the brow of a hill and a surprising new vista opens up.

And here’s another thing. If an essay is a trying out of ideas, what about feelings? Can feelings be ‘tried out’ too? An essay on feelings seems perfectly fine, but what about an essay of feelings, where feelings are the substance, where they do the heavy-lifting, rather than simply providing the content? Can my pulse race in an essay? Can I pause to look at that stunning pink and gold sunset, or, on a hike, feel the squelch on the soles of my boots, sucking me into the mud, or choke back the tears in a darkened room, as a father films his daughter on a camcorder at an airport, playing hide-and-seek with him for the last time?

These questions aren’t rhetorical ones – I’d like answers. And the route to these answers is in reading other people’s essays – not school essays but the kinds of essays that are published in book form.  If I ask, ‘can an essay do x or y or z?’ then going to essayists should help me find out. So here are a few observations about essays I’ve read in the past and more recently.

First, for me, some of the best essays are by brilliant thinkers, people who know a lot about something and think in exciting ways about that subject. Take Susan Sontag, for instance, writing about changes made by photographic images on our world and perceptions of that world in the collection On Photography in 1971.  It takes just five sentences in the first essay for her to come up with a stunningly insightful take:

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar, and even more importantly, an ethics of seeing.

Was this the first appearance of the idea of ‘reading’ visual images that have their own special ‘grammar’ – the metaphor of the written word being adopted for the visual in a highly illuminating way? Is it where the idea of ‘visual literacy’ originated. I’m not sure, but it’s a startling opening to a highly influential book. And the ‘ethics’ of seeing too. That’s an extraordinary phrase. It’s original thought encoded in surprising conjunctions of words that make one think afresh.

But not every great essayist is pithily constructing abstract new philosophies or highly intellectual ways of framing, or re-framing, the world. George Orwell is one of my favourite essayists and he generally follows one of two approaches. The essays are either a bit like a plainly stated, and carefully argued and exemplified, manifesto, or, in another style, more like a powerful story with a message – ‘Politics and the English Language’ is an example of the former, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, the latter. I like both. Both have a strong thesis, usually a political argument to be proved, and the engine of the essay never stutters or splutters but powers ahead full throttle.  This extract from ‘Shooting an Elephant shows Orwell being quite explicit about how the story he’s going to tell will throw light for the reader, as it the episode did for him, on some significant political idea, such as poverty, inequality, socialism or, in this case, imperialism:

One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism – the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, but I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out.

More recently, new genres of essay-writing seem to have sprung up, alongside the more conventional forms and perhaps these show how the essay can be something looser, more complex, with feelings and experiences allowable, and other things too. Annie Dillard’s collection The Abundance was gifted to me by Secret Santa, a collection of essays. That’s what the reviewer on the back cover calls it, and that’s how it’s billed. And yet it defies easy categorisation as such. There’s no thesis in the essays, no explicit argument, no explanatory voice, no concluding thoughts. Sections are not connected with each other, thoughts and feelings jostle with each other, sometimes randomly. There are stunning descriptions of landscape and wildlife and disturbing moments of alienation and confusion. Are they memoir? Writing from life? Are they, perhaps, even poetry? What exactly makes them essays? In the introduction to the collection Geoff Dyer talks of a recognised genre called ‘genre-resistant non-fiction’ and seemingly Dillard has been doing this since the 1970s, resisting convention and ‘essaying’ a different way of writing. Her focus is often, though not always, on the natural world, and herself in it, on trying to understand who we are and what our experiences in nature, and nature’s experiences of itself, might mean. So, in one essay she writes about an encounter with a weasel, about what it thinks and what she thinks and what that can tell her about both it and her.

‘Please do not tell me about ‘approach-avoidance conflicts.’ I tell you I’ve been in that weasel’s brain for sixty seconds, and he was in mine. Brains are private places, muttering through unique and secret tapes – but the weasel and I for a sweet and shocking time, both plugged into another tape altogether. Can I help it if it was a blank?

What goes on in his brain the rest of the time? What does a weasel think about? He won’t say. His journal is tracks in clay, a spray of feathers, mouse blood and bone: uncollected, unconnected, loose-leaf, and blown.

Dillard’s essays are metaphysical and philosophical and often quite strange, a bit off-the-wall. They leave you with powerful thoughts but few conclusions. If the essay has to have a conclusion, Dillard defiantly refuses to give you one.

