Milk and Static - 2

I'm a bit obsessed with recalling and recording the past at the moment, especially the time when I was on the cusp of adolescence. Another of my current manias is to think about my life in terms of the music that I associate with specific periods, events and moods. It's a bit of a nostalgia thingy, but I think I'm trying to capture as much of it as I can before age, distance, time and alcohol finally wipe my synapses clean of the ability to recall anything from more than thirty seconds earlier...

Not all of the milkmen were as affable and likeable as Martin. Thinking about it, this is not really a surprise: the demographic of that profession was predominantly white, working class, and aged 25-45 (or so), and a lot of them, I suspect, were just doing this job until something else came along. Back then, I had the idea that being a milkman was something of a vocation - that you signed up to be a milkman for life, and grew old doing it; I had seen older men on the floats, usually bespectacled, with that greased and combed-over-flat hair that only men in the mists of middle age sported. Out of that demographic, there must have been plenty who liked the idea of finishing by lunchtime, maybe spending some time in the pub or the betting shop, or in more shady pursuits.

Anyway, I worked for a number of them, and Martin was the only one who I liked. The others were a mix of the distasteful, the actively nasty, and the incompetent. The distasteful one was called Lawrence, I think: a little dark-haired guy with glossy black eyes and centre-parted hair; he wore his white milkman's jacket buttoned up, and it always seemed too tight, even on his little torso. He had quite a high voice, and a gurgly giggle, and he had a special 'mockery' voice that he used to laugh at us milkboys, at stupid motorists, and at customers who had displeased him or messed him around with their money on 'collection day' - this voice was gurgly, like his laugh, but it also had elements that referred to mentally ill and disabled people - usually this voice sounded like "oggle oggle oogle", and would be accompanied with a lot of eye rolling and tongue waggling.

It's a bit odd to think back now to how widespread and acceptable this mockery of the mentally ill and disabled was back in the early 70s - how integral it was to the culture that I grew up in. I remember that I embraced it fully in my innocence, along with the casual, widespread and deep-seated racism that was also thick in the air. My mum tells me that I came home from the milk round one day and said that "They [the ethnic minorities who lived in the tower block at the end of our road] should all be bricked up in there with their gold top milk". This from an 11- or 12-year-old boy in an overwhelmingly white, working class neighbourhood. I can only assume that I was repeating prejudices and terms of abuse that I had heard the milkman say - I know that I said it in a way that echoed the authoritativeness of a knowing adult who had the weight of experience and belief behind their utterance.

I still find it hard to accept that, even in a culture where racial stereotyping and racist abuse were acceptable, even on mainstream TV, I could think these things, even at the most superficial level of aping an adult's speech or beliefs. But I know that I did say it, and that it must have drawn on some embedded beliefs about the 'alienness' of these groups; what's most troubling is that this utterance implies that I was echoing the kind of 'exterminatory' language that the Nazis employed to demonise and marginalise the Jews and other 'undesirable' groups. This is troubling because it indicates how easily, how surreptitiously, these kind of messages can be imbibed by children as they're growing up - imbibed from adults, from their peers, from the images and words on TV, in the papers, in comics.

Obviously, I want to believe that there was some innocent little me at the centre of this, and that I didn't really say - and certainly that I wasn't responsible for it. And I do think that that's true: that I didn't make a moral choice about saying this thing; it was something that I picked up, that was 'programmed' into me. It was only later (around 1975-6, when I was 13-14) that I learned about the Holocaust, and watched "Roots" on the TV, that I began to see my attitudes 'from the outside', and was able to make some kind of moral judgement about them. I guess that was when I began to be a 'moral' being, and to step outside of the unquestioning, programmed, stimulus-and-response basis of my beliefs and behaviours. I suppose this happens to different people at different times, and that there are layers and layers of 'automatic' behaviours and beliefs that have been laid down like rock strata in the first few years of life, some of which you do become conscious of, and which you can examine critically, and others that are so deeply embedded that you can never escape them: the things that are so intricately wired in to your brain and body that you can never fully escape them.

There's a 'cyclical' element to this as well, I think: it seems to me that I moved beyond being a mere automaton in the mid-70s, when I discovered that the truths and shibboleths of my existence could be questioned, deconstructed, and remade. Thus I gradually constructed/evolved a new worldview, one composed of a secular humanism (if that's not a tautology...), empathy, relativism, tolerance, a romanticised socialism, bits of Marxist analysis, an innocent belief in altruism and the perfectibility of man, and an optimistic view of human nature and of eternal progress towards a more enlightened world. I can see now that this worldview was, in a way, just as artificial and 'context- and culture-bound' as my earlier unenlightened beliefs - in the sense that the late 70s (for me) embodied an upward arc of progress and enlightenment, dominated (at first, anyway) by leftist Labour governments that (so I perceived) were dedicated to the welfare state, to redistribution, to equality, and to the kind of grooviness that I wanted to see. Hence Thatcherism and the 'death of socialism' were a shock to me, and my socialist worldview was eventually smashed to pieces by the fall of the Soviet Union and the 'New Labouring' of the old Labour party; the beliefs that I had built up, and which occupied me for so long that they had become almost wholly habitual, were destroyed, and I had to realise that they I now had to reexamine them and rejig my moral universe. (Which I guess I'm still working on at some subconscious level...)

So, anyway, there were some milkmen that I wasn't keen on... (This started out as just another blob of nostalgia, and seems to have gone somewhere very different instead. Oh well. Back to simple sensory recollections...)

Static and Milk (1)

I'm not sure how I first started doing milk deliveries as my Saturday job, but I suspect that I got the gig through Stephen H, who was already 'on the milk'. The more I think about it, the more certain that that's right, because my first milk round memory is standing in the H family's dimly-lit kitchen in the pre-dawn dark while Stephen made us instant coffee in those mandatorially heavy-bottomed 70s mugs; I seem to remember that I found this rather sophisticated and adult, because at our house only the grown ups were allowed to use the kettle, and my little brother and I only got hot drinks when we were given them - we never asked for them ourselves. (This was all a part of the well-learned deference and quiet politeness that would stand me in good stead later when I denied myself any offered treats or pleasures lest I draw attention to myself or be thought a 'fat little pig'. This was part of a subtle process of learning that I did not deserve to have much, and that it was rude to ask, let alone take or accept.)

At one point, Stephen rummaged in a drawer for a spoon or a screwdriver or something and, not finding it, he opened the bottom drawer of the kitchen stack and poked around amongst the diverse objects in the gloom down there: these were precisely the same things that we had in our bottom kitchen drawer - balls of string, pot lids for pots that we didn't have any more, a couple of bicycle tyre levers, a rolling pin with one of its handles missing, and a sweet musty smell composed of dust, plasticine, decaying rubber bands, a greasy pack of cards and some stick-thin candles for birthday cakes. The radio was on, low, and Kerry Jubey was introducing early 70s pop records in his unplaceable accent. [Capital Radio, I guess it must have been...] The medium wave wavered and crackled a bit, but back then we had no conception of 'clean' digital sound, or even of FM as yet; radios had medium and long wave, and maybe a glamourous short wave band if you were lucky - my granddad had the first radio I saw with both SW and FM, and I used to fiddle around with the controls of this exotic beast without switching it on, imagining all the foreign voices that I would be able to listen to if only I had the courage to plug it in and switch it on. (In that upstairs room at nan and granddad's there was also a 'boxed' record player with a folding lid, and a musical box that hesitantly played its tinkling tune if you wound it up with the creaking, strained-feeling key/clockwork mechanism). That room smelt of the stuff that nan and granddad rubbed on their arms and legs for their aches and pains...like coal tar soap or Wintergreen's liniment (?).

It was during one of these early morning waits for the milk float to arrive that Stephen told me about the book he was reading: The Lord of the Rings. It's difficult now to untangle all of the later associations I have from reading the book myself (and from the Peter Jackson film trilogy), but what I think I remember is my response to the name 'Bilbo Baggins' - it sounded childish and ridiculous. This put me off reading the book, and it was only when my older brother's big fat single volume edition caught my attention a couple of years later that I actually got past that ridiculousness and read the book from cover to cover during a summer holiday stint in a commercial laundry.

When we step outside the house, on our way up to meet the milkman at the White Hart roundabout, it's cold, and I envy Stephen his woollen gloves with the fingers cut off just below the second knuckle. I'm quiet that first morning, nervous about meeting the milkman, and uncertain about what doing a milk round actually consists of: I was always a worrier, even at that age, thinking about what could go wrong and how I might end up making a fool of myself and looking stupid. Sometimes, later, this would become paralysing and isolating, and a barrier to experience and enjoyment.

We stand on the pavement on the Radcliffe Way side of the roundabout, waiting for the dim lights of the electric milk float to approach. I remember the quiet and the darkness, the amber streetlamps and their hazy discs of light, and the stillness of the deep, dark sky over the empty dual carriageway and the surrounding estates. The lights up on the balconies and walkways of the flats were cold and white. I was glad of my parka and, in later weeks, I would look forward to getting into the open-sided cab of the float and imagining that it was actually warmer in there than it was outside: in fact, the fibre glass moulding of the cab was cold and cheerless, but at least there was the light from the instrument dials and the purr off the three wheels on the damp raod surface.

