The Ritual of Cleaning

I have just spent a couple of hours cleaning and tidying the house because my eldest daughter is coming to visit. We all do this. We all forget that the person who is visiting was the messiest person in the world when they lived here, and therefore to tidy up mess for them is downright silly. They wouldn’t notice anyway, plus the mess is nowhere near as bad as it was when they lived here.

The specifics put a slightly different complexion on the matter. My daughter, Sarah, is autistic with profound learning difficulties. This means even if she objected to the mess, she would have no way of telling me as she has no speech and virtually no signing ability. The carers who will be delivering her to my door probably won’t come into the house, so I’m not cleaning the place up to impress them. I’m doing it because... it’s what you do. It’s an excuse to get the place into some sort of order for one thing. I am BAD at household chores. I do have a vacuum cleaner, but it’s in the understairs cupboard and there’s a heavy artist’s easel in front of it which I feel curiously disinclined to move, so the pine needles from the Christmas tree (and yes, I’m writing this in March) will have to stay until the painting is finished, and this is a HUGE painting which I expect to take several more months. I’m very good at making excuses. As for dust, I had years of old cobwebs accumulating on the ceiling until a few days ago, which I could have dealt with using a feather duster, but when, a few months ago, I located my feather duster I found the feathers had been eaten away by mites so I chucked it out. I finally replaced it with one that cost all of a pound and is telescopic so will reach into the corners easily, and I have actually cleaned away the cobwebs. They must have been there for years. I have lived in this house for twenty-six years, and am not sure I’ve dusted the ceilings before, because ceilings shouldn’t really get dusty. I also did the hallway for the first time ever – in most households, the hall would have been redecorated within twenty-six years, which would have spruced it up, but my hall has wood panelling which you don’t decorate as it’s a nice original Edwardian feature, so the dust has been clinging to it for a long, long time. It’s amazing how nice it looks now. I must dust it again in ten years or so.

My daughter is visiting because the carers will have realised it’s Mother’s Day this Sunday, so she needs to make her duty visit. That’s fine with me, and it’ll be fine with her. She likes coming here. She has a ritual – she goes into the kitchen for a piece of bread and marmite, then she goes to the toilet to have her pad changed, then she settles down in her favourite armchair and does nothing for an hour or so. I put on some music, which she enjoys, and she plays quietly with a few old toys and usually tries on one of my hats, an orange felt one that’s too big for me so I never wear, but she likes it.

None of this activity requires the house to be cleaned.

I know if I decided to call on my own mother, she would do exactly the same thing. She would go round the whole house tidying and dusting. She would wash the doors to get rid of any grubby bits round the handles. She wouldn’t do any of it very efficiently because she’s elderly and only partially sighted, so tends not to see dirt, but she’d still do it, and I’d only know she’d done it because it’s what she always used to do when visitors were expected. I suppose it’s a ritualistic thing. We want a sense of occasion. I’m aware that there are other women who are obsessive cleaners, and whose houses are pristine at all times, but I can’t get into that mindset. The hours they must spend! I would sooner be writing or painting or just about anything else.

***

My daughter has arrived, and has come in bearing a most acceptable gift of a bottle of Rosé (I must remember to thank the carers). As predicted, she’s now sitting quietly in her favourite chair, moving in time to the music. She’s enjoyed a long glass of water, but unusually, hasn’t wanted anything to eat. There are birthday cards on the mantelpiece, so she had a good look at those, but otherwise made no ‘comment’ on any changes, despite me having picked up piles of old newspapers and cleared my workspace so that you can actually see the table – but why would she? I’ve been clearing for her home visit for years now, so it’s how she expects it to be and it’s not worthy of comment. One day I must have the courage to leave it exactly how I like it to be, and see how she reacts. One of the qualities of autistic people is their ability to see even the minutest change. She has never objected to change as such, so I don’t think she’d be upset – but I’d love to know if she’d be pleased, if perhaps she’d be thinking ‘Yes! This is how it used to be. I like this!’

