The Blue Taffeta Dress

I’ve blah’d on here and in other places about the illusory nature of so-called ‘writer’s block’. Now it seems I’m just emerging from one of these things.

I have lectured myself about winter blues; about being physically and mentally tired after finishing the French Novel, not to mention the challenges of the Easington project; about using up my usually overflowing Ideas Basket; about the need for fallow time to give my mind a chance to spring back into place.

I acknowledged all that but it was painful to be in the middle of it. It struck me that writing is my one steady and true life-companion and I’m lonely without her. I am addicted to her deadlines and there is the possibility that the rolling deadlines - the organising feature of my life - are one way in which I feed that need.

I have my reasons for feeling used up. At the centre is the unique nature of the French Novel, where I explored the depths of my odd perceptions of time, space and life after death. These things are there at the core of my story of needy and funny Starr, of wise Modeste, and the miraculous boy Tib.

Perhaps I needed more recovery time after completing this novel than any other.

I tried to leave the write-stop (my new name for w.b…) alone. After all, there was Christmas and New Year with its baubles, presents and presentiments. There were my delightful and absorbing visitors. And there was the beautiful snow – although that was (and continues to be) an unwelcome and disabling visitor.

Then there was the afternoon by the fire with Debora sorting out old family photographs – particularly of her grandmother Barbara - so she could have copies. (You will note that the pictures of Barbara, inspired my previous, heartfelt post here.)

Apart from the photos of Barbara, images the whole of my life started to trickle before me – frowning baby , curly headed, earnest little girl,

and the only one out of uniform in sixth form groups,

and the astonishingly young and slender bride in a hired wedding gown ,

and the young and the older mother …

and the writer.

One very special snap emerged from the higgledy piggeldy pile - of myself at 11 with my older sister and younger brother in front of the door of the house we lived in then. My sister is wearing a flowered dress. I am wearing a dress in violet blue taffeta with a broderie anglaise trim on the collar and a ruched cummerbund. On my feet are inappropriate white, canvas plimsolls. I am thin. My arms and legs are stick-like.

I turned the snap over and there in a schoolgirl’s round hand is written. ‘I am in the flowered dress. The other girl is my sister.’

The Other Girl Is My Sister! Now there is a good title for a short story. Or a novel…

… and Bang! The the writer’s block /write-stop is gone.

I have gone from stop to GO. Debora and Barbara have done the trick.

wx

Falling Idols Part 2: Dorothy, William, Mary, Sam and Sara(h)s et al

‘So, Wendy, what is a family?’

My favourite young man, the one somewhat given to chocolate, asked me recently, ‘What is a family?’

Unfortunately I had, the previous evening, been watching a documentary about murderer Charles Manson, whose gang of young murderous sociopaths called themselves ‘the Family’, so the question floored me for a moment.

When I recovered, I fumbled my way into talk of my own family - my much loved son and daughter, their spouses, my sister and brother and nieces and nephews. Then I thought how my sense of family is also imbued with ever-present memories of my unique mother and my gentle brother. Even my father, who died when I was nine, sits perfectly in my memory and constitutes part of my essential self. I remember how he used to put his little finger up my cardigan sleeve because his hand was too big to hold mine properly.

Then I talked about the groups of friends I made emerging from college into later professional and adult life who are more knowing of me, more intimate even, than my family of the flesh - certainly they are more accurate mirrors for the person I have become.

All of which gets me back to the other part of my holiday reading A Passionate Sisterhood – the sisters, wives, and daughters of The Lake Poets, by the excellent Kathleen Jones to which I turned after the delights of Dan Brown.

I have appreciated the work of Kathleen Jones since she came to the prison where I was writer in residence, to read from her biography of Catherine Cookson, and play unique interview tapes of CC talking: we listened as this odd, phenomenal woman, talked, fulminated, raged about elements of her own story. I later devoured Jones’ scholarly work, which addresses the subtleties and dark, significant areas of the life of Catherine Cookson. This writer, because of her staggering universal appeal, is seen my some luminaries as not so much a writer as a literary aberration.

