A Tale of Three Erics

The winter of 1981-82 was freezing. I was living in Morecambe, Lancashire at the time. The attic room I rented for, I think, £6 or maybe £6.50 per week, had purple walls - 'like the inside of a Ladyshave box', one fellow-student quipped - which were so damp, mushrooms started growing all across them. One day we borrowed a thermometer off some physics students and took the temperature in the bathroom, which had a broken window. It was minus 18°C. Then our horrible landlord, who would walk into our bedrooms unannounced, decided to store a load of bricks in the bath, so we couldn't use it anyway.

Since I was only one year old during the fabled winter of 1962-63, 1981-82 is the coldest winter I can remember.

And it was dire. We had to go to the pub to use the toilets when all the pipes in the house froze. We took to bunking down on the floors of students lucky enough to have rooms on campus to try to get warm. I developed a hacking cough, which became a chest infection, which caused a weakness that was to plague me for some winters to come. My boyfriend broke up with me. Worse yet, I took him back a short while later, and - a few years after that - married him. And yet ... and yet ... there were things about Morecambe that winter that I loved. The bleakness of the bay - all those soft greys all the way to the horizon that were so easy on my eyes, and reminded me, somehow, of my beloved Dartmoor. The huge rise and fall of the tides that were remiscent of my native river, the Severn. And across the bay, the mountains of the Lake District, capped with snow for months on end. 

They weren't snowy yesterday - the first time I'd been back in 42 years - but my heart sang to see them again. Morecambe! Not the most beautiful place I've ever been to, but with one of the best views, even on a hot summer day. 

The Northerner, my blessedly lovely now-partner, and I didn't realise dogs aren't allowed on either the North or South beaches until we'd wandered from the Battery as far as the Midland Hotel, but since we clearly weren't disturbing anyone, we decided not to worry about it.

I must not start collecting gull feathers, I must not start collecting gull feathers ... 

`

... but curlew and oystercatcher feathers? Of course.

We stopped for a coffee in the 1930s extravaganza that is the Midland Hotel, largely because I wanted to see the artworks by Eric Gill, which had been in danger of being lost in the early 1980s, such was the delapidated state of the hotel, but which have now been saved and restored.

The frontage

Eric Gill's seahorses ...

... which look like they've been rather too free with the collagen lip injections. (Carved in situ by Gill and Donald Potter.)

The main staircase reminded us both of our local 1930s edifice, New Filton (Pegasus) House, which is part of Airbus and was completed a year earlier, in 1932.

Medallion featuring Neptune and Triton, designed and carved by Eric Gill and painted by Denis Tegetmeier, his son-in-law 

Bas-relief carved in situ by Gill, depciting Odysseus being welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa, as the epitome of hospitality 

My favourite artwork was the map of the coastline from Birkenhead (far right) to Whitehaven (far left). Such a strange perspective, and so whimsical and quirky, with the Midland right at its very centre. 

And yes, I know it's Eric Gill, and yes, I know he's problematic, to put it mildly:  being a fan of the Arts and Crafts Movement, I read Fiona MacCarthy's revelatory biography as soon as it was published in 2011 and was duly appalled, but at the same time, I love Picasso's art despite his apparent psychopathy, and Degas' despite his anti-semitism, and Gauguin's despite his propensity to impregnate underage Polynesian girls and give them syphilis; likewise, I admire Ezra Pound's 'The Cantos' and love 'Tarka the Otter' by Henry Williamson, though they were fascist sympathisers both. I believe works of art transcend their makers, and should stand on their own merit, though there's always a line to be drawn, and for me it's at J K Rowling, whose dangerous behaviour is happening right now. Not another penny of mine will finance her persecution of trans people.

 

Seahorse mosaic, desighed by Marion Dorn

The other art I would have loved to have seen in the Midland Hotel was the mural painted by the second Eric of the day, Ravilious, on the circular wall in the cafe, but the plaster it was painted on was poorly finished and it was lost a couple of years after it was completed, which was long before my time. 

Another thing that was missing was the Central Pier ... gone! Apparently, it caught fire in 1991 and was demolished the next year after being deemed unsafe - the second pier Morecambe lost, following the demolition of the West End pier in 1978, after it had sustained serious storm damage. And you know what they say about piers: to lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. 

And yet there was some new art, much of it bird-based. I adored these - well, I'm not sure if they're cormorants or shags, but they're lovely and I wanted one, but they were quite firmly fixed to their posts.