There were other mornings, later in the year, when we would do the round in shorts and tee-shirts, when the birds would be singing as the sun rose, when there were no other cars on the road, and when I was aware for the first time of my starting its adolescent changes: I was a skinny thing then, and I was highly conscious of the knotty hair that was sprouting under my arms, and I had a favourite cap tee-shirt, dark blue and tight, that felt tight under the arms and made me feel somehow muscled and attractive. I started to think of myself as a little man, who might develop to be like a grown up. I imagined that girls and women would find something attractive about those hairy tufts squeezing out of my ultra-short shirt sleeves. I would brace my arms so that the upper arms were always held a little way away from my body. I'm sure that tee-shirt must have smelled divine after four hours of work in the Saturday summer morning sun (deoderant? not for me - that was the pungent stuff [Brut, probably] that people like my dad and his football crowd mates wore - too much offensively noxious attention-seeking).

I think that first milkman's name was Martin: in my memory, he's a narrower and far less obnoxious version of Rory McGrath, with his tight, dark curly hair, Peter Sutcliffe-type beard, and a Terry-Thomas-like gap in his front teeth that gave him a slight lisp, especially when he said 'pints' - which of course he did, often: "Two pintsth,", "Three pintsth". He would always draw out this word humorously, as if it had some elongated comedy meaning redolent of something more than these mere pint bottles of milk. He was humorous, but in a way that made you feel like you were his equal - not like some of the other milkmen, who were sour, sarcastic and snide. Martin made the round a pleasure, and we laughed a lot.

CH³CH²OH - Part 3

So. I'm 11 or 12, I guess, making the transition between 'junior' and 'senior' school: when I was a kid, you were in the 'infants' school from 5-7 (ish), juniors from 8-11, and senior school from 12-16 (or 18 if you stayed on and did A-levels); I grew up with the idea that people who 'stayed on' were a bit 'poncey' or 'up themselves'. Neither of those phrases existed in those days, of course - but it was clear to me that these stayers on were different from the kind of people that we were, even though my older brother had won a kind of scholarship to a school that was totally outside my family's experience - a boarding school; you can't imagine how exotic this was in the place where I grew up. I remember being very proud about it for reasons that aren't all that clear to me now - although I think that they were to do with pride in my brother's achievement (he was a role model for me, especially after we became a 'one parent family) and my sense that my family was somehow different from the rest of the people in our street. I suppose that there was some kind of snobbery at work here (for no reason), and perhaps an early sign of the intellectual arrogance that would afflict me in later years, but I guess the root was in my sense that I thought I knew better than most of the people I was around, even though I was shy and quiet and couldn't demonstrate my (felt, but unspoken, and almost unconscious) superiority.

So many of the other boys in my street/neighbourhood demonstrated their superiority through physical strength (John and 'Butchy' S) or through perceived toughness and intimidation (Stephen K). My persistent 'outside school' peer group was small, although I did explore friendships with different sorts of boys and girls: Helen W (doctors and nurses, and her brothers' plastic models on the shelves); Gillian H (who I remember promising to marry - we were 9); Atilla B, with his exotic French background and the dark flat where his mother wafted around even more darkly amid scents of rich perfumes - he wondered about whether our universe might just be inside "a giant's box"; Robert L; Tracey C, who lived in the same small blocks of flats as the previous two boys, and who I was in love with at age 10, even though the stairs up to her flat smelt of milk and dust, and echoed drearily under every footfall - even in later years, when I was delivering milk, or papers, or election leaflets to these flats, I remembered that weird sense of threat that I felt on those early visits, tied up, I think, with the time when, as a cub scout on 'bob a job' week, I accepted an old lady's bag of bottles, promising to take them to the off-licence and bring back the deposit money...of course I dropped the bag and broke some bottles, and the offie was shut when I got there, so I dumped the remnants in a bin outside the (equally closed) off-licence; Chris H, the epitome of the spoiled rich kid; Nicky H, my next-door neighbour, who I thought was spoiled, and who had all the toys that he wanted, of which I was massively jealous; Tracey W, who lived over the road at number 12 (another prepubescent platonic friendship); and Andrew M, who was my bestest friend for a long time, and in whose company I was happy to discover (I realise in retrospect) that it was OK to be interested in intellectual pursuits and in music - I think that his parents were both teachers, and their house had a piano and music stands as well as a lot of books, an apple tree that was was climbable, and a brick-walled cold-frame that you could get into, pull the cold-frame over, and treat as a bunker. They also had a jar half-filled with jam in their garden in the summer, and I remember being fascinated and appalled by the way that the wasps went straight past me (a relief) and descended on the jam, only to become stuck, and struggle, and eventually be killed with a dose of water; even then, I recall being uncomfortable about that aspect. Astonishingly, they had a private house - yes, a house that they themselves owned. I don't think we knew anyone else like that that (except Helen W's parents, perhaps - but I never registered that...only that they seemed 'posh'. I suppose that I should have twigged, even then, that the houses on our side of the road were all 'council', and the houses on the other side of the road weren't.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

CH³CH²OH - part 2

So, where was I? Ah yes, listening to the near-silence at the end of that King Crimson album in that early 70s bedroom, one afternoon after school. The lisp of the dust-muffled needle is slurring across the album run-out, the tone arm veering in towards the LP's centre and the shiny chrome - what's it called? the spindle? Christ, how can I have forgotten that? Bloody digital age. Anyway, the record's finishing, and we'll probably go downstairs for some tea and sandwiches; the Holmes household is very hospitable (though it smells different to ours - more perfumey and foody, I think). Later, we might look dubiously and naively at a specialist magazine that we've procured from somewhere.

Later still, as dusk comes down, I'll walk the mile home, breathing in the lead from the A312's copious car exhaust supplies, while the orange street lamps come on and the sky above the housing estate darkens down to a mustardy-grey, dusty colour - all light pollution and urban haze. (In later years I'll hanker after being an astronomer, and sit in the back garden with blankets pegged up on the washing lines to shield me from the constant haze of light that climbs sixty degrees up the sky all around. It's hopeless, though - all I can see, most of the time, are the brightest stars of the most obvious and prominent constellations; even these, though, are exciting - the Plough, Cassiopeia and, best of all, the magnificent structure of Orion. Sometimes there are power cuts around this period (the miners are on strike, there's a three-day working week, and papers and magazines are severely truncated to save energy and materials). When all the streetlights and house lights are off, and there are just the car headlamps at low level, blocked off by the brick wall at the at the side of the last garden in our row of houses, I might see some more stars, especially on blue-black winter nights, things that I think might be Auriga and Taurus or, in the summer, Cygnus, Pegasus and Draco; these constellations are vaguer and only momentarily glimpsed, assembled in my mind from a series of mental snapshots taken through the wobbling object lens (?) of my cheap (but much prized) telescope, and I'm never entirely sure how much of the constellation was reality and how much of it was my imagination and invention. Quite often I'll persuade myself into being excited by the blurry object that's been swinging around in the telescope's eyepiece - a nebula, a galaxy, Jupiter (or maybe it was just a fragment of cloud...).

I don't remember watching much television in these times. In the evenings, I'd lay on the floor in the lounge (we called it 'the front room') and look at my war books - I remember my particular fondness for my 'Purnell History of the Second World War' binder, which contained the first twenty or so issues of that part-work; I loved picking each weekly issue up from the newsagent - every issue was a mixture of colour and b/w photographs, quite dense text and three-view coloured paintings of aircraft, tanks and ships - all in all, a rich and concentrated confection for a pre-adolescent boy who loved military hardware and who was fascinated by war - especially the Second World War. I'd lay the binder on the floor and just page through the issues, as if I was just soaking up the images and the ambience of the photographic world, and I'd create little stories and vignettes in my head as I looked at a particular soldier's face, or the way that a wrecked truck was angled into a ditch, or the smeared face of a town that was half-hidden behind a curtain of smoke. I'd draw on my reading of Commando, War Picture Library and Victor comics, and upon my limited knowledge of national cultures and stereotypes - French, German, Polish, Russian, Finnish, British, Italian - to build up a sensory and narrative picture of what might be occurring in each image, and threading together (I now realise) a vividly-imagined chronology and 'mood picture' of the war; or, at least, of the 1939-40 period - at some stage, I broke the sequence of buying the weekly magazines (or maybe they stopped printing them because of the austerity measures? That would be a better story for me...the aching, nostalgic loss of an unfulfilled and idealised dream...). Anyway, i never completed the set (I think there were going to be six or nine volumes or something). [Compare the 'History of the Railways' part-work that we did complete...]

Upstairs, in my big bedroom high up on the second floor, which looked out over the gardens and box houses and the main road to the blocks of flats beyond, I'd play with my plastic soldiers or my miniature cars under the yellowy light, or re-read favourite books that I'd read tens of times before, or glue together model fighter planes or bombers, innocently breathing in noxious paint and adhesive fumes while I pursued the perfect rendering of three-dimensional versions of the military machines that fired my imagination in photographs and war stories. When each model was in a state of relative completion (wings, tailplane, propellor and landing gear all attached, for example), I'd pick them up and swoop and climb them in the space above my workbench (the top of my chest of drawers, covered in newspaper), imagining extended dogfights and daring, semi-suicidal bombing missions, voicing all of the participants and imitating the sound of intercom static and the clipped, stoical debriefing reports of comrades lost fighting bravely and uncomplainingly for their country and its noble cause. Then there'd be bed, and my precious new transistor radio (a 'Buccaneer', made in Korea or Taiwan, with the first incomprehensibly translated instruction sheet that I'd ever seen - this was the first piece of electronics that I'd ever owned)...my radio under the covers, and me tuning the clumsy and unresponsive dial to try and find a medium wave station - any station - that I could listen to; there were only a few UK radio stations on the air in those days - probably Radio 1 and 2, and maybe Caroline and Luxembourg; anyway, i remember hearing a lot of static and a few distant foreign voices that swept in and out of focus amid whistling and the slow scrawl of interference like the wind heard inside a seashell held up to you ear. But I remember fondly that darkness and sense of exploration, and the slowly warming plastic held against my ear and cheek, and the way that the plastic grill covering the speaker would become damp with the sweat drawn out of my skin.

