The patchwork of memory - by Lu Hersey

My partner moved in with me recently, and to avoid either of us falling over furniture or stubbing our toes on unexpected boxes, we needed to clear a lot of stuff. Worse, my father has had to move into a care home, which means I'm trying to sort and clear stuff at his place too - which is all making me think minimalism is blooming good idea. 

But there are always some things you want to keep, even if they serve no practical purpose. Inside a big wooden chest I found a patchwork quilt, made long ago by my grandmother's family (seriously long ago - she was born in 1881).  Grandma was the 13th of 14 children, and I remember her telling me that anyone who visited the house when she was young had to sew a piece onto the quilt before they were allowed to leave. She said the tiny purple velvet pieces were from the mourning collar and bows she wore attached to her clothing when her father died. In fact to her, every fragment of fabric in the intricate patchwork represented a memory of a dress or blouse, or something from the household like tablecloths - a design made of memories of her family and friends, gathered by the fireside in Yorkshire, long ago.

I thought about why I wanted to keep it, now it's too fragile to use on a bed or hang on a wall. What does it mean to me? Perhaps not as much as it meant to Grandma, but it instantly conjures my memory of her  - an old woman I loved dearly, who came to live with us when I was a child. The smell of Foxes Glacier Mints and 4711 cologne. And how this patchwork quilt always rested at the end of her bed. But what will it mean to my children when I go? Even less. They might remember me telling them about my grandmother and how many brothers and sisters she had, that's all. 

Anyway, all this stuff moving has got me thinking about our memories, and the things that are important to us.

Take my father. At 96, living in a care home, his memory gets patchier by the day. After he's had a nap (he generally has at least a couple every day), he thinks it's the next day when he wakes up and demands another breakfast. The care home staff obligingly present him with one, regardless of the time - which seems like a good way to deal with someone whose reality is different and who lives two or three days in one. Like a hobbit, he has at least two breakfasts, as well as elevenses and lunch, afternoon tea and a supper or two. He also believes it's his birthday at least once every month, and I've started sending presents to avoid him getting upset and thinking we've forgotten him.

But his house, which he lived in for 50 years, refusing to move while either of his wives (not simultaneously) lived with him there, means nothing at all to him now. He never mentions it. His life is his breakfasts and birthdays, and lugubriously lamenting his forthcoming death (though he's actually not in any pain, and is well cared for). All that stuff he hoarded, that garden he worked on, those books that fill his bookcases - all meaningless to him. 

The main thing I'm learning from all this is that the things people insist on hanging onto are mostly very unimportant. Maybe keep them if they hold a memory of someone dear to you, but don't expect that object, whatever it is, to mean much to anyone else. There'll probably come a time when it won't even mean anything to you. In the end, only the people and pets you hold (or held) dear are important. (And breakfasts, if you're my dad)

For now I'll keep the patchwork quilt and maybe find some way to preserve it - a piece of folk art that people might find interesting. But the stories, like the people who made it, are long gone. That's just the way of things. How very cluttered the world would be if it wasn't.

Lu Hersey

Web: Writing the Magic

twitter/X: LuWrites

Threads: luwrites

A Wise Choice - by Sheena Wilkinson

‘You always had a book in your hand.’

‘You were always writing away.’

No doubt this what relatives will say to me this Christmas, reminiscing about ye olden dayes when we were all younge and merrye. And I will smile and quip that nothing has changed. 

When I was younge and merrye

Last month I gave a talk about Star By Star in the Tower Museum in Derry. I’d spent the afternoon walking round the city walls and remembering my very first time in Derry, a family weekend in summer 1979, when I was ten, staying with Chris and Irene, friends of my stepfather. That weekend in their tiny terraced house in the Bogside has always shone brightly in my mind. 

