Since my last post, I have come up with a name for my project, which celebrates small achievements as good things in themselves, or as steps on the road to bigger things. The name is Little Big Steps – so far so good.
I had thought that this could become a book, or that I could start a new blog – something big. But the whole idea is to celebrate the small. So I am choosing not to follow one of the habits of highly effective people, as outlined by Steven Covey: ‘Begin with the end in mind’. (From The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People). Starting with something big in mind might mean that you never get started at all. It all becomes too daunting.
I have been thinking about how I get started on my writing, how I got started in the first place, nearly 20 years ago, when I was very ill and had severely limited energy. It started with a notebook, a gift from a friend. I wrote a little poetry in the notebook each day, typed it up the next day, edited it another day. Twenty minutes at a time was all I could manage. The writing was enough in itself, without thinking where it might lead to.
There are Boats on the Orchard, my latest publication, was not the result of starting with the end in mind. I was living in a house that backed onto a disused orchard, in a village that had been a major fruit-growing area; the orchards now disappearing or in decline. I had finished a story collection, which I had been writing for five years (also not started with a book in mind – a pair of stories sharing characters, which accidentally grew). I was not sure what to do with myself. I had a quote pinned above my desk, about when you finish a long writing project, it is as if you are falling from a tree, hitting off every branch as you come down.
It was a kind of bereavement, after living with those characters for so long. And after a bereavement, you have to carry on every day, putting one foot in front of the other. Putting new words on the page, even if they seem slight, even if it seems they won’t lead anywhere. So I wrote about what I could see from the window of my writing shed, and things I noticed as I walked the local orchards. Over time, those poems grew into something bigger – a commission for Wandering Words followed, and eventually a pamphlet, working with Sara Fletcher to produce images to illustrate the poems. It had long been an ambition of mine, to collaborate with an artist, and all this grew from seemingly slight scribblings in a notebook.
I guess the point of this is, you don’t have to begin with the end in mind. Just take a step and see where it leads you. For the time being, I have a name – Little Big Steps – and I have begun a new notebook, one that I have been saving for a while. I am jotting ideas, copying quotations from books and articles, and I have already asked a guest writer if she would like to share a poem of hers on this website, which fits the theme. More soon…
I have two conditions that force me into solitude – one is chronic illness, and the other is being a writer. I don’t want to push the tortured artist thing, or the tortured sick person thing, but I do spend a lot of time alone. I don’t have consumption and live in a garret – it’s a comfy 1960s semi, actually, and my husband is often upstairs in his study in the smallest bedroom, and would come to my aid if I needed company or help, often summoned by the magic of WhatsApp if I’m too tired to climb the stairs.
Oare Gunpowder Works: a bridge beneath which only Borrowers could pass
I have been brought out of solitude by working on collaborative projects. The first was being one of a group of artists chronicling a year in the life of Rainham Community Orchard. We mostly worked alone, making our visits to the orchard: sketching, taking photographs, writing down lines of poetry, but some of my visits were with Sara E. Fletcher, who was to work on ceramics, some of which ended up with the words from my poems on them, and those of Stephy Stanton. Sara and I also met away from the orchard, to spark ideas off one another, which changed my words and inspired her work. During our walks in the orchard – on a windy February day, and again in September on one of the pick-your-own-apples days – I noticed things that I would not have done so if walking alone, and Sara could always be relied upon to identify plants and wildlife. The weeds I called ‘tall yellow flowers’ were Oxford ragwort, and both definitions ended up in a poem.
Walking with someone you have not walked with before, even in a familiar place, brings new insights. I did so with Anna Bell, ‘Anna Outdoors’, when she asked me to write a poem for children about Oare Gunpowder Works, near Faversham. For eight years, I lived close to the woods in which the ruins of the gunpowder works stand. I walked there alone, I walked with my husband, I was an ‘Artist in the Woods’, at their annual event, for a couple of years. And yet, with Anna, new revelations came to light – a low bridge over a leat (a waterway built to transport goods around the site, on powder punts), which Anna said would only allow Borrowers to pass beneath; the scribblings of bark beetles on a moss-covered log; the two-tone moan of industry from the other side of the road that borders the woods.
Anna, like Sara, knows things about nature. Her experience added to my inspiration, her words became mine in the poem (poets are magpies, we steal shiny things and claim them as our own). Anna talked of the ‘chattering of bats’, and that phrase was too good to let go.
