The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees

Tags

1967, alder, almond, amethyst, apple, armchair, beech, blossom, branches, breeze, cattle, change, cherry, children, chimney stacks, church, clock, common, cottage, economics, elm, enclosure, Essex, evening, eyes, fields, fir, fire, flame, forest, garden, gate, grass, green, hedge, Henry VIII, history, knowledge, landscape, lanes, laughter, leaves, London, Michael J Redford, mind, noise, oak, orchard, passing, past, pink, pollen, poplars, progress, red, rust, shadow, ships, silence, sitting, sky, smoke, society, speech, Spring, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, tiles, time, trees, village, walls, war, white, winter, woodland, writing, yellow

Trees

Spring’s tonic has risen within the trees and hazel catkins have swollen in greeting to the first warm days of the year.   Elm and alder are soon to follow heralding beech and oak and in a month or so the firs will show their new cones, green and full of juice, and their catkins will dust the ground yellow with pollen.   Throughout the villages cottage gardens will soon be filled with almond blossom and orchards will froth over with cherry white and apple pink spilling an aperitif to summer upon the living fields.   The hedgerows and woodlands become en-veiled by the diaphanous greenery of a million tiny leaves, an amethyst haze so tender and tenuous that I fear for its safety lest it be borne away upon the passing breeze.   I become aware of a restlessness within me that calls with increasing persistence to forego my writing and step out beneath the cavernous spring sky.   The pageant of the trees has begun.   Field and lane alike become heavy with leaf and only a section of red tile or a chimney stack, like flakes of old rust within the foliage, betray the presence of human habitation.   The blanket of summer affords us a privacy and seclusion that is unattainable in naked winter when one’s every move can be discerned by the neighbour’s critical eye, but here in the depths of summer, we can take our thoughts into the quiet of a woodland glade, we can be silent and be within silence for a little while and rest your eyes upon the shadows of the dancing leaves above.   And how restful the colour green, and how restful to the eye and through the eye to the mind that blossoms forth green thoughts.

This spring evening upon which I write is a decidedly chilly one even though the day itself has been full of warmth.   Thus I am to be found sitting in an armchair, putting my thoughts on paper, gazing between sentences into the dusty red glow of a log fire.   It is a funeral pyre really, the cremation of the last remains of an old local cottage that has long died, having fallen prey through disuse, to the vagaries of our climate and the onslaught of the village urchins.   I gaze with half closed eyes at the sawn up piece of beam that was once part of the skeleton of the old house, and see it burn with clear flame and little smoke.   In accompaniment to the ticking of the clock upon the mantle shelf I hear the old log’s tinsel murmurings that sound like a piece of screwed up silver paper, tossed aside and left slowly to expand, and as the pure white ash falls without sound, I feel myself drawn into the distant past and fancy I hear the laughter of children as they play beneath the boughs of a tree which this dead piece of wood was once a living part.   Whose children are these?   From what age do they come?   Perhaps they are the offspring of Henry VIII’s generation, the irresponsible youth of the day who cared nothing about the great cultural and religious upheaval taking place about them as they played handball between the northernmost buttresses of the old church wall.

It was at about this time when the monasteries had just been dissolved that the first enlightening book on agriculture by Fitzherbert of Norbury had just been published.   Was this historic pioneer of fertility indirectly responsible for the downfall of this old tree?   For the seas of knowledge flooded the land and split the forests into arboreal islands and many fine examples of the medieval forests became the battered flotsam of progress.

Certainly this old piece of wood never witnessed an act of enclosure, for the open field system was predominant right up until the late eighteenth century, when round and about the great open fields sprawled the commons, the scrubland and marshes, creating through their wastefulness and their infertility, a barrier to agricultural and therefore economic progress.   Although enclosure was a costly business, required finances could be supplemented by felling timber which, during the Napoleonic wars commanded a high price.   Also, in order to fence off enclosures, what was more natural than to plant more timber which, unlike normal fencing that needed constant and costly repair, increased in value as time went by.   The first choice of timber was naturally that which was most valuable such as ash and oak.   But the oak was slow in maturing, and where the ash spread its roots, no crops or grass would grow and no cattle would graze.   It was thus that the stately elm made its appearance and stamped the English hedgerow with a character all its own.   Being able to grow, and grow quickly in all types of soil, made it a very desirable timber to grow.   Also, the elm allowed grazing beneath its boughs and, due to its durability in water, it was at this time much sought after by the Navy Board for its ships.   Water mills, lock gates and drain pipes were of elm, and at the turn of the century, London alone still had over four hundred miles of mains constructed from its timbers.

Caught upon the ebb flow of time, I see the trees’ ancestral giants, the calamites, that reared two hundred feet into the sky.   They heard no child’s laughter, neither did they hear the buzz of insects nor the songs of birds, for they existed in the dim distant dawn of the carboniferous age millions of years before the birth of man, when even the birth of the first blade of grass was aeons in the offing.

They grew long, long before man, mute sentinels surveying the changing landscape, witnessing scenes that no mortal has ever gazed upon.   Then when man came, they furnished him with food, shelter and fuel; they gave to him the means of traversing the oceans.   They have been instruments of both war and peace and have featured in mans’ writing, music and art.   They have been made gods and devils and have bought good luck and bad.   Man’s long and close association with trees is evident from his desire to wander beneath the green boughs when time and toil permit, and from picnic parties who would sooner travel an extra mile to spread their chequered cloths within their shadows.   Perhaps it is because a tree expresses continuity, a security that mankind through all the ages and searched and worked for.

Although not a native of Essex, this ancient county endears itself to me more and more as time rolls slowly by, and time does pass slowly in Essex, for to plumb its highways and byways is to plumb history itself.   It has been slow to change through the centuries and there are numerous back lane hamlets which, even to this day, have experienced virtually no change for many, many years.   One lively youngster or eighty five who lives on the borders of Chignal Smealy and Chignal St. James (what delightful names are these), told me that the only difference he could see in his village was the height of the poplars at the end of his garden which, when he was only “knee high to a goose-pimple” were only a “stack an’ ‘alf ‘igh”, even the cottage gate that was propped open on one rusty hinge was the very same one his grandfather had made.

Having been one of the most heavily afforested counties in England, Essex is rich of fine examples of man’s utilisation of wood.   It can be seen in his architecture, in his tools, farm implements and vehicles.   The men of Essex are very conscious of their affinity with trees, and go to great lengths to preserve the more eminent members of their arboreal population, and I find it hard to believe that there is another county in the whole of the British Isles that can boast a greater number of ancient trees that have been propped up and strung up to cast their humbling shadows upon the heads of men.   Most of these old trees are of course oak, for Essex was noted for its oak forests, but as farming spread, so the forests disappeared, and the elms lining the fields and lanes now outnumber to oaks and are a far more familiar sight.   It is these old isolated trees that afford us a tangible link with the past.   They disperse any feeling of isolation in time and give to us instead a much needed sense of continuity, of that which has no end.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blossom wormhole: BLUEFLAGS by William Carlos Williams
branches & mind wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
breeze wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
change wormhole: Bridgnorth
church wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
evening & sky & thpought wormhole: space for probing thought
eyes & passing & shadow & speech & walls wormhole: ‘… plane is upright …’
fir wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
garden wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Pigs
green & Spring wormhole: LIGHT HEARTED WILLIAM by William Carlos Williams
hedge wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
history wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
knowledge wormhole: ‘a blacknight fitted perfectly …’
leaves wormhole: SPRING & LINES by William Carlos Williams
London wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
oak wormhole: behind / glass walls and wan and hooded eye
pink & time & white & yellow wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
red wormhole: SPRING STRAINS by William Carlos Williams
silence wormhole: despite that
sitting wormhole: getting fat in me old age
smoke wormhole: cross-section
society wormhole: raised brow
trees & war & winter wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
writing wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams

 

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Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George

Tags

1967, 7*, branches, breeze, brother, child, clouds, cuckoo, dust, earth, echo, Essex, green, hands, home, journey, land, lark, life, meadow, mind, pink, poem, retirement, scythe, shirt, Shropshire, silence, smell, speech, stone, time, wind, woodland, writing

                                old George

                long retired from land, unable to
                keep soil from his boots, continues
                working, earth and life, picking up

                branches and stones; the blades
                cut clean, men in the meadows
                sway to the rhythm of scythes,

                stems fall graceful to swathe and
                green aroma, the diminishing island
                cut to the last, magnified by

                silence, a lark high above the
                dust; the breezes will dry the
                stalks to rustle and the distant

                woods will echo – cuckoo; it is
                then the child places the building
                block on the nursery floor when

                there will be no time, day after
                day, save for forks of pitch and
                hands that burn pink and stalk

                of shirt and sweat, constant under
                minds of approaching storm cloud
                before the last journey home; old

                George had removed his jacket
                picking out fluff from the corners
                of a pocket, “…used to be my brother’s;

                lived in Shropshire … didn’t
                find no pound notes in it, just fluff,
                a few hay seeds,” flung them

                to the Essex wind – scattered
                poems and stacked essays,
                typed up and waiting to behold

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

branches wormhole: presence
breeze wormhole: chuckling
child wormhole: next unexpected step
clouds wormhole: that
echo wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay
green wormhole: PASTORAL by William Carlos Williams
hands & life & retirement wormhole: beguiled / desire
mind & writing wormhole: scintillating to mind’s content
pink & stone wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
silence & speech wormhole: new blue porsche
smell & time wormhole: LOVE SONG by William Carlos Williams
wind wormhole: TREES by William Carlos Williams

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Follow Your Nose

Tags

1967, air, brother, countryside, Essex, father, fields, green, honeysuckle, horse, Kent, London, Michael J Redford, morning, mother, nose, pub, smell, suburbia, Sunday, the Boats of Vallisneria, trees

Follow Your Nose

My father had a nose for pubs, there’s no denying that!   Noses were always a prominent feature of the Redford family and very sensitive instruments they are too.   I remember when my brother and I were still at school, how mother would pack a shopping bag with sandwiches, apples and flasks of tea and early on Sunday mornings the whole family would disappear into the countryside.   We were then living in South East London and we would take advantage of every opportunity to escape into the freedom and quietude of Kent.   I was born in Sydenham and my father also was a native of that area, but when he was a boy, the green fields of Kent came rolling to within easy view from his back door.   Now alas, time has stamped these green fields with the concrete monotony of suburbia.   So it was that many a fine Sunday morning would see the Redford family making a bee-line for Shoreham just north of Sevenoaks.   Shoreham was our stepping off point and in those distant days it seemed a million miles from London.   My grandmother used to work at the Crown Hotel there and we were permitted to leave our bicycles in the garden while we plunged into the green depths of the surrounding countryside.   Towards noon father would suggest that we find a pub where we could revive our flagging energy and eat our sandwiches and, pausing awhile, he would gaze around and say, “Let’s try over there.”   Over the hill we would go and, sure enough, the very first building we would come to would be a pub.   Now this never failed.   It mattered not what part of the British Isles we were in, ‘Dad’s Nose’ was an infallible receiver and every pub a homing beacon.   In this way, father had built up over the years, a storehouse of information concerning pubs in Kent, Surrey and Sussex.   Sometimes a friend of the family would arrive at the house and suggest that we all take a trip out somewhere and have a drink.   “I’ve found a nice little pub at Luddesdowne,” they would say, “The Red Lion I think it is.”

Father’s mental filing cabinet would whirr into action and he’d say, “Ah yes, you mean the Golden Lion.   Lays down in the dip alongside an orchard.   Landlord’s name is Bert.”

I have never known my father to be caught out by a pub he didn’t know, although there was one occasion however, when father’s probosciscal (sic) infallibility received a severe jolt.   While living for a short period in Basildon New Town in Essex we sometimes took a stroll to Stock on Sunday mornings.   This was a distance of some ten miles and we usually timed our arrival at Stock to coincide with opening time.   On our first expedition however, we mistimed ourselves badly.   We had walked only as far as Great Burstead when the pubs began to open and so we decided against going on to Stock that morning for it would almost have been closing time by the time we reached our goal.   Following Dad’s nose, we turned off the main road and climbed the hill in the direction of Little Burstead.   At the top, among elm and oak, stood an old grey church.   Nestling beside this in the shadow of its spire was a small weather-boarded building that displayed all the characteristics of an Essex pub.   There were only a dozen or so other buildings in sight which were quite obviously private dwellings, so we walked up to the leaning timbers beside the church.   I was stunned and father was puzzled. Above the door was a sign which read ‘Village Stores – Newsagents – Tobacconists – Confectioners’.   This was something I could never have dreamt possible, father had failed and the honour of a long line of Redford noses had been thwarted.   This nagging failure prompted my father to do a little research, the results of which, in our collective view, reinstated the Redford’s nose to its rightful place in history.   The village stores was once the King’s Arms, a very old inn that dated back to the seventeenth century.   It stands along one side of the graveyard and, in days gone by, when the worthy patrons drank their ale in the back parlour, they could look out of the bar windows onto the tombstones, and it was for this reason that the inn was also known as Dead Man’s Rattle.

However, I must not give you dear reader a false impression of the Redford’s standards of propriety and morality.   We are not inveterate drunkards, but merely people who enjoy a pint of beer in congenial company and in congenial surroundings.   The Redford nose is not sensitive to only yeast and hops, but is also most appreciative of other aromas.   The nostalgic scent of honeysuckle on a damp summer’s eve for example.   It is surprising how far the scent is carried when the air is damp.   I have on one occasion been aware of the sweet tangle of honeysuckle a full two hundred yards before reaching it.   Of course, not all the smells of the countryside are as attractive, and here most people will automatically think of the many muck heaps dotted about the landscape and although one can hardly describe the scent of these as attractive, I personally do not place them in the unattractive category, for a muck heap that has ‘made’ well emanates a virile, earthy aroma that gives promise of future bumper crops.   The smell which immediately comes to mind in this category is that of the Stink Horn, the woodland fungus that gives off an overpowering stench of putrefying flesh and is attractive only to the bloated blue-bottle which is the curse of all rural ramblers.   The ammoniac-al smell of stables is offensive to some people, but I have many happy early memories connected with horses and I find it difficult to pass by a stable without pausing and conversing with the inhabitants, and even if there are no horses at home, I will stop, stand and stare.   Anyway, it is surprising how it clears the head.

One fine spring morning I visited a farmer friend of mine, but I arrived five minutes after he had left for Monk’s Tye, a fifteen acre field somewhere on the other side of the farm.   I told his wife who had opened the door to me, that I wasn’t familiar with the layout of the fields.

“That’s alright,” she beamed, “Yer can’t miss ‘im.   ‘E’s fixing the fence ‘longside the bean field – just foller yer nose.”

I went to the end of the stackyard, sucked my forefinger and stabbed it into the air.   A mild breeze from the west was moving the tree-tops and borne upon it was the unmistakably sweet, and to my mind, the most glorious country smell of all, that of a bean field.   I faced the zephyr and tacked across the fields.   It was a cup of sweet wine that I drank with unashamed intemperance.

At one period during my military days when I was transferred to Egypt, we embarked upon an exercise that took us trekking across the Sinai Desert to St. Cathrine’s Monastery.   In the heart of that leafless and shale-covered land cradled in the depths of silence and time, it struck me how different was the smell of the air to that of an English day.   I have always been of the mind that pleasure is the product of sensual contrasts and this certainly holds true in this instance for, although I had always delighted in the scent of a field of well-made hay or a breeze heavy with the sweet scent of a bluebell wood, I have never appreciated them more than on my return from that arid land.   So marked was the contrast and so great the ensuing pleasure, that I was moved to write the following lines:-

            Ne’re before, ‘till I went away
            From England, did an English day
            Seem quite so fair.   No line ‘twixt earth
            And sky so soft, no scene so dearly
            Held within the memory’s store
            For man’s old age to reap.
            A golden sun o’er greenest grass,
            The whitest clouds the azure dusts,
            And gentle is the soft warm breath
            That lifts the lark and cools
            The summer’s day.
            Low wind the lanes ‘twixt hedgerows
            Honeysuckle scented, trees clasp their
            Fingertips above in trembling sway,
            And softly rustling chestnut leaves
            So green, turn gold against the sun,
            Their echoes of a year gone by –
            The hunting ground of stoat and fox.
            The slow warm hours the humming
            Insects ride and dart, the trickling
            Streams the hot stones smooth,
            And slowly pass the whiles of dusk
            Across the silent fields once more.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: just saying, is all VI: // accountable / for my own outbreath / …
father & Sunday wormhole: familiasyncopation
green wormhole: industrial estate
London wormhole: time
morning wormhole: 1964
smell wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – mmpph’
trees wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Snow

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times

Tags

1967, 3*, air, autumn, blackberries, blackbird, branches, brown, change, chestnut tree, childhood, climbing, clouds, cottage, countryside, cows, echo, elm, Essex, field, grass, green, grey, hawthorne, hedge, hill, ivy, lark, leaves, life, memory, Michael J Redford, mist, oak, path, red, RF Hilder, rook, running, seagull, signpost, silence, singing, sitting, sky, skyline, snake, summer, sycamore, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, tits, trees, vista, walking, wind, woodland, work, yellow

A Sign of the Times

Things are changing around us all the time and when one lives with and through these changes it can be very difficult to tell when they occur.   Changes are more evident and in many cases more startling when one returns to a scene of bygone years, and this has never been made more clear to me than now as I sit beside a signpost in an Essex lane.   It is a contrast so shocking that it has left me quite numb, and it is difficult to understand how not only the facial character, but also the spiritual character of the countryside can be altered beyond recognition.

Some five years ago, I holidayed with friends who lived in south east Essex.   One morning I crossed the meadow at the rear of the cottage and entered Ten Acres which sloped gently to the woods below.   The full heat of the summer had abated to the mildness of early autumn and great mountains of cumulous, creamy topped, towered above me, their shadows coursing silently over the yellow-grey stubble.   Two glistening sea gulls above the oaks did verbal battle with a colony of rooks quarrelling in the elms and, far above, it seemed a thousand larks were singing.   Blackberries, some bright red others over-ripe and heavy with juice, shaded themselves in the hedgerow, and beside a weathered bale of straw, forgotten perhaps or left too wet for carting, a grass snake basked in the sun.

Gazing down the green slope, there came within me a sudden desire to run, to stretch my legs in great leaping strides, to see the hedgerows flash by in a blur and to feel the mild air stream about me.   I wanted to race the wind that went tumbling down the hill to the woods below.   Twenty years earlier the desire would have been satiated without further thought, but time passes and the unconscious brakes of inhibition condemn these simple pleasures to the memory’s store.   For one brief second I was a young boy again about to satisfy a desire, but then all too soon, I was a man again, and grown men are not expected to behave in such a manner.   To see a child walking along the road in an orderly fashion one moment and then break into a mad gallop the next is an occurrence accepted without question, but many an eyebrow would be raised if I were to do such a thing now.   Such are the many simple pleasures we must perforce leave aside as we grow up.   There are of course many other pleasures which take their place, but even so the illogical, spontaneous desires of childhood every so often burst within the heart and flood the mind with memories.

I had reached the wood and was a boy once more.   Gazing above, I felt a sudden desire to reach up and haul myself into the green branches.   One can climb a tree a hundred times and go up and come down a hundred different ways.   I think perhaps it is the additional dimension which gives tree climbing that extra fascination, for if one explores an area of ground, one has but two dimensions to contend with, but up here in a green swaying arbour, one has a third.   In the fullness of summer, high up in the sycamores and the chestnuts, there are green caverns to explore, and the diverging paths that disappear into the foliage above lure one on to the very top where, in green shrouded secrecy, one can survey the surrounding terrain.

To me, and no doubt to a large number of other adults, these things still hold a fascination and most of us are able to fulfil these old desires in one way or another.   It may be by toying with model railways or messing about in boats; it may be by dressing for the local amateur dramatics or taking part in a sport.   On the other hand, it may be by casting a furtive glance over the shoulder and climbing a tree.

After walking for an hour or so, I came upon a signpost beside an open gate and, finally bowing to the truth that I am no longer a boy, I sat beside the gate to rest my weary legs.   The foliage of the countryside had turned a very dark green, almost brown in fact, heralding an early autumn.   The grass between the drills of faded stubble would not grow much higher now.   It had been an early year altogether and quite a large number of farmers had managed a second cut of hay.   Now the harvest was done and the good earth awaited the plough and the frost.   Hawthorn berries were an abundant red across the headland and a distant skein of Friesians grazed their way slowly across the skyline above.   A tit leapt across my view and into a thicket close by and made the shiny red rose-hips dance.   All around was the gentle yet positive movement of life.   It was something to be not only seen, but felt.   Little did I realise then how all this was to be changed.

Now five years have passed and I am once more beside the signpost, but this year the summer has been short.   Already the trees are bare and possess that clipped appearance of a Hilder autumnal study.   The tall grasses in the leafless hedgerows bend stiffly beneath the chilly winds which have been noticeable this past month.   Gone is the suppleness in their sway, gone is the living green from their stems.   Soon a wintry gale will snap and blow them into the ditches to join the ghosts of previous years.   The lanes are filled with dead leaves, but no longer do they echo with the laughter of children as they wade knee deep through them, for nobody comes this way now.   The gate hangs askew on its rusty hinges and needs to be lifted and torn from the coarse grasses which grasp the bottom rail.   Such action however, is not necessary, for although the signpost once read ‘Public Footpath’, no one walks this way now.   The letters are illegible and covered with green lichen, and around its rotting base a small ivy begins to reach for the sky.   The footpath which ran diagonally across the field is no longer to be seen, not that this matters either, for the tiny lane bears no traveller save that of the drifting mists of autumn.

(R.F. Hilder (1905 – 1993), an English marine and landscape artist and book illustrator).

I gazed at the signpost and thought of the sweat that went into the making of it.   Strong backs bent to dig the hole, strong arms lifted the stout wooden post.   A craftsman’s eye morticed in the sign that is as square today as it ever was.   The painted letters have peeled and left but a ghost on the woodwork.   It doesn’t matter anyway, for no one passes this way now.   But it used to lead somewhere.   For someone the sign pointed to journey’s end; once cows scratched their necks upon it and children used it as a target for throwing pebbles.   But now it merely points to the wind.   There is a strange silence in the sky.   No rooks, gulls or larks can I hear; no animals rustling in the hedgerows.   Never have I witnessed such an empty land, a land so void of life and feeling.   Although the wind is cold upon my neck, I cannot hear it in the trees and the dead leaves, sodden from the wandering mists, make no sound as they fling themselves at my boots.   The ditches have filled with rotted vegetation and the water has spread.   Marsh grasses and wild flock have appeared for a brief spell of life.   And brief it will be, for six months from now, the new town will be born.

                Once I worked among green hills
                And as I worked I sang, oh yes
                I sang mid the trees, in echoing woods
                And o’er the dewy fields.

                I sang with the rising lark, whose voice
                Cascaded from above,
                I sang always a joyous song
                Of those things that I love.

                My orchestra came from the wind,
                From trickling brooks and rustling leaves,
                From earth below and all about,
                E’en heaven’s lofty eaves.

                But now my green hills lay beneath
                A glaring concrete face
                And where once sang the blackbird’s heart,
                Ten thousand people pace.

                So now accompaniment have I none,
                Nor reason for to sing.
                My heart they buried ‘neath the stone
                When marched the new town in.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air & branches & seagull wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – gull circling out at sea
autumn & hedge & leaves & trees & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
blackbird & childhood wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – from arm to nature, doing nothing
brown & grey & path & red & silence & yellow wormhole: hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?
change wormhole: reaching branch
clouds & sitting wormhole: and smile / like a bud
echo wormhole: fresh destiny
field wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I suddenly / remembered
green & sky wormhole: through the pane – poewieview #34
life & mist & time wormhole: AT-tennnnnnnn – waitfrit waitfrit – SHUN!
oak wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
skyline wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
walking wormhole: trying to focus / on walking
work wormhole: travel

 

the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford

Tags

1960s, 1967, 1970s, 2007, 2016, Billericay, birdsong, childhood, colour, cottage, education, Essex, evening, farm, garden, grandfather, green, image, John, Kenya, life, London, love, morning, Ramsden Heath, South Africa, uncle, war, windows, writing

 

 

 

I have come into possession of a piece of work that my Uncle Mick did during the 1960s.   He was in his thirties when he wrote the ‘Boats of Vallisneria’ having survived a childhood of war and evacuation, having completed what education was available then, having completed a period of military service in Kenya and South Africa and returned to London, to move to Billericay in Essex, to begin his life proper.   His father (my grandfather) died early in the 60s and he spent the rest of his life living with and looking after his mother living in the tied cottage to the farm he worked.

He completed this work because he wanted to explore the shape and pattern of [his] life.   He completed it even while the changes in farming brought his work there to a close.   [He went on to become a gardener and eventually set up his own business framing pictures].   He submitted the manuscript to Dent & Sons for publication, but they declined.

He let me have a look at the script when I was in my late teens and visiting and whinnying on about wanting to be a writer.   This was in the later 1970s.   I was way too green and cursive to read it with great discernment or generosity and commented that it was OK but quite amateurish (a youthful candour with which I hurt many a person close to me when I was young and arrogant – I’m sorry, everyone).

The dear man died in 2007, and I had long since forgotten his work (although I remember being honoured that he had shown me his work – it confirmed to me that being a writer was a noble thing to be).   I had a visit recently from my brother who brought a whole case of artefacts from my uncle, one of which was the original manuscript.

… I think I’d like to publish it on my blog.   Share the work with the world that he was not so able to do during his own time.   In his honour.   In memoriam.   To preserve and celebrate the green-paint-on-sturdy-wood life of Ramsden Heath during the 1960s and 1970s.   To celebrate the linen-atmosphere of small-pane cottage window looking out on the garden in all facet.   To listen in on the darken-colours of morning and evening and bird-call in Essex countryside, every one different and newly-miraculous found.

While typing it up I felt I could tap the kernel of what he was exploring and cut in to his images and experiences within – and sometimes behind – his writing.   I would also like to explore his writing through my own.   And publish them alongside each other like a healthy pair of framed pictures above the mantelpiece.   To celebrate my love for him.   And make the contact with him that I was too gauche to make while he was alive.   (How much I appreciate people the most, once I have lost life with them).

His work will come first … soon

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

1967 wormhole: 1967
childhood & morning wormhole: currency of generations
education wormhole: aghh – we’ve been infected / it’s spreading through the system / we’re losing our files … / it’s taken out the processor … / I, I can’t open with this program anymore … / it’s scanning me – / I’ve got to buy a Virus Protection Program / from it …
evening wormhole: constant hummm
garden wormhole: diligence
green & life & love wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
London wormhole: tag cloud poem IX – haiku is awkward / the more that is left in / like uncombed hair
Ramsden Heath & uncle wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych
war wormhole: just saying, is all V: // … systematic and consistent disempowerment
windows wormhole: between thoughts
writing wormhole: balancing // with a whole lot of deft