Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

The Putting Green

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When I was a child, we would often go as a family to Swanage for our holidays, usually accompanied by my Nan and Grandad. I have wonderful memories of those times; sudden storms on the beach, the amusement arcade (from which my Nan was asked to leave after a mild-mannered contretemps with the change machine), evening milkshakes in Fortes, preceded by putting on the putting green (pictured below).

Putting in Swanage c1980

I loved putting and it was during a conversation in the office about Swanage that I wondered where exactly the putting green was. So often with memories, an event’s location slips anchor and drifts away, bumping up against other unassociated memories.

Using Google Streetview, I ‘went for a walk’ through the town centre, past the amusement arcade and what had been Fortes and, using the house in the background of the above photograph, arrived at what had been the putting green.

It was a putting green no more.

Google Streetview showing the location of the putting green today

It’s disconcerting, coming face to face with your past in the form of a ruin, or covered – as above – in tarmac. Suddenly, the way in which I visualise the far-distant past becomes the means by which I see my own.

I found the same on a visit to my first school, when I saw how the swimming pool had become an overgrown ruin.

John Wesley (1703-1791)

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Every Sunday, from when I was born to the age of 16, I went to church. It was in many respects – and still is, even though I no longer attend – the hub of family life, having played a central part in the life of my extended family from the moment my mum moved to Oxford with her family in 1952. I was christened there in 1971; my mum and dad were married there, as were my aunts and uncles and several cousins. Many members of my family met their partners in the Youth Club and of course we have said goodbye to family members; my Grandad in 1984, my Nan in 2010 and step-father in 2008.

I doubt there is any place in the world that harbours so many memories for me, but the one I want to recall today isn’t a specific memory as such but rather a recollection. I recall how as a young boy, I used – when singing hymns – to look at the dates of birth and death of the authors, in particular John Wesley. It’s hard to say what I thought while looking at his dates (1703-1791); I can, as an adult, only interpret what that child was thinking. (Thinking about this now, it could be that it was Charles Wesley’s hymns we sang, in which case the dates would be (1707-1788). It could of course have been both). I remember too a plaque on the wall, dedicated to the memory of a man killed in the Second World War. Again there was something about the dates that captivated me – a date from a time – and a place – before I was born.

The dates of someone’s birth and death delineate a space, much as a boundary on a map, a place that existed but doesn’t anymore. They are coordinates for the beginning and end of a journey.

Childhood Landscapes

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‘I can see him now,’ my Nana told me, talking about her dad, ‘because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us, and if we went out to play, our Mam would say, “you can go up the mountain to play…” but every now and then our Mam would come out in the garden and we had to wave to her to know that we were alright you know… always remember going up the mountain…’

Hafodyrynys and Surrounds
Nana’s mountain

I interviewed my Nana in 2007, the year before she died. What she was describing was a scene from her childhood landscape in the years after the First World War. During the Second World War, a young boy called Otto Dov Kulka was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau. He recalls his childhood landscape thus:

“The colour is blue: clear blue skies of summer. Silver-coloured toy aeroplanes carrying greetings from distant worlds pass slowly across the azure skies while around them explode what look like white bubbles. The aeroplanes pass by and the skies remain blue and lovely, and far off, far off on that clear summer day, distant blue hills as though not of this world make their presence felt.”

Auschwitz-Birkenau
Auschwitz-Birkenau

In previous blogs I have described my childhood landscapes, both real and imagined; most recently in the context of childhood landscapes pre World War I, this time of two girls who lived in what is now Bury Knowle Park in Headington, Oxford.

My childhood landscapes are bound up with journeys to and from my grandparents’ houses and in particular, my Nan’s garden (pictured below) also in Headington.

I have walked in all these places; in my grandparents’ garden; in Bury Knowle Park, on the ‘mountain’ in Wales and in Auschwitz. I spent many happy years in the garden of my childhood home (which has all but disappeared under a vast extension to the house).

Sukey

Proxies

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Following on from my last entry I’ve been wondering whether an empathetic link between ourselves and those who fought and died in the First World War can – based on Paul Fussel’s quote regarding “moments of pastoral” (“if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral”) – be found in the idea of the garden.

Can the garden – that domestic, pastoral space – become a space of memory and, therefore, experience shared with those who died in the violent landscape of the Western Front?

My grandparents’ garden in Oxford in the late 1970s
One of the main difficulties faced in trying to empathise with individuals who lived and died before we were born is that to think them alive we must think too of our own non-existence (and if we’re imagining our own non-existence we cannot truly empathise). Furthermore, experiences of people such as victims of the Holocaust or World War 1 soldiers are so far beyond our own, it’s impossible, even with a keen imagination, to bridge that divide.

We therefore need a proxy, and that proxy is place. Being in a place where an historic event has taken place can help us empathise, in that we can do so through a shared experience of that particular place or landscape.

This was certainly the case for me at Auschwitz where it was through observing the trees that I could best empathise with the people who were there, even though their experiences were so unimaginably different.

Trees at Birkenau

(One might imagine that a consideration of non-existence might lead to empathy through a shared consideration of death, but as Jean Amery wrote:”Dying was omnipresent, death vanished from sight.”

Non-existence bears only a passing resemblance to death and non whatsoever to dying.)

With soldiers of the First World War it’s also impossible for us to empathise with what they experienced. We can empathise through being in the landscape of Ypres or The Somme – i.e. we can empathise through a shared experience of presentness, of, in effect, being alive – but the fact the landscape looks so different today makes this especially hard.

Mouse Trap Farm c1915 – a place near where Jonah Rogers fell

Paul Fussel’s quote however helps us begin to bridge that divide: the concept of the garden, that pastoral space on a domestic scale, becomes the proxy – a space which we in the present could be said to have shared with many of those who fought in the war.

My Grandparent’s garden is as much a part of the past as the garden in which Jonah (above) is sitting. It’s almost as if the past becomes a single remembered landscape – a garden in which we can find those who lived and died long before we were born.

Me as a small boy with my mum, nan, aunt and great-grandmother (born in 1878)

Beneath the floor

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I’ve always found it amazing, when, on a programme like Time Team, an apparently empty field is shown to have once been the site of some vast Roman villa; how something so grand and seemingly permanent can one day be lost to both memory and the landscape; a memento mori of inscribed lines on quite an epic scale. The recent discovery of the tomb of Richard III is perhaps the most vivid illustration of this; how the grave of so eminent a man could be buried (albeit hastily) in the choir of a friary, only for all trace (of both the grave and the friary) to be lost beneath the tarmac of a nondescript car park. In Urne Burial (1658), Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

“There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell truth scarce fourty years; Generations passe while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.” In the garden of the house in which I grew up, there was an oak tree – now lost; a victim of the relentless drive to build flats and houses on every scrap of space ‘available’.

In the shade of that tree (visible above on the right hand side) and the lawn beyond its reach, I spent many childhood days, playing football, high-jumping (badly), playing at being ‘The Professionals’ and, on one occasion, holding a sale to raise money for charity. But in the last year, a few years since my dad sold up and left, half the house has been pulled down (including most of my bedroom) and a new one built alongside, covering most of the garden.

