Memories and their shadows

There are some recurring, involuntary, memories that have no shadows. The instance drops away into nothing. They are snapshots: the western corner of the junction of Addison Avenue with Holland Park Avenue, the northern junction of Campden Hill Road and Uxbridge Street with a view of the walkway that connected two warehouses or the part of Chiswick High Road vaguely opposite St Peter’s Square. There are no people, no action, simply these particular geographical locations recur as memories whenever I, so to say, idle.

There are other memories that have shadows that can be touched from the edge of the snapshot. I am riding in a Jaguar Mark Two over a flyover of the A4 at Cranford Park in London. The Jaguar is carmine, or is that a later play of words, deep cherry, is that another? Is there joking going on? There is no sound. Then, touching the shadow gives me the driver, a side-burned toper workmate in a firm called Cintec. Gives me that we are in 1971 on our way to Chelsea Football Club’s training ground to show them their last week’s match. This additional information is ninety nine per cent sure but the memory itself is simply a snapshot of two men in a Jaguar Mark Two.

There is another memory of that sort from the same time. An elderly man with a head-covering squats cross-legged on a bed in a house on Ernest Avenue, West Norwood. At the door of the room intrudes his enormous angry son, speaking to him in what I now believe to be a Balkan tongue. The son is my landlord, the house is five minutes away from Cintec. The shadow here is very obscure, it involves a story of a body in the garden, police — I can hardly credit it, nevertheless it is there, hanging at the edges of the clear enough memory of the elderly man living Balkan style in West Norwood.

I was a projectionist with Cintec. Their business was audio visual presentations and they had a sideline in converting Land Rovers into mobile cinemas for Africa. The Land Rover, green, long wheelbase, proud, sat in the yard by the big shed with a mezzanine in which we worked. As part of the deal, perhaps with the British Council, came a young, fat-faced Ghanian to learn how to operate the cinema side of the Land Rover. There was a harassed boss called Berwick; the foreman (an oldish electronics whizz who wore a white shirt and kept his hands in his pockets), a punchy black haired cockney called Colin and the toper with the Jaguar who had been thrown off film sound work for drink. Then there was the Ghanian and me, the two outriders.

Everything was analogue, mechanical. Cintec had developed a fast change system for twin Kodak slide carousels worked with powerful electro-magnets. There was a projector fed by a roll of celluloid on which drawings could be made and then by winding the celluloid a sequence slid across the screen. There was a huge, so called portable, thirty five millimetre projector that was my job to lug around.

They caught on quite quick that I was a bit of a twerp. I could just about handle the thirty five millimetre and I was allowed to do Chelsea after a bit. You showed them the film until the coach said stop. There was a thick glass filter that came down while the coach explained. You hoped not to smell burning. Afterwards the team ate huge steaks. Names? Sexton? Shilton?

They let me help with a big do at the Hilton, Park Lane. Every year Jeyes salesmen conferenced, sanitary freshener pumped thru the ventilation. Onstage district bosses made dummy phone calls to each other. At some point fifty men jumped up and started chanting we are the Brobat boys, we are the Brobat boys.

One morning I drove out to Fords at Dagenham starting in the black and coming into the twisted out-lands at dawn, to demonstrate a back projection booth for a promotional film loop for the new Cortina. I got a view of industry.

My last gig was in Birmingham showing a film about meat to a gross of butchers. I caught the roof of my van on a sprinkler head in an underground car park and on the way back south nearly lost it in a mesmerising motorway cone diversion that never seemed to end. From the mezzanine they saw the rut down the roof when I drove in. They let me go. All that played out against bed-sit time in the sinister house, with the angry foreign-speaking son and some hint somewhere of some trouble in the garden.

Tended carefully memory can be a delicate solvent that lets you down thru illuminated layers. It is what old people are meant to do, no? To see, at the end, a life constructed by enchainements of circumstance. Sometimes there are props for memory, which brings me to my post-office books. But first, why should anybody be interested? Only if the telling engages, only if it serves, or at least tickles, the reader.

Post-office books are money pass books. If you have money in your account the post office will give you money over the counter. They are neat blue booklets with waterproof plastic covers. On the first page at the top is listed where and when the book was issued or renewed. My series runs: October 1984 Edward Street Hebden Bridge, June 1985 c/o Azof Street Greenwich, January 1986 Park Avenue Hull, June 1986, same address, May 1992, same address, June 1992, same address, December 1992, same address, March 1993, same address. With a post office book you avoid the emotional sweat of asking for overdrafts — there were none. They were cleaner transactions. Each time you paid money in or drew it out they stamped the book with date and place so that they become, now, travel documents.