The women in prison - some CC fans, some not – were fascinated. Experienced as they were in the matrix of abuse that counts to some as family life, they saw aspects of their own life validated - not just in CC’s stories, but in her life.

So here I am, by the seaside, reading Kathleen Jones’s book on the extended ‘family’ that emerged from the emotional, intellectual and erotic encounters between poets Robert Lovell, Robert Southey, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and two sets of sisters - the Hutchinsons, Mary & Sara(h), and the Frickers, Sarah, Mary and Edith. The last but not least of this remarkable extended close-living ‘family’ was, of course,the remarkable Dorothy Wordsworth, sister, muse, amanuensis and all-but lover to her brother William Wordsworth.

The stories of these individuals have been told separately but Kathleen Jones weaves her delicate way through this matrix of self conscious geniuses, these eccentric individuals. In doing so she brings the clever women - for once - into the foreground. In doing so she makes profound points about intellectual women sacrificing themselves on the altar of male genius; about the slave- labour involved in being the muse and amanuensis, valued more for their copying labour (thousands of pages…) than their critique; more for their motherly care of these child-men, than for their intellect. This is so, despite the fact that the original attraction to these women was their intellect and bright personalities.

The women’s childbearing faculties (except for the famously childless Dorothy W) were a bonus for these men of acute sentiment, although the gross care of children was in the main laid it the door of the women. So far, so little time, then, for the development of the women’s own considerable talents.

Except for Lovell, who died early. and Roberts Southey, who cheerfully shouldered Coleridge's domestic responsibilities as well as his own, the men come off quite badly here. The radical Wordsworth became autocratic and full of pride. Beautiful Coleridge, who became addicted to opium and was often paranoid, made a profession of running and staying away from his stoical wife Sarah and played a double blame game with his doting friends the Wordsworths , who blamed Sarah as the cause of his woes. Despite the extent of his betrayals and self indulgence Coleridge was still sustained for a long time as a kind of sacred monster by this talented, extended mixed up family.

Then there were the next generation of gifted and eccentric children… but read the book, if you can get hold of it! Let Kathleen Jones lead you through this family maze with a novelist’s skill.

I have to say the book quite put me off Wordsworth, whose poetry I’ve long admired, and Coleridge whose Ancient Mariner was a staple of my childhood. And it made me wonder what Sarah Coleridge might have produced had she not had to love, labour and support in every way this lost – ultimately so unattractive – soul, Samuel T Coleridge.

Idols fall and we suffer and survive betrayal, disappointment, loss and change. But we survive. That’s families for you.

wx

The Sequinned Bag

Among photos scattered around my house is one of a small family - an upright man, an anxious woman in a pretty hat and a pretty, plump child in a velvet coat. There is another photo of the father of this family in naval uniform. This family is no relation at all to me but I knew the pretty child when she was an old woman, a spinster - but not, as she always assured me, an unclaimed treasure! She was the last of the line, with no descendents. I feel happy that these photos make her ours by adoption.

I thought of her last week when I was running an original writing workshop for International Women's Day (called Handbags and Gladrags). Amid sisterly laughter we looked for inspiration to, among other things, the contents of our handbags. I found myself thinking and writing about that pretty child, my old friend Isabel.

Isabel
A Mattisse drawing,
Of a woman dreaming
An ink pen and notebook,
Bleeding life
Battered bills to document money
Concert tickets never used
Strepsils to stop the screaming
Bright green purse, handmade -
Bought in France, a heart’s home.
A small sequinned bag, left to me
By my old friend Isabel, among
Her ‘personal effects’ -
Along with corsets, nightgowns, old fur coats
Edwardian photos of her sailor father,
Her mother, (the dressmaker),
And Isabel herself at three years old
Wearing a favourite, homemade velvet dress.

So - nothing of value,
Except the sequinned bag in which I keep
My mobile phone, which now I never lose...