Peas ready to be podded rested on the counter top. The lights were fading. Grandfather's smile, beaming...Memories, so poignantly powerful...Perhaps we are more memory than life.
I recall my grandfather playing with me in that kitchen, endlessly picking up a brown paper bag from the greengrocer which I threw to the floor and he retrieved - tirelessly - with the old radio on a makeshift shelf announcing the news of the day. And then...That photograph of us in the unremarkable garden - grass and granite chip path. A dull, nondescript patch of reclaimed Nature. He held me in his arms as a loving trophy who was yet to meet the future - whatever it held - with joy and pride. I knew him without really doing so...And of course, I will always miss him.
My grandmother, even in early images, photographed with her sister, Lothika and father betrays more than the early witness of sorrow and a deep darkness of unease. Both girls were, frankly, rather attractive and the image I am remembering here, reminds of a privileged, educated, pre-Independent Indian family of note - not dressed spectacularly and drenched in jewels but still people of important impact. It is self-evident. Their bearing says more than jewels will ever do. It might look to many, if not most, as a typical family portrait of its time. There is a certain stiffness and unfamiliarity of the subjects - a somehow, lingering sorrow of which one can only guess the origins of. Photography was invented in the 1840s, or so but had become a sort of craze in the late nineteenth century in the UK, Europe and of course, America. In the past, the long past, those who could afford the services of a portrait painter would buy his skills for an eternal representation of life. It is then and will be forever, the desire to circumnavigate the dictates of Time and Fate. The stiffness of the family portrait of course, was because of the long exposure time needed for the camera to capture. So, in all of these images of that time, a table, prop, a 'frozen look' was the norm. But still, frozen or not, the tale tells a story. Of course, no one smiled...No emotion was there.
My grandmother, as I impart, came to live in London in 1963 and the UK had endured two ice-cold winters - bitter cold - which even I seem to recall, although only two or three years of age. Or...This might simply be the evidence of photo-slices which , although capturing a moment or moments, suggest other things, other realities. It really is impossible to know. Perhaps we can indeed, reinvent our pasts with the now of thought. The speed of life demands - and we bow.
My grandmother was somewhat dour, quite brittle at times and mostly, very remote. One might say, belligerently so. It was certain that she was detached from what some might say was a 'normal' life. But she was clearly engaged with things that interested her. What I remember most was her love of Nature which she demonstrated to me by showing me imagery of creatures from our old, battered Nature Encyclopaedia bound in dull sapphire-hued cloth, ragged and much loved. We used to regularly see plates of exotic animals - giraffes, lions, tigers, foxes and monkeys and who knows where this interest came from in the first place. But it made a huge impact on me. For so long in subsequent years, at school, I was magnetically drawn to the magnetism of biology and the animal kingdom. I cannot even today find any wild creature other than a divine gift to us,.
At school...We had once, to dissect a frog. I refused. I remember the day so clearly and although the creature was of course dead pinned to a slab, I thought it a kind of second murder. I recall the light streaming through the classroom window - all white tables and strip light with the emerald frog, prone and ready for the scalpel. So, grandmother went on with her stories, pointing out the importance of and difference of natural Nature's protection when it can, to horns and claws - mountain goats to leonine creatures, beaks to even the sound of menacing wings...Today, I feed the birds in the garden and hear them chatting or fighting or whatever they do. High in the tree tops or stalking that same gritty path looking for scraps. Then...They are gone in a bust of wings, so sonic. I don't think that I would have felt any of this without her. Our Nature Sessions I seem to recall, happened frequently but I seem only to remember the lacy-grey days (almost twilight) when the mist and soon to come fog would press against the window as characters from an unscripted play. The rain pattered on the window and all seemed safe and more than sound. The protection of three windows which easily could have been broken at any time, still made it feel like an impregnable fortress. It was only, however, a feeling.
At the time, her other son, my uncle occupied the little room on the first floor, filled with old newspapers, seemingly never thrown away. He was a whizz at maths and tried to teach me on occasions. But I had the mathematics of word in my mind. He was the opposite of my father. My father cared. He did not. Both were stylish men of their generation but any stranger could tell the difference about the intent of the visage. My father died of a heart attack. My uncle succumbed to days of seizures. Perhaps there is some justice in this? Time allows thought of what might have been and indeed...What should have been. My uncle was more loved than my father by their mother. A second birth? One often hears that the second child is often a problem to the mother - psychologically and in some case, even physically. But it does take the next generation to really know and evaluate? Too close to the now and one might see things darkly...Too close to the past? Well...That might be the same. As Loudon Wainwright III wrote and sang most mellifluously -
'Be careful, there's a baby in the house...
And a baby will not be fooled'...
I knew then. I know, now...
And then again...Was it an impression of an impression? Wax, glass, clay, plaster, plasticine are all 'impressed' and what a value comes with that word alone? But is it always true? The stamp of the maker is one thing - But...
It was also my feeling that my father wanted more acceptance of his mother than she gave him. But again...This is only an impression - of an impression. This often manifested itself in my being brusque and often brutal with her - as if she had to be taught a lesson. And principally, this was because she did not like my Mother. A mother 'surrendering' her son to a wife is oftentimes, a universal reality but however...There was more behind the gilded curtain. I sensed injustice. But there we were, here we are... Memory clouds the clouds of memory itself.
These are only my thoughts. But...They are mine. Had my grandmother married her own kind, might there have been no problem at all? All know that a first-born son is a treasure. Globally and irrationally.
But no matter, she taught me about Nature. And I still feed the birds.
Ma as we called her (well, I didn't, actually) descended into an irreversible depression and had to be hospitalized at Shenley. I remember visiting her with my father one day and she seemed more than remote. That image of her taken so long ago held the truth of things. As TS Eliot has it - 'Of things past or passing or to come'...I recall the emerald green of the lawns and the distant trees which surrounded the place, her last place and felt that, well, this was not shall we say a prison for the incapable. The institution was not frightening at all. The staff seemed kind and attentive. I recall that she had made (perhaps not on her own, exactly) a basket from willow, softly bent twig wands. I seem also to remember that yere was a separate hue added to the lid in the form of a circle of interest and difference. The whole was ovular in shape and quite pleasing. Even then I thought it a womb. I think that after she died it was at my parents' house and used as a sewing basket, concealing reels of thread, needles and pins...
I suppose, naturally, despite not being what I would call 'loved adequately' my father was in a state of reasonable shock and mourning. Love simply loves. IF there is love...Or ever was...
On the day of her funeral, the first I had ever attended, of course but naturally not to be the last as life spins by, my father and I visited the local florist to buy funerary blooms. The scent of Jonquils and Bluebells still reminds me of that day. It was the conjoined perfume of meditation and things passing, or indeed past - but still alive because of personal memory. Every Spring in my mother's garden the Bluebells (but few Jonquils) announce the start of the year. And I love them. They remind of the almost impossibility of continuity. And yet...
I recall asking my mother on the day of my grandmother's funeral...Can I wear my bow tie? My mama was the one who introduced me to my fist Liberty shirt awash with teal paisley, dancing motifs and I still remember this and treasure it in the dictionary of my thought. She kindly and sweetly explained to me that this would not be suitable. A bow tie was for an evening's jolly or a fun time. But of course, at that time, I didn't understand exactly why. Death seemed so far away - more than now...Of course. But I did and do realise the jewel-explosion of flowers which having been snatched from the earth are dying, even on the way to market. Tumbril after tumbril...Brief explosions of seeming mirth.
To witness for your first time, your first glimpse of a coffin and especially at such a young age, puts all in a certain context. I seem to remember the stark, cheap blond wood it was made of. My father's fragrant flowers were there. I felt no sorrow. For, as someone so young, was this some kind of theatrical performance with no meaning? There was no sorrow - why and could there be - even with the request that I should wear my bow tie? That morning had a deal of surrealism about it...
But sorrow for tomorrow was stamped on the skies and in my heart, my mind...That day. And every funeral I have attended since, reminds - blade sharp. How could it be anything other?
At each such event, the gestures made, the looks exchanged, the incense, the persistence of the Yew tree...There, as timeless sentinels and reminders of the end. And in some ways, a beginning.
It still, all of it, occurs to me today when I must attend a service. Surely, surely it is part of a symbol. The idea of an idea?
An impression...Of an Impression...
ROBIN DUTT.