Memories of Elsewhere: Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Sara Bellini: 

The first thing I think about is the rain. The sound of a summer storm beyond the window pane just before going to bed, no other noise in the room. And then the petrichor, the smell of water on the grass slope behind the house the morning after, the earth still dark in the daylight. The first thing I think about when I think about the mountains is heavy rain on a summer night.

I cannot tell exactly when we stopped going to my grandma’s holiday home in the mountains. It must have been sometime before my teens, after my grandpa died, but I can say I went there every summer during my childhood from when I was six months old. My mum’s mum lives down in the valley, half an hour by car, and used to spend the whole summer there when the weather got too warm. My mum and I, and later my little brother, would join her, my grandpa and his sister (and the occasional guests) for a few weeks.

The second thing I think about is the smell of the pine cones burning in the little wood burner in the bathroom, their soothing crackling keeping me company during the shower, the stove’s warmth cosy and earthy. The pine cones and kindling were fetched during trips to the nearby woods, usually by my grandma and her sister-in-law (her partner in crime), both wearing skirts and comfy old-fashioned shoes. 

My grandparents’ holiday home was at the edge of a village on what is called the Plateau of the Sun, right behind Monte Altissimo, the mountain visible from my grandparents’ kitchen. They bought the house when my mum and aunt were in their teens and used it mostly during the warm season. The garage on the side was added later, and the old one on the ground floor was turned into a spacious kitchen/dining room/living room. I remember opening the house for the season, the big heavy key turning into the glass door and behind it a wall of peaceful darkness, heavy with the smell of wood panelling and sofas and cold stone fireplace.

The third thing I think about is the food. Like any Italian woman that had grown up during the war, my grandma’s main concern was that we were all well-fed, and happily fed too. This idea practically translated into all of her signature dishes: homemade lasagne, polenta with mountain cheese, pasta fresca with ceps, risotto... We would get fresh bread from the little stone bakery every day, and ice cream from the gelateria on the main street. And then of course there were the blueberries and mushrooms we picked in the woods, and ice-cold water magically pouring out from the mountain side. My own idea of a mountainscape is located very precisely in those experiences and in those places. Even now whenever I enter a forest my sensorial memory unleashes images of my childhood there: smells of pine trees, wet soil and wild strawberries.

My mum told me that one of the first solid foods I had were grapes. Once when we were on holiday in the mountains and I was about one year old I disappeared and everyone searched the whole house and went as far as the street looking for me. They found me quietly sitting inside a kitchen cupboard enjoying some grapes. I was too little to remember this, but my mum and my grandma have told the story so many times that I consider it a memory. And it’s the same with the many photos of me taken there in my early years: holding my great-uncle’s hand, playing with fresh mushrooms picked by my mum’s cousin, sitting on the dining room table while entertaining the grown-ups.

The fourth thing I think about is the old deck of Trevisane we used for the card games: briscola, scopa, Marianna. It had been handled so many times that the cards were almost soft, their laminated slipperiness worn away by time. We would all play – me, my mum, my grandma, my great-aunt and the regular guests. That’s what we would do on rainy afternoons or after dinner, for hours, chuckling and strategising. We were never bored. I think that’s where we got the habit of playing cards after eating, and even now, in the rare occasions when I see my mum or my grandma, it feels like a deeply familiar thing to do. 

A few years ago my aunt mentioned in passing that my grandma had sold the house in the mountains. My mum had probably forgotten to tell me. My grandma was just too old to be there by herself and all her holiday companions were dead. I hadn’t been there in a decade, but I was utterly shocked at the realisation that the possibility to go there was lost forever. And after the first instinctive shock came a second one when I thought how it must have felt for her to touch every familiar object and have to decide on its fate, to disassemble each room piece by piece, one memory at a time, and then leave the house for good.

