by Maria McCarthy | 1 Sep, 2018 | Food, Sixty Firsts
Gözleme, a Turkish flatbread made of flour, water and oil, cooked dry on a hotplate, stuffed and folded with a choice of two fillings: potato and onion; spinach and cheese.
There are two women sitting on the floor in the window of the Saray Broadway Café, legs outstretched, making flatbreads, which they cook on a hotplate. The café has plastic chairs with tube-framed legs fixed to tables, which are also screwed to the floor, in the style of a greasy spoon. These women are not in headscarves in the window during the week, but the Broadway Market is on a Saturday with its artisan breads, cheeses and vegan brownie squares at £4.50 a go.
The market is crowded on a hot day. The sun is in its third or fourth week of belting down relentlessly, turning the grass yellow in nearby London Fields.
Radu, Jamie and Maria in Greenwich, 2017
We are four: my husband, my brother, his boyfriend and I, and we opt to take our Gözleme into the park, to sit in the shade of the London Plane trees. The Gözleme are £3 each. We buy cans of drink in a nearby international supermarket. The hot wraps are stashed into brown paper bags inside a blue plastic one. Even with the walk to find a combination of bench and shade, then opting for just shade, the Gözleme are piping. Jamie, my brother, advises eating the edges first, to allow the filling to cool from its volcanic temperature. It’s delicious, the spinach and unspecified grated cheese. Jamie and Radu, his boyfriend, are vegan, so have the only other option: potato and onion. As I suspected, filling enough without the vegan cakes that the boys had added to their lunch menu.
People are out on blankets with small children and small dogs, the latter occasionally invading our circle of folded legs and stretched out bodies to sniff and say hello. Balloons are attached to trees and party food is carried across the grass to other circles of bodies all over the park. Buff, tattooed young men, stripped of their shirts, display their athleticism on the outdoor gym equipment. The entrances to the Lido and café can be seen in the distance; a film crew set up by a row of houses at the edge of the park.
Jamie tells me that Broadway Market was very run down when he first lived in Hackney, before the hipsters moved in and property prices soared. A patch of wasteland outside his low-rise block of flats, where foxes once roamed, is now filled with new apartments, with the obligatory ‘affordable housing’ going for upwards of £450,000 for a one-bedroom flat. The social housing element of the development, what we used to call Council Housing, has a separate entrance to the privately-owned dwellings enclosing a gated square.
We stop by the building that used to be a Housing Benefit office, now called Mare Street Market, an open space of café, cocktail bars and small businesses. The hubbub is unbearable, with diners sharing long, canteen-style tables and paying £5 for a half round of bacon sandwich. On artisan bread, of course.
Back in Broadway Market, there is the odd café that has survived gentrification, including F. Cooke, an eel pie and mash joint, like the one I knew when I lived in Woolwich in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with white-tiled walls. An older man sits by the door at the end of the counter, waiting for a single customer to cross the threshold.
It is forty years since I first moved to London, thirty years since I moved on to Kent. The landscape has changed beyond recognition. As we drove from Kent to Hackney that morning, the crane-like roof structures on the O2 came into view on the East Greenwich peninsula, which was mostly derelict and empty when I lived nearby. The shining towers of banks and hotels rose on the other side of the Thames as we entered the Blackwall Tunnel. Some of the places where I lived where once considered undesirable. Bathrooms shared with other tenants, water heaters, cookers and gas fires condemned as dangerous. Now houses in those streets are beyond the reach of locals or students (as I was) staying on beyond the end of their degrees.
As for my brother, nearly twenty years in Hackney, his local authority rent is controlled and his tenancy protected. He would no longer be able to live in the area if he were to start over, find a new place to live.
Sixty Firsts
I shall be sixty years old in September 2019. I am aiming to do sixty things for the first time before that date, many of them small. This was the first time I had eaten Gözleme, and my first visit to London Fields.