I remember going outside to the toilet in the back yard; I remember running down the steep street and walking round the walls, seeing the city beneath me and the river and hills stretching far beyond to Donegal across the border. I could hardly believe it when next day we crossed the border and went to Buncrana to the seaside, the most exotic thing that had ever happened to me.  In Donegal the postboxes were green and there was different money and different sweets. There were Troubles in Derry, as there were in Belfast, but I don’t remember being aware of them. 

When I saw Chris and Irene in the audience, almost forty years later, I was touched, and started to reminisce about what had always been a special weekend for me. And then, out of her bag, Irene took a neatly pinned -- yes, pinned, I mustn't have had a stapler -- wodge of pages. ‘Do you remember writing this for us?’ she asked.


This was a collection of stories, written that very weekend, carefully kept by them for nearly forty years.  I have no memory of writing them, but there they are as proof that in between walking the walls and playing on the beach in Buncrana I must have sat down and written. Their house was tiny; I must have written while the four adults chatted and their small daughter toddled and my sister played. 

Looking at the stories now I am struck by how professional I tried to make them look. At school I was doing cursive script, but the stories are printed to make them look more like real books. They are illustrated, as all my stories were – and reader, I take no offence if you are thinking it’s well I had no ambitions to be an artist. Two things stand out for me.

One is that nobody, reading these stories, would guess they were by a girl from a Belfast council estate in the middle of the Troubles. They are aspirational and escapist, rural and middle-class. They are the stories of a girl who has grown up with Enid Blyton and the Pullein-Thompsons. Jan, the heroine of The Lost Pony lives in Cherry Cottage with lots of animals. She copes very competently when she finds the eponymous lost pony, but is not sad to relinquish him to his owners because she has two ponies of her own already. The only note of the 1970s is when she buys Jackie at the village shop; real me would not give up Bunty for at least two years. (The Lost Pony is in fact entirely devoid of conflict or suspense; a weekend potboiler rather than part of my serious oeuvre.)

But talking of my serious oeuvre, the other thing that strikes me is my supreme confidence. Look at that Author’s Note: You have made a wise choice. I wish I had ten-year-old me doing my PR these days. I do remember, as soon as I got home, starting to write a family story set in Derry. No ponies, no kittens, no country cottages. It was my first foray into gritty urban realism. It has not survived. Maybe just as well. 

Hiraeth by Steve Gladwin

This month, to celebrate my two year anniversary as an abba blogger, (I know. Doesn’t it?) I’ve decided to do something different. For once I’m not going to waffle on but invite you, the reader, to use what follows as a reflection space. I hope that in doing so you will be able to find just a little bit of quiet in your every day and it might then encourage you to do more of the same and grab a few more opportunities than you usually do.

Before I do that however,  I need to talk about the Welsh concept of Hiraeth.

Hiraeth is one of those indefinable words – impossible to actually pin down and yet we know its essence when the word is both spoken and described to us. It is variously - longing, yearning, seeking or wishing to recapture someone or something which has gone. There are correlations with similar words and definitions in other languages, but being more of an instinctive person than a wikipedia one, I prefer to leave it to the individual. 

My own first experience of Hiraeth was rather an odd one. A few months before I moved from Somerset to Wales, I attended a friend’s book launch in Glastonbury. I bought a copy of his book and made like a fan so he could sign it. What he wrote in it was this.

‘Lift high the cup of Hiraeth.’

He doesn’t remember writing it, or where the inspiration to do so came from, but long before I knew the word, those few words of John's had managed to convey and even predict the future I would have when I moved here to Meifod and the beautiful Vyrnwy Valley – an ever changing web of inspiration and sadness, beauty and loss.

I love Wales and especially the place I live, but it is often hard. Sometimes that’s just how it is – the places we love are those that most challenge us. I remember standing by the bridge when I first arrived and wondering where the sadness I was feeling was coming from. When I found out about the concept of Hiraeth, it all began to make sense.

