Ecce Homo

St. Patrick's Day was not a significant date for me until 2004 - because my dear Dad died on this day.  Today is the ninth anniversary of his death.  This photograph of the two of us effectively captures something of how I feel when I think about him.  In worldly terms, he was not a 'successful' man.  He was an actor, often out of work until the last years of his life when he was suddenly quite busy and in demand.  Having the looks of (as a friend once put it) "the universal Wop, Spick or Dago" he would often play the role of the foreign baddie who was bumped off.  He was a good actor though, and sometimes parts did come along that allowed him to show something of what he could do.  He was a modest man and not, by nature, a Networker.  He didn't make efforts to go to the right parties, get in with the right people who might have helped his career along.  He did not have the knack of making money - whenever he tried to do something clever with money it was a disaster.  There is nothing outstanding that one could put on a CV and point to saying, Look - he did this, and this, and that. But each year that passes I have a growing sense of what it was that made him who he was.  I would like to find a word for it, but nothing comes to mind other than goodness. 

He was a good man.  Why do I say this?  It isn't about what he did (he did of course do good things, but that isn't the point) or that he loved each of his six children and they love him (though this is perhaps more to the point).  It is about what he was, and I suppose that this must have something to do with what was alive in him.  When I think of him, I smell apple and spice, and the sandalwood soap he liked to use (this and wholenut milk chocolate were the gifts we most often gave him).  I don't think that he literally went around all the time smelling of these things, but the essence of them are what express, for me, his substance - the sweetness of the man.  His laughter was always infectious because it came from the well of his sweetness, which included his sense of the preposterous, the overblown and ridiculous.  It would stream out at inappropriate times, in the company of bureaucratic officials who were checking his papers (East Germany) or on stage, in the middle of someone's important soliloquy.  He was a well known Corpser - an actor who might get a fit of laughter during a performance.  When the other actors spotted him they caught it too and a couple of times the curtain had to come down. 

He was not always laughing. Sometimes when out of work, he whiled away the moments that lengthened like shadows, stood on the threshold between one room and another as though listening for the rhythm of the day.  But in the middle of such times, there might be a moment like the time my youngest sister asked him to play the piano while she danced, and then insisted that they change places: "I play - you dance."  I never saw this, but it was a story he liked to tell.  Every now and then I picture him dancing in the dustbeams by the grand piano, lumbering around like an old bear doing a turn of tricks, carrying on until the music stops.

. 

Bio tex (a human stain)

Funny how something like this can unearth a memory.  It came up the other day when Son had a washing machine disaster with red trousers that coloured everything else pink.  I suggested he try and remedy the situation with Bio tex.  And then I remembered Donna.

She lived in one of the expensive houses at the bottom end of the mews that ran by the side of the flats where I lived as a child.  Her house had wrought iron bars across the windows on the ground floor and a door bell that went ding dong when you pressed it.  Her family was from the States, where they would rather have lived, but the father's work kept them in England.  They looked down on my family because we did not have money, or if we did then there were no visible indications of it.  My family looked down on Donna's because they had no culture, or none that my family recognised, and the fake antique coach light over the front door was a sign of this lack.

I can't remember how she and I met - probably in the mews where I sometimes played with my sister.  Donna was always nicely turned out in dresses or skirts, white ankle socks and penny loafers on her feet.  My sister and I were, by her mother's standards, scruffy and when not at school we usually wore trousers and scuffed shoes.  Donna's mother told her to remind me to wipe my feet on the mat when I came into the house.  She rarely addressed me directly, but I felt her eyes on me.  She was tall, straight and thin with long, shiny fingernails, always dressed as though for a special occasion.  Unlike my mother, she did not go out to work.  She eyed me from their gleaming kitchen or from the cream-covered sofa where she sat with a box of chocolates, reading a magazine or watching television.  Donna was nervous of her mother and exceptionally careful not to do or say anything that might displease her.  It was easy to do this, particularly with dirt or the possibility of it.  I was told never to sit on the cream sofa in case I made it dirty.  Donna was punished if she came home with a mark on her clothes.  When we went to the playground she wouldn't go near the sandpit.  She brushed the seat of the swing with the palm of her hand before sitting on it.