(I'm sure I'll get to that CH³CH²OH thing at some stage in all this nostalgic rambling...)

CH³CH²OH - part 1

There's a scene transition in Children of Men where you find yourself looking out through the windscreen of a Rolls-Royce as it negotiates its way through one of the film's many grunge-laden and crowd-congealed streets. The soundtrack to this traverse is the final track from the old King Crimson LP, In the Court of the Crimson King. This is one of the albums that I have to thank my childhood friend Steve Holmes for turning me on to: he always seemed to be ahead of me in discovering new bands and new records, some of which I liked, and others, did not. I remember being physically shocked by "21st Century Schizoid Man", the first track on the album, when I first heard it in Steve's bedroom in the two-storey 'box house' in Radcliffe Way, Northolt. (We condescendingly called them the 'box houses', us folks who lived in the three-storey 'town houses' a little further along the A312 Yeading Lane. Very grand.)

I can't remember what kind of 'record player' Steve had, but I think it probably was a 'stereo' (noun), but it can't have had had much wattage, not back in c. 1973, when the kind of music equipment our working class demographic was using probably still had valves in it. So, it's a stereo system with little speakers - probably 5-8 watts? - in a small room in a council house. The track starts with some poodling noises that sound like flutes and blown organ pipes and electric motors switching on and off, barely audible above the hiss of surface noise and the repeated clicks of static and scratches on the vinyl transferred through the fluff-encrusted needle on the pick-up, into the record player's electronics, and down the cheap copper wires to the speakers' paper cones. That hiss and echo is suspended in my memory of that dusty room, and carries with it the marvellous sense of things unknown and unheard waiting to be discovered in the future: that elusive sense of wonder that you somehow leave behind and only rarely rediscover - perhaps finding it again when a piece of music touches right memory-evoking synapses, or when a certain tang of a stranger's perfume on a train or a bus resurrects the feelings of your first love; remembering that sense of wonder comes much more easily to me when I think about old music and old moments like this, and takes me back - in a weird, tingly-hairs-on-the-arms, beyond-consciousness-and-just-at-the-periphery-of-feling-and-knowing kind of way - to those teenaged years of high emotion, naivety and a confused sense of the colossal, untapped potential and possibilities of each human life.

So that poodling intro poodles along for a few seconds, and I kneel on the carpet of Steve's room with the cardboard gatefold sleeve in my hands, staring at the weird imagery and the printed lyrics, with no idea of what this record will sound like, or what it will mean to me in years to come, or how I'll remember it thirty years later, and suddenly this massive, intrusive, metallic noise blasts out of the speakers, the distorted mix distorted by the cheap speakers and by my own stunned incomprehension at this bizarre noise; then the grating, scratchy sound of the vocal comes in, as if it's sung through a broken megaphone, and my head starts to hurt with puzzlement and incredulity. Listening back to this music now, in digital form and through headphones, I realise that it wasn't really the acoustic qualities and the volume that shocked me, but the strange nature of the music: I hadn't heard anything like this before, and the instrumentation, time signatures and structures were all new and unknown. My head hurt because I couldn't 'understand' what I was hearing - it was, in a way, 'unhearable', because I had no framework of familiarity within which to set this noise and make it comprehensible; all of my mum and dad's records, and Radio 2's crooners and Ellas and Franks lived in a different sonic universe. This King Crimson album, with that screeching, driving, metallic opening, and the subsequent tracks with their flutes and towering mellotron sounds that all smack of sword and sorcery, fairy tale, sixties innocence and noodly, prog rock self indulgence, locked itself into a certain imaginative configuration in my mind, and it has stayed there ever since, lurking, waiting to be evoked and, in turn, to evoke the sense of place, mood and emotional states from those teenaged years.

So what's that got to do with CH₃CH₂OH, you might ask? Tomorrow, tomorrow...

Thing

“What makes Dystopias so compelling is that they confirm us in our belief that we have seen the world as it truly is, at its bleak, horrific worst in those moments when the baseness and brutality of humanity is most vivid and heart-sinkingly pervasive. Those times when we’re stripped momentarily of our idealism and hope, and can see that it’s all gone to shit and that it will never get better. We find it simultaneously reassuring and depressing that we have seen things as they really are. The act of recognition and independent confirmation brings a kind of resigned acceptance.”

Film

Have you seen Children of Men? It's well worth seeing.

Denis

The men are playing cards on top of a wooden crate. One of them says, “What can we do for you, son? You look a bit lost, mate,” without taking his cigarette out of his mouth, and one of the others laughs a funny gurgly laugh that sounded like spit and stones being stirred in a bucket.

I said, “Have you seen my pappi, please? I can’t find him.”

They look at each other and snigger. One of them says, “Now then, now then, where can he be?” and the others laugh again. The man who makes the others laugh is fat, and his overalls are too tight. His hair is combed up from above his ear and over onto the top of his head, which is shiny and greasy, like it needs a wash, like mine does on Sunday evening before I get my clothes ready for school. Looking at his hair makes me feel a little bit sick.

{Mummy washes my hair in the kitchen sink while I lie on the china draining board on my back. The [china/porcelain] is cold against my neck, and there are [raised lines/ribs/embossings] that dig into my back. Mummy uses green shampoo that stings my eyes, and pours water out of a white jug that sounds like metal whenever it knocks against the tap [ie enamel – anachronistic?] Cold water always trickles down around my neck.}

The funny man picks up the cards and looks underneath them. “Nope, not there. Maybe he’s…” and he stands up and looks around the back of the crate. “Nope, not there either. Where can he be, lads?”

I start crying. They look at me, their eyes all crinkly with laughter. I shout. “Where is my pappi? I want my pappi!” and I cry harder while they pull their mouths back in tight little smiles, like they’re trying not to laugh. The fat man, in his horrible overalls, says, “All right, son, all right, all right,” and he comes over to me and sort of squats down and puts his hand on my shoulder. I can feel through his hand that he’s rocking backwards and forwards a bit, and holding on to my shoulder so that he doesn’t overbalance.

“Now then, son, stop crying and answer some questions for me.”
I nod, pushing my bottom lip out.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Denis.”
“Denis what, Denis?”
“Denis…[surname]. From [district].”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. What’s your pappi’s name, son?”
“I don’t…I don’t know,” I say. They laugh.
“Don’t know your own dad’s name?”

I shake my head. And it’s true, I don’t; I’ve never heard anyone call him anything but Mr [surname], and mummy never uses his name at all – she just speaks in a certain way, so that the spaces in her words or the way she says things lets pappi and me know that it’s him she’s talking to.

They ask me some more questions about pappi: what he looks like, what job he does – and at last one of the men says, “Oh, of course, it’s [nickname] – old, er, [first name].”

The others nod, and funny fat man says, “I know where he’ll be. [the different crews/groups all have their favoured bars, just like the shifts etc used to back at NatWest] Come with me, son; I’ll take you there.”

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Everyday Epiphanies, part 423

I've watched every episode of Six Feet Under, and I know that I, all of my family and everyone I know will die, however much I love them. I know, I know, I know it: but I live in denial - I suppose most of us do. As so often, there's that gap between the understanding of the intellect and the emotional understanding and acceptance that you have to have before you really believe something.

There was a piece in the 'family' section of Saturday's Guardian about grief, and specifically about how his grief at his father's death had suddenly struck him while he was driving along in his car months later. The rest of the piece was a series of reflections about 'coming to terms' with the death of your parents, which is something that I find difficult to focus on for too long; it's difficult to think about, and even stranger to write about. I can't concentrate on it for long enough to work out what I think and feel about it. So I guess that means that what I feel about it is fear. I suppose I should think about in a mature, adult way, and try and get past that fear and discomfort...but it doesn't come easily. And I also think that it will happen, and I will feel what I feel about it, and I will deal with it the: so, in a sense, there's no point in trying to think it through beforehand, because your emotional response is unplannable, unknowable in advance.

You might say that it's 'morbid' to think about it, and there's something in that. But I also think that there comes a time when it's so obviously a reality that it's hard not not think about it: I'm sure that every generation has to learn this for themselves - there's no way of being 'told' about it; it's one of those 'intuitive' truths that seeps through you like those waves of shivery feverishness when you have a cold. And then you have that 'felt' truth embedded in you. But you push it away and drift on through your daily rituals and habits, keeping the truth of universal mortality at bay through wilful ignorance, busy-ness and alcohol (or you satiating substance/activity of choice). You nudge up against that truth once in a while, but you push it back into the shadows, where it can't make you sombre or anxious.

You (I) can't live with that knowledge at the forefront of consciousness all the time; if you (I) did, it would induce paralysis.

Life is dangerous, random and contingent. I was reminded of that on my journey to work today. I'd come off the M40 and was driving down the dual carriageway towards the roundabout, in the inside land for the slip road. The traffic was queuing back from the junction, so I was poodling along at a safe distance from the car in front, doing about 20 miles an hour, half-listening to Wogan's reactionary burblings about the insanity of road closures after accidents (or something). Looking in the mirror, I noticed a white-cabbed three and a half ton truck approaching me from behind. Fast. Much too fast to stop. As I watched, I could see that the truck was rocking from side to side under heavy braking, and I thought - what? Probably things like 'shit' and 'fuck' and 'he's going to hit me'. I swerved to the left as far as I could, in towards the grass verge and the metal railing, as close as I could to the car in front, and looked in my mirror: the truck was starting to swerve to the right, out towards the second lane. I looked in the wing mirror, and the truck juddered past in a haze of flying dust, mud and brake smoke. It missed my rear wing by about a foot and a half, but clipped the front-left wing of a car in the outside lane. The truck finally came to a halt fifty yards further down the road, and the fat young driver jumped out and ran back towards the car he'd just hit, and which had stopped amidst its own debris, the driver unbuckling his seat belt as I passed.