The myths and stories of Wales are full of sadness of course. In one of the most famous, the story of Branwen, Daughter of Lir, the second ‘branch’ of the collection called the Mabinogi, there is a famous sequence involving a singing head. Essentially, Bran’s disembodied head keeps the only seven survivors of a great battle both entertained and enchanted for over eighty years, until one of them Heiliyn Gwyn, opens the door to the West. In doing so he lets in not just the natural elements but the power and sadness of all the terrible memories that the enchantment has so far held at bay.

Perhaps there is nothing quite so sad as a good spell that has been prematurely broken, especially if the reasons for casting it in the first place have been kindly and therapeutic. We cannot unmake the past and our sadness no matter how much we might wish to. Only the arts are able to do this and perhaps in doing so, gift us with a therapeutic base on which to build our future. Literature is full of sadness and occasionally there are places where the sad and those not quite healed of their griefs and the horrors and traumas they have witnessed, can go. I wonder whether Tolkien was aware of the concept of Hiraeth because in The Grey Havens he surely provided a place where the ring bearers, as well as the retiring elves, might be able to escape from it.

And so much of music too, in all its forms and varieties, is about sadness, about relationships failing and unrequited love. At the beginning of the film of Nick Hornby’s, High Fidelity, Rob, the main character played by John Cusack, reflects on whether parents ever really understand just how dangerous it might be to allow their children to listen to all that stuff about love and death. The answer, I suppose, is that of course they do, as they probably did the same thing themselves.

Maybe there is something to be said for such a form of therapeutic sadness, exposing us all to the ideas from an early age through the eyes and minds of others, so that by the time we come to realise it for ourselves, we will be that much readier. And of course that's what you find in so many fairy and traditional tales, and why it is all the more vital that children continue to read and engage with them.

This time last year I posted about my partner and her on-going struggles and about how this connected with the futurelearn course I was doing on mental health in literature. I was very moved by the many responses, but even gladder to share people’s recommendations for poetry which reflected the many aspects of this, and how they felt. It was the power of poetry which on that one occasion most helped Rosie and which, I have read - time and time again – has done the same for others.

So here are a few pictures of the place where I live in Wales, and where the gift of Hiraeth is sometimes overwhelming.  Perhaps you can think of some lines of poetry which any of these images remind you of, or you might simply take the space to reflect on the idea of Hiraeth and maybe with it the places, people or memories which particularly tug at you.

Of course it might also encourage you to dig through your own photo collection and find the ones which most evoke such feelings and maybe some poetry which goes with it.  Thanks everyone for the last two years and I'm looking forward to more.

​

Steve Gladwin - 'Grove of Seven' and 'The Year in Mind'

Writer, Performer and Teacher

Author of 'The Seven' and 'The Raven's Call'

www.stevegladwin.co.uk

Memory as Rescue Dig - Cathy Butler

1985 is history. It’s almost thirty years ago, for goodness’ sake – hardly anyone alive today was even born then.

It was in that long-ago year that the children’s writer Robert Westall, who had made his name a decade earlier with his novel The Machine-Gunners, published Children of the Blitz. Children of the Blitz was a collection of memories, the voices of Westall’s contemporaries who (like him) had been children during World War II. As Westall saw it, that generation was already dying out, and with it their memories of what had been the most dramatic years of many of their lives. He described the book as “a hurried, scattered rescue dig”, to preserve those memories for posterity.

It’s twenty-eight years later now, and Westall himself has been dead for twenty of them. My mother, five years older than him, had her 89^th birthday a couple of days ago. She’s in good health considering, and her mind is sharp as a bodkin; but 89, as she is well aware, is a fair old age.

I’ve always enjoyed listening to her talk about her memories from the 1940s and before, though she’s tended to be a little reticent about them. “Young people’s eyes glaze over when I mention the War,” she told me a while ago. “Mine don’t glaze over!” I replied. “They light up!” I try to speak with her about those times, for a little while at least, whenever I see her – my own rescue dig, I suppose. Many of the things she remembers are the stuff of public history: doodlebugs, V2s, Myra Hess giving recitals at the National Gallery. Have you seen the pictures of the crowds outside Buckingham Palace on VE day? One of those faces is my mother’s.

