My Big Sister Boudicca

 

      I have been locked down and shielding nearly six months now. I have the evidence of this extraordinary isolation in my rather untidy notebook.

 These conditions, for good or ill, lead to excess introspection – a detailed examination of the present, future and - particularly if you are my age – the past.

 So was that one day my late sister took residence in my imagination. I loved her deeply and for a long time she was my heroine.  So one day, notebook on knee,  shielding myself beneath my trees, I started talk to her about the hard times of our growing up, which we faced in very different ways.

 

           Big Sister

Your hair is the colour of a bright penny

much admired by  everyone.

 Mam - also red-haired -says,

“Like Boudicca and the first Elizabeth.

great women, both.”

 

At first you wear your hair in long plaits,

hooked up with green ribbons. One day

I sit on the stairs listening to them row

when – school looming - she insists

on cutting off those long plaits;

 

My own hair – curly and tangled, mostly unkempt -

means that eventually I’m christened Medusa

by cruel boys at school, where clever does not count

and  I’m never picked for teams and am ignored

by you in corridors. Unhappy times.

 

And each day with my tangled hair

and slipshod ways I walk ten paces

behind you  on our way to school.

You do not turn. And I feel   

 I am not here.

 

But with your clever mind and bright penny hair  

you find your place among the racy girls

who admire your dancing style and love

those green shoes with four-inch heels –  

that Mam has bought  for you on credit .

 

At school your friends - too cool to study –

hold you back,  drag you down,

and stop you showing your clever brain.

(Even so, you still go on into the world

and rise to the top. )

 

With Mam working at the factory

your cool friends visit  our tiny house,

roll back the rug, put Bill Haley

on our Dansette player – also bought on credit –

and start to dance

 

But I am here, lying on the sofa, half asleep -

these days playing truant seems to be my only option.

“Hey lass!” says the coolest girl. “Are you off school again?”

But you just stand there before the mirror, back-combing

your bright penny hair into a bouffant style.

 

Plundering Memory. A Writer's Odyssey

I am thoroughly relishing the work on my new short story collection called Kaleidoscope – Stories from the Frontier. I am now writing the sixteenth of what will be twenty short stories. Perhaps you read one of them on my last blog post - Patchouli?
One of the most exciting things in this new project has been to focus my mind on the whole notion of memory and how it works for a writer.

In the process I have asked myself questions. What is my memory? Is it objective? Is it all I remember? Is it, perhaps, what I have forgotten? Is it all that I’ve been told of what has happened to me? Is it what I have dreamt? Is it these buried subconscious memories that are meat-and-drink in popular articles on crime and its solutions?

Do I as a writer of fiction, plunder my own memory and the memories of others? In surveying my longish list of various kinds of publication I feel certain that I do this – not just in character, content, and narrative - but in those embedded memories of the language and syntax of storytelling – crucial inner memories of the senses, the feelings, the fugitive memories of pain of delight. 

From these I have created and recreated original characters in my fiction. And I have even borrowed others’ memories as though they are our own, and projected memories harvested from my reading. I reinvent lives as essentially original inventions and end up believing that that is what really happened.

The joy and privilege of being part of an oral as well as a written culture is that somehow we inherit memory as part of our acknowledgement of  our membership first of the human clan, and then the human race. This has been reinforced and strengthened throughout the millennia by the sharing of stories in family and social groups, allowing us to develop a shared heritage of collective memory, sensitivity and consciousness as human beings.  Modern discussions of genetic memory perhaps reflect this.  

A writer’s instinct is ultimately to express universalities which will link with our readers' own experience and world-view. Thereby hangs worldly success, after all. Perhaps this particularly might be said to be more purposely focused in novels attached to genres such as espionage, crime, romance or war.  But even in these fields the narratives and the characters should be unique and idiosyncratic to save the work from suffering from an uninspired sameness.

As novelists and storytellers  from the house of our own memory we invent characters with their own histories and conflicts and we use them as psychic dwellings for our own dense complex experiences.

