I have an old brown leather purse that belonged to my Nan. She died when I was 11 or 12. I;m 59 now and the purse is still in the drawer next to my bed. It has a certain smell and it takes me back to when I used to visit her with my mother. She was in her 80's then and I would sit in front of her patiently like a dog waiting for her to give me some sweets. She always wore the same brown zip up slippers and an apron and her hair would be tied back. A sort of Doris Lessing style although she would never have known that. I can see her wrinkled face now and see her hand dipping into her apron pocket. I used to play with her skin on her hand to see how long it stayed standing up. I do the same with my mother sometimes now. She had one of the old-fashioned hearing aids that she would turn off. Her apron smelled too but it was a good smell - one of warmth and love.
Inside the purse are some old pennies in tiny compartments held together by tiny clasps.
One day she was there and the next she was in a home and then she came home for a time and then she was gone. I was too young to see her in her last day or go to the funeral. She's still here in my heart and I'm starting to well up a little now as I type. I'm going to get the purse out again later and take a look and a smell. Go back and see her again. I miss her.
I spotted it with a kestrel’s eye. In a flash, I was on it. I’d been hovering in the museum shop – ‘Street Life’ they call it. It was on a trip ‘home’ with our then young children. A toy bus, but not just any toy bus. Navy blue and cream livery rushed me back to my childhood. EYMS: East Yorkshire Motor Services. And then I noticed the details. A 1970s Daimler Fleetline double-decker: my era. ‘59C Circular via Preston/Hedon’: my route. My ‘not my’ village named. Registration plate AFT 784C. I can’t be certain of that accuracy.
This bus took me home, every school day in the second half of the 70s. A circular route for people who never left. Dad’s patients. Shopworkers and shoppers. But a basket empty of school friends for this direct grant boy, the only one at the ‘posh’ school from my backwater village. Left to my top deck devices, I discovered a love of language forms and structures – irregular verbs, subjunctives, indirect speech. Yes, indirect speech, which I see now as a metaphor for a largely remote, if unhostile, teenage existence, where nothing seemed direct, close, or intimate. Instead, I found companionship in the reliable patterns of accidence, and security in the sounds of the ancients.
I’m looking at my toy bus now. It sits in pride of place on a middle shelf, beside a pot of raptor feathers, one of which is from a kestrel. I used to spot them from the top deck of the 59C, on the stretch beyond the lime trees. The bus is a quasi-talismanic die-cast treasure I’d give away last of my possessions. It tells me where I came from, where I went to, and – fittingly for a circular route – what I never managed to leave behind.
My mom and I would have terrible fights as is typical of most teens going through the growing pains between childhood and adulthood. Our fights would devastate me, leaving me feeling very unsafe. I would go to my grandparents house and spend the night often during our fights. I slept on a floral upholstered sofa in the living room, under a crisp white sheet, folded in half and a blanket. I would turn with my face towards the back of the sofa and pull my arms and legs up into a semi-fetal position, cuddling the back of the sofa. I would stare up at this painting in an ornate gilded frame. The painting was of several women and men dressed in Victorian clothing standing and sitting around a Victorian room talking to each other. I spent sleepless hours escaping into this painting. I wondered at the feel of the blue dress on one woman and what the man whispering in the ear of another was saying to make her look so engaged. Sometimes if I half closed my eyelids, through the blurry tears, I could see myself in that room, talking and laughing with those people. When my gram passed away, I took the painting and it hangs today over my sofa, where my little granddaughter looks up at it and asks me to tell her what the people are saying to each other.
Written by Fran Pollard. I'm from Surrey UK, l live in Cambodia, but currently in Portugal for a couple of months.
Frayed and burnt at the ends, the red thread coils on the wooden table I sit at. I haven’t discarded it, but I don’t know why I keep it. It lays dormant.
Her eyelids flutter like she’s dreaming, plumbing the depths of another world, at end of the video call. She’s propped up on a pile of books to level the angle of my chin. It’s evening, moon rises in the darkening sky; shadows sweep the walls. She takes her time. She opens her eyes, trancelike, and shifts her focus to mine. “Your grandmother is here.”
I reach for the thread and spiral it around my index finger.
“She liked her freedom. Grey hair, slightly curly. Short; rounded figure. Eyes exactly like yours. She was a loner, like you.”
51 days earlier, I’m in Nepal, looping string around my wrist. In the Linga Devi temple in Kathmandu, before the heat of the day, I make a promise: to honour the divine feminine- her strength, her power, her creative force. I make a 40 day commitment.
The medium speaks slowly, purposefully. “She wants you to put the red thread back on your left wrist.”
Shit.
“Put it back on as a sign of commitment: to yourself; to loving yourself, to protecting yourself; and as a sign of your connection to her in blood.”
