Kind Hearts: Marlow Bottom, Buckinghamshire
Very unusually, a picture is getting worked on for more than one hour and over more than one evening. This map is of Marlow Bottom, where I lived from age 8 to 16. General progress on picture and a few details of the animals. The spider marks the spot. More writing will emerge.
Even more surprisingly, the painting came out for a third session during a Drawing and Painting Socialist Support Group zoom meeting in November 2023. The new theme for the group was ‘Under the Surface’.
My friend Beverley Tyler was blessed with very thick, gleaming toffee-gold hair, brown eyes, and beautiful lustrous and abundant lashes. She had an easy smile and often laughed loudly, and her cheeks were pink. We played with dolls together for hours. And she had a Tressy: a teen doll with a button in its tummy. When you pressed it, its hair grew out long from a hole in the top of its head. I thought this was fantastic. More importantly, Beverley had a tender and kind heart. Her house was opposite a small field in which sat a rough wooden hut. In the hut lived an older man with wild grey hair. He was generally regarded as odd and wild and somehow frightening. He lived outside the norm. Perhaps he had been a worker on one of the farms before the village was overrun with housing developments. Perhaps he had lost his loved ones, perhaps he was neurodiverse, or a secret artist. Beverley might know. One day she told me that the man from the hut had come to her house, holding a bucket. His water supply – likely a standpipe – had stopped working. Beverley’s dad willingly filled the bucket. And then, Beverley related, the man had tried to pay for the water. Her face changed shape with compassion and sorrow. We were about 13 or 14 at the time.
This is Beverley. And now the painting is about about our friendship and a formative lesson in dignity and kindness.. Beverley was super-clever at maths. I wasn’t. I think she had a little dog called Benjy but I might have this totally wrong because I was scared of dogs then. It was at Beverley’s house that I first had the delicious combination of fish fingers and spaghetti hoops.
(Beverley later confirmed that she actually had TWO dogs called Benjy.)
This is the finished painting/drawing, above. All the Closed Doors, mixed media 2023
A Way Not to Lose: Wycombe High School, High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire
In a memory-mapping exercise led by Meg Jensen at Kingston University, on 15 November 2023, with fellow @ksa_research_hub researchers, I drew this map of my secondary school in 1976.
We were invited to reflect on a reorientation of thought, belief, experience, something that changed our view. My initial reflection was to do with trying to fit conventions and socially acceptable behaviours, and then finding out it was possible to try out alternatives to that. Then I realised what it was actually about: how much god and the queen were plastered around the place, and how this relates to the genocide in Gaza and the British involvement in the occupation of Palestine.
It was a state school and not a church school. But we sang hymns, national anthem, prayed continually, and filed past a huge portrait of the monarchy twice every morning. We prayed for the Queen and, astonishingly, even for Margaret Thatcher, who wasn’t even prime minister then. Force-fed imperialism, and religion. It was the norm, how the world should be. Monarchy and the Church of England.
So when the bomb scares came we passed on the rumours of men with Irish accents phoning the school secretary as we stood on the playing field, waiting for the all-clear. I never had cause or prompt to consider even for one second the military occupation of partitioned Northern Ireland by the British terror state, and the dehumanising discrimination against the Catholic minority. In 1968, young radicals, socialists, republicans rose up in Derry and Belfast against what was effectively the apartheid state of Ulster. They demanded their civil and human rights. And Britain’s response? Murder, occupation, internment, torture, bigotry. Tanks on the streets, guns blazing. Raids, rapes, executions, destruction.
The IRA used violent means to resist this oppression and repression. It wasn’t the way to win but it was a way not to lose. It didn’t overcome the division, only class struggle can do that, but its a position of #nosurrender. That’s why we had those interminable bomb scares.
I didn’t know that the IRA was trying to tell me something. It took me another six years to get that message.
