Broken

by Lori Mairs:

Uphill from the chilled dark of the cedars and into the warm light of the desert scape above, it is here on this parapet that the formations of hoodoos begin and end and where the prickly pear cactus grows. In some parts of Woodhaven there's a visual and temperate signature where distinctive bi-zones intersect, where the crossing from one to the other sometimes happens within eight or ten feet. This is one of them. 

The air is still cool from a surprising mid-March storm that thrashed down from an angry black sky. Window-rattling booms of thunder, sheets and strips of lightning ripped beyond the width of the horizon with a wall of hail pelting anything unsheltered below it. 

I like to walk after big weather. Mostly the walk is driven by curiosity and a pull to witness the affects of a wild that can't be tamed. This part of the dry interior is a desert knoll and the highest point of the trail system inside the fence line. It's a sheer drop, sixty feet or so in some places, to the forest floor. Steep-sloped honeyed-grey grasslands are still flattened from a winter dump of snow. On the forest floor, dirt changes from mottled grey-rust to a thick reddish brown where the bio-zone switches from fir-cottonwood to cedar-cottonwood. The first has sparse and evenly-spaced trees while the latter hangs with a thick canopy darkened above and sheltered underneath. I'm eye-level with the tip-tops of new growth fir and pine and I can see a third the way up gnarly old cottonwood right into the habitat holes. If I stand here long enough the squirrels will show up and put on a Cirque de Soleil show, but today is for seeing what the storm brought in or brought down or brought over and what it left behind.

Where the trail sign marks the junction, I go up along to the old flume where fir branches are broken and scattered on the ground from the wind. I reach down, grab and throw, grab and throw, at least a dozen times, winging the fallen ones into the underbrush. I cross over the big fir root that makes a step on the path then dips under the old flume on the far side. This mess of gnarled tin and wood is all that's left of what was once a water carrier for the apple orchards in the Lower Mission. It's corroded in some parts and the wooden frame that held it up at chest height is mostly on the ground and rotting. In a few places the half-hoops of galvanized steel that braced the whole thing from underneath are lying about and poking through dirt especially where the wooden frame and the metal half-pipe are mostly disintegrated. 

Next to this mangled mess of a flume sits the whole story of Father Pandosy, the mission priest who sailed to the “new” world to settle 'untamed' land. Father Pandosy planted food in rows and people in pews. He carved a path for Indian agents and land surveyors who would divide the place into parcels for grazing cattle and growing apples. The good Father and his flock missed the part where the land had no need of taming, the part where the effortless and obvious way in would have been to ask the people already here and thriving. The Syilx people have been in the Okanagan Valley for over ten thousand years, they could have been, and in the earliest times were, in easy partnership with European settlers. Father Pandosy did what new world priests do.  

Sometimes this crippled flume is a memento mori to the courage of the settlers and their child-like trust of the vision that inspired long and treacherous walks across barren lands. It was a certain ingenuity required to survive as they were accustomed to surviving. But on days like today, days after a storm and strange unheralded weather, I only have a desire to want to reverse what was done and untangle it from the mess. I want to clean it all up and supplant this settler mentality with a little grace in a world that once was new and make room for the efficacy to ask about how to be in this place from the ones that already knew. A simple task: ask.

My dad picks me up and sits me on the metal edge of the ship's railing. My mother has the baby and my other brothers and sisters are standing below on the wooden deck and waving. We're all waving. My mother, without turning toward him, asks my father if he can see the Hendersons. He finds them in the crowd and points out their position so my mother can wave in their direction. There are coloured streamers going from the boat to the wharf where a crowd has gathered and when the streamers run out the people on the pier throw toilet paper rolls all the way up onto the boat decks. It's a celebration and wall of grief all tucked into the leaving.

Where the metal and wood lie abandoned along the trail, broken and forgotten, are remnants of ice balls scattered about and melted puddle-dregs of a brutal sky-fall that was the storm. Ice balls and puddles, it goes from one to the other and I imagine it will eventually go all the way back up again, after it's saturated the earth. The plants will cast it off into the wind and the wind will deposit it into particles that will carry it to the sky and become cloud again where it will rain or hail next season. These are the cycles that live in the flume. 

I find a spot where the moisture has stayed well beyond the drift upward and it's here that moss grows luminescent green and glowing. The moss isn't a sign of the broken; it's a sign of the staying and reaping. There are teensy brown umbrella tops lurching out of cushioned pads, miniature capsules and splash cups all gathered into a Lilliputian garden to be savoured for those who venture to squat for the inspection. We don't get close enough sometimes. I want to see beyond the broken today, find the rich and nutritious in the cycles. Today I want hope and somewhere to pull back the tides and erase what keeps tugging at my midsection. 

There's a Maori troupe on deck and they begin to sing “Now Is The Hour” and my mother starts to cry. She is broken. She doesn't want to go on the boat like I do. I can see them both, my mother and my father, because I'm up on the metal railing. I look away and look down. The water below is a long way away and it's black and swirling like a whirlpool. I get scared all of a sudden that my dad is going to forget that he's holding me and if he does I'll drop into the water and be gone forever. I grab at his arm to remind him I'm there and see that he's crying too. A roll of toilet paper whizzes by our heads. The Hendersons have spotted us and they're waving and jumping about to make sure we've seen them in the crowd. The streamers and toilet paper rips and floats away into the whirlpool. The captain comes over the loudspeaker and tells us to cover our ears then the big horn sounds loud and long and low, a final bellow as our ship pulls away into the harbour.

There's always a time after a storm when the little things flourish. The battering of hail has fallen to silence and if my ears were like the deer or bear I'm sure I could hear water being sucked up through the dirt. I move along up the flume until I get to where I can cross over it safely and make my way to a fallen log that's been placed on the hillside for watchers. I come to this spot when I need to have a think. It's mid-March and these are days and nights when I spend time with my mother. Her birthday is March fifteenth, she died March thirteenth. 

As of today I've been a motherless daughter for 24 years. Seems like a long time when I think the words but it doesn't mean I can't still smell her. She would have loved this part of my life. She would have loved these days in Woodhaven at the in-between times of the season and she would have been here talking to the trees along with me. It doesn't matter how long ago something was, what matters is how much it mattered. Sometimes what mattered is the thing that purrs softly and cozies into a place in your heart that gets most remembered. Sometimes the most remembered is the unspoken agreements and all the un-saids that find a harbour in my midsection waiting it out for after a hail storm. March bites like that for me. It reminds me of the broken parts. 

