White Silk Tassels

From A Life in Short Pieces: Piece Five. 

White Silk Tassels.

I met my first proper friend, Iris in the year before my father died. I was eight and she was fourteen. For some reason we made friends. At the time I didn’t think this was strange. Iris has been much in my mind in recent decades when - wearing my writer’s cloak - I have been interrogating my own past.

I realise only now -   a generation later – that in my encounter with her I somehow witnessed a kind of

War damage in Coventry

hidden incest. I think I only really recognise this as I was writing the following piece, White Silk Tassels, sixty years later. I realise now that it must have stuck in my child’s mind because, having been my friend for many months, my friend Iris vanished and was never seen again.

Assembling all these feelings and ideas and thinking about my own life at the time as a child in Coventry  the implication of this disappearance dawned on me. In recent years there has been a certain amount of discussion about the phenomenon of recovered memory. I suppose as writers we dip into recovered memory and respond with various kinds of truth and fiction. Perhaps all writing involves both recovered and false memory

.

But writing this short piece called White Silk Tassels my recovered memory was suddenly moulded into an idea – a final explanation as to why my friend vanished.

I think as well that this memory dug deeper because of the contiguous events of my father’s death.

White Silk Tassels

Men  open their mouths wide

Reconciliation by Josefina de Vasconcellos
 at Coventry Cathedral, first conceived
 in the aftermath of the war. Image: Ben Sutherland,  

their teeth bite, bite like lions

their nails are sharp as pussy cat claws.

They go for the cream, lapping it up

with their sandpaper tongues.

In her auntie’s house  my friend sits

on her bedspread; it’s white silk tassels

sweep the linoleum, red as a cat’s tongue.

Her aunt and uncle have red faces too –

his more bulbous, hers pale and sharp as razors.

Weeks go by and the white tassels vanish,

one by one – bitten off by naughty pussycats,

according to her uncle. Our houses - Jerry-built –

are fenced in with chicken wire

but,  unlike me,  Iris has no chickens.

My father - prone to mild mistakes -

bought a dozen chicks for breakfast eggs.

He swings, his golden ring above their fluffy heads.

It swings to the left, so he was wrong.

These fluffy chicks are cocks, every one.

So, no morning chucky eggs for us, love!

Still, we feed these boys, clean their cage,

cluck over them like mother hens.

Come Christmas time we have to wring their necks

Not Daddy – all soft heart – but my uncle does the job,

smiling as his fingers squeeze out their little chicken lives.

Come Christmas too, my good friend Iris

has stolen her own savings - they say -

and run away.  Her red-faced auntie calls her

a sly cat, bad to the core and so ungrateful,

as she burns the white bed-spread in the garden

fenced all round with chicken wire.

Land of Your Possession: Stage 3 in my Novel Marathon

Another significant cover by Len Thurston
Click to buy

Using an aspect of your own life in fiction

I was born in Lancaster but conceived in Coventry just before the great World War 2 Blitz.  My dad worked in the aero industry in that city, which made it such a desired target for the German bombers.
      These events were part of our family story for years afterwards and years later I used them as the core inspiration for my novel Land of your Possession.
    I also brought back my central character Lizza who appeared in my first novel as a young girl. She, her sisters and, all live on in this World War 2 novel in which Lizza is a young mother, living in Coventry with her husband Roland who works in the aero-industry...

For You

About The Story

On the  terrifying night of the Blitz when Coventry loses its cathedral, the pregnant Lizza is comforted in her grief at the death of her daughter Rebecca not by her husband Roland but by Krystof, the Polish refugee who understands Lizza's feelings only too well.  Her home in ruins, her marriage crumbling and with two motherless children of neighbour in her care, Lizza heads for Durham, the home land of her possession, where only stray bombs fall.

Extract From near the beginning:

As she tucked Rebecca's blanket around her again, the war weaved itself through Lizza's head like a clinging vine. Ever since the summer she'd listened to the thrum-thrum of the planes, seen the dazzle of the tracer bullets across the Coventry sky, heard the thrump and boom of bombs falling in the spasmodic air raids  By now, however, the routine of warnings, the rush to the shelters and the clatter of the ack-ack had given her, in her optimistic moods, an illusion of protection, a feeling of control.

       After all there were still dances and the pictures. Queues most nights. Up till this last rush of work at the factory Roland and Lizza had gone dancing every Saturday. Roland loved to dance.  Lizza was proud of her husband's grace as he steered her expertly through the soldiers and their girlfriends and through the women dancing together, moving around the floor as though they were the only two dancers in the hall. 

       They had learned to dance in a little studio in Bradford: in that twenty foot square space their sturdy boy-girl friendship had  imported the sensuality that turned it into love. Even then Roland had cut a different figure, with his cultured voice and stories of his father sailing the high seas the other side of the world.

     Smiling at the thought, Lizza nodded cheerfully at Mrs Callaghan and walked on into town, forgetting the Ouija glass and its dire warnings. 

Extract from near the end:

(Lizza and Krystof have met in Durham Cathedral)

'i was thinking about what you said about your churches when you were a child. The feeling you had, about man-made beauty and anither creator.'

    'Did you feel it?'

    'I don't know. I felt something.'

    They sat quietly for a few moments then she grasped his hand, 'Let's think about Wanda, And all our children,' she said. 'Their passing must never go unremarked,'

     The boy in the choir started singing again and they sat quietly waiting fpr the song to end. Then Krystof pulled her hands together and placed his own over them. 'And let us think about our two selves, two halves of a whole,who will never be apart' ...

     ...They held hands all the way home and Krystof told her of the high praise his paintings had received and the proposal to tour the exhibition.
     She frowned. 'You mean, not to sell the paintings? All that hard work?'
    'Oh they'll sell eventually. That means the Spitfires and ourselves will benefit...'
     ...  She was just walking along the street, shoulder to shoulder with Krystof thinking what a good day it had been, when she saw the familiar car parked outside Campion House. It was the Morris, Roland's pride and joy, which she had last seen without wheels in the garage of the Coventry house. It had wheels on now and the dust of many miles of travel on its once highly polished bonnet.

I hope you enjoy it ...

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RICHES OF THE EARTH 

 UNDER A BRIGHTER SKY