Else shows me her new car. It has no door, so she has to be helped to step into it from a kitchen chair. It also has no windows.
‘How do you see where you’re going?’ I ask.
‘That’s a good point,’ her mother says. ‘We could cut out a window at the front.’
‘No, I like it like this,’ says Else, steering furiously with a paper bag.
Years ago I wrote a blog describing the atrocious behaviour of a senior manager in my company during a meeting with a supplier. Even now, when she and I have both long moved on, I dare not publish it.
When I left work I thought my days of dealing with people like that were over. But now I find myself in a situation which makes the predicament of that poor supplier seem trivial. It is so foreign to me, so unexpected, that I would love to write about it, even need to write about it, but am afraid to. It involves a member of my local community, about whom writing anything at all would be to invite further trouble. I am not exaggerating – I’m not a paranoid person. I do not go through life expecting the worst, fearing Armageddon, seeing conspiracy at every turn. If I did, maybe I would not be in this situation. Maybe I would have kept my head down, never argued back, never told the truth.
So I will say no more about what has happened and is still unfolding. But I can write about what I have so far learned from it. Much of this is not new, but then life consists of learning the same lessons over and over.
This is what I have found:
But perhaps the biggest learning, so far, has been about myself. I’ve always been much better in other people’ crises. When someone else is lying on the floor bleeding I’m calm, practical, resourceful. When it’s me, I’m dismissive of my pain, inclined not to make a fuss. Now I’ve had to learn to actively ask for help. And at the same time understand that no-one else is going to save me. Taking action on my own behalf, however scary, rather than expecting others to rise in the face of injustice and do it for me, is strangely empowering.
And most importantly, not for the first time, I have discovered I can perform well in situations where I feel unfit, destined to fumble and fail. I have a tendency to treat the whole of life like an exam for which I have to prepare and memorise. It’s not an approach designed to bring joy and spontaneity. But in this context, endless preparation and practice, organisation of my thoughts, remembering to answer the question on the paper rather than the one I revised, have stood me in good stead. I’ve surprised myself by for once being more verbally articulate under pressure than I thought possible.
But I’ve also, as is obvious from this piece of writing, become more cautious. At a time when you can be arrested for carrying a copy of Private Eye or suggesting that genocide isn’t very nice, my own small crisis has made me realise that the world is not – as I still expect it to be – run on principles of truth and justice. I’m less inclined right now to stick my head above the parapet, to be used as a pawn in other people’s games, to argue with those who make arguing their hobby.
In one of her books, I can’t remember which, novelist Sarah Moss points out how easily, accidentally, we cross the line from law-abiding, keeping-their-head-above-water citizen, to accidental penury, law breaking, a downward spiral of disaster which is not confined to characters in Dickens. In recent years I’ve seen several of my friends come within a hair’s breadth of homelessness, and understood how easy it is to slip over that precipice. We all walk a thinner line than we like to believe, balancing step by step.
Oh, there is one other thing. Whatever else is going on, a good haircut really does help.
A huge white car reverses up and stops opposite our house. I go out and ask the driver, who is wandering about in the street, to turn off his engine. ‘I go now,’ he says, showing me a handful of tiny unripe apples he has picked from our neighbour’s tree.
I use Google Maps to drive to a village in north Oxfordshire. Much of the route is familiar but I can’t remember the last bit. ‘Turn left,’ the Google voice says. About half a mile later she announces: ‘You have arrived at your destination.’ A narrow country lane stretches ahead of me through fields as far as the eye can see.
Trying to find our way in the woods my sister and I meet a woman with a friendly, glossy Doberman. She tells us which path to take, describes a longer walk with a country pub en route, explains how the dog is a post-pandemic rescue. Then she puts her hand in her jeans’ pocket and says ‘I hope you don’t mind. People hate us’. She pulls out a little blue card that says ‘Jehovah’s Witness’.
At the end of our day together I put my NZ visitor on the 20:08 to London. She doesn’t have access to social media, but by morning her 96-year old mother in Auckland who is not online has seen the photos, and there’s an email about them from her aunt in Tasmania.
I knock on a neighbour’s door, worried that her car is parked in the street with its windows open. She comes out to look. ‘That’s not my car’ she says, as the front door slams shut behind her.
We stand outside the house contemplating ladders, neighbours who don’t have a key. She borrows a phone.
‘Neil? It’s Jo. I’m locked out of the house.’
‘It’s Jo. I’m calling on Simon’s phone.’
‘Neil it’s Jo. You won’t recognise the number.’
‘It’s Jo! I’m your wife.’