***

Lori Mairs (1961- 2021) was born in New Zealand and lived most of her life in British Columbia, Canada. From 2002- 2017, she lived in the forest as the caretaker of the Woodhaven Nature Conservancy in Kelowna, British Columbia.  She completed her BFA and then an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was a sculptor and installation artist, using natural materials as well as fabric, metal and beeswax in her work.  She also participated as a lead artist in several eco art projects in Kelowna.  In the last few years of her life, she began writing essays and poetry.  In all her work, her primary concerns were the relationships we have with each other as humans and the deep and often reaching relationships humans have with the more-than-human world.  For many years she wrote a blog, “The Land of 7:30.”  She also practiced as a personal growth consultant until her untimely death.  She is greatly missed by her friends, family, clients and fellow artists, as well as the neighbors and other-than-human beings of Woodhaven where she wrote and made art for many years.

The Knowledge

By Nicky Torode:

“I can’t BELIEVE we’re leaving the EU,” my 6-year-old wails like he’s jammed his finger in the electric window as we ride, back seat, in a black cab over Croydon Flyover. The taxi driver twists his head, to double-take the young oracle, and veers, fleetingly, to the left. Good job we don’t drive on the right, my inside voice says, not ready just yet, though, for cabbie knowledge. 

Wales’s gone, England too. The early morning Brexit referendum results come on the radio, in and out, sleep to waking. We slow down at the lights on the Wellesley Road dual carriageway, slicing East from West. Jake turns to stare at the higgledy-piggledy queue curling outside Lunar House. A Union Jack droops from the staff on Lunar’s identical twin, Apollo. God of twenty-two floors of grey carpet and filed prophecies, ready for second-class dispatch. Two men in high vis vests, clutching clipboards, spit out the building’s revolving door, smiles long gone. 

I smile at Jake, squeeze his hand. We’ll look back on this moment, I’m sure, when teachers will ask me when it was that I realised Jake was so special. It was this taxi ride out of East Croydon station, en route to Gatwick, gateway to the world. Well, to Guernsey, at any rate, a hometown of sorts. It was this moment, this ride, through streets edged with shiny high rises, criss crosses of tram tracks and swinging crane arms. Ding! Ding! go the tram cars. Tuk-tuk! Tuk-tuk! go the chorus of pneumatic drills. Digging for a better future. 

How you gonna make a dream come true? Sensible sang, Croydon listened. Brutal turned pastel, beanstalks shot up even taller. Toblerone-shaped Saffron Tower, with windows of pinks and lilacs, glints in the morning sun. A giant crocus blooms again in Croh Denu, the Crocus Valley of old. 

I lean back into the padded, smells-like-new leather cab seat. Croydon, home for now. Tuk-tuk! go the drills. I stretch out, sigh. My breath on the window throws a ghost-like shroud over Fairfield Halls, South London’s South Bank. Grey walls of halls on land that’s been blessed by wayfarers to the fairs and markets of old. I’m so London, I’m so South, belts out Stormzy from the crackly radio. 

We rise up the trunk road, pass the two IKEA chimneys, long-established shrines of Valley Retail Park, and look down on a tangle of Scalextric roads at their feet. Really going up in the world. A smugness warms my chest, like I’ve backed a winner down William Hill’s. 

“Muuuuuum,” Jake says.

“Yes, love?”

“What’s the EU?”

The taxi driver, I swear, laughs inwardly. I see you, cab driver, peeping at me in your rear-view rectangle. The Palace furry dice, hanging from the mirror, bounce and bob in cahoots.

My shoulders start jiggling up and down too as we join a tailback on the A23. 

***

Nicky Torode is a born-and-fled Guernsey girl who lived in and around Croydon from 2009 until December 2016. She currently lives with her son in the lively coastal town of Hastings UK. She loves writing tales of place and has had a few shorts published (fiction and creative non-fiction). And the ink has just dried on the first draft of her novel These Are The Places.  She’s a career and entrepreneurial mindset coach and facilitator of journaling circles.

Portraits of War: Anastasiya

This is the seventh in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

As Anastasiya Volokita and I walk back towards Friedrichshagen station from the Müggelsee, we are talking about her Mum, her sister and her young niece, all of whom have managed to settle in a small Polish town, having escaped Ukraine. Her Mum, she says, used to be a bank teller but now cleans posh apartments for a living. It's okay, says Anastasiya, she likes it there and it's better than nothing. 

It's better than war, she says.

But then a cat crosses our path. The cat is a mess, its mangy fur is patchy at best, its ribs poking through. It limps sadly, like a drunken old man trying to get back to his empty home, far too late.

Anastasiya's got a cat, named Mushka Mukhich, that a friend brought out of Ukraine via Czechia to  to Poland. Anastasiya picked her up from there. Mushka Mukhich is a well travelled cat. She loves cats, and the state of this one floors her. We stop, she asks about where to find an animal shelter at this time of the evening; I've no idea, it's Friedrichshagen, it's May and the sun is already starting to set. She worries, asking two teenage girls passing if they can help. 

They can't.

A woman with a zimmer-frame comes slowly past, but she stops only to say how she loves Anastasiya's hair, intricate long plaits tightly, precisely woven with Ukrainian blue and yellow thread. 

And I too have to go. Anastasiya says it's fine. She'll take care of it, somehow.

She is wearing a black hoodie that she has zipped up, and pulls over her hands when the wind gets up as it does over the Müggelsee at this time of year – at any time of year. She has a pair of blue jeans that a friend gave her, and simple white toed trainers that were bought for her by a guy she met when she realised that she would be stuck in Berlin for a long time yet.

Because she'd never meant to stay. Anastasiya Volokita had just come to Berlin on the 22nd of February to celebrate her birthday three days later. But the most recent incarnation of the war in Ukraine broke out on the 24th, and she's not been back to Kyiv since.

“I just came for five days, for a change of mood, to have some fun, to take some time, to clear my head to prepare for the next festival season of work,” she says.

And though it might not seem much, it's the little things that have started to chip away at her confidence, at her sense of self. Anastasiya used to be, as she describes herself, “a fashionista”. Her wardrobe in Kyiv was full, she shimmered her way through the scene, but she says she doesn't really know who she is any more. Her brother will send some clothes from Kyiv soon, but she's already donated many of them to people there, people who have lost everything. 

She pulls at the sleeves of her hoodie again. At one point she giggles with a charming lack of self-consciousness when she says that she thought “it was always important to be important”, realising that maybe it wasn't.

She's a busy woman, Anastasiya. Or at least she used to be. From her first days at the design institute she moved to Kyiv to study at, her and her friends had made money by embroidering, decorating clothes for fashion designers and pop stars. She says they could do anything by hand and my eyes are drawn again to the eternal plaits in her hair. She went on to work for a designer, travelling to exhibitions, that sort of thing. But then, around 2014, she realised that she didn't need a boss who, as she says, didn't listen to her, and nor did she want one. So she struck out, alone.

“I just jumped onto the water and started to swim,” she says.

