By Ian C Smith
Persistent rain soaks my senses, the lively past’s good fortune knocking on memory’s door, or is that just the beating of my heart? Does being surrounded all night by an alluvial tattoo promote this hearkening back? Beckoned as if by a distant porch light when lost in a storm, I embraced rites from times swept by in the long steady dying since Gloucestershire when, open-eyed, I took it all in. An exhilarating melancholy floods me recalling standing inside a Norman chapel in the Cotswolds’ slanting light. I breathed ancient mortar’s microbial odour, imagining a careful congregation in the Middle Ages, rough-sculpted, their murmuring voices long gone into the cold earth, willowherb and meadowsweet dormant. That winter of my naïve yearning, fields of frost under a murderous owl’s moon, I shucked the duvet to fill pages rearranging words. Trying to make sense of life’s stampede instead of slouching off early to work as I had in Australia since I was thirteen, was life changing?
If possible before final darkness, I still want to picture our quaint haven with the snugly warm smoky pub where I bumped my head in the low doorway, and we won a Christmas raffle. I yearn for embedded images of that ilk to which I cling. Yet to discover Edward Thomas’s poem about Adlestrop station written after his friendship with Robert Frost began — I didn’t know that — bereft of trains and poems, it slept nearby. The poem was published days after his death in action. With an adventurous partner, wind and rain rattling our sanctuary, ruffling rooks perched high above the tennis courts, horses sheltering in Larkin’s ‘cold shade’, my blood quickened. Our first bus trip for shopping, the route wending through golden villages of stone between hedgerows hemming narrow roads, was studded with stops. Women wearing hats, carrying baskets, and elderly couples sticking together, filled the bus with their soft, cidery accent. Spotting travellers’ colourful caravans before reaching Moreton-in-Marsh, we messaged with our eyes to attract each other’s discreet attention.
Part-time servants, our Upstairs, Downstairs situation inverted, we hauled backpacks up flights of stairs. In our bower we scrubbed greasy gunk from the stove and bathed in several inches of costly hot water in an antiquated iron bathtub. I blue-tacked maps of our travels to damp walls under the roof where, on hushed evenings, dark so early, we read by lamplight. Borrowing a gas heater on castors, I decorated it with an Olympic pattern of coffee mug rings, starting my blind attempts at a writing apprenticeship. Each lunchtime, my bedmate, younger than me, living her antipodean dream, glowing after exercising hunters across frosted terrain listening to Ted Hughes’ ‘quake of hooves’, listened to me read what I, laughing at my own jokes, had written. She astonished her workmates once, choosing not to hang around after work to see a future king of England ride one of their horses, coming home to my self-congratulatory words instead. At other times she crossed her fingers for Reynard whenever we heard the hunting horn.
Born in England, an early boyhood memory was the story of my missing aunt. My father’s last sighting of his runaway sister was from the bus he was driving. For years I pictured this as a cinematic scene in monochrome with a grainy film-noir quality. A brave woman pushing a pram flees along a street, wet, like the beginning of this piece. Dim lighting casts shadows as she glances over her shoulder (a close-up). She has no-one to defend her, to help. Saddled with this unfinished business of finding her, Births, Marriages, and Deaths became my gripping reading. We bought a cheap, used car with a good heater. London’s records led to Liverpool, a city recently battered by riots. By simply driving there from the Cotswolds we transitioned from poor to posh. Absorbed, I accrued and sorted all this marvellous new material. Gold.
Neither of us adequately masked our scorn of protocol’s scripture, smirking at our employers’ gross snobbery undercut by their practical helplessness. Exacerbating this was my partner’s rising popularity among the local casual workforce, and our now interesting missing person sleuthing. Irked by supercilious nonsense early, ad-libbing po-faced about the difficulty of finding decent racing saddles for kangaroos, my ludicrous irony had been taken as authentic. I believed my Aussie bullshit humour leading the snobs from attempted humiliation to pathos was forever unforgiven. Perhaps it was my multiple errant triggering of their burglar alarms. That magical Christmas Eve, my birthday, befriended villagers invited us for carol-singing by flickering lantern lights from mansion to mansion for charity. The ethereal beginning of We Three Kings was a goosebumps highlight, my missing aunt never far from my thoughts. We also attended a pantomime at Chipping Norton, Jack and the Beanstalk, where I wondered what the Hooray Henrys might have made of this bewitchment.
For a joke when she who still dogs my dreams visits, I squeeze into my naval pea-jacket worn everywhere those years ago. Finger-fiddling a never used spare button in its silken pocket solicits past voices. I could display other memorabilia from then though she sternly advises just sticking to writing in the past tense. My lightweight phone speedily locates those places we slowly discovered, their wonderful names – Bourton-on-the-Water – biro-circled in a bottom drawer heavy with old maps I sometimes sniff to transport me. From there we journeyed all the way across another ocean, and prairies, the sky storybook-sized, hitchhiking to Alaska, sometimes at the edge of danger. And there was more, much more, but it is to that soft privileged borough, despite the more dramatic, risk-laden zones of our sojourns, that my mind constantly returns.
My phone can also conjure up the television programme episode we researched, resulting in a moving family reunion watched from the Green Room. It can’t locate the snappy words my partner exchanged with the famous ex-pop star presenter who complained about people fuddled with age after the show when she entered our descending lift in the studio. I want to grasp the smells, sights, and sounds of where this all began that lure me like a secret love. Time-travelling, from our attic window, transposed unscathed by age’s scourge – that raw cold would fell me now – breath fogging like the future we cannot see, I would gaze lingeringly once more on what shall be lost, therefore precious.
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Ian C Smith’s work has been published in BBC Radio 4 Sounds, Cable Street, Griffith Review, North of Oxford, Rundelania, The Spadina Literary Review, Stand, & Westerly. His seventh book is wonder sadness madness joy, Ginninderra (Port Adelaide). He writes in the Gippsland Lakes area of Victoria, and on Flinders Island.
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