Of Mice and Memories
Things are changing. A year lost to sorrow recedes into the distance and I am cleaning up and clearing out the house I grew up in. This will be a summer of stepping back and moving on. There is a great deal of work to be done sifting and sorting papers; my father’s archive needs taming and ordering. There is such a lot of it, much layered with dust in the further reaches of the attic. Dust and the early history of the counterculture.
On the one clear day of the Jubilee bank holiday, I went with friends to the house. They began gardening. The garden needs as much ordering as the archive – it is a church of little light under the steepling trees.I dived into the wealth of papers and began to clear some space. The long day passed. My father returned to London and then, in amongst a pile of addled, raddled and mice-ridden jiffy bags, I discovered a cache of handwritten manuscripts of my mother’s poetry (only one of which the mice had got to (it was her poem about the Peruvian flute made of human bone, and it too had been shaved down to the essentials)) and a collection of photos. Of us. Of the family, all my life ago.
In the photos, I too am shaved down to the bare essence of life – I must be three months old; these are the photos taken when we moved to the cottage, in a thumb offshoot of Slad at the heart of Cider with Rosie country. The house, now heavy with jasmine and boxed in by privet and yew, looks bare and young and clean.
My parents too; they hold their bodies like saplings, my mother sharp and fluid as a willow, my father a little more knotted, with a beard as aggressive as ivy. The land is bare; an apple tree, a few distant saplings; light. The black and white prints are light-subsumed, with only a few figures standing out in dark relief.I am caked in dust, encased in a skin of the past, sat at the top of the narrow curve of attic stairwell, my tea going cold. In the distance I hear chainsaws and laughter, the noise of change. I get up and go downstairs. In the front room, the new curtains are drawn. I walk to the front door and find myself surrounded by light, subsumed in it.
One small section of the garden has travelled backwards, has been shaved down to an earlier state. Photographs and present day have merged, become palimpsest. The yew trees lour above us, but this is a small, bare and fruitful Eden – the earth is dark and rich with neglect, the brutal, invasive stems of nettle and mint are tamed. The apple tree has been cut down.
New knowledge needs planting out.
This blog post ended up becoming a part of my book, A Thousand Laurie Lees…