Her boyfriend was a producer, so she started managing, doing PR, helping spread the word and putting out fires, she became a promoter, a spokeswoman, the public face and internal engine of Comic Con Ukraine and the White Nights and the street food festivals. 

She misses the constant whirr of action because she's always been able to get things done, to use her contacts, to find solutions to problems. If there was a crisis then she would work it out, it was her job.

Her skills are well honed, for in Kyiv in 2014 there was a fundamental crisis. 

Kyiv's Maidan square - at the heart of the city both geographically, and spiritually, she says, as the point where the big concerts and the parties, and the fayres and events would take place - was occupied, ultimately, by tens of thousands of people, protesting against the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, and the corruption and abuses inherent in his regime. 

It was a movement that divided the country in many ways, but also brought much of Anastasiya's generation together. In the protest's earlier days she was a regular visitor. She says there was something about the atmosphere, what she calls the revolutionary mood of the time, that couldn't help but draw her in. 

She felt she could do something important.

So she started doing what she did best, organising. She was letting volunteers stay on her floor or on her sofa. She and her friends set up flea market stalls to raise money to help. She sold off band merchandise at hers, anything she could, plectrums and drum skins and records autographed by big Ukrainian acts because she knew them all. 

And when Russian troops invaded Crimea she and her friends – and every tailor she knew - used the skills they had again. They made bulletproof vests and sent them to the volunteers going to the front. Anastasiya sourced the fabric and the materials for free, she arranged a studio to manufacture them in someone to pack them and someone to deliver them. 

But she can't do much here, in Berlin. She can't even speak the language, it's frustrating as hell. She's staying in the guest-house of a man who works in TV. She knows she's lucky, she's got enough space that friends can come to visit, but still.

“Now after three months... I don't understand who I am,” she says. “In general, I feel like like there's a big wall up, and I can't go back home, I don't know how to go back home.”

But, while at other times she is defiant, bullish almost, she says this plaintively. She says the word 'home' like it's a tennis ball being tossed in the air, her tone goes up and down. She almost howls it.

Kyiv is a cool city, she says, and she'd dreamed of it from the first time she went as a kid. Even when she was at the heart of a scene around a club in her home town of Dnipropetrovsk called Torba - which means either an old bag or to get pissed, depending on who you ask - where she knew all the musicians and the DJ's, she focussed on leaving. 

There's clubs that rival Berghain easily, there's districts that look more like Dubai than Berlin, she says. The effect of Comic Con Ukraine, for example, has been international, and she talks proudly of 'geek culture' and its importance to a generation who might never have connected in person without it. She talks of YouTubers and bloggers and of people being drawn there, when before they'd have otherwise ended up here.

She's in full flow. I ask if everyone in Ukraine is like this, talking and talking and talking, openly and honestly and endlessly, flitting between subjects the way a hummingbird does blooms, her sentences drawing themselves out, stretching over clauses and parentheses like the blue and yellow cotton spun through her plaits, but she says not. She says that in fact she's quite shy, but I don't believe her. 

At least not at that point.

The Müggelsee behind us is choppy. I drink a beer, Anastasiya a lemonade, and we are sitting down at a cafe table. The wind blows across us, whisking the ash out of the superfluous ashtray, and I worry about it blowing across the microphone on my recorder. 

So I push it closer to her at one point, only to withdraw it, unconsciously, a little as she talks of Bucha, where many of her friends had bought apartments because they were cheaper than in Kyiv, and where she had had an office before. Where she'd worked on a project setting up children's playgrounds. 

She says she knows that soldiers had ransacked those very offices, but that was the least of things, because she also knows of rapes and of murders. She says people she knows, colleagues and friends, died in the horrors that engorged the district in April, but she doesn't want to ask who. Her eyes are red, I ask her if she's okay, and she says she is. 

And then she tells me she can give me an “exclusive.” She says this with a nervous giggle that isn't entirely convincing, and one that makes more sense when I think of the way she pulls her sleeves over her hands, and the way her eyes are reddened, and how she seems so determined to convince me that she is okay with all of this - that she'll find a solution, because that's what she always does, despite the fact she's been stuck in the city she came to for a five day holiday four months ago, because her home country has been invaded and is currently at war.  

Anastasiya tells me then that she is also pregnant.

“Yeah,” she says, realising how weird it sounds to say out loud to a stranger.

She says that this is how men and women are in times of war. Men are drawn to fight and women to motherhood.

“I really think that when the war started, and I was like naked nerves, I needed a man who can relax me. It was a surprise, it's just happened, and we didn't talk a lot, we didn't know each other a lot, and we have just started to communicate. He has a lot of his own problems - I am in shock, I don't know what to do,” she says. 

“Life is changing so fast” she says, smiling again.

I tell her this is great news. “Congratulations” I say, and I mean it. I tell her having a baby is easier than you imagine, that the joy outweighs the struggle, which is true, but here and now as I say all this out loud the only thing really clear is that I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. For at  least my kids were born in a country of my choosing. 

She carries on though. She always has.

“But, no, I will find a solution. What I need to do - I have free time right now, and not so much work to do - I have time to learn German.”

She also says she wants to train to be a psychologist, she says she knows that it'll help, that it'll be needed in the aftermath of all of this. She's making plans already. She wants to go home desperately, but it's not just her any more. She also says the baby's father is serious, he wants to be there, he's talking of them buying a house in Ukraine when this is all over. He's the one who bought her trainers. But she's being pushed and pulled at from all sides. 

“Space”, she implores. “What's space doing with me?”

But then space had one extra little hurdle to throw in our way in the form of that battered old cat, sloping off to curl up somewhere for eternity. Later she tells me that the cat had limped away while she was asking in a restaurant for help, and I know she went back to the guest-house of the man who works in TV that she is currently living in to worry all about it.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Combustion

By Erin Ruble:

We walk from the airport into smoke. There are mountains all around but you cannot see them. Roads end, not in horizons, but in brown smudges of indeterminate distance.

Light looks different, pulling the luster of sunset forward into mid-afternoon. Actual sunsets are religious affairs. Exercise is dangerous. Clouds become suspect, especially those that plume at a single point on the horizon.

This morning we watched the sun rise over Vermont’s Green Mountains before lifting off from an earth lush with water. As we flew west the land flattened and broadened like the vowels of those beneath us. By the time we passed the Mississippi, Kelly green had faded to sage and then to tan. Irrigation created strange geometries, perfect circles, rectangles, and stripes across an otherwise sinuous landscape. 

Evidence of water is everywhere here: in the ripples of sandstone, the crooked paths of coulees, the cumulous clouds that stack in the sky. Water is visible in everything but itself. Step off the plane and your skin will crack and dry. Blow your nose and you will find dust and blood. 