The lawn on which we had picnics, over which the rabbit – Patch – thundered, chasing Sammy the cat – and the beds beneath which those same animals, amongst many others, were interred, is now itself buried beneath new concrete floors and builder’s rubble.

It’s strange to think of someone standing in a kitchen, or sitting in a living room, on the exact same space where we once played.

And that’s what made me think of those Roman villas lost to the past beneath the ground; all those memories attached to those buildings which have soaked away like water, into the ground over the course of two millennia.

The garage is now a particularly mournful sight. Here, I spent many hours (often with enormous hair as evidenced by the photograph) on the drive, playing football with my brother and friends – or sometimes by myself (I can still hear the sound of the plastic ball skitting across the concrete and the bash of the blue metal door which was sometimes the goal). The sounds too at night of my dad arriving home in the car, the radio blaring as the wooden gates were opened; the whoosh of the garage door being lifted, are memories more permanent than the concrete drive itself. Now the garage is a sorry looking creature, whose full demise is certain, along with the shed tucked away behind (in which we sometimes slept on warm summer nights).

The photo below of me and my cousins (on my dad’s side) was taken when I was a baby in the summer of 1971.

The patch of grass on which we’re sitting would soon become the garage….

Old Sky

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In response to my last blog entry, I remembered a painting by Howard Hodgkin which seemed to echo what I had written. It’s called ‘Old Sky’ and it’s a painting which, for me, is about the idea of that continuous cycle of time; of many cycles (single days) embedded in the cycle of years (which in terms of the pottery shard becomes a cycle of centuries).


The painting is an image of the end of a day and the remembered image of hundreds of days lost to memory and beyond. It’s about the act of remembering and the way the paint is applied to the frame becomes an attempt to reach beyond the limits of memory, to live again in the world when the memory was first formed. It’s almost frantic; an attempt not to forget what will certainly be forgotten. The frame remains intact, an acknowledgement perhaps that to relive a time that’s passed is impossible; that all that remains, inevitably, is a fragment of what has been.

As I alluded to in my blog, the relationship between colour and movement interests me a great deal and with this painting we have both colour and movement;  movement when the painting was made and the movement of the act of remembering itself. For me, this reflects the idea of the cycle of a day and its relationship to the cycle of centuries; the relationship between the leaf and the pottery shard found during the dig. When I look at the pottery shard (below) I try to picture the world from which it has come. It’s as if the edges of the shard are like the edges of the painting, and while we can’t return to the world from which the shard has come, we can with the aid of the present attempt to imagine it.

I wrote in my last blog entry how when I dug the shard out of the ground, the colours at once melted back into the world from which they’d been estranged. This idea serves to illustrate that of moving beyond the frame or the edges of the shard in an attempt to re-imagine the past; how the act of remembering is as much to do with the body as the imagination – how it’s a fusion of the two; a product of an embodied imagination; one which moves in the world just like those with whom we seek to empathise.


New Marston War Memorial Names

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At the bottom of my street is a War Memorial such as you find in most towns and villages throughout the country. I’ve walked past the memorial many, many times and while I’ve often thought of those who died in both World Wars, I’d never before read its list of people. Therefore, this week I did just that and have spent time researching where they died and where they’re now buried.

A couple of details at once stood out : A G Akers, the first on the list, lived in my road and died of wounds on the last day of the war; 11th November 1918. Arthur Gerald Harley was killed in action, aged 21 on 1st July 1916 – the infamous first day of the Battle of the Somme.

I will endeavour to find out as much as I can about some of those who are commemorated on this memorial, in the meantime the following list is what I’ve so far discovered:

A G Akers
Private 10524
11/11/1918 Died
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
S. II. GG. 20.ST. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen
Lived in New Marston
Harold John Akers
Lance Corporal G/6709
11/11/1915 Killed in action
Queen’s Own (Royal West Kent Regiment)
Panel 45 and 47.Ypres (Menin Gate)
Lived in Folkestone
Hubert Allum  
Lance Corporal 202107
10/09/1917 Killed in action
Age 25
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 96 to 98.Tyne Cot Memorial
Lived in New Marston
H Baker
Lance Serjeant 9341
02/08/1916 Died
Age 22
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
XXI. A. 19. Baghdad (North Gate) War Cemetery
Lived in Holton
Frederick Charles Burborough
Lance Corporal 17854
25/09/1915 Killed in action
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 37 and 39. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial
Lived in Tilehurst
Joseph Bailey Cross
Private 285440
05/11/1918 Killed in action
Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars
In South corner. Obies Communal Cemetery
Lived in Oxford
George Herbert Cummings
Private 4706
14/08/1916 Killed in action
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Pier and Face 10 A and 10 D. Thiepval Memorial
Lived in New Marston
Thomas Charles Dearlove
Private 18259
25/09/1915 Killed in action
Age 27
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 37 and 39. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial
Percival James Evans
Private 27723
18/11/1916 Killed in action
Age 24
Gloucestershire Regiment
Pier and Face 5 A and 5 B. Thiepval Memorial
R Faulkner
Private 22865
04/10/1917 Died of wounds
Age 19
King’s Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment)
P. III. K. 2A.ST. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen
Edward Gough
Private 446123
29/03/1919
Age 44
Royal Army Medical Corps
C. 213. Alexandria (Hadra) War Memorial Cemetery
Frederick Gray
Lance Corporal 10523
20/09/1917 Killed in action
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 96 to 98. Tyne Cot Memorial
Lived in New Marston
Frank Green
Private 5838
07/07/1916 Killed in action
Age 32
Royal Fusiliers
Pier and Face 8 C 9 A and 16 A. Thiepval Memorial
Lived in Oxford
Arthur Gerald Harley
Lance Corporal 10379
01/07/1916 Killed in action
Age 21
Royal Berkshire Regiment
Pier and Face 11 D. Thiepval Memorial
Lived in Oxford
Charles Thomas Hartwell
Stoker 2919T
01/11/1914
Royal Naval Reserve
5. Plymouth Naval Memorial
Lewis Heath
Private 201358
22/08/1917 Killed in action
Age 22
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 96 to 98. Tyne Cot Memorial
Lived in New Marston
Thomas Walter Madden
Private 201697
16/06/1918 Died of wounds
Age 20
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Plot 2. Row D. Grave 3. Montecchio Precalcino Communal Cemetery Extension
Lived in New Marston
Richard David Matthews
Private 31925
31/05/1919
Age 39
King’s Shropshire Light Infantry
P. 29. Cairo War Memorial Cemetery
Frederick Newport
Corporal 83648
03/09/1916 Killed in action
Royal Field Artillery
Pier and Face 1 A and 8 A. Thiepval Memorial
Charles Percy Phipps
Lieutenant 
19/07/1916
Age 20
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
Panel 83 to 85. Loos Memorial
William John Plumridge
Bombardier 24311
31/12/1915 Died
Age 26
Royal Field Artillery
Plot I. Row C. Grave 12. Corbie Communal Cemetery
Richard Tirrell Shrimpton
Squadron Serjeant Major 285021
09/08/1918 Killed in action
Age 27
Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars
I. AA. 1. Caix British Cemetery
Lived in Oxford
EW Shrimpton
Percy James Smith
Private 8068
01/11/1914 Killed in action
Age 26
Royal Berkshire Regiment
Panel 45. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial
Lived in New Marston
Charles Tolley
Private 5927
26/08/1916 Died of wounds
Age 32
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
I. A. 30. Varennes Military Cemetery
John Walton
Private 2239
09/04/1916 Died of wounds
Age 21
Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry
D. 31. Beauval Communal Cemetery