I should have stopped as a witness, probably, but I wasn't thinking straight: instead, my flight-or-fight reflex had cut in; as the truck had rattled past me, I'd felt as if all my blood was draining down to my feet - that strange feeling of sudden evacuation, as if you've voided your bowels, and your heart is sinking. The fear gripping you. When I got out of the car in the work car park five minutes later, I was trembling slightly all over, and my voice was shaky as I explained what had happened to a colleague, but there was also the strange feeling of elation, and alertness, and an intense sense of how alive I was. Like I'd awoken suddenly from an habitual dream.

I'm not one for over-dramatising things in a solipsistic way, as you know. But this felt like an epiphany: the wings of the angel of death wafting chilly air past my right ear as the truck bore down on me. If I'd not swerved to the left, if he'd been travelling a bit faster, if he'd left home five seconds earlier that morning...all those tiny contingencies and actions that could have had a very different outcome, and made this my last day. My last morning. My last breakfast. The last time I saw my mum. The last time I went to sleep. The last time I planned to do anything. The last sunrise. We all know that it has to come, but not yet, please. Each day and moment is too precious - if only we could remember that all the time...

More Denis

Yes, I know: this is rambling and directionless. But that's how I find novel-writing works for me; I find something, and follow it, and it wanders in a certain direction until it reaches what feels like an end-point. My writing isn't driven by tight plotting (not this time, anyway...), and these digressions and meanders are part of my 'finding the story' - I have a broad framework for the story and the characters, but I find that these parallel streams take on a life of their own, and I have to follow them until I find out where they are going. Even if they go nowhere useful, writing them out is, I think, all a part of finding the 'truth' of the characters and the story, a kind of background research that gives me a sense of where these people are from, and what's important - both about them and about the part they play in the story. So...it's going to be quite an edit. :-)



I put my finger in my mouth, between the bottom lip and my teeth, and then took it out again to see if there was any blood; to see where the blood-taste was coming from – but there didn’t seem to be any source. My lip felt very fat, though. I wondered if pappi could see how fat it was – whether he suspected that I had fallen over.

Pappi had just said, “Would you like to come to work with me?”, and of course I had said ‘yes’. I hadn’t thought about what we would do when we were there, or about how we would fill up the day. At first, it was just like when I went with mummy to the store: I wandered along a couple of paces behind her, trying to look as if I knew where I was going, and trying to seem as if I was on my own. Whenever she stopped to talk to a friend or a storekeeper (which was often), I would try and hide myself behind her coat so that the person she was talking to couldn’t see me – just like I had done on the bus with pappi. Always, though, it seemed that she wanted to introduce me to her friend, even if they’d seen me many times before. She’d half turn and shoo me round in front of her so that her friend could make the usual kind of comments about my age and size, and ask me questions that seemed stupid or which I thought were trying to catch me out and make me give a stupid answer. So I would mumble my stupid, monosyllabic replies and look bashful, stepping from foot to foot and trying to get back round behind mummy again as soon as possible.
Pappi made his slow progress around the [edge/terminus??] of the tram terminus, and I followed him reluctantly, like I followed mummy. Just like on the tram, there was lots of laughing and handshaking and, as I’d feared, I had to be stared at and smiled at by lots of the big men, some of whom wanted to pat me on the head, or pinch my cheeks, or ruffle my hair with their big, meaty hands. Some of them were quite rough, and hurt my scalp, and most of them smelt of tobacco or of last night’s beer.

After half an hour of this, and the men all talking about incomprehensible things, I was bored and a bit annoyed. I wanted to have something to eat, and I wanted to sit down somewhere or play with some toys or just be somewhere where I could be on my own. But pappi shows no sign of stopping his wandering and talking, and I wonder why he brought me here with him. The next time we’re on our own as we move between the different groups of men, I start tugging at his overall pocket and saying, “Pappi? Pappi?”

“Hmm?” He looks round at me, as if he’d forgotten that I was there with him.
“Can I go home now please, pappi?”
“Go home?”
“Mm.”
“Why do you want to go home? We’ve only been here for five minutes. Hm?”
“I’m tired.”
“Tired? Don’t whine, Denis. Come on – you can play on the trams while I talk to the boys.”

He grabs me by the elbow and we head off towards the men standing by the big block of trams in the centre of the terminus.
Once pappi let me get onto one of the silent, still trams, I was happier.

Denis (poor little lad)

One day, when I was still quite small, pappi took me to work with him. He was wearing his dark green [? – and cf earlier ‘coming home from work’ memories…] overalls that smelt of washing soap and oil, and a black cap with a little stiff peak that he pulled down over his eyes a little bit. I remember sitting on his lap on the tram, feeling the judder and bump of the tram as it crossed the rails (?), and feeling a bit sick from the chocolate bar that he’d given me, telling me “Don’t eat it all at once.” Naturally, I had devoured the whole thing at speed, barely stopping to chew. I looked out of the window, because it took my mind off my tummy ache and the horrible smell of all the cigarette smoke inside the tram. The sky wasn’t properly light yet, and it seemed like dark clouds were hanging low over the street. I couldn’t see very well, and I had to keep wiping fog off the inside of the window where it had steamed up from all of the passengers’ breathing and smoke. As a city employee, pappi travelled for free, and I travelled free with him: I felt proud and special when he held up his travel pass for the conductor to see; she’d smiled and nodded to him in a friendly way, and I had tried to catch her eye and have her smile at me too – I liked her face and red lips and her dark hair, and she was all smart and clean in her uniform. It occurred to me that I wished my mummy looked all smart and colourful like this lady. […]

It was raining quite hard, and the outside of the glass was covered in raindrops that ran together as the tram moved and jarred along. Sometimes the tram driver would ring his bell, and sometimes there was a little fzzzzzt and a flash of blue electricity from the top of the tram. After a while the sky got a bit lighter, and I could see that we’d left behind the apartment buildings and were moving past factories and warehouses. Soon, pappi let me stand up on his legs and pull the little cord that rang the bell to ask the driver to stop at the next [stop]. When we stepped down onto the wet pavement, with the dark clouds moving fast underneath a wet sky, I could feel the raindrops, small and sharp, against my cheeks. The air smelt of tar and coal smoke, and there was another, sharper smell – something I couldn’t identify that smelt like hot metal and paint and the iron-like smell you get in your nose when you have a nosebleed.

We had to cross the road to get to the stop for our second tram. I stood at the side of the road holding pappi’s hand, [confused/stunned/dazzled…?] by the numbers of people passing and crossing the street, which was thronged with horse-drawn and motor wagons, buses and trams, all rattling and grinding and speeding in different directions, a ceaseless blur of motion and intention. It made me blink and shy away from the road, but suddenly pappi said “Now,” and jerked at my hand, half-dragging me into the road in the midst of the traffic. My boots scrabbled across the rough stones of the road, the toes bouncing and scraping in the grooves where the tram lines ran.
We waited at the tram stop behind a queue of men all wearing identical-seeming dark grey trousers, jackets and hats; all with the same heavy boots, scuffed but solid; all with the same short back and sides haircuts, and the same weather-wrinkled necks. Only the repairs and the discolouring stains were different. As we moved forward as the tram arrived, I was squashed between pappi and the back of the nearest man, and all I could see for a moment was a white patch of sky above the funnel of their dark clothing. The man in front of me smelled bad, and I turned my face away from his clothes.

It was noisy on the second tram. We had to climb up the curving staircase as the back as the tram jerked and wobbled away from the stop, my face level with pappi’s boots as they ascended the worn wooden stairs with their embossed metal edging. Once we reached the swaying top deck, there was a chorus of greetings from men wearing the same kind of overalls as pappi. Through the fog of cigarette smoke they called “Aye aye!” and “[nickname based on his surname, with a ‘y’ added at the end], and “Wakey, wakey!” and “Eh, what? Eh what? Eh? Eh?” (to which pappi replied “What, eh? What, eh?”, and they all laughed and winked. Pappi was transformed from his usual still, quiet self into a more relaxed, tactile, smiling version of my father; he grabbed men’s elbows as he spoke to them, and laughed with his mouth open. Once, he took off his cap and slapped somebody on the chest with it. I tried to stay out of sight behind his legs and the bottom of his jacket: these men were all big and gruff and jolly and frightening, and I didn’t want them to laugh at me or to see how silly and small I was – if they did laugh at me, pappi would laugh with them, I knew. They were a gang that I wasn’t in: big men who knew things about cigarettes and drink and work and ladies and secret things that I couldn’t imagine. My cheeks were red and hot with embarrassment.

The tram swept round a curve and, before I could react and steady myself on the rocking wooden floor, I overbalanced and banged my mouth against one of the shiny metal handrails that looped above the back of the tram’s seats. My mouth went numb and I could taste blood in my mouth, and tears came into my eyes with the shock and pain of it. Fortunately, the tram passed immediately into a dark space, and no-one could see me cry or hold my hands to my face while I shook my head and moaned. My head started aching immediately, and I knew that my whole day was spoiled. The tram stopped, and the men all started moving in the near dark, back towards the staircase. I hung back in the gap between the staircase and the side of the tram, then followed them all down the stairs. Pappi hadn’t said my name or tried to find me in the darkness. I felt like crying all over again. My jaw was starting to throb.

