Spitalfields Life at the Redchurch St Party
Click to view this party on Redchurch St drawn by Adam Dant
Please join us at the SPITALFIELDS LIFE STORYTELLING PARTY next Saturday 15th September at 3 o’clock sharp, at 63 Redchurch St, hosted by Forster Inc & The Literary Platform.
Come and be regaled by storytellers from the pages of Spitalfields Life – including JOAN ROSE, who grew up in the Boundary Estate in the nineteen thirties, VISCOUNTESS BOUDICA, trendsetter and collector of domestic appliances, HENRIETTA KEEPER, octogenarian ballad singer, and KING SOUR, rapper of Bethnal Green, among others.
This event is part of a day of activities comprising the REDCHURCH ST PARTY which runs from midday until evening on Saturday 15th September.
Joan Rose‘s grandparents opened the grocers on Calvert Ave in 1900 and her father ran it until 1966.
Viscountess Boudica has the best collection of vintage domestic appliances in East London.
Henrietta Keeper was in the Tate & Lyle concert party for thirty years and now sings at E. Pellicci.
Lorraine & Owen Bartlett Lashley, Farmers
This is Lorraine & Owen Bartlett Lashley who grow vegetables upon an allotment in Goodmayes, Ilford, and come up on the bus each Saturday to sell their surplus under the awning outside Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue, where you will find them tomorrow morning behind a small table laden with some of the freshest produce you could buy in London.
There is a special quality to vegetables that have been grown by a smallholder and picked that day, which transcends any other produce you could buy. And, each Saturday morning, the table under the awning is a wonder to behold with piles of glistening green spinach, perfect specimens of beans and fragrant bunches of herbs, all proudly arranged. Lorraine & Owen are eager to show off their horticultural achievements and, with so few places to buy fresh vegetables around Spitalfields and Shoreditch, their weekly stall is especially welcome.
Originally from Barbados, Owen came to London in the nineteen sixties and Lorraine joined him in the seventies. The couple share a life-long enthusiasm for growing vegetables, which they have pursued zealously even in the most unpromising of urban environments and, recently, Lorraine told me the story of their life together in horticulture while Owen made up bunches of herbs, tying each one elegantly with a piece of vine.
“Before we came to this country we were both farmers, I lived on an estate of five acres and we grew vegetables to feed ourselves and sell locally. I’ve been here thirty-four years now, since Owen came back to Barbados in 1978 and we got married. When I first came to Britain, Owen was studying at Manchester University and I was a youth worker. We searched for a plot of land where we could grow vegetables as we had done in Barbados, but we couldn’t find one so we used the long garden that we had and grew organic vegetables there. We had some of the biggest veg you could imagine, marrows, carrots, beetroots and cabbages. We grew everything naturally, without putting any chemicals on the soil.
When we moved down to London in 2003, we were searching to find where to grow vegetables and a friend of ours told us about an allotment at Seven Kings that needed people, so we got one plot and then another and we ended up with four plots. It took a lot of work to get the land into condition. No-one had grown anything there for fifteen years and people had dumped broken beds and toilets on it, so we had to do a proper clear out and build the soil up again with a lot of compost and manure and comfrey. We ended up with more vegetables than we could eat or give away.
We feed ourselves from our allotment. We only buy oil, flour and rice. We would like to pass on our skills to the younger generation and teach children to understand of the fundamentals of how we eat and farm – and how to do it in a way that’s good for the environment. We plant marigolds among our vegetables that attract butterflies and drive away pests. We don’t use sprays, we pick off insects one by one with our fingers.
This week we have brought nasturtiums, green beans, purple beans, runner beans, mazuma oriental greens, bull’s blood sorrel, chard, spinach, beet leaf spinach, courgettes and herb bunches. We come up on the bus from Ilford which is free for us because we both have freedom passes, and it takes about two hours. I get up at five and I pick the vegetables at seven, then we are on the bus by nine-thirty and here around eleven. The first week was brilliant, we took fifty pounds which is enough to pay for the vegetables to plant for next year’s plots.
There is no other city like London, it is unique. My country is called Little England because we were colonised by the English and all we know is English, so we don’t have to adapt when we come here, we are already adapted and it is easy to fit in. We even had a Trafalgar Sq before the one in London. This is our second home, it’s like coming home to come here from where we come from. The only difference is the weather!”
Tomorrow, Lorraine & Owen will be out at dawn to pick the choicest vegetables from their allotment in Ilford and then they will bring them up on the bus to arrange them on the small table under the awning outside Leila’s Shop in Calvert Avenue as usual. So, if you wish to enjoy the privilege of London’s freshest produce, you know where to look.
Lorraine shows off her spinach and chard which she picked that morning.
Owen offers one of his sweet-smelling bunches of home-grown herbs.
Lorraine & Owen Bartlett Lashley
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Spinach & Eggs from Spitalfields City Farm
Growing Vegetables at Virginia Rd School
Buying the Vegetables for Leila’s Shop
From The Library Of Dr London
Shewing passage through the capital from its gullet to its arse
Click on this plate to enlarge and savour the full detail of Adam Dant‘s map which describes a journey through London as if through the human digestive tract from the mouth in Whitehall to the rectum in Whitechapel. Adam has taken liberties with anatomy to place the brain in Westminster, the liver in Fleet St, the heart at St Paul’s, the stomach in the City and the genitals in the East End. Yet it all serves to illustrate his notion that “London is akin to a voracious and hungry organism with the Thames running through it as a peristaltic gut continually in motion.”
This is just one of series of ingenious maps of big cities that Adam has contrived to capture their essential qualities, portrayed in huge ink drawings of double-page plates from volumes in the mythical Library of Dr London – all executed while touring around European capitals this summer and exhibited in a show which opens tonight at Hales Gallery.
Map of the City of London as a stained glass of Gog & Magog – Logos of corporate finance stand in place of crests of the livery companies.
The capital as a phrenological diagram, indicative of the desire for social order expressed by London’s squares.
Paris – The Bones of Liberty. The figure of “Liberty Leading the People” by Delacroix is manipulated to correspond to Baron Hausmann’s street plan.
Zurich as Hellmouth – The mouth is located at the Bahnhof and the journey to its arse, where it shits coins into Lake Zurich, runs through the Bahnhofstrasse which is home to the biggest banks with vaults containing more gold than anywhere else on earth.
The Nerves of Istanbul – The inspiration was a medieval Persian medical diagram with the head turned upside down and, on this map, it corresponds to the more European areas – while the coloured nerves correspond to the ferries, which cross the Bosphorus carrying commuters who live on the Asian shore.
New York. Manhattan stripped bare in the four different ways – the vessels, the entrails, the organs and the ribs.
Toyko – Shunga Metro Map. Tokyo is personified in a subterranean fashion through wrestling figures intertwined to form the lines of the subway.
Adam Dant spent the summer touring Europe with his peripatetic atelier to create the exhibition.
Drawings copyright © Adam Dant
Adam Dant’s exhibition From the Library of Dr London opens tonight at Hales Gallery in the Tea Building, 7 Bethnal Green Rd, and runs until 6th October.
You may like to take a look at some of Adam Dant’s other work
The Redchurch St Rake’s Progress
Map of the History of Shoreditch
Map of Shoreditch in the Year 3000
Map of Shoreditch as the Globe
Map of the History of Clerkenwell
Map of the Journey to the Heart of the East End
Meeting of the Old & New East End in Redchurch St
Click here to buy a copy of The Map of Spitalfields Life drawn by Adam Dant with descriptions by The Gentle Author
Gardening on the Roundabout
An annual ritual in Victoria Park Village at this season is the harvesting of the lavender on the roundabout, where Caroline Bousfield has been gardening for the past ten years with spectacular results. So I went along to lend Caroline a hand last week, out of curiosity at this extraordinary horticultural endeavour which happens in the midst of the traffic.
