books, shelves of them covering the thin brick wall dividing the houses as a feeble but beautiful insulation against travelling sound. She sourced everything carefully and locally – the rocking chairs in which I careered dangerously were from local makers, the hard green utilitarian carpet that left indentations in my knees if I knelt too long on it was from a shop in Stroud, there were rough-hewn benches and a painting of flowers she’d made when she was seventeen. In amongst this she placed the treasures she found in the woods. A sheep skull she’d found and written about took pride of place on the mantelpiece, alongside a delicate glass vase that was as violently yellow as a varnished egg yolk.
Upstairs, a cool, clean bathroom, a separate lavatory and two bedrooms. Mine was narrow and yellow and covered with posters of Breughel and of lions and unicorns dancing attendance to medieval ladies in wimples. Luminous stars glowed between the black beams at night. My parents’ room was green, with a map of the valley on one wall and a fool asleep on a hill opposite. The floorboards were painted black. Above this, the attic, in which one could sometimes find a box of crisps, a television or my father, if the tides were right, chattering away at the typewriter one-fingered, a green eyeshade of the sort worn by newsmen and card-sharps in films from the 1940s propped on his brow.
There was always a sense of shifting in the attic, the papers ebbing and flowing around the big Buddha chair from which I watched television on rare occasions. It was my father’s place, his rickety sanctuary, where he sometimes hid if visitors came. At night he would work on the kitchen table, but always before breakfast the papers were hurried upstairs and locked back behind my mother’s barrier of clean.
‘I hear you call my head a bin/where children dip their buckets in,’ my father would sing to her when she was down, bringing up a bubble of laughter in her throat. I envied his ability to make her laugh and tried to emulate it. She encouraged more seriousness in me, steered me towards careful writing, reading and speaking aloud.
In her lonelier periods in the valley, when my father was away, she took me walking, learning the names of flowers and the birds. I sucked in the knowledge, writing little poems about sheep in the fields and red campion and autumn. In ‘Poem of Absence’, she wrote:
to be alone for a month is good
I follow the bright fish of memory
falling deeper into myself
to the endless present
the child’s cry is my only clock
Yet the years wore on and my father’s absences became longer – sometimes I found him at Stroud station, suddenly beardless after a long trip around North America and didn’t recognise him. I hid behind my mother’s legs, shy and scared.
I sit in the woods at dusk
listening for the sound of your singing
there are letters from a thousand miles
you wrote a week ago
like leaves from an autumn tree
they fall on the mat
it was your voice woke me
and the absent touch of your hand
Absence stilled her, made her harder to reach. She would range out into the night on longer walks and take holidays to Cornwall with me only. Men would come to the valley, bringing parcels of adoration that she would not open, or at least not when I was there. I remember some of them vividly, the flash of their hopeful faces bright in the window, the way they were delicately attendant to my needs, solicitous and courtly and absolutely not welcome because they were distractions from my real business of living.
I only remember a couple of these interlopers and admirers fondly. Oswald Jones, a balding Welsh photographer, one of her dearest friends, who loved her deeply and took ceaseless photos of her (all of which she archly dismissed as awful), used to snarl at, satirise and tease me till I was his devoted friend. ‘Old Oz’ she called him, keeping him carefully, delicately at arm’s length. We had a little
Upstairs, a cool, clean bathroom, a separate lavatory and two bedrooms. Mine was narrow and yellow and covered with posters of Breughel and of lions and unicorns dancing attendance to medieval ladies in wimples. Luminous stars glowed between the black beams at night. My parents’ room was green, with a map of the valley on one wall and a fool asleep on a hill opposite. The floorboards were painted black. Above this, the attic, in which one could sometimes find a box of crisps, a television or my father, if the tides were right, chattering away at the typewriter one-fingered, a green eyeshade of the sort worn by newsmen and card-sharps in films from the 1940s propped on his brow.
There was always a sense of shifting in the attic, the papers ebbing and flowing around the big Buddha chair from which I watched television on rare occasions. It was my father’s place, his rickety sanctuary, where he sometimes hid if visitors came. At night he would work on the kitchen table, but always before breakfast the papers were hurried upstairs and locked back behind my mother’s barrier of clean.
‘I hear you call my head a bin/where children dip their buckets in,’ my father would sing to her when she was down, bringing up a bubble of laughter in her throat. I envied his ability to make her laugh and tried to emulate it. She encouraged more seriousness in me, steered me towards careful writing, reading and speaking aloud.
In her lonelier periods in the valley, when my father was away, she took me walking, learning the names of flowers and the birds. I sucked in the knowledge, writing little poems about sheep in the fields and red campion and autumn. In ‘Poem of Absence’, she wrote:
to be alone for a month is good
I follow the bright fish of memory
falling deeper into myself
to the endless present
the child’s cry is my only clock
Yet the years wore on and my father’s absences became longer – sometimes I found him at Stroud station, suddenly beardless after a long trip around North America and didn’t recognise him. I hid behind my mother’s legs, shy and scared.
I sit in the woods at dusk
listening for the sound of your singing
there are letters from a thousand miles
you wrote a week ago
like leaves from an autumn tree
they fall on the mat
it was your voice woke me
and the absent touch of your hand
Absence stilled her, made her harder to reach. She would range out into the night on longer walks and take holidays to Cornwall with me only. Men would come to the valley, bringing parcels of adoration that she would not open, or at least not when I was there. I remember some of them vividly, the flash of their hopeful faces bright in the window, the way they were delicately attendant to my needs, solicitous and courtly and absolutely not welcome because they were distractions from my real business of living.
I only remember a couple of these interlopers and admirers fondly. Oswald Jones, a balding Welsh photographer, one of her dearest friends, who loved her deeply and took ceaseless photos of her (all of which she archly dismissed as awful), used to snarl at, satirise and tease me till I was his devoted friend. ‘Old Oz’ she called him, keeping him carefully, delicately at arm’s length. We had a little
Similar Books
