the shell

One of the nicest pieces of work that I ever made was a gift to a Professor of English Literature, whom I was dating at the time, many years ago, now. It was a limpet shell, pale, steep sided, scrubbed clean of the echoes of the sea, and of the remains of the flesh of the creature once dwelling within, inside which, in the form of a spiral, I inscribed, in pencil, the words of a love poem by Robert Herrick. The shell, an enchantingly simple, bony tent-like structure, was delicately tinted in shades of ochre, buff and cream, the smooth interior surface accepting the mobile graphite as if it had been designed for just that. I placed the shell, weighted with words of love, in a small box lined with white tissue paper, and could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of bestowing it.

The relationship is long over; no correspondance has passed between us for at least a decade, but I remember the man, and the shell, and my longing both to give it, and to keep it. It was received, as I recall, in the very spirit in which I had fashioned it. One can ask for no more than that.

fear of flying

Once, taking a much delayed night time flight from the island of Cyprus, where my father and I had attended the wedding of my youngest sister, I fell prey to an overwhelming anxiety concerning the safety of air travel, and our journey in particular, a powerful presentiment of disaster taking an unshakeable hold on my mind. Overwrought by the long waiting, oppressed by the darkness of the night, and longing for home, I became convinced that my father and I would never see our family and our home again, that we would fall out of the sky over land or ocean, thus to perish.

As we took our seats in the aeroplane, I was conscious of a fine tremor throughout my body, a parched mouth and pent up breath escaping my lungs only in small gasps. Once seated, I placed my clenched hands, icy despite the heat of the night, in my lap, closed my eyes for a moment. In that moment, I felt the warm enclosure of my father's hand, taking my own in his, as though I were a child. He did not speak, beyond remarking that my hands were cold, there was no need for words; my desire to implore him to reassure me that we would reach England safely assuaged by the compassionate pressure of his hand.

At present, experiencing an anxiety of the most profound order regarding my ability to draw, I realise that whenever I think about the act of drawing, I suffer the same symptoms that possessed me whilst suspended in the airspace over Europe; a pounding heart, mouth as dry as the desert, chilled, damp, trembling hands, a nervous flutter in the gut. I have not touched pencil to paper, yet am wholly in thrall to the fear of failure, a terror of taking wing and thus becoming vulnerable to the possibility of falling.

Of late, desperate to calm my fright, which is a grave impediment to my practice, I have taken to closing my eyes, and imagining the loving warmth of my father's hand closing over mine, affording me precious comfort, and conferring upon me the reassurance that it will be possible for me to begin to draw once more, even though it may be many months before I feel that I am ready to make the attempt.

 I shall never again, beyond the bounds of memory and imagination, experience my father's tender concern, shall never again be able to take his hand in mine, as I did during the weeks of illness before his death, and as he took mine during that interminable flight from Cyprus, but I have at least the cherished remembrance of his paternal sensitivity, the selfless love he extended towards his family throughout his life, and which guided his every action.

the scent of daffodils

In the dim brown quiet of November, I plant close on three hundred daffodil bulbs in the long flowerbeds of my mother's front garden, sinking the point of the trowel deep into the stubborn, flinty soil, placing each paper jacketed bulb carefully into a funnel of damp earth at trowel's depth, trying for the engineer's neatness with which my father  had always planted them, yet straying eccentrically from the mathematical regularity which he attained.

I remember my father, crouched over the  chill ground as I crouch now, handling the plump, dry, rustling bulbs tenderly, working with a rhythm acquired over a life time of planting bulbs, bright annuals, fragrant wallflowers, elegant foxgloves, reassuringly steady. It is only when he stands, pausing from his labours, that one recognises the weariness of old age, the reluctance of his limbs to perform the task he has set for them, and only then that a shaft of disquiet penetrates one's mind, hitherto lulled into security by the easy cadence of his actions.

I find that I am suddenly blinded by the tears called forth by my remembrance, scalding tears  that fall upon my hands, and cause me to cease in my endeavour, overwhelmed by an intensity of grief, muddied, chilled, exhausted.

Months later, the daffodils stand tall and brilliant in the long flowerbeds, legions of golden trumpeters proclaiming the arrival of the yellow season in all it's cool glory.When I come again to visit, my mother fills a vase with them, and places it in my room, where at night their cold, honeyed scent  perfumes the air, recalls to mind the image of my father, meticulous, stoop shouldered  over the dank, leaf littered soil of Autumn, entrusting the delicate globes of the bulbs to the darkness below ground, confident that with theearth's turning their nascent brilliance would come as a benediction and a vital affirmation of the cycle by which we all are bound.

my father's hairbrushes

Almost two years after my father's death, his hairbrushes remain upturned upon the bedside table in the room in which he last slept before being taken ill and admitted to hospital. There are two brushes, one for each hand, and it was my father's habit to take them thus, and sweep them one after the other from his brow to the nape of his neck.

They are old, slightly worn, a few silver hairs clinging to the bristles. They still smell of clean skin and the faintly musky odour of hair; the scent of my father's forehead when I bent over him to kiss him farewell at the close of each hospital visit. The scent, lingering on well after the extinguishing of life, and the cremation of my father's body, shocks me into tears, awakens such an acute sense of loss that I can no longer bear to hold the brushes, and I lay them down, side by side as my mother had placed them.

lupin

This slight drawing represents a moment of rare indulgence and pleasure on my part. It is the last drawing to be made before the onset of the crisis of fear which has prevented me from being able to work, and dates from November 2009. It is a drawing of a lupin seedling, which was growing in a little pot on the kitchen windowsill. Something about the frailty of the minute leaves, and the courageous aspect of their habit of growth moved me to make this tiny sketch, which remains precious to me, especially so as the seedling did not survive, and I have only the memory of it captured in wax crayon and pastel on a scrap of paper.

moon

I cannot witness the rising of the moon without thinking of my father, who loved the moon, and used to watch with delight as the first thin slip of the new moon gradually waxed to become a full brilliant disc, upon the surface of which it was possible to see the shadowed outlines of meres and mountains with the naked eye.

For some years my father had suffered cataracts in both eyes which had grievously distorted his vision, presenting the world as fractured and indistinct, ghostly duplications taking the stead of wholeness, print dissolving and blurring before his gaze. He was in his seventies when the cataracts were removed, and his vision restored once more to shining completeness. For him, it was though a miracle had taken place, he spoke of it as such, and to look upon him, witnessing the air of lightness about him, the new assuredness of his step, but above all, the clean, clear youthfulness of his eyes, we could believe it to be so.

We bought him a pair of binoculars so that he could look more closely on the moon, and a moon map, so that he could understand what he saw, gifts he had long postponed because he would not have been able to see the moon without a gleaming twin appearing alongside, the features of both muddled and inseperable.

In the back garden he tilted the binoculars upwards, exclaiming with child like enthusiasm at what he was now able to see, moving us to tears at his pleasure, hopeful that the transformation to his sight would be long lived.

During the last days in hospital, just before his death, his eyes had seemed very blue, opened wide in anxiety, the eyes of a frightened child. It was difficult to recall that night in the garden, when hopefulness had embraced us as the light of the rising moon had enveloped the garden, holding us rapt, bound together, for those precious moments invulnerable to the fact of our mortality, our inevitable separation from each other. It is the frantic intensity of his worried eyes that I remember, and which I would have given my life to assauge.