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by Maria McCarthy | 23 Jun, 2018 | Medway music, Relationships
We are at a beer and music festival, and our ears are assaulted by the wonderful noise of Stuart Turner and the Flat Earth Society. I am somewhere between ‘Wow, this is amazing’ and ‘When will it stop?’ – I think this is what the band are aiming for. I find just the right description for it, and Tweet: ‘The Medway version of the Wall of Sound @stfes’. My husband Bob leans towards me and says, ‘You can’t hear [guitarist] Bob Collins’. ‘Go and speak to the sound man,’ I say. He looks uncomfortable. ‘They don’t like it when people do that.’
He squirms a little longer, then heads off to the speak to the sound man.
Our wedding cake, decorated with poetry and a guitar
Just as our ears are recovering and we have refreshed our glasses – Wantsum bitter for him, Dudda’s Tun elderflower cider for me – a lone guitarist takes the stage, Darren Hayman. He decides the stage itself is not intimate enough, and steps off the low blocks with his mic stand, into the audience. From the little I have learned from being married to a musician, and the buzz of feedback, I know this is not a good move, sound-wise. ‘He’s given the sound man a headache,’ Bob says, ‘With the mic in front of the speakers.’ I nod. The sound man does his best, and marital and musical harmony are restored.
Before we met, I knew that Bob was a musician. His profile shot on Dating Direct showed him leaning on a guitar. On the third date, he brought his guitar with him and sang to me in my living room. He was a member of several bands at that time. I called him a musical tart, as he’d pick up his guitar for anyone that asked. I wondered, when I first went to see him play, why the band’s other wives and girlfriends weren’t there. I soon learned that having a muso for a partner meant arriving hours before the gig and sitting at a sticky pub table, alone, while they set up, played, then packed up the equipment.
At our wedding – not so much a reception as a music festival – I had to remind Bob not to spend all evening on stage with the various bands that he played in. I decided, in the end, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, as I grabbed the tambourine someone threw in my direction and joined in with backing vocals on ‘Fisherman’s Blues’.
We don’t go to many gigs together, but when we do, I know that Bob wants to be close to the stage to see the guitar work. I often indulge this, bagging second row tickets for Loudon Wainwright III and Richard Thompson (billed as Loud and Rich) at the SouthBank. Front row tickets for Martyn Joseph at Whitstable Playhouse proved too much for my poor neck, head tipped back to see the man with the guitar on the high stage. We moved seats after the interval, causing Joseph to remark on the empty seats, and I, with some embarrassment, shouted out that we had only moved further away.
Let’s also talk musical taste. Bob and I don’t always agree. Martyn Joseph is not my cup of tea; Bob adores him. I have fallen asleep at two Martin Simpson gigs (technically brilliant; does nothing for me). I had a wider musical education than Bob, starting with the Irish bands played on the Dansette at home, through a love affair with Motown and Soul, exposed to ska and reggae by my siblings, and finally coming to heavy rock via my school friends. Punk was not my thing at the time (a kind of tribalism at play), but I later came to love it. The folk thing came a lot, lot later, and was what attracted me to Bob when I saw his profile on the dating site and sent him a message: ‘Are you a folk bloke? You’ve got the beard for it.’ Which he ignored for several months, leaving me thinking I had offended him.
Bob looks blankly at me when an old song comes on the radio that I identify within a few bars. (Who needs Shazam when you live with me?) Bob was pretty much a folk and Prog fan all along.
There is much we agree on, music-wise, though. Including that we don’t like jazz. Before Bob, I had a boyfriend who loved jazz. I went along to jazz sessions and gigs with him. Lovely people, the jazz audience, very friendly. Lovely man, too, the boyfriend. Trouble was, I couldn’t stand the music. I turned to the boyfriend after several minutes of what I’d describe as musical wanking, and said, ‘So what’s wrong with the 3-minute pop song?’ At a whole day of the goddamned stuff, a festival in a marquee by the river Medway, I stepped outside for a break and contemplated throwing myself in the river rather than returning to that tent and watching the admittedly skilful musician play two saxophones at once. Let’s just say, nice man, but the relationship was doomed.