I stood on the platform downstairs and looked for pappi, wondering if he had forgotten that I had been with him. But no, there he was on the edge of the group of men standing there in the gloomy interior of the tram terminus, shaking hands with a big fat man wearing a suit and waistcoat. When they’d finished shaking hands pappi looked back at me and jerked his head sideways to indicate that I should join him.

There was a great block of trams parked in the [gloomy] centre of the terminus. The space inside the building seemed huge and high to me, with great, windowless brick walls climbing into the shadowy roofspace. The roof was all zigzaggy, with some small skylights in the angled sections {???}; the windows were grimy with dirt and spiders webs and pigeon poo, and let in very little light. There were a few electric lights in the offices that ran around the bases of the brick walls, but otherwise the only light seemed to come from the massive doorways at two ends of the building.

There was a line of men formed across each of the two entrance doorways, and, at the far end from where we had come in, there was a brazier full of burning wood. As I watched, the men all raised their hands and waved as a blue tram passed by in the street with its bell clanging.

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Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

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Blossom. January 5th...
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

I Know, I know...

Still a bit dormant at the moment, because trying to reconcile the new year, being back at work, being out of condition, living in a new environment and - the result of all these - feeling like I'm really short of energy. However, there are some promising signs: I wrote a few (novel) words tonight; I'm back on a healthy eating regime; and I have been laughing and smiling a lot more than in 2006. I feel as if the wheel is turning, and the days of creativity, energy and fitness are on the way back. The solipsism will continue...

Anew

Happy new year to you - whichever calendar system you happen to be on.

Dream and Memory Flood

I'm in one of those funny phases at the moment, when all of the channels are open, and all of the pipes are connected, and memories and vivid dream images are able to flood through into my consciousness and my subconscious.

Last night, for example, I had two extremely vivid dreams. The first one involved me standing on a football terrace with my little brother, in a time that was a mixture of the 1980s and a future time, and a stadium that was a mixture of various London grounds and more northerly constructions but, at the same time, was absolutely Griffin Park, the home of the mighty Brentford. We seemed to spend most of our time moving around in the early evening light (my favourite time for standing in a football stadium, preferably at a pre-season game in August, with the smell of roll ups and beer in the air), trying to find a place to stand where we could get a clear view of the pitch. Secondly, I was dancing with Nigella at a school end-of-term disco, the last, slow dance. She was beautiful and warm. It was very exciting. The main component of this dream was the warmth that was passing between her and me, and that warmth carried over into my waking state, when I was semi-conscious, and seeing that imagery in my mind, with that warm feeling echoing powerfully through me, and feeling that poignant feeling you get when you want that imagined/dreamed thing to persist, to be real.

Thinking about the poignant beauty of that dream later in the day, I found myself smiling at the warmth and desirability of that dream state.

I also found some other bits and pieces of memory creeping in unbidden: the subtle, splendid mouldings of a plastic model kit that I bought in - what? - 1977? - the Airfix B-26 Marauder (a WW2 US light bomber): I remembered how I'd been excited by the excellent moulding of the wheel bay interiors, and the subtlety of the control surface mouldings - I just knew that these would all look superb once they had been painted, complementing the aesthetically pleasing curves of the aircraft structure itself. I could unwind a whole other set of associations from this, so tactile and real are the memories that are living in my fingertips and in my nostrils - but I won't bore you with them (not yet...). I guess what I'm getting at here is that the things that really hit you, and the things that make an impression and spring easily to consciousness are not necessarily the things that you would choose if you had any conscious choice about it; the grand narratives that you create for yourself are undercut by the minutiae and randomness of your actual experience, creating a gap (and tension) between the imagined self and the reality of the living physical organism with a definite timeline and set of contingencies.

What you are, and what you want to be. The essence of being alive, and human, and fallible.

Transformations

[Calendar note - this refers to Saturday 23rd December]
Travelling in to London on the train yesterday, I noticed that there were patches of foggy countryside where the trackside trees were all liberally sprinkled with a Christmassy frosting of - well, of frost. These trees looked clean and crusty white - like the thick white icing on a home-made Christmas cake against the duller grey and off-white of the surrounding fog and mist, and where the sun broke through (only very occasionally) they were lit up bright and dazzling.

Our village has - like most of the rest of the country - been covered by near-freezing fog for days: a heavy, dull blanket that's been damp and unremitting, making moisture that's dripped off the trees and reducing the daylight to dusk-like levels throughout the day. Today, when I went out on my bike for the first time in ages, the fog ceiling had lifted a little, and you could see the roofs of houses and trees in their entirety. It was still chilly and damp.

Cycling up the long slope to Eydon, mist still clung to the top-most branches of the tall trees and, as I climbed, I saw that the trees up here were showing the same whitened effect as the ones I'd seen from the train. All of the lane-side hedges and bushes Strangely, though, the whiteness seemed to fade away as I got level with each tree. I slowed down a bit and tried to look a bit more closely, but the residual ground-level mist was collecting in tiny drops on my glasses, so I stopped to wipe them dry, pulling up at the side of the lane and putting my foot up on the verge while I fished my hankie out of my jogging trousers' pocket. Thus unencumbered of obfuscating moisture, I could see that the 'white' frosting was actually clear ice: each branch, twig, berry and dead leaf had, courtesy of the fog's condensed moisture, collected an extra layer on its windward side/underside - a partial sheath of ice that refracted the flat winter light so that the ice looked like a white covering; the closer you got, the more easily you could see that this uniform whiteness was composed of frozen rivulets of ice and, increasingly, of individual droplets as the daytime temperature rose and the ice began to melt.

As I cycled further around the route, the drip, drip, drip of falling water increased in intensity as the ice melted, sometimes quickening to a rain shower-like sound under the bigger trees. This drip and fall of water was interspersed with sudden scratchy flurries of melted ice tinkling onto the road surface as - seemingly - some kind of critical mass is reached and large quantities of ice crystals melt and fall in slithering sequence. My bike's tyres scrunch over the ice.

Denis again: starting putting words in a line again at last

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an over scale chess set.

Then you came to the part of town where all the [Jews] lived: the poorer [Jews], that is – the men with their beards and their funny hats, and the women with their proud faces and their bold way of looking at everybody, as if they didn’t have anything to be ashamed of, living here in this poverty and squalor.

There were Jews in his story books. Richer Jews, not like the ones who lived close by in his city. They weren’t always called Jews, as far as he can remember, even though there were sometimes references to the ‘the rich Jew’, or ‘the Jewish shopkeeper’, or the ‘miserly old Jew’, but the parental readings of the books, and the accompanying commentary and the answers to his ‘What’s that? Why? Why? Why?’ questions made it clear that these characters were Jews.

These characters usually lived alone, in the last cottage in the village, or in a large, dark, looming house in the city, with bare tree branches in front of the windows and the moon rising above the chimney pots. The front doors of the town houses were always black, with a door knocker in the shape of a monster’s head – all scales and teeth and blank eyes beneath venomous lids.

Open/Shut

I took a lovely drive this morning: cross country from Woodford Halse (Northants) to Long Stratton (Norfolk) via the A14/A11/A140, to pick up my 70-year-old mother, newly-returned from her latest late-flowered holiday trip - Prague, this time.

I had intended to drive over on Friday night straight after work, but a sleepy head and the prospect of crawling round the M25 and along the A12 made me change my mind. As it happens (guys and gals, uhuh huh huh huh huh uhuh) this turned out to be a good call.

I left the house at 0405, closing the door as quietly as I could, with chilly air at my back and the night's rain reflecting the cold white light of the sparse streetlamps. It was marvellous to be on the roads at this early hour - the first time I'd been out this early for 18 months or so. I'd forgotten how much I like the feeling of 'owning' the road, that sense of solitude and independence that creeps over you when you put your headlights on full beam and head off into the darkness, knowing that you've got a 3 hour drive in front of you: there's something of a sense of mission that seizes you (me), the feeling that your mundane journey assumes a deeper meaning because it's being undertaken under a rain-scattered night sky, with the vague, soft orange glow of distant towns staining the horizon. It's true that the mood is momentarily shattered by a stupid grouse (?) sitting in the road for too long and eventually taking lazy wing and bouncing off your windscreen, leaving behind a wet, feathery stain on the glass. But a swift flick of the wipers sweeps away the bird residue, and you carry on.

On the radio, England take an early wicket against Australia. In the voices of the commentators - even the earthy, bitter tones of Geoffrey Boycott - you can hear the Australian heat, sun and dust and, despite the early wicket of Hayden, you can hear England starting to fall into the darkness of defeat, somehow more poignant for being on echoey, scratchy long wave. At the lunch break (some time between 0430 and 0500, when I've negotiated all of the twisty country roads and have reached the A14) I switch over to FM and search for something else to listen to. I fall into a hypnotic regime of channel-hopping, trying to find music that's either (a) familiar, (b) nocturnal or (c) somehow appropriate for night driving. In this state, I find that I'm really keen to buy records (CDs, that is) by The Feeling ("I love it when you call"), Snow Patrol ("Chasing Cars") and Keane ("These songs all sound the same, but they've got something about them"). Weirdly, in the rain and the dark, alone and unspeaking, passing a lorry in a haze of spray, I start to feel as if I'm back in touch in life.

Something by Joss Stone comes on - "Super duper love", I think. It feels horribly bogus and manufactured - a strong, interesting voice that can't quite carry off the material: it just feels too mature for a woman of her age, and it rankles. I switch channels. James Morrison (I think that's his name...) - he's another one with a voice that sounds older than his years, but somehow it feels more believable than Joss's, as if it's easier to think that he will grow into his voice through his experience.