As a child, I spent a lot of time on Epsom Common. I was a member of ‘The Red Pea Club’, named after the berries of the hawthorn tree in the alleyway near to our house. We had a club song, ‘Acorn’s the Word’, and a tree that we claimed as our own, The Dragon, which had branches that were wings and a tail, and a ‘cockpit’ from which to steer the dragon’s flight. I couldn’t tell you what sort of tree the dragon was, nor could I have named a hawthorn. I knew the ferns, the blackberries, and the wild golden rod that flourished on the Common, and the lilies of the valley that grew in our garden, but that was the limit of my knowledge of the names of plants and trees. Lost Words? I never knew them.
Back to the walk in the woods with Anna. She was keen for me to emphasise the sensory details in my poem, both of the Gunpowder Works as they are now, and as they were when the site was a factory, producing the black powder for the munitions industry. A friend told me that someone we both know has a licence to make gunpowder, so Anna and I visited Dave Lamberton at his Faversham home, where he fired a pistol in his garden, so I could experience the smell of gunpowder smoke. I stepped out from his kitchen to the garden, walked into the cloud of smoke – nothing at first, then in the nose, then down the back of the throat and onto the tongue, a bitter tang. The smell hung in my hair for the rest of the day. And all for one word in my poem, ‘The Gunpowder Spell’.
So, what have I learned? Writing is not just sitting alone with a notebook. It’s about walking and talking with others, with those whose experience is different from yours, and it’s about stealing – taking shiny words, storing them in your nest, then sharing them with others.
A Kestrel for a Knave, by Barry Hines, was first published in 1968, and the Ken Loach film, Kes, came out the year after. I don’t remember if I read the book or saw the film first. As I read, scenes from the film played in my head. I now wonder if I read the book at all, or just saw the film. I was rereading (or perhaps just reading) A Kestrel for a Knave, for a writing and wellbeing event. We were asked to bring along a book on the theme of nature or ecology; one that meant something to us. I am sure that this book brought about my lifelong love of birds of prey.
A Kestrel for a Knave is about the transformation of a boy’s life through raising a hawk – Kes. Billy Casper lives in a mining town in Yorkshire with this mum and brother. His father has left home, and Billy no longer sees him. Billy is coming up to school-leaving age, which was 15 in those days. He is expected to work down the mine, as most lads who go to his school end up doing; Billy’s brother Jed is a miner. But the only thing Billy is interested in is his kestrel.
Billy is no saint. He steals Kes from a nest, and when he tries and fails to borrow a book on falconry from the library, he goes to a bookshop and steals a book instead. This is a child who can barely read and write, yet he teaches himself the art of falconry from this book.
A Kestrel for a Knave is filled with the language of nature. At school assembly, hymn books ‘bloomed white across the hall as they were opened.’ At a football match, Billy is described as ‘growling like a little lion’, and the other boys as ‘ a herd of multi-coloured cross-breeds gambolling around the ball.’
Cinematic descriptions, with an all-seeing eye narrating, made the book just right for translating into a motion picture. An omniscient narrator is frowned upon in current fiction-writing, but Barry Hines does it so well. The voice does not feel all-knowing; it’s just that there is no singular point of view. And the reader can easily picture the settings, action and people.
The scene I remember most is in the classroom, where Mr Farthing is leading a session on fact and fiction. He asks the boys to tell true stories, and the first boy leads with a tale of filling wellies with tadpoles and then putting them on. The other boys then encourage Billy to talk about his hawk. Billy holds the class and the teacher in rapture as he talks about Kes. This is a boy who is seen as unintelligent, a write-off, but here he is, an expert on falconry. The boys are then asked to write a tall story. Billy’s, poorly written in terms of spelling and grammar, describes an evening where his father is living back home. They go to the cinema as a family, and have fish and chips on the way home. It’s heartbreaking. What should be an ordinary account of family life might just as well be a fairytale.
Of course, the book does not end well. Billy takes money, meant to place bets on behalf of his brother, and spends the cash. Both horses win, and Jed would have won a tidy sum. Enough to take a week off work. Unable to catch Billy, Jed tries to take Kes from the shed where Billy keeps him, and inadvertently kills the bird.
The edition I read was published in 1998, thirty years after the book was first published. There is an afterword by Barry Hines. Hines went to a grammar school; his brother to a secondary modern, like Billy. He talks about the divisions this caused, with children condemned as less intelligent, less worthy. Billy is seen as a failure, but, ‘If there had been a GCSE in Falconry, Billy would have been awarded an A grade, which would have done wonders for his self-confidence and given him a more positive self image.’