I sit cross-legged atop a white washed wall. My back to the 50m cliff drop into the Atlantic a mere meter behind me. I face Maria: Senhora da Rocha, in Portuguese- the lady of the rocks. Mother Mary to me; the Virgin Mary to my grandmother with her Catholic upbringing. The snake of red thread in my hands. In a different temple this time, I reclaim the serpent as a sign of my commitment to myself, to her.
Sep 4, 2023·edited Sep 4, 2023Liked by Tanya Shadrick
These objects, these pieces of clay, paper and stone. My talismen. My connections with the past, control of the present, and hopes for the future. Silent, inanimate objects, that scream for attention when I least expect it.
First is a palm-sized fragment of pottery I found on the beach, wave-washed between water and sand. Made from pale clay, it is unrefined, coarse grains visible in its thick broken edges. But once flipped, there’s the embossed face of a man crowned with thorns. I touch and hold it, though I’m not religious. I pray with it clasped tight in my hand. When all hopes seem extinguished, it’s my go-to ‘you never know’ lucky charm.
Beside it is a framed black-and-white photo. Four people standing at the brow of a hill, descending from left to right in size and age. First is mum, then my sisters, Christine and Diane. I'm on the end, the little one, half their size. We’re wearing flared jumpsuits, flower-power dresses and happy faces. Thumbs raised. It’s the way I want to remember us, ‘the girls’ posing for dad and his precious box-brownie.
Last is a cat. Tiny compared to the other objects, two-centimetres high, jet-black with ruby-glass eyes and a silver collar engraved with wiggly lines. It’s a nod to some hoped for Irish gypsy or witchcraft family blood. Carried everywhere by mum in a kid-leather purse as she dodged doodle-bugs during the London Blitz. Now it's mine.
Three ordinary objects with extra-ordinary significance.
I brought nothing from that place, I wanted nothing from that place. What I did bring I have long since set aside, sentimental tokens that were quick to lose their value, false currencies from a previous world.
I could have taken a piece of glass, something from that tall cabinet where garish clowns looked out with mocking humour, but she had polished them weekly until there was nothing on their cold, smooth surface to offer any emotional purchase, no chip nor flaw that made them any easier to break.
I could have taken something from his box of tools, sweat-browned and polished by his hard and calloused hands, sharpened to a safer edge or point, better to cut and shape white pine or straight-grained hardwoods, but they had only ever been dull instruments that played music loud enough to drown the cries.
I searched the rusting biscuit tins of phtographs, looking for one that still reatined some sweetness, but they were bitter with dead relations who stared out at guilty cameras with eyes unblinking and unconscious of those years to come. There were some of me that I wanted to rip and scatter but chose to burn with scathing laughter.
In the end I left with empty hands, a hollow heart that boomed like the bell that warns of a dangerous tide, and skin that bit thicker than the one I wore before, better to contain what feelings might remain, impervious to cuts from the splintered glass of clowns or the strop-sharp points of ancient chisels.
The dust sticks to the velvet, round and around. The needle glides on to the oil slick vinyl, a familiar crackle and the music builds quietly. It’s a satisfying ritual remembered.
My Auntie was the coolest. My mothers youngest sister, she was closer to me in age. My godmother, charged with looking after me if anything happened to my parents. To my 11 year old self, she was a confident whirl of red lipstick, leather pencil skirts and fishnets. Slightly punk hair, eyeliner. Musky perfume mixed with cigarette smoke. A red beret and bright 80’s jewellery. Sang in a band. She used to babysit me & my sister and bring her spanish boyfriend & her Talking Heads records. The vinyl was exciting, weighty, full of future possibility. They would sit and discuss the latest song and then she’d sing along in our lounge and I was amazed by her. I’d tell my friends about this band they’d never heard of. Super cool.
Years later, I took her to see David Byrne play at Brighton dome and it was joyous, alive elation.
She left suddenly, dramatically, horribly. Gone in a second. They said she wouldn’t have known. Cerebral haemorrhage at 49 while her husband walked the dog.
When she died, I needed to find a way to be close to her, to believe that she was real, that she existed. To hold on to something physical, to feel her. To hear her. To also remember myself before the violent shock of loss.
The Talking Heads vinyl with its musty yellow cover and dusty surface still felt exciting. Carefully slid out of its cover. Make sure you don’t scratch it as the needle goes down, a forgotten act. I hear the familiar crackle and opening notes and I am 11 years old, watching her sing in her red hat and lipstick, visceral and alive. Ready for the possibilities before death and tragedy took over.