Edward Street runs straight and level from a road that climbs out of the valley. It ends in a wood with no vehicle access. Children play, women cut each other’s hair when it is fine, men mend cars. On October 16 I opened the book with a deposit of one hundred and sixty pounds. The following day I drew out fifty and the day after that fifty in Manchester. Then I went back to Hebden Bridge and drew out another twenty. On the 22nd I drew out twenty pounds at Todmorden, no doubt after a night shift at the fire station. On the 24th I was back in Manchester again and then there are no entries for six days altho I’d only drawn out fifteen pounds. Perhaps I was receiving hospitality.

It is possible that I was in Manchester to visit my daughters. In my dark blue leatherette Fire Brigade Union diary for that year their black and white photos are tucked in, hopeful faces. Behind is a letter heading for a Manchester art gallery, Castlefield. In the diary for the Manchester day is the name Sue Grayson with a phone number for the Palace Theatre. Sue Grayson, of course, now Sue Grayson Ford MBE, founder of the Serpentine Gallery, will have been a playmate met when I was with Welfare State International. A lunch date. A note in the diary says slides to South Square, a gallery at Thornton, Bradford that would show me in April 1985. Untucking, unfolding again: a National Express counterfoil for a coach journey between Cheltenham and Swindon on 26th May, a copy of a typed letter by me asking a builder to finish his work waterproofing at Edward Street, a building society receipt for the valuation fee for the same house, a membership card for National Union of Labour and Socialist Club and a card headed please give us a call from Scottish Finance (money lenders).

By October 30 I have run thru the money in the book. November 5 I deposit one hundred and eighty, taking out twenty the next day. On the 8th I take out fifty pounds at what looks like Leicester, fifty the next day at Oxford and sixty the day after from the same post office. I am in Oxford spending freely. Why? I was visiting provincial playhouses with the idea that thru their foyers passed people of culture who might buy my linocuts. At one time I identified all towns having an American Express and a Cathedral. My executory ideas were always more fantastic than my artworks. Or maybe the visit was to see Susan (see below). On November 12 Mick Blowers starts to paint the staircase walls a warm grey, I am having central heating put in, the Gas Board visits. There are no more withdrawals until December 12, nearly a month. There is nothing in the diary other than the regular cross marks of my tours of duty, two days, two nights.

On the Edward Street side the house is two storeys plus attic but at the back on Eiffel Street overlooking the town it is four storeys plus attic. The under dwelling, as they call it, is into the earth on the ground floor and I had it tanked. When I bought the house (from Martin Parr the photographer) I had hoped the potter I was with would take up her trade in the under dwelling. It was not to be.

July 5 note susan? note September 10 susan moves. October 10 note susan? November 27 susan goes to hospital nuneaton 8.30. To explain this I have to dig back: from April 29 to June 15 I had been at the Fire Service College at Moreton-in-the-Marsh. A squad of sixteen men, some away from home for the first time, the general feeling of national service except that we were all newly promoted. We had tests and exercises all day and at night we hit the local pubs. It was a fools paradise. I chose as a study for my end of course paper firefighting for airfields and in the College library I spotted a slim librarian with big hair and an inward gaze. Tantalising. Susan. We went to look at Chastleton house, grey and gaunt with shreds of the original family care-taking it, a long attic with a rocking horse where the children ran about when it rained. Outside, listening to the guide, our hands found each other. We made summary love in the gardener’s shed at Batsford Arboretum. Moonlight moulded her curves. There was innocence and pleasure but I am surprised now to see her picked out so often in the diary.

Chaotic, post-divorce, life in Hebden Bridge came to an end with a bang. Just before six on the morning of December 20 we were called from Todmorden to Summit Tunnel, a fire involving a train of thirteen four star petrol wagons. (I tell this story elsewhere). Within a week, altho my Station Officer urged me to book sick on the grounds of general mental dilapidation, I had handed in my notice. I thought I had been that quick but diary tells me that I waited to give notice until February 19, judging I was no longer fit to have other’s lives in my charge.