Thoughts about my Nan

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As I stood in the church hall following the service of thanksgiving for my Nan who died on September 16th at the age of 98, I looked towards the stage at the back of the hall, through the door on the left hand side and into the short corridor behind. At that moment, in a split second, a number of memories crashed down around me, as if the way I was standing – the shape of my body – had unlocked the door behind which they’d been piled. The Christmas Bazaar, when I was a child was one of them, in particular the lucky dip box filled with sawdust and prizes. That was the first. It had stood there, just before the stage near the steps. I can still smell the sawdust; I can feel it on my hands as I search, in my mind, for a prize. Father Christmas had always made an appearance and would hand out gifts in his grotto. It was, in many ways when Christmas began, even though it was always held in the last week of November. It was at the Christmas Bazaar that I bought Nan a hideous ornament – china flowers in a china pot; gaudy coloured and chipped.

When I heard my Nan had died (I was on holiday in Spain at the time) my mind, for some reason, took me into the room which once ran the width of the church behind the large cross at the front. It was once an open gallery (you can see it in a photo of my aunt and uncle’s wedding), but had long since been blocked off from the church. Back then, when I was a child, it was always full of junk. It was where Father Christmas has his Grotto, and whatever the time of year, there was something of Grotto about it, with or without the old man in the red suit.

Back in the hall on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I could see the stage in my mind’s eye complete with the box at the front, one which ran the length of the stage, which when it was opened revealed a long line of lightbulbs. When I was a child, most of the bulbs were missing. You could see the sockets and the wires, but they hadn’t been used for years. There was a lighting box on the left hand side – just before the door through which I was looking – in which the old switches and levers had become grown over with time. In the single wooden panel, dividing it from the stage, was a hole through which you could see what was going on. My cousin and I had operated a tape player in there, some time in the mid 1980s for the performance of a pantomime whose name for the moment escapes me.

Inevitably, as I write, my thoughts are going to wander, as one memory leads to another, but back on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I thought about what I’d just remembered; the lucky dip, the Christmas Bazaar and the lightbulbs underneath the box. These were not isolated memories, they didn’t come to me like pictures in a gallery, one after the other. Instead they were physical and part of a web of memories, the threads of which seemed to vibrate with all that I had felt and experienced before. For a moment, when I moved, I could almost feel them again, I could hear the hubbub of the bazaar, see the stalls piled with jumble and the Christmas decorations hanging above. I was in the company of people who’d long since gone.

The photo below is of my Aunt and Uncle’s wedding reception, which took place in the hall. Very little has changed, apart from all the people.

Back to the day my Nan died – it’s interesting that my first thought was of the room immediately behind the church, but hardly surprising when you consider, that along with my Grandad, she’d lived in a house just opposite the hall. The house and the church were linked by Sundays, on which day we would cross the road to the house to select our sweets from the sweet-tin. Bon-bons, lemon sherbets, candied peanuts, mint imperials… we could choose 5, 6 or 7; the number changed from week to week. I can see the tin now – a round biscuit tin, I can hear the sweets rattle as the lid is prised off.

 Whenever we slept at Nan’s, my brother and I would find paper bags beneath our pillows in the morning, with a few sweets inside. Before bed, we’d have Ritz biscuits and grated cheese whilst watching TV. The television was one that had to warm up before the picture was fully revealed. I’m always reminded of Boxing Day when I think of the front room. That and the Two Ronnies – and in particular the Phantom Raspberry Blower. Seaside Summer Special too. I can feel the texture of the chairs and the sofa. It’s the afternoon on Boxing Day as I think of it now, and while some have gone to the football, everyone else stays in the warm, getting things ready for tea; cold meats, pickles etc.

I remember once, when I was 5 or 6, when my brother and I slept over at my Nan’s. It was in the summer, late at night. The night was warm and a storm was brewing. We couldn’t sleep and at about 11 or 12 o’clock, my Nan came upstairs and asked if we wanted to run around in the garden. Of course we did, and so out we went, into the garden with Nan as the storm approached. It was a simple thing, but in many ways a magical one. Back then, as can be seen from the photograph above, there was a large apple tree in the garden which I remember vividly that night. It’s gone now. A house has been built on top.

In the 1980s, the church was remodelled, with the space between the church and the church hall – which until then had been open to the elements – covered over. Many of the rooms were also remodelled. It was necessary, and no doubt it made the church more comfortable, but of course something was inevitably lost as a result, just as it was when the church itself was changed several years before. The corridor down which I’d looked from the front of the church hall, had once been part of a single room in which we had our Sunday school classes. I remember the tiny chairs and the out-of-tune piano in the corner. Leaving this room, you’d find yourself outside. A door straight ahead led to the toilet (always cold and full of spiders) and one to the left into the gallery room – or Santa’s Grotto. To the left, after the door to the Gallery Room and the just before the loo, a flight of metal steps led down to the church. A green gate blocked the way to the street, while the steps themselves were hazardous by today’s standards, especially in winter. I can still hear the sound they made as you walked down. At the bottom, you turned left and in front of you was another room (The Fellowship Room) and another toilet opposite (even colder and with even more spiders). In my mind it’s always damp here. I can always see puddles outside, and in the Fellowship Room there is the smell of old clothes; costumes which were always kept in a walk-in cupboard (blankets for Shepherds in the Nativity).

Dame Myra Hess

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I have just been chatting with my 97 year old grandmother who was telling me how she remembered going to see pianist Dame Myra Hess play at Reading Town Hall some time during the war. The name rang a bell and I remembered watching a programme about lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery which took place during the war when all the paintings had been removed to the mines of Wales. I was sure the pianist was the same and indeed, looking her up on the web I discovered this was the case.

I’ve never heard my grandmother say anything about this before and although it’s just a short memory and nothing of great significance, it nonetheless gives me a way into the past which wasn’t there before.

Before Demolition

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On Friday last week I paid a visit to my old school (Northway Midddle) which is due to be demolished in the next few weeks to make room for houses. I left the school in 1984, the year that it was closed, and even then it was clear that the preferred option of many was to pull it down and make room for houses. Ever since, the building has remained standing in a kind of limbo, part community centre, part office space and having heard the decision last week to finally put the place out of its misery – a decision which seems absurd given its potential (potential which the council couldn’t see if it picked up a football and did six hours of keepy-ups) – I decided to try and gain entry and take a few photographs before it’s lost forever.

Northway Middle School

Granted, Northway School is not the most beautiful of buildings, but with its gym and playing fields, art room (including a walk-in kiln) and stage it could have been turned into a first class sports and cultural centre. Of course the council were as unimaginative in 1984 as they are today and instead it became a wasted space. And whatever the merits – or otherwise – of the building itself, it’s nonetheless a piece of the area’s heritage. It’s played a major part in the lives of many people and deserves to be recorded.

