October 1997 Kitty (maker unknown, London)
July 1999 Barbie (maker unknown, London)
June 2002 Blockhead B (Zoe Windle, London)
July 2002 Land Girl (Zoe Windle, London)
September 2002 Trucker Girls (Zoe Windle, London)
October 2002 M (Zoe Windle, London)
October 2002 Elvis Presley (Zoe Windle, London)
August 2002 - November 2002 50's Women/ Alarm Clock/ Girdle/ Pyjama Case/ Mirror/ Shoes/ Glasses/ Bow (Zoe Windle, London)
January 2003 Bow & Lilies (Zoe Windle, London)
February 2003 Trailer Trash Girl/ Flamingo/ Trailer (Zoe Windle, London - drawing by Mitch O Connell)
August 2003 Swallow (Ray, Edinburgh)
September 2003 Skullerfly (Zoe Windle, London)
January 2004 Gun (Goaty, Cardiff)
February 2004 Anchor (self made, London)
February 2004 Kirby Grip (Duncan X, London)
April 2004 Cherries (Goaty, Cardiff)
May 2004 Diamond (Tomas Tomas, London)
September 2004 Lucky Horseshoe (Lee, Anniston, AL. USA)
September 2004 Gladys (Lee, Anniston, AL. USA)
November 2004 It'll Be OK (Steve Herring, London - drawing by Rebecca Craig)
December 2004 Cupcake (Duncan X, London)
December 2004 Thrills 4 Girls (Barry Hogarth, London -drawing by Kim Merrington)
January 2005 Banal Ideas Cannot Be Rescued By Beautiful Execution (Xam, London - Quote by Sol LeWitt)
January 2005 Nine Red Dots (self made, London)
February 2005 Pirate Ship (Barry Hogarth, London)
March 2005 Dagger & Ribbon (Xam, London)
March 2005 Denise (Barry Hogarth, London)
April-June 2005 ‘Do Unto Others As You Would That They Should Do Unto You’
(aka ‘The Last Supper’) (Thomas Hooper, London)
June 2005 Star (self made, London)
March 2004 -August 2005 Deco Flowers (Duncan X, London)
January 2006 Sombrero Sporting Skull (Lee, Anniston, AL, USA)
February 2006 Our Lady Of Fatima (Lucy Pryor, Swansea)
May 2006 Cigarettes (Duncan X, London)
June 2006 Skull & Crossbones (Lee, Anniston AL, USA)
June 2006 5 Blue Diamonds (Lucy Pryor, London)
June 2006 Chicken/ Crossbones/ Comedy Scar/ Dots & Crosses (self made, London)
July 2006 Moustache (Gary Weidenhoff, Derby)
August 2006 Butterfly (Adi, Manchester)
August 2006 Plasters (Lucy Pryor, London)
August 2006 Budgie/Nurse/Butterfly (self made, London)
September 2006 Three Ticks (Nikole Lowe, London)
October 2006 Matryoshka (Lucy Pryor, London)
October 2006 Kewpie Doll (Phil Kyle, London)
December 2006 Andrew (Xam, London)
February 2007 Small Yellow Bear (Zoe Windle, Swansea)
March 2007 Fuck You Monkey (Mark Armstrong, Manchester)
April 2007 Strawberry (Tony Piercy, Birkenhead)
April 2007 Roses outline (Jayjay Dallas, London)
May 2007 Swallows (Uncle Allan, Copenhagen)
June 2007 Fly/ Stork/ Cat/ Cardinals Hat/ Knuckleduster/ 2 Safety Pins/ Crown/ Owl/ Bottle/ Bomb (Tallulah Belle, London)
July 2007 Roses (Simon Erl, London)
July 2007 Black Heart ‘M’ (Micaela, London)
July 2007 Blue (Blue, London)
August 2007 I Love Nate (Lucy Pryor, London)
September 2007 Bug (Sandy, Manchester)
October 2007 Key (Phil Kyle, London)
November 2007 Arrow/ Wounded Archer/ Row of houses / Skull/ Skeleton Hand/ Sewing Needle/ Pterodactyl/ Origami Dog/ Tiny Bird/ Coffin/ Sinister Snowman. (Mr X, London)
January 2008 Broken Hinge with Rose (Drew XIII, Sheffield)
March 2008 Vase (Drew Romero, Sheffield and Peterlee)
March 2008 Candle (James Kiley. Manchester)
April 2008 Severed Head (Drew Romero, Manchester)
August 2008 Rose (Drew Romero, Coventry)
December 2008 Ben Harris Has Hooves (Billie, Manchester)
June 2009 Hello Kitty (Lisa Toye, Liverpool)
June 2009 Puffin/Rose/Timo (Simon Erl, Liverpool)
March 2010 Nate's drawing (Beany Rosic, Manchester)
April 2010 Fan of Daggers (Daniel Morris, Manchester)
April 2010 You Don't Suck (Gre Hale, Manchester
May 2010 L&R (Daniel Morris, Manchester)
May 2010 Aeoropain (Gre Hale, Manchester)
May-June 2010 Fan of Daggers (Daniel Morris, Manchester)
August 2010 My Cat Pie (Scarlet Hel, Doncaster)
October 2010 Another Diamond (Daniel Morris, Manchester)
November 2010 You're So Cool (Gre Hale, Manchester)
December 2011 & I-V-Y (Daniel Morris, Manchester)
February 2012 Mama's Milk (Jemma Jones, Manchester)
Paula Hardy Kangelos 2012
(Version 6, Original 2005)
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stories. Show all posts
My Father is a Liar
My father is a liar.
That may sound a little harsh; perhaps it would be more kindly to describe him as someone who exists in a state where he controls his own narrative. However, in the interests of truth and authenticity, I will stick with my original phrasing.
My father is a liar.