One hot day in my kitchen when we were having my favourite drink of raspberry cordial with soda water and ice, some of the cordial syrup spilt on the white kipper tie that lay on her chest, over the navy blue dress.  Donna had protruding front teeth that bit into her lower lip whenever she was nervous.  They bit hard as she looked at the stain.  She whispered, my mother will kill me.  I understood the situation well enough not to suggest that the tie could just be washed.  It was not just the fact of having marked something, though this in itself was bad - a sign of disrespect, lack of care and wilfulness.  The raspberry juice would leave a stain on the white that would not wash out.  My mother will kill me, repeated Donna.  I pictured her mother's face as she stood on the threshold between kitchen and shiny parquet-floored hall.  Even when she was not angry there was the sense that she was looking for a mark - some point to which she could direct the fury that simmered beneath the tight lips, the dark eyes that moved over one's face and body like searchlights looking for the fault.  Though she might not literally kill Donna,whatever punishment was delivered would be fearsome.

I rummaged under the kitchen sink where we kept detergents.  I remembered something that had once been used to make a cloth white again after wine was spilled on it.  On the cardboard box it said to soak in cold water but I boiled a kettle, filled a bowl with hot Bio tex solution and put the kipper tie in it.  Almost at once, the stain turned blue and then began to fade before our eyes.  As the material whitened the colour came back to Donna's face, and after ten minutes all evidence of stain had disappeared.  I fetched the iron and ironing board and pressed the tie until it was dry.  And we lived happily ever after and at some point went our separate ways - I to boarding school, she back to the States.

But the stain does, in a sense, endure.

**

Mach's Gut

The final wedding party was in a place that was once a farm collective in the old GDR and is now occupied by artists, writers, musicians and biodynamic gardeners. We had a couple of nights in the East Side Hotel, hard by the old wall that separated east Berlin from west, you could see it from a porthole beneath the window in our room.

There was a pre-nuptial party, a coach ride to the registry office in Köpenick followed by a two-hour river journey with champagne and canapes. It was the wedding of my ex-stepbrother, there were people I had not met for many years. The elephant in the proceedings was ex-stepfather who has for many years, King Lear-like, cut himself off from everyone he ever knew. His absence was a palpable presence. He had many children, many liaisons, some also connected to my mother's early life in the Free German Youth. It is complicated, but when you are in the middle of proceedings it somehow isn't. My e-s-b wanted a celebration that brought the disparate pieces of his life together. We were, for the duration, a patchwork community, brought together by this event to be (for a space) all of a piece. This is what celebrations can be very good for.

I also had an appointment with anthroposophical doctor who knows about PBC. He has basically endorsed what the specialist over here said, so off I go on the new regime with medications - sans alcohol or anything with paracetamol, so obvious that it's barely worth mentioning; except that doctors over here tended to equivocate and shrug when I asked about these. Will need to find other, possibly more fun things to give me a break from muscle pains.

The appointment was in Kladow, where I lived for nearly three years as a child. I experienced a kind of symmetry to this. The language and sense of place live strongly in me, though the actual and imaginary sometimes merge, and who is to say that the imaginary is less true. I always pictured a pine forest at the back of my house where the small window of my bedroom was and where, for a time, I used to fear that witches might fly through. In reality there are just a few trees, similar to the kind found here on English Edge. In fact the whole area is not dissimilar and it is as though in coming here I found an English version of the German village, though I was not consciously looking for that. I learned to read in both languages, I read early and intensely so the stories became a part of the environment. The years were not happy or easy ones. My father was an actor with a distinguished theatre company in east Berlin but things were not turning out the way he had hoped and though the wall was not yet in place, the east/west division loomed. Each day he would go from the west, where we lived, to work in the east. My sister was born in the British military hospital. My mother went to parties in town but was, I think, depressed. She had not (nor would she ever) come to terms with her father's death in Buchenwald.