Drawing Christine

I’ve recently been working on a set of portraits of Christine Keeler. I wouldn’t normally do more than one picture of somebody I don’t know, but I did the first, and Fionn Wilson, the artist who is masterminding the Christine Keeler project, suggested that a set of three or four might be a good idea, so I though, yeah, okay. She didn’t want copies of photos, which is absolutely fair enough. Anyone with rudimentary drawing skills can copy a photograph, but think of your own passport photos. Do they actually look like you? Highly unlikely. Sometimes there’s no choice but to work from a photo, but even if you can’t get a sitting with the person you’re drawing, there are other ways, especially if they’re someone in the public eye like Keeler. I went to that font of all moving images: Youtube, found a documentary with plenty of video, and watched until I got more of a feeling of what she really looks like, until I started to feel that any image I produced might be in with a chance of getting under the skin and showing something of the real person rather than the superficiality of the outer features. The first portrait I did had her resting her chin on her hand, looking downwards, serious, the next also had a serious expression, so in the third I wanted to capture, if not exactly laughter, something akin to amusement/bemusement. In that one she looks as if she’s saying, ‘I can’t believe you really just asked me that question’ which must have been something she often thought as she was being interviewed.  I think I managed it okay, because each time I drew her I felt I got closer to the real person, and each portrait looked more like her in some inexplicable way. She is someone I am unlikely ever to meet, but the more I draw her, the more I want to meet her, and this is often the case with portraiture, because there is something weirdly intimate about staring intensely at someone’s features when they can’t look back. 

I like to work relatively quickly, so these drawings took no more than an hour or two to complete. I’m going to make a note of the specific technique here, because the way I draw changes every few months and I’ll want to look back and check how these ones were done.

First of all I do a very careful line drawing using a sharp Derwent Onyx pencil. This is just outline to make sure the proportions are spot on, concentrating on eyes (easy), nose (okay) and mouth (often surprisingly difficult). I also indicate dark areas, not with shading, but simply by encircling them. It means the drawing looks like the plan for ‘painting-by-numbers’ at this point, but that’s fine. The guidelines are vital, and once they’re there I can continue with some confidence. Then I change medium – I have a fat and chunky Faber Castell 2B graphite stick, and I use the flat end to block in the tones. This is still very pale – it calls itself 2B but it feels far harder. Once I’ve done the blocking in, I have a ghost image, but it already looks recognisably like the person. The final medium change is to Conté, specifically a well-sharpened Pierre Noir 2B conté pencil. I love this type of pencil because it is intensely matt black, something you can never achieve with graphite however soft because of the sheen you inevitably get which makes it so hard to scan or photograph, or even see in some lights.

While the pencil is still very sharp (and I use a professional mechanical sharpener to ensure this) I draw the eyes in as much detail as I can manage, though as conté is by its nature thick and crumbly, this is always going to be an approximation. I work lightly at first. The real darks will come later. Once the eyes and eyebrows are accurate, I work on the nose, then with extreme care, tackle the mouth. I avoid erasing if at all possible, and the rubber only comes out if I make an accidental fingerprint on a bit I want to remain white – because the whites are vitally important. Highlights on cheeks and nose stay as pristine white paper, which incidentally is ordinary photocopier paper as often as not. I like its smoothness, and it takes the various pencils extremely well. By this time the pencil is blunted, and I can start working on the tones of the cheeks, under the chin, bags round the eyes, and so on. Once they’re roughed in, I set to work on the hair, because if the hair is very dark, for example, it’s going to have a major effect on the balance of the tones overall so I need to get that in as soon as possible. From this point, it’s a question of gradually building up the darks so that the underlying skeletal structure is there – and of course the personality, because this shows in the precise angle of the mouth (which is why the mouth is so difficult) as well as any hollowness in cheeks, and in older people, the precise way in which wrinkles and laughter lines have formed.