He plays an ongoing game of Chinese whispers with himself. Each time he tells one of his laboriously invented stories to a new audience, it has changed, shifted. The more he tells his tale, spins his yarn, the more it is altered, reshaped. Eventually he has knitted an entirely new untruth. Only no one seems to notice, his fictions are consumed, accepted, eaten up with a spoon and a cherry on top (or more likely, a beer and a packet of scratchings). The inconsistencies are allowed to slip by without acknowledgement. The only witnesses to his untruths, his daughters. My sister and I are undecided as to whether he himself is aware or not. He is certainly very convincing. Perhaps convincing enough to assuage even his own doubt. Perhaps it is not even his fault; after all, his whole life has been a sort of fiction.
My maternal family tree is easy to trace, even if it is a little fragmented due to a few, shameful moments hastily hidden and re-revealed when the times changed. Nonetheless, it is all there to be found in the boxes of papers and photographs saved my grandmother. This tree even has roots: 10 generations have moved barely 20 square miles in 300 years. My maternal family has a home, a history and all of its associative traces. Parish records, gravesites (unmarked, paupers graves, but recorded in the ledgers nonetheless) birth certificates, inscriptions on War Memorials, books of remembrance and old school rolls of honour (“for perfect attendance”). The people are gone, but the evidence remains.
My paternal family left no evidence at all. This branch of the tree is missing, amputated, absent or at the very least entirely obscured by a blanket of untruths. An unresearchable line of enquiry.
Thus, considering the vast mystery surrounding the circumstances of my father’s life, it is easiest to start with the information that has been corroborated by my mother’s family. In a sense, my fathers factual existence only began when he met my mother, age 14, at the weekly Youth Club, held at the Village Hall. My mother said it was not a pleasant meeting, she was in the red telephone box on the corner, squashed up in front of the tiny mirror with her two best friends, tentatively backcombing their provincial beehive hairdos. Apparently, my father wanted in, in order to use the phone and my mother had slung a disembodied door handle at his head. (It had come off in her hand earlier, in the Village hall and she has stuffed in into her cream vinyl handbag to avoid the verger’s wrath). This antagonistic beginning soon gave way to something more familiar, because by 16 they were engaged and by 18, married. My sister and I assumed it was a typical “Blue Jeans” romance story of young, puppy love blossoming into a life-long commitment. We were not very intuitive in those days.
My father had little to do with his mother, Louisa. Blind, cantankerous, foul, who, in my own living memory seemed to have only one hobby, scaring away assorted district nurses, home helps and relatives. She was very good at this. By the time I was 10 years old her only regular visitors were my mother and my mother’s mother. My two grandmothers could not have been more different, yet Gladys tried her best, shopping for Louisa and cleaning her filthy home. Eventually Louisa falsely reported Gladys to the police for theft, determined to repel everyone so that she could truly wallow in her own misery, uninterrupted by the last of the sympathetic. My sister and I were relieved. Granny stank.
Gladys told me that it was not the first time that Louisa had attempted to repel her family with help from the long arm of the law. Apparently, she had pressed charges against my father as a teenager and they had both been “Bound over to keep the peace” when my father was 15. He became my mother’s granny’s lodger after this incident and rarely spoke to his own mother again. My mother’s mother told me that she always felt a little sorry for my father, who lived three miles away in a large family with his already somewhat neglectful mother. My father showed little affection for his five siblings, save for his one younger brother. In fact, Louisa’s funeral was the only time the four brothers had been in the same building in some 20 years. The sisters declined the invitation to the funeral tea.
Louisa’s house belonged to the council; so after her death all hands were required on deck, to clean her home before the keys were returned. My sister managed to wangle her way out of it (probably crying GCSE revision as an excuse) but I was sent off to help. It was in between holding breaths and rushing outside to fortify myself against the stench I came across two birth certificates, folded up and pressed beneath an old newspaper lining a drawer. I did not immediately recognise the names on them, as the surname was entirely unfamiliar. I showed it to my father who simultaneously dismissed it and destroyed it. I’m not sure if he even glanced at it, due to the speed with which it hit the inside of a black bag, he certainly didn’t claim it as his own and I cannot recall the surname featured. When I mentioned it to my mother, she told me that she suspected that Louisa had never actually married her husband, John, as he was rumoured to have already had a wife and young family on the other side of town. She also told me that although Louisa had taken on his surname of Hardy, there was some debate as to whether that really was his name anyway. Furthermore there were stories of him only being in Hertfordshire on account that he was on the run from his native Yorkshire, where he was wanted by police for stealing from his family, apparently a dynasty of not inconsiderable means. No one actually knew who John Hardy, my grandfather, really was. He was as mysterious and perhaps as fictional as the talented Mr Ripley, which clearly did not bode well for my father’s young psyche and sense of self:
Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other– which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other. In that declaration of identity and identification, the loss of not being the other and yet remaining dependent on that other for self-seeing, self-being.[1]
Unable to identify his father, his other and thus unable to locate the boundary, left my father floundering, unable to declare his identity. Instead, he chose to construct his own, through performativity and utterance.
My father became larger than life. He has a loud voice and the kind of presence that captivates a room. He would clearly have been great in show business, but instead spent his whole working life, from the age of 14, in the rag trade. His charm and resourcefulness allowed him to progress rapidly from sewing machinist to production manager, but he certainly worked hard for the promotions. As children, we rarely saw him, apart from on Friday nights when he would baby-sit and my mother would go to Bingo, when he would invariably sleep, leaving us to our own devices. He must have been exhausted; travelling, as he did, to London each day in order to create a new person in the city where it seems no one has any real history.
For us, life was comfortable. We were the only family in the village with two cars and I suppose we appeared to be, in context, quite well off. There were odd times when something catastrophic happened, like my tenth birthday, forever remembered as listening to my new A-ha album, on my new record player, whilst watching a strange man set light to my father’s (company) car from my bedroom window; just one of the many dramatic incidents that arose as a direct result of my father’s indiscretions and my first real understanding of his leading a dual life.
My mother always forgave him though, so we did too. After all, the lies were not so different to those told by countless others the world over. Until 1988, when things became very strange indeed.