By the shores of the lake, where the steamer takes tourists on excursions, Mr. Signs and I stopped by a kiosk for coffee and streuselkuchen. In Germany, wherever you go there is sure to be food of some kind. A customer who was clearly a regular said goodbye to the melancholy kiosk man: Tchus, Jurgen - mach's gut! Go well; literally, make it good. In the Berliner accent it sounded like mach's yut. I remember this, the softening of the letter g. I can still speak like a Berliner if I need to, my accent almost perfect. But anyone who knows can hear that there is something not quite right, I don't have the words, the language is broken, I am not from there. But in a sense I also am. We are such stuff as memories are made of.

I've been watching I'm in a Rock 'n' Roll Band on BBC 2 and thinking about the good old days when guitar riffs would go on for twenty five minutes and apart from times I burned the midnight oil pinching my arms trying not to show anyone how bored I was, it brought back some good moments. But the truth is that long stretches of my erstwhile life wasn't very rock 'n' roll. I worked in offices, supported a young husband through university, typed letters and made tea, did the shopping on the way home before cooking the evening meal, took a weekly bag wash to the launderette. I worked with single homeless people for a bit - helped to find temporary places to live, made sandwiches, ran around trying to make myself useful. Then I lost the plot for a while, went off the rails, broke a heart and got mine broken; sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, one of the worst periods of my life, but it's a place I can point to and say I was there, I wouldn't have missed it. And everyone survived.

I'm sure I had something to say about all this, but it's gone - as though I'd smoked some very strong weed - ha! Sometimes M.E. brain is so rock 'n' roll (not!)

I will be shuttling back and forth to Brighton for the next week or so. There are things still on the to do list, plus the festival going on, and daughter spending her first night there soon. I am still ticking items off the shopping list but there is a seemingly never-ending catalogue of bits and pieces to go shopping for: waste paper baskets, bins, dustpan and brush, roller blind, innumerable odds and sods for the kitchen. We have a bottle of champagne saved up from some occasion or other, for when all the stuff is done, and I am looking forward to cracking it open, even though I can't actually drink much of the stuff.

Son comes back from India next Sunday. Can't wait.

I'll be back here before then, though - because it's M.E. Awareness Day on the 12th of May, and that's a party I obviously ain't gonna miss. Laters.

chemistry

I woke at some ungodly hour thinking about stink bombs. I can explain. At some point in the next couple of months we will have to find a way of clearing out the loft. Son will be arriving home with all his stuff and though he will come and go, his stuff will need house space for a while. Therefore some things will need to go loftwards, but loft is full and, apart from Signs children's art works and old soft toys I have gone blank and can't remember what is up there, apart from a 1960s chemistry set (unused) my dad gave me for Christmas one year.

It is still in its cardboard box, everything in its place: the glass vials of blue, yellow and red crystals, the pipette, a thin pamphlet of instructions, unread. On the box is a picture of two children, a girl and a boy, that remind me of my Janet and John early reading books. She is neat and wholesome in tight plaits, he is smart and keen, short back and sides, holding a vial up to the light.

It was the Enid Blyton books about girls’ boarding schools called St. Clare’s and Mallory Towers. All human life was there, but there was no complexity. If you were a girl who liked to be pretty and neat, this was what you manifested in all you did. Ditto if you were good at lacrosse and team games. The sensible girls who held the social structure together never did anything reprehensible and if one of those did, say, utter one small untruth or throw a paper dart at mam’zelle in the heat of the moment, she would suffer the purging effects of inner remorse until all was made clean again. She would in due course be made head girl. There was the fat one who ate too much, stole other peoples’ tuck and was lazy, the shy one with problems who would be taken into the protection of the sporty one and go on to develop some artistic gift such as playing the violin, and then there was the odd-ball, slightly out on a limb with a touch of the Tomboy about her and cheerfully self-sufficient who was tolerated and indulged by the rest because she was a decent sort and frightfully clever. She played practical jokes and got away with it. She had a chemistry set. She made stink bombs. She might set one off on a particularly auspicious occasion when parents and teachers were gathered together and the girl no-one liked because she was so vain and up herself was about to make a long speech no-one wanted to hear. The stink bomb sent everyone rushing outside onto the lawn to have their cool lemonade and cucumber sandwiches and the clever, naughty girl was severely reprimanded but the headmistress had a twinkle in her eye. The twinkle followed this girl around like a charm. She could write her own script. She could duck out of things she didn’t want to do (embroidery, hockey practice), she could build a crystal radio set and make stink bombs. She had a secret tree house in the grounds where she kept her treasures: old medals, stamps and coins, a daily journal like a kind of lighthouse keeper’s log book; her chemistry set. When the school goody-two-shoes found out and reported her, it was goody who got the flack for being a sneak, not clever individualist stink bomb-maker. And when the time came for a heroic act, she would come and save the day – rescue the new first-former from the blazing fire. Decent.

More importantly, she had a life that was her own, one that I coveted. I possessed a journal, all I had written into it so far was the words for Raggle Taggle Gypsies but I could work on this. The boarding school would come and with it my chosen persona. All I needed was the chemistry set. I must have flicked through the pamphlet once at any rate. There was no reference to stink bombs. You could mix one substance with another to make something else happen, melt the crystals down and make a large one. I was not interested. But still, I had it.

My boarding school was not like St. Clare’s or Mallory Towers. People were less fathomable. My own nature too was a mystery to me. I was not brave, clever or charismatic or resourceful enough to learn how to make a stink bomb. I read books and found that reading about such things was more to my taste than putting them into practice.

But still. The box has come with me, moved from place to place for decades. The crystals have congealed and hardened. The pink on Janet’s cheeks has faded and John seems altogether insubstantial, as though touched by a wraith from the land of Mordor. There is a yellow and a blue that is never seen on children’s packaging any more, not even in Eastern Europe. The set is what we might now call long past its use-by date; untouched, yet still touched by the glamour of its original promise. I'll never bring myself to open it or throw it away.

a bit of gold

You know how one gets these snippets of memory; and how if you keep looking at the snippet it will sometimes open up to things that you had quite forgotten; and then there is the question of how much is memory and how much the past re-imagined: I was thinking about a gold wristwatch I have that used to belong to my grandmother, and suddenly I pictured it on her arm. She wore it every day when my sister and I went on holiday to Italy with her.

We were staying in a hotel just across the road from a beach. We could see the beach from our bedroom window – a long strip of yellow and the blue sea, just like a child’s drawing. My grandmother said that the sand was nicer in Rimini, paler and not so coarse, but it was good for building sandcastles, which we did every day while my grandmother read back copies of Prediction magazine (it still exists, I just checked), underneath a large umbrella, dressed in her cream-coloured suit. She never took her clothes off no matter how hot it was. Every now and then she looked up to see what we were doing and smiled. I wondered why she never wanted to sit in the sun and get brown – getting brown was one of the reasons to go on holiday, when you went home from abroad people would admire your tan. My sister and I put our forearms together to see who was more brown. My grandmother said she was brown too and took off her gold watch to show the white mark underneath.
“Look how white it is,” she said.
“Now take your ring off,” I said. She moved it around on her finger but it didn’t slide off easily.
“I never take my ring off, so it doesn’t want to leave my finger now.”

A man with brown hair and a deep tan watched as we decorated a sand turret with shells and poured drops of wet sand over it to give a rippled effect.
“You have made a beautiful castle there,” he said. He had a German accent, but it was different from my grandmother’s, not so pronounced.
“We’ve been practising,” I said. “This is the best one so far.” He nodded.
“Yes, practice is always a way of doing things better.”
He asked me how old I was and where I came from in England. I told him that I lived in London. He knew the place where I lived because it was near Belsize Park, where he had friends – refugees from Nazi Germany.
“My grandmother was a refugee,” I said. “She lived in Belsize Park too, but now she lives in Hannover.” The man looked over to where my grandmother sat. She was looking at him and he nodded a respectful acknowledgement, bowing his head slightly. She nodded in return and went back to reading her magazine.
“I knew you were a Jewish girl as soon as I saw you,” he said. I told him that my grandfather had died in a concentration camp. He turned his head away and nodded.
At supper my grandmother asked what we had been talking about. She didn’t look pleased when I said about my looking Jewish.

The next day he was there again, still at a distance from my grandmother.
“Are you going to swim in the sea?” I asked. He said no, he preferred to swim in the evening when it was cooler. He had two books by his deckchair, but I never saw him reading them. He liked to look around. He enjoyed talking to me.
“You look just like a girl I once knew,” he said. The girl had had dark hair and eyes, like me, and a lovely smile, an expressive face. He had known her, he said, when he was in a concentration camp. He had come out of the camp alive, but the girl had grown ill and died. My grandmother and he exchanged nods again. I went to her and asked why she didn’t come and talk to him. I sometimes thought it was lonely for her, just sitting on the beach every day with her magazines. But neither she nor the man, whose first name I can’t remember, seemed to expect anything more from each other than an occasional nod. The man told me that his surname was Goldberg, and he was happy to have a beautiful name which meant gold mountain. We spent many afternoons talking together while my sister carried on making sandcastles and my grandmother read her copies of Prediction He told me he believed in reincarnation and wondered if I might have been the girl he had spoken of, in my previous life.

One day I looked up and saw her moving the gold ring around, and suddenly it came off her finger. I went over to look at the white mark, but her hand looked poor and naked without the ring. I took the ring and held it in my palm, trying to feel the weight of it.
“Be careful,” said my grandmother. Then three things happened: from the corner of my eye I saw the man get up from his deckchair and walk to the sea, a black dog ran past and brushed against my leg and I, looking up, lost my balance slightly. The hand that held the ring tilted and the ring fell into the sand.
“What have you done?” said my grandmother.
“It’s ok,” I said, getting onto my knees in the sand, “it’s just here.” But it wasn’t here or anywhere. I scrabbled in the dry sand, but the more I did that, the more lost the ring became.

I can’t be sure how the story ends because I don’t remember anything else about the ring (was it found or lost forever?), and I don’t remember ever seeing the man whose name was Goldberg again. I can’t even be sure that the business with the ring in the sand was exactly as I think I remember it. But there are things I recently discovered about my grandmother’s time during the war, when her husband was in the camp: secrets. The ring could well be a metaphor – rings so often are.

The half-remembered past reflects the lived present. I begin to imagine.

The Other Life

(blame the resonance of mince, lentils and black bean casserole)


There is no mobile phone.
You miss the train and trust
he will wait for you.

There is no supermarket.
You buy a meat pie from the corner shop
and a tin of Batchelor peas.

There is no video recorder.
You watch Planet of the Apes
on a black and white portable

and make your own entertainment:
marjuana grown from seed in terracotta pots;
you play marbles, and lose them.

You picture him in Euston Road,
head bowed against the hard rain.
It is so cold.

There is nothing but the Incredible
String Band singing, this moment is different
from any before it. These moments -

you will hold them in your palm,
string them together like beads,
hang the beads around your neck:

each train the last train;
each bead the last bead;
each minute the last minute.

Eight Random Facts About Signs

I have been tagged by Cusp.

Here are the "Rules":
(Note from Signs: Please adapt or ignore as you see fit).

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.


1) My mother was chosen to present a bouquet of flowers to Hitler when she was a child at school in Germany. She had long blonde plaits and Aryan-blue eyes, they didn’t know her father was a Jew and in Buchenwald. She lived with her grandparents. Later, she was sent to England on Kindertransport.

2) My father’s skin smelled of apple pie and sandalwood. My mother says this was because, as a baby, his mother bathed him in goat’s milk. He came to England from Germany in the nick of time, with his family.

3) I have been to eleven schools and wonder if it is for this reason that I have never felt I belonged anywhere, or because I feel myself to be a diaspora Jew. My father thought that it was that it was good, not belonging too much to anywhere. He said, “My home is where I hang my hat.” I sometimes think I should get myself a hat and a nail to hang it on.

4) As a child I lived in Germany for some years. Back in England, I couldn’t get used to the food, especially school dinners. We had to finish everything on the plate, but at my table there was a hungry Greek boy who ate everyone’s leftovers, so I passed my potato lumps, cabbage and meat gristle to him when the dinner lady wasn’t looking. He nodded and smiled. His name was Gregory.