Thirty years ago I visited Skye with a friend. It was a raggle taggle holiday, we slept in a damp, wheelless camper van marooned in the garden of my friend's friends house. One day we visited the site of a cleared village, the people thrown off their land so the laird could bring in sheep. I got out of the car and was struck by a wave of sadness and longing so strong that I didn't want to go further, the residual emotional charge was like an elextric fence keeping me out. My friend went exploring. She came back with a strange piece of rounded granite with one shiny flat side. It was the size of a large egg. She gave it to me and for the next thirty years it was placed on a shelf in every one of the many, houses, flats, rooms and sheds I lived in. I felt a strange reverence for it, that small granite enigma.
One day watching some tv archeology programme I realised what it was. The knowledge was sudden, profound and immediate, I went over to the shelf, picked it up, noted for the umpteenth time how well it fitted my hand and knew it to be a hand quern. A woman on Skye had used it daily to grind grain on a flat stone, hence the flat shiny side. I could see the dark mark her thumb had made through many hours of holding it, her hands must have been about the same size as mine.
A few years later I looked at it one morning and had another sudden realisation - it wanted to go home. It was a struggle to let it go, we'd kept company for half my life, but i contacted a museum in Skye, picked at random. Wouldn't you know it they had just got funding for an exhibition of hand querns. It was part of a wider movement to acknowledge and document the daily lives of women on Skye through the ages. So I boxed it up carefully, wished it 'Mar sin leibh agus gabh turas sàbhailte' and sent it off. Now its back home in Skye, gone but never forgotten.
Thank you so much for your kind words, Tanya! They mean so much to me - your encouragement always does. I will act on your final nudge, be assured.
Of the many blessings since I committed to creativity and decided to do the Travel & Nature Writing MA, becoming a small part of what you do in this project has been one of the richest. Your example - it started with reading TCFS - has shown me what it means to write with bravery and sensitivity.
Either today or tomorrow my finger will hit ‘Submit’ - and send my MA portfolio to its destiny. Within it sit some pieces that began life as responses to your prompts. They are pieces which are dear to me. Thank you for inspiring them - you are their midwife, I guess. Paul x
On the landing windowsill in my grandparent's house, there was a red glass chalice, shaped like a brandy balloon, but much larger. The light shining through pooled red on the white gloss sill. It was just the right size for a child to put a hand into – very carefully. This was precious.
And I have a memory of putting my hand inside it, and drawing it out covered in blood. My hand, gloved in blood. It’s one of the most vivid memories of my childhood.
The thing is, it’s not true. It never happened. None of the adults remember it, and there’s no way I could have hidden all that blood. Or not panicked and run for help. It’s a strange, false memory. I don’t know where it came from. A dream? A fantasy? A mixture of the image of red light on my hand and other memories of bleeding (I stood on a cucumber frame, I fell off my bike…). It’s strange that this image - so visceral, so real – has somehow inserted itself into my brain and lingered there. How did that happen, and why? Why?
My parents were evicted from my childhood home in their fifties, rendering them homeless.
The object that holds most power for me from that house is a robust white jug with blue stripes and a pure white handle. Extracted from the texture of that house into my possession for years now, this jug is a kind of portal weighted with the love and pain of my childhood. There are times when I look at it and all I see is a void, a hollow glaze, a no thing thing.
My mother kept our baby bottles warm in this jug. It feels as though I have used it for nothing in particular and yet, it has had many uses. I have used it to rinse my children’s hair at bath time, I have used it to store their bath toys, to pour champagne from on my 40th birthday, and in latter years as a holding vessel to soak reusable menstrual pads.
Now it is an ornament I guess, and sits innocuously beside the bath.
I have guarded the jug closely, (despite myself as I thought I was above nostalgia), having announced more than once to my kids, “Careful of the jug!”
“Huh, why?”
“Because it means something to me”
How vacuous that must sound I think, how mealy and anaemic an explanation . And yet to tell them more would break my heart.
I know it doesn’t make sense but there are times when I will the thing broken. I suppose it’s something to do with the familiarity of loss, the inevitable finality of things, the desire to get it over with so I can add it to the grief section of my heart and stack it neatly among the bones of the other losses, quietly shushing it up.
And now, it was as if Dad had somehow finally kept his promise. There were barely any tourists and I gather that down the years the seafront shops became fewer and further between - even then, several were boarded up. I remember a dark souvenir shop with odd curios that looked like they may have been languishing in the baskets and jars for aeons. I lighted upon a strange pod-like thing that sat neatly in my palm. It wasn't unlike the chestnuts that I used to collect with Dad at Chetwynd when I was a tiny child but more wrinkled and flatter as if it had been trodden on while damp. I took it to the counter and the shopkeeper charged me the princely sum of "ten new pence." Given it was more than twenty years since decimalisation it suggested even more that this grey-haired, kindly faced man was very much living in the past and that his business was more about love than profits. I can still hear him asking, "Would you like your lucky sea-bean wrapped?" Ah, so that's what it was! I thanked him, yes I would, and he dutifully popped it in a brown paper bag, which he twirled several times as if it contained a quarter of bonbons, before twizzling the corners with a flourish.