When I think about the wooden house in the mountains I think about family and home. When I think about the mountain I think about my grandma.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Memories of Elsewhere: La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Krueger

La Fleur en Papier doré by Antonio Ponte - Licensed by CC-NC-SA 2.0

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Marcel Krueger: 

I love beer. This may sound shallow, but I guess every one of us has one of those "Save the Earth, it is the only planet with ...." items. For some it might be chocolate, for others avocados or Polish pierogi. Mine is beer, all types and colours, preferably not mass-produced. So it might not come as a surprise that I have visited the European beer nation par excellence, Belgium, often and with immense pleasure.

When it comes to brewing and culture around beer, there is no place like the slightly surrealist multinational Kingdom of Belgium with its three official languages and distinct Flemish and Wallonia identities. This small country of 11 million inhabitants and a size of 30,000 square kilometres has around 230 breweries that produce an impressive array of different beers including pale lager and ales, amber ales, lambic beers, pilsner, Trappist beers, bock, wheat beers, porters and stouts. Each brewery, often in operation for hundreds of years, comes with a distinct labelling and its own glass for the beer, like the gnomes on the labels of Brasserie d'Achouffe in the Ardennes, the distinct Art Deco lettering of the Rodenbach Brewery in Flanders and the strange small wooden gallows for the round-bottomed, hourglass-shaped receptacles for the Kwak ale brewed by the Bosteels Brewery near Brussels. On average, Belgians drink 84 liters of beer each year, which is shockingly down from around 200 liters per capita in 1900. Maybe the water quality has improved in the last 120 years. And that Belgium's other nutritional staples include artisan chocolate and the best chips in Europe I shall only mention in passing here. 

Fittingly, when living in Cologne, my wife and I lived in the Belgian Quarter, a lovely though gentrified neighbourhood with many 19th Gründerzeit houses lining the leafy streets and a cafe or restaurant never far. Just around the corner from our house was (and still is) the small cornership named Brunne vun Kölle (literally the ‘Fountain of Cologne’) which stocked many rare and delicious Belgian beers, especially my favourite type, the dark and sweet dubbel Trappist ale - which is these days also brewed by places not associated with the Order of Reformed Cistercians of Our Lady of La Trappe, as the Trappist order is officially called. So, after a long and exhausting day in the home office, I would often use the opportunity to stretch my legs on the approximately 450 meters that separated my house from the Brunne, and return with two or three bottles of Westmalle Dubbel or Waterloo Double Dark, brewed near Napoleon's last battlefield and with three sabre-wielding British dragoons on the label, for an appropriate apéro. It is a bit sad that, despite the excellent beers available in Ireland where I now live, Belgian beers are hard to come by here in Dundalk. Our only well-stocked independent off license closed at the end of 2018, and the only other place in town that sells Belgian beers is my local pub, the Spirit Store by the harbour - which these days is also sadly closed due to a certain global pandemic.                   

A fine beer deserves a fine establishment to drink it in. While the Spirit Store is surely one of those and just around the corner from my house, right now I cannot imagine anything more pleasant than a nice Belgian alehouse to drink my Belgian ales in. I have two contestants for this. One is the Café Vlissinghe in Bruges, a tavern from 1515 that is still open to this day and with its dark wooden ceiling, bullseye window panes and massive, 17th-century fireplace is the perfect place to sit in an order a dark and sweet beer on a cold and rainy day. It can truly feel as if either D'Artgnan and Aramis or Capitan Alatriste will be entering the tavern any minute, shake off the Flanders rain from their coats and plunk their booted feet down in front to the fire. 

The other, and for the sake of this piece the one I will have my drink in today, is La Fleur en Papier doré or Het Goudblommeke van Papier. This lovely small bar, of which the name translates to The Flower made from Gold Foil, is a fittingly dark and quiet place to have a beer in peace, despite its appearance on Tripadvisor (4.5 out of 5 stars) and Lonely Planet. It sits on the slightly sloping Rue des Alexiens, halfway between Brussels Midi station and the Grand Place in the center of Brussels, a street that used to run along the medieval city wall and the Droogeheergracht dry ditch, but of that medieval glory nothing remains today. The buildings here are all 1980s and 90s concrete and glass, so the pub building with its dark wooden window frames and floral metal ornaments on the facade already stands out. Once you enter, past a sign that reads ‘Ceci n’est pas un musée’, this is not a museum, you enter two dark and crammed rooms filled with chintz, framed and bleached-out black-and-white photographs, Art Deco graffiti on the walls.