It took me twelve weeks after the Tunnel fire to follow thru the logic and close down my life in Hebden Bridge. On pages for December, diary shows me looking north, listing Scottish addresses including poet Alan Jackson and Pete Miles, Hebden Bridge people hiding near Perth in order to meditate gnostically and Spiney a solid chap I’d met with Welfare State lodged at Moffat just north of Lockerbie. On the same page I listed location research companies, perhaps I had an idea to be a roving location scout, a tramp telephoning back reports of fascinating dells. On January 8 I note that carpenter John Hooley, a great, shambling Northern Irish drunk, has begun to fit the oak slab kitchen work top that he had towed down the canal from Charlestown.

In a Hebden Bridgean flourish I walk out in a rage from Edward Street at half past four the morning of February 15 and hitch hike to Birmingham where I draw out one hundred pounds and go on to Worcester where I stay with Susan in the Star Hotel: comfortable but with only one ash tray. So there was a follow on. By the time I got back to Hebden Bridge, having seen the world, I was ready to resign and did so. I left in a hired Datsun Bluebird automatic with my studio kit, a suitcase of souvenirs, a sack of potatoes, a spade and a portable gas fire which could be turned on its back to cook with.

I headed north by instinct and pass thru Skipton on the 27th where I withdrew fifty pounds. The name Li Yuan-Chia came to mind, in 1982 he’d shown painter friend, Ray Elliott. The Bluebird points nor’ nor’ west up to Banks in Cumbria on Hadrian’s Wall. Li receives me with full grace and lets me stay. He was a refugee from China who had got hold of a farmhouse on Hadrian’s Wall and turned it into an art centre. He was the break I’d earned by quitting. The building was white with curiously Chinese square windows. Li was an agile, succinct, human — we let each other be. Even so, some time that summer he moves me into a caravan in the garden, from which I tore leaves to make soups and read Wavell’s memoirs, borrowed over the home brew of a retired Eighth Army Major.

On March 27 I came south again via Harrogate where I had a gallery interest and back to Hebden Bridge. April 2 I am at Oxford, on the 4th at what looks like Lancaster (the date and place stamp is often half or completely illegible). I am back at Li’s by the 13th. I go down to Hebden Bridge and clear the house of odds and ends and take them down to London on May 16 to Adrian Frost. This son of an abstract painter ex-commando prisoner of war (so he knows all my secrets) was squatting in a pre-fab in the East End, the second flush of artist’s colonisation. By the 31st I was safely back at Li’s. That Post Office book finishes July 17, me a little tired, a little shabby in the caravan in the garden.

I don’t give the Brampton address for my next Post Office book, I give a c/o address: my mother’s house at Maze Hill, London. That spells uncertainty. I start with a balance of one pound six pence. I had never been quite so poor before. I go on the dole for the first time. For my dole interview I hitchhike the lovely rolling road between Banks and Carlisle. On the way back I call in at a pub where the talk was all tractors and then waggle back the last four miles.

I made two good friends at Banks (Li was special category). Donald Wilkinson was a lithographer with a beautifully organised studio, a kind and welcoming fellow professional. Jenny Steinbugler was an amusing and intelligent older woman marking time in a big house who lent me a barn space as a studio towards the end of my stay. She and Shirley Wilkinson both bought a linoprint from me, one of which turned up on ebay recently.

At the beginning of July I was up in Glasgow, there is a trip to Skipton at the beginning of August and another to Darlington in mid-September. As the summer struggled to its end I came to realise that the luck which had landed me my unofficial residency with Li wouldn’t extend to finding a cheap cottage. I would not get the country life, I should find a town. At Skipton I have to leave a pub over a wall at the back on landlord’s advice, at Darlington I sleep the night in the middle of a roundabout. They weren’t the towns for me.

Post Office book tells me I go back to Hebden Bridge for a whole month in October. The house in Edward Street had been re-possessed, we were at the tale end of the over heated housing fury. There had been an exceptionally talented team in Hebden Bridge, Linda Bye, an estate agent and a white skinned smart suited big car young man who drove round offering mortgages to the most unlikely candidates. I just caught some of this dodgy largesse in order to finance my half of a council improvement grant. I signed the house back over to the winning mortgage company on October 1.

I decided, sitting on Hadrian’s Wall and trying to think like a Roman, that I would go to Hull. I decided that I would be a father who kept in touch with his children. It was a voluntary limit which I have never regretted. Therefore the town I sought must be in reach of Leeds. I knew Manchester and Bradford already and York as well, my sister had bagged Newcastle and Liverpool was badly omened. Geographically Hull was intriguing, hanging on like a blemish to a watery way. I knew about Philip Larkin.