My lucky sea-bean came with us whenever we moved but somehow, somewhere, it got mislaid. Perhaps that was when things started to go wrong. Who can say what powers these little amulets have over us. I have no difficulty recalling the shape of it, its warmth and texture. Perhaps the memory is just as much a charm.
Thanks Tanya, glad you liked it. I have not received any indication when my piece on Holloways will be published by MagNorth. I will email Colin to make sure all is well concerning the piece.
The board leans angle perfect, dead weight against my study wall. It's soft wooden flesh pocked marked with schoolhood secrets; a carved out diary of adolescent anguish and unease, coded with emotional angst. It's been a constant travelling companion down the decades, resting innocently in plain sight; a reminder of someone I used to be. Whilst the technical drawing board stays young, I grow older, but the memories are Spring fresh.
This wooden mnemonic loops me back into a frozen-still-silence of a classroom with Mr "T" Square finger thumping my sheet of pristine white paper with his fleshy, aged skin smudges and my eraser frantically rubbing them out. Then his disarming, stern punch of a face slamming into my loose grip on self confidence. A tongue lasher warping and bending my straight lines.
Two years of double technical drawing forged permanent-elemental-memories, peppered with invective shrapnel from a barbed sneer bent on teaching pencil etiquette. Knocking a pencil on the floor was a capital offence. Double day dreaming for me was a soul cleanser, but also a graphite breaker. My musings and inattention created a wreck of lines, inaccuracies and the inevitable dropped pencil, the graphite bone suffering multiple fractures; damage beyond repair. All was lost.
"Hand Out!" barked the sneer. My finger bones rattled from the blows of a twelve inch, calibrated wooden cudgel.
"A plague on your pencils!" I whispered. I grew a skin of wood and took the blows.
Rescuing me from these thwacks of encouragement were the initials, LW carved into the heart of the wooden board. A first love lexicon sculpted in the top right hand corner, a totem to a teenage romance.
When my secondary education finally collapsed, I took the board as a trophy against adversity and here it leans.
As a child I remember dusting my mum’s dressing table every week. Placed in front of the bay window in my parents’ bedroom, it contained all her treasures.
I gingerly lifted each ornament, her gilt-edged mirror, brush and comb set and her bottle of Blue Grass perfume, wiped them with the duster and rearranged them.
I liked all the ornaments, but it was the cylindrical hessian box, edged with lace and pink roses, that stayed in my mind. I had crafted it at Sunday School. Made from a toilet roll holder and a piece of cardboard, I recalled my mum smiling as I gave it to her. It symbolised my love for my mum who was and is always there for me and my family during happy and difficult times.
As an adult I found a similar jewellery box. My ear-rings were stored in it until Ace the dog discovered it one day. At first she chewed the edges, so I put it back together. After she chewed the base I hid it in my drawers.
It would be easy to blame Ace for the messy situation involving my son and his ex-girlfriend, but she is only one factor.
After several months in our care, she has settled down and become a loving dog with minor issues. Instead of chewing every piece of paper and object of value to me, she merely grabs something and releases it.
Let’s hope the situation my son is experiencing will loosen soon too.
Nov 21, 2023·edited Nov 21, 2023Liked by Tanya Shadrick
I have kept two cherished objects from my childhood in my China cabinet, purely for the memories they invoke. Both are reminders of how my family offered sustenance. Sweetness was withheld, and savory treats were relished.
One was a 1950s Mid-century Shell Pink Milk Glass Candy Dish gifted to my mother by an old maid, not very fond of children. There was something about this fancy candy dish that was off-limits to the five children in the family. It was only for show, with specially wrapped hard candies on a kidney-shaped glass coffee table. It's funny how things were not child-proof then, even if they were dangerous. There were strict rules about not touching or not going near things that could cause harm. This candy dish has a bittersweet memory because it was very tempting to look at. My mouth would water just tasting the imagined sweetness that was always an arm's length away. Sweetness was forbidden and always withheld.
The other object was a Green Depression Glass Sectioned Relish Tray with Scalloped Edges. This platter was my father's favorite; he cut up savory vegetables and arranged them colorfully for special occasions. He would use it for pickles and olives or cheese and crackers. He always invited us to try something salty or spicy. This green glass tray became a centerpiece for our formal dining room holiday dinners. Of course, we remembered our manners sitting around the table. But father passed this beautiful dish, relishing the sight of his family seated around the festive table.