There are simple wooden tables and chairs abraded by thousands of behinds over the years on the tiled floor, and that perfect pub smell of decades of spilled beer mixing with cleaning detergents and dishwater and a slight undertone of cigarette smoke, even though no one smoked in here for twenty years, fills the air. But when you observe the photographs and images on the walls closer, you'll see that these are not only the stereotypical things you might find in any old pub across Europe like pictures of long-dead soldiers, framed proverbs or small flags, no, some of the slogans seem to have been drawn on the walls on purpose and some of the images portray the bar and former patrons. This is because La Fleur en Papier doré was one of the main hangouts of the surrealist artist movement of the 1920s. World-famous painter René Magritte used to drink here, as did composer André Souris and poet Louis Scutenaire. Other former patrons include cartoonist Hergé (who allegedly loved sweet gueuze beer) and Belgian chanson crooner Jacques Brel, and all left the mark on the place, in ink or spirit. There is a slightly more bright backroom in a more modern annexe with framed cartoons on the wall, and a small theatre space on the first floor. La Fleur to this day contributes to the creative scene of Brussels.

But I'm not here for theatre. Instead I will firmly and comfortably wiggle my behind into one of the old chairs of this lovely anachronism that is really not an anachronism at all, and order a cold and dark Westmalle Dubbel, brought to my table in its trademark chalice and with plenty of delicious foam. If the barkeep asks before if I want the 'yeast in' that has accumulated at the bottom of the bottle I'll answer yes, and might even order one of the staples of Belgium bar food, spaghetti Bolognese (I really couldn't explain why this dish has become so popular in bars here, so you better not ask). 

I'll take a sip, smack my lips and lean back. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Memories of Elsewhere: Heartbreak Beach, by Emma Venables

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Emma Venables:

Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else, is in North Wales where I lived and studied for eight years. I’d never really explored anywhere beyond my university’s city, Bangor, until I met my best friend when working in retail. At a particularly difficult time in both our lives, she had just learned to drive and so we drove down those winding roads, the Welsh countryside wrapping around us like a comforter, in search of breathing space. I’d play DJ, feet on the dash (before I realised how dangerous it was), and we’d sing our blues away to Katy Perry, P!nk, and Lady Gaga. 

On Heartbreak Beach, we stood. Our wellies soaked by the sea. Hair frizzing in the wind. Cheeks stinging. We looked out at the Llŷn Peninsula, at the tip of Anglesey, at the weak sun hitting the Irish Sea. Breathing deep, taking it all in. Together, but alone in our thoughts. The view and atmosphere bestowing a definite calm on our addled minds which we carried with us into the car and back to our everyday lives. 

A few months later I took my dad and our dogs, Bobbi and Charlie, to Dinas Dinlle. My parents had just split up and whenever I think of this time, I’m reminded of a quote from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road: ‘They set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.’ I see us, walking on the sand, up and along the pebble banks, united in our heartbreak and confusion, with our two terriers running in and out, making our load a bit more bearable.

It was a gloomy day, clouds touching the cliffs. We were well wrapped up against the breeze that nipped at us with its puppy teeth. I had my digital camera with me, determined to document these special moments with dad and dogs. As I raised my camera, pressed the button to capture Charlie running at full pelt along the beach, my dad said there wasn’t any chance of the photograph coming out – Charlie was going so fast, he’d just be a white and brown-eared blur against a dull, yellow, background.

But the photograph did come out. It’s one of the best pictures I have of Charlie. All four paws off the ground, ears up, a smile seemingly on his face. Pure joy. A dog’s life. That photograph hangs on my wall now, Charlie’s collar and lead draped over it. He’s been gone for nearly three years, and that image brings as much sadness as it does joy, but I wouldn’t be without it. 