I have to pull over to blow my nose (the ridiculously long-lived remnants of a cold). The parking spot is on a bit of heathland I know well from daylight stops: scrubby grass and yellow-flowered broom (?) bushes, Scots pines in the distance, and a lichen- and grass-covered pillbox from World War II (this area was heavily airfielded until recently, when the US Air Force withhdrew their fighters and bombers). I get out of the car and feel the cold wind and the swirling mist of the passing lorries. I feel very vulnerable all of a sudden, and move around to the front of the car to stand in the headlights' light so that (a) the lorry drivers can see me, and (b) any potential killers are confused by my silhouette, and might think twice about attacking because their maniacal features would be revealed to my (non-existent) passenger. I quickly get back in and carry on.

This all makes me think about being an editor...(of which more tomorrow).

P l a c e h o l d e r

Well, here we are...my cold starting to fade, and my new job starting to lose its grip on me, freeing me up gradually so that I can give my attention to other things apart from work. It's always all-encompassing and knackering at first, innit?

Anyway. Having access to a broadband connection, I had a bit of a play at 'Second Life'. After registering and setting up my avatar, I logged in. It was weird: as soon as I emerged into the light of the 'arrival island' and saw the other avatars around me, just starting to find their way along the paths amongst the grass, I did exactly what I do in real life when I pitch up in a strange place with lots of people in it: I headed off, away from the crowd, and tried to find somewhere where I could stand on my own, unobserved, and get my bearings while I built up some confidence to engage more fully with the environment. I thought it was telling that my personality was projected unconsciously and instantaneously through the keyboard and into that virtual environment. I guess one of the interesting things about such an environment is that you can train yourself to behave differently from your usual modes, more safely. Hm.

S t i l l o n p a u s e, s o m e w h a t

A bit quiet around here, I know: I'm a bit preoccupied with my new job and living arrangements, plus I have a reet manky cold (bah humbug). I've pledged to myself that I'll start to get back on track on...Wednesday this week.

Thank you for your patience.

H i a t u s

Just started a new job in a new location - hope to return to prolificness next week...

Gabriella half-pissed rant fragment – for somewhere...

The central paradox, it seems to me, comes down to this: one, you look at the world around you every day, at all scales, and it’s boring and hard and ugly and plain fucking brutal for most – especially for the people who don’t live in our cosy, economically dominant little Western/Northern bubble, with our historically supreme capitalist system of accumulation; two, all the books you read, and all the songs you listened to – no, heard up to age twelve, and all the films and comic books and television programmes you looked at, and all the things adults said to you – if you were lucky, and if they were kind, – they all told you that the world was fair, and that things worked out all right in the end, and that good people got their just rewards, and bad people got paid off and punished. And you have to resolve that paradox for yourself, using a set of values and taught/absorbed rules that just don’t equip you for the random, meaningless, empty truths of the world – all the stuff about emptiness, and injustice, and realpolitik, and power and cynicism and brutality and death, and the irreducible differences between belief systems.

And it’s because you can’t escape that taught set of rules and assumptions that resolving the paradox is so difficult – you’ve got this emotional commitment to fairness and rationality programmed deeply into you, and your rational mind is yelling at you to reject it and let it go, but your emotional self is screaming back saying ‘no no no – without that trust and faith in the world, you’ve got nothing, nothing.’ And you’ve spent the first twenty or so years of your life either thinking all that sentimental stuff was true (or at least clinging on to it as a romantic ideal), and it’s so, so hard to let it go, because you have no idea how you’ll orient yourself towards the world, how you’ll reconstruct your life with an alternative, realistic worldview without becoming cynical, bitter, acidic, hopeless and misanthropic. Fucking cheated.

Christ.

Denis - from the 'dark' novel...

That Sunday, when mama had stood at the sink peeling potatoes in the cold water and told him to go away and leave her alone, he had stood outside their apartment door in the still gloom of the afternoon, hearing the muffled sounds of families behind their closed doors, smelling the smell of their green vegetables boiling, and sniffing up his own tears and run snot, trying to clear his head of emotion and upset before he has to expose himself to the world. His tears and self-pity only live in these certain small spaces: the hallway, the gloom of their doorway, his bedroom in the dark, the lavatories in the playground at school after a bigger boy has hit him or humiliated him.

He thinks he’ll walk in his usual direction: up the street towards the main road, the park, the city beyond. He can take a shortcut through the hole in the chain link fence on [Bahnhofstrasse] and go play in the wasteland where the lead factory used to be, where the stone pavements are cracked and rain stained, and where nobody ever goes, except the kids like Denis who want to play on their own, and bigger boys who want to be somewhere where there are no adults. The weeds are already high there, grown up like hedges, and you can find spots where you can lie down and be invisible while the sky blows across the space between the weeds’ waving seed heads. Somewhere to be alone, where no-one else can reach you or touch you.

The hallway is empty, the well of it opening out into the darkened space around which the doorways all cluster on the balconies rising up to the roof.

The apartment building’s sounds are familiar to him: the sound of his boot soles descending the bare wooden staircase echoing up into the stairwell to dissipate there in the shadows. But as he reaches the last turn of the staircase, he recognises the sound of the main street door handle rattling and the door opening inward. He hangs back on the stairs, in the shadow of the [banister post??], not wanting to be seen, and hears the door close, followed by the sound of shoes shuffling across the linoleum. Once he gauges that the person has passed, he leans around and looks past the [banister post??]. There’s an old man standing right in front of him at the foot of the stairs, getting his breath back and mopping sweat from his tall forehead. He’s holding his hat in his other hand. He sees Denis’ face and says, “Good afternoon, young man. And how are you?”

Denis looks back at the old man, wide-eyed, but says nothing. The old man has a smart three-piece suit on under his overcoat. He also has thick, heavy-rimmed glasses, and the stereotypically large nose with big flaring nostrils.

He’s a Jew, thinks Denis. I shouldn’t talk to him. But what’s he doing here?

“Are you all right, young man? You look a little…strange – upset?”

Denis speaks at last: “No, I’m not upset, not at all.”

“I’m very pleased to hear it,” {He’s talking like Rabbi Lionel Blue, I think, in my head…}, “I don’t like to see young people upset. Life is long enough for sorrows enough, and I recommend that you put them off for as long as possible.”

“Oh.” Denis has never heard anyone talk like this: he thinks that it’s kind of sugary and false, but…he quite likes the sound of it, the way the words flow together and the rise and fall of the old man’s voice. He smiles involuntarily, hoping that the old man will say something else. He still feels like he shouldn’t be talking to this Jew, but there’s something holding him here.

“Ah, sorrows,” the old man goes on, “they are both our misery and our salvation.”

Denis feels like there should be more to follow this statement, but nothing else is forthcoming. The old Jew looks down at him, smiles, and then raises his hat again (?) before turning away and walking across the [vestibule]. Denis watches him go, wanting to say something – ask a question, perhaps – that will make him stay a little longer: while the old man is there, talking, Denis doesn’t have to think or reflect on anything – he can be led, and advised, and informed. [obviously he’s still at the stage where he thinks that any adult must know infinitely more than he does, and thus that these adults have inherent authority…]

Outside, it’s a typical gloomy Sunday. The street is quiet, with the usual Sunday afternoon torpor, the suspended space between (a) the working population’s belief in the infinity of rest that seems to stretch ahead of them on Sunday morning, and (b) the eight PM realisation that their shirts aren’t ironed, the chores aren’t all finished, and they’ll have to be getting out of bed for work again in nine hours’ time.

There are a few people on the streets, but all of the shops and cafes are closed, and the blank glass shop fronts and empty pavements make Denis feel more comfortable in these public spaces – as if he owns them in some way. It gives him an unusual confidence as he pushes his face against the shop windows, cupping his hands around his eyes so that he can see as much of the interiors as possible: washed butcher slab tiles; pale yellow fly papers suspended from the ceilings, carrying their loads of dead and decaying insects; shadowy back rooms seen through doorways and lit by small, barred windows; and sweet shops with their sterile rows of fat glass jars, the colours of all the sweets dimmed in the shadows.

Further along, the shopping streets give way for a while to some more open areas, flanked by grass- and tree-planted green spaces with benches and flower beds, and sometimes a small bandstand or an overscale chess set.

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Reading and Remembering

At the moment I'm reading Robert Fisk's The Great War for Civilisation which, as the title doesn't really suggest in an obvious way, is his collected/reworked journalism/memoir from his foreign correspondent postings in the Middle East (as it used to be called when I was a nipper). This is an excellent read so far, for three main reasons: (1) The prose is very tight, powerful, vivid and descriptive; (2) The material deals with Big Events but encompasses the small and the personal, and covers issues that are still resonating powerfully all around us; (3) It reminds me about the big things that I have lived through (vicariously), and which I had half-forgotten - for example, the first section of the book is about Afghanistan, and deals in detail with the Soviet invasion in 1979 and its aftermath, touching peripherally on other contemporary stories - the hanging of President Bhutto in Pakistan, and the Iranian revolution, for example. These stories, and the pictures that Fisk paints of them, remind me of the news coverage of the time, of how I felt about those things, and of my political standpoint (I was switching out of a emotionally Marxist phase and coming to see the Soviet Union as just another self-perpetuating state - I also swallowed [hook, line and sinker] the idea peddled by the media I watched that the mujahideen were 'freedom fighters', and assumed that they must share the democratic values of the liberal west. Ah, happy innocence and simplicity...). These kind of reminders are very powerful for me, and make me realise how...'insulated' i seem to have become as I've grown older - that classic thing about how the middle aged become more conservative (with a small 'c'). It reminds me that I feel more alive when I am intellectually engaged with the wider world.