But I like better still the glimpses that I could find nowhere else. Like being a young child in Wrexham some time in the late 1920s, and seeing the lamplighter come down the road with his long pole. Or the little hiding place beneath the floorboards of the kitchen, nicknamed Togoland by her brother and sister. Sitting on back of her father’s Shire horse (he was a haulier at the time) and doing the splits. Or the way that nature came to take over the bombsites in London during the War, so that a woman accosted her in the street, exclaiming, “Willowherb in Bloomsbury – imagine!”

There are more rounded anecdotes, too, of course – lots of them, and many brought to a high polish through years of handling. (For example, there was the time she sent a friend who worked in the Palace a risqué poem about the Virgin Sturgeon only to have it intercepted by Princess Elizabeth, with the hilarious result that – ah, but we would be here all day...) But I value just as much the things that are fragmentary, more like memories themselves, in all their ephemerality and miraculous survival. They don’t just give insight into history, they become part of one’s own experience, to the point where I may even forget what happened to whom.

That doesn't happen with my mother alone. One of my earliest memories is of watching my great-aunt on the morning of her twenty-first birthday, jumping up and down on the bed, her long red hair braided with sunlight, crying, “I’ve got the key of the door!” Of course, that memory is not mine directly. It was my grandmother’s first – who died before I was born – and she passed it to my father, who handed it on down. I treasure it just as I would any other heirloom. It’s of no great value or interest to anyone else, perhaps, but precious to me. It’s history; it happened today.

Happy Birthday, Great-Aunt Suzie. Have a good 1901.

Snapshots

Recently I found myself thinking about my earliest memory. It is a snapshot from a time before I had much in the way of language and it has worked itself from the moorings of anything else I was experiencing at that time of my life and floats freely now in the stream of my imagination. As a writer, it is a scene I find interesting precisely because of its lack of moorings, because it throws up questions and starts me thinking of the possibilities of its context.

So much of the memory is clear and sharp. I can see, hear, feel and taste things as though I were experiencing them this instant. The first thing I see is bars – cot bars. This immediately throws up the first question: how old am I? I must be less than two, as I know that I had to vacate the cot for my younger sister who came along about two years after me. But I am sitting up, so I am not a small baby. As I let the scene run in my mind’s eye I realize I can hear crying, and that it is me making the noise. So, I have been left in my cot and I am crying. But why? I am still very small, arguably too small to be left crying like this. I then hear that the crying is not particularly convincing. It has in fact reached a point where I am simply moaning the word “Mummy” over and over again at a subdued pitch. So possibly I have given up hope on anyone coming to see what I am crying about. I then realize I have already cried too long and too much by this point. I have come to the memory at the point where I have almost cried myself out; my eyes are swimming with tears, and my nose and mouth are full of tear-snot, that liquid which is thicker than tears and which comes at the end of a particularly long bout of weeping. I have managed to produce so much of it by now that I am blowing bubbles with it every time I say the word “Mummy”. My crying is slowly giving way to the creation of these bubbles as I watch, intrigued at how big I can make them. 

And then the memory ends, switches itself off as though I were watching a short video clip which is now finished. Did my mother come and get me? Had she left me for a long time because she had fallen asleep, exhausted by looking after a toddler while she was pregnant with my sister? Or perhaps someone else was looking after me that day? If so, did they feel bad when they finally came to me and saw how much and how long I had cried? Or was I in reality only crying for a matter of minutes anyway, my sense of abandonment amplified by my lack of an understanding of the passage of time?

As I thought about this memory, I realized that my writing often starts like this, with a scene or a snapshot of a character, and then the whys and wherefores, the what ifs and how comes are what set the cogs whirring and thus the story into motion. Without an initial image or soundbite, I do not have a hook on which to hang my story.