I was 11 when my father was diagnosed as having Hodgkin’s disease. He was really rather ill, the chemotherapy took his hair, left him weak and the steroid treatment left him bloated; yet still he worked. Throughout his treatment, he did not take a single days sick leave. Rather, he attended early chemotherapy appointments and made it into the office by 10, at the latest. Words, such as “marvellous” and “brave” were bandied about in his general direction and in response my father had took on the air of an officer, going into battle. His actual illness was rarely directly discussed with us, but much was made of his Doctor, his hospital visits and some such unspecified future tragedy that was intimated as to be looming on the horizon. It was implied that my father had less than six months to live. Moreover, he was still in work every day. A formidable man indeed! Six months later, it seemed as though a miracle must have happened. He was the same as he had always been, his hair had grown back, he was fit and healthy, and six months after that and six months after that…but still the whispers, the rumours.
My father has claimed to be terminally ill for two decades. Living with such an enormous cloud of untruth must not be without its challenges. My father is acting a role from the moment he wakes to the moment he sleeps. He is the ultimate method actor, for the pretence is making him ill.
Occasionally, someone of my parents’ generation, someone I barely remember but who seems to know everything about me, will tell me how terrible it is for my father. And it is. They mean, living under a cloud of death, which he does, only not in the sense that they assume. There is no arbitrary distinction between fact and fiction in my father’s life. He is a doomed man. It is now 21 years since his diagnoses and my father still tells how he has six months to live. Although, not to me, I no longer speak to him at all. The time he told me he had won the Euro lottery and the time he claimed to have been wrongfully imprisoned in a Romanian jail have stretched our relationship to breaking point. I wonder what stories he tells to explain his lack of filial contact.
So,
My father is a liar.
But he is an authentic liar, he has fabricated his own authenticity and validated it through his relationship with his peers. He has told so many tales that he simply can no-longer separate fact from fiction, he is an entirely constructed identity, continuously performing his own self-written narrative. A method actor that has gone too far, far over the precipice and straight down into a quagmire of untruths, from which he cannot escape, and he cannot be rescued.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge.
That may sound a little harsh; perhaps it would be more kindly to describe him as someone who exists in a state where he controls his own narrative. However, in the interests of truth and authenticity, I will stick with my original phrasing.
My father is a liar.
He plays an ongoing game of Chinese whispers with himself. Each time he tells one of his laboriously invented stories to a new audience, it has changed, shifted. The more he tells his tale, spins his yarn, the more it is altered, reshaped. Eventually he has knitted an entirely new untruth. Only no one seems to notice, his fictions are consumed, accepted, eaten up with a spoon and a cherry on top (or more likely, a beer and a packet of scratchings). The inconsistencies are allowed to slip by without acknowledgement. The only witnesses to his untruths, his daughters. My sister and I are undecided as to whether he himself is aware or not. He is certainly very convincing. Perhaps convincing enough to assuage even his own doubt. Perhaps it is not even his fault; after all, his whole life has been a sort of fiction.
My maternal family tree is easy to trace, even if it is a little fragmented due to a few, shameful moments hastily hidden and re-revealed when the times changed. Nonetheless, it is all there to be found in the boxes of papers and photographs saved my grandmother. This tree even has roots: 10 generations have moved barely 20 square miles in 300 years. My maternal family has a home, a history and all of its associative traces. Parish records, gravesites (unmarked, paupers graves, but recorded in the ledgers nonetheless) birth certificates, inscriptions on War Memorials, books of remembrance and old school rolls of honour (“for perfect attendance”). The people are gone, but the evidence remains.
My paternal family left no evidence at all. This branch of the tree is missing, amputated, absent or at the very least entirely obscured by a blanket of untruths. An unresearchable line of enquiry.
Thus, considering the vast mystery surrounding the circumstances of my father’s life, it is easiest to start with the information that has been corroborated by my mother’s family. In a sense, my fathers factual existence only began when he met my mother, age 14, at the weekly Youth Club, held at the Village Hall. My mother said it was not a pleasant meeting, she was in the red telephone box on the corner, squashed up in front of the tiny mirror with her two best friends, tentatively backcombing their provincial beehive hairdos. Apparently, my father wanted in, in order to use the phone and my mother had slung a disembodied door handle at his head. (It had come off in her hand earlier, in the Village hall and she has stuffed in into her cream vinyl handbag to avoid the verger’s wrath). This antagonistic beginning soon gave way to something more familiar, because by 16 they were engaged and by 18, married. My sister and I assumed it was a typical “Blue Jeans” romance story of young, puppy love blossoming into a life-long commitment. We were not very intuitive in those days.
My father had little to do with his mother, Louisa. Blind, cantankerous, foul, who, in my own living memory seemed to have only one hobby, scaring away assorted district nurses, home helps and relatives. She was very good at this. By the time I was 10 years old her only regular visitors were my mother and my mother’s mother. My two grandmothers could not have been more different, yet Gladys tried her best, shopping for Louisa and cleaning her filthy home. Eventually Louisa falsely reported Gladys to the police for theft, determined to repel everyone so that she could truly wallow in her own misery, uninterrupted by the last of the sympathetic. My sister and I were relieved. Granny stank.
Gladys told me that it was not the first time that Louisa had attempted to repel her family with help from the long arm of the law. Apparently, she had pressed charges against my father as a teenager and they had both been “Bound over to keep the peace” when my father was 15. He became my mother’s granny’s lodger after this incident and rarely spoke to his own mother again. My mother’s mother told me that she always felt a little sorry for my father, who lived three miles away in a large family with his already somewhat neglectful mother. My father showed little affection for his five siblings, save for his one younger brother. In fact, Louisa’s funeral was the only time the four brothers had been in the same building in some 20 years. The sisters declined the invitation to the funeral tea.