I haven’t been to Heartbreak Beach for such a long time, but when I sat down to write this piece, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, much to my surprise. There they were, memories of that beach in North Wales alongside sitting in a rowing boat on Lake Bled underneath a cloudless sky and walking through Berlin’s Tiergarten on a late summer evening with foxes and rabbits skittering here and there. Perhaps my mind keeps returning to Heartbreak Beach now because, for me, the times I’ve spent there encapsulate periods in my life where I felt confused and scared, concerned for what would happen next. I went there in search of breathing space, of head space, of more-to-life-than-this space, with the people closest to my heart and came away feeling a little bit lifted, a little more hopeful. 

When the lockdown comes to an end, I’ll return to Heartbreak Beach, Dinas Dinlle to everyone else. I’ll take my dad, my stepmum, and their rescue dog, meet my best friend there. We’ll clear the chaos from our heads, find ourselves again in the sea air, the sand, the glare of the sun hitting the Irish Sea.

***

Emma Venables is a writer and academic living on the Wirral. Her short fiction has recently featured in The Cabinet of Heed, Ellipsis Zine, Lunate, and Mslexia. Her first novel, The Duties of Women, will be published by Stirling Publishing in summer 2020. She can be found on Twitter: @EmmaMVenables.

Memories of Elsewhere: Krobo, by Tim Woods

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Tim Woods:

It didn’t take self-isolation to transport me back to Ghana; I’ve been visiting regularly in the seven years since I left. And more often than not, my memory dumps me on the scrubby slopes of Krobo.

At 345 metres, Krobo is far from the highest mountain in the country. Nor is it the most spectacular, a title belonging to the peaks further north in the Volta Region. There isn’t much in the way of wildlife to draw your gaze: the resident troop of baboons are the only mammals likely to be spotted, although the birds are, as throughout Ghana, spectacular. But one thing Krobo has in its favour is accessibility. In under two hours, you can escape the sweaty chaos of Accra and be out in the wild. Somewhere open. Somewhere green.

And escape I did, as often as possible during my two-year stay in the country. Along with the other Ghana Mountaineers, I spent every second Sunday hiking up the inselbergs south of the Volta River. Iogaga and Osoduku were more challenging, but Krobo was my first hike in the country and remained throughout my favourite. A short, steep scramble through sharp-bladed grass and over dry streambeds takes you onto the summit plateau, where you will find a giant metal cross, a bizarrely located family of terrapins and hazy views south towards the Shai Hills. Coffee too, if you remembered to bring some.

There are more obvious places for my absent mind to wander. England is one, being the country I called home for thirty years longer than I did Ghana. Yet despite the relative brevity of my time there, the country got under my skin with an urgency that hasn’t dulled with absence. Almost as soon as I left, I vowed to return. 

It’s not proven as easy as expected. Two children have complicated all travel plans, even those that only extend as far as the other side of Berlin. Then of course there’s the issue of climate change, that swiftly forgotten existential threat to our species that was demanding that we curb our habits long before some uppity virus turned up. I have long since felt a responsibility to tame my wanderlust, to fly far less often. Travelling to another continent just because I’d quite like to now seems an extraordinary indulgence. It will happen, because my principles aren’t as robust as I’d like. But I’m not yet sure when. 

If, when, I do go back, Ghana won’t be as good as it is in my memory. One advantage of exploring places through reminiscence is the chance to apply filters. From the comfort of my sofa, I can overlook Ghana’s traffic, dust and poverty; tune out the biting insects, the regular sickness, the power cuts. Even hiking virtually up Krobo, it’s easy to eradicate the dust in the throat, the cuts and scratches covering legs and hands, the perspiration stinging eyes. 

It will be different, too; places change when we’re not there. Accra will be shinier, busier, not quite how I left it. Will Krobo also have altered? There was talk of making proper paths up its slopes to attract more visitors, and of introducing a hiking fee to benefit the local community. Noble ideas, but they haven’t happened in my memory. Like many people’s favourite places, I want it to remain exactly as it was when I first encountered it.

