The Dragon Café is Mental Fight Club’s latest creative project:
a relaxing café and imaginative space, open to all, located in the Crypt of St George the Martyr Church, opposite Borough tube station. The creative director of Mental Fight Club is Sarah Wheeler , one of the contributors to Transitions 2 which was launched at the Folkestone Book Festival in November 2012. To launch the search for contributors to Transitions 3 which we intend to publish in May 2013. We are staging readings from Transitions 2 with music from the Afro-jazz singerMaiuko a contributor to both Transitions 1 and 2. Transitions 3 invites people to write about their journey into mental illness and their recovery from it. By turning back to myth perhaps we can look forward to a greater story of which we are part, and by understanding the universal aspect of our own personal experience be freed from its constraints. Our theme will be Ascent. Recovery. Transformation. Reintegration. ‘So much good writing is in itself a form of health’ 
Reading and Music
From Pavement Pounders Publication;
Transitions 2 at the Dragon Café,
The crypt of St George the Martyr opposite
Borough Tube.
7 p.m Monday 18th February 2013
Entrance Free
Links
|
Saturday, 9 February 2013
Readings from Transitions 2 and music from Maiuko at The Dragon Café
Friday, 8 February 2013
Funding for a third Issue
We now have funding for a third edition of Transitions
We are delighted to announce that issue 3 will be published jointly by Pavement Pounders CIC and "The Mental Fight Club"
Transitions,
a journal of crossings, is a forum for ideas celebrating crossings whether they
be universal or personal, real or imaginary, in story, article or poem. It invites
a personal take in other words of the universal themes of transition and
transformation.
Transitions 1 was
launched in September 2011 during the Folkestone
Triennial to reflect the mythological concepts of migration,
home and otherworldliness
Transitions 2 again addressed transitions and transformations but
with the ‘liminal’ and the ‘fountain’ as its particular themes
Transitions 3 invites people to write about their journey into
mental illness and their recovery from it. By turning back to myth – even that
of Orpheus’ or Demeter’s descent - perhaps we can look forward to a greater
story of which we are part, and by understanding the universal aspect of our
own personal experience be freed from its constraints.
Our theme will be Ascent. Recovery. Transformation.
Reintegration.
‘So much good writing is in itself a form of
health’
Links
Saturday, 1 December 2012
Article from Transitions One
A
Million Miles and Back Again
Gillian
White
Most
decisions I have made in my life have been dictated by circumstances rather
than any burning ambition to radically transform it. It is only now that I can
see that a pattern has emerged and maybe I have reached my destination after
all. My stopping off points always lasted longer than I had intended and two of
them have consisted of living by water: Bodensee in Germany and Lake Como in
Italy. However there has been a constant in my life and that’s been brief visits to Folkestone.
I
was born in Ashford, Kent, then a small market town, when the most exciting
thing to do was witness the Golden Arrow going through the station on its way
to the continent, or follow the cattle being driven down Bank Street to the
market. In the late 1950’s I spent summers in Sandgate with my friend and her
widowed mother. I remember them as times of complete freedom when at the
outdoor lido on the seafront in Folkestone we swam all day in freezing water,
lost our pocket money in the Rotunda and cycled down Sandgate Hill praying our
brakes wouldn’t fail. As long as we were home for tea no one worried about us.
I
had always been interested in the arts which had begun perhaps with my
education at Ashford School for Girls, and my spare time was spent simply
enjoying the act of creation. At school we had intense needlework lessons where
we learnt to make our own clothes and embroider. Our teacher wouldn’t tolerate
mistakes. Everything had to be unpicked if it wasn’t up to scratch. My father
always said that the soundtrack of my teenage years was one of the clank of the
ironing board opening in order to press seams, my running footsteps up the
stairs to sew on my machine and my exasperated shout when I realised I’d
stitched a cuff to the sleeves the wrong way round. I taught myself to knit and
weave on a small loom much to the amazement of my mother who had no interest in
making anything. My father had made a theatre for my string puppets and I would
write epic plays, make scenery and send visiting relatives to sleep as they sat
through a three hour production which only ended when all my characters had
died. After leaving home any spare time was spent teaching myself the
techniques of lino printing, crewel embroidery and designing my own patterned
knitwear.
To
this day I still experience the same excitement when I purchase new materials
to work with and plan how to use them. The colours and textures trigger ideas.
Then I can’t wait to begin and feel bereft when I have to put them to one side
and get back to everyday tasks.
In
the early 1960’s there wasn’t much for young people to do in Ashford, so my
friends and I would visit Bobby’s, the department store in Folkestone,
ostensibly to have afternoon tea and listen to the pianist, but really to meet
our boyfriends away from parental supervision. Yet Folkestone, via my parents,
inspired my love of classical music at a young age. My obsession with opera
began when they took me – crouching low in the car to avoid being spotted by my
younger brother who would have caused a scene - to concerts at the Leas Cliff
Hall. Here I saw Yehudi Menuhin,
Vladimir Ashkenazy, John Barbirolli, a concert of Rigoletto, the Halle
Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as other big London
orchestras. I also remember the magic of the moment when the curtain went up on
the pantomime at the Pleasure Gardens in Folkestone and triggered a life-long
love of theatre.
