Second Childhood?

 

 

 

We crept sheepishly past the ticket office,  trailing fronds of coloured leaves at our sides, hoping the nice lady who had greeted us on our way into the grounds of Powis Castle and wished us 'happy wandering' would fail to notice the spoils we carried with us on our way out. The rucksack overflowed with leaves of all shapes and sizes, twigs, tantalising pieces of bark, mossed over in soft green and sporting growths of lichens in pale sea-green, reminding me of a beautifully fashioned piece of coral reef. Do you remember those primary school collages: coloured leaves stuck with PVC glue to limp pieces of coloured sugar paper, bright and vibrant for a day, then curling up at the edges and all the precious leaves dried and crumbling on the paper?

 

We strolled nonchalantly back to the car, relieved to have passed the guard without being asked to put it all back and accused of denuding the forest floor to the detriment of other garden visitors' enjoyment. Glancing around us, we expected to be encouraged in our theft by seeing children  spilling out of the gardens carrying armfuls of leaves like us, competing with each other to pick up the brightest and best. Families there were, in abundance, obviously enjoying to the full this last of the autumn days before the cold of winter set in for good, but no leaf-waving children. Don't they do it anymore?

 

We had plans for grown-up pursuits of artistry at home in our dual purpose guest room/hobbies room, using our collection of nature's best but what about those children? Had they never had the joy of sticking and glueing, choosing colours and shapes to delight their own innate sense of creativity at this time of year? Was there no time any more for such innocent pleasures? Maybe David Hockney will spark them into action again with his inspired use of I-pad painting apps. Perhaps today's generation will find it preferable to record their own experiences of the season's exploits on screen and text it to their friends. Whatever the chosen medium, the creativity remains dormant in each of us and will hopefully burst out in response to nature's prodding. I hope so. 

Shades of Grey

So, how is your summer so far? If, like me, you live in northern Europe, you may feel a little cheated, apt to complain or demand your money back. Me too. After a long, bitter winter, following on from a wet, almost non-existent summer last year, this year's spring and summer have been a bit of a bad joke.

 

But, complaining achieves nothing. There are forces out there we just don't (yet?) seem to have the technology to deal with. No point in bashing your head against a brick wall. The weather, it seems, just ain't gonna change. So, try another tack... How can I enjoy it anyway? Well, here in Wales, close to the beautiful west coast, and surrounded by glorious green mountains, I am learning a new technique. One defining feature of my personality is that I love the open air. Another is that I am incurably a 'colours' person. Sadly, I love warmth too, but let's just put that one on one side for the time being...

 

Open air - well, it's still out there! It's just a tad chilly and I feel the cold quite badly. Solution: instead of wearing winter clothes and feeling cold (as I do for most of the winter), I can wear my winter clothes and feel warm. After all, it's summer! Moving here has been an experience, although the bad summer doesn't seem to be limited to Wales.

 

Last week, in our attempt to explore the local community and what it has to offer, we had a night out at a recently completed chapel conversion. The new community hall offered us a first-rate night out, with a chamber quintet all the way from England and some wonderful local musicians, together with tea and biscuits in the interval and some of the friendliest local people you could wish to meet. Coming down from the tiny gallery still incorporated into this wonderful converted chapel building, I noticed that the locals are well equipped this year to survive our novel summer weather. Sun-dresses? Strappy tops? Flimsy summer sandals to celebrate this special night out? Not a bit of it! One elderly lady struck me as particularly sensible and well-adapted - a smart outfit as befitted the occasion, but topped with a woolly hat! I'm still on a learning curve myself, but in our entrance hall at home hang a selection of summer and winter attire, a sunhat (for optimistic days) and a brown woolly hat which I don for brisk, blustery walks along the seafront. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

 

Colour? Well, the mountains are still a glorious green, the sheep are still gleaming white, especially the newly shorn, shivering ones, but the sky is often grey and the hills are sometimes shrouded with grey mist, upsetting my natural colour sense which is more adapted for the Mediterranean. As for the sea, I am learning to appreciate a whole new colour range -  misty grey, light grey, deep-dark-depressing grey, grey-black, grey-blue, grey-green, blue-grey and just plain, unadulterated grey. In the end it drove me to poetry. Well, what else can you do, sitting in the car in the drizzle, with a thermos of hot coffee on a summer's afternoon...?