To conclude, (or should I say thus, therefore, so, to sum up, or what you will) essays, these days, can be pretty much anything that is short, written in a writer’s own voice (I’ve come to this conclusion late on in my conclusion, for which apologies) and rooted in non-fiction. It can be poetic, it can tell a story, it can be brilliant philosophising (or not). It can follow strict rules or none. Perhaps it does have to have that element of ‘essaie’ of trying out something – trying out a thought, a position, a viewpoint, a way of understanding experiences. And the provisional, questing, enquiring nature of the name might help the reader to see it as something to enjoy for this very reason – that it allows us access to someone else’s mind, and their efforts to think things through, in a valiant literary attempt at something…whatever that may be.

Barbara Bleiman

April 2023

On the Eloquence of Bare Trees

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Bare winter trees have fascinated me since childhood. Until recently, I would have said it was down to their beauty, to the pleasure of watching empty branches sketched against a winter blue sky or for the enjoyment of seeing the structure of things, a complexity made visible.

It took an iPad painting by David Hockney to reveal a further, surprising reason why trees have held my attention for decades.

*

I’m eight and beginning to understand that the world is a ball, spinning at a rate I can’t imagine. If it slows down we all fall off into outer space.

In my Church of England primary school the windows are high. Church-like. Looking up, I notice clouds moving against the sky and take this to be evidence of Earth slowing down. I daren’t tell the teacher – what words would I say? I make a plan. I will hold tight to one of the trees that grow in the playground. They are fixed to the spinning ball.  

Perhaps I soon realised my fear of flying off the planet was unfounded but memories of gazing up through that classroom’s high windows remain vivid. Soon, my attention shifted from clouds to the trees in their bare winter state.

There I am, bored by multiplication, finding it compelling and mysterious to study the way one branch, then another, divides and divides down to the finest twigs. I could have watched trees all day but for Miss Warburton nudging my attention back to the squared pages of my arithmetic book.

Later, at Grammar school, we had an inspirational art teacher, Mr Lofthouse – a real artist – who dressed casually and had a beard. In the Sixties, this was radical in a traditional Grammar school. Keen on abstraction, Mr Lofthouse encouraged us to study natural forms and to take our cue from these to make pictures that spoke of the world and how we felt about it, but not literally. How thrilling to discover it was possible to say things without using words.

I’m fourteen, about to start the end-of-year art exam. I turn over the paper to find several topics but couldn’t say now what the others were because as soon as I saw the words WINTER TREES, I was off. At ease, mixing shades of grey, creating with a few brush strokes a winding path to recede across the page, implying a sense of depth. Soon I’m not thinking how to do it, I’m lost in the flow, excited, urgently making marks to suggest a trunk, main branches and the pattern of finer and finer twigs.

Mr Lofthouse gives me a mark of 90%. He frames the piece and hangs it on the wall of the school hall. This is unusual, and a touch controversial. Not many people in this academic institution are as impressed as Mr Lofthouse and certainly not my parents. Art is a pastime not a serious subject. Why hadn’t I got 90% in History or Maths? For my parents, anxious, fearful people, my interest in art is disturbing. ‘I don’t know where she gets that from,’ they said as if I had a disease. I don’t know either. Perhaps it’s from my mother’s side? Perhaps she comes from a long line of artists? But she won’t reveal where she came from. We don’t know if she has any extended family. The fear in her eyes at the mention of relatives makes it clear we mustn’t ask.

*

Since my mother died, aged 96, I’ve been researching and writing the story of her hidden past, a story I’ve needed all my life. Just when I feel I’m reaching the end of the memoir, my perception of my mother, her mystery and my view of it, starts to shift again. This happened recently while gazing at a postcard of an iPad painting by David Hockney. I’d seen the original in the 2021 exhibition, The Arrival of Spring, Normandy, 2020, at the Royal Academy. The exhibition was hung chronologically to give the viewer the experience of spring emerging. The piece titled, No 97, 5 March, 2020, alandscape of bare trees, lit by a full moon, was in the first room.

As other visitors hurry towards colourful works filled with blossoms and sharp greens, it’s in that first room that I linger, returning to it several times. This painting, for me, holds a charge. I want to lift it off the wall, to own it.