In
the early 1970’s my grandfather, like many retired people came to the South
Coast to spend his remaining years, but at the Four Square Hotel, Sandgate Road
where he was staying, he met his second wife and moved into a flat in Castle
Hill Avenue aged 79. On a trip back from Italy I travelled to Folkestone to
visit him and introduced him to his great-granddaughter just before he died.
Encouraged
to be independent and travel at a young age I can remember sitting on my
suitcase one January on the outside deck of a ferry from Folkestone, hoping I
wouldn’t be blown overboard or be sea-sick. In those days, unlike today’s
luxury car ferries, there was very little indoor cabin space and no facilities
at all. My youth seemed to have been spent in a state of excitement or fear
that I would get on the wrong train to Southern Germany or lose my
luggage. During the first visit to my
exchange family I never quite knew whether we were going shopping, visiting
historic sites or sailing on Bodensee. I
would even misunderstand the time and turn up an hour late. This enabled me to
learn German very quickly.
When my parents moved to Hythe in the mid
70’s, Folkestone Central again became an arrival point for my children and I
visiting once a year. I would take them to the Folkestone Rock shop where they
would stand for hours watching the rock being made or spend their pocket money
in the joke shop.
My
long transition period began when I got divorced and having to find a new
career stumbled into Retail Management which came to an abrupt end in 1995 when
the business I was working for went under. My health also suffered and I seemed
to have reached a dead end with no desire to be continuously beating last
year’s figures. It was more than time to consider my options. Unbeknown to me
my real journey was beginning.
I
was offered a place in a small community arts group run by Canterbury Social
Services that was so successful it was extended to one day a week. At last I
would be able to realize the act of creation that I had so much enjoyed from a
young age. First it was simply a matter
of finding the confidence to express myself through experimenting with different
materials. Then I began to believe I could think about further education. Three
of us gained places on the Access Course for Fine Art and soon I found myself
fully engaged, drawing trees in the college grounds, having tutorials, writing
essays and turning into a completely different person. Never believing I had
the capability to go for prolonged study - after leaving school in the 60’s I’d
rushed up to London to enjoy the excitement of the King’s Road - I was amazed
to be offered a place on the part-time Fine Art Degree Course. With my theatre
lodgers and a small mortgage I could just about finance it. This decision
transformed my life and without knowing it I was approaching my destination.
Folkestone.
After
so many years spent in a restrictive working environment, this course,
encouraging me to be adventurous, debate ideas and be part of the contemporary
art scene, was to become the most influential experience in my life. I made
many friends at university - we’ve just celebrated ten years since we graduated
- but we couldn’t be students forever and I begun my career as a practicing
artist. I started work on my house in
Canterbury to turn it into an artwork and open it to the public. I exhibited
all over Kent in group shows and came down to Folkestone on two occasions to
show my work in Georges House Gallery. Many of my theatre lodgers purchased
pieces of my work during their stay with me. They had lived in my house for a
week surrounded by my work so how could they not leave without taking something
with them! One friend practicing around Canterbury was involved with Strange
Cargo’s first giant, Torrent of Littlebourne, in their Giants project. I helped by waving Torrent’s left arm for the
2006 Charivari in Folkestone and after the parade spent a blissful day on The
Leas, enjoying the stunning views of the Channel and the wonderful community
atmosphere. I began to think I could live in Folkestone. In fact I nearly
returned again that day as I fell asleep on the bus to Canterbury and if I
hadn’t been woken up by the driver, would have ended up back in Folkestone Bus
Station.
At
last I had to make a decision about the outcome of my journey and as
Folkestone’s art scene was beginning to thrive it seemed the logical place. The
road I lived in had become so over-run with student housing it had lost that
cohesive, peaceful community of the last twenty years. It was time to sell up
and move. For six years running after graduating, I had opened my house to the
public for the Artists Open Houses event during the Canterbury Festival. My
farewell exhibition took place at the same time I was showing prospective
buyers around my house. One Saturday morning, twenty five viewers for the
exhibition were dashing about the house and garden and the front door bell was
ringing continuously when the estate agent rang to say she was bringing a
client round. Denim skyscrapers on my dining room wall complete with sound
recordings of New York streets, a giant scrabble board in the living room,
carved wooden feet in the bath, a mural of Lake Como on the back of the house
and an installation about life on tour in the bedroom where my Marlowe Theatre
lodgers slept, filled my tiny house. I’m
not sure the estate agent had ever conducted a viewing like this. When her
client was asked about the art work she had to reply that she was here to buy
the house. Yet she made an offer to buy there and then! So much for having to
clear away clutter, maximize space and have coffee brewing to give the right
atmosphere in order to sell a house.
In
the afternoon I was talking to a regular visitor about going to Folkestone and
he said he had a house there to rent which I could move to when I was ready. I
was astounded. I had sold my house in the morning and found somewhere else to
live in the afternoon without so much as stepping outside my home. Yet it was
an emotional day. I was faced with
parting with a much loved home and, as a city girl, moving to a small seaside
town which was beginning to reinvent itself.
