Heartsease                   

You are a ghost that I walk through on a Boxing Day derive. In the electrical cluster-fuck of your supernatural event, everything I own has run out of battery. The pigeons have won the battle for the balcony and with it so too falls the flat. Their shit constellates the asphalt, the plastic owl and the snow damaged fag ends.

 *                        *                          *

How do you grow something larger than its own boundaries? Do you knock down and rebuild with the economics of space at the back of your mind, a chimney coming down in your solar plexus?

*                         *                          *

There is a gully in the Plantation woods, that snakes it’s way around the edge of a sometimes lake. The lake is empty in December, but in the spring months it’s full and is frogspawn and rotted mulch, birch frosted with moss. O Children of Heartsease, these are you woods, let me dream of you at the edges, weapons in hand crafted from mattress springs and winter winded spikes, jutting out like your bony elbows.

*                          *                         *

 There is sunset on the co-op. Sunset on the strip lights. Sunset on the boys, cycling on one bike. There is sunset on the single eye of the CCTV as it follows me, down Holmes Close, like a sleepwalker until I vanish out of sight.

Happisburgh

I cut out an obituary recently of a wood engraver by the name of John ‘O’Connor. It was illustration of his wood engraving, ‘Little Garden in the Evening’ attributed to the year 1946 that caught my attention. I felt there was something deeper in this engraving that had affected me. It’s a summer evening, of that I am sure. In the foreground there are several grasses and towering weeds and a barrel full of water. Behind this a fence enclosed garden with what looks like a pair of hollyhocks, standing above a sea of what could be crowfoot, pyrethrum or maybe candytuft. Behind this is a garden shed, pointing up to the sky like a cathedral to nature. The background is made up of various trees, swinging their branches furiously as the sky darkens with an incoming storm. The water in the barrel is like a tiny sea, the surface water angry and unfit for sailing. The shed is peculiar; it almost seems out of place, a hermitage for O’Connor’s thoughts. The Obituarist Simon Fenwick writes: “He (O’Connor) saw his favourite painting places in Suffolk – the ponds, willows, briars and honeysuckle – disappear beneath the bulldozer and combine harvester, and eventually moved with his wife to the emptier spaces of south-west Scotland.” O’Connor was chasing a ghost, a rural ghost, much like John Sell Cotman’s ‘From my father’s House at Thorpe’ had chased a garden of childhood memory, and instead of a work steeped in nostalgia, we see instead work bathed in melancholia; swimming in the black bile of a man’s inner life. O’Connor’s engraving is alive – I can feel the wind, and the air alive with the storm’s electricity. I can smell the heavy perfume of the garden flowers. And I can hear the trees and the water moving in the barrel. Trees have always played a part in human death; they are the dark smudge at the edges of our vision. As a child I remember a man from the village disappearing a week before Christmas. I was at a friend’s house, and we decided to go into the woods and he suggested that we may find the man living wild amongst the trees. That evening we sat watching the Two Ronnies, anticipating The Phantom Raspberry Blower, while waiting for my father to collect me. We were so engrossed that we had not noticed the arrival of my father who was talking in hushed tones to my friend’s parents. They had found the man hanging in the woods. Not far from Shepherd’s Barn where a farm-hand had taken his life too, in the very same manner. Nestled in a small valley, the place up until thirty years ago was one of the loneliest places imaginable, and as kids we would all avoid it. Some said you could hear the rope in the wind. Others said they had seen a sad looking man with a bruised neck watching them from the barn door. Forgetting local ghost stories that probably manifested in saloon bars, this place where a young man felt compelled to take his own life, down among the linden and the ash, is now crossed by a million people a day as they circulate the M25. 

Before moving to Norwich, the news was full of the disappearance of a thirteen year old boy called Thomas Marshall, from a North Norfolk coastal village named Happisburgh and the subsequent discovery of his body in Thetford forest. The village butcher did it - grooming the local kids, until one of them (Marshall) tried to blackmail him for confectionery and ended up being murdered and crudely and cruelly dumped in the forest. I visited Happisburgh recently. The village sits right on the bend of Norfolk as the coast swings round towards Cromer. Happisburgh is a place that is disappearing itself. People have woken up and found the value of their property plummeting into the North Sea as the cliffs move closer and closer to their backdoors. The local pub has a plaque with Sherlock Holmes emblazoned upon it. ‘Conan Doyle wrote here’. 

