Remembering the dead

My cousin died by his own hand ten years ago today, aged 22.  This is a poem I wrote for him then.  Nothing has changed.


Prawle Point

Don’t imagine for a moment

that I didn’t think of you

just because the sun spilt honey

and the tumbling lanes drowsed,

mesmerised by flowers.

True, my memory tripped

like wind through wheat fields,

chasing Chinese whispers, wild rumours,

only to eddy on itself

as we stumbled down the blinded combe

towards your crucible of fleet, elusive dreams,

where, beyond a crest of hawthorn,

a cormorant kept the look-out

from its lonely pedestal.

Basalt angel?  Reliquary urn?

My eyelid flickered in the glare. 

Fifteen days ago we launched

your narrow, wooden boat.

Flags flapped low, taut wires and lines

against high masts tolled your passing.

And one black cardigan, forgotten,

lifted from a railing on the breeze,

as hapless – hopeless – as the sail

of the Athenians’ homebound ship.

Deborah Harvey © 2001, 2011

'The Darkling Thrush' by Thomas Hardy: a reading

A reading of Thomas Hardy's poem by me, with illustration by Dru Marland.

Something blue

Some days you have to get away from it all. Especially when there's a R*yal W*dding.

It's not always easy, though.

Something old ...  

Ancient woodland in the Forest of Dean

Something new ...  

Ted, two years three months old

Something borrowed ... 

Companionship - me old mucker, Jill, with the commemorative plate she kindly made me to mark the day 

Some dead shrew.

OK, OK - something blue ... 

   

Tipping the balance

It’s been an eventful few days.  On Thursday night I had a phone call from Daughter No 2 to say that she was stuck on a bus in the middle of Stokes Croft while a pitched battle raged on all sides.  The road was closed, there were police with riot shields everywhere, and it was getting hairy.  Luckily, I hadn’t had much to drink so was able to drive down and extricate her. 

Apparently, 160 police, some of them drafted in from South Wales, were needed to help arrest four squatters whom security guards working at the brand new branch of Tescos (which most locals oppose) claimed were making petrol bombs.  The result was a pitched battle involving an estimated 300 protesters which lasted most of Thursday night.   

It's all starting to feel very much like the 80s.  

In contrast, the next day was lit up by the humanity of the Robert Lenkiewicz exhibition at the RWEA, followed by another jaunt on Saturday, chauffeuring my elder son to the O2 to see three Robot Wars shows.  (Being his Personal Assistant means that I get to drive all over the country in pursuit of his obsession, and whilst finding things to do in Barnsley on a freezing, wet Sunday afternoon in February can be a challenge, there’s no such problem with London.)  I had company too, in the shape of my younger son who had come along for the ride.  Unlike me, he’d already been to the Imperial War Museum but was keen to revisit, so that’s where we went.  

There was a lot to see that was disturbing, but the most horrifying part of our visit was the Holocaust exhibition.  Going round, I remembered the first time I ever heard that word and learnt what it meant.  I must have been in my very early teens, and was sat at our utility dining table doing my homework when Panorama came on.  It was such a shock. My brain couldn’t take in what it was seeing, and my assignment went undone.  Since then I’ve been to Dachau and Yad Vashem, but am still no closer to comprehending any of it.

Every day atrocity. You have to wonder what it will ever take for us to value our differences and live in peace.

Death and the Painter: Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives

On the way into the Royal Academy of the West of England’s latest exhibition, I misread the banner over the door.  ‘Robert Lenkiewicz Still Lives’, it declared.  I started.  But he died a few years back, at the horribly early age of 60 or so – didn’t he?

My momentary confusion is understandable given that Lenkiewicz did once fake his own death in order to publicise a forthcoming exhibition on that very topic.  I know this because every summer throughout the 70s and 80s when I was down in Devon and local newscasters were pleading nightly for somebody to contact them with news, Lenkiewicz’s eccentricities were constantly on screen.  Another of his more notorious acts that caused a huge stir was the post-mortem embalming of his friend and model, Edwin Mackenzie aka ‘Diogenes’, ‘for use as a human paperweight’. 

Add to this the scandal of many wives, lovers and children; a propensity to surround himself with vagrants and addicts; his apparent penury (although he ended up leaving over £6,000,000); such challenging subject-matter as mental disability, suicide, old age, and sexual behaviour; and, worst of all, the fact that his art is (whisper it) figurative, and it maybe isn’t surprising that it sometimes slips under the radar. 