Conté is imprecise, which is why I love it. I’m not going for photo-realism, ever, or I would use all the grades of graphite available and end up with something incredibly smooth. However, if it’s too rough, then the subtlety is invisible, and faces are nothing if not subtle, so the very last thing I do is the blending. Some people swear by paper stumps and suchlike, but I find with conté, to get absolute control, the tip of my little finger is best. And I use it vigorously, picking up black dust from the darkest areas to rub into the mid-tones, and I rub and rub away (conté is very forgiving) until the gradations of tone are to my satisfaction but it’s still looking lively because of the extreme contrasts between the darkest and lightest tones, and my earlier rough and scribbly drawing. I end up filthy, and I’ll have sharpened away half the conté pencil, but with any luck, the whites on the paper are still bright and clean. I scan it as quickly as possible at this point, as the chances of damage are high. For preservation, I tend to put it straight into a pound shop frame, which I find is much safer than a plastic wallet, where it might move about and smudge. If it’s any good, I can always re-frame it at a later date.

So that’s what I’ve been doing in the last few days. Three down, one to go. Today, however, I’m giving myself a self-indulgent break and intend to draw Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes, because I’m a huge fan, and his is a face I’ve never tackled. Then I’ll go back to Christine afresh, and complete the final portrait.

History Is Everybody

‘History is everybody’ – not the most inspiring quote, but I was being interviewed today and the interviewer thought it was because she made sure she wrote it down then and there, even though it was being recorded and she could transcribe later. The context: she was interviewing me about ‘My Hidden Mother’, the biography I have written about Mum that, in a nutshell, tells the story of a Jewish girl from a nice middle class family growing up in a world that’s about to implode, ie 1930s and 40s central Europe. The story is all about what happens when a whole group of perfectly ordinary people are dehumanised by the system. They become a label. They are no longer people. They are unwanted, they must be discarded, disappeared. My mother was lucky in that her disappearance meant her survival – for millions of others it meant death. You can read in your history books about Hitler, but you don’t read so much (with the exception of Anne Frank) about people who were not in positions of power, despite the fact that they are the majority by a factor of millions. History is bunk? Certainly is in the text books.

This is changing, slowly. All I remember about history at school was the astonishing fact that Queen Elizabeth I had 2000 dresses. This is a ridiculous factoid. What does it even mean? 2000 dresses at one point? During her entire life? What might be more interesting, is who counted them? Was there really some lady-in-waiting who one night thought, what the hell, why don’t I count how many dresses she really has, then write it down, and a few hundred years time people will be SO grateful I did, because this is what really matters. Put like that, one can see how absurd it is. I want to know how many dresses I might have had if I’d lived then; I want to know what my underwear would have been like, I want to know how I coped with periods and boyfriends. There is one hell of a lot that would be really interesting to know if an ordinary person like me had written it all down, but nobody like me did. I wouldn’t have had sufficient education, wouldn’t have had the level of literacy necessary, probably wouldn’t have had parents who could afford to buy paper, certainly wouldn’t have had access to a publisher.

Different now. I don’t need to be able to afford paper, because I have a computer, and I can write my mother’s story and I can get it published and I can get it out there so that people can read it. And then a student from Greenwich University can come across my book and read it and love it and decide to interview me about it, and maybe she’ll recommend it to others to read, and all the tiny, enormous, everyday and extraordinary facts of my mother’s life will become known beyond the small circle of my expected readership.

We are all history, but if nobody writes it down, after a few generations we disappear.

There is a photograph of my mother with her family. She and her brother are smiling for the camera. Her parents are not. They know what’s coming. I think it’s the most desperately sad picture I have ever seen. We are ALL history.