I headed out there, my book is stamped Jameson Street, Hull November 12 with a withdrawal of five pounds and I am at Hull for the rest of the month settling in. My boarding house is on Spring Bank West opposite the cemetery. At the breakfast table are two youths, a scrunched up cheerful dwarf-like fellow and a ginger haired beanstalk. Toast with margarine and flaccid tinned tomatoes and the harsh welcome of the landlady’s budgerigar. I play it quiet, I am in shock, my shoes have cardboard soles. I go back to Hebden Bridge for a week in December; emotionally it is still the major planet.

On January 7 1986 a new book addressed 34 Park Avenue, Hull — my address for the next seven years. My first task was to rid myself of the curse of alcohol. I talked myself out of it for days until it came naturally,

“…energy derives from fuel. as in aeroplanes alcohol is a fuel but with a high-jacker on board. You may assume a mateship of levity with this skulking fellow — in fact there you are at the bar he has you over his shoulder and your face is mouthing words — slack falls your body across his back — he drinks heartily, for two.

“I “ is a series of choices made by me. I have seen grown men struggle to find the right “I” for a particular demand. You may watch a man go through a series of selves as carelessly as an ill positioned sentry guard is eliminated in a battle. It is quite possible by rapidly discarding these false selves to come to the point of an angry frightened child which all the time has been hoisting the pasteboard people which are soon dispersed in the rough flood of the worlds work. In fact adults become in drink closer to the child’s remembered I.

It is archaic to consider ourselves as distinct individuals, only so far as we have names and personal histories. Your brain is not a self-sufficient instrument, it is part of a network as much as each brain cell is. Your place in the network is distinctive because of your trail, your “history”. Just as in economic terms we often act simply as cash-couriers from one shareholders bank account to another, so in information terms we may represent a state of reception, manipulation, storage, transmission, thus the infallible tendency to club together represents the gathering of a wider brain”

I began to go out sober,

“… in my sky seagulls and TV aerials play celestial Mikado/Meccano. Angle of neck inverse to the opera-glass one. How lucky to get seagulls in your dippy (place-name kit-bag),TV aerials pointing the same way in a depressed state of obedience from under mingy low-brow national service housing. All saluting. Punks at heart opened up the skies, ripped out all that cold war directional beaming and perked up into satellite open cones and more greater hairstyles. In the Adelphi the press was grim, zoomed on the sound of heavy girls clacking like war horses jangling shuffling swaying. In the early hours I pulled up staggering in the steamy heat round me dancers puffed untighted. One mile on the sound of a giggle and a slap the street light shows girls bare feet coming out of town”

Some of it was personal,

“… a favourite unearned luxury is the toilet man who sings while you shit at the ship-shape shiny pier head conveniences. Acting privately in the garden is one thing but how about out there? Yes neighbours I was the screaming skull that tugged the dustmen’s tails. I have always been alarmed by working cloths when they call with blended duties like armed tourists. The police, Mormons, Avon Ladies, Gypsies, the Electric men, Landlord or his agents, Parcel Post — up and running youngsters with trash to sell or those that hand you a card to say they are deaf and dumb to sell a tea towel. People wanting other people who might have lived their briefly — in eight years you get a lot of them.

As English castellation I have hung agricultural metal-heads rake scythe fork in the angle of the glazed garden end of my one-room flat. In the North light their silhouettes speak to my buried sense of utility, drawing me out to hack at the brambles. At what resolution do you operate? What do you miss at the speed you go? Is the bubbling sphere of your experience coarse or fine grained? Is the image of the mesh useful? What is being strained through us?”

A last look back,

“… before the city walls above Drinkbenchgate over from Spring Bank and Paragon Street there is a little known path that runs across the sky. Orange ‘copters from the direction of the North Sea bring swimmers, seamen, Baltic princesses with damp skin or wounds hover to the hospital, low enough to see the dirtiness. Many more helicopters were promised by all known futurists but as any fool know those rotors they chop and they don’t show”

By 1988 I was in a different case. A London gallery was taking my work and paying up front. In December I hired a car and drove up to Scotland to see Spiney and plead a Christmas at cousin Tom’s in Glasgow.

As I came into Lockerbie there was orange material scattered across the highway. In the bushes that ran alongside were queer objects, twisted and black. Eventually there was a police block and a diversion. I had run into the debris of the Lockerbie airliner bombing, four days before Christmas.

Spiney was well tucked in to oak panelling and deer’s heads, he didn’t take kindly to me and I moved on. Cousin Tom was just leaving to go down to his parents. He lodged me with friends who wondered aloud whether I was adult. It seemed, and seems, unlikely.