Tag: memory

KIng Charles the Martyr – in a jar?

When you’re as old as me, you’ll probably find yourself saying “many years ago; when ….” – rather too often, since that’s the point when you realize that your children no longer care about, let alone believe your stories. But I’m not going to be caught out that way. I’ll merely say …….

I was on a silent retreat in a Franciscan convent in Dorset and since I was the only man present I was sequestered alone in a cottage on the edges of the estate. Meals were conducted in silence apart from the first five minutes of the one o’clock news on the BBC controlled rigidly by the Superior. Conversation was not allowed and so you had to learn some kind of sign language to get hold of the salt. The silence was only broken once – this was in the period of Margaret Thatcher’s greatest pomp – when it was announced that she’d shut down a couple more coal mines and a steelworks. One of the younger sisters was unable to contain a long snort of hatred and derision. We shared a conspiratorial smile among ourselves and went on with lunch – knowing that if we didn’t eat it all, it would come back meal after meal until it grew whiskers. I remember an old friend, a retired orthopaedic surgeon saying on his 90th birthday that the trouble with thriftiness was that you never got to eat a decent apple. The table rituals were both arcane and hilarious. We were each given a coloured napkin ring and told to sit at whichever place we found it on. What we weren’t told was that no one could leave the table until the final napkin was rolled and replaced in its ring. Needless to say I was the first victim of the rule, but I got my revenge by making everyone wait for each subsequent meal by sitting there beaming until I got bored. It was there that I discovered that I’m absolute rubbish at silence. I much preferred the Benedictines where they were still silent but you got a glass of wine with lunch and one of the monks read aloud from an interesting book.

Anyway the Franciscans were devotedly high church Anglicans and one of the curiosities was their attachment to martyrs, not least King Charles 1st it seems. By and large they were a radical bunch who really did walk the walk, but I was caught out by a jam jar on the table at breakfast time which was plainly labelled “King Charles the Martyr”. God knows (I thought religiously) what’s in there and I wish it would be marmalade but the thought that it might actually contain some sort of relic held me back. A single hair or fingernail would have made me feel very ill. And in any case was it entirely correct to celebrate the memory of the slaughtered king by eating him? Was this sacramental food in some arcane sense? or was it a witty joke by a rebellious sister? and if not – what?

Madame and I really like marmalade, but ever since the invention of Hartley’s “New Jam” – which was as watered down as “New Labour” turned out to be and then sold in smaller jars to add insult to injury, shop bought marmalade- in fact most shop bought jam too has lost most of its fruitiness because it’s lost most of its fruit. If you want the real thing you have to make it yourself. The Potwell Inn has one small problem in that I prefer my marmalade chunky and Madame likes it thin cut with as little peel as possible. This results in half finished jars having all their juices spooned out leaving dense faggots of orange flavoured brushwood at the bottom. I bear it bravely but it gives me terrible hiccoughs. I will get to the point ASAP.

So my family always made marmalade and home made jams, preserves and pickles have always been part of my life. My mum strayed from the path of righteousness at some point in the past and started to use the tinned, pre-shredded and cooked to be sold in giant tins. It didn’t feel right and we’ve never yielded t0 the temptation. If we’ve done the numbers right, we have marmalade all year round but sometimes we run out and then the wait for early January when the Seville oranges come in is a festival of longing. This year and true to tradition they arrived on January 2nd. It was only this week that I finally joined the dots regarding King Charles the Martyr. His execution took place on December 30th and so it’s just possible that the Sevilles arrived a bit early the year of my retreat and that Sister Angela, or whichever one was cooking that week, commemorated the religious festival on a jar of marmalade. It made me think of the Benedictine aphorism that “to work is to pray and to pray is to work”

But marmalade making is equally a thanksgiving festival for me; along with Christmas puddings and Christmas cakes. It’s impossible not to think of my mum and my gran as I’m chopping and simmering, boiling and bottling. It’s a ceremony that requires faith in the future; that we’ll be there to enjoy all fifteen jars in the course of this new year. It’s our opportunity to prepare and eat the best of food rather than the blandest and cheapest industry can manage. It’s hard work slicing the peel of 4 Kg of oranges and I have to keep sharpening the knife. My hands and wrists ache from the effort but it gives a long space of time to meditate and savour the grace of the ingredients and their journey to our kitchen where they fill the flat with their lovely fragrance. The whole act of making marmalade collapses time, prompting an escape from all the anxieties of the present moment, and it’s free; no books (the recipe is so simple) no gurus, churches or self-help groups; and if praying for King Charles 1st is your bag – that’s fine too; it wouldn’t be mine but feel free if its yours.