Wearing the regulation high-visibility vests that are an essential safety requirement for gardening on a roundabout, we crossed the road carrying secateurs and baskets. Even now at the end of summer when most city gardens are frazzled, the roundabout presented an impressive display of flowers, including valerian, marigolds, evening primrose, cosmos, achillea and euphorbia – all set against the dramatically contrasted foliage of Caroline’s planting which creates such a luxuriant vision for those passing on the bus or shopping on the other side of the street.
“It was before the days of guerrilla gardening,” Caroline informed me, revealing that when she first began gardening on the roundabout, it was borne out of a gardener’s frustration in witnessing the neglect of such an attractive location for planting.“There was just a mass of green vegetation with straggly weeds around the edge. Every time I walked past it my fingers would itch to pull some of it out and plant something better in its place. And I think I did, once or twice, before I realised I should ask permission.” she admitted, as if she had no choice in her actions. Over the intervening years, Caroline has entered into an agreement with the council to lease the roundabout so that she can continue tending it on their behalf. “I think things have changed and Hackney Council is more open to this kind of thing nowadays,” she confirmed sagely, as we started work, cutting the lavender in handfuls while the buses and trucks sped past just feet away.
Yet the pungent scent and the absorption of the work induced a state of concentration in which the presence of the traffic did not register. We were consumed by our task, gathering three large baskets of lavender – but leaving enough for the bees that swarmed upon the plants, equally preoccupied in their work. And, once the lavender was cut, it was time for tidying up. I undertook the unravelling of bindweed which was choking the smaller shrubs, while Caroline pruned the buddleias that had reached the end of their flowering. As the branches were cut away, she called me over to see the scattered paper and foil food packets revealed beneath the buddleia – the debris of foxes’ takeway dinners scavenged from the bins and enjoyed here in peace, as a moonlight picnic within the depths of the shrubbery at the heart of the roundabout.
Carrying the armfuls of pruned branches off the roundabout proved to be an activity which required a certain knack to find the gap in the traffic and haul it across to the pavement in time. In this task, Caroline demonstrated expertise borne of experience and an innate sense of timing, while I undertook the less challenging work of carrying the lavender. Then we stashed the sweet-smelling baskets in Caroline’s pottery workshop nearby where she has been making and selling her own pots since 1975. Here she stores the lavender in the loft of this former carriage house, and when Caroline fires the kiln it fills the entire workshop with a powerful and intoxicating scent. By making her lavender up into bags and selling it through the local shops, Caroline makes enough money to pay for any new plants that are added to the roundabout each year. Although she also confided to me that she was off on holiday to Cornwall, where she hoped to get some seeds of a deeper-coloured valerian which grows wild on the cliffs there.
People driving past and travelling on buses may wonder about the mystery of the familiar “lady on the roundabout,” but there is no secret. Over ten years, Caroline has created a widely-admired garden and a known landmark, distinguished by a more lyrical style of planting than the standardised design of the corporate-sponsored roundabouts which exist elsewhere. During this time, Caroline’s roundabout has become a centrepiece for the life that surrounds it and a symbol of the thriving community in Victoria Park Village. Today, Caroline’s roundabout pays for itself and sustains itself without watering. Caroline’s roundabout owes its existence to her knowledge, insight and imagination, and her passionate and committed gardening.
“People do notice,” she confided to me in modest satisfaction, as she sat in the cool of the workshop to take a break, drink a glass of water and catch her breath.
“a certain knack to find the gap in the traffic and haul it across to the pavement in time”
Enough lavender left to satisfy the bees.
The lavender harvest of 2012 in Victoria Park Village.
Caroline Bousfield – “People do notice.”