My husband and children and I return to Montana every year to visit my parents. This summer, as a hurricane drowns Houston, wildfires have spread across eastern Oregon, Idaho, and Montana. The smoke is thick enough to touch. People follow the Incident Information System, InciWeb, like news junkies watch CNN. 

Grass crackles under our feet, brittle, brown, thin. My mother reports that the Ponderosa pines in the pastures hold less moisture than kiln-dried lumber. I’m not sure how anyone knows this but I do not question her. 

Combustion is my parents’ favorite summertime conversation. Too frequent school fire drills have spooked my seven-year-old, though, so I ask them not to talk about it. But after a few days at my family’s vacation cabin my husband and I, coming back from a hike, see a billow of dirty white down the valley. The cabin is surrounded by mountains on three sides; the only road out is somewhere near that fire. We head back along the ridge in order to keep track of its progress. As we walk it jumps over the top of a hill and starts down the other side. Now, faintly, we can see flames. 

This is a familiar threat. My sister and I used to sit in the bay window during summer nights, watching lightning pulse through clouds. Just half an inch of rain fell during the entire summer of 1988, as Yellowstone burned; by the end of August, ash capped every fencepost. Everything smelled of quenched campfires when the clouds finally broke. When I was twelve I drove our pickup through our rocky back pasture, peering over the windshield for tracks to follow, shuttling firefighting supplies to my parents and neighbors so they could fight a blaze that the city fire department refused to address. The year before my son was born a fire roared through the valley that holds my family’s cabin, missing it only by the grace of a sudden change of wind. 

Now my mother calls the sheriff’s department. The fire began only an hour ago but the powers that be have learned of it already, and are sending helicopters, earth movers, even a slurry bomber. The forest service is adopting a let it burn policy when they can—lodgepole and grasses and all kinds of organisms depend on fire, and it’s too expensive to obey Smokey the Bear’s edicts anyway—but a few years ago a lightning strike just down the road burned over 200,000 acres and cost $22 million, so today they’re taking no chances. 

We pack up the kids and drive down the county road to where the fire eats its way downhill. We pull off and park. Expensive ranches line the river, sagebrush bluffs giving way to emerald pastures. Someone has let their horses out and a black and white pinto trots over to us. 

Helicopters drop what look like thimbles of water on the fire. Each time they seem too small to make difference, but after a moment, the orange glow dims. Bulldozers crawl over a ridge I’d swear was too steep for a horse. 

My parents and son stare at the work. My daughter draws a picture in the car. I pat the pinto. A neighbor stops to pass on news. Everyone seems very calm, and in fact, by evening they will have put out the fire. When we drive home the next day, we will see miles of black stripes across the tan hills, the red stain of retardant like glowing coals. 

Soon another summer will be gone.

***

Erin Ruble’s essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Green Mountains Review, Tahoma Literary Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Montana, she now lives in Vermont with her husband and children. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.

Portraits of War: Yuriy Seredin

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the sixth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

Though in exile in Berlin since the start of the war, Yuriy Seredin is still in his position as a professor at the Lviv Conservatory. He's teaching remotely. The building itself - with its warm, storied rooms, flanked by pictures of, and played in by disparate figures such as Chopin's disciple Karol Mikuli and the pop star Rulana – sits empty, waiting to be filled with music again.

The carved figures of two muscled, loin-clothed men flank its name on the faded sky blue and pale mustard yellow coloured facade. A stone bandura, the 36 string instrument that stands as a potent symbol of Ukrainian musical nationalism, is below. 

It was Seredin's dad who introduced him to music, who showed him his first chords on a piano, and who realised the young man's perfect pitch when his age was still only just in double figures. He could pick out a melody without trying, there was something natural, an intrinsic musical sense about him. 

But that sense was honed by Eugen Filin, a teacher, pianist and prodigious composer, who'd previously studied and taught at the fabled Moscow Conservatory. Later, Seredin would go to boarding school for young musicians, but it was Filin who was the formative musical influence.

He talks about him with a certain awe, its as if he's in the park with us, off in the trees, listening in to the conversation, somehow. He taught the young man about Orlando Di Lasso and the Flemish school, about the history of polyphonic composition, and he gave him the courage to trust his own instincts. 

Seredin says that Filin changed his life. Though one is in Lviv and the other in Berlin, they're still in touch.

“He basically taught me how to improvise, not like in jazz, but how to play in different styles of classical music. And also he showed me how to play expressively on piano, like when you choose any two sounds and you can play them endless amounts of times, every time differently, emotionally. It's like psychokinesis... the human brain can do amazing things with that.”

It is as a jazz musician that Seredin is best known. His father had bought him a Louis Armstrong tape; it had the hits on it, 'Hello Dolly', that sort of thing, but then came another one, the greats of jazz piano with Fats Waller and Chick Corea and Dave Brubeck. Seredin then discovered Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner, and, despite a time when he focussed purely on classical music, his fate was largely sealed. 

The first track on Yuriy Seredin's breakout, award winning 2018 album, 'Asylum Search', is called 'Krasne', after the village his Grandmother lived in. A little way east of Lviv, it's tiny and rural, nowadays dominated by the silos of the grain production plant, and cleaved in two by a railway. She was, he says, like a second mother to him, though he remembers the poverty that lead to him spending much of his childhood there. 

His memories drench the composition, and he describes the way they permeate his work.

"I live through this euphoric state when improvising; and at the same moment I am in real time, living through visions. It's like I'm fantasising, and playing that into the instrument... you know, living life through music"

The opening stabs of tenor and alto saxophone are rooted in the traditions of American hard bop – tonally it sounds like 'Eventually', the opening of Ornette Coleman's 1959 masterpiece 'The shape of Jazz to come' – but they are soon underpinned by Seredin's vast, swelling piano parts.

I had thought the record's underlying message was of unavoidable exile. It is called 'Asylum Search', after all – and it was recorded in Berlin, not Lviv or Kyiv - but he says not. He says it's more about the search for solace, for internal peace, a place to be.

"When I was recording this my father was about to die, and what I was playing in the studio was all about this. Thoughts and memories... it was a really personal record. Asylum Search is about looking for a place where you can feel an asylum for your soul, your home in the highest meaning, you know?"

But his search for asylum is no longer metaphorical, internal. He's sat in Berlin watching the war at home. It took a while to adjust, to train his focus, and he says that his relationship with his music has changed. He pours his energy into his piano when he's on stage, he calls it his thirst to express. 

But Berlin's not his home, no matter how he says he does like it. Even if the jazz scene is better than Kyiv's. Even if, as he says, the players are better and more numerous here. 

And he doesn't know how long he'll stay now. He says it depends, depends on the war, and on what's left when it's over. He'll still need to be able to play. He's resigned to being away for a while. 

“Time will tell”, he says.

Yuriy Seredin thinks a lot abut the composition process, and it dominates our conversation. Especially, I think, because it's so much harder to come up with much new material since the war began. 