The Sisters and the Covent are long gone, scattered across the country and perhaps absorbed into other groups but I remember them with great fondness. The Franciscan movement has something to say to us, even now. They could be trailblazers in the search for a new and all embracing spirituality of the natural world – it’s there in the foundational writings of St Francis from the beginning. Every religious movement has to learn to live with its Jabez Bunting and its Brother Elias. The women did better with Hildegard of Bingen and Sister Clare, but there’s always a battle between the bureaucratic and the visionary when the founder dies and the battle for succession begins.

As for the Potwell Inn we opt for the quiet life and do our best to preserve it.

The stream of consciousness – a creative affliction.

Whitchurch Common, Dartmoor. March 2016

I said to Madame yesterday while we were walking through Bath – “I think I’m living in the 1940’s and 50’s”. She, being an avid reader of history and biographies, knew exactly what I was saying. She’s presently finishing the last of C J Sansom’s Shardlake novels and living in the Tudor period. Not having to explain things is one of the great blessings of our long relationship. Of course the imagination can play tricks and too lax an attitude towards truth telling could lead all the way to prison or even to 10 Downing Street; but in the manner of a psychoanalytic session – by allowing the mind to range freely and without comment, connections of the utmost significance can be forged.

So, if you’re a Potwell Inn regular you’ll know I’ve been thinking about and researching Geoffrey Grigson – author of “An Englishman’s Flora” and husband of Jane Grigson the great food writer. Chains of thought often take us on a journey and in this case it involved reconnecting with the village above By Brook where we lived for two and a half years while we were at art school; and a hairy drive over to Slaughterford in search of a pub that was actually one village further upstream on the little trout river which runs for around twenty miles between Castle Combe and the Avon at Bathampton . In the course of our day and in subsequent reading we discovered that Slaughterford is probably not the site of a famous battle between Alfred the Great and a small army of Danish raiders. and that the name probably derives from the Anglo Saxon term for the crossing near the place where the Blackthorns grow.

But this turned out to be much more than an antiquarian story. Immersing ourselves in a landscape in which we’d lived the early years of our relationship stirred up the strata of many memories. The melodious sound of the small river, for instance became the river that runs through the Potwell Inn garden in HG Wells’ novel – “A History of Mr Polly” as well as being the real place where we’d attempted unsuccessfully to poach brown trout and where I’d spent days drawing a tangle of tree roots. Being an artist or a writer seems to involve a huge struggle to lay hold of something significant. That laying hold rarely seems to work and we are left empty handed. The poet RS Thomas brilliantly describes it as being like placing your hand in the warmth of a hare form which a hare has recently fled. The creative life is full of almost and not quite.

Standing next to the river, memories resurfaced of moments in galleries and museums when suddenly, as if a flare has gone off in the mind, you can see clearly for the first time. Once, unexpectedly bursting into tears in front of a Renoir painting I’d only ever seen poorly reproduced less than the size of a postcard. Being young, passionate and raw the memories never leave you. The paintings that had given us a whole expressive language floated through my head and so in a wild yomp through the unconscious I remembered John Minton and, the imagination being capable of leaping over impossible fences, suddenly brought a roomful of associations – Elizabeth David, Jane Grigson, MFK Fisher, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Davidson; who would all have known one another. Geoffrey Grigson would probably not have figured in too many Christmas card lists having been rude to, or about, so many people.

I’ve got a proof/review copy of Francis Spalding’s biography of John Minton “Dance ’til the stars come down” * which I bought quite cheaply because I couldn’t afford the original. It has no illustrations but in searching the secondhand booksellers today the book came up with his familiar self-portrait on the cover. Completely unexpectedly I almost welled up with grief as I recalled his melancholia, alcoholism and eventual suicide. A man I never met evoked a sense of loss that took me completely by surprise and the terrible thought came to me that this, perhaps, was the beginning of the end. The moment when the dark forces of conservatism began their fight back against post-war optimism and freedom. Since then they’ve synthesised joy and sold it back to us by subscription – one trivial experience at a time. We seem to have lost touch with the ordinary, everyday moments that used to make us dance ’till the stars came down. Art’s now a business, patrolled by curators and gallerists, and art schools run courses on keeping accounts, tax returns, building a website, networking effectively and staying in touch with the fashion of the moment.

I’m filled with the need to go and sit quietly on the bank next to the river once more to listen to what the spirits of the place still have to say to me. They, at least, have not been silenced by the self appointed magistrates of taste!

Postscript

The title of the Minton biography is a borrowing from W H Auden’s poem, which is itself a representation of the medieval “Danse Macabre” and equally a working of Stravinsky’s 1910 Firebird. The idea was very much in the air and was echoed in all sorts of media, not least in Bernard Leach’s rediscovery of 17th century English slipware. I’m thinking of the pelican in her piety. With two world wars in mind, there’s less hope in Auden’s poem – “not to be born is best for man”. A kind of mad defiance in the face of an overwhelming threat is his prescription.