And we went to see Eric no 3, of course; Eric Morecambe, who died the day after my finals finished in May 1984. The flag at Lancaster University was flown at half mast.

More cormorants/shags at the entrance to the stone jetty ... 

... and along its length ... 

... plus this brooding 'Mythical Bird', near the lighthouse. I loved all of it. I wouldn't go so far as to say Morecambe's been gentrified since my last visit, but it certainly feels like it's loved these days, and that's far better. 

Blinking in the light

Somewhere in one of the boxes of photos under my bed, there must be a picture of my friend, Angela Prior-Kimball, and me together, when we first knew each other at Lancaster University in the early 80s, but for a reason that has nothing to do with our friendship, I still haven't mustered the inclination to unearth them.  So here we are not together, Angela having taken the second photo, of which I was completely oblivious, at the 1983 graduation ball. 

On the face of it, our friendship was somewhat unlikely. Angela was ebullient, with a can-do attitude - to the last, as it turned out. She was good at tennis - her nickname at the time was Angela Prior-Lloyd-Bum (Lloyd after the then Chris Evert Lloyd) - and even then she had a fascination with fashion, and impressive boundaries. I, on the other hand, was bookish, definitely not sporty or fashionable, and riddled with insecurities. 

One episode I remember - which Angela had forgotten, although she appreciated it when I told her the last time I saw her - involved a rabbit fur coat my father had given me, which had been given to him by a former client from when he'd sold insurance. Of course, I wouldn't dream of wearing fur now, but this was the winter of 1981/2 , which was so cold it has its own Wikipedia entry, and I was steadily freezing to death in the west end of Morecambe, in a mouldy attic which was painted the colour of the inside of a Ladyshave box (as another friend memorably described it), so I suppressed a vague feeling of disquiet, and wore it. Until, that is, the night I bundled it into an alcove in what was then Lonsdale College bar, only for it to be gone when I came to catch the bus back to the Battery. 

Any relief I felt at not wearing rabbit skin over my own any more was swamped by anxiety at what my father might say when he found out I'd let the damn thing get stolen. I still wasn't fully reconciled to its loss when Angela turned up unexpectedly in my flat a few nights later and asked if I'd had any news of its whereabouts. I immediately launched into a description of where I'd looked, who'd been in the bar at the time, various false sightings, etc, only for her to start laughing and call me a silly moo because in my consternation, I hadn't noticed that it was draped around her shoulders. The landlord, it turned out, had put it behind the bar so that it wouldn't get nicked, but hadn't been there when I was looking for it, and had forgotten to tell me subsequently. Angela, though, like the Vintage Queen she was to become, had ferreted it out. 

Being a language student, I graduated a year later than Angela, in 1984, by which time she'd started her business, Heaven Vintage, and was rumoured to be managing a pop group. Within a few years I had multiple babies and she was appearing on The Clothes Show; then, by the mid 1990s, she was living in Miami and it seemed our paths had diverged for good ...

... though elsewhere, computer programmers were dreaming of a phenomenon called social media, and by 2011,  we'd re-forged our connection to the point where I dedicated a poem in Communion, my first poetry collection, to her. 

Even so, that might have been the extent of our rekindled friendship, were it not for a chance encounter in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2014. I was hurrying to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre to see Henry IV Part I with my partner; Angela was sitting in the sun with a friend on the corner of Sheep Street and High Street, and true to form, spotted me as I passed by, quite unaware, and shouted my name. 'I recognised you by your walk!' she declared, somewhat disconcertingly. 

After that, we kept in closer touch. My last two trips to see her in Coventry came after her diagnosis of Stage 4 ovarian cancer almost exactly two years ago. The first included a visit to the Cave of Wonders that was her flat on Blondvil Street, which address suited her to the ground.

On my second visit this September we sat in the sun by the River Sherbourne at Charterhouse, watching the bees in the Himalayan Balsam and eating ice cream. Angela was as indefatigable as ever, planning a huge vintage fair to raise money for a new treatment that isn't available on the NHS. As I was hoping to go, I thought there was every chance I'd see her again, but a dose of Covid (mine) and Angela's cancer colluded, and although the fair happened in November, another visit wasn't to be. 

So it goes. Solstice feels like a good time to write this. The year has turned, and we're all heading towards the light; it's just that my dear determined friend has beaten us to it.