But what a shame that this is the case.  I know little about art, so approach it with the most basic of requirements: what determines whether I find a work engaging or not is whether it excites an emotional response.  So whilst Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy leaves me cold and the Chapman Brothers soon pall, Lenkiewicz can exalt and humble me, charm and repel, arouse curiosity, concern and a determination to make the most of the time left to me. 

Death plays a major role in the work of all the above artists, but it is Lenkiewicz’s tenderness, the humanity with which he depicts our mortality, his refusal to avert his gaze, that is so affecting.  We too are made to look upon Death, not just in the form of ubiquitous memento mori (skulls and hovering intimations of figures on the edges of his canvases), but also literally in the case of Diogenes, naked but for his dignity, and as distant in time as Lindow Man or an Egyptian Mummy.  I was reminded of Yossarian’s assertion in Catch-22 (the film, I think, rather than the book): ‘Well, he died. You don't get any older than that.’ 

Good, then, to see the old man alive and sparkling elsewhere in the exhibition, gazing out of this and that work, alone or with his fellow vagrants or the artist himself.  There is a joyous defiance in so many of Lenkiewicz’s sitters – the self-possessed young Muses, lovers and offspring; the elderly who return your gaze with equanimity; the terminally sick and the disabled who dare you to glance away.  It is when his subjects look askance that I feel alarm and discomfiture – the parents of disabled children, whose situation I can identify with so well; those close to death who don’t look back, who seem already to have slipped behind an invisible glass screen.    

And Lenkiewicz’s own gaze fixed unwaveringly on things we might prefer not to examine closely, such as the subject matter of the diptych Still-Born Child in Kitchen.  In one panel there is an almost burly-looking, purplish newborn lying in a bowl, still attached to its placenta, against a sterile and mechanical backdrop of white kitchen appliances; in the other, members of the artist’s family, including very young children, standing and sitting around while the artist avidly stuffs raw umbilical cord into his mouth, the remainder of the placenta flopping on his lap like a grotesquely swollen scrotum.  I struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, when I would have preferred to turn away.  Is the father celebrating the birth of his dead baby? Is he celebrating its death? Given that it is part of a project, does the diptych have a wider symbolic significance, or is it just a fellatory joke?

A revelation to me was Lenkiewicz’s mastery of light.  The highlights in a young woman’s hair, the fringes of another’s shawl, the satiny sheen of a coat lining all sensuously, deliciously depicted.  Also, the extent to which he was in thrall to the Great Masters: work after work described as being influenced by this or that painting in the National Gallery, which Robert had haunted as a young man.  I plan to go on a bit of an odyssey with him over the next few months, and also to return to the exhibition at least once more before it closes at the end of May.  For all that it is about death, this is the stuff of life and living.  

Making the Earth Move

After Friday’s trip to the southernmost peak on Dartmoor, I felt inclined to visit the northernmost, Cosdon Hill, for a long time believed to be the highest point on Dartmoor until accurate methods of measuring revealed Yes Tor and High Willhayes to be higher.  I had a second reason also: the feasting accompanying Son the Younger’s 17^th birthday the previous day meant that I had some atonement to do.  A serious climb would make me feel less gluttonous.

Ted and I started out at South Zeal, right on the edge of the moor.  After passing the brick chimney and spoil heaps of the disused copper mine on Ramsley Hill, we climbed steeply onto open ground and began to make our way around the side of Cosdon.   

This is a walk characterised by Bronze Age remains and the first set we encountered was The Graveyard – not my usual sort, attached to a church, but three parallel rows of stones processing up to three larger ones at the head, beyond which lies the tumbled slabs of a double kist or ancient burial chamber. 

It was such a beautiful day, and we were so gloriously alone, that Ted and I sat quietly for a time and listened, first to trickling larksong and then, when it stopped, the breeze and the mewing of a pair of buzzards rafting the up-draught.  For any Plathians who stumble across this account, the views we were enthralled by are almost certainly those described by Sylvia in ‘Ariel’ and ‘Sheep in Fog’. And who knows, maybe this is one of Ariel's descendants, having a good scratch.

The next stage of our walk involved the skirting of Raybarrow Pool, one of the largest and most treacherous mires on the moor, via the deep-cut mediaeval peat path. 

After a while it tends to ‘peater’ out into bog, although the recent spell of dry weather meant that the going was nowhere near as wet as usual.  That said, at one point Ted and I still had to divert some way up onto the saddle of land between Cosdon and Little Hound Tor, before regaining our original route lower down.   