Pieters

Maybe I am too soft. Like that time I found that blackbird in our back yard, mauled by a cat. This is – what? – fifteen years ago now? And I tried to kill it, to put it out of its misery, but it just wouldn’t die. I can’t really think about it still, it’s such a horrible memory. I think I got a bit tougher for a while after that – closed off a bit, and didn’t let things hurt me or get close to me. I didn’t like to feel that helplessness and panic like I’d felt when that blackbird’s head had spun back round after I’d tried to throttle it, and the way it just sat there looking at me with its eye fixed on me and its head all lopsided and the flesh and blood showing through the feathers where the cat’s claws and teeth had hurt it. I was still pretty young then, of course.

There was a swan with a broken wing in the field last week, and that reminded me of the blackbird again – brought back those horrible vivid memories. It made me feel very upset, actually – kind of shaken up and sad. You know, like when…well, I don’t really know like what – not like anything I can think of that you might have experienced. But sad and empty, but sort of clear about everything at the same time, as if the thing you’re doing is not really happening to you – it’s more like you’re looking at yourself from outside. And that clarity stays with you as you walk away, breathing in deeply. It’s as if everything else in your everyday life suddenly seems simpler and more manageable. As if you’re ready to take something new on. Funny.

I sat down on a fallen tree trunk, quite close to where the swan was, but not so close that I would frighten it. I just sat and looked at it, feeling sad, knowing that there was nothing I could do. The swan was sort of folded up into itself with its neck swept around and its head facing backwards, but its eye was looking at me. The broken wing was stretched out on the stubbled edge of the field, the feathers very white against the brown earth. The swan looked as if it was trying to shrink away from the world, to hide itself inside itself, as if it were embarrassed or ashamed, and didn’t want to be seen.

It still felt strange to be sitting there, doing nothing, just looking. I thought about going over to the swan, maybe trying to pick it up and move it closer in under the hedge, or between the tree trunk and the bushes, where it would be more sheltered, but I knew that it was just going to die anyway, wherever it was, and I thought that if it was left a bit more exposed it might die more quickly – which would be the kindest thing. It didn’t seem right to kill it myself, even though I had the shotgun with me, so it would have been easy to do. So I just left it to die on its own.

Pieters

It’s almost frightening to think about how long ago I started in this job…how long I’ve been here. It’s nearly eight years. Christ, just thinking about that number takes me aback every time – how could so much time have passed, almost without me noticing? Frightening, frightening.

Anyway. Back then the department didn’t even supply the free boots, so you had to wear your own. That year, when I went home on leave in the autumn – that was the time when the gabbling bloke with the funny laugh was here covering for me while I was on leave…the one who left the toilet in a disgusting state – when I got home my mum had bought me some winter boots (second hand, of course). They were nice boots. Well kept. But they were a bit stiff, and the seamed pieces at the back of the heels dug into the backs of my ankles, just there between the bone and the tendon, where your skin is stretched and sensitive. And it really hurt, the way that that stiff leather and the stitching chafed on the day before’s scabs and sore skin. But I kept wearing them, for mum’s sake, even though she wouldn’t have known if I’d have left them off. It just doesn’t feel right not to appreciate and make use of the things that people have bought you out of generosity or love, does it? Not to me, anyway. That’s always been something big in our family – the whole extended family, not just our houseful – even though we don’t talk about it out loud with each other. We look after each other. We want everyone to be OK. We care about each other, and we look out for one another. Like I say, we don’t talk about it, not really, but it’s there in the handshakes, in the pats on the back, in the arms around the shoulders. That’s the sort of thing that makes our family – the whole community, really – hang together: those kind of instinctive values and unspoken understandings. Hard to put your finger on where they come from, or how you learned them, but they’re there all the same, and you wouldn’t be you if you hadn’t learned them.

Although sometimes I wonder if I’m too soft – if I think about these things more than some of the others. Sometimes they can blank you, or treat you like you don’t deserve the same attention or time as some of the other relatives. That’s especially the case with some of the younger men, I think, like at Christmas parties or at family weddings, when the younger men cluster around the bar in an aggressive little group, smelling of cheap aftershave and beer, with their smooth skin and their sleek black hair, and all they’re interested in is shouting and laughing and the young single women. It’s almost like you don’t exist for them. They just sort of look past you if you talk to them, tapping their fingertips on the side of their glass, nodding, but desperate for you to get out of their line of sight. I know it’s them, and not me, but sometimes you can’t help but feel hurt – ignored. But that’s me being too soft, as I say.

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The Customs Officer – Pieters?

There’s history here – that’s one of the things about the job that he loves.

There’s been a customs post here for more than five hundred years. Think about that: a building on this very spot for five centuries, serving the same purpose for decade after decade after decade. All of the people who have served here and lived in the accommodation, all serving their country, protecting their country from all kinds of different threats, and all making their little contribution to the well-being and prosperity of the nation. Every time I think about that, I feel humbled and privileged. Privileged to be doing a job that I like, in a building full of history…living in a cottage that’s housed customs officials for two hundred years – the same stones, the same woodwork, the same windows and chimneys. What a privilege! To be in an historic building all the time, the kind of place that ordinary members of the public never get to see.

I particularly like my job at this time of year, when there’s snow on the ground all the time. There’s not much work at this time of year, if I’m honest. Not many people try to come in, and those that do are easy to spot and track against the snow. Easy targets. There’s a bit more to do in the lodge when the weather’s like this, I suppose – keeping the boilers fired up all the time, and then there’s the need to keep things tidy around the lock and the water gate, which is always more difficult with all of the snow and ice on the towpaths and up over the tunnel portals’ brickwork, but I do have these special-issue boots with the metal cleats on the soles, which are really marvellous. I get a new pair issued every year – for free, of course, part of my salary – so they never wear out. And they’re so comfortable. I think annual reissue is a bit too frequent, actually – a bit of a waste of money. Still, I take the old pairs back with me when I go home on leave, so the family get good use out of them – though I ask them to keep quiet about where they got them from. So I suppose it’s not that much of a waste – not like a lot of the undeserving things (and people) that the Councils seem to spend money on these days – you might have well have pissed that money up the wall and have had done with it. But that’s another story.

Odd richness

I don't know why, but my dreams over the last couple of nights have been very vivid, rich and varied. I've been married to Madonna (who was surprisingly down to earth, loving and considerate); run away from Starsky and Hutch (who were, surprisingly, both vampires); sat next to a bloke called 'Terminator' who was a 6 foot 5 inch cross between the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction and Jonathan Franzen; watched a vast, white delta-winged airliner crash into the sea; sat in a big wicker basket under a hang glider wing with my parents as we descended towards the shallow sea alongside a summer pier thronged with bathing suited holiday makers; chatted with some students as they stacked books in bookcases in the garden of a 16th century country house; hurried through the streets of nighttime Oxford with a madman following me - he's alternately shouting expletives and the names of 1970s bands...Osibisa, for example; and stepped into the flooded part of my nan's garden, which then transformed itself into a large pool, in which I was soon up to my nadgers, and then the pool was a river with a current, and I gave up to it and let myself be swept towards the rapids ahead...as I anticipated telling my new-found student friends about my rapids-shooting experience over coffee at a pavement cafe, I realised that the rapids actually had a drop off of about 100 feet...on the opposite side of the ravine the rapids fell into there was a glass and concrete office block, and a woman in a green dress fell from a high window to her death on the pavement below...which is when I woke up - mid-plunge.

Is it any wonder I'm not refreshed in the morning?

Hendricks

He doesn’t actually enjoy seeing people struggle and flounder, but he does prefer them to damn themselves rather than go through the collected evidence and series of failures – which he finds much more sordid and depressing. So he gives them plenty of rope, and time, and lets them get on with it. Ultimately there’s not going to be any argument about his decision, so any semblance of a debate or examination of evidence is rather tedious and patronising, he thinks: it’s better to help these benighted souls come to the only possible correct conclusion – as quickly as possible. In truth, he prefers it if these things are dealt with by one of his deputies or sub-managers, but if it’s a particularly senior official, or someone he feels a particular responsibility towards – say, somebody that he hired personally – he’ll agree to take the ‘bad news’ meeting himself.

Back in his chair, stirring dissolving brown sugar and nutmeg into his hot wine, and looking down at his finger tapping on the briefing papers on the desk top, Hendricks is the centre of attention, the vortex of power [?] in the high-ceilinged, ornately plastered room. Without looking up, he says, “Who wrote this report?”

The three officials are silent for a few seconds, and Hendricks’ spoon clinks and scrapes around the inside of his glass. The youngest of the three officials, who scarcely looks old enough to have left school, and who is in fact the author of the piece, imagines that all the blood is draining out of his head and coagulating in a dense ball in his bowels, and his head becomes slightly woozy with panic and the fear of impending doom.

Eventually the senior official – Brightman – says, “It’s a departmental team effort, Councillor. Fleming here – ” – he gestures at the young man, who grimaces – “ – did most of the core research.” Fleming’s stomach seems to void itself into his legs, which feel suddenly chilly and light.

“Huh,” grunts Hendricks. “It’s actually very good indeed.” He nods, twice. “Yes, very good. Excellent, in fact.” He looks up at Fleming, whose grimace is struggling not to morph into a smile, and says, “Where did you get your insights into the religious and cultural aspects of this issue? They seem very well thought through to me.”

Fleming looks at Brightman, who nods. “I studied Central European culture as part of my degree studies, sir - Councillor. And I’ve always been interested in that area anyway, in my own personal reading, so I…”

“The content is troubling, though,” interrupts Hendricks, flicking through the papers until he finds the particular page he has in mind, “we need to look at this whole issue of migration cycles and patterns much more carefully, Brightman, and develop the appropriate policy to set before the Council.”