Therefore with my camera I endeavoured to do just that. I had been warned that the interior of the building had been altered a great deal after 1984 but even so I wanted to find something, one image that encapuslated what the place meant to me and many others. Standing inside the building for the first time in 25 years I could see just how much it had changed (rather like myself), and as I walked around in the company of the caretaker, I found that my memories were somehow scrambled as if by by the stud walls and altered layouts of the rooms. Nevertheless I started taking pictures, attempting to jump start my memory, as if the camera was a defribulator for my brain.

Before Demolition

The stairwell hadn’t changed a bit and I could almost hear the sound of the school bell and voices chattering. But in most parts of the school’s trashed interior it was as if I was walking in a place I’d never been to before. Even the view through the windows had changed almost beyond recognition. The John Radcliffe hospital loomed ever larger and the playground had already been turned into houses. Only the imposing tower block on the estate anchored the view in the past, and catching a glimpse of it through a few of the windows started the memories coming.

Before Demolition

After about half an hour and having walked around the school from top to bottom, I began at last to recall things, to see memories much more clearly. I was able to remove the stud walls and new corridors and reimagine how the place had looked when I was there. I remembered the maths room and Mr Smith. I could recall how he’d turn on the lights before appearing. In looking out the window, I could also remember that I’d been in this room when my grandad had died on January 13th 1984. It was around 2.15pm when he passed away.

Before Demolition

Perhaps the room I remembered most clearly and that which was the most recognisable was Mrs. Bantam’s. She was my teacher in the first year and even though the room was just a shell, I could easily recall how things had looked, what it was like to move around inside. The way we move around a given space and the way memories are ‘attached’ to such a movement became very apparent here. Whereas before (except on the stairwell) familiar paths through the building had been blocked by ‘new’ partitions and so on (particularly in the third year area), here those paths remained intact. Memory isn’t only triggered by what we see and hear and what we smell, but the way we move through a space. Memory is kinaesthetic.

Before Demolition

After about an hour I had to leave, finishing with photographs of the windowsills into which some pupils had scratched their names.

Before Demolition

As I think back to my visit, I don’t so much see the things I saw then, the images which you can see on the photographs, but rather my memories, which despite the altered condition of the interior have become sharper – at least in places.

Before Demolition

The above picture was once the science room, the domain of Mr. Hipkiss. The room I remember as being dark. There were high wooden desks, a blackboard in the corner and the strange lingering smell of chemicals which were kept in a room at the front of the class. We had to cover our books in wallpaper (woodchip in my case) and it was in this room that I first heard the word Google. In fact, I now recall how Mr. Hipkiss had written the number (a Googleplex, one comprising umpteen noughts) on a long sheet of paper. I can see it now on the wall. I seem to remember black blinds which might account for the fuliginous aspect of my memory and the faces Mr. Hipkiss drew of eminent scientists which were always photocopied so the text and drawings were pink. They weren’t true likenesses, he told us. He had made them all up.

Before Demolition

The above picture shows the old art room and at the back was where we had cookery lessons with Mrs. Braybrooke.

Before Demolition

This room was a basic woodworking room and general craft area which had a walk-in kiln. So which photograph encapsulates my time at the school? Well it would have to be the second photograph in this blog, that which I reproduced below.

Before Demolition

Memories are, as I said kinaesthetic and nowhere are the paths through the school better preserved than on the stairwell. How many times did I walk up and down them? Impossible to say. All I know now is that I won’t ever again and soon no-one ever will.

Back to my First School

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Today, my brother Simon and I took a trip down memory lane and visited New Marston First School which had opened its doors as part of its anniversary celebrations. The school had opened in 1949 and 27 years later, in 1976 I began my time there, leaving four years later to attend Northway Middle school. Simon had started three years earlier than me and it was hard to believe that some 30 years and more had passed since that time. I can still recall quite clearly my time at nursery (a stone’s throw away) and my first visit to the school when I was four years old. I’d made a picture of a lamb with polystyrene balls – or rather out of polystyrene balls I should perhaps say. And so there I was today, almost ten times the age I’d be when I first walked through the gates; if I was to return ten times my current age I’d be getting on for 400; dead in other words and a little upsetting for the children of 2409.

Almost straight away, as soon as we walked through the gates I began to feel a wave of nostalgia flooding not so much over me, but within me; ‘welling within me’ would perhaps be a better phrase for I could sense the place physically; I could recall walking there as a child. Much of it looks much the same, although of course things have changed, a few new doors, a new bicycle shed (or is it shelter now?) and so on, but essentially little else had been altered. However, after 30 years or more things are bound to be different and nowhere was this more evident than at what had been the swimming pool; a place beloved by my nostalgic mind, but loathed at the time by my feeble little body.

New Marston First School

The changing rooms were always, to say the least, basic; sheds (or were they shelters?) comprising holes, breezeblocks and a corrugated roof. They were insubstantial then and just about standing in their decrepitude now, but the pool itself, if anything does remain is now lost in a jungle of trees, brambles and weeds. I couldn’t imagine a scene more different from what I could remember; indeed, if the whole plot had been cleared and a new block built in its place it wouldn’t have seemed as changed. It was shocking to see that part of my childhood had already become in part a ruin – but not just a ruin, rather, one undiscovered in the midst of sprawling vegetation. The swimming pool had become the equivalent – albeit less dramatic – of a Mayan temple lost in a Mexican jungle.

New Marston First School

Nature was reclaiming a part of my childhood, much as it had recovered the graves I’d seen at Highgate cemetery and I was reminded of the words of Walter Benjamin and his concept of ‘Natural History’ which is not, as we might suppose, the history of nature, but rather a term to describe the manner in which the ‘artefacts of human history acquire an aspect of mute, natural being at the point where they begin to lose their place in a viable form of life.’ I’d always thought about this definition in respect to ruins and other monuments of the past, and yet here it was, perfectly illustrated at the remains of a pool in which I used to swim (and in which I’d gained my 10 metre swimming badge).
Standing at the back of the pool and looking into the undergrowth, I could almost hear the sound of the water; I could remember the grey clouds which always seemed to gather whenever it was swim-day. And looking at the backs of the changing rooms, I could see in my mind’s eye, the board on which the temperature was always chalked and which was never above 16oC.

New Marston First School

Inside, the school had changed very little. The main hall straight in front was everything I remembered it being – although there was a new floor (the old floor was a brown tiled one with a tennis court marked – for some reason – in tape) but before we could go inside we were greeted and taken to the ‘anniversary display’ in what was, in our day at least, the east-end of the school and a very different place to the west. It has to be said that the display left something to be desired. There were a few documents from the 1950s and 90s, but very little from the 70s which rather surprised me. Still, I was rather more interested in looking around and walking the length of the ‘east-end’ corridor the memories soon returned. But these memories were not so much of specific things but rather a general sense of having been there before a long time ago. They were memories insofar as I could recall images, albeit vague, and could recognise differences (it’s in the differences – what’s not there and what has been added – that memories are perhaps most clearly defined), but these memories were as much physical as cerebral; they were sensations rather than impressions. Now this may not be the time to begin discussing the kinaesthetic nature of memory or the notion of consciousness as corporeal (embodied mind as opposed to a mind/body dualism) but I was interested in how my visit to the school would help me in my recent work with phenomenological perception… but more of that later.

