Tag: Normandy

‘Solitude as Translucence on Worthing Beach’: Travelling the intertidal zone back to my two year old self for Magma Poetry.

 Trigger warning: reference to childhood sexual abuse in the context of witness and healing.

In high summer, when our days swim with light, and heat,  it can be hard to remember midwinter. In the same way as adults, sometimes we often feel unreachably far from who we were as very small children. With the publication this July, of an essay that I wrote for Magma Poetry back in January, about my first two year old memories, I have been able to set these two sets of opposites side by side.  My brief for the magazine, edited by Isabelle Baafi, Ilya Kaminsky and Lisa Kelly, was to explore solitude. I chose to document a three night writing retreat, staying in a seafront hotel in Worthing, more or less opposite the Normandy beaches below my French grandmother’s house that I visited every childhood summer from when I was two.

Worthing, West Sussex.

 The essay grew from observations I made and photographs I took on the winter beach, responding to Worthing’s marine landscapes, and tides. I wanted to open myself to the acts of looking, and noticing, that are the foundation of a very young child’s self.  Through them, we begin to build their relationship with the world, and form a sense of who we are and where we fit. 

My creative intention was always to share the photos and diary entries through this blog when the Magma essay was published, to give readers access to the raw materials I was working with. My journey from London started out looking bleak. I passed through heavy fog on the South Downs, and then came out in the the aftermath of heavy rain along the coast. No sooner had I left my bags in the hotel room, however, than the huge sky began to clear. Straight away, I felt new and old energies entering me.  Seeing the sand ripples left by the tide, early days rose up again.  I was fifty-seven, wrapped up against the end of a midwinter afternoon in scarf and gloves, a thick winter coat and rubber boots. But I was also a two-year-old barefoot child dressed only in her swimsuit and rubber sandals. Together, through our shared consciousness, we registered the thrill of small waves breaking and frilling around our ankles, of wading through streaming seaweed, jumping over water channels streaming down the beach. 

As I walked back down the beach towards the hotel, the sunset made the shallow tide pools to flame with colour – as if they were singing back the sky’s song.  Climbing the stairs to my room, it seemed as if the natural world had opened itself to me in my time of need, and longing.

I stayed working and reading until high tide, just before midnight, then headed out to a world flooded with moonlight:

Nearly high tide no 1: January 19, midnight. The nearly full moon is looking down on the beach out of its single white eye, silvering the black waves. It feels as if the water is breathing. Clear blue sky. Intense cold. Frost coming.  Wet shingle sparkling.

Hurrying down onto the beach the next morning, I used the low, vertical light to capture the mussels growing on the iron legs of the pier, the worm casts rising like twirling castles out of the sand casting tiny triangular shadows, before the water covered them.  After an hour of walking and thinking alone, and swimming in memories, I climbed up the shingle to the Marine Gardens Cafe.

Surrounded by friends meeting, and couples enjoying breakfasts, admiring a lady cutting up a sausage on her plate, for two alert terriers beside her on the bench seat,  made me feel I was in the presence of other lives. I began to write my way back in time. On my way back to the hotel room, the tide was rising, and I sat on the shingle to document it.

Thursday 20 High Tide 

Sitting by the sea with my eyes closed, I hear the tide clink through the shingle. A long slow rattling pull back, then the landing thrashing of a wave crest and its rush upwards through the stones. The water dropping, the breath landing.  The slow rattling pull back of exhalation. I try to sound-time my body to this in-out movement. Drawing the world in. Letting it out. Hearing the water rattle the shingle and gather its energy to rise up a little further. 

I open my eyes to see the swelling that pushes the wave up closer to me each time and the swirl of the foam.  As if the sea is heaving itself towards me, sliding up the beach in liquid movement.  Further out the sun makes a triangular glitter path. Warm enough for the first time this year to feel it on my skin. I face myself into its energy.  Say enter me. Enter me life force. 

Close up the lace frill of breaking water. Curling over, massing in whale rises.  Heaving and roiling. Covering the beach in wet kisses.

When I went into the hotel after the high tide I dropped back into writing.  Three or four pages flowed, and the essay opened.  Then it was time for the cafe on the Lido, with its checked plastic tablecloths, and view of the sea through the storm grills. By now, people were enjoying a mid-afternoon slice of cake. After, I walked out along the pier over the water, adding a vertical line to the horizontals I had traced up and down the seafront. The sun was behind the pier, and the wind was cold, but the light was golden. 