My book Monkey Business started with a voice in my ear, that of the hippy uncle character, Zed. I heard him muttering one day, talking to his nephew, Felix, and explaining how Nature has its own rhythm without recourse to watches or clocks. Suddenly a scene was there, fully formed, and I could work outwards from that to create the rest of the book – a story essentially about a little boy who worships his uncle and shares his love of animals and how this, coupled with a large dollop of misunderstanding, gets the characters into some tricky situations. I had wanted to write about a boy like Felix for a while, but had not known how to start the story until Zed turned up.

My most recent book, I’m A Chicken Get Me Out of Here! had a similar beginning. After a night of anxiety when one of our chickens did not come home to roost (but did thankfully appear the next day unscathed) I began to wonder how she had survived. I was turning this over in my mind when my son's friend asked if he could bring his guinea pig round to our house to meet our chicken. This meeting sparked off a scene in my imagination where the fictional chicken arrives at her new home to find she is expected to share a hutch with an OCD guinea pig called Brian. Once I had scribbled down my imagined scenario, the rest of the story found its way, spreading its tentacles outwards from that snapshot.

Even though snapshots such as these kickstart a story, they rarely find their way on to page one of the finished story; more often than not they will worm their way into the middle of the book, and beginnings are often written once I have got to the end.

So I thought I would throw this out into the ABBA ether – how many of you start with a scene or an image? And how many prefer to work in a more linear way? Answers on the back of a snapshot, please.

www.annawilson.co.uk

Is There Chowder Still for Tea? Cathy Butler

Penelope Lively’s career is an interesting one. The first few novels she published – scattered through the 1970s – were for children. They're all good, but three I think of as classics: A Stitch in Time, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, and The House in Norham Gardens. However, from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s she began to write adult novels, and has been doing so successfully ever since without having written another full-length children’s novel.

That isn’t the interesting part, though. It’s not very unusual for female writers of Lively's generation to begin by writing children’s novels and move on to books for adults. (Examining the reasons for this would demand another post.) No, the interesting thing is that when Lively switched from children’s to adult books, she also switched from fantasy to realist writing. The two moves are connected. As a realist writer, her continual theme has been memory: personal memory, communal memory as enshrined in history and popular belief; and the more objective forms of memory etched on the land in the form of geology, fossils and archaeology.

While geology, archaeology and fossils also make their appearances in Lively’s children’s books, the theme of personal memory looms far smaller, and for an obvious reason. Whatever resources children may have at their disposal, one thing they lack is the ability to look far into the past using the tricky fairground mirror of their own memory. This is not to say, as is occasionally claimed, that children are wholly orientated towards the future. Anyone who has heard a five-year-old sigh wistfully about “The good old days” will recognize that as nonsense. However, even though children can be as intensely nostalgic and curious about the past as anyone else, they necessarily have less material to work with, having spent fewer days on the planet. When Lively wrote children’s books, she got around this problem (though I doubt she was thinking of it in quite this way) by introducing fantasy devices – timeslips, ghosts, talismanic artefacts – that would give her child characters access to a more distant past than memory alone could afford them. Once she moved to adult books, the necessity for this receded – hence the change of genre. At any rate, that’s my theory.

Why I am mentioning all this? Largely because by the time you read this post I will be on my way to Boston, whence (after a few days) I will be visiting Martha’s Vineyard. When I was younger I was lucky enough to spend three magical summers in a row on the Vineyard, the last being in 1993 – twenty years ago.  If I were writing my life as a novel (and who isn’t, dear reader?), I’d be trying to conjure up the difference between Now-me and Then-me, as well of course as charting the distance between the Now and Then versions of the Vineyard, and describing the refractions and occlusions of memory rolling in like a fog from Nantucket Sound. But these are very adult-novel subjects, for the reasons I’ve suggested.

So, my question to you, as I eat my in-flight ready meal and settle down to watch Toy Story II, is this. Which children’s books best handle the subject of personal memory, and the differences between past and present? And (given that children, by definition, haven’t been around very long) how do they go about it?