                                           So Many Shades of Grey 

                                                Grey blue sea

                                                Calling me
                                                Blue grey sky
                                                Flying high
                                               Grey brown stones
                                               No-one owns
                                               Yellowish grey
                                               Sand-filled spray
                                               Greyish blue
                                               Distant view
                                               Greyish green
                                               Hills between
                                               In the rain
                                               Grey again
                                               Shades of grey
                                               Glorious day!

 

 

Not the best of poetry, but it made me feel better. You should try it sometime.

 

 

 

Nostalgia Tour

“Daddy, ple...ase don’t mow the daisies!” As a child I loved flowers. I loved nature. I loved anything beautiful. I would get myself up on summer nights after I had been put to bed and climb up on the windowsill, staring out, spellbound at the fiery, crimson and yellow, pollution-induced colours of the sunset above the local reservoir at the bottom of our road. I loved the bright, tall gladioli that grew against the wall in our garden and the tall wigwams of runner beans with their scarlet flowers that my father grew. Looking back, beauty of all kinds was of paramount importance to me, and especially colour.

 

Yesterday we went on a nostalgia tour: on a trip back in time to the country town where my husband was born. He pointed out the stream where he had played as a child, repeated stories of the hop fields through which he had walked on his way to school, pointed out the road where his junior school was and showed me, with a mix of pride and regret, the prestigious school whose entrance examination he had failed years ago. We walked together past black and white half-timbered buildings, a relic of the past still present in the busy modern-day shopping centre, past little rows of Georgian houses, tucked away down side turnings, past the old green, the castle and the river, recalling his childhood. The town nestled amongst green fields, country houses and picturesque oast houses. It was a very different childhood to mine. “You can see why I grew up the way I did, can’t you?” he said. It explained his abiding love for the countryside.

 

It didn’t explain mine. Brought up in a fairly ordinary London suburb, the most beautiful thing I remember in my past was the sunsets and they were probably the product of the dirty smoke belched from factory chimneys, the fumes from the already growing traffic problem and the coal fires that were lit every night by thousands of Londoners, in the days before smokeless fuel. But looking back, I remember the daisies on the lawn and my sorrow each time my father got the lawnmower out of the garage and brought their short, beautiful lives to a premature end. I remember the vivid pink cherry blossom in the front garden and my horror when the tree had to be cut down because its roots were undermining the garden wall. I remember the huge clump of brown daisies growing beside the garage door, permanently surrounded by a cloud of buzzing bees. I remember the tall green poplars that grew on the other side of the railings around the tarmacked playground of our junior school.

 

Despite my urban upbringing, I was an admirer of beauty and a lover of nature. Where did these longings come from? I have no idea. But they are as strong in me today as in my husband. I never played beside a stream as a child. I never walked through hop fields. My early environment was full of city streets, shops, gasometers and blocks of flats. Nowadays I shun most of this and head for countryside and the sea. My mother was a country girl, from a rural Somerset village. Maybe these family memories are buried deep in my genes and I am simply a product of my inheritance, not my upbringing. How do these things work? I don’t know. But I seem to have a peculiar, nostalgic connection with a past existence that never happened to me.

Box of Delights

I feast my eyes on the polished wood, with the rounded edges. I run my fingers over its smoothness. I contemplate it and try to imagine the shape and the size of what might be hidden inside. The phrases in my head: ‘box of treasures’, ‘box of delights’, conjure up romantic dreams, stories of Arabian Nights, or something unknown and delightful.

At a meeting of our writers circle we were asked to write about one of several objects on the table in front of us. The small wooden box caught my eye immediately and I started to think of John Masefield’s wonderful story of the Box of Delights. The wonderful thing about a closed box is the idea of something tempting and tantalising, holding a mystery that you cannot see from the outside. Like opening presents, it’s best to keep the suspense for as long as possible – to keep the secret hidden inside: to admire the wrappings, the bows, the accompanying message, to shake, to smell, to turn upside down (gently) and examine before opening it.

When I finally slide open the box, twisting the two polished halves from each other, and peer inside, I am not wrong. It was worth savouring the moment. I am captivated first by the colour and then by its iridescence, by the blend of softly shining blues, turquoises, greens and colours for which I do not have a name. The intricate patterns of the shell embedded in the wood and their soft sheen and pearly quality fascinate me. A real treasure.