Dance, dance for the figure is easy,
    The tune is catching and will not stop;
    Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
    Dance, dance, dance till you drop.

W H Auden – Death’s Echo

Camino 8 – on being an unreliable narrator.

Looking down on Aumont Aubrac at dawn

23rd May 2010

Left Aumont Aubrac early. We set the alarms for 4.45 and it was dark when we woke.  I had an extremely restless night – hardly slept.  We were right next to a main road and the transhumance festival parties didn’t begin until 11.30pm so all night there were drunks outside the campsite shouting and banging the railings.  I was praying they wouldn’t see our 2 little tents.  We didn’t want to wake Alain and his wife so we breakfasted at the camp gate on dried apricots and yesterday’s apricot pasties + water.  When we left – way before sunrise – there was a thick mist over the valley bottom.  We climbed and climbed for several hours knowing that this was the last day we would have the heavy (35lb) loads because we had agreed (long haggling session) to shed lots of stuff the previous night.

Big dream during my restless night.  I dreamed I was at Severn Bridge railway station* except it looked exactly like an SNCF station like the ones you see in French films (and in France of course). Suddenly this strange and sinister man dressed like the Sandeman sherry label logo comes towards me.  He’s all grey, very large with no face.  I start to tear at his clothes and in a kind of fast-forward sequence I tear all these clothes, disguises and appearances off one after another – he’s everyone, everything, and all these flash past in front of me until at last I’m left holding a plucked chicken!

After a stiff climb we reached Les Quatre Chemins which was just a bare road junction such as you might find on High Mendip.  Gloriously there was a café (Chez Regine) perched on the corner.  It was a proper French bar/café with Regine – if it was her – looking as if she had been hot smoked with tobacco. 

Previously in Lasbros we’d fond an immaculately clean toilet complete with paper, which made up for the lack of overnight facilities.

Due to the early start we crossed the Aubrac Plateau before the sun got too hot.  Unbelievably beautiful wildflowers – including [this is a misidentification I now realize] gentians which I’d never seen before.  Untouched pasture and some of the healthiest and happiest cattle I’ve ever seen.  In Lasbros we saw a foal that could only have been born an hour before – just standing up all knock-kneed.  It was a hard and hilly day and very very hot.  Even I drank 3 litres of water but fortunately there were many taps. Finally staggered into Nasbinals mid-afternoon.  Andrew had pulled a muscle and was getting grumpy.  Found campsite at other end of town, as always, so probably walked 27K.  Put up tent, slept , had a shower and walked back into town at 6.00pm passing a restaurant on the way in.  So we booked a table or 7.00 and had a couple of panachés in the local bar.  Meal was excellent and shared with 2 Germans and 2 French.  Young Frenchman reminded us it was Pentecost.

Journal

*Incidentally, although the Severn Tunnel (not the bridge) does have a railway station, on the Welsh side, I’ve never set foot on it – so its role in my dream is just one of life’s imponderables.

This afternoon I realized that I’d already mentioned, out of sequence, an evening shared with a nightjar as well as the worst meal ever. Having laboriously checked the previous seven posts on the Camino I thankfully discovered that neither incident was claimed as a component of the walk we’d already done and so I’ll continue gracefully along the Way but very aware of the fact that even with the aid of exif data from photos, a handwritten journal and a pretty reasonable memory it’s incredibly easy to slip up and transpose experiences from one day to another. Why it should be so important to me to get it exactly right is a question I can’t answer except for the fact that as I write this I’m constantly trying to answer a crop of my own questions. I hesitate to describe this exercise as therapeutic but I would love to think that when I press the last publish button on this group of posts, I might be just a touch wiser. Of course, 30 years as a parish priest taught me that life is irredeemably complicated and is very rarely understood by the people having to put up with it, and even less so by the people trying to explain it. That’s why psychoanalysis is so expensive. Not many caring professionals can resist explanations and keep quiet for as long as it takes for the client to hack their own way through the undergrowth.

The day was, as I’ve described it previously, full of wonders. Watching a transhumance take place is like watching a thousand years of history roll back. On a more mundane level, my mention of the newly born foal took me back to the day and the place so vividly I was able to revisit Lasbros in my mind as if it were yesterday.

Deja vu?

Looking down from the iron bridge above lock 3 of the Kennet and Avon canal

Walking down the canal a few days ago we reached exactly this point on the towpath when I found – in the sky, the clouds and the opening buds of the trees – a feeling; a sensation near to joy that was out of all proportion to its dimensions and properties as a view in the ordinary sense of the word.

Naturally it was a welcome change from lockdown ennui but it caused me to wonder how it can be that sense experiences (like Proust’s madeleine for instance), can carry such a huge metaphorical load. I could, if there was time, draw a mind-map with the scene at its centre, and which would embrace dozens if not hundreds of deeply personal associations, many of which could generate further mind-maps. Just to give this a bit of an anchor I could mention wild garlic which is just coming into its glory. My subsidiary mind-map would embrace childhood memories of walking by the river Frome and on from there.