“I'm still in this position where it's really hard to get into this euphoric state to compose, because all this background stuff is fucking it up”, he says. 

He's polite, and answers all my questions, no matter how stupid they may be. It's the first real day of sunshine Berlin has seen for months, and we are sat in the Tiergarten as birds around us regain their voices and schoolkids give continued exercise to theirs. Police in short sleeves drive lazily around the gravel paths looking for something to do, someone's day to interrupt. 

But there's a sullenness to Seredin, something looming over him, a weight bowing his back. We sit in the shade. He has a thin puffer jacket which he zips up halfway through our conversation. His skin is pale, his hair dark and thick. Though he's probably two metres tall, he reminds me a little of Andrea I Appiani's painting of Napoleon, somehow. His nose is inquisitive, it pokes out of his face, but he points it at the ground between his feet a lot.

His voice is low, and he talks of mental health issues he's faced before the war in his home country began. 

Seredin is happy about the path he now treads (though he's careful to say he's not proud, because pride stunts development), the one that winds between playing and composing and teaching a new generation of Ukrainian musicians at the conservatory. He felt let down by at least one of his professors when he studied there, who barely seemed to care about his charges and their musical development at all. It was as if he was just killing time, dining off his reputation.

He takes music seriously. This is more than being just about melody and arrangement. Shit, he says, he's hardly in it to get rich, and in this he probably has a point. 

But he also knows of music's inherent political power, as embodied by the contemporary recognition of the blind peasants who played the bandura, that strung instrument embossed in stone on the conservatory's front, wiped out under Stalin in the '30s. 

Or by the ideas of its founder, Mykola Lysenko, himself.

Lysenko, who died in 1912, was a composer whose life's work was dedicated to the pursuit of creating a purely Ukrainian canon. He wrote the music for the hymn, “Prayer for Ukraine” still played across the country today, and described as Ukraine's 'spiritual anthem'. There is a story about how Tchaikovsky wanted to stage one of his works in Moscow but the state wouldn't allow it to be sung in Ukrainian, and Lysenko refused to have it translated into Russian. 

So when Yuriy Seredin talks to me of a nascent new project, adding orchestral music to traditional Ukrainian folk songs, he is again following in Lysenko's footsteps. Lysenko published seven volumes of them in the 1800s. 

But there is something unsettling in the darkness Yuriy feels, at the destination his desperation has lead him towards as we talk. He is embittered by the war, and when we speak he is clearly being dragged through the mires of his emotions. It has made him, as he says, “at different moments, disappointed, desperate, sad, bitter and depressed” – justifiably so, of course - but he's closing himself off. 

"After last April I realised I needed to get rid of the influence of any Russian info-space. Because I was a big fan of Russian literature, of Russian music. Of course I speak Russian to some Russians here because they don't speak Ukrainian, and these are people who I know, that I'm quite sure about their okay position regarding the war. I understand from human point of view Russians, who are against war and suffer from hate. For that I pity them. But the thing with collective responsibility, I guess, also remains. But I'm trying to avoid... I stopped reading Russian books for sure, listening to their music. I just want to distance myself from that.”

We moved on after he said this. We talked about composition, about jazz and about Berlin, but I couldn't shift it from my mind. It drew me back again and again.

“I decided that I will never play with any Russians 'til the end of my life, it's just my civil position after what Russia did. It's like... I'm not... I know many people are against the Putin regime and I have friends there, but... like... at least what I'm thinking now, its my - how do you say - not to say my tribute to the victims - that's the wrong word - but in memory of the victims I don't ever want to play in any Russian band or one that contains Russian musicians. I think that's not right.”

Aside from the obvious tragedies of this war it strikes me that this is one of its most pernicious and devastating, and long-ranging effects. The closing off of cultural exchanges, doors slamming shut on other worlds. And I suppose I really just hope at some point he will be able to change his mind.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Eh-ALL-ing: Finding Poland in London

Photo by Nina Vlotides

By Emma Bielecki:

Let me take you to a part of London you probably don’t know, and won’t find on any map. It has a physical infrastructure, located in West London, but mainly it exists in people’s minds, and more specifically these days in their memories. It exists in my memory because it’s where I spent slivers of my childhood, taken there by my father, who inhabited it psychologically if not physically, and who would now and then announce on a Saturday morning: ‘Let’s go to Eh-ALL-ing.’

Going to Eh-ALL-ing — or Ealing, as people without Polish accents persisted in pronouncing it — most often meant going in search of foodstuffs then unknown to English supermarkets, with strange, sonorant names: kabanos, myśliwska, krakowska, chleb. Kabanos: a long, thin, leathery sausage hung in horse-shoe shapes behind the counter of the Polish delicatessen; myśliwska: a short, thick, leathery sausage displayed in bunches like bananas; krakowska: a fat cylinder of pork, paler pink on the inside than the others and with bigger white splodges, which comes in a synthetic casing you need to remove.

I remember how my dad would peel the sausage as he ate it, leaning against the kitchen counter with the sausage in one hand and a sharp knife in the other. I would try to imitate the gesture, the confident twist of the wrist, but I always made a mess of it, hacking off big bits of meat along with the casing. There was, though, something thrilling about the process. When I was a child, meals were often a formal and fussy affair: one ate sitting down, at the table, never standing up and never, never, in the street; one minded one’s manners, which meant worrying neurotically about one’s elbows and the correct way to hold the utensils. How liberating to be able to stand at the counter, to peel the casing from a sausage in a gesture that could never be described as either well-mannered or ill mannered, but was simply, perfectly, adequate to the task in hand. To see my father peeling smoked sausage was to see a man completely at ease in the world.  

Most often we ate the sausage withchleb and Kremska. A dictionary will tell you that chleb is bread. The dictionary is wrong — or was wrong in the 1980s, when bread was white and spongy when untoasted, but hardly ever untoasted or unbuttered; chleb was darker and harder, with a little aniseed kick from the carraway seeds. Kremska is a Polish mustard, and was a source of endless frustration and disappointment for my father. No jar of Kremska bought in London ever tasted right, which is to say no jar of Kremska ever tasted like it had back home. 

My father chalked this up to geographical displacement: in Poland, surely, Kremska still tasted like Kremska? He was wrong, of course, because it wasn’t physical distance that had wrought this change, but time. Kremska in Poland no longer tasted like Kremska either, that is to say no longer tasted like it had when my father was a boy.

Nowadays, all these products are widely available. You can get Polish sausage and Polish bread and Polish mustard in pretty much any supermarket in England. Along with Polish foodstuffs, the Polish language has become ubiquitous. I’m writing this in a café and I can hear Polish in stereo — a conversation between two young men in one corner, between two young women in another.  I think of pierogi, those little dumplings stuffed with all sorts of things. I like mine z kapustą i grzybami, with cabbage and mushrooms. When I hear Polish in the background, wherever I am, on the bus or the tube or in a supermarket queue, phantom pierogi always haunts my palate, the bassline rumble of affricate consonants like the deep umami taste of mushroom, the nasal vowels like the sharp acid burst of sauerkraut.

