this too

MY GRANDFATHER'S SHOP

The lovely people at Bewdley Local History Group carried on looking after I left and yesterday sent me a photo showing my grandparents' grocer's shop. It's a little disappointing - you need a magnifying glass to see the name, Peter Morris, but evidence that it really existed. 

Looking at the vehicle and the clothes, I'd guess this photo was taken just before WWI. That means my father or one of his three younger sisters could be among the group of children on the bridge. I recall a sepia photo of them, posed in similar outfits: knickerbockers, boots, white aprons. Even if I could get that photo now, I don't think I'd be able to tell if they are among these children - too far away they are, in every sense.

So I fall to day-dreaming, imagining their lives above the shop, and in particular my father's long bachelor life there. The census and business records I saw on my recent visit told me they took over the shop in 1902 or 3, when he was a toddler, and there he lived and later worked for nearly 40 years, until his widowed mother's retirement in the late 1930s, when they moved two doors along to the corner house on the riverside.

Not a hard worker, I remember his sisters telling me (but fondly). No scurrying, servile or officious businessman my father, growing up to take his place in the shop with its flow of customers, all of them regular and familiar, no doubt, in this small town. What he liked was smiling and chatting, 'passing the time of day', as they used to say - the mundane enquiries and answers, smiles and chuckles. Often to be found, they said, leaning on the bridge outside the shop, watching the world and the river flow by.

Did he love the smells and sounds of the shop, although he refused to be its slave? Was he sweetly lulled by its familiar, useful sameness? Or was he frustrated, absenting himself into imagination, staring down the river at a wider world he saw no way of reaching? I've no idea. He never said. Or perhaps I didn't listen.

TRANSFIXED

   

If you stand quite still

and cover your ears

and listen inwards,

you can hear the whipping willow

of a malevolent fairy's wand

hovering around your heart,

taking aim,

and then you're struck -

not dumb,

for your mouth keeps on babbling,

not witless,

for your mind still seethes with ideas,

not senseless,

for you can feel it all -

simply transfixed.

 

Not your body,

your soul.

AGAINST THE SKY

   

BOTH

Look

both ways.

Still not enough.

(Third and final entry in the Illustrated Poem Marathon)

WHICH?

Beckoned by shadows

of what's gone or what's to come

- so hard to know which.

(Another for the Illustrated Poem Marathon).

THE BELL

from evening mist

the bell

of life passing

Issa

For the Illustrated Poem Marathon, the latest brilliant idea from the talented Wally, aka Crack Skull Bob, curator of the recent wildly successful Self-Portrait Marathon. Entries so far are here.

LITTLE THINGS

IN THE FOREST

Having gone away on holiday with the stated intention of getting lost, I did just that.  In the forest. Where better? Armed with one of those little books of suggested walks whose author's definition of 'straight on' and 'bear South-East' were, ahem, clearly not quite the same as mine. So what proclaimed itself to be a half-day's hike took a substantial detour, retraced its steps, tried again, and ended up being an all-day hike. I was glad. I wasn't expected anywhere. And the intended route just skirted the forest, rather than walking, as I did, through its heart.

Seeing no one for several hours, speaking only to the trees, rarely having a view more than fifty yards ahead - and happy, happy! To be just right here and not know quite where you're going. To be surrounded by green and softly filtered light. To be held and enfolded and lured gently onwards. Lovely.

Leaving behind grief and failed plans and confusion, it was what I needed. It's what I need regularly and don't get nearly enough of. I think it's what my nature needs, actually, and that the lack of it is no small part of why we're going to pot.

BEWDLEY

Worcestershire, where I come from, is gentle, middle-English countryside, and I suppose 'gentle, middle-English' describes me too. Certainly I feel at home here, walking through woods and fields beside the River Severn. This is a country of old trees and rowing boats and swans and fishermen and perfectly preserved steam trains which chug and whistle across the landscape.

Last week I did what hordes of middle-aged people do on their holidays. I went to Bewdley, my father's birthplace and where he lived for most of the fifty years until his late and ill-advised marriage, in search of his roots and mine. Few of those hordes, perhaps, do this with the guilt I felt in seeking a dead family when I've foresworn the living one.

 

Between long country rambles, the trail led to an old house beside the river where my father's family lived, to Telford's bridge, where - I remember hearing from his sisters - he leaned and gossiped instead of serving in the family's grocer's shop (the large corner house by the bridge in the old print - it's still there; the shop, two doors down in the print, is gone). It led to the office of the local history group and poring with them over censuses and parish records, leafing through their files and finding a receipt from 1914 with the signature of the grandfather who died long before I was born. It led, via a conversation with a gallery owner who sold me an old postcard, to a country church and churchyard outside the town where the gravestones of 18th and 19th century Morrises may be, but I didn't find them, and the stained-glass window is by William Morris (no relation, but proud to share the name). 

It led nowhere, really, for the past is not there. My father isn't there. He's not by the bridge or in the tea-rooms crowded with old women on a coach trip from Birmingham, thirty of them packed into what was once his sitting room. It led nowhere, I suppose, except into myself. But it was a sweet small journey.