I have an old brown leather purse that belonged to my Nan. She died when I was 11 or 12. I;m 59 now and the purse is still in the drawer next to my bed. It has a certain smell and it takes me back to when I used to visit her with my mother. She was in her 80's then and I would sit in front of her patiently like a dog waiting for her to give me some sweets. She always wore the same brown zip up slippers and an apron and her hair would be tied back. A sort of Doris Lessing style although she would never have known that. I can see her wrinkled face now and see her hand dipping into her apron pocket. I used to play with her skin on her hand to see how long it stayed standing up. I do the same with my mother sometimes now. She had one of the old-fashioned hearing aids that she would turn off. Her apron smelled too but it was a good smell - one of warmth and love.
Inside the purse are some old pennies in tiny compartments held together by tiny clasps.
One day she was there and the next she was in a home and then she came home for a time and then she was gone. I was too young to see her in her last day or go to the funeral. She's still here in my heart and I'm starting to well up a little now as I type. I'm going to get the purse out again later and take a look and a smell. Go back and see her again. I miss her.
59C
I spotted it with a kestrel’s eye. In a flash, I was on it. I’d been hovering in the museum shop – ‘Street Life’ they call it. It was on a trip ‘home’ with our then young children. A toy bus, but not just any toy bus. Navy blue and cream livery rushed me back to my childhood. EYMS: East Yorkshire Motor Services. And then I noticed the details. A 1970s Daimler Fleetline double-decker: my era. ‘59C Circular via Preston/Hedon’: my route. My ‘not my’ village named. Registration plate AFT 784C. I can’t be certain of that accuracy.
This bus took me home, every school day in the second half of the 70s. A circular route for people who never left. Dad’s patients. Shopworkers and shoppers. But a basket empty of school friends for this direct grant boy, the only one at the ‘posh’ school from my backwater village. Left to my top deck devices, I discovered a love of language forms and structures – irregular verbs, subjunctives, indirect speech. Yes, indirect speech, which I see now as a metaphor for a largely remote, if unhostile, teenage existence, where nothing seemed direct, close, or intimate. Instead, I found companionship in the reliable patterns of accidence, and security in the sounds of the ancients.
I’m looking at my toy bus now. It sits in pride of place on a middle shelf, beside a pot of raptor feathers, one of which is from a kestrel. I used to spot them from the top deck of the 59C, on the stretch beyond the lime trees. The bus is a quasi-talismanic die-cast treasure I’d give away last of my possessions. It tells me where I came from, where I went to, and – fittingly for a circular route – what I never managed to leave behind.
My mom and I would have terrible fights as is typical of most teens going through the growing pains between childhood and adulthood. Our fights would devastate me, leaving me feeling very unsafe. I would go to my grandparents house and spend the night often during our fights. I slept on a floral upholstered sofa in the living room, under a crisp white sheet, folded in half and a blanket. I would turn with my face towards the back of the sofa and pull my arms and legs up into a semi-fetal position, cuddling the back of the sofa. I would stare up at this painting in an ornate gilded frame. The painting was of several women and men dressed in Victorian clothing standing and sitting around a Victorian room talking to each other. I spent sleepless hours escaping into this painting. I wondered at the feel of the blue dress on one woman and what the man whispering in the ear of another was saying to make her look so engaged. Sometimes if I half closed my eyelids, through the blurry tears, I could see myself in that room, talking and laughing with those people. When my gram passed away, I took the painting and it hangs today over my sofa, where my little granddaughter looks up at it and asks me to tell her what the people are saying to each other.
Written by Fran Pollard. I'm from Surrey UK, l live in Cambodia, but currently in Portugal for a couple of months.
Frayed and burnt at the ends, the red thread coils on the wooden table I sit at. I haven’t discarded it, but I don’t know why I keep it. It lays dormant.
Her eyelids flutter like she’s dreaming, plumbing the depths of another world, at end of the video call. She’s propped up on a pile of books to level the angle of my chin. It’s evening, moon rises in the darkening sky; shadows sweep the walls. She takes her time. She opens her eyes, trancelike, and shifts her focus to mine. “Your grandmother is here.”
I reach for the thread and spiral it around my index finger.
“She liked her freedom. Grey hair, slightly curly. Short; rounded figure. Eyes exactly like yours. She was a loner, like you.”
51 days earlier, I’m in Nepal, looping string around my wrist. In the Linga Devi temple in Kathmandu, before the heat of the day, I make a promise: to honour the divine feminine- her strength, her power, her creative force. I make a 40 day commitment.
The medium speaks slowly, purposefully. “She wants you to put the red thread back on your left wrist.”
Shit.
“Put it back on as a sign of commitment: to yourself; to loving yourself, to protecting yourself; and as a sign of your connection to her in blood.”