‘My Hidden Mother’ by Catherine Edmunds

Book: https://www.feedaread.com/books/My-Hidden-Mother-9781786101747.aspx

Photos: http://s78.photobucket.com/user/delph_ambi/My%20Hidden%20Mother/story

Dhal

You know those days when you’ve been teaching until late and want something quick and tasty? Steak would do nicely, than you very much – but there’s nowt in the freezer so you have to think: what’s filling, doesn’t take too long, tastes great. Store cupboard contains a packet of green lentils, not the big fat ones, but little ones, bit like Puy lentils but not quite. They take an age to cook. Solution? Pressure cooker. So here’s what I did, and when I do lentils I think dhal, so I have no doubt there are culinary experts who can make suggestions on how to improve this recipe, but this is what I did, and it ended up surprisingly tasty.

First of all, I set the lentils going in the pressure cooker with plenty of cold water (I’ve destroyed pressure cookers in the past, and have learnt my lesson). Meanwhile, I sliced up some of onions and set them to fry in a pan with plenty of oil. I threw in some chopped up fresh ginger, plus some cinnamon sticks and a few green cardamoms, couple of cloves. While that was frying away, I ground up (in a pestle and mortar, best way) some coriander and cumin seeds, black peppercorns, dried chilli, fenugreek seeds, along with some paprika and turmeric.

I have this way of doing onions that I learnt from the Curry Club, years ago. When they start going brown, throw in a splash of cold water. This plumps them up, and means you can cook much longer without burning. So I kept on, chucking in some cold water, plumping up, etc etc, until they were rich and brown at which point I threw in the ground spices, boiled away, another splash of cold water, and so on. You need to keep an eye on it – the oil needs to get hot enough to release all the aromatics, but not so hot that the spices burn. By this time the lentils had had ten minutes or so at high pressure, so I turned off the gas and let the pressure cooker come back to ‘normal’ at room temperature. When I opened it, the lentils were still intact, but nearly done, and there was still plenty of liquid so I threw the lot into the pan with the spices and onions, boiled it away for ten minutes or so. At this point I reduced the heat and threw in some full fat Greek yogurt – the real stuff, intensely creamy and delicious. Heated it through.

Ate it, with a glass of Sicilian red left over from the weekend. It was bloody delicious. I’m writing this down, because my ‘throw-it-in-the-pot-and-see-what-happens’ recipes don’t always work, but this one certainly did, so I want to have a record of how I did it.  

Being a Writer

An email out of the blue – a student at Greenwich University asks if I’d be happy for her to interview me regarding ‘My Hidden Mother’, the book I’ve written about Mum surviving the Holocaust. I’m happy to oblige, though I point out I’m a long way from Greenwich. She however is amenable to coming up to Darlington, so we arrange a date. She knows about the book from her grandparents. She gives me their name, but it means little to me, so I ring up Mum who tells me they’re a couple she regularly meets at the bus stop.

This is so random. I was expecting them to be people she’s known for decades.

So next weekend I’m going to be interviewed, and I’m going to have to sound as if I know what I’m talking about as regards writing. I’m going to have to sound like a proper writer. This student is studying creative writing – all I have is an O level in English Language. I wrote stories at school only if they were set by the teacher; never just for the sake of it. I then wrote nothing for decades, didn’t even consider writing until I was in my forties, and then it was purely by chance, and wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t fallen in with some poets in an internet chatroom. I’ve never written a diary and I didn’t spend my teens writing angst-filled poetry. I still don’t write a journal of any kind, which is why my blog entries are so few and far between. When I’m out, I don’t have a notebook with me to jot down ideas. I don’t have paper and pen by my bedside in case I happen to wake up in the middle of the night needing to write down something incredible because I know I’ll forget it by the morning. I was never one of those people who thought they had a novel in them and who were just waiting for the right moment.