New Marston First School

At the end of the east-end corridor is a small incline on which we used to stand in line to get our dinner. The canteen itself has now been moved (to what was a cloakroom) but looking at the room from the outside I couldn’t get over how small it was. My memories of the canteen have always been of a large room, full of echoes in which hundreds of children sat and ate their food. Looking at it today I could see how my memory had ‘grown’ the interior to match my body in the years that had passed. It was a fraction of the size I’d remembered.
New Marston First School

Looking at what is now called the sports hall – opposite what was the canteen – I could see that something was different but couldn’t tell exactly what that something was. Initially, and consciously at least, I thought that nothing much had changed, but a change had been registered somewhere, because when we went outside, I could see straight away that most of the old large windows had been blocked off which answered the question ‘what’s different?’ that had been there all the time.
The more we walked through the school, so more changes became apparent. Where the school had previously been one long corridor, there were now several doors dividing it up. This, I would imagine, has as much to do with fire safety as anything else and called to mind how when we were at school the fire alarm was the headmaster, Mr. Norris, who during drills walked through the school ringing a bell. In the event of a real fire, one imagines he might well have run rather than walked and shouted ‘Fire! Get out! Get out!’ just to be sure.

New Marston First School

In the main hall, which we’d glimpsed when we first arrived, things – apart from the floor and a scattering of technology – had changed very little. The wall-bars still stood against one of the walls and the stage still stood musing upon my past successes.
New Marston First School

Boy in dressing gown was one notable part. A snake-charmer in Little Mookra another. But the crowning achievement was Prince Florenzel in Snow White. When I was meant to be proclaiming to the audience of my love for Snow White I was indisposed in the toilet. The stone steps leading to the stage (from the toilet) are still as they were; as clear and as sparkly as the memory itself. Indeed, along with these steps, there was a lot that was quite unchanged.

New Marston First School

The clothes pegs, benches and shoe-baskets of one of the old cloakrooms were still in place. But it wasn’t so much things still in situ or things that had changed which prompted a rush of memories, as the line we were walking.
New Marston First School

What was most familiar to me as we walked through the school was the shape of the corridor, the shape of the ‘line’ we followed. Therefore, the nostalgia pangs (for want of a better way of putting it) weren’t so much the result of a mental response to the school but also a physical one. Or, to take the argument I alluded to previously, the response was that of an embodied mind; in other words, we don’t remember things in the mind and as a consequence feel a physical response, but rather they are one and the same thing. The recollection isn’t only triggered through our senses (in this case our vision) but by our physical position in a place, by our being in that place; we sense and think with our bodies.
New Marston First School

I felt this particularly strongly in the playground in which there was a notable absence of climbing frames – proper climbing frames that is, with metal bars and concrete underneath. As I walked across the playground to the door which led back into the west-end corridor I found myself ‘physically thinking’ of times associated with my being at the school; my nan’s garden, summer holidays and our house in Coniston Avenue. It wasn’t so much just recalling memories but somehow experiencing them.
After 40 minutes or so we left, and it was a very strange feeling to walk back through the gates, doing something so clearly connected with going home, to where we lived as children. The view up the hill only served to pull the body in that direction.
New Marston First School

Instead however we turned left and walked towards our old Middle School – Northway, which is now something of a community centre; I say something, as from the outside it looks more than a little care-worn. Again, the same pangs of nostalgia took a hold as I walked through the gate, and again these sensations came about as a result of being in that particular place. Seeing a photograph brings back memories, but that is very different to feeling them. In looking at a images of something as it was may bring about visual memories. But being in a place makes them physical
Like the swimming pool at New Marston, I haven’t seen something so fundamentally altered (and which has made such an impact on me) as the playground – or rather, the place where the playground used to be. The whole area including a large piece of land surrounding what was the second year area has now become a small housing development. The problem is that part of the school or community centre or whatever it’s meant to be now appears utterly incongruous.
Northway Middle School

To have a school gym abutting a bungalow is odd at the very least; in terms of my remembering the past and how things used to be it was utterly absurd. Of course things change, but one would have thought that planners could have been a little more imaginative in how the school was incorporated into the development and how in turn the development was incorporated into the school.

Northway Middle School

The gym and the second year classrooms, of which I have very fond memories, looked like a limb tied off from the body of the school, and as a result they appeared lifeless and in need of removal
Northway Middle School

Having left the school and returned to the car we drove past our childhood home in Coniston Avenue. All roads from the two schools we’d visited seemed to take us there but when we drove past we saw clearly how the passage of time could change things, again for the worse. Since my dad left a few years back the house has gradually fallen into a state of disrepair, but this has become a whole lot worse and the house looks on its way to becoming derelict. The fences have gone, the garage is boarded up and most shockingly of all, the large oak tree which played such a part in my childhood, being feature of the small world that I knew and fuelling my imagination has been cut down. We drove past quickly so I didn’t have time to take it all in, but in that split second I found a gap which couldn’t be filled by a hundred years of looking.

A to B

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As part of a new project, I took a walk to Headington, going via the house where I grew up. I haven’t walked around that area for many years and was quite surprised at how run down it appeared to be, particularly my old house. Of course places change – it’s only natural, but many houses and gardens in what was once a very well maintained street looked – for want of a better word – shabby. Like a lot of places nowadays, the front gardens have been abandoned, either to cars or, through apathy, to the weeds. Walls and fences have been torn down. They’ve collapsed or been removed. There’s a profusion of signs too – a common complaint for many – which litter the streets; a far cry from the 1970s and 80s.

I was also aware as I walked of the huge increase in traffic in the area, at least since I’d lived there, particularly towards Old Headington which, I assume has something to do with the ever expanding John Radcliffe Hospital.

It was on my way to Old Headington that I became aware of two different qualities of memory – not specific ones as such, but those accumulated memories which help us know where we are. I’ve walked thousands of times up and down the streets where I lived (to and from school; to and from the shops), but on the road towards Old Headington my memories are much more of being driven, usually on my way to my Nan’s in the back of Dad’s car. Walking the street today, I noticed things that I’d never seen before whereas walking down the street on which I lived everything was much more familiar (even though they’d changed). This difference is due to the way memories of these places were formed. Of the street on which I lived they were formed, in the main, through walking. On the road to Old Headington, they were formed, again in the main, through a window in the back of the car.

As we walk, we accumulate a sense of place through the memories which are stored in the mind. These images are stronger and clearer when taken in through walking, and indeed when recalled through walking. The slower the pace (although not to the point of a standstill) the more we absorb of the world and thereby the better our sense of place.