Other features in this drawing will be addressed anon. Meantime, here below is the original drawing without the phone-app colour-smudges. Someone on Facebook wants to know more about Mrs Buxton.
Feeling our Feelings on Peckham Rye
Map of a Day: 3 January 2024, mixed media 2024
Remapping is a way I can make connection between lived/embodied experienced, inner life, history, society and relationships. And geography! (I nearly forgot that one.) Academic research these days is opening up to cross-disciplinary studies and explorations, and new methods of creating knowledge. For me, it’s a way of finding things out about the world, in the world.
Just after the New Year, following a quite uneasy holiday time for me, my friend Sheila came to visit on the Overground, from where she lives in Mile End. As she is a well-published Marxist theorist on women’s oppression and the family, I was planning to ask her some incisive questions about the early trade union movement in Britain, in the 1880s, and how it was that the revolutionary demands of Marxists involved in the Second International organisation were watered down. How the aims for workers’ control of factories, and full socialisation of childcare, for instance, got lost in claims for adjustments such as higher wages, reduced hours and tighter regulations on child labour.* This was to help me with writing a review of M E O’Brien’s Family Abolition: The Communisation of Care.
But I was full of horrible, uncomfortable emotions. Worry, worry, worry about my dad. Depression was haunting me, and the fear of depression. I felt stuck and trapped and anxious, stuffed with discomfort, riven with the idea that I must act and do the right thing – but what? It’s times like this that living alone is hardest, and anxiety at its most paralysing. I literally feel like I can’t go out; there is a magnetic force pinning me down, weighing me down. Sheila’s arrival lifted me up and we always begin with something to laugh about: reunion! And her face makes me smile. We sat on the sofa with my little dog Olive between us, snoring, and talked and then we had some lunch. Food is also something that when alone I feel flat about. With Sheila I was inspired to combine soft goat’s cheese and black garlic, with avocado salad. It was a dull, damp, dank day but we got in the car, Olive in the front in her massive car-seat, and drove over to Peckham Rye for a stroll. It was so cold and damp I had to carry Olive in her little carry case, her nose poking out from the folds of a snuggly blanket a very lovely friend called Rosie gave me, several years ago. Sheila and I walked and talked and comforted and made sense of what we wished were different, what we worked so hard to change in our lives. We also talked, as always and at length about politics and what were are doing in our activist lives. Then we had tea in the cafe just as it was closing, pressed through the heavy cold air to the car, and I dropped Sheila off at the station.
I picked out some details from the picture which show the contradictions of a kind of double life and my ghost-selves which can never be entirely infused with the warmth and comfort of friendship, or which slip out or fall down as soon as the nourishment of love wears off.
There is masking, the effort neurodiverse people make to be as ‘normal’ as they can, so as to minimise the sense of being different, and isolated. I do my exercises, see my friends, drive to the park. But these selves, unheard younger parts of me, cry out to remind me to listen to them and recognise their pain.
Chronic fatigue pierces every day with worry and fear about what I can and cannot do. All the day I was with Sheila I was exhausted and although our talks energised me, the yearning for bed and sleep went with me in the car, to the park and when I was back home again I went to bed and slept before dinner. Below is a slideshow of these fatigue feelings – just click on the side arrows to view.
in looking at this work and thinking all the thoughts, I was particularly struck by the sad ghost-self peeping over the top of the zoom room. This zoom room was the art group I host each week, where six or seven friends from far-flung parts of the UK, several of whom I’ve never met in person, chat and draw and paint. I’m in the room – the one in the middle, top row – hosting, participating, spotlighting, chatting. In that particular session I was adding paint and more figures to this very painting. But overseeing all this social functioning is a liverish malaise, a ‘being sad as well as happy’. Luckily, everyone in the art group – as well as dear Sheila – accepts and understands this feeling and nothing is ever pretended.
* If you would like to see Sheila’s lovely face, too, and hear her speak about social reproduction theory, here is a link to one of her talks.