I
could say I arrived in Folkestone with a bang. I had barely settled in when on
28th April, 2007, Folkestone had an earthquake. Fortunately the house I was
renting was only slightly damaged and, standing in the street wearing pyjamas,
was a way to get to meet the new neighbours.
Though I was a little anxious, having dramatically uprooted myself after
so many years in Canterbury, Folkestone’s regeneration was well under way and I
had the first Triennial of 2008 to look forward to.
One
morning I gave up unpacking boxes and went for a long walk through the Coastal
Park and beyond. I found a semi-circular bench below the amphitheatre
surrounded by shrubbery on the bank behind that made me invisible to anyone
passing until the last minute. Though it was only April, the sun was very hot.
As I sat in this secluded spot the only sound I could hear was the sea. Above
the hedge opposite I could catch a glimpse of the most incredible blue and
turquoise patch. The sky was so clear and the light so bright, I had to shut my
eyes for a few moments. I could have been in the South of France or on a Greek
Island. I could look out to sea and be happy just to be still. This, I thought, was why I came to
Folkestone: all this on my doorstep and only having to walk to it.
It
is 2011 now, I have a beautiful flat in the Creative Quarter with stunning
views from the viaduct to the harbour and on clear days a glimpse of France.
Early in the morning I can stand on my terrace, drink a cup of coffee and smell
the sea. I can see ships in the Channel balancing on the horizon, looking as if
they’ll topple over the edge.
Last
summer my childhood friend came to visit and we stood together where the Lido
had been and reminisced on our happy days of complete freedom in Folkestone.
That freedom has changed into something else. With art and a new home merging
to become more than a stopping off point my transformation feels well near
complete. I began my journey with no timetable and no direction but my
transition periods were building experiences for my homeward destination. An
Odysseus returning to Ithaca it has taken a long time for me to arrive in
Folkestone.
Folkestone
too is on a journey. Like me it has had some very low periods and struggled to
thrive. New generations will need other reasons apart from revisiting childhood
memories to come. The ferries have gone and the Channel Tunnel speeds people
past Folkestone. The new High Speed train taking less than an hour from London
has brought more people, but it’s still a town of enormous economic divides and
social problems. The Leas and the west end retain their architectural elegance
and wide tree lined streets but seem almost separate from the east. I have
watched as crumbling properties in The Old High Street have been refurbished or
rebuilt through the generosity of Roger DeHaan and his vision to bring a
thriving community to this end of Folkestone, despite the time it takes to
regenerate a town, especially during a recession. Although after many years of
struggling, I am now for the first time in my life, financially stable, I look
around and see other people struggling.
As
I walk up and down hill, from East to West Folkestone I absorb Folkestone’s
history. A young girl sitting on a ferry, I had no idea that in 1914 young men
had left from Folkestone harbour to fight in the trenches, never to
return. Now, I can see the changes
taking place. The Creative Foundation have a mission to put Folkestone on the
map again as a national and international centre for the arts, improving access
to education and promoting arts festivals. I hope that the visitors to this
year’s Triennial will see Folkestone as a place which is on its own long
journey to prosperity. I have found a safe harbour to stay. Though I am still
building my life in Folkestone and on some days look out to sea and wonder if I
should journey again, low tide prevents me leaving this particular harbour.
Besides which I have no desire to travel further. My transformation can
continue on dry land as a part also of Folkestone‘s regeneration.
So
yes in a sense I have arrived in Folkestone. But in another, and if arrival is
to do with creation, I never left. This drive to be creative, which I never
question, has been with me for ever, as if the creative process itself were an
ongoing epiphany. I embark on long complicated projects, forget to eat or sleep
and before I have finished one piece, am thinking about the next. If you give
me pencil and paper, I will have to reshape the pencil and sculpt the paper. I
see the shape of mundane objects and want to give them a new identity, and then
if people smile and reach out to touch them, I feel my idea has worked. At
times, I want to be both architect and entertainer and feel the word artist is
too restrictive for my practice. As a child, my mother told me I had too much
imagination which I now realise was never a curse but something to celebrate.
Having only snatched moments to be creative in isolation the freedom of
expression I found at university meant that at last I could show my work and
perhaps inspire others to realise it is never too late to transform one's
life.
Transitions 1 & 2
Transitions 1 & 2 are published by Pavement Pounders CIC in the Creative Quarter Folkestone with
contributions from mainly local authors,
Contributors to Transitions Two
Anon, Georgina Baker, James Bennett, Ray Duff, Maiuko
Fi, Jim Fitzgerald, Maggie Harris, Paul Harris, David Lay, Trevor Minter, Mike
Sanders, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Annie Webb and Stephen Welch.
1.psd.jpg){kind=spacer}
Here is a link to images of the launch of Transitions at Googies Art Cafe
Music provided by Maiuko Fi Afro jazz singer accompanied by --Jus-i
pianist and Scott Willey double bass
Link to article in local press by contributor Ray Duff
launch-of-our-journal-transitions-in-folkestone-tonight-7th-november-2012.html
Copies can be had Priced £10 each from us phone 01303 227150. Mob 0750-5813297
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
Published by Pavement Pounders
TRANSITIONS, A JOURNAL OF CROSSING
Transitions is published and edited by Pavement Pounders Community Interest Company who are based in Folkestone's Creative Quarter.It comprises articles by mostly local authors.