The world today, or rather our interaction with and indeed within it is very ‘nodal’. We travel from A to B, usually (but not always) as quickly as we can. The bit in between A and B is taken up, in the case of the car, with looking at the road ahead of us. I should point out that I am in no way anti-car, anti-train or anti-plane; I rely on them as anyone does; my point is that we rely on them far too much at the expense of our engagement with the world around us.

When we walk from A to B however, we don’t ‘get’ just A and B but everything in between. The act of walking ‘anchors’ our destination and the place from which we travel, positioning them in the world. We have time to think, to see and to accumulate a sense of place. We have time to engage with the world and thereby position ourselves within it.

Whilst studying the Old London Road for another project, I began to get an understanding of how slowing our life down helps us to engage with the world around us. I also became aware of how roads today are much different to those in the past. Journeys were slower and roads were very much more a connection between two places. This may sound like a truism, but what I mean is that today, one could travel for mile after mile on roads without actually getting anywhere at all. Destination is not something built into the fabric of the road – something which I felt was very much the case on the Old London Road. Again I should point out that I am not in favour (were it possible) of a return to bumpy, uncomfortable, 16 hour journeys to London.

When the pace of life was slower, when people walked more than they did, I wonder whether their sense of place in the world was different (physical as opposed to social). Again I don’t want to sound as if I’m being naively romantic about the past – it was often grim and difficult to say the very least, but I do think it must have been the case that the world was perceived very differently, not because of the lack of technologies such as the camera, the internet, film or television per se, but because of the pace. Technology of course is a contributing factor to the increased pace of life (and not just through transport). Increasingly we use our mobile phones or email to contact one another (and a great thing both of them are too). But again, this form of contact reduces the world to nodes, to A and B. In the days before such technologies (even when phones were abundant – this applies to a time not so long ago) if we wanted to speak with someone, we would go to meet them, or write them a letter. Either way, our words were physical; they had a place in the world; it wasn’t just about A to B but, as with walking, A through to B.

I think what I’ve gleaned through my ramblings – both physical and verbal – is that we are missing the bits in between. Everything is being reduced to A, B and C. Where there are bit in between, they are little more than a hinterland, glimpses of which we snatch as we travel along roads, motorways, train tracks or even through the air. This brings me back to the houses of which I spoke earlier. They have the appearance, even to the walker, of something that is seen in transit, at speed. Even if one looks for a period of time at one of the houses I saw today (again by no means all of them) it’s as if one is looking through the window of a passing car.

Memory and Iconoclasm

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I watched a programme the other night on the Iconoclasts and the destruction of English Religious Art during the 16th and 17th centuries. Seeing the sculptures with their faces hacked and limbs broken off, I couldn’t help but think how beautiful these images really were; paintings with faces rubbed away, headless sculptures surrounding effigies and so on. There is a beauty in the destruction, a marker of man’s presence which is, distrurbingly perhaps, more palpable than any sculpture could ever be. Perhaps it is the mark of the common, ordinary man as opposed to the rare being which makes these destroyed images so imminent. It takes little to smash; quite the opposite to create. Or perhaps the rough hewn cuts, cleaving the stone are evidence of a moment; a moment in time which through its violence is as immediate as a haiku. 300 years can pass in the few seconds it takes to read one. 300 years can pass in the second it takes to see the mark of an axe.

As I thought about what I’d seen – the whitewashed walls and the triumph of words over imagery, I couldn’t help but see memory in much the same light. As soon as the outside world enters through our eyes, memory sets to work with its own hammers and chisels, striking out and smashing the retained image to pieces. And even though our memories – like the sculptures and paintings vandalised during the Reformation – are vague, they are nonetheless imminent windows which compress time as effortlessly as the axe and the haiku.

Dark Tourism Conference III

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At college yesterday, I noticed how the text I’d written on the windows (see Dark Tourism Conference II) had faded. There was something very poetic about it, the fact the text (the wire) had in the course of time faded, although there were still parts of it remaining. It served to remind me how the past eventually dissolves altogether, how the pain of tragedies in the course of time fades into forgetfulness.

Dark Tourism

Something else which struck a chord with me regarding this link between text and forgetting, was a quote from Frances Yates’ book, ‘The Art of Memory,’ in which she writes:

“In the Phaedrus; Socrates tells the story of the God Theuth who invented numbers and arithmetic, geometry and astronomy, draughts and dice, and most importantly of all, letters. The king of all Egypt was the God Thamus who told Theuth that the invention of writing was not, as suggested, an elixir of memory and wisdom, but of reminding; the invention will produce forgetfulness.”

It would be interesting to create this project in a place where the text could remain, to slowly fade away in time. One could imagine going over the text as it fades, creating on the glass a kind of palimpsest…

Zuleika Dobson

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It was through reading E.M. Forster’s lectures (collected in a book entitled ‘Aspects of the Novel’ and first published in 1927) delivered under the auspices of Trinity College, Cambridge, that I first came across a reference to Max Beerbohm’s satirical novel Zuleika Dobson. In particular it was a passage quoted by Forster as ‘this most exquisite of funeral palls… Has,” he goes on to say “not a passage like this a beauty unattainable by serious litertature?” The answer to that is in some respects yes and below is that very passage:

“Through the square, across the High Street and down Grove Street they passed. The Duke looked up at the tower of Merton… Strange that tonight it would still be standing there, in all its sober and solid beauty – still be gazing over the roofs and chimneys, at the tower of Magdalen, its rightful bride. Through untold centuries of the future it would stand thus, gaze thus. He winced. Oxford walls have a way of belittling us; and the Duke was loth to regard his doom as trivial.

Aye by all the minerals we are mocked. Vegetables, yearly deciduous are far more sympathetic. The lilac and laburnum making lovely now the railed pathway to Christ Church Meadow were all a-swaying and a-nodding to the Duke as he passed by – ‘Adieu, adieu your Grace,’ they were whispering. ‘We are very sorry for you – very sorry indeed. We never dared suppose you would predecease us. We think your death a very great tragedy. Adieu!”

The premise of the novel concerns the arrival into Oxford of the beautiful Zuleika Dobson, a woman of such beauty, any man who sees her cannot help but fall in love.

“To these Emperors, for whom none weeps, time will give no surcease. Surely, it is sign of some grace in them that they rejoiced not, this bright afternoon, in the evil that was to befall the city of their penance.”

Broad Street

The problem is that Miss Dobson herself cannot love any man who loves her in return and so, having fallen in love with the brilliant Duke of Dorset, her love is immediately lost on hearing of his reciprocal feelings. Spurned, there is only one course of action left to the Duke and that is suicide by drowning in the Isis during Eights Week. But such is the esteem in which he’s held, and such is the love every undergraduate holds for Miss Dobson, that almost the entire undergraduate population of Oxford plunges into the river and is lost.

Taking the plaintive tones of the passage above and some other extracts of the novel, I assumed (not recalling the date of its first publication) that Beerbohm’s novel was something of an allegory about the lost generation of the First World War, of the lost innocence of Edwardian Oxford. However, the novel was first published in 1911, and as such, the book is not unlike the pair of black owls which perch on the battlements of the Duke’s ancestral home and foretell of his death.

“Young Oxford! Here, in this mass of boyish faces, all fused and obliterated, was the realisation of that phrase. Two or three thousands of human bodies, human souls? Yet the effect of them in the moonlight was as of one great passive monster.”