I sit cross-legged atop a white washed wall. My back to the 50m cliff drop into the Atlantic a mere meter behind me. I face Maria: Senhora da Rocha, in Portuguese- the lady of the rocks. Mother Mary to me; the Virgin Mary to my grandmother with her Catholic upbringing. The snake of red thread in my hands. In a different temple this time, I reclaim the serpent as a sign of my commitment to myself, to her.
These objects, these pieces of clay, paper and stone. My talismen. My connections with the past, control of the present, and hopes for the future. Silent, inanimate objects, that scream for attention when I least expect it.
First is a palm-sized fragment of pottery I found on the beach, wave-washed between water and sand. Made from pale clay, it is unrefined, coarse grains visible in its thick broken edges. But once flipped, there’s the embossed face of a man crowned with thorns. I touch and hold it, though I’m not religious. I pray with it clasped tight in my hand. When all hopes seem extinguished, it’s my go-to ‘you never know’ lucky charm.
Beside it is a framed black-and-white photo. Four people standing at the brow of a hill, descending from left to right in size and age. First is mum, then my sisters, Christine and Diane. I'm on the end, the little one, half their size. We’re wearing flared jumpsuits, flower-power dresses and happy faces. Thumbs raised. It’s the way I want to remember us, ‘the girls’ posing for dad and his precious box-brownie.
Last is a cat. Tiny compared to the other objects, two-centimetres high, jet-black with ruby-glass eyes and a silver collar engraved with wiggly lines. It’s a nod to some hoped for Irish gypsy or witchcraft family blood. Carried everywhere by mum in a kid-leather purse as she dodged doodle-bugs during the London Blitz. Now it's mine.
Three ordinary objects with extra-ordinary significance.
But only to me.
I Left With Nothing
I brought nothing from that place, I wanted nothing from that place. What I did bring I have long since set aside, sentimental tokens that were quick to lose their value, false currencies from a previous world.
I could have taken a piece of glass, something from that tall cabinet where garish clowns looked out with mocking humour, but she had polished them weekly until there was nothing on their cold, smooth surface to offer any emotional purchase, no chip nor flaw that made them any easier to break.
I could have taken something from his box of tools, sweat-browned and polished by his hard and calloused hands, sharpened to a safer edge or point, better to cut and shape white pine or straight-grained hardwoods, but they had only ever been dull instruments that played music loud enough to drown the cries.
I searched the rusting biscuit tins of phtographs, looking for one that still reatined some sweetness, but they were bitter with dead relations who stared out at guilty cameras with eyes unblinking and unconscious of those years to come. There were some of me that I wanted to rip and scatter but chose to burn with scathing laughter.
In the end I left with empty hands, a hollow heart that boomed like the bell that warns of a dangerous tide, and skin that bit thicker than the one I wore before, better to contain what feelings might remain, impervious to cuts from the splintered glass of clowns or the strop-sharp points of ancient chisels.
‘The world was moving
She was right there with it
And she was’.
The dust sticks to the velvet, round and around. The needle glides on to the oil slick vinyl, a familiar crackle and the music builds quietly. It’s a satisfying ritual remembered.
My Auntie was the coolest. My mothers youngest sister, she was closer to me in age. My godmother, charged with looking after me if anything happened to my parents. To my 11 year old self, she was a confident whirl of red lipstick, leather pencil skirts and fishnets. Slightly punk hair, eyeliner. Musky perfume mixed with cigarette smoke. A red beret and bright 80’s jewellery. Sang in a band. She used to babysit me & my sister and bring her spanish boyfriend & her Talking Heads records. The vinyl was exciting, weighty, full of future possibility. They would sit and discuss the latest song and then she’d sing along in our lounge and I was amazed by her. I’d tell my friends about this band they’d never heard of. Super cool.
Years later, I took her to see David Byrne play at Brighton dome and it was joyous, alive elation.
She left suddenly, dramatically, horribly. Gone in a second. They said she wouldn’t have known. Cerebral haemorrhage at 49 while her husband walked the dog.
When she died, I needed to find a way to be close to her, to believe that she was real, that she existed. To hold on to something physical, to feel her. To hear her. To also remember myself before the violent shock of loss.
The Talking Heads vinyl with its musty yellow cover and dusty surface still felt exciting. Carefully slid out of its cover. Make sure you don’t scratch it as the needle goes down, a forgotten act. I hear the familiar crackle and opening notes and I am 11 years old, watching her sing in her red hat and lipstick, visceral and alive. Ready for the possibilities before death and tragedy took over.