I have written previously about the divisions of the school system, my own experience of grammar school, while my sisters were sent to secondary moderns. I can see why Ken Loach picked up this book so readily and made it into a film that tells so much about class divisions and education.
A Kestrel for a Knave is well worth rereading (or reading for the first time?). Next for me is to watch the film Kes again.
I have just finished reading Baggage, A Book of Leavings, by Victoria Field. A memoir of walking the Camino de Santiago as a way of reflecting on and recovering from the end of a marriage. Earlier this year, a friend rang to say that he was going to be walking the Camino, or part of it, as he only he had two weeks in which to do so. ‘Are you going to find yourself?’ I asked, only half joking. This friend had been through a major health scare in the previous year, as well as his wife’s treatment for breast cancer the year before. He needed this trip. I followed his progress on Facebook, recognising the pain of blisters and fatigue, but also with envy. I couldn’t ‘do’ the Camino, unless someone offered to carry me in a sedan chair or on the back of a motorbike.
I realised that I had to make changes, make my own pilgrimage. And I keenly felt my inability to walk far, how I still miss going out for a trek 19 years into an illness that ‘put a halt to my gallop’, as my mother used to say. My mother died earlier this year. One of those things that makes you stop and reflect on your life. In the past two years, I have moved house, my husband had a heart attack, and I have lost a friend of a similar age to me. Lost as in died: let’s not sugarcoat it. I also lost the ability to write for a long time – now happily returning to me like an old friend whose company I have missed, but who often annoys the hell out of me.
Whilst reading Victoria Field’s book, I have thought a lot about feet as well as walking. There is a pilgrim with boots made especially from a mould taken of their feet, who nonetheless finds himself in excruciating pain. There are blisters, feet with flayed skin, and an account of a man who devotes himself, unpaid, to tending the feet of pilgrims by the side of the road. Before her pilgrimage, Victoria decides on a pair of ‘cheap and nasty’ boots that she has been wearing long before her trip, rather than shell out hundreds of pounds on a ‘good pair’, and these boots serve her well.
Maria at college, in her walking days
I have been writing recently about the difficulty of finding physical and psychological space, living in a large family in a small house when I was growing up. And I realised that I found that space when walking. It was always with a purpose, rather than going out for a stroll – to work; my Saturday job in Woolworth’s, or to college when I decided to leave the grammar school and go to an FE college to take my A-Levels. The school was yards from my house, and I had never experienced the bus journeys to school of my classmates, having also lived within a short walk of my primary school. When I told my mum that I was leaving the sixth form, during the first weeks of term, she firmly said that she would not pay my bus fares to college, so I walked at least one way every day – some three miles. I did this in plimsolls or flip-flops when it was warm enough to wear them. I had never had fitted or expensive shoes, and there was no question of buying good walking boots.
I got a certain rhythm whilst walking, and would pride myself on how far along the road I got before a bus passed me. Neighbours would often say that they had seen me ‘going hell for leather’ as they had passed on a bus. It was the only space I had to myself, between home and work, home and college, and I often walked late at night, coming back from parties or nights out. I was only ever bothered once, during these late walks, by some lads at the hot dog stand in town, and when one came over to me, I just mentioned my older brother’s name, hoping that they might know him, and was left alone to continue my journey.
Into my twenties and thirties, I continued to walk with a purpose, and found, after my marriage had broken up, that walking by the river and across the Rochester Bridge would help me to sort out things in my head. My body would loosen, my mood lift, and more often than not, something I had been trying to figure out would resolve itself as I walked.
Then illness struck and, slowed to a snail’s pace, I still walked until I reached a point of near collapse, like when marathon runners hit a wall, except the distance I covered was minimal. I was deprived of my way of creating space for myself, solving problems, feeling better. I dreamed of it still, of running for a bus, of walking, jumping, skipping.
I am treating my toenails at present. Stripped of their summer clothes of brightly-coloured varnish, I am tackling the thick and discoloured nails with a twice-daily lotion, applied like nail varnish with a brush. I have noticed that the nails on my right foot grow faster than those on my left. I have noticed the stripes on my feet from wearing the same sandals all summer: two broad white strips across the lightly tanned skin. The second toe on each foot is longer than the big toe. Someone once told me this is a sign of being psychic. My feet are quite long and slender, and I like the look of them. I think of the phrase ‘a well-turned ankle’. I think it was used at a time when women showed little of their legs, and a flash of an ankle could drive a man, or woman, to desire.