Louisa’s house belonged to the council; so after her death all hands were required on deck, to clean her home before the keys were returned. My sister managed to wangle her way out of it (probably crying GCSE revision as an excuse) but I was sent off to help. It was in between holding breaths and rushing outside to fortify myself against the stench I came across two birth certificates, folded up and pressed beneath an old newspaper lining a drawer. I did not immediately recognise the names on them, as the surname was entirely unfamiliar. I showed it to my father who simultaneously dismissed it and destroyed it. I’m not sure if he even glanced at it, due to the speed with which it hit the inside of a black bag, he certainly didn’t claim it as his own and I cannot recall the surname featured. When I mentioned it to my mother, she told me that she suspected that Louisa had never actually married her husband, John, as he was rumoured to have already had a wife and young family on the other side of town. She also told me that although Louisa had taken on his surname of Hardy, there was some debate as to whether that really was his name anyway. Furthermore there were stories of him only being in Hertfordshire on account that he was on the run from his native Yorkshire, where he was wanted by police for stealing from his family, apparently a dynasty of not inconsiderable means. No one actually knew who John Hardy, my grandfather, really was. He was as mysterious and perhaps as fictional as the talented Mr Ripley, which clearly did not bode well for my father’s young psyche and sense of self:
Identity is perceptible only through a relation to an other– which is to say, it is a form of both resisting and claiming the other, declaring the boundary where the self diverges from and merges with the other. In that declaration of identity and identification, the loss of not being the other and yet remaining dependent on that other for self-seeing, self-being.[1]
Unable to identify his father, his other and thus unable to locate the boundary, left my father floundering, unable to declare his identity. Instead, he chose to construct his own, through performativity and utterance.
My father became larger than life. He has a loud voice and the kind of presence that captivates a room. He would clearly have been great in show business, but instead spent his whole working life, from the age of 14, in the rag trade. His charm and resourcefulness allowed him to progress rapidly from sewing machinist to production manager, but he certainly worked hard for the promotions. As children, we rarely saw him, apart from on Friday nights when he would baby-sit and my mother would go to Bingo, when he would invariably sleep, leaving us to our own devices. He must have been exhausted; travelling, as he did, to London each day in order to create a new person in the city where it seems no one has any real history.
For us, life was comfortable. We were the only family in the village with two cars and I suppose we appeared to be, in context, quite well off. There were odd times when something catastrophic happened, like my tenth birthday, forever remembered as listening to my new A-ha album, on my new record player, whilst watching a strange man set light to my father’s (company) car from my bedroom window; just one of the many dramatic incidents that arose as a direct result of my father’s indiscretions and my first real understanding of his leading a dual life.
My mother always forgave him though, so we did too. After all, the lies were not so different to those told by countless others the world over. Until 1988, when things became very strange indeed.
I was 11 when my father was diagnosed as having Hodgkin’s disease. He was really rather ill, the chemotherapy took his hair, left him weak and the steroid treatment left him bloated; yet still he worked. Throughout his treatment, he did not take a single days sick leave. Rather, he attended early chemotherapy appointments and made it into the office by 10, at the latest. Words, such as “marvellous” and “brave” were bandied about in his general direction and in response my father had took on the air of an officer, going into battle. His actual illness was rarely directly discussed with us, but much was made of his Doctor, his hospital visits and some such unspecified future tragedy that was intimated as to be looming on the horizon. It was implied that my father had less than six months to live. Moreover, he was still in work every day. A formidable man indeed! Six months later, it seemed as though a miracle must have happened. He was the same as he had always been, his hair had grown back, he was fit and healthy, and six months after that and six months after that…but still the whispers, the rumours.
My father has claimed to be terminally ill for two decades. Living with such an enormous cloud of untruth must not be without its challenges. My father is acting a role from the moment he wakes to the moment he sleeps. He is the ultimate method actor, for the pretence is making him ill.
Occasionally, someone of my parents’ generation, someone I barely remember but who seems to know everything about me, will tell me how terrible it is for my father. And it is. They mean, living under a cloud of death, which he does, only not in the sense that they assume. There is no arbitrary distinction between fact and fiction in my father’s life. He is a doomed man. It is now 21 years since his diagnoses and my father still tells how he has six months to live. Although, not to me, I no longer speak to him at all. The time he told me he had won the Euro lottery and the time he claimed to have been wrongfully imprisoned in a Romanian jail have stretched our relationship to breaking point. I wonder what stories he tells to explain his lack of filial contact.
So,
My father is a liar.
But he is an authentic liar, he has fabricated his own authenticity and validated it through his relationship with his peers. He has told so many tales that he simply can no-longer separate fact from fiction, he is an entirely constructed identity, continuously performing his own self-written narrative. A method actor that has gone too far, far over the precipice and straight down into a quagmire of untruths, from which he cannot escape, and he cannot be rescued.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: the Politics of Performance London ; New York, Routledge.
Charlie
I moved to Dalston in 2002 and took up residence on the top floor of a 30s built social housing block. The majority of the tenants had already left, either decanted or disillusioned by the council’s empty promises of regeneration (or at least repair). Many of the flats were boarded up, windows smashed to prevent squatting, once homes but now ghosts with net curtains. This relative isolation suited my neighbour, Charlie. A migrant from Malta, he had bought his flat from the council (his sworn enemies) in the right to buy boom years of the 1980s. Charlie had taken the phrase “An Englishman’s home is his castle” quite seriously and for the next 20 years had set about turning his English home into a fortress, clad in a distinctive armour fashioned from the discards of others. Charlie was, in popular culture terms, a Womble - making good use of the things that he found. Along with this ingenuity, he also possessed an iron will and an obviously super-human strength. How else would he have been able to drag not one, not two, but three rusting discarded washing machines up five flights of steep concrete stairs in just one afternoon? He was indomitable when it came to discarded goods.