Just after reading the novel, I started reading again Peter Vansittart’s survey of the First World War, Voices From the Great War. Comprising quotes, poems, letters and so on, the book paints a picture of the war through the long lost contemporaneous voices. I first bought the book following a visit made to Ypres and turned to it again having received a gift of almost 200 postcards from the time of the Great War.

World War 1 Serviceman

Taking the three together – Beerbohm’s novel, the postcards and the quotes – one begins to read the absurd fantasy of Zuleika Dobson in an altogether different way. We have all seen images of men cheerfully marching to the Front, waving their hats and shouting, and when one reads of the mass (almost cheerful) suicide of all the young men in the novel, one cannot help but compare.

“There was a confusion of shouts from the raft of screams from the roof. Many youths-all the youths there-cried ‘Zuleika!’ and leapt emulously headlong into the water. ‘Brave fellows!’ shouted the elder men, supposing rescue-work. The rain pelted, the thunder pealed. Here and there was a glimpse of a young head above water-for an instant only.
Shouts and screams now from the infected barges on either side. A score of fresh plunges. ‘Splendid fellows!'”

And from Vansitartt’s book…

“The enormous expansion of wealth in the peaceful years between 1908 and 1914 brought not happiness but fear, and fear so powerful that it could be expressed only in images of fear and destruction. When war came, it was almost universally accepted as something foreseen and foretold. Even those who loathed the notion of it acquiesced in it as inevitable, and it is not foolish to conclude that what ultimately brought the war was not the ambitions and fears of Germany, but a death-wish in the peoples of Europe, a half-conscious desire to break away from their humdrum or horrifying circumstances to something more exciting or more exalted.” C.M. Bowra

“War might drive a man till he dropped: it could be a dangerous and bloody business; we believed, however, that it still offered movement, colour, adventure, and drama. Later, when the murderous, idiotic machinery of the Western Front was grinding away, of course all was different.” J.B. Priestly

Of course it was different – the reality of the situation. And having turned the last few pages of Beerbohm’s novel, I wondered what it would have looked like, all those dead young men lying prone in the waters of the Isis.

Memory – The Poor Draughtsman II

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Following on from my last entry on the subject (Memory – The Poor Draughtsman) I thought back to the ruined church I saw in Berlin, the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial church.

For me, the tower is just what the memory of a building is; a ruin of sorts, one which in part has been reconstructed by the brain to make an image which best approximates reality. Its edges are indistinct, the stone is vague and the fabric a hotchpotch of different materials no doubt rescued from the rubble. Whenever we think of a place we know – for example a building – we build – or rebuild – anew in our minds every time we think of it, constructing the remembered thing from whatever we can find.
The following image is a quick Photoshop sketch which takes the idea of the remembered ruin by blending an old map of Oxford (1750) with the image of the contemporary city as a ruin (aerial view) which I made recently. A more finished piece might leave those buildings still extant intact and blend in fully the areas which have been completely destroyed or altered.

Looking at this, and considering ideas of memory and draughtmanship, I was reminded of the work of Arie A. Galles who has made fourteen large scale drawings of aerial photographs taken over death camps during the second world war. I first discovered his work when studying the death camp at Belzec and have now begun to understand or interpret his work in a different way.

For him, memory is no ruin, it is as sharp as a photograph taken from the skies. But there is it seems a difference between the memory of a place and the memory of people. In the image of Belzec (above) something has been obscured, hidden, buried. It is a piece of text, the fourth verse of the Kaddish; a prayer said for the dead. Perhaps then, we should read this image as a warning, that this place of trauma will always be there, but is victims are gone; there is always the risk it seems of forgetting.
What is also interesting for me about Galles’ work, is the fact the drawings are made using charcoal. There is something about it (something it shares with coal), which gives the drawings of Galles’ extra poignancy; something living, now dead is used to make something new – it creates. I mention coal as I have in light of my work on my family tree, in particular with regards my great-grandfather Elias who worked in the coal mines of South Wales, been considering making drawings using coal. The images of the ruined city, the areial photographs and the black and white photographs I’ve been looking at of people long dead all point to my looking more closely at this idea.

The Memory of the Mountain

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Having considered my recent findings as to the meaning behind the name Pantygasseg, I realised that a visit to the area in the next few weeks was essential. I knew I had to draw the outline of the mountain, it’s shape, perhaps on a large wall, but as I considered the line, I began to think of ways of expressing it. Could there be a way of expressing it sonically for example? Perhaps, yes, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought about using material pertinent to the place itself, in this instance; coal.

My work is about mining the past, bringing the past to the surface, and coal is of course a product of the past (mined and brought to the surface). It’s a material composed of things which lived and which could be used to create, i.e. like charcoal – and could be used to draw the line of the mountain, or to be more precise, my memory of the line of the mountain. Coal is therefore a means of expressing my memory using the very substance of the mountain’s own; a means which also highlights the contrast between the human scale of time and History itself.

There’s also a contrast (with regards to my research on the Family Tree and my work on the Holocaust) between memory and forgetting, particularly when considering the metaphor of the ground as mind. The ground is mined, coal is extracted and the past is ‘remembered’. What the Nazis were hoping to accomplish, when they killed and buried hundreds of thousands in pits (at places such as Belzec) was, in a sense, to forget.

Invisible Cities

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Distance

“Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes. For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.”
Threads

“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
Postcards

“Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow on from one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.”
Measurements

“The city does not consist of this but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past; the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat’s progress along it as he slips into the same window; the firing range of a gunboat which has suddenly appeared beyond the cape and the bomb that destroys the guttering; the rips in the fish net and the three old men seated on the dock mending nets and telling each other for the hundredth time the story of the gunboat of the usurper, who some same was the queen’s illegitimate son, abandoned in his swaddling clothes there on the dock… As this wave of memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira’s past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”
Memory

“Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced… The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.”
Contingency

“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites… Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment…”

Memory
“Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced… The city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations ,parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory.”

The Moment

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Recently I was reading an article in the National Geographic about memory and was particularly interested in an explanation of how it works, i.e. the physical/chemical structure of a memory within the human brain. In layman’s terms, the brain is in a constant state of flux; neurons communicate with one another via a 1000 trillion synapses and a memory is a stored pattern of this communication. Every memory we have therefore is a pattern, the shape of a network, which ties in with the image I drew of a moment as being made up of numerous lines – pathways – knotted together, but always in flux, always being untied and retied with other paths to make new moments. Therefore, re-creating a memory (or a post-memory) in ‘artistic’ terms (string work) is, diagramatically how memory works in the human brain.

