A point of stillness

Gathering the landscape, late autumn blooming and a brilliant new offering from Alan Garner

A dipper caught on a rock on the river Wye

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I had been clinging on for this week in the Peak District and, when I jumped onto its raft, although it seemed to drift by in an instant, I stepped off a different person.

I had visited the Peaks briefly many years ago, and when I read here of

Tom Cox

visiting Scarthin Books in Cromford and then

David Barton

speaking of its beauty and peace, it seemed as though I should pick up on the hint, and return.

My intention was to spend the week drawing, and I stuffed my rucksack with materials and sketchbooks in heady hope and expectation, but when I arrived at my cottage along a bumpy track on the edge of Staffordshire moorland, rather than bursting into action, I found myself drawing slowly to stillness.

I had arrived as the light was fading, but already my jaded palette was being sparked by the banks of golden limes and field maple and I felt a rush of excitement as I began to see a new world so at variance from my usual flat plains of Norfolk.

The trickiness of longed for drawing trips away is that when they arrive, the level of expectation is high: your mission is that you have 5 days in which to capture an unfamiliar place, to return with a sketchbook crammed full of work that will evolve into fully fledged paintings as soon as you reach home. Putting myself under such pressure to be productive, when already tired and frayed, does not, as you will realise, provide the ideal environment in which to be creative. Often as such weeks progress, I have felt a rising sense of panic that this precious time has to be squeezed to extract the best possible results, and I forget that it is something I am meant to be doing for pleasure and that it is not a stick to beat myself with.

A kestrel hunts along the drystone wall opposite the cottage

As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

from “Windhover” by Gerald Manley Hopkins

Instead I decided to gather the landscape in a different way. I put my tiny sketchbook and a pencil in my pocket, just in case, and instead soaked it in by walking. I made notes of the muted colours of the moorland and took photos of the mulberry bramble stems and their flaming leaves. I listened to the distant grouse and watched a kestrel as it hunted in front of the cottage. I picked the stems of spiky docks, bulls blood against the stone walls, with their companion whirligig willowherb and bone bleached grasses. As the light faded I would return to the cottage, gathering up the spoils of the day to make watercolour monoprints on the kitchen table to secure it all in my memory. Any thoughts of dwindling time had gone and I just felt intensely happy to be following those crumbs.

One of the watercolour monoprints, colour notes and collected leaves and seedheads

At home I am used to single oaks as puntuation marks in the prairie fields, but here they spread with open arms and there are hawthorn tugged by the wind, growing out of the riven rock and glades of beech with pools of copper leaves. I wished I could stay another week as I adjusted and my focus returned, but instead these will have to wait for another journey.

Landscape spoke to me before I knew what it was, but I heard.

Alan Garner

On the last couple of days, I went to sit by the river Wye, in Darley Dale. I watched dippers sweep up and down stream, guarding their territory, and I finally settled down to draw for a few hours. The sound of the rushing water was so loud that the sudden arrival of a bounding young Pointer, diving towards me, scattering my pencils and paints, shook me out of my absorption. Thankfully, he just wanted to play, but it was still quite a surprise. The owners were hugely apologetic, but the dog’s exuberance had just made me laugh and I realised the shift that had taken place over the week.

Sketches made on the river bank in pencil and Derwent Graphitint and liquid charcoal

My curious neighbour

Sometimes you come across something that simply brings delight. On the last day of my trip, I pulled into a car park and in front of me were dozens of ducks looking up attentively at a lady who was scattering bird food. I realised that beyond the hedge lay a river and that the ducks had come up for what appeared to be a regular snack station. While this was very touching in itself, what moved me is that driving away after the feed, she waved vigorously to them, just as you would bidding a fond farewell to friends. Whoever you are, dear lady, such sweetness lifted me day.