Charlie and I were the only residents left on the top floor of Pamela House so, just occasionally, Charlie felt compelled to ask me in for tea. This was a complex event involving many logistical problems and in order that proper planning could take place my invite would invariably be issued several days in advance for it took this time for Charlie to clear an adequate space in which a visitor might sit. So on that occasional day when Charlie felt suitably in control of his collection to allow an outsider in, he would indicate to me that the best way to negotiate his flat was to turn to your side and shuffle in like a crab. The piled boxes lining the walls had created some very slim passageways and, given his modest three-bed flat, a rather cave-like quality. Nonetheless, spurred on by the thought of witnessing Charlie’s latest finds, I would ease my way in and perch on the edge of an overstuffed chair, on top of several folded blankets, sipping from a cracked Lady Di mug and try my best not to stare at the multiple stacked TV sets. To witness how he lived was a truly awe inspiring experience. Occasionally, Charlie would make a fleeting reference to the existence of a lock up unit that he rented further East. My imagination is doubtless insufficient to adequately conjure up the endless treasures stored there.
Occasionally, the council would take offence to the spread of Charlie’s stuff and things and send a stern letter, or perhaps an even sterner inspector. Luckily for Charlie, he was a leaseholder making eviction a costly and laborious process and as the estate was on the verge of being condemned, further action was deemed pointless. Instead, they wielded their authority by removing the stacks of rubber tires that Charlie kept amongst the pot plants on the stairwells, supplemented by the occasional dead toaster. He was not too bothered; he liked to confess to me that it was ok because he “kept all the really good stuff inside”.
Charlie died on Boxing Day 2005, leaving his grown up daughters to the unenviable task of taking the proceeds of 20 plus years of wombling back down the five flights of concrete stairs. It took quite a while and several skips. His eldest showed me the flat right before they rented it out. It was surprisingly big, very clean and very empty. They had painted it magnolia.
On occasion, I have been accused of being possessed by the spirit of Charlie. I have a funeral director friend who delights in relaying tales of call outs to the homes of pack rats who have suffocated under the weight of their collections. She seems to delight in the randomness, the craziness. I prefer to rationalise it as three-dimensional collage. So, perhaps I am a little like Charlie. My amassments, like his, both deny categorisation and defy possible completion. I simply cannot imagine that there would ever have been the intent to collect a whole in Charlie’s mind. Instead it was simply a very random snowball, starting out small and gentle and eventually thundering down hill in a very alarming fashion indeed, his life’s work; an admirable display of dedication and commitment. Perhaps I am more selective, limiting myself to snapshots and other sundry traces of otherwise lost and forgotten existences, but I might be doing Charlie a disservice in this assumption. It is possible his decaying electrical equipment was similarly selected, albeit to unverbalized criteria. Certainly, I am sure that he felt, like me, that he was not collecting these objects in an attempt to impose his order over them, to control through knowledge and possession like the butterfly collector. Rather our shared need to conserve, protect and care for our things clearly put us into their service, rather than them into ours.
Long live the Wombles.
Charlie and I were the only residents left on the top floor of Pamela House so, just occasionally, Charlie felt compelled to ask me in for tea. This was a complex event involving many logistical problems and in order that proper planning could take place my invite would invariably be issued several days in advance for it took this time for Charlie to clear an adequate space in which a visitor might sit. So on that occasional day when Charlie felt suitably in control of his collection to allow an outsider in, he would indicate to me that the best way to negotiate his flat was to turn to your side and shuffle in like a crab. The piled boxes lining the walls had created some very slim passageways and, given his modest three-bed flat, a rather cave-like quality. Nonetheless, spurred on by the thought of witnessing Charlie’s latest finds, I would ease my way in and perch on the edge of an overstuffed chair, on top of several folded blankets, sipping from a cracked Lady Di mug and try my best not to stare at the multiple stacked TV sets. To witness how he lived was a truly awe inspiring experience. Occasionally, Charlie would make a fleeting reference to the existence of a lock up unit that he rented further East. My imagination is doubtless insufficient to adequately conjure up the endless treasures stored there.
Occasionally, the council would take offence to the spread of Charlie’s stuff and things and send a stern letter, or perhaps an even sterner inspector. Luckily for Charlie, he was a leaseholder making eviction a costly and laborious process and as the estate was on the verge of being condemned, further action was deemed pointless. Instead, they wielded their authority by removing the stacks of rubber tires that Charlie kept amongst the pot plants on the stairwells, supplemented by the occasional dead toaster. He was not too bothered; he liked to confess to me that it was ok because he “kept all the really good stuff inside”.
Charlie died on Boxing Day 2005, leaving his grown up daughters to the unenviable task of taking the proceeds of 20 plus years of wombling back down the five flights of concrete stairs. It took quite a while and several skips. His eldest showed me the flat right before they rented it out. It was surprisingly big, very clean and very empty. They had painted it magnolia.
On occasion, I have been accused of being possessed by the spirit of Charlie. I have a funeral director friend who delights in relaying tales of call outs to the homes of pack rats who have suffocated under the weight of their collections. She seems to delight in the randomness, the craziness. I prefer to rationalise it as three-dimensional collage. So, perhaps I am a little like Charlie. My amassments, like his, both deny categorisation and defy possible completion. I simply cannot imagine that there would ever have been the intent to collect a whole in Charlie’s mind. Instead it was simply a very random snowball, starting out small and gentle and eventually thundering down hill in a very alarming fashion indeed, his life’s work; an admirable display of dedication and commitment. Perhaps I am more selective, limiting myself to snapshots and other sundry traces of otherwise lost and forgotten existences, but I might be doing Charlie a disservice in this assumption. It is possible his decaying electrical equipment was similarly selected, albeit to unverbalized criteria. Certainly, I am sure that he felt, like me, that he was not collecting these objects in an attempt to impose his order over them, to control through knowledge and possession like the butterfly collector. Rather our shared need to conserve, protect and care for our things clearly put us into their service, rather than them into ours.
Long live the Wombles.
Mauby -When she was at school. 1927.
My maternal grandmother, Gladys, was a storyteller. She liked nothing better than the invitation to narrate the family album and as children we were pleased to indulge her in this performative act of remembrance. I do not recall her being particularly attached to or involved with the boxes of photographs – they were stored haphazardly with no apparent system of classification or hierarchy. These were not on permanent display, not holy relics nor revered images – instead they were merely props for my grandmothers narratives, illustrations for her stories, entirely secondary to her own interpretation of a lifetime of events.