I have also been considering how my research into my family tree fits in with the projects I have been working on recently and over the past year or so. I made the following list of areas which have interested me:

My place in history (Holocaust, WW1)
My place in the spaces of history (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oxford)
My relationship with people in the past and their relationship with me
Old photographs of Oxford
Old photographs of victims found in Auschwitz / found photographs
Old family photographs (holiday snaps/distance)
Memorials (as aids to memory and post-memory)
Objects (as aids to memory and post-memory)
Landscape (past, present and future)
Perception of history/the past (Frog and Dinosaur)
Maps, fictional and factual
Pathways
Moments as a combination of pathways
Potential Space
Windows and bicycles in old photographs
Twinned (GPS)
Parisian Cemeteries

The family tree is a living document. There is a big difference between a list of names on a memorial and those in a family tree. It is a social document which reveals my relationship with people in the past as well as the sheer number of people to whom I am related today; people who are as anonymous to me as I am to them.

It is a document of my coming into being and a blueprint for my own existence. It’s an impossible document, both certain and utterly implausible at the same time, and its impossibility, the unlikely combination of encounters from the late eighteenth century through to the present, is illustrated when births are mapped on a map of the British Isles. Ancestors from Norfolk, Lincolnshire, South Wales, Sussex, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire all moved from villages to towns, from one part of the country to another, following pathways which eventually led to my being born in Oxford in 1971. Every action they made, every thought they had (which of course would influence their actions) had to be exactly as it was for me to be who I am; anything different, no matter how small or irrelevant, and I would not be me. The more one thinks about the combination of actions and thoughts, things that were said and things that weren’t said, things seen and those which went unnoticed, the more impossible existence becomes.

This means of course that it isn’t simply the thoughts and actions of our ancestors which had to be the same; the thoughts and actions of everyone they knew, or strangers they met or saw in the street had to be as they were, for nothing exists in isolation.

These – till recently – unknown, anonymous relatives are like the distant people in my old holiday snaps, people with whom I shared a space and who therefore, unwittingly affected the path I took in life. Making these anonymous people the subjects of the photograph, places me and my family into the distance and therefore allows me to experience what it means to be anonymous to other people; the fact is, there is no difference at all.

I am related to thousands of people I do not know, who are distant, yet our lives have been brought into being through common elements; a shared ancestry.

Looking at holiday snaps as things in themselves we can say that they are two things; they are examples of both a memory and a moment. Of course, it could be argued that they are memories of moments and therefore one the same thing; however memories of that moment (sitting on the beach) are only linked to the main subjects (my family) and not the rest of the people who shared, or made that moment. Referring back to the maps of memories and moments, these photographs and indeed every photograph taken are themselves both these maps in one; they are the image of someone’s memory (the photographer’s) and the image of a combination of paths at a given moment in time.

When looking at photographs taken in times before our birth, we become a part of the moment and somehow witness that moment. To view, for example a photograph of Oxford taken in 1907 is to participate in that moment and in the photographer’s memory. We can use conjecture to imagine the immediate future and the past, but of course this then becomes a fiction, a made up country like the places I would invent as a child; a case of the frog and the dinosaur, where fragments of the past (dinosaur DNA in the bodies of mosquitoes trapped in amber) are combined with our own imaginal thought (frog DNA) to create our new Dinosaur (our picture of History).

As I’ve said before, this Jurassic Park metaphor is interesting in that our own DNA is itself derived from our ancestors, some of whom would have participated in the moment of the photograph, after all, a moment is not restricted by space, a moment is not defined by a physical place, but a period of time covering all places. In the photograph shown, I can wonder what my Great-Grandmother was doing the moment the shutter was released.

To some extent, we have all participated in all time because we are the outcome of an immense combination of moments, each comprising incredibly intricate paths, thoughts, conversations etc. We were imminent or potential in every moment, and as every moment required for our coming into being came and went as it should, so our potential grew until we were born. Anything different, anywhere in the world and we might not be here.

The non-confining of moments to space is illustrated by the boundaries of a photograph. Events pictured in a photograph did not happen in isolation. An open window reveals other spaces of that moment, spaces such as those inhabited in that moment by my forebears. Open windows are evidence of lives being led, oblivious to the photograph being taken.

A parked bicycle at the side of the road is also evidence of this. The owner of that bicycle has left the picture, but not the moment; he is completely unaware of the image being taken, and through his absence in the image, his presence in the moment is somehow heightened.

When looking at photographs of the Holocaust, in particular of transports arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau, we must remember that these events did not happen in isolation. The moment did not exist solely behind the barbed wire fences or within the borders of the photograph, but across the entire world, and, as with my holiday snaps, reality is not that determined by the lens of the camera, it is not only a moment annexed by the chemical reactions which miraculously capture the image or solely the subject of a discriminating eye, but everything existing around it. Just as enlarging the distance of a photograph pushes the original subject into the distance (a subject made no less real because of it), so we can imagine the photographs taken at Auschwitz-Birkenau as being events in which my ancestors were simply the distance, in which they shared a moment in time; and it wouldn’t take a leap of the imagination to enlarge the distance of these images and make those who are distant, my ancestors, the subject.

Researching my family tree has heightened the sense of my participation in past events. Recalling Henri Bortoft’s book, ‘The Wholeness of Nature’ I thought about authentic wholes and how the whole is imminent in the parts. If we as individuals are the parts of the whole family tree then it might be said that the entire family tree, past, present and future is imminent in each and every one of us. I thought also of my work on the gesture of the apple tree in my garden and considered how much it shares with the gesture of individual existence.

Thinking about this and the idea of my ancestors being merely in the distance of the Holocaust, I thought about the gesture of the Holocaust, something which showed itself to me whilst watching Raul Hildberg in Claude Lanzmann’s ‘Shoah’, when he talked about a document detailing the journeys of death trains arriving and leaving Treblinka. The document was on the face of it a banal piece of bureaucracy, a timetable which, superficially, had all the significance of a timetable for trains taking tourists on holiday (it should be known that the same company which timetabled the trains for taking the Jews to the death camps, and which collected the fares they had to pay, was at the same time transporting people on their holidays, where they no doubt took photographs). Of course, these trains were taking, as I said, the Jews to their deaths. Therefore, when looking at photographs of trains at Birkenau, one mustn’t just see them as trains that have always been there within the confines of the image, just as the people being unloaded were never only victims. They were people who had lives before the war, brought in on trains, timetabled by bureaucrats from places all over Europe. With them they brought the banal objects of existence from which we can try and piece their lives together. But banal in this sense does not mean dull or boring, but rather normal in the face of what they were to experience.

Looking again at my map of where I came from, I get the sense of people not existing in isolation and also of moments not being confined to spaces or places; I understand with greater clarity, the sense of who these victims were; people just like me and my ancestors. And when researching, it is often the banal which is the most interesting, not as I said, the dull or boring, but what is normal in the face of History.

Bill Viola and Highlights

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“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”

I was thinking about the above quote from Bill Viola in relation to the myth of the Three Fates; Clotho, Lachesis and Atropo. I had imagined creating a work involving string being drawn, measured and cut as signifying life being measured and cut. This was to have been created in relation to my ongoing work on the Holocaust.

However, it could be that the lengths of string represent not only individual lives, but these discrete moments (memories) which Viola describes, i.e. moments of a single life. This could be very interesting as regards work which aims to find the individual amongst the millions who died in the Holocaust. A pile of cut strings could represent a pile of bodies, or, a pile of one person’s memories.

19-10-07

19-10-07-ii

© Nicholas Hedges 2006-20

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