5) I know by heart all the German stories and songs I used to have on gramophone records. Whenever it snows at all I think of Frau Holle in the sky shaking her feather bed and pillows, and the children’s chorus refrain: “Frau hi ha Holle, du, schuttle immer zu!”

6) I once met Harold Pinter’s mum in the launderette near Primrose Hill (before it was posh) doing a bag wash. She looked and sounded like Terry Jones in the Monty Python Jean-Paul Sartre sketch. She told me who her son was and asked whether I’d heard of him. She said that he didn’t visit her very much.

7) My sister and I had our fortunes told by George Melly. He was sitting in a teepee dressed as Gypsy Rose Lee at a (Labour Party fund-raising) garden party down the road from where I lived. He told my sister that she would spend her life looking after an aged parent and that I would be a famous actress. I was delighted but my sister was not best pleased. As it turned out, my sister became an actress and I, though only god and the angels will bear witness to this, have vowed to look after my aged mother (in my fashion) when the time comes. She is still going strong with weekly Pilates and aqua aerobics.

8) When I was three or four my Spanish nanny, who loved me dearly and wanted to secure my place in heaven in the hereafter, had me secretly baptised in a Catholic church. I don't know how the secret was discovered. I remember the priest pouring water on my head. I haven’t seen the the nanny since I was five and she went back to Spain to look after her mother and unmarried brother, but we sometimes exchange Christmas cards. She never married or had children. She thinks of me.


I have tagged:

Anna Mr
Chipendale
Digitalesse
NMJ
Surroundings
That's So Pants
The Periodic Englishman
Moonoverwater

Life on Earth

Just been watching the second series Life on Mars which is the best thing on TV since the first series. Apart from the characters, the script, the whole idea of it, what I enjoy is being back in 1973, even a pretend 1973. You can never really recreate the past, though they do a good job with the rusty Ford Cortina, everyone smoking all the time everywhere and Yellow Brick Road.

I have been up to London to spend a night in the Hammersmith Novotel with Him Outdoors who has been attending a conference. Walking along the stretch of road between Hammersmith station and Novotel, I realised I had not walked that stretch of road for 40 years. It has all changed, of course, but I’m sure I recognised the odd bit of pavement and know where the old kiosk used to be where I bought my Maltesers en route to the crammer that was supposed to put right my “falling behind” on account of my two years at a Rudolf Steiner school. The crammer was pretty awful – no stories, no songs or pictures (doodling on exercise books strictly forbidden) but I suppose they did their job. I passed the entrance exam into a Good School - which I was chucked out of a few years down the line. Now in the late summer, or autumn, of my life (depending on whether I’m spared some or many more years), I think I have changed less than the area has. I like playing games where you make things up and I try not to walk on the cracks. I like eating the chocolate around the Malteser before biting into the crunchy part. I think about what I will do when I grow up. If I were to be time-warped back to 1967 I would feel right at home. When I go to London now I feel a stranger. It isn’t my place any more. I am constantly surprised by the swarms of people everywhere at all times. I wouldn’t be able to get proper coffee but I don’t mind instant and know how to make pretend latte.

We went to see Nothing But the Truth by John Kani at the Hampstead Theatre. John Kani also acted one of the central characters in the play. Set in post-apartheid South Africa`at the time of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it is in many ways a play about memory and identity, exposing the shortcomings of the reconciliation process and the necessity of talking about the past. During the performance, we found the response of some of the audience very peculiar. Listening to the endless tittering, it seemed that much of the play was received as a kind of laugh-a-minute sitcom, though everyone did at least shut up during Kani’s wonderful, moving monologue at the end. And people rose to their feet and gave him a standing ovation.

I am preparing for a couple of days creative workshopping with some poet friends (all writing teachers) here at Signs Cottage, followed by a triumphant inaugural poetry café event in the local community centre on Friday night. Getting together and making things up as we go along is the kind of thing I would have liked doing in 1967. Then I would have had to justify the time spent. Now I don’t. Wish me strength.