Sometimes, when we went to Eh-ALL-ing it was not to buy food but to visit friends of my father. In general, this was not an experience I enjoyed. My father’s friends seemed much older than him (they weren’t, but in his 60s he had married a much younger woman and had kids for the first time, creating an illusion of relative youthfulness) and much more old-fashioned. They lived in tudorette semis furnished with tasselled lamps and Roman Catholic wall art, smelling of herring and talc. 

As a small child I slightly dreaded venturing into such houses; as an adolescent, I sneered at their decor. It was only as an adult, at funerals, that I learnt about what had brought their inhabitants to Ealing in the first place. About Zula Stankiewicz, who spent her childhood in Dachau; about Andrzej Plichta, who had five older brothers, all killed at Katyń; about Halina Kwiatkowska, who lived for six years in the sewers under Warsaw; about Olga Rymaszewska, who joined the resistance at 17, was captured and tortured and sentenced to death, but who survived because, for some unknown reason — maybe she reminded him of his sweetheart back home? maybe it was his mother’s birthday? — the German officer supposed to shoot her let her escape. Now I regret every time I wriggled away from a bosomy hug, or rolled an eye at a tasselled lamp, or imitated an accent for a cheap laugh. Now I marvel at the how the heroic made a home in the most humdrum of English suburbs.

What I learnt from my father and his friends is that nothing is fixed: you can always rebuild a life, even on a heap of rubble and ash. The reverse is also true though — a life can collapse into a heap of rubble with very little warning, can go up in flames in the blink of an eye. The town my father was born in was in the east of Poland. When the Soviets invaded in 1939, he was sent with his mother and grandmother to a labour camp in Siberia. Now the town he is from is in Ukraine, and women and children are being deported once more. 

***

Emma Bielecki lives and works in London, where she teaches and researches nineteenth-century French literature. In addition to authoring articles on Balzac, Belle Époque detective serials, and radioactivity in the popular novel, she sporadically enjoys writing about other things that interest her, such as Bob Dylan, pet cemeteries and the history of Poles in London.

Outer space in Währinger Strasse

By Pippa Goldschmidt:

It was a weekend of dissonances. I’d gone to Vienna to talk about outer space at a symposium held in an arts centre called WUK; a complex of dilapidated brick buildings which started life in 1855 as a railway locomotive factory. This soot-stained evidence of Vienna’s industrial past contrasted sharply with the fancy Baroque palaces for which the city is famous, their gold-and-white decoration gleaming in the early March sunshine.

Amongst the topics for discussion at the symposium was the Outer Space Treaty, a utopian attempt by the United Nations in 1967 to declare that no nation state can stake a claim to any object in ‘outer space’ – wherever that may be exactly, the treaty avoids having to define its location. But in the decades that have passed since it was originally drafted and ratified, many companies have decided they want to stake a claim to objects in outer space, such as asteroids, in order to mine them for metals which are rare on Earth. The symposium agreed that outer space should be accessible to all, and not colonised for the purposes of making rich people even richer and we shared a hope that the future of space exploration might be profoundly different from its past; more egalitarian, less connected to military and imperial aspirations.

The symposium had an online audience, perhaps connected to us by those invisible satellites we were discussing, and I was constantly distracted by my image on a screen just off to one side of me. As I read out part of a short story, so did my on-screen doppelgänger, but she was always half a sentence behind me. When I finished, I watched her mouth move silently before she too stopped and we regarded each other.

The speakers at the symposium discussed the origins of satellites and rockets in metal that has to be dug out of the earth, and described how workers in some of these mines have gone on strike over the dangerous conditions and environmental damage. This juxtaposition between shiny rockets soaring apparently effortlessly into the sky and people working underground was mirrored by the half-imaginary entity of outer space – a legal no-place far above us – contrasting sharply with the post-industrial spaces of WUK and its rusting iron pipes.

Once the capital of a vast empire, Vienna now feels like a city out of time, not quite sure how it can fit into the 21st century other than presenting itself as a theme park with endless statues of emperors and empresses, with the percussive clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages taking the tourists for rides around the Ring, and where these tourists (after their carriage rides) can queue outside traditional cafés to eat Sachertorte or Kaiserschmarrn. Cafés where everything, even the strong and bitter coffee, is covered with a thick layer of whipped cream.

But there is yet more juxtaposition for me personally, and on much smaller scales. WUK is situated in Währinger Strasse, a long street that juts like the spoke of a bicycle wheel out of the city centre towards the woods in the north-west. I had heard of this street before I came here because it is where my grandmother was born and grew up. She left in 1938, one of the few Jewish adults able to get a visa to enter Britain, possibly because she was young and could speak English. Her parents, who had no savings, and were neither young enough to work nor able to speak English, were left behind in Vienna. She never saw them again.

So for me, Währinger Strasse is not a place associated with nostalgia or coffee served with Schlagsahne. When I was young, my grandmother repeatedly told me to visit Vienna, to see the imperial art collections and the architecture; the magnificent churches with shining domes and steep patterned roofs, as well as the Modernist Secession building and the Bauhaus-influenced house designed by  Wittgenstein for his sister. She did not tell me to go to Währinger Strasse and see the apartment block where she spent her childhood, and from where her parents were evicted in 1939 before they were forced into an overcrowded ghetto in the city centre. There her father died, and her mother was deported east.

My grandmother didn’t tell me to go there because she never talked about this part of the family history, but she had written down the address and so I went there anyway.

There was nothing to see, of course. There never is anything to see at these places, their very anonymity heightens the horror. If it could happen here at this four storey apartment block on a bend in the road and with a tramline running past the front door, it could – and did – happen anywhere. I stood and watched the building from the other side of the road, perhaps wanting to see a sign of life. But nobody inside gave me any such sign, the windows remained blank and dark, and so I left.

I returned to my hotel near the busy shopping street Mariahilfer Strasse, and just across the road from the Westbahnhof, the station from where my grandmother would have caught that train in 1938. There is a memorial in this station to the Jewish children who escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1939. But it says nothing about the adults who also escaped. Given how large it was, the destroyed Jewish community of Vienna has remarkably few memorials, the city apparently prefers to dwell on more distant events. And perhaps I do too, after all my main reason for coming here was to talk about outer space, rather than be confronted with what happened to my grandmother and great-grandparents. But the buildings dragged me back down to earth.

