Images from a Shed

Here are a few pictures/sketches which emerged from my shed at Benjamins Cottage in Kelling in 2013. I confess to a certain nostalgia for the shed, the location, the quietude.

The song is “Shady Lane” by Snowgoose. I found it on the July 2012 “Now Hear This” compilation of new releases which came with the now sadly defunct “Word” music magazine. This was a fine publication: music old and new, with in-depth interviews and  deep knowledge delivered with panache.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

“I found I was standing before acres of ploughed earth. There was a fence keeping me from stepping into the field, with two lines of barbed wire, and I could see how this fence and the cluster of three or four trees above me were the only things steadying the wind for miles. All along the fence, especially along the lower line of wire, all sorts of rubbish had caught and tangled. It was like the debris you get on the sea shore: the wind must have carried some of it for miles and miles, before finally coming up against these trees and their two lines of wire. Up in the branches of the trees, too, I could see, flapping about, torn plastic sheeting and bits of old carrier bags. That was the only time, as I stood there looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming accross those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was Norfolk after all.. I was thinking about the rubbish, the flapping plastic in the branches, the shore-line of odd stuff caught along the fencing, and I half-closed my eyesand imagined that this was the spot where everything I’d lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it..”

These are the words of Kathy H., the narrator of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go. She reflects on her solitude after the demise of her lover Tommy, and her progression towards the gruesome destiny defined by society for her and her closest friends. When I lived on that same Norfolk coast, at the time believing that this place indeed was where I also had washed up,  I knew they had to belong, at least geographically, to this Miscellany.

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Kazuo Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go

This novel by Kazuo Ishiguro has details of boarding-school existence which captures some truths for those who have gone through the experience. The formation of cliques, the petty rivalries, the attachment to benevolent teachers, the management of feelings in a parent-free environment are all in the mix, and it is this mix that key individuals discover and explore their core humanity, in spite of the controlling regimentation of daily life. But the novel is not, of course, only or even at all about boarding school existence.

Kathy is a thirty-one year old carer. Those for whom she cares, as we soon discover, are a special set of people, of whom she is one. She is good at her job – she has been doing it for eleven years. But now she is about to give it up for what is, it turns out, to be the beginning of the last phase of her life.  We find her now, reflecting back over that life, and its unique experiences. She calls to mind her days at Hailsham, the idyllic boarding school she went to and which had a major influence on her later years.

But we soon find out, through arcane references and the odd vocabulary that peppers Kathy’s narrative, that Hailsham was no ordinary school, in fact not quite a school at all. It is recogniseable as a boarding school, but differs from the norm in fundamental ways.  A key difference, we soon learn, is that the children here have no parents to go home to, and so that important rhythm of mixing different worlds, is lost to them.

Some of the teachers are distant, uncomfortable with the children. The unspoken secret between controllers and controlled weighs heavy. The punishment for Miss Lucy, who one day reveals all to the class, is immediate dismissal. The class, however, is strangely muted at the revelation. It is a secret which remains unwelcome and quiety shelved as life, of a kind, continues.

But in this mix, Kathy’s friends Tommy and Ruth want to discover more about their destiny. As they grow older, they find themselves working through their emotional bonds which grow from the seeds planted in their time at Hailsham, and it is this love story of possessiveness and then self-sacrifice that provides the background to our exploration of the parallel political, social and emotional world of the novel.

Paths from a White Horse

As an introduction to an author of whom I had been hitherto ignorant, this one was a gentle and pleasant surprise. In April 2012 I was in the Salvation Army shop in Histon, near Cambridge. I believe us males, when pushed by wives or by circumstance into such stores, are known always to make a bee-line for the CD racks or the bookshelves. This wintery February day was no exception for me as I made for the far end of the warm mustiness within. My eyes scanned the row of books before me,. I checked out the covers on the few volumes which had been chosen for special display. As I did so, a rather fine-looking tome caught my gaze – a hardback with a deep green cover with the unmistakable image of the Uffington White Horse emblazoned upon it. I was looking at the cover of Peter Vansittart’s “Paths From a White Horse”, his memoirs.

I paid my 50p and felt enriched. All things associated with this iconic figure deliver to me warm feelings of connection.  Never mind that I had no idea who this man was, shame on me ( * … but see below). But the opening paragraph of the memoirs made sure I knew I was in good company. Here was a man who knows was it is like to have this creature embedded in his consciousness.

“1923: I was three. A White Horse lay bare and solitary, cut into a hillside. It changes whenever I return to it, like a book, painting, friend, but remains fixed in my imagination, a reminder of the multiple transformations that enthuse life. All is provisional. Memory contracts and enlarges as if in a dream that does not cease in the morning”.

Vansittart’s words resonate. Being North Berkshire (now Oxfordshire) bred, and with various members of my extended family living in villages in the Vale of the White Horse, how could they not? The image of this unique creature was and is everywhere: on milk bottles, vans, church magazines, dry cleaners’ shop fronts, cafes. Living away from the downland on which the hill is dominant, my early experience was always of the printed image, which beguiled me.

 It was to be many years before I could stand on the hill itself, for reasons which I still hardly understand. But travelling on the A420 from the age of six, in the truck  laden with pigs and driven by my father to the slaughterhouse at  Stratton-St-Margaret, I had glimpses on the unmistakable contours of the hill. On good days, I could make sense of the fleeting outline of the beast itself, always incomplete, always demanding a closer look. My father is not here to tell me why he never took time to take me to get that closer look. I had to wait for boarding-school days. But I have a lesson from Vansittart when I read this:

“Adults seemed strangely unaware of the White Horse, or reluctant to mention it. Here, already, was the first of the countless secrets that helped to awaken me. The Horse, existing without breathing or eating, though, in days of shadow and sun, it sometimes appeared to move, seemed mysteriously more real than an actual white horse assiduously cropping the pastures.”

In those few words, I am given permission to believe absolutely in the value of symbols.

White Horse Hill, Uffington June 2010

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* .. or perhaps not. This is the intro to the obituary by the Daily Telegraph

Peter Vansittart, who has died aged 88, was among the most prolific writers of historical fiction, with 15 such novels to his credit; but while he attracted much critical acclaim his books achieved only modest commercial success, none selling more than 3,000 copies.

“My novels have been appreciated, if not always enjoyed, more by critics than the reading public, which shows no sign of enjoying them at all,” he ruefully observed. “This must be partly due to my obsession with language and speculation at the expense of narrative, however much I relish narrative in others.” >>> more

Read more in; Peter Vansittart Biography – Peter Vansittart comments: – London, Owen, York, and Historical – JRank Articles