I love surprises. I often dream of creating a garden with winding pathways and hidden surprises. A garden where you can take a walk down the path and find a hidden glade of bluebells, or some glorious white lilies of the valley, giving away their hiding place by their scent wafting on the breeze. In my garden you would stumble over a lily pond or a rambling rose, a honeysuckle entwined in the branches of an old tree …

Recently I celebrated a birthday and I spent the day tantalised by the sight of a large purple box, light as a feather but enormous, that had arrived a day or two earlier from a family member living abroad and been spirited away by my husband to be produced on the big day. I gasped as I saw it sitting there on the breakfast table, wondering what on earth it contained. No time to open it before my husband rushed out of the door to his place of work. No fun opening presents on your own so there it sat, purple on my red tablecloth, awaiting the end of the day when I could sit down, together with husband and pot of tea, ready to uncover the surprise.

I pondered on the purple box. A fragment of a poem flitted into my head – ‘purple with a red hat’- yes, that’s what I am supposed to wear when I am old! ‘When I am an old woman I shall wear purple, With a red hat which doesn’t go.’*! Perhaps this huge purple box, light as a feather, but concealing surprises, contains my red hat! Perhaps it’s time to get ready for that day when I add the red-hatted eccentricity of age to my life’s experiences. I already wear plenty of purple…

However, the best birthdays are full of surprises and this was no exception. Another present lay on the table, which I had earlier opened, as I sipped my early morning cup of tea. Carefully, I slid the cover off the long, narrow box. There inside lay 24 sticks of pure colour! As you will know by now, I love colour and there it was – pure, unadulterated colour in 24 glorious shades: oil pastels, just waiting for me to experiment. This box promised hours of absorbing, creative fun – another box of delights!

So, leaving my purple box where it lay, and thoughts of old age behind, I decided to rediscover my childhood instead and played with my new box of delights, crayoning to my heart’s content with my glowing colours to see what youthful creativity could concoct. The other box would have to wait and so would growing old!


* poem entitled ‘Warning’, by Jenny Joseph

Colours of My Mind

Last weekend we went shopping for colours. I love colour. I always have. A black and white world would be a kind of hell. Colour is what it makes it live.

The colour we found at the weekend came in boxes: 36, 24, 12 colours in a box. We saw colour in tubes, too: fat, squashy tubes of vivid colours, waiting to be squeezed out like toothpaste, blended, merged, mixed, brushed, scraped, textured and slapped on the canvas in 101 tantalising shades. There were small packets of moulding clay in a variety of colours. They are bright and temptingly tactile. They look inviting. I am a child – I want to play!

I am jealous of the artist. I admit it. He sits there mixing, blending, stirring, absorbed in his art, applying personalised colour schemes to his personal creation, recreating life in glowing shades of colour. The results are bold, striking and immediate, jolting me into his personal view of life, showing me what he has seen. He is a lucky man. He has the tools for the job. With just four tubes of paint, he tells me, he can create any colour he needs. We have purchased them from the dark recesses of an artists’ paradise – a treasure trove of pastels and paint boxes, easels and canvases, oils and watercolours. They beckon to us, inviting exploration and experiment, indulging the artist’s own fantasies and dreams. We have chosen carefully: Burnt Umber (not Burnt Sienna), Cadmium Yellow (not Lemon), and a special kind of Crimson. Ultramarine has been discarded in favour of a deep Prussian Blue. It is important to get the details right. The rest will follow.

For me, too, detail is important. But I have no tubes, no boxes, no colour. Yes, there is colour in my imagination – my head is full of it; the brown/yellow/golds of autumn fill my head right now. Leaf shapes and leaf colours, earth textures and earth colour fill my daydreams. But I have only one tool. I can draw simple lines only with my pen. Words are my only medium and the words must tell my story of colour and shape, with textures and shades of meaning, moods and emotions. My words alone must tell the whole story, paint the whole picture, squeeze out the truth and apply it to the page in a multi-coloured spectrum rivalling the artist’s.

Language cannot be mixed in a palette, but careful choices must be made from a vast treasure store, as tantalising to me as the artists’ shops we have visited. My Word Store, as the Anglo-Saxons would have named it, is a huge chamber with dark recesses filled with treasure. It is only important to be accurate. I must learn to choose my words and phrases with infinite care.

Where language fails I must use my imagination, invent, embellish, like a James Joyce or an Edward Lear and add to my personal word store a Jabberwock, a gyre or a gimble. Where words fail me or laborious descriptions produce a ‘dead frog’, faithfully observed and accurately depicted, but lifeless, I will become an Impressionist. I will abandon detail for a while and try to evoke an impression, capture essence or express a feeling or mood. I will approach my subject from every angle and build my meaning layer upon layer like a Cubist. I will dissect my subject and reconstruct it, describing its multi-faceted being from a unique point of view and shedding new light on its objective reality. Braque and Picasso will be proud of me.

I will use my art to its best advantage and transfer the colours of my mind to the limits of the page. I will not be beaten! The artist has inspired in me fresh determination to push the boundaries of my own art. This little pen of mine will yet dispense the glories of the spectrum and pour forth a torrent of literary delights from the Aladdin’s cave of my word store, not that I wish in any sense to be competitive, you understand...

Blue and green should never be seen

We had an interesting discussion the other day in the office about redheads. (No, not Red Ed!) When I was younger I wore a lot of green. Two factors were responsible for this – my mother and my hair colour! I was blessed as a child with a warm, caring mother (but one with strong views about most things). I also possessed a rather striking hair colour.

At school I had the misfortune to be labelled ‘ginger’, which wasn’t nearly as fashionable or desirable as it currently is. At home, my mother insisted proudly that it was ‘auburn’ and so it probably was. Less prejudiced, less culturally-conditioned adults admired it. However, I probably suffered just as much, as a rather shy child, from their compliments as I did from my schoolmates’ teasing. My mother’s friends and total strangers, in the shops or even on the bus, would stop my mother and say admiringly, above my head, “Hasn’t she got lovely hair?” I would shrink away behind my mother, blushing a deeper colour even than my hair, but at least able to privately cherish the compliments later.

Not all colours match well with red hair! Red, for one, purple, pink and so on, do not. “Green” my mother said firmly, “green is your colour.” As a child, my school uniform was always navy blue, but away from school, the favourite colour (my mother’s favourite) was green. I was fortunate there are so many different shades of green.

I loved dancing and attended ballet and tap dancing classes every week in the London suburb where we lived. For the dance show one year we all wore pixie outfits in various colours – a little tutu and a pixie hat with petals and a stalk on top. Mine? Brilliant emerald green, of course. Actually, I loved it!

Colours have moods and atmospheres and as I grew up I shied away from blue. It was enough to wear it for school each day and I didn’t like school that much. Later on, of course, I had to wear the regulation blue denim jeans that all my friends wore, but that was different. They made me feel good - at one with my generation and a bit of a rebel. But my primary colours were drawn from an autumnal palette – oranges, browns, yellows and, of course, greens. When you have ginger (auburn) hair, you wear green… and whatever colours go with it.

Over the years, my tastes have changed. In my thirties I had a good friend, some years older than me, who wore beautiful, flowing ‘arty’ clothes and jewellery that I much admired. Cherrie wore shades of turquoise, Wedgewood blue, aqua-marine and purple. Her home furnishings followed the same pattern and gradually my tastes began to change. I began to sense new possibilities.

In later life, nature has given me another fashion hint! No longer is my hair that vibrant colour that clashes so violently with pinks and purples. Over the years it has faded, first of all to a rather enviable pale gold (I liked that stage), followed by one that gives the impression of deliberate highlights (although I’ve never paid for any!). Finally, most of the extravagant colour is gone and I am on my way to light grey. Whilst still adjusting to this fact, I met a friend of a friend I had known in London in my twenties and was insulted and hurt when she commented “I don’t remember … did you maybe have ginger hair once?” I was outraged that I had remained so tenuously in her memory that she couldn’t even remember my hair colour! But, more than that, I had to come to terms with the fact that my present head of hair gave her very few clues.

However, every cloud has a silver lining and mine was no exception. My new grey hair (could I maybe call it silver?) opened the door to a whole new adventure in colour! I love colour and now I could experiment with the whole spectrum. Nearly every colour was permissible. My wardrobe is now full of a whole rainbow of soft greens, subtle browns and beiges, peach, purple, shocking red, gorgeous turquoises and cherry pink and I can mix and match to my heart’s content.

One more thing – the popular adage of my youth, often quoted by my mother and her generation: “blue and green should never be seen” has been proved to be a myth. I regularly mix blues, turquoises, sea greens, emerald and other such delights in both clothing and home decorating – and it works! The seaside is one of my great loves. The countryside is another. Nature has, it seems, designed itself to include both sides of the colour spectrum – blues and greens – in its own mix and match scheme, defying any rules we may think appropriate.

Colours for every season and mood: some encouraging relaxation, some vibrant with energy and motivating us to decisive action. These days, interior designers, fashion experts, counsellors and psychologists, as well as New Age therapists, know how to exploit these and I am enjoying the results to the full.