One more thing about being at a gig with a muso – he just wants to be on stage with the other musicians. He’ll say, ‘They could do with a bass player,’ or the like. I know that, if he were invited to take an instrument and join in, he would leave me in the audience and do it. Our date night would become his gig night.
Bob only plays with the one band now, Acoustic Architects. Though he is quick to find other musicians wherever he goes. He left me for a good half hour recently, when he discovered the man running the Kent Wildlife Trust stall at a local event was also a musician. They exchanged numbers, and within a week Bob was off to the man’s house, guitar, mandolin and mandola in tow.
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by Maria McCarthy | 5 Jun, 2018 | Chronic illness, Death and grieving, Irish writers and writing, Lyme Disease, Writing, Writing and wellbeing
A few years ago, I heard Andrew McGuinness read a story at the University of Kent. It was a funny tale, and his delivery owed much to stand-up comedy. McGuinness taught creative writing at the university, and at Christchurch, the other university in Canterbury. I saw him at many events, reading his own work, interviewing writers and hosting panels. And then I didn’t.
Like Jack Mann (a stand-up comedian and the protagonist of Andrew McGuinness’s new novel, Anatomised), Andrew McGuinness was struck with a mysterious illness. I don’t like to assume that all of Jack Mann’s experiences reflect those of Andrew McGuinness. This is a work of fiction. However, my guess is that the research that has gone into Anatomised is borne of hard personal experience. The medical details, the intricacies of test results, and the psychological effects of having a life-changing illness that no-one can explain. Jack Mann is thrown from a comfortable life (albeit with family and bereavement issues in his background), having just relocated to the Kent coast, to a Kafkaesque nightmare of weird symptoms, hospital admissions and doctors who can’t see beyond their own specialties – stroke, MS – to alternative therapists who advocate positive thinking when the tinctures they give Mann don’t work.
I nearly stopped reading Anatomised, as Jack Mann’s experiences reflect some of my own as a person misdiagnosed, mistreated, disbelieved and ignored, both in the early days of my own chronic illness, and even several years on. The falling away of friends and relatives, the isolation, the unexplainedness of it all, the grief, the suicidal thoughts. Jack Mann, in a darkly comic scene, fails to throw himself on the right railway track, watching the train (which he has timed from hearing it pass at the end of his garden) speed past on the opposite track as he lays there, awaiting oblivion. My own (lack of) attempts were less dramatic. I walked by the river Medway several times a week, past some steps that descended into the water. I imagined stepping down and down to a watery grave. I never even took the first step down, but my dreams, when they came amidst years of barely sleeping, were of drowning, then a hand pulling me out at the last moment.
This isn’t a review. More of a reflection on lives that once were, altered forever – mine, Jack Mann’s, and Andrew McGuinness’s. And how writers can process their experience through fiction rather than memoir. McGuinness’s novel is not perfect – I felt the author’s anger at his mistreatment channelled through Jack Mann and his wife Alice. It was a little too noticeable at times. Would a reader who doesn’t know McGuinness’s story notice this as much as I did? Or a reader who hasn’t been through that kind of anger themselves, sometimes channelling it through poems and stories, which would have been better left until some of that anger had subsided? Perhaps a fictionalised account is the best one can do, given the closeness of the material, the pain. It gives the writer a distance from the awfulness of it all.
Anatomised has stayed with me, and given me a great deal of cause for thought. I read a lot, but needed a week before beginning another book, to process Jack Mann’s story, Andrew McGuinness’s personal story, and my own. I thought of it as I walked with my husband Bob on a recent holiday. Bob has only known me with my illness, as we met when I was some seven years into it. On this holiday, as I do in my daily life, I could only manage a couple of hours out everyday, then I slept and rested for the remainder of the day. ‘I’d understand if you wanted a wife who could walk further,’ I said, as I took Bob’s arm, struggling to walk back to the house where we were staying. ‘Nah,’ he said, ‘Think of all the bother of divorcing you.’ We laughed, but I thought of how holidays used to be, before all these years of illness; a third of my life lived like this.