But that’s the whole point of memory: to enjoy the good stuff while ignoring the different or uncomfortable or forgettable. Now, when thoughts of happier, freer times are more vital distractions than ever, or in better times when I simply fancy idling, I can relive those Sunday mornings out in the bush. Climbing with friends and catching up on our expat lives. Hoping to spot the baboons before they spot us and scarper. The crisp taste of fresh watermelon on the drive home, and the splash of chilled beer on a burning throat. Thankfully, Krobo will never be too far away for a quick visit. 

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on Twitter here.

Memories of Elsewhere: New Quay, by Charlotte Wührer

Painting by David Hughes Jones

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… 

By Charlotte Wührer: 

Elsewhere is a beach. Elsewhere is the beach on which I was buried alive up to the neck, given a tail of sand, a mermaid for a minute until the dog came.

Antonia’s fingers went deathly white after a swim, and back then we couldn’t imagine how miserable it might feel to be so cold while everyone else sweated. Ten years later, we’re sorry we didn’t take her seriously until the rest of her body turned blue.

One year, we squirmed into wetsuits, the old neoprene of some a little cracked, and went out in the kayaks to watch the late afternoon sun. A family of dolphins circled us as my kayak slowly but surely began to sink. The sea teemed with jellyfish.

Another year we drank gin from the bottle sitting on the pier, and it got messy. Perhaps it was that summer we also downed endless pints of ale brewed in whisky casks at a pub quiz before rolling all the way down the hill. From Dylan Thomas’s favourite watering hole into the sea. The bats and stars were more visible there than in any other place. We felt very small, and sobered by the dizziness of not knowing where was under water and where was the night sky.

By day we ate crab meat with lemon juice and black pepper from the shell on the porch bench overlooking the sea. Sometimes we wore straw hats. Sometimes we read books. Sometimes we played games. Sometimes we walked along the clifftops. A lot of the time, we were pretty sunburnt and pretty hungover. Late morning, someone would make the first cup of tea and we’d all get into each other’s beds.

Another year: recovered from the mess, we - the same constellation but with a few additions and a couple of gaping absences - let the seagulls circle the mackerel we’d gutted on the hot September tarmac before the house. Rivers of blood ran downhill past the porches of the other terraced houses, down the patchwork slope of the visitors’ car park, past the tourist knick-knack shop and Annie’s fruit and veg store, down the sand and past our barbecued fish and sandy burger baps, until it was reclaimed by the sea. (Do fish drink the water they swim in?)

The sea that comes after this beach can be seen and heard from the house, which belongs to Sophie’s parents. They were teenagers when they met here in the town, probably on the beach. Now they live both in Swansea and in this little house in New Quay, and I’ve been once a year almost every year since I turned eighteen.

If you know the town, the house stands in the middle of the second row of houses on the north side. It’s not hard to find on googlemaps. Find in street view the purple house with the stained glass porch door. The sash windows are old enough for the glass to have suddenly shattered one windy morning as we slept. The key is in a special place not many people would think to ever look. The house feels a little damp even at the height of the hottest summers.

No one wears shoes in the house or on the short walk down to the beach. City codes of acceptable dress are suspended. The dog wears a superman cape that is also a towel over her eyes. Sophie and I drove down once from Bristol, maybe last year, and it took three hours longer than it should have because there was a swan on one lane of the motorway. Police men wearing fluorescent warning vests stood around it scratching their heads. At the Swansea service station, Sophie’s parents pulled up in their car, handed over a large bag of still-warm welsh cakes, Sophie briefly held the family dog like a baby, and then we drove on belting Savage Garden, more excited to arrive than kids going on a family holiday.

***

Charlotte Wührer is a Berlin-based writer and translator from Newcastle-under-Lyme, England. Her writing appears in numerous online and print publications, including SAND Journal, Ellipsis Zine, and Daddy Magazine. She was shortlisted for the Bristol Short Story Prize and the Cambridge Short Story Prize, and is currently working on a flash fiction novella about place and desire.

David Hughes Jones paints mainly seascapes and landscapes around New Quay in Ceridigion in West Wales and the occasional shipwreck from the past. His subjects are inspired by many years of sailing and messing about in boats, and walking the coastal path. David Hughes Jones Art on Facebook.

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz.