NWP WEMBLEY LOCKDOWN 2020 WRITING

Writing with your feet

I’m on the Bedford embankment, ‘taking life one step at a time’. I am finding my way. My mum has just died – and we are going for a walk.

Yes, I said ‘we’ because I feel that she’s still very much here, hobbling alongside me with her stick, talking about the trees, looking on the bright side of life. I can hear her. She is saying, ‘I don’t worry, dear.’ And for 95 years, she didn’t.

I miss her. But I am not alone in these heavy times, of course.

Nor am I literally alone. I am walking with three of my writing group. From two metres distance, we talk about love and loss. Ramesh is uncertain. Colette is angry. Paul wants to be alone by the water.

We look and listen. We use our notebooks to collect ‘found language’: memorial inscriptions from the back of benches. Choice phrases from tourist information. Covid warnings from the foot of the bridge. Maybe a poem will come.

We read the words of Robert Macfarlane:

“Paths are the habits of a landscape. They are acts of consensual making. It’s hard to create a footpath on your own. … Paths connect. This is their first duty and their chief reason for being. They relate places in a literal sense, and by extension they relate people.”

[‘The Old Ways’ (2012)]

We are surrounded by spoken texts as we walk: ‘Alsatian man’ charges past us, relating loudly to someone on his mobile. We overhear him say, ‘I test drive cars and that’. When his dog has pulled him out of earshot, one of us asks incredulously ‘… AND THAT?!’ Even before Paul lamely suggests ‘lorries?’, we are all crying with laughter. None of us quite knows why. But Alsatian man goes straight into the notebook.

Macfarlane writes about the poet, Edward Thomas:

“Walking was a means of personal myth-making, but it also shaped his everyday longings: he not only thought on paths and of them, but also with them.”

So, at the end of our walk, we too weave life and memory into myth. A helicopter clatters and fades; geese cackle; traffic purrs. We re-read our notes. We mentally retrace our steps. Then we scribble furiously – shuffling, skipping, splurging – magically discovering what we want to say.

After 20 minutes, we are ready: Colette has written a ghost story which is also a love story. Paul has conjured the effing voice of Alsatian man. And, in something a bit like a poem, Ramesh has nudged his uncertainty aside with the refrain, ‘What are we fearful of?’’

We have, as indigenous Australians do, let the path speak its songlines to us. We have kept pace with each other. We have taken steps, on path and page, to feel closer and less lost.

SIMON WRIGLEY

Jack

it’s the scrabbling

in the skirting

under the floorboards up above

tiny crumbs of droppings

scattered at the back of the counter

a trail over the dishwasher top

your full sentence

cannot be ignored

my shriek, opening

the cupboard to you,

cowered frozen furry

staring at my hugeness

clutching at my giant face

your unwanted sovereign

Mouse God terror devil

Mouse Hamlet

forced to consider your fate

Alison Jermak

Portraits: based on ‘Daphne, Haringey Resident’ by Tim Benson

Daphne is inside, in the evening, all lights switched off except for the tall lamp by the sofa.

She has heard a noise outside - a sharp metallic snap. It has drawn her eyes away from the book, startled her pulse, sprung her into action, fingers under the blind, craning over the sink. The lid on the communal recycling bins, that’s all. She had been sleepy, mint tea in her lap, slippered feet curled up under her bum. Now she feels charged and taut.

A dog barks and the sound of glass bottles poured into the bin echoes against the metal. She sips the tea and closes her eyes to swallow. She returns to the book, dumped brusquely on its face, and smoothes a few pages. She finds her place again. She lowers her eyes prayerfully, and the yellow lamplight glows on her forehead, gilding the tip of her nose, the baby hair at her temples, the gold makeup on her eyelids.

She steps back into the daytime of the novel, the garden soaked in sunlight, cutlery clicking, polite laughter ricocheting off the teacups. Without breaking her gaze, she licks a finger, picks up the thin paper at its top corner, turns a page.