 Each one of us, with our unique baggage of complex memory picks up our pen and then asks the writer’s question What if…?  This is what I have been doing as I am writing Kaleidoscope. Stories from the Frontier.  My theory is that our writing is fuelled and developed from our embedded and continuing memory, whether intended or not. So in the end – as I have found in working on Kaleidoscope -it’s quite exciting to do this with a greater degree of consciousness than ever before.

Several Pieces for My Mindometry Collection

Work in Progress. 

I am writing and collecting pieces that mirror my reflections on my time over the last three months on experiencing what the medics call  'low mood.'

 It's not all bad.

I hope eventually these pieces will build into a collection called:

Mindometry

States of mind

La Même

Thinking he was someone else

you leaned down and kissed him

But he wasn’t someone else,

he was the same -

the same slow delight,

the same pale, bright eyes,

the same puckish smile.

But you must admit

he was not the same.

Not the same.

Descartes

You sheltered under a dry stone wall

on the windy side of the moor

sharing the contents of his leather bag:

red wine and round biscuits.

You spoke of thinking and being,

your laughter echoing his,

across drying heathers.

When the storm blew up

you scampered down,

his leather bag over your shoulder,

leaving behind an empty bottle

and the last round biscuit,.

Je pense donc  je suis. 

OR 

Cogito ergo sum

OR

I think therefore I am 

Promise

It was a new car.

You did like your cars

You drove me two hundred miles

to the place where you were born -

the street where you played as a child

and the beach where you fished with a long line

and then to the road

across from the grammar school

where you walked with your father.

He said to you,  'The red brick building 
over there will be  your gateway to power.

Be sure of that.' 

Still a Problem 

Turmoil in your mind

stops you sitting down

to do what you want to do

These are not hard tasks –

simple transcriptions or

straightforward amends. Easy.

But it’s like I’m stone or steel

Lacking the power to move from

sofa to  desk.

  

  
  

   

The Door

The desk in the window is making a difference.

She see the light streaming into the room

and onto the grass and the tall trees. Easy to sit here

for three hours and concentrate on a book or a blank,

naked page. Sweeter than the other place
.
The other place is a back room with a big door. Once,

she chose this as the perfect workroom with a living fire,

space for shelves and tables for papers.

And a big technology corner. Sun only after noon.

But that room became a forbidden place

Darker than this room with its sunny window.

She thinks the back room must contain some essence.

Already in her life she’s glimpsed and heard things

That she knew weren't there.

She’s no longer reacts to this, remembering

the half-smiles shot in her direction.

As a child she’d been accused more than once

of being away with the gypsies.

But what about this essence? Is it the dread-feeling 

of  some eighteenth century maid who feared the place?

More likely it’s the world flooding in 

through the firecracker-gateway of the computer: 

a world too vast, too packed with too many people,

 too many things, too much pain.

But perhaps this crisis of the door, the room,

represented her own guilt about work undone:

tasks untackled, obligations unmet

Or perhaps it's the timid soul

which sits there at her core

not daring to try to breach that door.

So now, in the window the sunny room,

she decides to pull herself together,

get out of the house, away from the door

and away from that essence, that dread-feeling.

Wouldn’t it be too easy, to stay locked in

and fall asleep yet again?

So she flees the house, drives out through trees

and finds a cool space where she can focus –

manufacture order out of chaos, move on forward.

New feelings surge through her, freeing her

from the visceral strings that tie her down, that

make her dumb and stop her thinking straight,

Now, away from the dull routine and the person 

she’s become. She knows she’s not that person -

the person she’d invented to meet the low expectations

in the house with the room with the big door

and its threatening interior spirit,

its emanation of pain. She thinks now that

she loves the house, even the room  with the door.

Surely after so many years they’re woven into each other

like a precious carpet. She begins to see that

caring for the house is no different to caring for herself.

Sensing that spirit in the room where she works is sensing

herself in turmoil. Something to deal with, not to flee.

Yes, it's complicated. Be sure of that. sk in