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Sunday Morning Stroll With John Claridge
Legs, Spitalfields 1960
Shall we join photographer John Claridge for an early Sunday morning stroll through the East End? Maybe John is coming back at daybreak from a party in Chelsea that he went to one Saturday night in 1960 and he stopped of at Rinkoff’s in Vallance Rd for a smoked salmon beigel on his way home to Plaistow? And maybe he looked up at a window in Spitalfields and saw these legs, and to this day he does not know if they were real or a mannequin? Or maybe John was out on his paper-round early one snowy day in the harsh winter of 1961 and he noticed an old bike frame abandoned on the Sewer Bank, and just in that moment it looked like a horse? Or maybe John was riding his motorbike along Narrow St in the dawn mist in 1963 and saw a ship emerging like a vision from the fog, and he stopped and got off his bike to capture it with his camera?
There is no doubt that John is a man of an early morning disposition, as these pictures – published here for the first time – testify. In John’s youth, when the London Docks were still in operation and the East End was full of manufacturing, people went to work early and the streets were crowded at six or even earlier on weekdays, yet Sunday morning stood in contrast as the time when there was almost nobody out. This was when John chose to explore with his camera, delighting in the surrealism of these hours at the crack of dawn when familiar places became strange and the territory was his alone. And the smog, and the fog, and the smoke, and the early morning mist all contributed to the melancholy beauty that John photographed in these soulful East End streets, when – emptied of people – they became the landscape of his dreaming.
Wapping, 1963 – “Can you see the ship just entering the river?”
White dog, E13 1978 – “A little bull terrier looking at the world.”
Hough’s Wharf in Narrow St, 1963.
Back door in Spitalfields, 1982 – “There was obviously a gate that had gone, and then they got this big door from a factory and wedged it in place.”
Three cranes, E16 1962 – “That morning light again, it just smells nice. There’s smoke in the distance, something was working.”
Queens Rd Market, E13 1959 – “I wonder what happened to all the old trolleys.”
Warehouse, Silvertown, 1963 – “I got off my motorbike, just to watch the light coming up in the mist.”
Horse, Sewer Bank Plaistow, 1961.
Torn Curtain, Spitalfields 1964 – “I walked by and I thought this was almost a piece of modern art – that very cheap plasticky ragged curtain was very beautiful in contrast with the bricks around it.”
Upton Park Station, E13 1969 – “There used to be old ladies sitting in there by the fire.”
Pie & Mash Shop, London Fields 1966.
Under the Railway, E2 1982 – “Drunks slept down there under the arches.”
Pony Cart, Spitalfields 1968 – “This guy kept this pony and on Sunday mornings he went for a ride.”
Dockside, E16 1968 – “It looks like they started work on the building and then left it.”
Gents, E14 1982 – “Very early morning when the street light hadn’t yet gone off.”
It’s Great, E3 1982 – “A fair set up on an old bombsite and I thought it was fucking ace.”
The Bridge, E14 1963.
Drain, E1 1970 – “I want to know what a 20% incline sign was doing in Wapping when there is no such gradient in the East End.”
Early morning fishermen on the Regent’s Canal beside Victoria Park, 1972. –“I asked this man, ‘Have you caught anything?’ He said, ‘I haven’t got a bait, I just like sitting here.’ You can’t argue with that.”
Photographs copyright © John Claridge
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Along the Thames with John Claridge
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Along the Ridgeway
They say it is the oldest road in Britain, maybe the oldest in Europe. Starting from the highest navigable point of the Thames in prehistoric times, the Ridgeway follows the hilltops to arrive at Salisbury Plain where once wild cattle and horses roamed. When the valleys were forested and impenetrable, the Ridgeway offered a natural route over the downland and into the heart of this island. Centuries of cattle driving wore a trackway that curved across the hillside, traversing the contours of the landscape and unravelling like a ribbon towards the horizon.
Over thousands of years, the Ridgeway became a trading route extending from coast to coast, as far as Lyme Regis in the west and the Wash in the east, with fortresses and monuments along the way. Yet once the valleys became accessible it was defunct, replaced by the Icknield Way – a lower level path that skirted the foot of the hills – and there are burial mounds which traverse the Ridgeway dated to 2000BC, indicating that the highway was no longer in use by then.
In fact, this obsolescence preserved the Ridgeway because it was never incorporated into the modern road network and remains a green path to this day where anyone can set out and walk in the footsteps of our earliest predecessors in this land, as I did last week. Leaving Spitalfields early and taking the hour’s rail journey to Goring & Streatley from Paddington, I was ascending the hill from the river by eleven and onto the upland by midday. In this section, the flinty path of the Ridgeway is bordered with deep hedges of hawthorn, blackthorn and hazel, giving way to the open downland rich with the pink and blue flowers of late summer, knapweed, scabious and harebells.
A quarter of a century has passed since I first passed this way and yet nothing has changed up there. It is the same huge sky and expansive grassy plain undulating into the distance with barely a building in sight. This landscape dwarfs the human figure, inducing a sense of exhilaration at the dramatic effects of light and cloud, sending patterns travelling fast across the vast grassy wind-blown hills. When I first began to write and London grew claustrophobic, I often undertook this walk through the different seasons of the year. I discovered that the sheer exertion of walking all day, buffeted upon the hilltops and sometimes marching doggedly through driving rain, never failed to clear my mind.
As a consequence, the shape of the journey is graven into memory even though, returning eighteen years since my last visit, the landscape was greater than I had fashioned it in recollection. And this is the quality that fascinates me about such epic terrain, which the mind cannot satisfactorily contain and thus each return offers a renewed acquaintance of wonder at the scale and majesty of the natural world.
In those days, I was in thrall to endurance walking and I would continue until I could go no further, either because of exhaustion or nightfall. This vast elevated downland landscape encouraged such excessive behaviour, leading me on and on along the empty path to discover what lay over the brow and engendering a giddy sense of falling forward, walking through the sky – as if you might take flight. I walked until I thought I could walk no more and then I carried on walking until walking became automatic, like breathing. In this state my body was propelled forward of its own volition and my mind was free.
One day’s walk brings you to Uffington and the famous White Horse, carved into the chalk of the downland. Placed perfectly upon the crest of a ridge within a vast fold of the hills, this sparsely drawn Neolithic figure looks out across the arable farmland of Oxfordshire beyond and can be seen for great distances. A mystery now, a representation that may once have been a symbol for a people lost in time, it retains a primeval charisma, and there is such an intensity of delight to reach this figure at the end of a day’s walking. Breathless and weary of limbs, I stumbled over the hill to sit there alone upon the back of the hundred foot White Horse at dusk, before descending to the village of Bishopstone for the night. There, at Prebendal Farm, Jo Selbourne offers a generous welcome and, as well as the usual bed and breakfast, will show you the exquisitely smoothed ceremonial Neolithic axe head found upon the farm.
The second day’s walk leads through the earthen ramparts of Liddington Hill and Barbary Castle, and on either side of the path the fields are punctuated by clumps of trees indicating the myriad ancient burial mounds scattered upon this bare Wiltshire scenery. It is a more expansive land than the fields of Berkshire where I began my journey, here the interventions made in ancient times still hold their own and the evidence of the modernity is sparser. As I made the final descent from the hill towards Avebury, a village within a massive earthwork and stone circle which was the culmination of my journey, I could not resist the feeling that it was all there for me and I had earned it by walking along the old path which for thousands of years had brought people to arrive at this enigmatic location of pilgrimage.
In two days upon the hilltops I had only passed a dozen lone walkers, and now the crowds, the coach parties, the shops and the traffic were a startling sight to behold. And so I knew my journey had fulfilled its purpose – to reacquaint me freshly with the familiar world and restore a sense of proportion. My feet were sore and my face was flushed by the sun. I began my journey in August and ended it in September. In Berkshire, the ripe fields of corn were standing, in Oxfordshire, they were being harvested and, in Wiltshire, I saw the stubble being ploughed in. It had been a walk to arrive at the end of the summer. It had been a walk through time along the oldest road.