The photographs were perhaps surprising in number considering the status of the family at the time – working class agricultural folk, yet they abound. Some are snapshots taken with cheapo box brownies, but many are the kind of studio portraits that you would dress up in your Sunday best for and then pay by the print. This photographic history begins in the 1910s and gradually gains in number as the years press on and photographic equipment becomes cheaper and increasingly commonplace.
At the advent of World War Two, the number of photographs swells considerably and a disproportionately large number of images document a reasonably short period. Multiple pictures of my grandmother and her comrades in the Women’s Royal Air Force jostle for space with the images of her glamorous younger sister, Ivy, in NAAFI uniform and the skinny, malnourished young men in various Military outfits that would later become their husbands or forever vanish, romantically immortalised as the lost loves-of-their-lives.
At the moments that the pictures were snapped, either of these outcomes seemed entirely possible, although this uncertainty had been historically resolved before I ever encountered the pictures. The photographic images of those-who-mattered must have been so terribly precious when you had legitimate doubts that you would ever see that loved-one again.
My Grandmother’s position as family storyteller was entirely in opposition to that of my grandfather - the silent one, the keeper of secrets. The consequences of war were no mystery to my Grandfather, Leonard Jnr. His father and namesake had been sent off to Europe in 1912 and in his place returned an oversized, bronze medal, a Death Penny. This killed-in-action medal had pride of place in my family home where it had refugee status, seeing as my grandfather had refused to have it in his own house. Leonard Coote Jnr had rejected it, recognising it for what it was - poor substitute for a father, killed before his son was born. Leonard Coote Snr remains where he died in 1916, buried in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium, just one of many identical graves.
And it was with the death of his never-known father in mind that Leonard Coote Jnr went off to war, like his father, a lowly private in the Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire Regiment. He did not talk of his war experiences, returning from a liberated Burmese POW camp with Malaria, a battered leather trunk a fresh tattoo and a new taste for spicy food. He had somehow managed to carry with him a small, battered studio photograph of my grandmother – his future wife, throughout his 5 years of service, through Europe, Africa and Burma, ostensibly in the left-breast pocket of his battle-dress tunic.
In peacetime, he continued to carry the same photograph in his wallet, next to his Labour membership card. The image showed the woman who was to become his wife, frozen in perfect late 30s glamour, thick lipstick, rolled hair, a provincial Betty Grable. He carried this picture for the next 50 years.
Indeed, my grandmother attempted to replicate that image of her own former self for the same time period and beyond, her red lipstick densely smeared across her thinning, puckering lips in a fearsome act of defiance. By the time my grandfather died in 1989, the photograph was as worn and tired as the woman.
My grandmother took the photograph from her newly deceased husband’s wallet and transferred it to her own purse, a relic of lost life and lost love. Eventually it was stolen, on pension day along with the rest of her Thursday-morning-shopping bag. She did not care about the money or the keys or even the pork pie she had previously purchased at Saxby’s the Butchers, but she was distraught over that much travelled, ratty old photograph.
I moved to London at seventeen, first to Burnt Oak, then rapidly to Camden and by eighteen I was living in Bow. It was a sunny Saturday on the Roman Road when I first made acquaintance with Mauby. She was poking out of a litterbin, her simple glass frame smashed across the bottom. I could have been mistaken but I concluded that she appeared to be forlorn in response to her current indisposition, although she was clearly posh enough that indignation or outrage would have been a more natural expression. I picked her up, shook off the loose shards of glass and took her home, where she took up a rightful stance on the living room wall. A decade later, several house moves, a new frame and mat and ‘Mauby when she was at school, 1927’ still occupies my living room wall.
Mauby is a curious hybrid; a painted photograph. The indexical trace of the sitter through the camera mechanism is the base, but that base has all but been obliterated by the painter’s hand. Did Mauby really look like that? This is not a question one would ask of the pure photograph – but here we need to know, how much of this image is Mauby and how much is the unknown painter? Who commissioned such a thing? Clearly, Mauby was very important to someone. It is not she, the subject that is now the focus of my curiosity, rather it is her relationship to the possessor, the orchestrator and the keeper of this curious image and by extension, the relationship to her new possessor, me.
Mauby is a prop without a play, an illustration without a story, a silent narrative with an absent storyteller. I know who she is, she is Mauby, when she left school, in 1927. Yet I don’t know why she is frozen this way, mummified on my living room wall, she cannot tell me.
When my grandmother died in 2004 her boxes of photographs were piled amongst a myriad of random objects and detritus, borne of 86 years of living, loving and saving, These things were stacked in their containers in my mother’s conservatory, designated “To be dealt with sometime hence”. When my mother died unexpectedly a few weeks later, the photographs came to me, along with a treadle operated Singer sewing machine and a box of cutlery. My great-grandfather’s Death Penny was strangely absent. In time my grandmother’s boxes of images have become to be just like ‘Mauby’, without my grandmother’s story-telling the people featured are no more or less to me than the random woman I rescued from an East-end bin. Of course, I do know who the people in my grandmother’s photographs are. I have a context for them in the post-memories I have constructed from my grandmother’s narratives, but I still do not know these people. I have no knowledge of how they moved, their voices, their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, I only know my own relationship to the images. These post-memories are filtered through the mind of my grandmother- I can tell her stories, much the way she did, but as much is forgotten as is remembered. They now are props for a game of filial Chinese whispers.
Moving to Dalston in 2002 introduced me to a lot more “Maubys”, or photographs without attached memories. The famous Dalston Wasteland Market often turned up battered envelopes of fading snapshots or disembodied photographic album pages. More occasionally, I found whole volumes, complete documents of unidentified dynasties. Sometimes the images were of places, tourist spots, exteriors of properties, even domestic interiors; but mostly they featured people, family documents without families, forever separated from their natural owners due to divorce, death or illness. Many of these photographs found their way home with me. Sometimes other things too - used greeting cards, a baby’s (born 1941) booklet recording birth weight and first steps, but not completed, ending abruptly either through lack of novelty or loss of the booklet, or perhaps even the child itself. Most specially, a handbag complete with its entire contents exactly as its last owner had left it - a rain bonnet, a comb, a hand sewn bag containing paper hankies, a button hook and a teeny-tiny statue of the Virgin Mary in her own tomb-like container. A stallholder specialising in house-clearance once remarked that he liked me because I always picked out the things that other people did not seem to notice.