Thirty years ago I visited Skye with a friend. It was a raggle taggle holiday, we slept in a damp, wheelless camper van marooned in the garden of my friend's friends house. One day we visited the site of a cleared village, the people thrown off their land so the laird could bring in sheep. I got out of the car and was struck by a wave of sadness and longing so strong that I didn't want to go further, the residual emotional charge was like an elextric fence keeping me out. My friend went exploring. She came back with a strange piece of rounded granite with one shiny flat side. It was the size of a large egg. She gave it to me and for the next thirty years it was placed on a shelf in every one of the many, houses, flats, rooms and sheds I lived in. I felt a strange reverence for it, that small granite enigma.
One day watching some tv archeology programme I realised what it was. The knowledge was sudden, profound and immediate, I went over to the shelf, picked it up, noted for the umpteenth time how well it fitted my hand and knew it to be a hand quern. A woman on Skye had used it daily to grind grain on a flat stone, hence the flat shiny side. I could see the dark mark her thumb had made through many hours of holding it, her hands must have been about the same size as mine.
A few years later I looked at it one morning and had another sudden realisation - it wanted to go home. It was a struggle to let it go, we'd kept company for half my life, but i contacted a museum in Skye, picked at random. Wouldn't you know it they had just got funding for an exhibition of hand querns. It was part of a wider movement to acknowledge and document the daily lives of women on Skye through the ages. So I boxed it up carefully, wished it 'Mar sin leibh agus gabh turas sàbhailte' and sent it off. Now its back home in Skye, gone but never forgotten.
Thank you so much for your kind words, Tanya! They mean so much to me - your encouragement always does. I will act on your final nudge, be assured.
Of the many blessings since I committed to creativity and decided to do the Travel & Nature Writing MA, becoming a small part of what you do in this project has been one of the richest. Your example - it started with reading TCFS - has shown me what it means to write with bravery and sensitivity.
Either today or tomorrow my finger will hit ‘Submit’ - and send my MA portfolio to its destiny. Within it sit some pieces that began life as responses to your prompts. They are pieces which are dear to me. Thank you for inspiring them - you are their midwife, I guess. Paul x
On the landing windowsill in my grandparent's house, there was a red glass chalice, shaped like a brandy balloon, but much larger. The light shining through pooled red on the white gloss sill. It was just the right size for a child to put a hand into – very carefully. This was precious.
And I have a memory of putting my hand inside it, and drawing it out covered in blood. My hand, gloved in blood. It’s one of the most vivid memories of my childhood.
The thing is, it’s not true. It never happened. None of the adults remember it, and there’s no way I could have hidden all that blood. Or not panicked and run for help. It’s a strange, false memory. I don’t know where it came from. A dream? A fantasy? A mixture of the image of red light on my hand and other memories of bleeding (I stood on a cucumber frame, I fell off my bike…). It’s strange that this image - so visceral, so real – has somehow inserted itself into my brain and lingered there. How did that happen, and why? Why?
My parents were evicted from my childhood home in their fifties, rendering them homeless.
The object that holds most power for me from that house is a robust white jug with blue stripes and a pure white handle. Extracted from the texture of that house into my possession for years now, this jug is a kind of portal weighted with the love and pain of my childhood. There are times when I look at it and all I see is a void, a hollow glaze, a no thing thing.
My mother kept our baby bottles warm in this jug. It feels as though I have used it for nothing in particular and yet, it has had many uses. I have used it to rinse my children’s hair at bath time, I have used it to store their bath toys, to pour champagne from on my 40th birthday, and in latter years as a holding vessel to soak reusable menstrual pads.
Now it is an ornament I guess, and sits innocuously beside the bath.
I have guarded the jug closely, (despite myself as I thought I was above nostalgia), having announced more than once to my kids, “Careful of the jug!”
“Huh, why?”
“Because it means something to me”
How vacuous that must sound I think, how mealy and anaemic an explanation . And yet to tell them more would break my heart.
I know it doesn’t make sense but there are times when I will the thing broken. I suppose it’s something to do with the familiarity of loss, the inevitable finality of things, the desire to get it over with so I can add it to the grief section of my heart and stack it neatly among the bones of the other losses, quietly shushing it up.
The Lucky Bean
"We'll come back here one day," he'd said.
And now, it was as if Dad had somehow finally kept his promise. There were barely any tourists and I gather that down the years the seafront shops became fewer and further between - even then, several were boarded up. I remember a dark souvenir shop with odd curios that looked like they may have been languishing in the baskets and jars for aeons. I lighted upon a strange pod-like thing that sat neatly in my palm. It wasn't unlike the chestnuts that I used to collect with Dad at Chetwynd when I was a tiny child but more wrinkled and flatter as if it had been trodden on while damp. I took it to the counter and the shopkeeper charged me the princely sum of "ten new pence." Given it was more than twenty years since decimalisation it suggested even more that this grey-haired, kindly faced man was very much living in the past and that his business was more about love than profits. I can still hear him asking, "Would you like your lucky sea-bean wrapped?" Ah, so that's what it was! I thanked him, yes I would, and he dutifully popped it in a brown paper bag, which he twirled several times as if it contained a quarter of bonbons, before twizzling the corners with a flourish.