The old msn chatrooms were much like facebook today – a right old load of tosh, but with the occasional brilliant conversation. I started jotting down ideas from these conversations, invented characters, threw difficulties at them to see what they would do, and they took off, they flew – and ended up as a novel. Having never written anything longer than three or four sheets of A4 at school, I soon had a manuscript of 96,000 words. In my naivety, I sent it to a few agents. When that got me nowhere, I published with a vanity press – cost me nothing, but I was bombarded with ‘special offers’ to buy my own book at an exorbitant cost, so I sold very few. That book is now thankfully out of print. First novels, eh? Absolute tripe if you don’t know what you’re doing, and I certainly didn’t.

The writing bug had taken hold, however, and within a few years I had learnt the craft properly and had a number of traditionally published books to my name – a poetry collection and three novels.

Did this make me a ‘proper’ writer?

No. When you’re starting out, publication feels like the ultimate goal. Then you realise all you have to do is write something and send it somewhere and someone will eventually publish it. On my website, I used to list all these publications, but I’ve now heavily culled the listings as I’ve realised too many of them are embarrassments. The poetry collection and novels are fine, as they’re out with Circaidy Gregory Press, a very decent indie-press, so I keep them on the list, along with Bridport listings, Pushcart Prize nominations, Butcher’s Dog, Frogmore Papers, etc – but I keep very quiet about some of the others from the distant past before I knew better.

Being published in the right places, however, still didn’t make me a writer, it simply mades me a person who happened to write and who sometimes managed a decent hit.

I mentioned my O level in English Language earlier on. That was slightly disingenuous of me, as it makes me sound as if I haven’t studied writing at all. I have, but I’ve used the internet. I soon realised the chatrooms where people said ‘thank you for sharring’ (sic) were to be avoided at all costs. I drifted instead towards the private, much tougher forums, one of which set me on the right track. I learnt a lot there, but it didn’t make me a writer.

A few years later, I discovered Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’, and if you can’t learn how to be a writer there you’re really not trying. I’ve been a ‘bootcamper’ for three years now, and have learnt one hell of a lot – but none of the skills I’ve picked up there make me a writer in themselves.

What makes me a writer is the fact that I’m currently writing every day – averaging around 1000 words – and I’ve been doing this for months now, not even stopping for Christmas Day. When you’re primarily a poet, that’s pretty much impossible, so much of my output at the moment is short stories. They pour out, and they’re initially gibberish, so when they go through the bootcamp mill they’re eviscerated by myself as much as anyone. I fix them if they’re fixable, submit them if they have a chance in one of the better markets or competitions. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t – but the important thing is that I’m writing them, so the idea of a student from London coming up to interview me about my writing no longer seems such a weird idea. This is not a hobby. It’s what I do.

An Important Book

So John asks me to do a review of his cancer book and my immediate (though not vocalised) thought is ‘urrgghh!’ – but I know I WILL do a review because I’ve known John a long time and he’s a fine poet, and he and I have a history of reviewing each other’s books, but this? An account of his stay at a cancer facility in New Zealand? I don’t expect it to be a laugh a minute. I brace myself.

I don’t like the front cover. It doesn’t lead me to believe I’m going to find anything other than trauma and pain inside. The back cover’s better, though I’m not sure I quite believe the claims of ‘redemption and hope’. They sound like blurb hyperbole.  I set aside a morning to read it, expecting to have to break off regularly to go and stand in the sun and look at flowers or something to wrench myself out of the harrowing account I expect to find between its pages.

And then I read it, and it’s short, only 56 pages, I get through it in, I don’t know, half an hour or so? I really have no idea. More to the point, I never stop reading; I never go and have a coffee or do some other activity that will keep me away from the text. There are many reasons for this, and one of them is the sheer joy of how the book looks, once you get away from the depressing cover art. The inside pages are a mass of colour, of joyful photos, of stunning graphic design. This is one hell of a slick publication, quite apart from John’s writing. The publisher has done him proud and produced a thing of beauty.

As for the writing itself – it’s everything I would hope from the pen of John Irvine: wry, witty, warm, happy, sad, poignant. As for the promised ‘hope and redemption’ – well yes, though these are not the words I would have used, as they suggest something a bit wishy-washy and sentimental, or worse still, ‘inspirational’. I’d have thrown the book across the room if it had been ‘inspirational’ (metaphorically – I’m reading it on a pc, so the practicalities might have stopped me).