I did not only notice them. I fell in love. These snapshots that I so adore are not indicative of memories – more they are Barthesian counter-memories - they look like memories (or at least, they look like the way we have culturally assigned visual form to memory), but how can they become real memories if there is no one left to perform the act of memory in their presence? They are instead traces, specimens, samples and cross-sections of times and moments - proof that time itself exists, as much evidence of time as the stark contrast between my grandmother’s 80 year old crudely lipsticked mouth and her perfect portrait of 60 years previous.
The photographs were perhaps surprising in number considering the status of the family at the time – working class agricultural folk, yet they abound. Some are snapshots taken with cheapo box brownies, but many are the kind of studio portraits that you would dress up in your Sunday best for and then pay by the print. This photographic history begins in the 1910s and gradually gains in number as the years press on and photographic equipment becomes cheaper and increasingly commonplace.
At the advent of World War Two, the number of photographs swells considerably and a disproportionately large number of images document a reasonably short period. Multiple pictures of my grandmother and her comrades in the Women’s Royal Air Force jostle for space with the images of her glamorous younger sister, Ivy, in NAAFI uniform and the skinny, malnourished young men in various Military outfits that would later become their husbands or forever vanish, romantically immortalised as the lost loves-of-their-lives.
At the moments that the pictures were snapped, either of these outcomes seemed entirely possible, although this uncertainty had been historically resolved before I ever encountered the pictures. The photographic images of those-who-mattered must have been so terribly precious when you had legitimate doubts that you would ever see that loved-one again.
My Grandmother’s position as family storyteller was entirely in opposition to that of my grandfather - the silent one, the keeper of secrets. The consequences of war were no mystery to my Grandfather, Leonard Jnr. His father and namesake had been sent off to Europe in 1912 and in his place returned an oversized, bronze medal, a Death Penny. This killed-in-action medal had pride of place in my family home where it had refugee status, seeing as my grandfather had refused to have it in his own house. Leonard Coote Jnr had rejected it, recognising it for what it was - poor substitute for a father, killed before his son was born. Leonard Coote Snr remains where he died in 1916, buried in the Lijssenthoek Military Cemetery, Belgium, just one of many identical graves.
And it was with the death of his never-known father in mind that Leonard Coote Jnr went off to war, like his father, a lowly private in the Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire Regiment. He did not talk of his war experiences, returning from a liberated Burmese POW camp with Malaria, a battered leather trunk a fresh tattoo and a new taste for spicy food. He had somehow managed to carry with him a small, battered studio photograph of my grandmother – his future wife, throughout his 5 years of service, through Europe, Africa and Burma, ostensibly in the left-breast pocket of his battle-dress tunic.
In peacetime, he continued to carry the same photograph in his wallet, next to his Labour membership card. The image showed the woman who was to become his wife, frozen in perfect late 30s glamour, thick lipstick, rolled hair, a provincial Betty Grable. He carried this picture for the next 50 years.
Indeed, my grandmother attempted to replicate that image of her own former self for the same time period and beyond, her red lipstick densely smeared across her thinning, puckering lips in a fearsome act of defiance. By the time my grandfather died in 1989, the photograph was as worn and tired as the woman.
My grandmother took the photograph from her newly deceased husband’s wallet and transferred it to her own purse, a relic of lost life and lost love. Eventually it was stolen, on pension day along with the rest of her Thursday-morning-shopping bag. She did not care about the money or the keys or even the pork pie she had previously purchased at Saxby’s the Butchers, but she was distraught over that much travelled, ratty old photograph.
I moved to London at seventeen, first to Burnt Oak, then rapidly to Camden and by eighteen I was living in Bow. It was a sunny Saturday on the Roman Road when I first made acquaintance with Mauby. She was poking out of a litterbin, her simple glass frame smashed across the bottom. I could have been mistaken but I concluded that she appeared to be forlorn in response to her current indisposition, although she was clearly posh enough that indignation or outrage would have been a more natural expression. I picked her up, shook off the loose shards of glass and took her home, where she took up a rightful stance on the living room wall. A decade later, several house moves, a new frame and mat and ‘Mauby when she was at school, 1927’ still occupies my living room wall.
Mauby is a curious hybrid; a painted photograph. The indexical trace of the sitter through the camera mechanism is the base, but that base has all but been obliterated by the painter’s hand. Did Mauby really look like that? This is not a question one would ask of the pure photograph – but here we need to know, how much of this image is Mauby and how much is the unknown painter? Who commissioned such a thing? Clearly, Mauby was very important to someone. It is not she, the subject that is now the focus of my curiosity, rather it is her relationship to the possessor, the orchestrator and the keeper of this curious image and by extension, the relationship to her new possessor, me.
Mauby is a prop without a play, an illustration without a story, a silent narrative with an absent storyteller. I know who she is, she is Mauby, when she left school, in 1927. Yet I don’t know why she is frozen this way, mummified on my living room wall, she cannot tell me.
When my grandmother died in 2004 her boxes of photographs were piled amongst a myriad of random objects and detritus, borne of 86 years of living, loving and saving, These things were stacked in their containers in my mother’s conservatory, designated “To be dealt with sometime hence”. When my mother died unexpectedly a few weeks later, the photographs came to me, along with a treadle operated Singer sewing machine and a box of cutlery. My great-grandfather’s Death Penny was strangely absent. In time my grandmother’s boxes of images have become to be just like ‘Mauby’, without my grandmother’s story-telling the people featured are no more or less to me than the random woman I rescued from an East-end bin. Of course, I do know who the people in my grandmother’s photographs are. I have a context for them in the post-memories I have constructed from my grandmother’s narratives, but I still do not know these people. I have no knowledge of how they moved, their voices, their peculiarities and idiosyncrasies, I only know my own relationship to the images. These post-memories are filtered through the mind of my grandmother- I can tell her stories, much the way she did, but as much is forgotten as is remembered. They now are props for a game of filial Chinese whispers.