My lucky sea-bean came with us whenever we moved but somehow, somewhere, it got mislaid. Perhaps that was when things started to go wrong. Who can say what powers these little amulets have over us. I have no difficulty recalling the shape of it, its warmth and texture. Perhaps the memory is just as much a charm.
Thanks Tanya, glad you liked it. I have not received any indication when my piece on Holloways will be published by MagNorth. I will email Colin to make sure all is well concerning the piece.
Steve.
Board Perfect
The board leans angle perfect, dead weight against my study wall. It's soft wooden flesh pocked marked with schoolhood secrets; a carved out diary of adolescent anguish and unease, coded with emotional angst. It's been a constant travelling companion down the decades, resting innocently in plain sight; a reminder of someone I used to be. Whilst the technical drawing board stays young, I grow older, but the memories are Spring fresh.
This wooden mnemonic loops me back into a frozen-still-silence of a classroom with Mr "T" Square finger thumping my sheet of pristine white paper with his fleshy, aged skin smudges and my eraser frantically rubbing them out. Then his disarming, stern punch of a face slamming into my loose grip on self confidence. A tongue lasher warping and bending my straight lines.
Two years of double technical drawing forged permanent-elemental-memories, peppered with invective shrapnel from a barbed sneer bent on teaching pencil etiquette. Knocking a pencil on the floor was a capital offence. Double day dreaming for me was a soul cleanser, but also a graphite breaker. My musings and inattention created a wreck of lines, inaccuracies and the inevitable dropped pencil, the graphite bone suffering multiple fractures; damage beyond repair. All was lost.
"Hand Out!" barked the sneer. My finger bones rattled from the blows of a twelve inch, calibrated wooden cudgel.
"A plague on your pencils!" I whispered. I grew a skin of wood and took the blows.
Rescuing me from these thwacks of encouragement were the initials, LW carved into the heart of the wooden board. A first love lexicon sculpted in the top right hand corner, a totem to a teenage romance.
When my secondary education finally collapsed, I took the board as a trophy against adversity and here it leans.
Hessian jewellery box on the dressing table
As a child I remember dusting my mum’s dressing table every week. Placed in front of the bay window in my parents’ bedroom, it contained all her treasures.
I gingerly lifted each ornament, her gilt-edged mirror, brush and comb set and her bottle of Blue Grass perfume, wiped them with the duster and rearranged them.
I liked all the ornaments, but it was the cylindrical hessian box, edged with lace and pink roses, that stayed in my mind. I had crafted it at Sunday School. Made from a toilet roll holder and a piece of cardboard, I recalled my mum smiling as I gave it to her. It symbolised my love for my mum who was and is always there for me and my family during happy and difficult times.
As an adult I found a similar jewellery box. My ear-rings were stored in it until Ace the dog discovered it one day. At first she chewed the edges, so I put it back together. After she chewed the base I hid it in my drawers.
It would be easy to blame Ace for the messy situation involving my son and his ex-girlfriend, but she is only one factor.
After several months in our care, she has settled down and become a loving dog with minor issues. Instead of chewing every piece of paper and object of value to me, she merely grabs something and releases it.
Let’s hope the situation my son is experiencing will loosen soon too.
I have kept two cherished objects from my childhood in my China cabinet, purely for the memories they invoke. Both are reminders of how my family offered sustenance. Sweetness was withheld, and savory treats were relished.
One was a 1950s Mid-century Shell Pink Milk Glass Candy Dish gifted to my mother by an old maid, not very fond of children. There was something about this fancy candy dish that was off-limits to the five children in the family. It was only for show, with specially wrapped hard candies on a kidney-shaped glass coffee table. It's funny how things were not child-proof then, even if they were dangerous. There were strict rules about not touching or not going near things that could cause harm. This candy dish has a bittersweet memory because it was very tempting to look at. My mouth would water just tasting the imagined sweetness that was always an arm's length away. Sweetness was forbidden and always withheld.
The other object was a Green Depression Glass Sectioned Relish Tray with Scalloped Edges. This platter was my father's favorite; he cut up savory vegetables and arranged them colorfully for special occasions. He would use it for pickles and olives or cheese and crackers. He always invited us to try something salty or spicy. This green glass tray became a centerpiece for our formal dining room holiday dinners. Of course, we remembered our manners sitting around the table. But father passed this beautiful dish, relishing the sight of his family seated around the festive table.