Instead, I make do with the postcard which sits on the mantelpiece in my workroom along with other postcards of Hockney’s winter tree paintings. But with this latest one, I find myself often stopping to enjoy the bands of colour suggesting a landscape at night. A translucent blue, stippled by lighter patches suggesting thin cloud, forms the sky. To the left, a circle of bright white depicts a full moon. Below the sky, a darker, thinner band of a solid bluish-grey forms a hill and in the foreground a band of green evokes a field, hatched with tiny touches of white along its edge where the moonlight falls.

Against the bands of colour, Hockney deftly sketches several bare trees. In the centre foreground a single large tree dominates, its branches reach up and inwards. To the right of the field and further back, so it seems smaller, is another lone tree. This one has branches that reach outwards.

As I study the relationship between the two trees I find myself thinking of the large one as my mother – fiercely independent, closing in on herself. The smaller tree, with the branches opening out, reminds me of myself, always reaching but getting no closer. Fanciful as that may sound, to me it feels right. Here is a representation of the years of longing to know what lay behind my mother’s secrecy.

The idea takes further shape as I focus on the rows of trees on the hill in the background. Those far off in the distance to the right suggest ancestors, long dead, but whose stories I’ve been colleting from the living relatives recently discovered. Could those people be represented by the group of trees to the left of the scene, under the moon and closer in? No wonder the painting felt charged. It encapsulates the mystery I have grown up with, the situation before I had words for it. Bare trees. A bare family tree.

Of course, what we notice, what snags our attention in the outside world, will have a connection to our inner world. As Hockney says, ‘we see psychologically.’ And hadn’t Mr Lofthouse taught me that years ago? The painting I made as an inquisitive fourteen-year-old no doubt said much about my state of mind at the time.

Thinking again about my eight-year-old self – perhaps those scudding clouds, my fear of falling into outer space, also had something to do with feeling unrooted, untethered. At least I could hold onto the trees. Bare trees offered somewhere tangible, to direct my curiosity for the intangible.

My new reading of Hockney’s painting is a reminder to look again at a work of art that won’t let you go – what might it be trying to say?

After the bleak winter of not knowing, my mother’s family tree is starting to reveal buds; the deep, wordless winter now edging towards the arrival of a kind of spring. As Hockney notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, ‘… to show the full arrival of spring you have to start in winter …’

Pamela Johnson March 2023

On Reading the Farm

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I’m staying with my sister in Canada, find on a shelf one of my favourite books from childhood. One I read avidly (or so I thought). It was always my book: Jane’s Country Year. A young girl spends a year away from the city on a farm. I’ve carried an image of that farm safely through all those years, or thought I had.

I’m with my brother-in-law; we’re driving through Northern Alberta on our way to visit a real working farm. Our view is flat: sky, prairie, a few abandoned grain elevators. We’re going to collect furniture fifty miles beyond Beaver Lodge. I tell him what I’m expecting to find: a farmhouse in a green valley. Not this one, he says. It’s just a barn I rent.

But there would be a farm? He grunts, yes. He doesn’t seem curious about my book discovery so I don’t confess that I’ve already put it in my suitcase. Did any other story I read as a child have a farm? I read or was read to, and can vaguely remember a few things. There were themes the stories seemed to hold in common: an escape from somewhere not described. Out of the city? To the mountains or the countryside and security. Or Wind in the Willows. Follow Mole and be safer underground.

These were stories of houses, homes, burrows, cottages, farms, isolated in the countryside. Those accounts, those cosy illustrations of rural idylls, webbed into each other. Yet their content has slipped away leaving a sense of comfort in the strangeness. What did they add up to? A farm, a house I wanted as home – kettle on the stove, welcoming grown-ups, warm range, red-check table-cloth, jugs of milk.

He says we’re nearly there. I tell him that I’d just rescued from their shelves my favourite childhood book. He grunts. Our van bumps over potholes. Jane’s Country Year. I add that I’d remembered a cottage embossed in the centre of a green cloth cover but when I’d checked the cover I found it was not a cottage; it was a tree. So, not after all, a cottage deep down in a valley. He grunts again.