I’m glad I didn’t take that walk down the steps into the river, because life is good, in spite of my limitations. I’m glad that Andrew McGuinness was able to recover enough, to fight enough, to give us Anatomised. It is lyrical and thought-provoking. I would particularly recommend the last few chapters, where … but I don’t want to give the game away.
Anatomised by A.F. McGuinness is published by Red Sail Press and costs £12.99. A proportion of income from sales of the book will go to Lyme Disease charities.
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by Maria McCarthy | 28 Apr, 2018 | Uncategorized
I used to be a sheddie. I had my very own writing shed that overlooked an orchard. I lost that shed at the end of January 2017 when we sold the house we had lived in for eight years. And yet the shed continued to feature as the header photo for this website … until today. And this blog page, which was called ‘The Word from the Shed’, has now been renamed ‘Written by the river’.
I miss my shed. Facebook often reminds me with Memories featuring the shed and the orchard; my latest book is about orchards, and features the shed. But the shed is dead, or now under the ownership of a lovely young couple and their baby. The shed is in good hands, and I must let it go.
Thames barges on the Medway near to my home
Now my vista as I open the bedroom curtains in the morning is the River Medway. It lies just beyond the Jubilee Clip factory, with a view of Hoo Marshes in the middle of the river and Hoo St Werburgh on the other bank. I spend a good half hour after I wake staring at the river and the sky, watching the birds, the sky, and various shipping pass by.
My desk is now tucked downstairs at the back of the house. I write facing a wall, but if I turn, I can just see a sliver of river in the gap between the houses and the factory. I write in my house, down by the river.
The river and I have history. I used to live a short walk away from the Medway, when I first moved to the area nearly thirty years ago. I crossed it, via Rochester Bridge, to walk to work for a couple of years, then drove across twice a day when a new job took me further afield. When the Medway Tunnel opened, that served for more journeys than the bridge. When we drive beneath the river, the sat nav picture shows blue, as though we were swimming. And I was a kind of swimmer once, with Medway Mermaids women’s writing group. I still am. Mermaids only lapse; it’s like being Catholic.
I am written by the river. I write by the river.
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by Maria McCarthy | 21 Apr, 2018 | Death and grieving, Family and forgiveness, Relationships, Secrets
Shall I tell you a secret? How weighted that phrase is. If I tell you a secret I am relieving some of the weight from my shoulders and bestowing it on yours. What would you do with that secret? Like the man from the story who had to shout into the ground, ‘The King has donkey’s ears’, as he couldn’t hold the secret any longer, secrets can rarely be buried.
Notebooks full of secrets
I’ve been thinking a lot about secrets in the weeks since my mother’s death. Our family was and is full of secrets. My siblings and I were told, as children, not to talk about things outside the house, things that happened at home. We also didn’t talk about secrets amongst ourselves. Over the years, some secrets have oozed out, secrets some would know about and not others. ‘Don’t tell your father’ was a regular phrase we heard from our mother, often followed by, ‘It’d kill him.’ So the lesson was secrets can kill.
I am writing this, for once, without drafting by hand, in my notebook full of secrets. Without reflection, research and careful thinking. I want to watch myself. Who knows what could slip out. Whom I might kill.
I carried secrets for years, under threat of killing or harming others. The result was that I harmed only myself, and when I did speak those secrets, guess what? Nobody died. But people fell silent. Or blurted for a while before it was all zipped up again. Or told me I was to stop upsetting people by speaking my truth.
Notice I’m not telling you the secrets. There is still a chance that people might die (though not my father; he is long gone; nor my mother; recently departed).
I did not go public about my mother’s death on social media. It was a secret. Mine. But I have let the secret out little by little to those who know the bigger secrets, some of whom have secrets of their own they have shared with me. Some who, like me, have spoken their truths and found the truth was not a welcome guest.
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