My ankle was well-turned in a fall down the steps of the house I used to live in. I sprained the ligaments in my left foot, which swelled up and turned from black to blue to yellow as the bruising progressed. This was some fifteen years ago, and I still get pain in that foot, that ankle, from time to time.
I no longer wear plimsolls or flip-flops. A year ago, I decided to take better care of that foot and ankle, and to buy better shoes. I spent £80 on a pair of comfortable yet stylish shoes, which are serving me well. My feet deserve it.
As for a pilgrimage, walking the Camino is not for me, but I am going to do some travelling in my sixtieth year. By train, mainly. I never had a gap year as a teenager, never went interrailing or grape-picking, and have seen little of the world. My aim, as part of my Sixty Firsts, is to ‘travel fearlessly’. The trips may be short and not as ambitious as others might undertake, but I shall be broadening my world, flexing my feet, and showing a well-turned ankle..
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.
The past twelve months have been full of change, disruption and uncertainty. Writing has not come easily, and there have been times when words have deserted me. Writing is the one thing that keeps me sane, and deprived of that outlet, things have been hard.
What has been different from other bad spells, when I carried on writing through the worst of times, and about the worst of times, is the shifting of the very walls and ground that hold me, like a slow earthquake, with cracks developing beneath my feet, and dust from the tremors falling all around. Of late, these cracks, this dust, moved from metaphor to reality, as we moved to a new house, and channels were gouged into the walls to run wiring to replace that which had been in the house since it was first built, in the early 1960s. Phenomenal dust rose, settled, was wiped away, then more settling and wiping in a cycle that seemed to last forever. Like Sisyphus rolling his rock, so my damp cloth worked each day, only to see more thick grey deposits the next morning.
It is hard to think, to write, to give space to creative thoughts when living with dust, noise and builders; with your precious things still packed in boxes; when the walls around you and the roof above you are not those you have lived with; when the view from your window is not the one you have woken to for the previous eight years. And when the certainties of your life for the same number of years have been shaken: a dear cat companion declining and dying; a husband rushed to a cardiac unit in an ambulance, sirens blaring; financial difficulties forcing a move of house.
Writing and publishing is a long game, however, and there have been cheering moments when poems and stories have been published several months after submission, and an even longer time after they were written. Reminders that you can write words that others want to read, that the one thing that keeps you well is still below the surface.
This summer will see the publication of an illustrated pamphlet of my poems, There are Boats on the Orchard. These were some seven years in the writing, and for the past six months I have seen the orchards and poems recast in wonderful drawings by Sara Fletcher. It’s a bittersweet project, since I no longer write in a shed overlooking an orchard. In fact I had no permanent place to write for a couple of months, when one house was sold and another had not yet been secured. Then the struggle to find a space amongst dust, builders, and too-much-stuff that fitted in the old house but not in the new. But now I have a desk and a space in the house to write.
Instead of an orchard, I now have a view of the River Medway from my bedroom window, plus a view over the dips and rises of hilly Gillingham. There is a road, houses, and a factory that makes Jubilee clips. In the middle of the river there is a strip of land, Hoo Marshes, and on the other bank I can see the spire of the church at Hoo St Werburgh. It’s a moving landscape, as the tide comes in and goes out on the estuary, and small boats pass – sometimes larger shipping. The lights of the factory come on at 6.00, and people arrive by bicycle, in cars and vans, and on foot. The traffic climbs and descends Danes Hill all day. The landscape moves, and I remain still, as the floors and walls beneath me settle and stay.
Beneath the floorboards, raised by Dan the Sparks and John the kitchen fitter, there were packages and a yellow cash tin, hidden by the previous owner of the house, who lived here for 46 years. Amongst the documents and mementoes was a compass in a brass case. I opened the case and oriented myself in the house: the river to the north; the front of the house facing east; the back facing west.
Returning to the house after a week away, I first went to the bedroom to look at the river, my constant north. When my three-year-old granddaughter visits, it’s where she heads, too, calling to everyone, ‘Do you want to see a river?’ She dashes to the other rooms, to see if there is ‘another river’, but there is only one.
my latest publication, was not the result of starting with the end in mind. I was living in a house that backed onto a disused orchard, in a village that had been a major fruit-growing area; the orchards now disappearing or in decline. I had finished a story collection, which I had been writing for five years (also not started with a book in mind – a pair of stories sharing characters, which accidentally grew). I was not sure what to do with myself. I had a quote pinned above my desk, about when you finish a long writing project, it is as if you are falling from a tree, hitting off every branch as you come down.