I’ve forgotten so much. When I found the lost book on their bookcase I’d remembered other titles that might have an image of that cottage, that valley. I’d googled and found an Enid Blyton with 1950s red-cheeked children: The Family at Red-Roofs. But this wasn’t the one I remembered where a wren was nanny to four children, making egg sandwiches. And was she really an overgrown bird? This one featured a cottage with red roofs but no chubby wren seemed to be catering?

Surely there was a farmhouse in a valley; there were barns and trees. I remember looking down from a height, that there below us was a house? I checked Jane’s Country Year again. It was there, inside, in an illustration. Not as I remembered it but certainly looking down at a valley, farmhouse, several barns. A year. Events like delivering baby lambs only came round once and then something else amazing to witness and then the child was gone away. Or did they invite her back? I must have checked the end of the story? I still could, now that I have the book. Or was it like Heidi with Grandfather? Seduced by the mountain slopes to go back and to keep returning. Whatever was left behind in the town was a longing and a blur. Or was it some threat that Heidi had to escape? Here and there, mountains, snow and a summer with the same vast extent of green.

Not magic but common sense. Down to earth. Like Mole and Ratty. There was food throughout that year, in all the stories. There was a journey there. And a leaving. But that was all right. While I was immersed in reading, it became my year in the countryside, nothing to do with ‘that girl’ at the centre of the story. A farm in a valley surrounded by the seasons, a range, a kitchen, a comfort. Each month accounted for.

As I started to read it again I realised I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to track down and re-read any of my childhood favourites. If I imagined myself back to that ‘Jane’s’ world, I might lose the security of that changing landscape. The warmth of hay in the barn. The cows swaying indifference as they crossed the yard. The steam popping from the cowpats. I didn’t want to relax any more in Mole or Ratty’s kitchen. What was it really like to be cuddled by Jenny Wren? Hardly comfortable.

The adults in the story didn’t consume the children but kept them fed and safe. It was a year that was built round that seasonal year of change. It was secure in the valley. As I read I could hear the conversations, I could hear people that sounded much like my imagined voices for Grandfather and Ratty as they described the workings of the farm. I was shown that countryside so it would never be lost to me. Always isolated, always in a green valley that surrendered to the seasons – bucolic, cows swaying their indifference on their way to the milking-shed. I was given the countryside as if that world was open to me.

That place was in a story, a picture and a feeling and all held in one year. The cycle. A small image embedded into the centre of the green cloth cover of a farmhouse and trees. Looking down from the height, there below us. Ok, it was actually just one tree embossed into the cover.

It was the year. Things only came round once and then she was gone. Or did they invite that girl back? I can’t remember and don’t want to check the book to see. Was it like Heidi with Grandfather, seduced by the mountain slopes? The same extent of green. Down to earth. Like Mole and Badger. There was food. There was a journey there. And a leaving. But that was all right.

My year in the country. All imagined. A farm in a valley surrounded by the seasons, a range, a kitchen, a comfort. Each month accounted for, it was such a long time that it stretches to now. If I go back there, I might lose the security of that changing landscape, the warmth of the hay heaped up in the barn, the cows’ udders swaying as they crossed the yard.

I was given a home in that book but I remember nothing about the young girl at the centre. She was probably too good and sweet to be true. It was the structure of the story that let me imagine my own adventures. It was secure in the valley but mainly I wanted to be back inside, in that warm kitchen. I didn’t always want the open road with Toad, I sometimes wanted to burrow down. Badger’s home in the middle of the Wild Wood would have been welcome.

My brother-in-law takes a sharp turn to the left. He says we’re there and I look out at yet more prairie. We rattle and bump down a track; a gate has been left half connected to a broken fence. We bounce and judder to a halt.

Suddenly I can see nothing. Not only is there no farm, no gentle cows, there is no anything. I don’t move. My brother-in-law has got out into a madness of mosquito and buzzing and is quite lost to me. There are denser shapes walking around that might be animal. A different buzz of energy seems human shaped, it breaks up into a couple who have come out of what must be the farmhouse.

They stand together in the front doorway in a daze of buzzing killers, their arms are crossed over their chests and they are watching. They seem sullen. I had started to get out of the van, not to be a coward, but am immediately covered and stung by these angry packets of hate. I get back in and wait while he loads up the back.

He does a thumbs-up to the blur that is the couple. They do not move; he gets into the van. You ok, he says?

I nod and we reverse, drive back down the track, take the road away to the town.

Jane Kirwan