Holmes in profile: the classic Basil Rathbone jaw line, the customary hat and pipe - far more recognisable than the profile of Doyle the embittered writer of the great detective, and later the mourning father-cum-spiritualist in search of his son’s soul who took a bullet in World War One. Around a century later, a case worthy of Holmes presents itself in the very same village, and using Holmes’ scientific methods, Norfolk police get their butcher. In Happisburgh church they’ve erected a steel spiral staircase up the tower in memoriam to Marshall, where from the top one can enjoy views across the North Sea or back across the flat and treeless Norfolk landscape. I wonder if Doyle ever climbed the original stairs of the tower and imagined Holmes and his biographer, Dr John Watson, taking in the view. Watson, out of breath, (due to being overweight and his knee wound from the Boer war giving him gyp), commenting on how the British landscape makes a man proud of his nationality. Then Holmes, the sweat pouring from his brow due to his opium addiction, destroys Watson’s pastoral maundering by looking at the landscape with his usual dread of human nature and regarding it as the perfect stage for an evil more vile than in any of London’s darkest alleyways, to manifest. 

Anglia Square - Oh you wounded beast!

Anglia Square

Of your fearful symmetry I was afraid. I was young then, and could only relate you to houses covered in Christmas lights, a dog dragging its backside across a carpet, a man hiding in the leylandii.  Now, you are much more the slant of light in a shady room, the wind-farm out to sea, the echo on a school field. Oh you wounded beast! You council designated demolition job! There are fragments of love messages caught in your barbwire. I will read some to you:  “Potatoes 2, XXL”, “Summat for the baby”, “...the thing I can’t remember”. Or how about this: “I hear the Police dogs howling in the spiral stairs.” Further out, signs of diss-respekt plastered on the walls, ATL CREW, IN YER MANNER. Far cry from the planners who dreamt of you as a town within a city; a concrete and glass perplex, with Hollywood cinema, the cardboard wookie and droids, guardians of a future discarded like a fag packet. In your centre a little train follows a circular track, a man with a placard[1] stands and speaks in your voice to the pigeons, ‘entropy, entropy, they’ve all got it in for me’. The car tyres scream in your upper reaches; dirty puddles reflect the endless, ambivalent blue, and I stand and stroke you like a stranded whale on a wintered beach. I whisper in your ear like a child: “Sleep now mister whale, sleep now and dream no more.”

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[1] “Massive Card Sale Today – Birthdays, Weddings, Funerals, Xmas”

Air Mail!

Sometime in 2003 a postcard landed on the doormat of the house I almost lived in at the time, on Magdalen Rd, Norwich. It was for a previous resident, a professor at the University of East Anglia.  It was left by the people (not the Prof) living in the house and for a while was stuck to the music stand of a piano that had at some time found its way into the house and refused to leave. The piano, out of tune and in need of some restoration, held onto the postcard for four years.The piano makes me think of the Sussex town Rye. I have no idea why.

The front of the postcard has a picture of Norwich cathedral viewed from the South-East. There is something a little unsettling about the rear of the cathedral, resembling the thorax and abdomen of some stone insect. At some point in time, this postcard found its way to New York, and after residing with the original recipient, it must have found its way into a junk shop, or was passed on in a shoe box after someone died, either way, and I'm sure there are many other ways, the postcard ended up in the hands of Milo + Ann.

Let's imagine some store in Manhatten, where one day Milo + Ann, now in their 70's are taking a stroll along the pavement/sidewalk and come across the thrift store. Flicking through the postcards, Milo discovers Norwich, something resonates, the marbles of memory drop through the holes in his conscious and he cries "Ann, Ann, wouldja look at this!".  Ann, a bit annoyed at being disturbed from a 1952 book of circus photographs peers over her glasses. "Norwich, Ann! That's where the Prof lives, man I gotta send him this!"

Later, at home, Milo carefully sticks down some white labels over the original message (which taunts us to try and read the palimpsest beneath; the only thing legible beneath Milo's handywork is the frustrating 'best regards' like a ghost waving goodbye from a ferry). Ann, who is still narked at losing her concentration on performing elephants and bears in Coney Island dressed up as women, lets Milo sign the card for her.

And here it is, in the wrong persons hands. It's 2010, and the Prof still hasn't had his birthday wishes for 2003.

I found out in 2007 that the Prof has an office in the same school of the UEA that I teach in. I moved from Magdalen road, three times in fact, in three years. I forgot about the postcard until now. It had been moving around my desk for weeks, hiding as a bookmark between pages, scooped up with photos and then returned to my desk, somehow unable to be filed, homeless and shifting from room to room. A few weeks back I was commissioned to write a poem that involved Norwich Cathedral. Back on my desk again, I picked up the postcard and thought about the word 'airmail'. The poem emerged from lines in this postcard and by translating overheard mutterings inside the cathedral.

Tomorrow I will slip the postcard under the door.