I should also mention that it’s also a cracking good read. It’s about comradeship, about the way people touch each other’s lives in unexpected ways. It’s about the way the most dreaded of circumstances can lead you to places that you couldn’t have foreseen, and can show you precisely what it means to be human – and that is the heart of it; that is why this is an important book.   

You And Me And Cancer Makes Three

by John Irvine

Pohutakawa Publishing

ISBN-13: 978-0994115188

 

Writing Blog Tour

I’ve been handed the baton in this writing blog tour by Su Bristow of http://subristow.weebly.com/blog, so here goes.

1.     What am I working on?

I have two major projects on the go at the moment: a biography (My Hidden Mother) and a collaborative novel (The Driftwood Tree). The biography has already been shortlisted in the Earlyworks Press Biography Challenge, which is heartening. I chose to write about my mother because she might not be famous, but she is a survivor – a hidden child during the Holocaust – and her story needs telling. My other project, The Driftwood Tree is a collaborative novel with writer John Bennington, set in rural Ireland in the 1920s. As well as full length works, I also regularly write short literary fiction and poetry. I have a writing competition habit that needs feeding, and I make enough prize money to justify entering even more competitions. I am also about to start editing and writing the preface for poet Nigel Humphreys’ new translation of Daphnis and Chloe, to be published by Circaidy Gregory Press, and have recently finished the technical edit of a new edition of Michael Short’s seminal work, Holst: The Man And His Music, also Circaidy Gregory Press.

2.     How does my work differ from others in its genre?

My Hidden Mother is not just a Holocaust tale, and neither is it purely a mother and daughter memoir – it’s both, and it’s more. My mother was hidden through the war, and in many ways her background has been hidden from me, even though she was always happy to tell me about her background as I grew up. What she did not realise was that like many second generation holocaust survivors, I had an instinctive feeling that I needed to protect her from what had happened, so I never asked as much as I might have done for fear of bringing traumatic memories to the surface. Now, however, we have both realised that these things need to be told, so the book has been an exploration of what that means to both of us, as well as being a first hand account of what it was actually like to be growing up in such difficult times.

The Driftwood Tree is very different to other novels in its genre. For a start, it’s not just a novel – it is fully illustrated, and each chapter contains around half a dozen original poems. John Bennington is the ideas man. He’s in charge of the research, the setting, the plot and the characters throughout the main text – he is a natural storyteller – but I am the editor, the poet and the illustrator; the person in charge of tightening this huge sprawling text and turning it into a book. I suggest revisions as we go along, and he feeds me suggestions for illustrations and edits the poems. It’s a fascinating process, particularly as living a good 500 miles apart, we have never met – everything is done by email.

3.     Why do I write what I do?

I like to write about things that matter; that will have meaning for people. I am not interested in pure entertainment. I want my stories and poems to have resonance and to stay with the reader long after they have finished. In the past I haven’t been too bothered about genre – I have written magical realism, general fiction, science fiction, crime fiction – but now I am moving more and more into literary fiction. It’s what I read, and it’s what I want to write.

4.     How does my writing process go?

I rise early, switch on the computer, and leave it running most of the day so that it’s available for writing at any point. I never write by hand if I can help it as my writing is illegible and very slow, but typing is effortless and quick. My writing day will usually include either a poem or a piece of flash fiction, plus some work on the novel and the biography. I’m also currently studying the art of short story writing on Alex Keegan’s online ‘Bootcamp’ and have become a far better writer, editor and critic as a result, which has naturally had a knock-on effect on all my writing. I try to write as much as possible every day, whether it’s original works or critiques of other people’s work – and of course I read, and I think about what I’m reading.

Next stop on the tour is with Geoff Nelder, at http://geoffnelder.wordpress.com