Afternoon on Beach 20 January spoken into phone:

Four o’clock.  The tide is sliding down the beach with barely a ripple. Out to sea, a huge flock of seagulls have landed. They’re just sitting on the water.  Little white flecks.  Shimmers catching the setting sun.  The sun is gold and heavy, dropping down past the end of the pier.  The water is gunmetal, turquoise, grey, aquamarine.  The colours keep shifting.  It will be minus 3 tonight and the cold is in the air already, biting my fingers through the gloves, making everyone wrap up. The low sun is catching pebbles, catching the shingle, catching the wooden groynes that stop the beach shifting. Layers of golden colour striping the beach and two women wading into the still water. Further out the wind turbines rise up like white exclamations marks. The sky is moody grey over Brighton. Golden to the west.  The two swimmers have dipped down into the water.  They are keeping their heads high, swimming out with confidence.  The seagulls are turning golder as the sun drops lower.  The wind turbines are glowing. The sun is catching them. The wooden groynes are golden stripes across the brown shingle. A child is balancing on one. His father is photographing him, holding this cold January moment when the sun is still high enough to see by at 4pm, when the pier is balancing on its metal stilts and the sun’s path is golden beyond it. When the rim of the sky is apricot fading to gunmetal. 

On the way back to the hotel, my ears ached from the cold, but my head felt exploded by colour. Walking into the Marine Office to buy a tide timetable, I was shown a small tank of beach finds.  Purple-green snake haired anemones tangled their tendrils in the artificial current. A cuttle fish rose out of the sand on the floor and shot out its tentacles for food. Weed billowed. I knew I wanted to create ‘Chalk’ as a space where people could experience a microcosm of my childhood through their senses as well as their minds. 

On Friday morning the sand was shining again as the sun rose above the long low tide pools.  Sitting in the Marine Gardens cafe, for toast and coffee, after walking the morning beach, I fell deeply into writing a darker memory, which I describe in the Magma essay. On my way back, I found two lumps of chalk on the beach and carried them up to my hotel room to put on the windowsill.   They are cold to the touch, heavy, punctured by holes, the work of many events. I have taken them back to London.

Friday 21  high tide.

Yesterday I was on the beach recording the tide at sea level.  Today I am in my fourth floor room. The water is aquamarine today – a clear pale green blue – and moving more friskily than yesterday.  Seagulls surround a man as he takes his shoes and t-shirt off ready to swim He makes a star shape before entering the water. The waves are creaming and breaking up the shingle – full of energy. The man is waiting with his arms up then dives down at 1.13 into the high tide and swims parallel to the shore.  The cold waves are lapping and caressing the beach and he is swimming strongly where I swam last summer.   After a clear morning the sky has clouded over but there is a low gold on the horizon which is gilding the moving water. Pale blue, green, gold running up the land, agitated with movement all the way out to the horizon after yesterday’s stillness.  Seagulls flying strongly at level with my window. After a grey two months there is gold everywhere as if to remind me that life is always present. The swimmer is swimming strongly down the coast. The waves are curling and breaking into discreet white froth, not wild ragged storm waves but their elegant midwinter companions doing the work of bringing the water up onto the beach and letting the sand flats shine out in Normandy.  The swimmer is coming back doing a brisk crawl. He duck-dives down, immersing himself fully, doing somersaults, playing like a child in the freezing water before wading out.  There is an immersion in vastness that art also requires – a surrender to something huger and not without risk, that can infuse you with a larger energy.   Pulling on loose trousers and a t-shirt, he seems intensely alive going across the beach at speed to dry and warm up. The waves are less frothy now they are being called back to France, the work of travel moving the other way.  

In the early hours of Saturday morning, after writing all day about my father, and reaching back deep into golden places with him which I thought I had lost, I woke very cold after dreaming that my mother had come for my two year old self and taken me from my grandmother’s house.   Afterwards, when I tried to go back to that house, its door had been broken in and all the cupboards had been ransacked. The bathroom streaked with red. This is something I write about in more detail in the essay.

I got up on Saturday morning to a grey sky. My head was still heavy with tears with my eyes swollen – as if I had been crying in my sleep. These were tears which had taken more than half a century to be allowed to form. My time alone by the winter seaside had allowed me to go far back into my childhood and find a very difficult memory, which I write more about in the Magma essay.

I packed up my bag, and settled my bill, knowing that a part of my two year old self, who had been exiled from my conscious mind for decades, at last had her place again within me. The memory the dream gave me back was hard to receive, but I could have asked for no greater gift. As the year has turned from winter, through spring, into summer, this very small girl has continued to travel with me.  I am more whole for her presence. 

If anything in this blog has been difficult for you, the Mind website is a good place to look for help, or you could speak with your doctor.

If you would like to buy the Solitude issue of Magma it’s available here.

I will be reading from the Magma essay ‘Solitude as translucence’ live and online in Cardiff at 11.30 on Saturday 30 July at the Seren Books Cardiff Poetry Festival. Tickets for the event are £3.00 online or £5.00 live or you can buy a Festival Pass for all the readings over the three days from 29 to 31 July for £5.00 online or £90.00 live.

my debut ‘bird of winter’ – published by Pavilion in May 2021

When I was first experimenting with poems, five years ago,  I was working blind, like a mole digging upwards. Coming from a prose background, all I knew was that I had to find words able to hold what I needed to write. 

Like millions of other people around the world, I was groomed, and then sexually abused as a young child.  In my case, this took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. I then stumbled through the messy teenage aftermath as Punk gave way to Two Tone and Margaret Thatcher took power.  Nearly forty years later, memories of what happened can still flood my dreams.  Physical symptoms replay old injuries. 

Nowadays, sexual abuse is discussed extensively in the media.   Measures are in place to identify, make safe and support children who have been subjected to predation of this sort, even if these have been compromised during the recent lockdowns.  But there is still limited comprehension of what the crime entails, and how it impacts people, not least because it is so difficult, and painful, to think or talk about.  

Changing awareness, and giving witness, were two things I had in mind as I shaped my fledgling poems.  I wanted to make compact pieces of art.  They needed to contain and express what had happened to me, but do so with a degree of agency and protection for both writer and reader.  Like seashells found on a beach, they had to be small, beautiful fragments that you could pick up and hold to the light – while thinking of the depths in which they grew. 

Aside from a transformative Jerwood Arvon mentorship by Pascale Petit, and generous insights and readings from other poets along the way, three key elements fed into the poems that will be published by Pavilion as bird of winter in April 2021.  The first was my own long-standing fascination with Pompeii and Herculaneum.  I visited the two sites in the summer of 2000, along with the Naples Museum which holds many of the key finds.  I also subsequently saw, and bought the catalogues of, exhibitions at the British Museum and the Ashmolean. From the plaster dog, cast out from the void left in the ash by his evaporated body, to wall paintings and brothel graffiti testifying to lost lives, the findings gave forms to my excavations of my own past.  

bird of winter was also shaped by the notes I salvaged from my childhood and adolescent medical records. They corroborated my hospital stay as a teenager.  They additionally reflected how doctors saw children like me, at a time when sexual abuse was almost always missed. Finally, two trips to Dieppe in the summer and autumn of 2019 let me reconnect with what had sustained me through those very difficult years – namely the love I received from my French grandmother, and my father until his death when I was eight.

When bad things happen to you growing up, they can choke and pollute the waters of your life like an oil slick, and cause immense local damage. But they are not the whole story, any more than an oil slick is the whole surface of the sea.  Healing comes through cleaning up the damage, and then moving beyond it, to clearer waters and moments of love and joy, which more truthfully define us and let us know who we are.  I wanted bird of winter to honour these good elements, which enabled me to resist, and ultimately reclaim myself. 

First in the July sunshine, and then in October rain, I travelled across from Newhaven on the ferries like those I used to sail on to see my grandmother. I stood outside the gates of what had been her clifftop house, along the coast from Dieppe. I climbed down to the beach where I paddled and swum with her and my father.  To be there again, to know the movement of the sea, to hear the waves ringing through the shingle, was to feel a tide of strength flowing through me, as I worked on what proved to be some of the core poems of bird of winter. 

When I was asked by Pavilion to choose the cover colours, I knew immediately that they had to be from the Channel off Normandy.  They needed to wrap the darkness which the collection addresses in a transformative mantle of light. Some of them can be seen in the photos that run alongside these words, which were taken on those two trips in 2019. 

In the months to come, I will be writing more about bird of winter, and the real, and imagined, birds which take flight from its pages, alongside the objects excavated from Pompeii and Herculaneum which inspired some of the poems.  I will also write about what it is like to take back your medical notes, and see how you were seen, when you could not see yourself.

For now, I want to thank Deryn Rees-Jones, currently recovering from Long Covid, for making me a Pavilion poet, on a list which includes many writers who speak to my heart. Nuar Alsadir, Mona Arshi and Bhanu Kapil, to name only some, occupy sacred spaces on my shelves. I am honoured to be appearing alongside Alice Miller and Sarah Westcott in 2021 and hope we will be able to read together. 

In closing, I express solidarity with all of us who have been impacted by sexual abuse in childhood – whether at firsthand, or because it has come into the lives of those who matter to us.  By giving witness, by supporting each other, by making art that reclaims agency and beauty, we can work together across our communities.  We can help the world to see and think differently. 

If you would like to order a copy of bird of winter please follow this link.

To find more about the other amazing Pavilion Poets please follow this link.