Then another ancient site – the White Moor stone circle – came into view ahead of us.  As this was Ted’s first visit, I was interested to see what he would make of it.  Some people claim to feel a tingling like an electric shock when they touch any part of a stone circle, and folk tales persist of horses jibbing when asked to cross them.  No such problems for my irreverent dog, although surprisingly he did fail to mark his territory. 

According to my book of walks, this was the furthest point of our foray, but no way were Ted and I going to stop there, as a little further on stands White Moor stone, an ancient menhir which has also served as a boundstone for many centuries.  We reached it in a few moments.  Again, no cocking from Ted.  Curious. 

I still didn’t feel ready to head for home, away from the hypnotic heart of the moor, and neither did Ted, so we continued for an extra mile and a half, first to Hound Tor (that is, another Hound Tor, not the more impressive one to the south and east) and then Wild Tor, which we passed last summer when we walked out to Ted Hughes’ memorial stone. 

  

I climbed up onto one of the granite stacks to get a good shot of Taw Head and Hangingstone Hill, and only discovered it was a logan stone or nutcracker when it started rocking under my feet.  Figuring that the moment the earth moves was probably as good as it was going to get, I persuaded Ted that it was finally time to turn back.

So we retraced our steps to the stone circle and then continued on over Little Hound Tor and Cosdon to the beacon and trig point at its summit. 

I know I always claim this, but on a clear day there is a fabled view from here which encompasses both the English Channel and the distant Severn Sea.  Today it was far too hazy to see anything much  - even Wild Tor, less than three miles away, was barely discernible.   I didn’t mind, though; if anything, horizons disappearing into mist only enhance Dartmoor’s isolate, otherworldly atmosphere.  I was reminded of Ted Hughes’ memorable description of Dartmoor and Exmoor in ‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’ as ‘two stone-age hands/cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering’, and I felt lifted up with them. 

As we headed back down the northern side of Cosdon, South Zeal with its distinctive mediaeval burgage plots came back into view.  

A short detour from our route took Ted and I down through the village, with time for a brief stop in St Mary’s, the tiny Chapel of Ease in the middle of the high street.

On the way back to the coast I ignored the sat nav’s advice to take the A30 and A380 and returned via the lovely Wrey valley.  After 10 miles across challenging terrain I felt lulled rather than exhausted. Now to find a way of feeling as free and alive in my daily routine as I do on Dartmoor.  

Beating the Bounds

As far as visiting Dartmoor is concerned, Easter is my New Year, and the first visit to my patch a taking stock of the months that have passed since the previous one, and of those to come. 
The biscuit tin by the sea is only five minutes from the beach, but being contrary, my first footing has to be on Dartmoor. To that purpose, Ted and I were up and out early(ish) last Friday despite the grey and misty weather.  

At Harford Gate, we rendez-voused with my co-worker Ellie, her partner, Vicky, and their two Lab-Collie crosses, Teddy and Dougal, who were camping close by.

Our walk took us up onto the dismantled tramway that runs from the former Red Lake China Clay pits, high on the moor, to Ivybridge. This offered easy walking below Hangershell Rock and Weatherdon Hill, with the added advantage of avoiding cattle which both Ellie and Ted (my Ted) dislike. 

This is a dead thing I saw – an (extraordinarily well-endowed) shrew. (Or maybe they are all that well hung?)

We then climbed to the cairns south of Butterdon Hill and strolled along the ridge to Western Beacon, the southernmost peak on Dartmoor.  

From here there’s often a spectacular view of the coast, but today it was murky.  Though we agreed that Dartmoor is best viewed in a mantle of cloud, and as it was Ellie and Vicky’s first walk there, it was as well they saw it in all its brooding magnificence.        

We then wandered back to the car, stopping off on the way at Butter Brook, where the dogs had a good splash and a play, and the humans teetered over the stepping stones. 

Having said goodbye to our friends,Ted and I popped into Harford’s Church of St Petroc.  Best feature was the rugged cross in the churchyard, a former wayside cross ‘rediscovered’ in 1909 being used as a gatepost. 

Later, back at Holcombe, my son Samuel, Ted and I went for our traditional evening walk a short way along the coast path and back via footpaths and fields – a sort of literal and spiritual beating of the bounds.

We were too early for the bats which throng the lane from dusk, but Ted alerted me to our first swallow of the year as it fluttered seductively past. Another first was this whitethorn in one of the more sheltered spots on the coast path, its gorgeous, sexy perfume so much more alluring than the pong of alexanders, lamentably ubiquitous this time of year. 

The fields were sprouting with some cereal crop, while the bluebell wood was still relentlessly green.  It will look spectacular in a couple of weeks’ time, but alas, I shall be in Bristol and shan't see it.