When I left Vienna to return home I caught a train from the Hauptbahnhof, which was crowded with refugees from Ukraine. Hundreds of people waited on the main concourse to travel further west; exhausted women, children, old people and pets were all being given food by volunteers. My train, advertised as nearly empty when I booked my ticket at the beginning of February, was now full. I sat next to a teenage girl who slept almost the entire six hour journey to Frankfurt, her pet rabbit in a travel carrier at her feet. I thought of my grandmother and great-grandparents, and cried.

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books), and most recently she’s co-editor (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) of Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press) an anthology of work inspired by Freud’s uncanny as it reveals itself in the human body, the forest and the city. She’s recently completed a memoir/family history The German Lesson about what it feels like to ‘return’ to Frankfurt, the city her grandfather fled in 1938.

Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

In the littoral (a song cycle)

By Sarah Frost:

The sea is noiseless tonight,
crickets creak a quiet refrain.
Somewhere in the valley
an owl calls for something he lost.

A snake glides across the black river,
slides into a waiting tree.
Behind him water furrows in mushroom folds,
soft as the forest floor. 

***

Cuttlefish clouds shear the salmon sky,
wind exfoliates the beach.
Full of blue motion, waves compete for the shoreline
where a jelly fish lolls, like a severed head. 

In the mountain shadow, there is no wind.
From a rockface, a lone flower extends
over a dark pool, orange fire.
Nothing disturbs the milky foam’s calligraphy.

Lost in branches the loerie hops,
his tail feathering bronze as a cormorant
diving into the gale-rimmed sea,
a body visible, then not. 

***

Under the sea-slicked sand
where finger plough snails sail across the wet
on creased oval feet,
the sand clam burrows,
ligamented halves clasped tight.

At the backline white stallions roar,
siring tsunami foals –
but it is quiet here in the littoral
where layered waves mantle in the swash. 

In the shallows’ ebb and flow
I bend to touch a snail’s proboscis.
Boldly he probes the foam,
sniffs ozone heady as a drug.

Under us, the sand mussel clenches,
siphoning water through her secret straws.
A knife of gulls prises whelk-clouds open
pearly sponges, dripping light. 

***

Where sea shallows meet sand, salps,
small blobs of ointment on shore scraped raw by the sea.
Stretching spinal, their line hooks a plunder of plough snails.
Unphased by relentless wash of waves
and wind funneling from the dunes,
these see-through crescent moons bloom
an axis of notochords threading clear as water,
a broken jellyfish splatter, gelatinous diamonds,
strange viscous secretions, singular and many,
like daubs of clear silicon, gluing me
to the backbone of the world, its animal tides. 

***

At the lagoon’s edge, I held her on my hip,
our heads leaning in, river stones.
Suddenly, I saw not what my daughter saw
but how she saw; the morning leaping,
a silver fish, from hills cupped like hands
to catch fern green water, a forever of trees.
Diamond air danced as laughing,
she reached for my sunglasses,
inviting me to look through them with her.
My feet sank heavy into the wet estuary.
Her touch at my neck was a dune breeze.
Child time, sage as the sea pumpkin’s shade,
turned her sky blue gaze
to polaroid gauze,  intensifying light. 

***

Like broadband, the waves graph a beachy spectrum,
static hum sounding through sonic boom.
Three cormorants fly in a faithful motif
familiar as the jut of headland into the current. 

A Tabard -green sea rolls in from the deep,
clear as an eye.
It blinks at the sun trawling ultramarine,
oyster catchers’ beaks red javelins. 

This ocean churns with sidewash, backwash,
spindrift stitching swathes as if mending a tear,
I navigate a path over the crags to the gulley,
where the secret daisies grow.

As if binding lovers in a handfasting,
incoming waters grasp the gulley’s rocky wrist,
tie it to sand bare as a promise. 

*

About Sarah:

Sarah Frost is 48 years old and mother to a 17 year old boy, and an eight year girl. She works as an online editor for Juta Legalbrief in Durban, South Africa. Sarah has been writing poetry since she was 19 years old. She has completed an MA in English Literature at UKZN and achieved a first class pass in a module in Online Poetry at Wits University. She won the Temenos prize for mystical poetry in the McGregor Poetry Competition in 2021. Her debut collection, Conduit, was published by Modjaji in 2011. She is currently fine-tuning a second manuscript, The Past, which she hopes to publish soon.

Nothing to see here

Illustration by Karen Joyce

By Jane Hughes:

Going back to Mum’s house after she died was always going to be traumatic. But nearly a month had passed. I’d had time to prepare for it. Looking at photos of Mum, sorting through her belongings, remembering old times, these all came with a mournful, aching sadness for something that was gone. It went through me in sickening, oily waves, but it was something you could get used to. What threw me utterly was not her empty house. Not her empty wheelchair. It was something unbearable about the landscape that I used to call home.

The day before the funeral, I took a taxi from the station, along narrowing roads on the edges of damp, stubbly fields, and I felt viscerally distressed by the place. But I couldn’t see what it was that was so hard to look at. In the months that followed, I found myself grasping for it. 

I scrolled through photographs of the area, trying to find whatever it was that kept making me cry. I’m continually struck by the emptiness of the place – is that it? The feeling that something used to be there, but has gone now? People and places from long ago whose stories have been lost. I’m here too late. Roman villas, iron age forts, the people who carved the White Horse on the chalk downs above my home town, the lively communities who planted the hedges and farmed the fields that no longer require labour - is that what makes me sad? That something I can’t understand was once there, but all I can see is the empty space where it was, and I’ll never get a connection? That would make sense. I try it on for size. No, it doesn’t make me cry.

The landscape is so featureless that it is hard to define, but I recognise it immediately, and the recognition feels physical. I tried to find a landmark to anchor a memory. Some local artists fixate on the White Horse, or return repeatedly to Wittenham Clumps as a subject, like the crazed man in Close Encounters sculpting an oddly-shaped hill out of mashed potato.

But I don’t think I ever went to Wittenham Clumps, why would we? Especially since Mum couldn’t walk far, and certainly not on rough ground. I realised that, as a family, we had never really explored on foot. Everything I had seen had been through a car window. Dad used to point out groups of trees on small hills on the horizon, and say ‘wittnum clumps!’. I thought that all small thickets on small hills surrounded by the more or less flat fields of the rest of the landscape were wittnum clumps. Recently, I sent Dad a photo of a painting that looked like a wittnum clump to me, and he replied wistfully that those were the days, when we still had Elm trees. I remembered Dutch Elm disease in the 1970s, and the big tree dying at the front of the house that Mum had named Elmwater. Dad didn’t know that the old trees at Wittenham Clumps were Beeches, not Elms – and so, why would I? 