Moving to Dalston in 2002 introduced me to a lot more “Maubys”, or photographs without attached memories. The famous Dalston Wasteland Market often turned up battered envelopes of fading snapshots or disembodied photographic album pages. More occasionally, I found whole volumes, complete documents of unidentified dynasties. Sometimes the images were of places, tourist spots, exteriors of properties, even domestic interiors; but mostly they featured people, family documents without families, forever separated from their natural owners due to divorce, death or illness. Many of these photographs found their way home with me. Sometimes other things too - used greeting cards, a baby’s (born 1941) booklet recording birth weight and first steps, but not completed, ending abruptly either through lack of novelty or loss of the booklet, or perhaps even the child itself. Most specially, a handbag complete with its entire contents exactly as its last owner had left it - a rain bonnet, a comb, a hand sewn bag containing paper hankies, a button hook and a teeny-tiny statue of the Virgin Mary in her own tomb-like container. A stallholder specialising in house-clearance once remarked that he liked me because I always picked out the things that other people did not seem to notice.
I did not only notice them. I fell in love. These snapshots that I so adore are not indicative of memories – more they are Barthesian counter-memories - they look like memories (or at least, they look like the way we have culturally assigned visual form to memory), but how can they become real memories if there is no one left to perform the act of memory in their presence? They are instead traces, specimens, samples and cross-sections of times and moments - proof that time itself exists, as much evidence of time as the stark contrast between my grandmother’s 80 year old crudely lipsticked mouth and her perfect portrait of 60 years previous.
My Grandad's Tattoo
The first tattoo I ever saw was the faded and blurry blue dragon on my grandfather’s right forearm. He and I would sit in his house, curtains closed against the afternoon sun, watching a tiny black and white TV set. My Granddad didn’t go out much anymore. Instead he read the racing pages and dozed in front of The Three Stooges. If any of the Royal Family ever appeared on the flickering monochrome set, he swore and switched it off.
Otherwise, he was a quiet man.
I sat on his lap and examined his tattoo. But he never answered my childish questions “Did it hurt?” and “Who did it?” and "Why?"
He died three weeks after my thirteenth birthday and it was only then that my Nan told me about that faded, blue dragon.
She told me that in 1944, at the tail end of the war my grandad, Len, had been an inmate in a Japanese run Prisoner of War camp in Burma.
It was there that the tattoo had been painfully etched into Granddad’s arm with a sharpened stick.
For my Nan, that old, blurry tattoo had become all that my grandad would not, or could not say.
She told me that my Grandfather had dug a hole in his flesh and buried his stories inside.
Otherwise, he was a quiet man.
I sat on his lap and examined his tattoo. But he never answered my childish questions “Did it hurt?” and “Who did it?” and "Why?"
He died three weeks after my thirteenth birthday and it was only then that my Nan told me about that faded, blue dragon.
She told me that in 1944, at the tail end of the war my grandad, Len, had been an inmate in a Japanese run Prisoner of War camp in Burma.
It was there that the tattoo had been painfully etched into Granddad’s arm with a sharpened stick.
For my Nan, that old, blurry tattoo had become all that my grandad would not, or could not say.
She told me that my Grandfather had dug a hole in his flesh and buried his stories inside.
In the beginning...
I used to go to Sunday school, every-bloody-week.
But I didn't really care if Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam or not. The church was damp and smelled mouldy and it was too old to have a toilet. The pews were hard and the stone floor, stone cold.
I didn't want to talk about how to be a Good Samaritan nor shake a tambourine. Instead, I spent hours colouring cheap photocopied pictures of Noah, Samson, Moses and Daniel-in-the-lions-den.
Mrs. Wall wasn't too happy when I made Jesus Christ's face a perfect shade of emerald green. Her wrinkled old mouth puckered and quivered when I proudly showed her the flat, dark fruits of my not-inconsiderable labour.
I'd coloured so intently, so completely, so willfully, that the felt tip had completely dried up. My relentless industry had rendered my tool useless, defunct, dead.
Like Jesus.
The spent marker pen pleased me, I carried it home in my pocket and gave it pride of place on my windowsill, next to a picture of Morten Harket (from A-ha) and my great-granddad’s WWI Death-Plaque.
Mrs. Wall told my mother that she thought I was disturbed.
I still had to go back to Sunday school though. Every-bloody-week.
Sometimes I prayed that Noah's floods would come for me so that I wouldn't have to ask Mrs. Wall to take me outside to wee over the drainage grate.
But I didn't really care if Jesus wanted me for a sunbeam or not. The church was damp and smelled mouldy and it was too old to have a toilet. The pews were hard and the stone floor, stone cold.
I didn't want to talk about how to be a Good Samaritan nor shake a tambourine. Instead, I spent hours colouring cheap photocopied pictures of Noah, Samson, Moses and Daniel-in-the-lions-den.
Mrs. Wall wasn't too happy when I made Jesus Christ's face a perfect shade of emerald green. Her wrinkled old mouth puckered and quivered when I proudly showed her the flat, dark fruits of my not-inconsiderable labour.
I'd coloured so intently, so completely, so willfully, that the felt tip had completely dried up. My relentless industry had rendered my tool useless, defunct, dead.
Like Jesus.
The spent marker pen pleased me, I carried it home in my pocket and gave it pride of place on my windowsill, next to a picture of Morten Harket (from A-ha) and my great-granddad’s WWI Death-Plaque.
Mrs. Wall told my mother that she thought I was disturbed.
I still had to go back to Sunday school though. Every-bloody-week.
Sometimes I prayed that Noah's floods would come for me so that I wouldn't have to ask Mrs. Wall to take me outside to wee over the drainage grate.
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