Her phone buzzes rudely on the side table and becomes a fat, comic bumblebee as she walks down the garden path with her potential suitor, bantering about the strawberry plants with such outrageous euphemism that she feels the blood rise in her cheeks. Now is not the time to suffer a bee sting, but it would be just her luck.

But it buzzes again, and again. Daphne sighs, again, flips the book, this time into her lap, tastes a memory of her mother scolding such disrespectful reading habits, grimaces, folds the corner for good measure, puts her mug on the side table, reaching for the phone with her now-free hand.

The dog barks again.

The bin sings.

Haringey re-enters the scene.

Katie Kibbler

Britain

The virus hitches a lift into the country. No border checks, no questions of where it had been. It had sequestered itself in the suitcase of the businessman who flew from the east, had taken up residence within his shirts, his gloves. Joined his friends in the Alps. And then came across the Channel on his skin, his hands, in his lungs.

And it is here, in the south of England, a nonentity of a town. Brighton? Eastbourne? It reaches out of his lungs, makes him cough, hot. The businessman takes the virus to his Health Centre, that square low building on the edge of the new builds. He’s given a tonic, antibiotics. The virus does not leave. It entrenches. Gets into his car, drives his kids to school, football training. Goes with him and his wife to that big anniversary dinner, in the Grand Hotel. Never mind your headache. You’ll enjoy yourself when you’re there. And don’t sweat so much.

Right on, replied the virus, as it passes on in droplet words of platitudes.

How was your trip?

The virus’s trips.

Next day, they all had sore heads.

And from that town, the virus explores the environs, the travel system. It goes for a day trip to London. Takes a diversion to the West Country. Even goes to the races at Cheltenham. Twickenham, And heads north, up the Pennines. It takes its time. Some journeys by bus, some by rail, getting on and off at stations. Travels by cars on visits to relatives, university residences, hotels, restaurants. Squeezes through Watford Gap, pays the M6 toll for Norton Crane services, and rests up with the lorries at Scotch Corner. Takes in visits to cathedral towns, busy city centres, uses its National Trust and English Heritage cards to wander through gardens, around castles, walk over Hadrian’s Wall.

And always, shares with others. All the way through Britain.

Marjory Caine

Portraits

And as he doubles back at 7.15 on the Regent’s Canal, I zoom out from this moment of my life and I find myself doubled and split-screened: on one side, the body of a person, running, aflame with life, cold winter air igniting their lungs, the smooth black canal their soothing company. Then again: a woman, young, alone, in half-black November dawn, a moving target for a man homing in fast.

On one side, headphones fusing this fresh new day with musical memories of all the other days sung strong before: a life line. Then again: his gesture for her air time, take out the earbuds, see me, listen. Indignance at her polite disinterest. Tone shifting from stern-kind to stern-steely, kind-livid to sharp-sickly. To: okay, but can you help me? Why do you think girls don’t like me? She multiplies in his mouth from one person to all women, and yet he still needs to collect all her personal particulars: and where does she live? And what’s her name? And are her eyes green? And aren’t they amazing? She fakes her life’s truths to blank herself out, to placate his need to collect her by sling-shotting plausible stones of dishonest statistics - oh, Ellie, um, Camden, no, brown, no, not really.

And as I watch her through these two windows I can see, on one side: a body flying, the thin white wire of the headphones resurfacing alone, still playing yesterday’s tunes. Hands on his knees, he catches his breath, then straightens up and shuffles off down the towpath towards Angel.

And then: a body, flying, heels skimming over water like a swan, like a god, racing towards vanishing point and scattering red sparks like an angle-grinder slicing through the water, a comet effervescing, and him bewildered on the gravel, squinting at the business card smoldering cool between his fingers.

It reads:

I’ve called the police.

You should run.