The shoebox Yvonne has left for me is labelled on the lid: JANE. Inside is a jumble of hexagonal paper templates, some with pieces of fabric stitched or pinned to them. The paper shapes are cut from a financial report dated 1976, and the fabric is mostly caramel-coloured Laura Ashley, c. 1980. I have a photo of myself wearing a jacket in the pink version of this same fabric, the night I finished my finals. My eyes are unfocused, probably with drink, my face impossibly round and unblemished. The jacket was quilted, reversible, made by my mother. I wore it constantly.
Accompanying the shoebox is a note: ‘Have been sorting a few things and found patchwork pieces – if any use please take, or throw away.’ So they are my responsibility now. I lay the pieces out on the floor. There are too few to make even a tea cosy, the colour is that of Caramac chocolate. I have more than enough bags of ancient patchwork pieces of my own, but I (who have ruthlessly emptied the houses of three close relatives) can’t throw these away. Who cut out this huge pile of paper hexagons, these patches of fabric? Were they for a quilt that never happened, or left over from one that did? Fifty years on, the pins are not even rusty.
***
A few weeks ago I bought some African printed cotton, unearthed my Grandma’s sewing machine from under the heap of very useful old envelopes and Jiffy bags in the cupboard under the stairs, and made three cushion covers. The sewing machine only works if the power cable is in a certain position, held in place by a heavy object. It has a sneaky habit of unthreading the tension control and leaving me with long lines of useless loopy stitching. Sometimes it stitches of its own accord when my foot is not on the pedal.
But the sound it makes, that gentle intermittent whirring, the click of the presser foot being raised and lowered, the snap as I cut the thread, is the sound of my childhood. Comforting, tedious, as old and familiar and long gone as the Magic Roundabout music or late nights in smoke-filled bars .
***
At around the time I was wearing my pink quilted jacket, Pedro Almodóvar was releasing his first feature film, Pepi, Luci, Bom, about a dissolute heiress, a masochistic housewife and a lesbian punk singer living a hedonistic alternative lifestyle in Madrid. The funniest part of the gloriously anarchic film is a roof-top party, secretly funded by a closet gay man who is watching the event through binoculars while his girlfriend vents her disappointment at him. The party climaxes with a game called General Erections, in which the men line up to compare penis size (length × circumference). The extremely smug winner has a ludicrously large appendage and his prize is to do what he wants, how he wants, with the person of his choice. Almodóvar is satirising electoral practice in Madrid at the time. He might just as well have made the film today.
Even though I no longer have to deal with academic authors, company directors, the head teachers of private schools, I still feel much of the time like an unwilling spectator in a competition for the biggest male ego. My job as an editor all too often involved taking heaps of garbage put together by someone playing at being a writer, and turning it into a book for which they got the credit and the royalty. Not only did I do this, I did it diligently and so well that my boss, when he wasn’t creating impossible tasks for me, would sometimes tell me what brilliant writers these ‘authors’ were. (The rest of my time was spent taking on those tasks that only middle managers will do: removing a dead mouse from a cupboard, fixing the franking machine, filling in pointless forms.)
These days my only work is as a volunteer, but I still fume at autocratic decision making, pointless changes to plans we all agreed on last week, and acting as unpaid ghost writer and shoelace tier for those oh-so-busy and clever men. In all the important ways it often feels as if nothing has changed since I sat in a meeting in 1989 and the smug winner of the biggest ego in the room addressed me and my two male colleagues with the words ‘Well gentlemen…’
And that is just the micro scale. I think we know those who have won the biggest ego contest on the world stage and, like the winner of General Erections, are doing what they want, how they want, with whoever they want.
***
There’s nothing I can do about that. But I can make choices in my own life, can’t I? I’m no longer a dutiful daughter, a middle manager, an employee. So why have I so readily accepted the responsibility for doing something with the historic patchwork scraps Yvonne cannot quite bear to bin? Why can’t I turn my back on the giant egos in my own life and do something less boring instead? And why, even when I am on a longed-for week’s holiday, do I look at my emails, respond to ‘do-it-now’ demands, fume and complain, when I could be walking on the beach asking myself why the sea always looks as if it is sloping upwards to the horizon, or celebrating the skylark that is singing, despite the bitter wind, high up above the racket of the seagulls?
A reminder that Dulwich is showing Tirzah Garwood: Beyond Ravilious, until 26 May. It is the first ever major exhibition of her work. The constant references to her husband Eric Ravilious are annoying – you wouldn’t find this in an exhibit of a male artist’s work. But her woodcuts, paintings, marbled papers, collages are perceptive, inventive, surreal at times, witty, rich in detail and an absolute joy, with a touch of sadness.
I blogged about Garwood last year.
Two young men talking in a Jermyn Street café. One says: ‘I’ve only had a couple of interactions with her on a bilateral basis.’
janebuekett 