Transitions One
The First edition, Transitions One was published during the Folkestone Triennial in September 2011. Transitions One is edited by Maryanne Grant Traylen, PhD, and illustrated with drawings and other artwork by artist David Lay - a journal of crossings from the edge, Folkestone itself. It explores the archetype of journeying whether real or imaginary, through myth, psychology, personal account, story or poem, and is divided into three sometimes overlapping sections: Ships and Arks, Sea Crossings and Descents and Exiles and Epiphanies.
Contributors to Transitions One
James
Bennett, Julie Crick, Jim Fitzgerald, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Maggie Harris, Shaukat
Khan, Nikolaj B. S. Larsen, David Lay, Maiuko Fi, Sonia Overall, Sunjeev Sahota, Annie
Webb and Gillian White
Transitions Two
This Blog
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This blog exists to provide information about the publishing arm of Pavement Pounders CIC. Here you will find Extracts from Transitions one, Information about Transitions Two, launched during the Folkestone Book Festival in early November 2012,.news of future issues, and most importantly tells you where you can buy a copy
We currently have no public funding so rely solely on sales
Help us to make Transitions Three possible. Transitions One and`Transitions Two
£10 per copy from us order by e mail pavementpounders@gmail.com or phone 01303 227150
or through Paypal most credit cards accepted
£10 per copy from us order by e mail pavementpounders@gmail.com or phone 01303 227150
or through Paypal most credit cards accepted
Postage and packing Free until Christmas (U.K only)
Tuesday, 13 November 2012
"Transitions 2" is Launched at Folkestone Book Festival
"Transitions 2" is Launched at Folkestone Book Festival
 |
| David Lay director of Pavement Pounders CIC who both publish and edit Transitions introduces the readers |
Transitions 2 is published by Pavement Pounders CIC in the Creative Quarter Folkestone with
contributions from the following mainly local authors, Anon, Georgina Baker, James Bennett, Ray Duff, Maiuko
Fi, Jim Fitzgerald, Maggie Harris, Paul Harris, David Lay, Trevor Minter, Mike
Sanders, Maryanne Grant Traylen, Annie Webb and Stephen Welch. Copies can be had priced £10 each from us
phone 01303 227150. Mob 0750-5813297
It was launched at Googies` Art Cafe, Rendezvous St., Folkestone as part of The Folkestone Book Festival 2012
Here is a link to images of the event at Googies
There were readings from several contributors.
Music provided by Maiuko Fi Afro jazz singer accompanied by --Jus-i
pianist and Scott Willey double bass
Link to article by Ray Duff in the Hawkinge Gazette
Wednesday, 31 October 2012
Ours Are the Streets Sunjeev Sahota
More from Transitions one
Out of Tune’ A V Dolven
Exile
In the Descent myths Demeter is separated from Eurydice, Isis from
Osiris and Orpheus from Eurydice. The story of Cupid and Psyche is also a tale
of separation and sometimes of unity. It warns of the analytical frame of mind
that destroys synthesis - analysis kills and synthesis brings to life - that
Psyche uses when she looks at her lover through the outward rather than inward
eye. Analysis breeding paralysis we might say. This understanding of the myth
illustrates Cartesian dualism of eighteenth century’s so called Enlightenment
that separated mind from body, subject from object, consciousness from
unconscious, humanity from the divine, heart from head - splitting human beings
down the middle.
Yet this psychological characteristic of twenty first
century mind is not as immediately apparent as the plight of an immigrant cut
off from much he loves and knows. Where
Nikolaj Larsen’s film shows the hope of migrants for the Promised Land,
Sanjeev Sahota in novel Ours Are the Streets shows disillusion and despair
of a second generation immigrant’s uncertainty with identity and belonging. Yet
he takes us under his protagonist’s skin teasing us with an empathy we feel for
this outsider - split down the middle, caught in a kind of limbo-land between
much he loves and despises - whose action we can’t condone.
In Ours Are the
Streets the feeling of longing and loss, though never self-pitying, is
painfully acute. It speaks of an exile more enormous than that from countries
or being sandwiched between cultures. The compulsive beauty of Sahota’s flowing
prose where the ordinary is bold and highlighted by something extra, but
ultimately disappoints, because of the protagonist’s own cultural isolation, is
raw reminder that it doesn’t matter how far we’ve travelled. The amount of
loneliness or un-belonging we can unburden doesn’t equal the miles.
This is brought home in the film Welcome about a Kurdish
boy who has travelled four thousand miles and now wants to swim the Channel,
like Leander, to reach his girlfriend who is betrothed to another. And yet,
remarks his trainer, he himself cannot even cross the road to reach his
estranged wife.
What follows are extracts from Sanjeev Sahota’s haunting novel Ours
Are the Streets published this year by Picador.
Extracts from
Ours Are the Streets
Sunjeev Sahota
Picador, 2011.
Second
generation immigrant in two worlds.
We
were meant to become part of these streets. They were meant to be ours as much
as anyone’s. That’s what you said you worked for, came for. Were it worth it,
Abba? Because I sure as hell don’t know. I used to just slam the door and stand
with my back to it, wondering, What end? Whose end? When is this fucking end?
Because what’s the point, man? What’s the point in dragging your life across
entire continents if by the time it’s worth it you’re already at the end?
Ameen. (p 70)
‘Honestly,
Tauji. We don’t really know what we’re about, I guess. Who we are, what we’re
here for’. But that weren’t nothing like what I wanted to say. Even to me it
just sounded like the usual crap I’d been hearing for years. I wanted to talk
about why I felt fine rooting for Liverpool, in a quiet way, but not England. I
wanted to talk about why I found myself defending Muslims against white and
whites against Muslims. About why I loved Abba but had still wished him dead.
But I couldn’t think of how to say anything I wanted. ‘I mean, we’re the ones
stuck in the middle of everything. Like we’re not sure whose side we’re meant
to be on, you know?’
(p137)
Acceptance.
A
boy in long blue robes were looking at me. He were crouched down at the side of
the road, cleaning his teeth with a stick and spitting into the sand. I were
expecting him to come begging, but he didn’t. He just spat again into the small
frothy puddle of dirt he’d made, then got up and walked off. I think that were
the first time I’d been on a busy street and no one had hassled me for money.
Maybe it were my own robes and loose turban, my beard and way of standing, but
whatever it were no one sempt to take me for a valetiya. I’d changed. (p192)
Isolation
and connection.
The
nights would feel so cold over there, like the cold wanted to settle in my
bones and make me its home. It’s funny, it might’ve been the most isolated
place I’ve ever been, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt more connected to the
world. Not in the packed streets of Sheff or at uni, not in England really,
where I always felt that even though there were all the rush and noise you
could want, I weren’t actually ever bumping up against life, instead just
constantly moving out of its way. (p202)
People
don’t even think about that, do they? That there are different types of
soldiers. That Faisal were different to Aaqil. But Faisal understood. He knew
about love for his people and he knew that were the best thing in the world to
feel because then their pain becomes as real to you as yours, and for the first
time you realise you’re not on your own. (p236)
Heartbreak.
‘I
need to wash, don’t I? The sun’s gonna be up soon.’
‘Right.
Well, in that case,’ she went on, putting on a happy voice, ‘shall we pray
together? I don’t think I’ve done the early prayer once since Noor was born.’
‘We
can’t. Men and women can’t pray together. You just go back to sleep.’
‘That
hasn’t stopped us before.’
‘This
isn’t before. Didn’t you hear me? Just go back to bed.’ (p286)
Sunday, 28 October 2012
Land-a-Hoe Short Story by Annie Webb from Transitions One
Land-a-Hoe
A Short Story by Annie Webb
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Born on a tiny island at Europe’s most southerly tip where
the silhouette of a lighthouse stood darkly against two glassy seas, one
tide-driven and the other tideless mingling at an indistinguishable confluence
that linked Africa to Europe, the sun - as antidote to a dream that troubled
Conchita where a witch pointed a glittery finger and turned her into stone
- touched a point equidistant between
east and west, sunrise and sunset, in a glorious blaze of light.
The mythical story
of Eurydice’s double whammy – first to have been bitten by snakes, then, when
Orpheus had descended into the underworld and disobediently turned round to
look at her, been turned to stone – could like any story her mother taught her,
be rewritten.
They lived in a wooden house so small they called it their
hut, and Conchita’s father washed up on the island by a storm had made a
harbour of her mother but left at the next high tide. On her fourth birthday he
made the mistake of bringing a present to her nursery - a jig-saw puzzle with
huge wooden pieces suitable for her child’s clumsy fingers, of an spreading
olive tree abundant with fruit - only to be escorted out by a carer who said
this wasn’t the place for estranged fathers. Conchita’d wondered if estranged
was a word for good-looking, but her mother had said sharply before bursting
into tears that there was nothing good about her father, he was probably trying
to kidnap her. And though the memory of him faded an imprint of his handsome,
already gnarled face stayed always in her mind.
To have been born on this island, a mid-point so to speak
on a whirlpool that stirred the Atlantic into the Mediterranean in a solar
blaze reflecting off ripples of light, was proof to her that some but not all
seas, lands, lives and bloodlines dip and re co-mingle in areas mapped as
fixed.
And the places that weren’t fixed changed according to
light. According to Heraclitus who saw all things in flux presided over by one
underlying logos. If you stepped several times into a river at the same spot it
would always be the same river but its waters different. When Conchita came to
live in La Villa she didn’t abandon that belief altogether but found that some
things had to be fixed if fixed was a word for Doing. The plight of the olive
industry and Michel would demand that. And the unpredictable, unfixed play of
light and shadow so bright and stark on a windy day it could challenge your
equilibrium, making an enemy by imbalance of what you needed to find.
The twin peaked mountain of Las Grajas,
ornate jackdaw, and Tajo Lagarin, rose
like the ears of a Siamese cat, the double sides of a coin or
personality, from the plain stretching from one side of La Villa to
Zahara. Conchita had come to live in a
house beside Michel in La Villa for the olive-picking season. Through
eucalyptus trees on the plain glistened a turquoise lake, once a river crossing
a valley before it was damned, said to contain the purest waters that flowed
from the heights of these sierras.
Though she didn’t know it then
mill-owner Alberto lived on the opposite side of the plain at the summit of
Zahara in a mill under patchy outcrops of rock where mules had once dragged
axles on conical stones over olives. His twin brother Albert, manager of
workers constructing the Channel Tunnel, lived at the edge of the Saxon
shoreline in southern England. Alberto loved to read his brother’s letters
about the Channel’s story fraught with danger and difficulty triumphing in the
end. A tale with a beginning, a middle
and an end.
The danger with the ‘beginning’ lay a Bay of
Biscay away from the island Conchita had hailed from, in the twenty-two mile
crossing that brought two fully tided seas in the Dover Straight’s La Manche
together at its narrowest and most treacherous. Strong tides churned the waves
that mixed with brisk winds and heavy fogs buffeted against Shakespeare Cliffs
making sea-farers sick if they weren’t already blind like Gloucester. Once when
fog had hung heavy and wind-swept over rollicking waters, the Paracas, ignoring
the shipping lanes, had brought down the Texaco Caribbean. Its wreck had
brought down the Brandenburg. Then later the Nikki - leaving no survivors.
The
difficulty with the ‘middle’ had existed since mid-eighteenth century when
Desmaret’s, Mathie’s and Mottray’s ideas for crossing the narrow rabid waters
had come to nothing. Supposing Napoleon had invaded with fleets of balloons or
rafts powered by windmills or paddle-wheels? Supposing he’d already dug out a
secret tunnel? But before an attempt was made on Napoleon’s life Queen Victoria
had told Gamond, who’d spent years on the Channel’s bottom, that he’d have the
blessings of all the ladies who ever suffered sea-sickness, and twice in 1882
and 1975, a tunnel had been bored, even champagne drunk, but abandoned first
because of the Great Anti-Tunneller’s objections and next because of a fuel
crisis.
After the danger and the difficulty of the
‘beginning’ and the ‘middle’ Alberto wasn’t entirely satisfied with the
‘conclusion’. The signing of the Treaty of Canterbury in 1986 agreeing to a
fixed link between enemies and leading to a plan to construct the
channel-to-trick-the-treacherous-waters was, of course, triumphant. Land at
last would meet through land, earth not water the medium for unity via a tunnel
boring into it, linking one solid thing that was already linked, to another.
But for Alberto the triumph –which should soar like Bleriot through the skies -
was tinged with regret. Why not build a graceful bridge to span La Manche
supported by islands and towers towering like gothic cathedrals visible to all,
he wondered before answering his own question. A bridge, like our imaginations
or even our feats of engineering, was too filigree frail to combat or
‘overcome’ wrathful storms. Narrow waters too wide. Feat enough to have joined
two lands or two people, an effort of the enquiring mind which had in the first
place created the dualism it now sought to snuff-out.
Conchita was Alberto’s other
fascination. Not in the sense he wanted to ‘have’ her as he’d had the others
but as she appeared in the gilt-framed photo taken by Michel that towered as
high on his wall as his wish of using her as an ‘icon’. Her dark hair
resembling the sinuous curves of the olive branch she leant on, fell in long
waves down her back, and her form tumbled like a cascade of water in contrast against
the rigid, clawed and clambering olive branch. She smiled, and the
crowd-attracting happiness and command in this smile, like the triumph of one
who’d knocked over a last skittle -
triumphs after all were conclusions to a story Alberto felt he didn’t
have - could be used as a trick to convey the power of personal fulfilment
rather than the success of his impersonal profit.
If Alberto gloated at her ‘moment’
four workers from the cuadilla
in the background watched with leering smiles as she leaned far out with her
stick to knock a stubborn olive on to the manta, the net burgeoning with ripe
fruits, and while others beat back branches with sticks, grovelled to pick
windfalls from circular grassless spaces under trees smoothed over by tremulous
rakes, she the perfect role model, reached out the farthest to shake every last
olive from the branch.
At first Alberto didn’t notice how
she smiled and performed only for Michel who she called Orpheus, father of
songs, because he sang for her with honeyed voice, humming like the wind while
he worked. Nor did he know that after work Michel crossed over from his house
to hers bearing gifts as luscious as his songs and as wild and as full with
movement as the brushstrokes he used to abstract paintings he’d painted from
photos. Nor that she’d told Michel she never wanted to be a Eurydice who’d been
bitten by snakes then turned to stone.
But Alberto saw her as his property, and not
liking it when he recognised the photographer’s love for his subject, decided
to ‘let Michel go’, take back his house - he’d get the sack for being clumsy
with the olives, squashing, missing or letting them skip off down the hill like
dancing monkeys. And Conchita’d receive her first snake-strike too.
After
dealing his blow Alberto did a strange thing and went to England’s south coast
to visit his brother where other workers, unlike his, dug deep into the sea-bed
through porous layers of clay, reaching to the chalk underneath, wading deeper
than gravel, sand or flint to assault then reinforce the soft but waterproof
marl. Alongside Albert Alberto seemed to wash his hands of his own workers and
watched these instead following the boring machine secured against the walls of
the cavern, saw the cutter heads holding the auger against the chalk face
whirling on wheels, biting through clay, and marvelled as the men lifted the
concrete semi-circular lining segments, one by one, laying them around the soft
clay circumference of the tunnel.
As
they followed the ‘mole' they might be moles themselves he thought trying to
ignore an image of twitching burrowing noses forging passage for the ‘human
creature’ in underwater land, with this mole bigger, spanning the length of two
football fields and giving existence to dark tunnels, places that those from
the olive groves he assumed, couldn’t negotiate.
With each segment they extended the march of
the hole underground, further toward France, ‘overcoming’ the storm by
‘undercoming’ it as it were, low in the bowels of the earth secure from
ruthless lashings between the tided seas. And the tunnel, once hollowed out
would become the little island’s new limb, reaching across in subterranean
darkness to touch a bigger land as if they’d never been joined in the first
place before the splitting into continents.
When he saw one of the workers slip
as they often did, he thought of Michel, then Conchita. But did he have an
inkling then that she'd slipped too, or a six-sense of how more would all slip,
as if the rug had been pulled from under their feet, in order to be found?
It was winter two thousand feet up
above sea level in the muddy olive groves when Conchita learnt Michel had lost
his sanity, and as the foreman waved to tell her, fell like the underground
workers into a nest of metaphorical vipers whose outer semblance, as she worked
from dawn to three wading and sliding knee deep in rain sodden raw earth, was
the high gale that tore at branches and riffled the already sifted earth into
circles with its whirlwinds.
In the Zahara hospital she found
Michel cowering in the corner of a room muttering ‘this cannot be'. A marred
light streamed unsteadily through the window, a striped orange curtain twitched
uneasily in a wind that blew over dry uncut grass from outside, wheedling its
way through a small opening in the metal frame, festering with odours from an
old plastic mattress that leant against a wall bulging with Polyfilla-filled
holes. No-one knew why Michel was so
stricken, as if derangement was a chemical imbalance you could catch like a
virus or a horror-movie, or, as his consultant un-technically advised - he was
suffering from a combination of what he was powerless to control and what he
wasn’t.
When Conchita tried to imagine what
Bedlam looked like in Michel’s mind all she could see was a loop that wasn’t a
link and couldn’t be punctured, and feeling so alone she might as well have
been turned to stone cried out in frustration to the loop that prevented
passage and forbad Michel’s answering,
“Why did you have to be dragged down, unwilling, wrecked hero – a
blinded Paracas, Texaco Caribbean, Brandenburg or Nikki - of the underworld?
Till now I was no Eurydice needing rescue from Hades”.
A brooding cloud had invaded all
their blues. The ‘ornate bird’ from the mountain terrace plateau-ed now not
peaked, and as the bird was flat, the firebird dead, Conchita turned her eyes
away from the mountains and lake that’d once contained something in a nutshell.
The hills planted with olive trees (because the ‘olive fever’ demanded ever
more virgin olive oil) had replaced the ancient almonds and the lines of olives
marching in strict linear formation made the hills’ surface look like stitches
in an old leather belt, goose-pimples on skin or stubble on an unshaven chin
which, she decided, belonged to the land-owner she'd never met: the boss who
made the rest of them seem like paltry baskers basking in a crepuscular light
or in the dawdling emotion that light evokes in the small person’s ever
wanting-to-relish but drained-of-power soul, living in a twilight world which
savours the taste of a fermented grape or a marinade olive, but doesn’t profit
from it.
So when summoned by Alberto she made
her way in fury from La Villa to Zahara, ready to remind him that although
olives needed to be gathered before they fermented to acerbity, whereas grapes
needed to be left to erupt and slowly ferment, the purpose in preparing both -
to achieve the highest quality of oil or wine - was always the same.
And that of the three substances
which could be squeezed from the olive, the oil, the fibrous orujo and the
bitter black briny film, the alpechin that floated to the surface of alpechineras
ponds, only alpechin couldn’t be used for anything, not even recycling.
And she wouldn’t stop there. She’d point out that this
filthy alpechin could never resemble the black nigredo or prima
materia of the alchemists, the starting material of the personality, the
soul that might be re-worked, modelled as it grew. And the result couldn’t be
the gold of individuation, the person who got well, perfect and whole.
Alpechin, she’d tell him, was an evil by-product that would not be regenerated.
A substance like states of mind that aren’t part of us. A waste resistant to
degradation.
And she’d tell him how alpechin had surfaced, so to speak,
in one of his worker’s minds. Black scum rising. Unwashed and unshaven,
Michel’s degradation not degradable. And softening as she’d have to, she’d ask
him, would he, if he could, help her stop his madness? Short circuit the ever
increasing loop?
As it turned out neither telling nor asking were
necessary. Thrown off course by seeing a picture of herself on the walls as she
walked down the corridor, reaching for olives, and then by a wooden jig-saw
olive tree on Alberto’s desk identical to the one she still had given to her by
her father long ago, she felt herself looking at his gnarled face in
astonishment. Alberto, too pleased to see her likeness to his photo didn’t
notice her expression at first. But as she picked up the wooden olive tree,
slowly fingering and separating its huge parts, and he said he’d another he’d
given to his daughter once, they both fell very silent as shock and truth
dawned on them simultaneously. By the time Conchita left three hours later
there was no doubt Alberto, her father, would help her in whatever way he
could. He had a brother, her uncle, in England.
Beyond
the help of medication or negotiation, Michel looked near to death. As there
was only one thing that might save his life the consultant said, there was
nothing to lose. So Alberto used his influence to get the controversial
treatment, and despite everyone’s horror, Conchita’s shame in agreeing, Michel
got the deep dark shock that stopped him from turning to acid on a hard, stony
ground. Leads got strapped to his head. The switch flicked on. And after the
lightening through his brain had saved him Michel vanished from the mountains along
with the father Conchita had just found - was he Charon or Hades or just plain
Alberto – and her.
Before
closing his mill behind them she noticed Alberto’s olive tree jig-saw still
standing on his desk, and on top of his reading material about the tunnel a
book on Jungian psychology: Finding Lost Treasures of the Deep opened at
the chapter, Freeing blockages, beginning “What goes up must come down….”. But
Michel’s transformation seemed unrelated to psychology. The book was about
Bleriot or plumbing her father said both grateful for the catharsis of black
humour to expel the blackness of alpechin. Before Jung and the defining of the
unconscious and before flight, Heraclitus had said that what went up and what
came down were one and the same thing.
Conchita
went with Michel where he could convalesce to an outhouse of Albert’s perched
high at the edge of the Saxon shoreline, Conchita’s mother, reluctant at first,
persuaded to join them in Albert’s main house where Alberto was staying. In her version of the Orpheus myth, Conchita
recalled, Eurydice had descended to rescue Orpheus so he couldn’t turn her to
stone. After a few weeks her mother tending the garden full with yellow irises
as bright as blazes of sunshine at midpoints, was joined by her father. At the
garden’s edge roots of tamarisk, its fruits the manna from heaven, clawed the
soil of the sea-banks to keep them stable. They wondered what the marshy flats
below looked like when they were sea and remembered a harbour.
On
a dull day along the coast the bobbing grey sea, monotone and simple, became a
mantra humming under a mist of more grey, a light drizzle of rain on the
skyline, and the whiteness of a domed gazebo (I will gaze) picked out by a
single ray from an otherwise hidden sun, dazzled: a full-stop setting the limit
of sea-horses and long-shore drifts alike. Brandished like these white domes on
green-grey seas, as green as Conchita, not grey, and as smooth as satin
unfurling, she was, Michel said as she walked on the beach in her emerald green
skirt and olive jacket, his gazebo, setting his gaze anew. When she put out her foot to trip him they
tumbled together on to the pebbles.
Mickey
Man Friday, as Albert’s new hard worker had been nicknamed, said quietly to Albert
in his strong accent so his mates couldn’t hear to take the mick, that he’d had
a dream of forging new passageways as if dreams like cross-pollination were as
easy as enemies becoming friends, then gone underground at the point where the
seas were at their narrowest and most powerful, down where it was deep, dark,
damp and dirty and there was no-sense-of-water nor solar blazes at midpoints
above. An older man who looked like Albert the foreman, the workers said, dug
beside him.
Two
years later, 1990, Christmas approaching, Mickey/Michel was deep underground
when the English and French came together under La Manche, Cozette and Fagg
popping their heads through to where lazar and radar waves had guided the
‘moles’ that then got buried. He heard the crowds roar and saw photographers’
flash-lights bounce off the sides of the tunnel along with his own. His was the
only picture Conchita saw that captured this ‘moment’. He kept it just for her.
When
disaster came to the tunnel as irony would have it, it came from fire not
flood, but Mickey/Michel couldn’t have been that disgruntled worker who’d set
fire to concrete linings which, like a micro waved potato or repressed psyche,
had exploded because there was no means of letting vapour escape.
For
the Channel of communication, whether it linked lover to lover, father to
daughter, head to heart or England to France, had been prized open. During the
tunnel’s construction from 1987 the Wall had come down, Mandela been released
from prison and Communism in the Soviet
Union looked set to collapse. The high speed train rushed and sighed with
relief.
Twenty
years later, one hundred and one years after Bleriot’s flight Michel and
Conchita still walk on what Michel and Alberto helped form from over
four-million-cubic-metres of slippery chalk marl, alchemical clay dug out,
loaded on to conveyor belts, amassed, spread out, dropped into lagoons, formed
into mounds, smoothed down then grassed over with paths for them to walk on,
inside and outside the mind. Not as big as the island Conchita’d hailed from,
this mound, Kent’s newest land still made Britain bigger by sixty-eight
football fields and three Cheops pyramids.
As
if progress had made way for one more Heraclitean pebble of change to be thrown
into the one underlying, riverine, cosmos, Samphire Hoe, below the cliff where
Gloucester never fell, was solid, underfoot now not underground or in the sky.
More solid than the point where light had danced on invisibly mixing seas, this
Hoe or grass-covered land, monument to and of earth extracted with huge effort
to allow passage and communion between two lands and people, made way for the
change-without-fear that levelled nightmares, moving like that train or river,
stopping us from turning into stone.
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