I remember walking up to the White Horse with my Dad, mainly to show it to some Swiss visitors. There’s not much to see up there. I couldn’t not stand in the horse’s eye and make a wish, because I knew that every chance I got to make a wish, I should use towards trying to make Mum better, but the eye of the White Horse was a deep, milky puddle. My memory of the White Horse is of grabbing a private moment, when the Swiss and Dad were heading back down to the car park, to do something that would have looked idiotic if there had been anyone else up there to see it. 

(As I write, another memory that’s recent enough to be raw – of taking Mum out in the car so that she might be able to see the White Horse again, and not being able to find it at all, and then glimpsing it, but never being able to find a place where the car could go where Mum could see the horse, because by that time she couldn’t turn her head.)

I bought a map. It upset me. Despite having spent my whole childhood and adolescence in the Vale of the White Horse, I couldn’t find my way around it. I had no idea what was where. How could I call it my home? I felt embarrassed. And I couldn’t locate places of importance because, it turned out, I couldn’t think of any.

I bought some local history books. They upset me. Despite having (etc etc) I didn’t know most of the stories - or else, it turned out that what I thought I knew was all wrong. I knew that King Alfred burnt the cakes at Wantage, because my parents told me, but it turned out that they weren’t cakes, and that anyway, he didn’t. 

The more I looked, the more it seemed that there was no actual place for me to attach my grief to. I was not crying over my old school, or any of the houses where my family had once lived. I thought I was upset about the cherry orchards being grubbed up – could I cry about that? Not really. I had no right. I was one of those kids who grew up on the brand new housing estates and never gave a thought to whatever was there before them. In the middle of one of those estates, there was a nice patch of green where we had a party for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee and I ate a fish paste sandwich for the first time. I think that that patch of ground had some interesting bits of broken masonry on it, a sort of a ruin, and at the time I think I thought it was something to do with Abingdon Abbey. But it looks as if it might just have been an artful attempt to repurpose some of the more interesting lumps of rubble that came from demolishing an old children’s home. Once or twice I went with schoolfriends to the Abbey Meadows and hopped about on the ruins there, but they weren’t the ruins of the abbey either, just a Victorian folly. Everything I thought was wrong, and my memories are just loose rubbish blowing about like tumbleweed.

The place has changed. Is that the problem? Chagrin: I have to admit, the change that hurt me most was the brutal demolition of Didcot power station! I cried over that. But it’s not the sense of things changing that hurts me. It’s something about being disconnected, about not belonging there any more, and about not having anything to hold onto. My attachment seems to be to a landscape that is mostly empty. The pictures that feel most like home to me are the ones without landmarks. Pictures of empty fields. Nothing there, nothing at all. Just something so familiar about the shape, and the lines of the plough furrows. The feeling I get is of a landscape that doesn’t feel any need to connect with me. 

The last time I went to the place that used to be home, I felt lost and rejected. I recognise the place, but it doesn’t seem to recognise me. From now on, I’m just a visitor. I have no reason to go back there unless to visit a grave or two. 

August 1, 1978
Disappointment of various places and trips. Not really comfortable anywhere. Very soon, this cry: I want to go back! (but where? since she is no longer anywhere, who was once where I could go back). I am seeking my place. Sitio.
– Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary

***

Jane Hughes is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Aberdeen, UK. Her work is currently focusing on bereavement, attachment to place, and life writing around loss. Her essay, ‘Three Wheels on my Wagon’, appears in Essays in Life Writing published by Routledge in 2021.

Illustration is by Karen Joyce and is used with permission. You can find Karen’s website here.

Vulcan Street (On the Docks with my Grandfather, Seventy Years Apart)

By David Lewis:

The road along the Liverpool docks used to flow with the loading and unloading of great cargoes, noisy with the constant bustle of wagons, horses, steam lorries and the trains that ran from the enormous goods stations to the docks.  The streets behind held pubs, churches, engineering companies, shipping offices, workshops, forges.  Over all hung a pall of soots and smokes from steam engines and roaring chimneys.  On weekdays at least it was never silent, never still.  

Today the docks are neglected and vulnerable.  The goods stations have been demolished, leaving weedy cobbled footprints and buried rails.  The Dock Road is a boundary between redundant docks and streets of crumbling, derelict warehouses, each one a poem, an essay in brick, soot and obsolescence.  There are small businesses here, music spaces and hipster cafes, green shoots growing up between the cracks; but this is largely a place of ruined beauty and lost purpose, of silted iron doorways, towering brick walls, silences.  I have been alone here many times, walking the wind through rust, the rain through windows, walking sunlight on stone; walking the iron whispers, the lost stations of the Overhead Railway.  To walk these old places is to remember, and walking the visual memories of the city is inevitably an act of commemoration.  

At the dust and ghosts of the Canada Dock Station I imagine my grandfather Vincent walking down the wide steps to the crowded noisy street one day in 1952.  He is 48, ten years younger than I am now.  He shifts his brown canvas tool bag from hand to hand and turns through the working, shouting bustle of the dock gates out onto the quayside.  He worked all his life with wood.  Out on the dock there is a hut to be repaired, or a fallen beam to be cut or moved, given a new purpose.  Or perhaps he walks up a gangplank to a broken door or smashed panelling, maybe there are salt-warped frames to be straightened as a ship is loaded.  I imagine a careful unpacking of clamps and gluepot, a canvas fold of nails and screws, valuable and counted against the day’s work.  Vincent never lost his appreciation of wood and in old age he would run his hands gently over unworked timbers, unconsciously, the woodworker’s caress.  His hands were like warm sandpaper.  

On the Dock Road this grey day I am walking the wind through broken glass, meandering through a clatter and a scattering of pigeons.  All day the road is silent.  In his day the noise is unrelenting as he stops for some bread and cheese, an apple, a hand-rolled cigarette. Seventy years apart I eat a sandwich on the stump of an oily wooden beam on Vulcan Street, opposite the lost dock church of St Matthias.  It is now a petrol station.  Street cobbles are disappearing beneath sandy dust and fleshy wildflowers.  His river city is fading beneath tyre graveyards and taxi-cab workshops, and yet the massive ruins have a smashed grandeur, a solid, precarious dignity.  My grandfather lives on in my heart, but only as a smile, a face, as the memory of laughter, this man dead these forty years; in the ghost signs of lost businesses on the cold miles of these streets – importers, chandlers, engineers - I catch a glimpse into his world.  

The light is failing, perhaps it is November.  The air is thick with grease and smuts, the streets busy with cargoes loaded and unloaded, slow heavy trains, patient horses and their wagons.  My city too is darkening, the light is closing these old streets down, and it is time to head back to the present day.  In 1952 the golden pubs are roaring but through sirens and endings Vincent turns for home. He carries his canvas bag up the wooden steps to the station platform and waits for the train, dreaming of potatoes, sausages, a steamed pudding. Turns for home as the ship, warped panels straightened, slips from the river on the evening tide.

***

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 - and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter