Today I launch a crowdfund to publish a book of the magnificent portraits of WOMEN AT WORK taken by Spitalfields Life Contributing photographer Sarah Ainslie since 1992.

Please click here to learn more

Sarah celebrates the contribution of female labour in exuberant photographs that capture the passion and struggle of the working life, forming a panoramic survey of social change over four decades.

“My pictures are a testament to the indomitable spirit of women whose work is often unrecognised, whether in factories, working from home or caring for the vulnerable – tradeswomen, community organisers, garment workers, faith leaders, artists, firefighters, shopkeepers, transport workers, cleaners and NHS staff, women who are catering, and many more who sustain and bind together communities with their warmth, labour and fellowship.

The process of searching and building relationships with the women who participate has been an adventure, and these photographs are a celebration of the generosity of these women who welcomed me into their working lives.

It means so much to me and will be an important recognition of all the women I have photographed over the years for this book to be published by Spitalfields Life Books, a perfect home for it.”

Sarah Ainslie

Please help us publish a handsome 200 page hardback to honour the work of these women who shape the fabric of our lives. We are organising a major exhibition of these portraits at the Four Corners photography gallery in Bethnal Green to coincide with publication of the book this autumn.

Please click here to learn more

Loretta Lietch, Electrician 1992 & Evie Spray, Firefighter 2022

Claire Camelo, Bethnal Green Tube Station 2022

Sabeh Miah, Mahmuda Jaigirdas, Cooks 2011 & Sister June, Sister Pam, Cooks 1992

Lanma Horton, Smithfield Market 1992

Lannette Edwards, Machinist 1992 & Hafsa Diallo, Publican, DJ 2022

Sue Venning, Kelly’s Pie & Mash 2011

Click here to book for my next City of London tour on Spring Bank Holiday May 4th

Poet Andy Strowman wrote this memoir and poem as a tribute to his late Uncle Barney whose birthday it is today.

There is a quiet cemetery where you may find yourself the only living soul other than the grave diggers. It is East Ham Jewish cemetery. Amongst the graves is one Barnett Cohen, my Uncle Barney. He is the only Barnett Cohen buried there.

The East End is a sparsely populated Jewish area now. Time has crept away, and Barney and I are of a time long gone. Yet behind each gravestone there is a story.

Uncle Barney was born in Whitechapel in the early twenties, to Milka and Herschel Cohen, refugees who escaped the pogroms, the mass slaughter of Jews, in Eastern Europe.

The memory I have of him is as the personification of kindness. A man with a gentle sense of humour who came to visit our house in Milward St where he had grown up himself, a street that was one hundred and fifty years old when I was born, behind the London Hospital. He was born in Villa, now part of Russia, in 1897 and was married in 1914.

I recall he would always eat an orange after every meal to conclude it. When he visited me and my mum, he would bring us so much joy by doing magic tricks, like holding a penny in place in front of an eye. He confided to me about the time he visited London Zoo dressed in his new suit and a chimpanzee humiliated him. The large creature came to greet him at the side of the cage, then spat water all over his suit while the surrounding crowd laughed.

Yet the bravery of his choice to leave the army during the Second World War as a Conscientious Objector because he did not want to kill anyone revealed the moral courage of the man. Even so, he was ridiculed by North London Jews when he moved there from the East End.

It was something I identified with personally, since when my school moved to Essex, me and my friend were humiliated by Mr Philpott, the head teacher, in front of the school assembly when he said, ‘We will not have children in our school, who live in the gutter and play in the gutter, behaving badly in our school.’ Today I recall those words and how the rest of the school turned to look at us. I still remember how the teacher asked ‘Where’s your pen?’ with the reply, ‘I ain’t got one, Sir.’ To which the teacher said, ‘Speak properly, boy’ and the pupil said ‘I haven’t got one, Sir.’ ‘Not “I haven’t got one”‘ insisted the teacher, ‘I have not got one, Sir.’

So what became of Uncle Barney? He had an arranged marriage to a woman called Dolly. Before I was born, he had lived in the same house where I grew up. His brothers were Jack and David and his sisters were Rachel and Rose. They occupied 17 Milward St behind the London Hospital and their mum and dad were Milka (Millie in English) and Hershel (Harris in English).

I got the feeling that Barney lacked confidence. Much like me, he went to a school where University was not an option. The concern of the day was survival and so he went to work in the garment industry, leaving school at the tender age of fourteen to enter the workplace.

When the World War Two broke out, he enlisted into the army. Sensitivity and inferiority left him unable to hurt anyone and full of fear. He told his sergeant that he did not want to be shipped out to fight. Barney did not want to kill anyone. In all my time of knowing him I never heard him say a bad word about anybody. He was put in the guardhouse and then transferred to Wormwood Scrubs Prison where his weight deteriorated to five and a half stone. Millie, his mother, knew she had to act or risk his death.

She had two sisters who were well-off and lived in North London. One of them went with her to a government office and – as we say in the East End – ‘the old brown envelope’ was handed over and Barney was released.

One retired prison officer told me recently, ‘You wouldn’t have liked it in there. The cells were very small and there was only a tiny courtyard. You could have had someone banging on the wall of the next cell and shouting through the night, and be threatened too. The only time we intervened was if one prisoner hit another.’

Uncle Barney had lost a lot by being in prison and developed a habit of scratching his backside. In the workplace he was not an asset and, if he worked alongside his brother Jack, he continually asked him if it was any good the work he was doing.

When I was sixteen, my mum told me Uncle Barney had endured six sessions of Electro-Convulsive Therapy at Long Grove Hospital, the same place Ronnie Kray went to. The hospital was closed in 1992.

Yet it would be unbalanced to leave out the wonderful kindness bestowed on Uncle Barney that he transferred to others. Nor his sense of humour which he brought out in others with his magic tricks.

Such was his aura and persona that, when I was a child, I did not want Barney to leave. Whenever he visited us at 17 Milward St during his lunch hour from Ellis & Goldstein where he worked and was talking to mum, I crept quietly to the front door and locked it by sliding the bolt across. When my mum struggled to open the door, it prompted a laugh from my Uncle Barney. I must have been about eight years old at the time.

At the tender age of fourteen, my mum was chosen to be bridesmaid at his wedding to Dolly. Marriage can be very hard at times and I am sure the legacy of coming from a poor family and having complex mental health problems demanded much understanding from all the family. In my experience, it can be very challenging not only to get help for it, and good help, but having your family understand what you are going through, because unless they have been through it themselves it can be very straining for them and for the patient.

Barney looking dapper at this son’s wedding

BARNEY

I honour you today

Like an FA cup,

Your eyes glazed by kindness

And your lips sealed by honesty.

Kissing the frontiers of your life

I exchange sugar with Alan Sugar,

Tip toe through the darkness of your life

And strangle the people who ridiculed you.

Hours have passed and light bulbs have died.

We could not stop you going into the Army

Or the mental hospitals,

But we never stopped loving you

For the laughter you gave us.

Daily we watched it grow.

Uncle Barney is fourth from the left at the back at my brother  Howard’s Barmitzvah party. I am seated on the chair at the bottom left.

You may also like to read about

Andy Stroman, Poet of Stepney

From Andy Stroman’s Album 

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Simply add the code SPRINGSALE at checkout to get 50% discount

“As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture which threatens to turn the city into the backlot of an abandoned movie studio.”

The Gentle Author presents a humorous analysis of facadism – the unfortunate practice of destroying an old building apart from the front wall and constructing a new building behind it – revealing why it is happening and what it means.

As this bizarre architectural fad has spread across the capital, The Gentle Author has photographed the most notorious examples, collecting an astonishing gallery of images guaranteed to inspire both laughter and horror in equal measure.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF THE CREEPING PLAGUE OF GHASTLY FACADISM

Culminating a distinguished career spanning more than sixty years, historian Gillian Tindall has written a novel as her final statement. In an astonishing feat of literary imagination, she projects herself back onto one of her forebears to conjure a compelling vision of 17th century England.

The protagonist is a Huguenot metal founder, an occupation that leads him from the Sussex Weald to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, and beyond to the North Country. While in London, he lives above a coffee house in Brick Lane and the book conjures a vivid evocation of Spitalfields at the time of the Huguenots.

This is a hymn to those who pass through life not leaving a trace, except in the hearts of those into whose lives they have been cast.

‘Gillian Tindall’s JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN is a novel of rare distinction. Tindall’s voice is richly her own: tender but unsentimental and lit by intimate knowledge of her chosen world.’ Colin Thubron

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN

The Gentle Author assembles a choice selection of CRIES OF LONDON, telling the stories of the artists and celebrated traders, and revealing the unexpected social realities contained within these cheap colourful prints produced for the mass market.

For centuries, these lively images of familiar hawkers and pedlars have been treasured by Londoners. In the capital, those who had no other means of income could always sell wares in the street and, by turning their presence into performance through song, they won the hearts of generations and came to embody the spirit of London itself.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF THE CRIES OF LONDON

David Hoffman’s bold, humane photography records a lost era, speaking vividly to our own times.

When David Hoffman was a young photographer, he came to live in a squat in Fieldgate Mansions in Whitechapel and it changed his life.

Over the following years, he documented homelessness, racism and the rise of protest in startlingly intimate and compassionate pictures to compose a vital photographic testimony of resilience.

A hefty cloth-bound hardback of 240 pages containing over 200 duotone photographic prints on good quality paper.

With an introduction by David Hoffman and commentary throughout.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF ENDURANCE & JOY IN THE EAST END

‘a timely reminder of all that modern Britishness encompasses’ The Observer

In this first London Sikh biography, Suresh Singh tells the candid and sometimes surprising story of his father Joginder Singh who came to Spitalfields in 1949.

Joginder sacrificed a life in the Punjab to work in Britain and send money home, yet he found himself in his element living among the mishmash of people who inhabited the streets around Brick Lane.

Born and bred in London, his son Suresh became the first Punjabi punk, playing drums for Spizzenergi and touring with Siouxsie & the Banshees.

In the book, chapters of biography are alternated with Sikh recipes by Jagir Kaur.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF A MODEST LIVING

Tessa Hunkin’s Hackney Mosaic Project has been responsible for some of the most witty and imaginative mosaics of recent years.

In a bold reinvention of the classical tradition, Tessa has assembled a passionate and diverse team of makers, creating beautiful mosaics that have become cherished landmarks, celebrating community and elevating the streets of East London.

This inspirational collection reveals the scope of Hackney Mosaic Project’s achievement for the first time, ranging from modest pieces in private gardens to expansive murals and pavements in public parks.

Includes an interview with Tessa Hunkin by The Gentle Author, commentary by Wendy Forrest, a map with locations of the mosaic and a description of the working process.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF HACKNEY MOSAIC PROJECT

‘This small, beautiful book is an elegy to companionship. Encompassing both the everyday and the profound, it should be judged no less valid for the fact that the friend in question is a cat.’ Times Literary Supplement

Anyone that has a cat will recognise the truth of this tender account by The Gentle Author.

“I was always disparaging of those who doted over their pets, as if this apparent sentimentality were an indicator of some character flaw. That changed when I bought a cat, just a couple of weeks after the death of my father. ”

Filled with sentiment yet never sentimental, THE LIFE & TIMES OF MR PUSSY is a literary hymn to the intimate relationship between humans and animals.

AS Jasper’s tender memoir of growing up in the East End of London at the beginning of the twentieth century was immediately acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’

In this definitive new edition, A Hoxton Childhood is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s struggles and eventual triumph in the cabinet-making trade,The Years After.

Illustrated with line drawings by James Boswell and Joe McLaren

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF A HOXTON CHILDHOOD

CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10

‘It was a fine night, though chill, and the stars were out. I went walking on, beyond the Spital Fields and Brick Lane, out into the countryside to Mile End and beyond, to where there were few houses along the highway, out to where the Jews have made a burial ground. (I had met a few, newcomers to London like to the Huguenots, and they were very much the same manner of decent, hard-working people, for all their Spanish names). I had my knife in my belt as usual, but there was nothing to fear that far east out of Town: no-one about at all.

The moon was shining over St Dunstan’s, out at Stepney, and I lent a while against the dead Jews’ wall, watching it. I even contemplated walking yet further, so full of a strange energy did I feel. It was as if something that had been in the bottom of my mind for years, vaguely troubling me from time to time but ever quietly dismissed, had suddenly risen to the top that evening like liquid over a fire in a pan.

Jews, I know, have their own God whose son has yet to appear on earth. The Saracens have another one, of much the same kind by all accounts. The Huguenots, Protestants, Puritans, Catholics, Greek Christians and all the rest are supposed to believe in One God and His Son, but that has not stopped them from fighting and killing each other in the most un-Christian way in every century of which I have heard account. They were at it here in England all my childhood years.

How much fervent, angry, desperate praying goes on by all sides, many of the prayer-sayers wishing damnation on the others. And how little of it ever truly produces a result, except by ordinary life chances that are then falsely claimed as ‘prayers answered’?

And in that moment I knew, in a burst of freedom, like a man before whom a door that he believed firmly locked and forbidden is suddenly open – that I did not believe in any of it, and had not done so for many years.

And as for the idea that the great Maker of the construction is perpetually watching each of us separate persons, intent on testing every one of his multitudinous subjects’ loyalty with particular troubles and griefs, like a bad tempered and unjust King doling out unmerited torments to some on purpose to ‘try them’, while occasionally and unexpectedly bestowing blessings on others no more deserving – this was suddenly revealed to me as a story for badly behaved children.

And I strongly suspected in that same moment, that a number of the men whom I had met in London, and whom I most respected, had secretly come to the same never-to-be-spoken conclusion. Unbelief is contrary to the Law of both God and Man. But surely honest.

I went on standing there for quite a while, I think, trying to take in my new-found freedom. It felt right and just. But lonely, if – from – henceforth, there were none but myself in charge of my fate. Also a sense of my consequent, helpless separation in my secret heart from all others. For a few minutes my desolation recalled my first weeks alone in London. And I had no one at that time with whom I felt intimate enough to admit my new conviction.

And then something odd happened while I stood there. One of those moments, like the one in the night before I left the Forest (which I had dismissed as a dream). Although the Mile End Road was deserted, the few cottages around shuttered and none about but a half-grown fox in the Jews’ cemetery, who had caught sight of me over the wall and had scampered away, I suddenly became convinced that I was surrounded. By houses and people that I could sense but could not see. The moon at that moment had gone behind a thick cloud, a country-dark descended. Yet I felt as if I were standing in a City street. Voices, passing by, that I could not hear properly, and footsteps on stone and other sounds of rushing or roaring that I could not identify. Such as the sound of machines. But my strongest sensation was that I was hemmed in, crowded.

Cravenly fearful, as if my ungodly thoughts were somehow visiting on me a revenge, I clutched the top of the brick cemetery wall with my hands. That at least seemed solid and of all time. Fearful of what the returning moon might reveal, I shut my eyes for a while. I believe that by habit I even cravenly and illogically prayed ‘Keep me safe, Lord!’

I opened my eyes again at last when the sounds had faded away. The moon had returned. The Mile End Road was its peaceful, deserted, night-time self. The clock of St Dunstan’s struck twelve.

Suddenly very tired, I must have made my way back to the Spital Fields, though that I do not remember.’

CLICK HERE TO ORDER JOURNAL OF A MAN UNKNOWN FOR £10

Walter Donohue by Sarah Ainslie

We are delighted to announce that – due to popular demand – script editor, producer and luminary of the British cinema, Walter Donohue has agreed to teach another  two-day screenwriting course at Townhouse in Spitalfields on the weekend of 18th and 19th April.

Here are some comments by students on Walter’s previous course:

“I just want to say thank you for putting on such a fantastic weekend – it was so, so interesting speaking with like-minded people who share such a love for film and to be able to speak to the wonderful Walter and Mike Figgis and glean some of their vast knowledge. The food was delicious and the setting was ideal, I really appreciate the effort that you put into making it such a fantastic weekend.” MN

“The course itself exceeded my expectations – I learned so many invaluable lessons about screenwriting and the film industry itself. I will take all the new skills into my career. Both Mike Figgis and Walter led an incredibly useful course and truly took their time with each student.” GE

“The weekend spent in the Townhouse was nothing short of wondrous. Walter’s passion for writing and storytelling is infectious. For every story that the students had, Walter had suggestions that took that story to a new level. The man’s knowledge of what is needed in screenwriting and how to pitch, for me, was invaluable. The weekend was two days that I will never forget. I now have the tools and ammunition to start my own personal project. The visit by Mike Figgis was insightful. His views on Hollywood and filmmaking were blunt, informative and most importantly, honest! I could have listened to him talk all day.”  JL

WALTER’S EXPERIENCE

In the eighties, Walter began working as a script editor, starting with Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas and Sally Potter’s Orlando. Since then he has worked with some major filmmakers including Joel & Ethan Coen, Wim Wenders, Sally Potter, David Byrne, Mike Figgis, John Boorman, Viggo Mortensen, Alex Garland, Kevin Macdonald, and László Nemes.

For the past thirty years he has been editor of the Faber & Faber film list, publishing Pulp Fiction and Barbie, and screenplays by Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, David Lynch, Sally Potter, and Greta Gerwig & Noah Baumbach, Joel & Ethan Coen, and Christopher Nolan among many others.

Walter also published Scorsese on Scorsese, and edited the series of interview books with David Lynch, Robert Altman, Tim Burton, John Cassavetes, Pedro Almodovar and Christopher Nolan.

THE COURSE

Walter’s course is suitable for all levels of experience from those who are complete beginners to those who have already written screenplays and seek to refresh their practise. The course is limited to sixteen students.

APPROACHES TO SCREENWRITING

Walter says –

“My course is about approaches to writing a screenplay rather than a literal step-by-step technique on how to write.

The objective of my course is to immerse participants in the world of film, acquainting them with a cinematic language which will enable them to create films that are unique and personal to themselves.

There are four approaches – each centred around a particular film which will be the focus of each of the four sessions.

The approaches are –
Structure: Paris, Texas
Viewpoint: Silence of the Lambs
Genre: Anora
Endings: Chinatown

Participants will be required to have seen all four films in advance of the course.”

This is a unique opportunity to enjoy a convivial weekend with Walter in an eighteenth century townhouse in Spitalfields and learn how to approach your screenplay.

Refreshments, freshly baked cakes and lunches are included in the course fee of £350.

Please email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book your place.

Please note we do not give refunds if you are unable to attend or if the course is postponed for reasons beyond our control.

Photographs copyright © Sarah Ainslie

“I remember coming out of the tube in Whitechapel in 1974 and being overwhelmed,” recalled Stephen Watts affectionately, his deep brown eyes glowing with inner fire to describe the spiritual epiphany of his arrival in the East End, when coming to London after three years on North Uist in the Outer Hebrides. Today Stephen lives in Shadwell and has a tiny writing office in the Toynbee Hall in Commercial St where I paid him a call upon him.

“Migration is in my awareness and in my blood,” he admitted, referring to his family who were mountain people dwelling in the Swiss Alps on the Italian border – living twelve hundred feet above sea level – and his grandfather who came to London before the First World War, worked in a cafe in Soho and then bought his own cafe. “I realised this was an area of migration since the seventeenth century when the farm workers of Cambridgeshire, Kent and Suffolk began to arrive here, and I immediately felt an affinity for the place,” Stephen continued, casting his thoughts back far beyond his own arrival in Whitechapel, yet wary to qualify the vision too, lest I should think it self-dramatising.

“It is very easy to be romantic about it, but I think migration has been the objective reality for many people in the twentieth and twenty-first century. So it seemed to be something very natural, when I came to live in Whitechapel.” he revealed with an amiable smile. Yet although he allowed himself a moment to savour this thought, Stephen possesses a restless energy and a mind in constant motion, suggesting that he might be gone at any moment, and entirely precluding any sense of being at home and here to stay. Even if he has lived in his council house in Shadwell for forty years, I would not be surprised if the wind blew Stephen away.

A tall skinny man with his loose clothes hanging off him and his long white locks drifting around, Stephen does present a superficial air of insubstantiality, even other-wordliness. Yet when you are in conversation with Stephen you quickly encounter the substance of his quicksilver mind, moving swiftly and using words with delicate precision, making unexpected connections. “In the Outer Hebrides the unemployment rate was twenty-five per cent and it was the same in Tower Hamlets when I arrived,” he said, informing me of the parallels with precise logic, “also Tower Hamlets had large areas of empty water then, just like the North Uist.” drawing comparison between the abandoned dockland and the Hebridean sea lochs, in regions of Britain that could not be more different in ever other respect.

We took the advantage of the frosty sunlight to make a half hour’s circuit of the streets attending Brick Lane and these familiar paths took on another quality in Stephen’s company, because while I tend to be always going somewhere, Stephen has the sense to halt and look around – indicative of certain open-ness of temperament that has led him befriend all kinds of people in pubs and on the street in Whitechapel over the years. I took this moment to ask Stephen if he chose to be a poet. “I made a choice when I quit university after a year and went to live in North Uist,” he said as we resumed our pace, “and then I made a choice to be a poet. But as a choice it was unavoidable, because I realised that it was so much part of me that not to have done it would be a denial of my humanity.”

Returning to the Toynbee Hall, Stephen allowed me the privilege of a peek into his tiny room on an upper floor, not much larger than a broom cupboard. The walls were lined with thin poetry books in magnificent order, arrayed in wine boxes stacked floor to ceiling and standing proud of the walls to create bays, leaving space only for one as slim as Stephen to squeeze through. It was a sacred space, the lair of the mountain man or a hermit’s retreat. It felt organic, like a cave, or maybe – it occurred to me – a shepherd’s hut carved out of the rock. And there, up above Stephen’s head was an old black and white photo of shepherds on a mountain road, taken in the Swiss Alps whence Stephen’s family originate and where even now he still returns to visit his relatives.

Stephen’s room is a haven of peace in the midst of Whitechapel, yet he delights to complement his life in here by working alongside Bengali and Somali poets in all kinds of projects in schools around Tower Hamlets, and pursues translation alongside his own poetry too, as means to “invite difference” into his work. Possessing a natural warmth of personality and brightness of temperament which make you want to listen and hang off his words, Stephen has a genuine self-effacing charm. “I don’t believe in being a professional poet in the sense of promoting myself, being a poet is about becoming embedded in humanity,” he proposed modestly, presuming to speak for no-one than himself, “And that’s why I lived in the East End and that’s why I still find it inspiring – because of the tremendous range of human presence in Whitechapel.”

BRICK LANE

(after the death of Altab Ali, and for Bill Fishman)

Whoever has walked slowly down Brick Lane in the darkening air and a stiff little rain,

past the curry house with lascivious frescoes,

past the casual Sylheti sweet-shops and cafés

and the Huguenot silk attics of Fournier Street,

and the mosque that before was a synagogue and before that a chapel,

whoever has walked down that darkening tunnel of rich history

from Bethnal Green to Osborne Street at Aldgate,

past the sweat-shops at night and imams with hennaed hair,

and recalls the beigel-sellers on the pavements,  windows candled to Friday night,

would know this street is a seamless cloth, this city, these people,

and would not suffocate ever from formlessness or abrupted memory,

would know rich history is the present before us,

laid out like a cloth – a cloth for the wearing –  with bits of mirror and coloured stuff,

and can walk slowly down Brick Lane from end to seamless end,

looped in the air and the light of it, in the human lattice of it,

the blood and exhausted flesh of it, and the words grown bright with the body’s belief,

and life to be fought for and never to be taken away.

Song for Mickie the Brickie

Mickie I met down Watney Street and he whistled me across.

“How are you” he said

—and of course really meant “have you a little to spare for some drink”—

but could not bear to ask.

We walked through the decayed market,

a yellow-black sun gazed down over Sainsbury’s as I went to look for change.

Ten pound was hardly enough to get him through the dregs of that bitter day.

We stood on the corner where for centuries people have stood.

Many worlds passed us by.

When he had been in hospital he’d taken his pills and been looked after and had not got worse.

Now he’s barely getting by.

He walks out of the rooming house in Bethnal Green when it gets too loud inside.

His scalp’s flaking and he needs a reliable level and a small brickie’s trowel.

That woman’s son’s inside for good.

That one’s man is a chronic alcoholic.

This one’s on her own and better for it.

But how can you know anyone’s story when every day you walk by without stopping.

Charlie Malone was a good friend. So was John Long.

Now they’re resting in Tadman’s Parlour

—and first thing in the morning Mickie’ll go and say to them words that cannot be answered.

Those are the best words, but they’re hardest to bear.

To me he says : “Always—always—stop me—always—come across.”

And what is the point of centuries of conversation if no-one’s ever there to hear.

FRAGMENT

… And so I long for snow to

sweep across the low heights of London

from the lonely railyards and trackhuts

– London a lichen mapped on mild clays

and its rough circle without purpose –

because I remember the gap for clarity

that comes before snow in the north and

I remember the lucid air’s changing sky

and I remember the grey-black wall with

every colour imminent in a coming white

the moon rising only to be displaced and

the measured volatile calmness of after

and I remember the blue snow hummocks

the mountains of miles off in snow-light

frozen lakes – a frozen moss to stand on

where once a swarmed drifting stopped.

And I think – we need such a change,

my city and I, that may be conjured in

us that dream birth of compassion with

reason & energy merged in slow dance.

Photographs copyright © Lucinda Douglas-Menzies

I am proud to publish these excerpts from THE HOXTON CHRONICLE by Steven Smith, a graduate of my writing course. Steven set out set out to explore his local neighbourhood through stories.

Follow THE HOXTON CHRONICLE

I am taking bookings for the next writing course, HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ on February 7th & 8th. Come to Spitalfields and spend a winter weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches and eat cakes baked to historic recipes, and learn how to write your own blog.

Click here for details

If you are graduate of my course and you would like me to feature your blog, please drop me a line.

Earl

SO LONG, CHEAP BOOZE!

Steven Smith celebrates the legendary ‘Cheap Booze’ off-licence

When Earl and his partners opened Cheap Booze at the corner of Haberdasher St and Pitfield St in 1991, it immediately became a local landmark with its huge green bottle sign made by the artist Matt Parsons. Earl comments that he would be rich if he had a pound for every photograph taken of it. Cheap Booze sells exactly what the name suggests –  wines, beers, spirits, cigarettes and a small selection of sweets and snacks. It has a do-it-yourself feel. ‘Why spend money on the interior?’ Earl asks. ‘It will not sell a single extra bottle.’

Earl has prodigious energy, a broad smile and diverse interests in many enterprises. Somehow, despite the routine of running the shop, he finds time to pursue them all. He was born and grew up in Hackney, describing his childhood as ‘loosely supervised’, allowing him and his crew of close friends to roam freely in pursuit of whatever took their interest. Their shared passion was music. They pooled scarce resources to buy records and gradually assembled a powerful sound system from a mixture of bought, scrounged and self-assembled scrap materials.

While still in school, Earl and his friends were already performing gigs around London. The ‘Man & Van’ couriers, hired to ferry the vast sound system and record collection to venues, found it deeply puzzling to be contracted by children for serious late-night moving jobs to obscure locations. At sixteen, Earl’s schooling ended with a final gig at which he and his pals unveiled the massive sound system they had created to the amazement of fellow pupils.

Earl and his mates were now free to pursue their music full-time. However, Earl’s father had alternative plans, explaining to Earl that he was free to do whatever he wished but could only stay in the family home if he studied for a commercial trade. Surprised by this stern life lesson, Earl decided to take an apprenticeship as an electrician, reasoning that it might be useful in wiring his sound system. His friends were given similar parental injunctions too and became apprentice electricians too. On qualifying, they immediately established Heatwave Electrics, their own independent company. Work poured in, keeping them busy as electricians by day and DJs by night.

One day, whilst wiring a grocery store in Leyton High Rd, they realised they should open a shop of their own. Based on their collective observation that ‘everyone drinks’, they quickly hit on the idea of opening an off-licence in a vacant shop in Hoxton. Thirty-four years of Cheap Booze began with this moment of inspiration.

As the music side of life grew more serious with larger gigs, they worked to pioneer a new genre, blending reggae, ska, pop and rock to create what became known as Drum & Base Jungle music. Kevin Ford, a core group member since schooldays, became better known publicly as DJ Hype, recognised as one of the world’s foremost producers and performers of Drum & Base.

Music has taken Earl to almost every continent as a DJ. The trips were frequently long and arduous with a dozen flights between gigs in as many days, ending with a long-haul return flight to London in time to deliver him back behind the counter at Cheap Booze. Consequently, travel has become another of Earl’s passions that he is eager to indulge in future. The tropical landscape, and the calm and peaceful lifestyles of Ghana and Grenada are particular attractions. He confessed he may find his future in one of these locations. He says, ‘I have never worked for anyone, I am the centre of my business and can operate and prosper anywhere.’

After thirty-four years, Earl feels it is time for personal reinvention with a new enterprise. Given his outlook, robust energy and enterprise, he will surely prosper but Hoxton will be a duller place without him and Cheap Booze.

We wish him well.

The famous green bottle sign was made by artist Matt Parsons

HOW TO WRITE A BLOG THAT PEOPLE WILL WANT TO READ  – 7th & 8th FEBRUARY

Spend a weekend with me in an eighteenth century weaver’s house in Fournier St, enjoy delicious lunches, savour freshly baked cakes from historic recipes, discover the secrets of Spitalfields Life and learn how to write your own blog.

This course is suitable for writers of all levels of experience – from complete beginners to those who already have a blog and want to advance.

This course will examine the essential questions which need to be addressed if you wish to write a blog that people will want to read.

“Like those writers in fourteenth century Florence who discovered the sonnet but did not quite know what to do with it, we are presented with the new literary medium of the blog – which has quickly become omnipresent, with many millions writing online. For my own part, I respect this nascent literary form by seeking to explore its own unique qualities and potential.” – The Gentle Author

COURSE STRUCTURE

1. How to find a voice – When you write, who are you writing to and what is your relationship with the reader?
2. How to find a subject – Why is it necessary to write and what do you have to tell?
3. How to find the form – What is the ideal manifestation of your material and how can a good structure give you momentum?
4. The relationship of pictures and words – Which comes first, the pictures or the words? Creating a dynamic relationship between your text and images.
5. How to write a pen portrait – Drawing on The Gentle Author’s experience, different strategies in transforming a conversation into an effective written evocation of a personality.
6. What a blog can do – A consideration of how telling stories on the internet can affect the temporal world including publishing books, writing articles, creating guided walks, curating exhibitions and leading community campaigns.

SALIENT DETAILS

The course will be held at 5 Fournier St, Spitalfields on 7th & 8th February. The course runs from 10am-5pm on Saturday and 11am-5pm on Sunday.

Tea, coffee & cakes baked from eighteenth century recipes by the Townhouse, and lunches are included within the course fee of £350.

Email spitalfieldslife@gmail.com to book a place on the course.

Comments by students from courses tutored by The Gentle Author

“I highly recommend this creative, challenging and most inspiring course. The Gentle Author gave me the confidence to find my voice and just go for it!”

“Do join The Gentle Author on this Blogging Course in Spitalfields. It’s as much about learning/ appreciating Storytelling as Blogging. About developing how to write or talk to your readers in your own unique way. It’s also an opportunity to “test” your ideas in an encouraging and inspirational environment. Go and enjoy – I’d happily do it all again!”

“The Gentle Author’s writing course strikes the right balance between addressing the creative act of blogging and the practical tips needed to turn a concept into reality. During the course the participants are encouraged to share and develop their ideas in a safe yet stimulating environment. A great course for those who need that final (gentle) push!”

“I haven’t enjoyed a weekend so much for a long time. The disparate participants with different experiences and aspirations rapidly became a coherent group under The Gentle Author’s direction in a  gorgeous  house in Spitalfields. There was lots of encouragement, constructive criticism, laughter and very good lunches. With not a computer in sight, I found it really enjoyable to draft pieces of written work using pen and paper. Having gone with a very vague idea about what I might do I came away with a clear plan which I think will be achievable and worthwhile.”

“The Gentle Author is a master blogger and, happily for us, prepared to pass on skills. This “How to write a blog” course goes well beyond offering information about how to start blogging – it helps you to see the world in a different light, and inspires you to blog about it.  You won’t find a better way to spend your time or money if you’re considering starting a blog.”

“I gladly traveled from the States to Spitalfields for the How to Write a Blog Course. The unique setting and quality of the Gentle Author’s own writing persuaded me and I was not disappointed. The weekend provided ample inspiration, like-minded fellowship, and practical steps to immediately launch a blog that one could be proud of. I’m so thankful to have attended.”

“I took part in The Gentle Author’s blogging course for a variety of reasons: I’ve followed Spitalfields Life for a long time now, and find it one of the most engaging blogs that I know; I also wanted to develop my own personal blog in a way that people will actually read, and that genuinely represents my own voice. The course was wonderful. Challenging, certainly, but I came away with new confidence that I can write in an engaging way, and to a self-imposed schedule. The setting in Fournier St was both lovely and sympathetic to the purpose of the course. A further unexpected pleasure was the variety of other bloggers who attended: each one had a very personal take on where they wanted their blogs to go, and brought with them an amazing range and depth of personal experience. “

“I found this bloggers course was a true revelation as it helped me find my own voice and gave me the courage to express my thoughts without restriction. As a result I launched my professional blog and improved my photography blog. I would highly recommend it.”

“An excellent and enjoyable weekend: informative, encouraging and challenging. The Gentle Author was generous throughout in sharing knowledge, ideas and experience and sensitively ensured we each felt equipped to start out.  Thanks again for the weekend. I keep quoting you to myself.”

“My immediate impression was that I wasn’t going to feel intimidated – always a good sign on these occasions. The Gentle Author worked hard to help us to find our true voice, and the contributions from other students were useful too. Importantly, it didn’t feel like a ‘workshop’ and I left looking forward to writing my blog.”

“The Spitafields writing course was a wonderful experience all round. A truly creative teacher as informed and interesting as the blogs would suggest. An added bonus was the eclectic mix of eager students from all walks of life willing to share their passion and life stories. Bloomin’ marvellous grub too boot.”

“An entertaining and creative approach that reduces fears and expands thought”

“The weekend I spent taking your course in Spitalfields was a springboard one for me. I had identified writing a blog as something I could probably do – but actually doing it was something different!  Your teaching methods were fascinating, and I learnt a lot about myself as well as gaining  very constructive advice on how to write a blog.  I lucked into a group of extremely interesting people in our workshop, and to be cocooned in the beautiful old Spitalfields house for a whole weekend, and plied with delicious food at lunchtime made for a weekend as enjoyable as it was satisfying.  Your course made the difference between thinking about writing a blog, and actually writing it.”

“After blogging for three years, I attended The Gentle Author’s Blogging Course. What changed was my focus on specific topics, more pictures, more frequency, more fun. In the summer I wrote more than forty blogs, almost daily from my Tuscan villa on village life and I had brilliant feedback from my readers. And it was a fantastic weekend with a bunch of great people and yummy food.”

“An inspirational weekend, digging deep with lots of laughter and emotion, alongside practical insights and learning from across the group – and of course overall a delightfully gentle weekend.”

“The course was great fun and very informative, digging into the nuts and bolts of writing a blog.   There was an encouraging and nurturing atmosphere that made me think that I too could learn to write a blog that people might want to read.  – There’s a blurb, but of course what I really want to say is that my blog changed my life, without sounding like an idiot.   The people that I met in the course were all interesting people, including yourself.   So thanks for everything.”

“This is a very person-centred course.  By the end of the weekend, everyone had developed their own ideas through a mix of exercises, conversation and one-to-one feedback. The beautiful Hugenot house and high-calibre food contributed to what was an inspiring and memorable weekend.”

“It was very intimate writing course that was based on the skills of writing. The Gentle Author was a superb teacher.”

“It was a surprising course that challenged and provoked the group in a beautiful supportive intimate way and I am so thankful for coming on it.”

“I did not enrol on the course because I had a blog in mind, but because I had bought TGA’s book, “Spitalfields Life”, very much admired the writing style and wanted to find out more and improve my own writing style. By the end of the course, I had a blog in mind, which was an unexpected bonus.”

“This course was what inspired me to dare to blog. Two years on, and blogging has changed the way I look at London.”

A few tickets left for THE GENTLE AUTHOR’S TOUR OF SPITALFIELDS on January 1st: CLICK HERE TO BOOK

Inspired by W S Graham’s poem, I took a walk through the nocturnal city, following in the poet’s footsteps with my camera to create this photoessay as an homage to Harold Burdekin

The Night City

Unmet at Euston in a dream
Of London under Turner’s steam
Misting the iron gantries, I
Found myself running away
From Scotland into the golden city.

I ran down Gray’s Inn Road and ran
Till I was under a black bridge.
This was me at nineteen
Late at night arriving between
The buildings of the City of London.

And then I (O I have fallen down)
Fell in my dream beside the Bank
Of England’s wall to bed, me
With my money belt of Northern ice.
I found Eliot and he said yes

And sprang into a Holmes cab.
Boswell passed me in the fog
Going to visit Whistler
Who was with John Donne who had just seen
Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green.

Midnight. I hear the moon
Light chiming on St. Paul’s.

The City is empty. Night
Watchmen are drinking their tea.

The Fire had burnt out.
The Plague’s pits had closed
And gone into literature.

Between the big buildings
I sat like a flea crouched
In the stopped works of a watch.

Unmet at Euston in a dream…

St Pancras Church

I ran down Gray’s Inn Road…

High Holborn

and ran till I was under a black bridge…

Boswell passed me in the fog…

Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

I hear the moonlight chiming on St. Paul’s…

Fell in my dream beside the Bank of England’s wall to bed…

Whalebone Court

…just seen Paul Potts shouting on Soho Green…

Poem copyright © The Estate of W S Graham

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Over successive Christmases, as I was growing up, I witnessed the disintegration of my family until today I am the lone survivor of the entire clan, the custodian, charged with carrying the legacy of all their stories. Where once I was the innocent child in the midst of a family drama unknown to me, now I am a sober adult haunted by equivocal memories of a conflict that only met its resolution in death. Yet in spite of this, whenever I examine the piles of old photographs of happy, smiling people which are now the slim evidence of the existence of those generations which precede me, I cannot resist tender feelings towards them all.

I was an only child and, though I wished for playfellows occasionally, I do not regret my childhood solitude because the necessity to invent my own amusement gave me my life as a writer. Since there were just the three of us, I had quite separate relationships with my mother and my father, and I never perceived us as a family unit. My father’s parents and my mother’s father died before I was born, and so it was only when we went to visit my grandmother at Christmas that we were forced to confront our identity as part of a larger tribe.

Even the journey to my grandmother’s house, a mere forty minute drive over the hills, was fraught with hazard. As I lay in bed surrounded by my presents newly-unwrapped on Christmas morning, I could hear my parents in the kitchen below discussing which was the greater risk – of skidding on black ice on the upland roads or getting washed away in floods surging down the valleys. Though, throughout my entire childhood, we never encountered any mishap on this journey, even if the emotional dangers of the visit were immense.

In the week before Christmas, my mother would have her hair ‘done’ in hope of passing her mother’s inspection on Christmas Day and as we climbed into the car, even as she closed the door, she would be checking in the mirror and repeatedly asking, “Do you think my hair looks alright?” Complementing my mother’s worry over her hair was my father’s anxiety over his engine. As the owner of a series of secondhand wrecks bought on the cheap, he was reluctant to undertake any journey that involved an incline, which proved to be something of a problem in Devon. Consequently, journeys of more than a few miles were uncommon in my childhood and our rare summer holidays were taken at seaside resorts less than twenty miles from home.

While my parents sat consumed by silent dread in the front of the car on Christmas morning, I was naively entranced by the passing landscape, with its bare fields sparkling in the frost or puddled by rain, and the old cottages punctuating the hedgerows. Over the years, I grew to know this journey intimately and experienced a child’s delight in the transformation wrought upon the landscape by the changing seasons. Yet the final steep descent into the small town of old stone buildings where my grandmother lived was always accompanied by a corresponding rise in tension. My father’s palpable anxiety about black ice coinciding precisely with the approaching ordeal. Invariably, we arrived as late as he could manage and, parking in the yard in the back of my grandmother’s house, pass through the wooden garden gate and walk slowly down the path in trepidation to arrive at the kitchen door.

Inside the house, my grandmother would be discovered at the scrubbed wooden table, beating something vigorously in a mixing bowl, smoking a cigarette and still dressed in the fur coat and velvet turban she wore to church that morning. One memorable Christmas, she cast down her wooden spoon as we entered. “You look a fright, Valerie! What have you done to your hair?” she exclaimed, advancing and running her fingers through my mother’s hair to dishevel it. My mother ran through the hallway, up the stairs and along the passage to lock herself into the bathroom, as she re-entered the emotional drama of her childhood in the place where she had grown up.

It was the last house in the town, a late-Victorian villa at the end of a line with only fields beyond, and I was entranced by its gothic architecture. The stained glass porch with colourful encaustic tiles was the threshold to a dwelling which contained mysteries from the years before I came into the world. This was an effect compounded by the hallway, with its ancient grandfather clock whose chimes conjured an atmosphere of stately gloom and dark wooden staircase ascending in a spiral to the upper rooms where the ghosts of the past dwelled. Halfway up the stair hung an old oil painting in a gold frame of sailboats emerging from the mist like apparitions coalescing from the miasma of time. Yet even this also contained a mystery of its own, since I was led to understand that there was another painting that might be discerned beneath this nineteenth century nautical scene, which had been overpainted upon a seventeenth century Dutch interior.

Dominating the hallway at Christmas was my grandmother’s spectacular annual display. Each December, she arranged winter foliage in a gleaming copper jug upon the oak hall table as the climax of her year’s endeavours in competitive flower-arranging. When the carpet crunched beneath my footstep once, I lifted it to find beech twigs pressed between sheets of The Daily Telegraph. My discovery occasioned a complex explanation of the alchemical magic of standing beech branches in jars of glycerine to preserve the leaves which might then be flattened beneath the carpet until November, when they could be sprayed gold to serve as the flourish in my grandmother’s festive arrangement of holly, scots pine, ivy, and Christmas Roses.

Of equal fascination to me were these Christmas ‘roses’ which were like no other roses I had ever seen and grew close to the ground beside an old wall in my grandmother’s garden. With their curious, pale wax-like petals which came into flower when all the other plants died away, I believed they were unique to her and their extraordinary qualities were an expression of her mastery of nature itself.

My grandmother occupied a prominent position within her immediate community. It was a status that was confirmed when she undertook the role of Elizabeth I, enthroned upon a float in the town carnival, outfitted in a starched lace ruff and a dress of embroidered velvet and satin spangled with pearls. The other members of the Women’s Institute dutifully enacted the supporting roles of ladies in waiting, clad in second rate outfits and offering obeisance to their omnipotent monarch.

Naturally, she had conscientious reasons for wrecking her daughter’s hairstyle that Christmas morning. The act was an expression of the burden of responsibility that fell upon her and she could not avoid it. She had been brought up to be particular, educated into the expectations that are the birthright of the privileged, and she wore her fastidiousness as a badge of honour. As the youngest daughter of a declining aristocratic family without any inheritance, my grandmother gamely overcame the obvious disappointment in her marriage to a bank manager and still hoped to reassert the fortunes of her noble line by marrying my mother off to local land-owning gentry. She felt it had been churlish of her daughter not to co-operate.

Yet my mother’s most cherished possession was a copy of Cicely M. Barker’s ‘Book of the Flower Fairies,’ inscribed by my grandfather “To the little girl who loves all the wild flowers” and she dreamed of going to university to study Botany. She had no interest in cultivating the attentions of boorish yeoman farmers. Instead she escaped, climbing over a wall with her suitcase at night and fleeing from the typing and secretarial college where she had been sent when the possibility of higher education had been denied her. Running away to the nearest market town, she took a room in a lodging house, found employment at the local library and married my father, who was the handsome centre-forward in the city football team and worked as an engineer at a foundry.

Consequently, my mother’s marriage was the death of my grandmother’s social aspirations. And since my grandfather gave up his position as a bank manager to go on the stage, pursuing an energetic career as a conjurer in vaudeville that led him to an early grave, she became a lone sentinel of her class. Mercifully, the bank granted her the right to stay in the house that he had rented from them on favourable terms, leaving her domestically secure yet struggling to keep up appearances for the rest of her days.

She displayed no photographs of my mother or my father or me anywhere lest visiting Rotarians might see them, but once a year she invited us over at Christmas as an act of Christian charity, thereby ameliorating her own sense of loss. The truth was that, even in relation to my grandmother’s straightened circumstances, we were the poor relations. My father laid out the bills next to his pay packet each week and often wept in helpless anger when his meagre earnings as a mechanical engineer were insufficient to cover our modest living expenses. One day, I came home from school for lunch only to discover my mother in despair because her housekeeping money had run out and we had nothing to eat. Yet at Christmas, we wore the best clothes we had and, maintaining solidarity, did our best to keep up appearances and resist my grandmother’s insinuations.

Once emotions had subsided and I had persuaded my tearful mother from the bathroom, we all convened in the drawing room for an aperitif. My Uncle Richard would be arriving back from the pub full of cheery good humour after drinks with his friends in the amateur dramatics and the cricket club. Seizing this moment to light another cigarette, “Would you like a glass of sherry?” my grandmother announced, filling with sudden enthusiasm, before adding with a significant glance in my father’s direction, “I think I have bottle of beer for Peter.” Reminding us of her impoverishment since the early death of my grandfather who indulged her aristocratic spending capacities, “We’ve had to cut back this year, I haven’t been able to do as much as I normally do,” my grandmother always informed us, catching my eye to indicate that I should not expect much from her. With saintly self-control, my father would open a newspaper with a sigh and take a seat by the fire, doing his best to maintain dignified silence in the face of this humiliation.

It was my grandmother’s custom to deliver her turkey to the baker on her way to church on Christmas morning and collect it again after the service, almost roasted, so that she could finish it off in the oven at home, thus permitting her to give full attention to the serious business of vegetables and, of course, the pudding. Shedding her fur coat when it came to moment of serving, she nevertheless maintained her hauteur in a well cut tweed skirt, silk blouse, pearls and crocodile court shoes, with only the addition of an apron casually slung around her waist to indicate her culinary responsibilities.

My uncle sat at the far end of the table, facing my grandmother at the head, while my mother and father sat together on one side and I sat opposite them beneath a mezzotint of Jean-François Millet’s ‘The Angelus.’ I sometimes wondered if this sombre image of a pair of down-trodden peasants praying in a field reflected my grandmother’s perception of my parents’ life. When I gazed across the table, I could see my mother sitting under a print of George Frederic Watts’ ‘Hope,’ depicting a blindfolded woman trapped on a rock in a rising tide while plucking upon the single string left on her makeshift harp. In spite of their obvious sentimentality, both of these pictures demonstrated stoic attitudes in the face of adversity which suited my grandmother’s temperament and circumstances.

Placing her cigarette carefully between her pursed lips, she leaned forward with intense short-sighted concentration to slice the turkey on the table in front of her. We each passed up our plates and, when it came my father’s turn, she would cast her eyes down the table to him and my uncle would catch her eye before reaching out to give him a playful shove. “Are you a breast or a leg man, Peter?” he asked with a chuckle and a lewd grin. This annually repeated gesture was a source of enormous amusement for him and my grandmother, but a cause of deep embarrassment for me and my mother and father.

I can only assume this jibe was a reference to my father’s supposed sexual prowess, as the only possible explanation they could entertain for my mother’s attraction to a man beneath her class. They did not wish to appreciate that my mother’s curiosity about life beyond their limited social milieu had opened her eyes to recognise sympathetic qualities in people of all kinds, rather than simply to assess the social status of new acquaintances.

It was only after my father’s death that I discovered he had been born as the illegitimate child of a young housemaid who contracted tuberculosis and had no choice but to give him up for adoption. Then, at the tender age of just eleven years old, denied a proper education, he was put to work in a foundry. As an adult, his disadvantaged origins were such a source of shame that he chose never to reveal the truth even to my mother.

Among his own mother’s surviving letters that I found preserved in a padlocked box I broke open after his death, I read her account of being committed to a sanatorium on Dartmoor where patients were exposed to the elements in a belief this treatment could clear their lungs of infection. “I don’t think I shall be home for Christmas. Must tell you it is a bitter cold place here in winter. We sleep out in the open, and when it rains it comes right in and you are not allowed to shut any doors and the wind nearly blows you out of bed,” she wrote in an unlettered cursive hand.

When I read these letters, I wondered if her words from so long ago haunted my father at these Christmas feasts. “I don’t know what sort of Christmas they spend here,” she confided in a note written from the sanatorium in the months before her death, “Have you made your Christmas pudding yet? I hope you will send me a little bit to taste. It will seem more like a Christmas to me if I can taste a bit of pudding.”

Accompanying the letters was my father’s birth certificate, confirming his father as ‘unknown.’ This single word contained a personal tragedy which grew into a lonely secret. His desire to overcome this deep sense of shame became a motivating factor which led him to marry my mother. Just as she wanted to escape the pretensions of her family, he wanted to better himself by taking a step up in the world. In this sense they fulfilled each other’s desires perfectly, even if they wanted quite different things from the union and their contrary wishes were a source of occasional conflict. This was the nature of their marriage.

“I always wanted to be a close family,” he confided to me once in a moment of weary confession, “but they weren’t having it.”

After my grandmother had carried in the flaming pudding, the crackers had exploded and my mother had done the washing up, we were able to escape the house for an afternoon walk through the cool air in the damp lanes to recover our senses. Returning for tea at dusk, I would take this opportunity to slip away from the fireside, leaving the adults to their conversation and climbing the staircase to explore the dusty attics at the top where my grandfather’s stage properties and conjuring tricks were stored. In these chilly abandoned rooms, I discovered a wind up gramophone and was happy to wear his silk top hat and play alone among the mirrored cabinets until it was time to leave.

As a child, I was spared the pain that my parents endured when confronted with the social disparity of their marriage by my grandmother. “None of these people have ever worked a day in their lives,” my father repeated to us in the car, every year on the way home, venting his vituperation at last and drawing further tears from my mother. In spite of the tensions of the day, she was always reluctant to leave her childhood home that held so many happy memories buried beneath the recent conflict.

On one of the last Christmases before my grandmother died, when I returned for the holiday from college, she insisted that I play her at Scrabble. It was already late in the day. We had had our tea and cut the Christmas cake, and we were preparing to leave. My father, who hated driving in the dark, was getting worried about the possibility of lethal black ice on the upland roads. Yet I knew my mother realised that this was a challenge I must not walk away from, even though my grandmother was county Scrabble champion of several years standing. She had memorised all the obscure yet permitted words, using unlikely letters and winning high scores. At eighty years old, she needed to prove her mind was still as sharp as a razor and she wanted to find out what I was made of too. It was a rite of passage.

Once my grandmother and I were set up on opposite sides of the dining table with the Scrabble board between us, my parents retreated to the drawing room in silence, unable to bear their suspense at the outcome. Although my grandmother generously offered to share her list of permitted words with me, I declined. I did not want her help. By now, I knew the weight of history. In fact, I would not even compete with her. Instead I chose to apply my creativity to contrive the most ingenious words I could make with my letters, without pursuing a high-scoring vocabulary or keeping an eye on the score card total. Although I knew it was a test, I persisted in the thought that it was a Christmas game.

I won. My mother and father entered and stood in the doorway with blazing eyes of unspoken elation. Withholding her emotion and describing it as ‘beginners’ luck,’ my grandmother commenced another game immediately. I maintained my non-competitive strategy while she played to win. This time, my grandmother won. Yet when we added up our scores in both games, which ran into hundreds, we discovered we had both won exactly the same number of points.

It was a strange moment of intimacy and mutual vindication. A certain truth had been revealed by Scrabble, even if it was an epiphany capable of entirely contradictory interpretations. My grandmother believed it confirmed that, in spite of my mother marrying my father, the family spirit persisted in me, while my parents believed she had been taught a lesson and could not look down upon us any more.

My uncle never left his childhood home or, to my knowledge, ever formed any significant emotional relationships beyond his immediate domestic world. Brought up with aristocratic expectations, he was a dilettante who stood apart from life, never working but passing his time in amateur dramatics, county cricket scoring and collecting jazz records. He suffered from meningitis as a child and my grandmother doted on him, favouring him over her daughter. She waited upon him until she died, knocked over by a swinging coal house door one dark winter’s night shortly before Christmas when she was eighty-four.

At the funeral in January, my uncle asked my mother, “Would you like to take anything, Valerie?” Eschewing the valuables in the house, she found a trowel and unearthed the cherished Christmas Rose, transplanting it to her own garden where she nurtured it as a living memento of her mother.

After the death of my grandmother, my uncle was left to fend for himself. He did not know how to make a bed or boil a kettle and he let the house go to pieces. He ate only microwaved frozen food and grew so fat that he could not bend over to reach the floor, living ankle deep in rubbish. The last time I visited, I discovered he had worn a path in the carpet through to the floorboards in the drawing room between his armchair and the television. Meanwhile upstairs, in his room on the first floor, he had worn the mattress through to the springs and, entering the next room, I found he had done the same in there too and in the next.

I remember telephoning him to break the news that my father had died. “Well, I never did like Peter,” was his immediate response. Eventually, an organised gang of thieves broke in and stripped the house – when he could no longer get out of bed – and he lay there helpless as they carried the silver, the grandfather clock, the old Dutch painting and the rest of the family heirlooms out to the truck.

There was only one childhood Christmas when we did not visit my grandmother. It was the year that a particularly virulent form of gastroentiritis struck. My mother, my father and me, we were all afflicted with flu and lay in our beds on Christmas Day, engulfed by fever and drowsy light-headedness engendered by lack of food. I recall lying awake with my cat in the half-light of drawn curtains, clutching a hot water bottle, and feeling overwhelmed by the weary languor of my body. Yet at three in the afternoon, we convened in the kitchen in our dressing gowns and we drank a cup of hot water together. I think it was the sweetest drink I ever tasted and I cherish the memory of that day, isolated together in our intimate cell of sickness, as my happiest childhood Christmas.

As years pass, each Christmas conjures the memories of those that came before it, until eventually the experience of recalling these memories of the past overtakes the present. Then Christmas becomes a time which contains all the former Christmases gone by. Apart from my flu Christmas, I can barely distinguish any particular years and, looking back, all those visits to my grandmother blend into the one eternal childhood Christmas which I have described here.

When I grew up and left home, I always returned for Christmas. Now that I live in the city and no longer have any relatives left alive, I have no family obligations at Christmas and I have no reason go back to Devon. Yet I miss them all, I even feel nostalgic about their fights and their angry words and I cannot resist the feeling they are all still there – my parents in their house, and my grandmother and my uncle in their house – and I wonder if they are having Christmas without me this year.

Wood Engravings by Reynolds Stone