A. Flame.

Katie Kibbler

Home

I can see you reach the pavement
when the gravel drive stops crunching underfoot
shadow from the overgrown hedge aids your turn right

43 paces take you to the cutting down to the Ditches
the labyrinth of lanes that run between back gardens
to the park by the school to Church Lane and beyond
to the beach front the bank the co-op
Daedalus-like you have mapped the routes
radiating ways from home

this time I watch you unravel your thread
go north to the T junction for Carlogie Road
and at the metal jang of the railing
tackle the hill up to Panmure

from there the wide open skies are above you
the glens a distant haze behind you
the North Sea’s grey water wrinkles white
and the impossibility of the Bell Rock Lighthouse
suspended above the horizon
winking winking even in daylight you think

you turn carefully your stick reaching in front
tapping its way along the filament of memory

I can see you walk these passages of shadow and darkness
and will you to call out to me when you reach home

Marjorie Caine

Britain

The tree outside the Happy Man pub is not just a tree. It is strung with red lengths of fabric, floppy bedsheets that have slogans like #SAVE OUR TREE and SHAME ON YOU and, my favourite, DON’T TOUCH OR ELSE, an ominous threat defanged by petulance, a scrawl on a nine year old’s diary, a post-it on Boris Johnson’s biscuit tin.

It is webbed with rebellious knitting, strewn around the trunk in yellow and turquoise and pink, a joyous outrage spun by giant, disapproving grannies. There is a tent in the lower branches, in which people sleep overnight, to stop attempts to fell the tree under cover of darkness. I think they overestimate the fat cats’ energy, and they’ve already distracted them with the wool, after all. Each day a new trinket is added to the grotto - another length of fabric embracing the trunk, another sign tacked into the bark, new graffiti on the hoarding behind it, sheltering other injustices under its majestic reach: #BLM, Stop Gentrification, Tories Out, Choose Love.

The tree is very old and very ordinary, and I think this is why it is not just a tree. It is a common tree, and common trees. Common trees with London names: London Plane Tree. Its elegant and plain and ordinary trunk branches into several broad and wide-reaching arms, dappled and sparrow-coloured, spreading broad and susurrant branches up into the sky above the pub. Others like this tree line London’s streets as commonly as lamp-posts, cause sneezes as commonly as grass-clippings. They punctuate our pavements as commonly as commas, a pause for breath, joining up the clauses of our postcodes.

The tree is not just a tree because it is a tree, standing in front of a pub, asking not to be replaced by tall glass flats. Asking to reach its roots under the pavement and into our clay. To feel its way over our sewers and wear its vast green crown proudly on the estate once country, then council, now concrete - sold off for real estate regeneration for people who never drank at the Happy Man pub, who never smelt the beer in the carpet or saw their pints illuminated amber by slanting sun at the close of a scorching summer day, condensation running over sore red fingers. People who never prayed to be housed in the sturdy redbrick blocks of the old new 1950s Woodberry Down Estate, ringing with the promises of Bevan and the New World Order, before Thatcher sacked the groundskeepers and kneecapped the council and officials let the slow deliberate decay justify their demolition, the digging up of the roots and the plunging of new foundations into the earth.

The tree is not just a tree because it is one hundred and fifty years old and all that this number means. It means the wars - muskets and canons and cavaliers, and bombs, A- and H- and Blitz and Molotov, raining down on Sevastopol, Ypres, Dresden, Stoke Newington and Mile End and Greenwich, on Mosul and Belfast, Baghdad and Kings Cross, the people whose homes changed at the drop of a bomb, the dinner plates unwashed, bedsheets left warm in the middle of the night. The concrete blocks springing up around the village like mushrooms, the buses going electric, the death of the people born and born, family trees’ branches’ rapid subdivision. The six hundred seasons, the days in the lives of the rooks laid and hatched in the branches, the names carved into the bark, and then carved into granite, all the nights the leaves went green to black and came back again at dawn.

The tree is not just a tree because it might be cut down and no longer hold all of that time and all of that life, and that ability to drink in light and give out green.

Last week they flattened the pub.