I have no idea whether all this can be adequately explained by brain chemistry unless the scientists would concede that human memory simply stores and recovers these experiences through the workings of brain chemistry, like a biological hard drive – the means don’t matter to me very much but the experience lies at the root of all creative processes, including science. As an allotmenteer and as a rather incompetent amateur botanist I understand that the stimulus which drives us on; enables us to tolerate frost and wind and the loss of a whole crop or drives me to immerse myself in the minutest details of a plant’s structure for hours just so I can give it a name; that stimulus is wonder.

When we’re visiting new places – especially gardens – or walking in unfamiliar environments; meeting new people, the imagination is alive; fired up. Somewhere in the mind the sense impressions are finding places, associations, pre-existing memories, experiences and cultural thought-paths; and the inner workings of memory stores them – each in their right place like roosting hens finding their place on a perch at dusk; each discrete experience tagged and keyworded so that later, many years later perhaps, the precise configuration of a landscape, a flower, a gesture, a sound releases releases the whole stored, aggregated complex. If you were looking for a non-supernatural explanation of the déjà vu experience it’s right there.

A cowslip in our friends’ meadow yesterday

Why the sudden outbreak of philosophy? – Well, this week we’ve been partially released from lockdown. We’ve spent proper time with our children and grandchildren after a year of hermetic isolation and we hugged and clung to each other like shipwrecked sailors. We went to the campervan full of trepidation and replaced the dead battery and took ourselves off for our first night away from home in many months. We camped up at Priddy which is a place soaked in teenage memories of caving expeditions; watched rooks squabbling over nests and ate up the silence. Notwithstanding a terrible night’s sleep, as we were kept awake by a series of power cuts that had the heating unit cycling noisily on and off ; we came back to Bath feeling that we’d begun to emerge from emotional winter again.

Which brings me to our walk when (at my suggestion) we found the entrance to Swildons Hole which I’d not seen in fifty or more years but which is still full of memories. I’d spent so much time down there cold, wet, tired, fearful and occasionally completely panicked but always blown away by the powerful sensation of being underground and by the occasional bursts of sheer beauty hidden from human eyes for millennia.

A few years ago I met an outdoor pursuits instructor at the climbing wall in St Werburghs who offered to take me down again, but somehow we never got around to doing it. One glimpse of the entrance was enough to convince me that it would be a miserable and possibly dangerous experience for a septuagenarian! But that in itself was enough to remind me that however powerful the memories, not all experiences are repeatable however appealing the thought might be. The sense of our own mortality sharpens and intensifies these remembered experiences which linger in the mind like ghosts.

On the other hand, if you look closely at the third photo from the left, you’ll see something of a line of trees above the pill box entrance. I had no recollection of them from the past. In fifty years or so they’ve grown into a magnificent beech hanger and the sound of the wind rustling through the branches was unmistakable and worthy of a ten minute stop for a free symphony. You can see the leaf buds about to break as they turn from chestnut brown to green. At last a recoverable and re-liveable memory from my childhood trips to Stoke Row in the Chilterns. No I hadn’t really been here before, because on my last visit the trees were so much smaller and yet my memory was able to recover more from my grandparents smallholding to furnish and make sense of this new and powerful experience.

So what about the allotment? Well, we’re in suspended animation as the pampered indoor plants grow like cuckoos while we wait for the present icy spell to end. The earth is a dry as dust and we’re having to continually water in the polytunnel because daytime temperatures soar in the spring sunshine. Slowly, slowly, enough tough old stagers are emerging to break the illusion of winter and the apple blossom sits, clenched in bud waiting for the spring as a child waits for Father Christmas. It will come soon, but evidently not yet and not soon enough for some of the wind tormented broad beans. Inside the tunnel with an additional layer of fleece we’re just coming to terms with its capacity to advance the season. Every time we look at the spinach and lettuces or the young cabbage plants we have to pinch ourselves. The container grown potatoes are growing so vigorously I seem to be constantly mixing soil and compost to earth them up, and I think we’ll have a crop by early May.

Between the flat, the greenhouse, the tunnel, the hotbed, various cloches and the open ground we find ourselves managing half a dozen quite different seasonal microclimates. One little moment of joy came when Madame opened the crown of one of the cauliflowers and found the white curds just beginning to form – and that’s the first time we’ve grown them successfully. The asparagus is beginning to accelerate into life and the newly planted trees and soft fruit all seem to have taken. There are tadpoles in the pond and the Hidcote Giant lavender plants have arrived ready to be planted out and ready to attract insects and bees.

So it’s all good. Confusing, frustrating and good – as life usually turns out to be. Any prolonged silences over the next few weeks will probably be down to sheer busyness!