Brightman, scribbling notes, nods vigorously, and all three officials sit forward, gripping their pre-prepared option/implementation papers, eager to get into the policy details.

“So,” says, Hendricks, “what else can we do to protect our borders?”

Hope, hope

Ian Fleming's first novel - Casino Royale - was published in 1953, when he was 45.

I'm 44. 44.

Hurrah!

03.00 The Right Honourable Councillor Peter Hendricks, in his office in the Palace of Councils building (Interior Ministry)

In the mist and dusk Hendricks can just about make out the shape of the cathedral tower on the other side of the Palace of Councils’ plaza [?]. The cathedral bells’ three o’clock chimes are shuffling their muffled way through the damp air. He presses his face against the window glass, filling his visual field with the mists and with the reflection of his own eye sockets.

In the brightly lit office behind him the three civil servants rest their plump, besuited buttocks on the plump, shiny leather armchairs, and plentiful firelight glints and winks on the chandelier and on the facets of the large brandy glasses that all three men are balancing on top of their laptop stacks of papers.

Councillor Hendricks’ office is renowned for its comfort and high quality comestibles as well as for its professionalism, rigour, and for the councillor’s penetrating questioning style. His intimidating, unblinking silences are also legendary, silences into which the nervous, the inexperienced and the under-prepared or soon-to-be-dismissed gabble unintended revelations, awkward truths, or confused, self-contradictory rationalisations of things done or left undone. It won’t happen again, Councillor. And it usually doesn’t, since Hendricks most often consciously employs his silences against the fast-learning tyro in need of a career-stiffening lesson, the over-promoted incompetent who’s on their final warning, or the politically naïve or expendable who’re about to be sacrificed to the press for the good of the department or the Council.

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Gabriella

[The soldier/he] remembers how strong and secure he felt then: his mother and father providing him with everything in the comfort of their sturdy village home, and he was young and healthy, with all the possibilities of his life still open before him: the village, the market town, the more distant city and, from the port there, the great river to the sea. And then across the whole world, carried by the imperial ships that commanded all of the known oceans and seas.

When he remembers that kitchen on that summer day, and the soft wash of sunshine through the ivy-shrouded window, he sees the cottage set in a green, sunlit garden, partly shaded by broad, leafy trees, as if at the centre of a net laid over the countryside, over the map of the map of the nation, over the blue seas and distant lands, deserts, hill stations, passes and rivers, jungles and snow-topped imperial mountains. And he knows that each strand of the net was a tightrope that he could have walked, each [node? Net-strand junctions…] a point of decision, a place to pause, feet balanced on the ridged knots of the junctions, and consider the options that are open to him, the results of all of the choices he’d made and all the accidents he’d adapted to in his life so far.

And yet, in spite of all the informed choices that he had made, all the fine calculations of odds and return, he finds himself here in the moonlight, in the service of the empire in a war it is struggling to win, with the net strained and torn behind him, and limited choices before him. Now it seems that retreat is the only choice, a return to the past across a changed landscape that he has already traversed once, when the net seemed whole and unbreakable.

Gabriella, half-awake in the gloom, thinks the soldier is sad and brave and vulnerable, and she wants to be his friend and to comfort him. She thinks about his bright, clear eyes and his thick, dark moustache until she falls asleep, assembling in her mind a fresh, clean, deep blue uniform for him, and placing him, smiling, in a succession of sunlit spring parks and gardens, and in plush but tasteful townhouse interiors, drinking tea with young ladies to whom he is politely attentive, but whom Gabriella knows he secretly finds deadly dull. He is waiting for someone else, she knows: his perfect love and sweetheart. She holds that warm thought tight as she falls asleep.

[Anna continues]
“The little girl was a little afraid of the woods”, my grandmother had gone on. “She knows that it’s bad luck to cross a moon shadow, but the moon above the hill is throwing black-striped tree shadows across the road in the sunken lane. But she’s a brave little girl, just like her mummy told her to be, so she keeps her eyes on the clear moonlit patch of grass at the end of the sunken lane [it’s a bit like a tunnel…], and she steps into the shadow of the trees, and is never seen by anyone on earth again. A darker shadow has swept into the dark after her. [NB - All of this has been in the dream of the young girl in Nanny Anna’s story {the little girl and her story are derived from Anna’s own childhood experience in that village…} …Imply this by making the language of the dream within the story more coloured/descriptive, less like the simple ‘story speech’ of the rest of Anna’s tales…making it sound less like my normal narrative voice…]

“The little girl awoke, confused, under the creaking oak tree. Just as in her dream, she was cold, her thin cotton dress chilled by the falling night. She could see a few stars through the tree branches, very glittery and hard looking in the darkness, and the silvery-blue light of the moon was creeping up into the sky from behind the hills. It was as if, while dreaming, she’d been watching the evening with her ears and eyes wide open, seeing the colours change from blue to orange to pink to grey to blue-black, watching the trees drain the colour out of their silhouettes, and hearing the birds settling down, their songs and calls thinning out gradually to a single cheep, to a furtive ruffle of wings, to silence.

“The little girl’s mummy, exhausted by her day’s toil, is startled awake as her daughter rattles the door latch and bursts into the firelit room. The little girl, breathless, snivelling, gulps for air between spasmodic sobs. The woman puts her arms around her daughter, squeezing, stroking, rocking her until the upset subsides, and then coaxes her, despite her own tiredness, into telling her what’s wrong. And so it all comes tumbling out, lubricated with fresh tears and paroxysms of [crying/sobs/breaths]; the fear-ridden journey from the river, the dark lanes beset by animal sounds from the fields and undergrowth, the shivers of cold and anxiety.

When the deluge of words and fear has abated the mother is stroking the girl’s forehead and shushing away the last ebb of the [upset], the fire is flickering down, almost to extinction, and there’s a cold, blue-white wash of moonlight on the windowsill and the bare wooden floor. Gathering the child in closer to her on her lap, the mother says, ‘Shh, shh. It’s all done now. You’re safe with me. We’re safe together here.’

“The little girl says, ‘Mm,’ still wide awake, and calm now.

“The mother says, ‘I’ll tell you a story before bed, shall I?’, and feels her daughter’s head nodding agreement against her shoulder, the little girl’s hair brushing against her mother’s throat.”

Gabriella

When I think of those woods, and that hill in the moonlight, I see the mess and chaos left behind in the evening after the battle that took place there, many years before the little girl was born. Nanny Anna’s stories often included references to this battle, and to soldiers, and to the wars that seem to have been the constant backdrop to the lives of the people in the village and in the towns and cities in the widening circle beyond the confines of the village stories.

Dead soldiers. Dead horses. Wounded men, smashed carts and cannon, and abandoned equipment litter the dark fields and the grassy slopes and the fringes of the woods.

I imagine the moonlight picking out the pale wood of severed branches, and glinting on pools of [thick/coagulated] blood that hasn’t yet drained into the soil. There are white breeches and dark uniform coats, shattered wheels, muskets and pikes half-hidden in the rough grass and the crop [?] fields, and – always – the young soldier, his head untidily bandaged, pouring water onto the lips and moustache of a dying comrade who’s leaning back against some empty cannon shot boxes. The young soldier’s face is grave but resolute as he looks down at his [comrade’s] face, as if he were trying to keep the older man alive through sheer seriousness and force of will alone.

I always thought that if the young soldier softened the intensity of his gaze the older soldier would slip away to the land of death, which I imagined to be a smoke-wreathed replica of this nighttime battlefield, haunted by abandoned, voiceless soldiers, by wolves and battlefield scavengers in human form, and by horrible things that crawled and chewed and burrowed into [exposed/bare] flesh [especially at the throat, at the collar??].

The soldier’s efforts are fruitless in the end. The veteran soldier dies, eyes wide open in the moonlight and chin still wet from the last choke-spilled mouthful of water, far from home and unknown to his family.

The young soldier straightens up, feeling the tension in his head and the back of his legs for the first time. The moon is high and nearly full, and he can look out over the gently sloping land and its clutter of battle detritus, seeing the clumped shapes and their skirts of shadow. Away to the east, glittering in the moonlight, a twist of metalled road makes a silvery S against the [matt] fields. As the wounded and the dying groan under the moon and animals snuffle around the bodies of the dead, he feels a cool breeze against his cheek, and he thinks of home.

[Gabriella now? Or back then? Or is this Anna’s memory/story? Who knows…?]
He remembers a blue jug on a thick wooden table in front of a window, backlit with buttery yellow light. There’s a blackbird whistling its characteristic fluting tune in the vegetable garden beyond the window. This summer afternoon moment is the soldier’s recurrent memory of his childhood. He can step back into the cool, shadowed [pantry??] of the cottage kitchen, his shoulder blades [angular and protuberant – tender??] against his coarse [linen? Poor cloth…] shirt, leaning back against the rough plaster, his fingertips brushing over the familiar pocks and lumps on the wall.

He can step forwards into the kitchen proper, look left, and see his mother, grey-skirted and white-bodiced [?], her hair secured under a white cap, kneading dough, with a dusting of flour up to her elbows and little globules of dough on her cheeks and forehead where she’s wiped away the sweat with her forearms.

Tuesday

Another flawless winter's day. Managed a quick 12 mile circuit on my bike this morning, not wearing enough layers on my torso. Brrrrr... I say 'quick', but actually the wind was an icy bully with a longer reach than me, and it reached out its bony hands and put them flat against my chest, pushing me backwards for half of the circuit. Bastard.