Something to listen to

I was a latecomer to Dickens, having an absurd prejudice against him while I was a student avoiding his work at all costs. But, while working at South Bank University a few years later, which is placed in the midst of so many of the novels’ locations, I began reading David Copperfield on the bus to work each day, and I was hooked. It was my first love and the likes of Peggotty and Barkis, drawn with such humanity, changed my view and I became the most zealous of converts. On several occasions I was so absorbed I missed my stop and during my lunch hour I would go in search of the places I had read about. One such hunt was for the Marshalsea, the notorious debtors’ prison, which once housed Dickens’ father for not paying his baker, and led the 12 year old Dickens to work in a blacking factory. The prison was demolished in 1842 and only a section of the wall remains, but it is still an imposing and chilling reminder. The shame of this experience led him to write “Little Dorrit”, his most personal novel, which I listened to on my journey home. Dramatised beautifully by Mike Walker, as part of a series of eight forthcoming dramas, it is a gripping listen and my journey passed in pleasure.

The remaining wall of the Marshalsea that is in Angel Place, near Borough Market

Something to read

The Lie of the Land by Amanda Craig It is rare that I find a novel that keeps me reading into the night until I can barely keep my eyes open, but this was one of them. The choice of holiday reading is a weighty decision - I can always remember what I was reading where. I usually return to a favourite author, as I have the assurance I will be in good company for a week, and while I read Craig many years ago, for some inexplicable reason I haven’t read her since. This sweeping novel of our times, tells of Lottie and Quentin, on the brink of a divorce they cannot afford. They move to Devon, rent out their London home for income, but the countryside brings unexpected consequences and something nasty lurking in the woodshed…I found myself dwelling on these characters through the day and looking forward to returning to them each evening. I understand from

Ann Kennedy Smith

that her current novel, The Three Graces, picks up characters from this and begins another tale in Tuscany. I can’t wait.

Powsels and Thrums - A Tapestry of a Creative Life by Alan Garner

Handloom weaving produced snippets of cloth which the weaver kept for his own use. These oddments were known as “powsels and thrums”; and Joseph’s and William’s families would have been clad with the bits that skill had brought together to make something whole and new.

As with weaving, so with writing.

After reading “The Lie of the Land”, this proved the perfect successor. I never read Alan Garner as a teenager, though I wish I had. I find his novels both beguiling and bewildering. I loved his recent “Treacle Walker,” which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and although it has stayed with me, while reading it, I hardly knew what to make of it. (If you want to learn more, listen to this episode of Backlisted and here is a film that shows his extraordinary home.) It is as though his writing seeps into your consciousness and an understanding is gained via a different route. This collection follows the threads that run through his life and are here sewn together to create a tapestry that is a rich summation of his work. There are short stories, poems and memoir moving from his school days to the “embers of the day”. Garner is in his 90th year and on listening to this he remains as vital and creative as ever and it is a book I will treasure and return to again and again.

Something to watch

I found this on returning home, and as the passing of time is something that keeps uncomfortably prodding as I approach that “big” birthday, this was the perfect antidote. Joan Bakewell’s thirty minute essay on the exploration of how artists respond to old age, “Flowering in Autumn”, is both refreshing and inspiring. There is the indomitable Paula Rego, who was still working from 10 am to 7pm each day - and just watch her face when Bakewell mentions retirement; Louise Bourgeois, “I don’t say that I am a wild beast all the time, but I am a wild beast some of the time”; and the writer John Mortimer, creator of the glorious Rumpole, as mischievous and sparky as ever. In spite of “times winged chariot”, these artists show that they still had much to do and say and that the creative impulse, far from diminishing, was simply prodding that bit harder. There are just 12 days left to watch on i-player, so don’t miss it!

And to end

Under unending interrogation by wind

Tortured by high scoldings of light

Tried to confess all but could not

Bleed a word

stripped to its letter, cruciform

Contorted

tried to tell all

Through crooking of elbows

Twitching of finger ends.

Finally

resigned

to be dumb.

Lets see what happens.

A Tree by Ted Hughes

Thank you for joining me here and I hope you enjoyed my visit to the Peaks - plans are already afoot to return in the Spring. If you liked this post, I would be very grateful if you could press the heart as it does help my work to be seen. Do drop me a line in the comments, I would love to hear if you have enjoyed any of the works mentioned, your favourite holiday reads or do share anything you think it might be good to include in a future post. I look forward to seeing you again in a couple of weeks.

Two purchases from the brillliant Scarthin Books in Cromford. I have never read Alfred Duggan (let me know if your have) but I couldn’t resist these wonderful Edward Bawden covers.