Goring Mill
“Join it at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames, at once it strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the downs.” Kenneth Grahame, 1898
A ninety-two year old man told me this year is the worst harvest he could remember. “It doesn’t want to come in the barn,” he lamented.
At East Illsley
“A broad green track runs for many a long mile across the downs, now following the ridges, now winding past at the foot of a grassy slope, then stretching away through cornfield and fallow.” Richard Jefferies, 1879
“A rough way, now wide, now narrow, among the hazel, brier and nettle. Sometimes there was an ash in the hedge and once a line of spindly elms followed it round in a curve.” Edward Thomas, 1910
On White Horse Hill
“The White Horse is, I believe, the earliest hill drawing we have in England. It is a piece of design, in another category from the other chalk figures, for it has the lineaments of a work of art. The horse, which is more of a dragon than a horse, is cut on the top of the down’s crest, so that it can only be seen completely from the air, or at a long view, from the surrounding country – but it was precisely this aspect of the Horse design that I found so significant.” Paul Nash, 1938
The Neolithic axe head found at Prebendal Farm, photo by Rob Selbourne.
At Bishopstone
At Barbary Castle
“The origin of the track goes back into the dimmest antiquity: there is evidence that it was a military road when the fierce Dane carried fire and slaughter inland, leaving his nailed bark in the creeks of the rivers, and before that when the Saxons pushed up from the sea. The eagles of old Rome were, perhaps, borne along it and yet earlier the chariots of the Britons may have used it – traces of all have been found: so that for fifteen centuries this track of primitive peoples has maintained its existence through the strange changes of the times, til now in the season the cumbrous steam ploughing engines jolt and strain and pant over the uneven turf.” Richard Jefferies, 1879
Since the man suspected of making crop circles died, his protege has adopted a different style of design.
At Avebury
You may like to read about my previous trips beyond Spitalfields at this time of year
On Sunday Morning
On Sunday – when I was a child – my father always took me out for the morning. It was a routine. He led me by the hand down by the river or we took the car. Either way, we always arrived at the same place.
He might have a bath before departure and sometimes I walked into the bathroom to surprise him there lying in six inches of soapy water. Meanwhile downstairs, my mother perched lightly in the worn velvet armchair to skim through the newspaper. Then there were elaborate discussions between them, prior to our leaving, to negotiate the exact time of our return, and I understood this was because the timing and preparation of a Sunday lunch was a complex affair. My father took me out of the house the better to allow my mother to concentrate single-mindedly upon this precise task and she was grateful for that opportunity, I believed. It was only much later that I grew to realise how much she detested cooking and housework.
A mile upstream there was a house on the other riverbank, the last but one in a terrace and the front door gave directly onto the street. This was our regular destination. When we crossed the river at this point by car, we took the large bridge entwined with gryphons cast in iron. On the times we walked, we crossed downstream at the suspension footbridge and my father’s strength was always great enough to make the entire structure swing.
Even after all this time, I can remember the name of the woman who lived in the narrow house by the river because my father would tell my mother quite openly that he was going to visit her, and her daughters. For she had many daughters, and all preoccupied with grooming themselves it seemed. I never managed to count them because every week the number of her daughters changed, or so it appeared. Each had some activity, whether it was washing her hair or manicuring her nails, that we would discover her engaged with upon our arrival. These women shared an attitude of languor, as if they were always weary, but perhaps that was just how they were on Sunday, the day of rest. It was an exclusively female environment and I never recalled any other male present when I went to visit with my father on those Sunday mornings.
To this day, the house remains, one of only three remnants of an entire terrace. Once on a visit, years later, I stood outside the house in the snow, and contemplated knocking on the door and asking if the woman still lived there. But I did not. Why should I? What would I ask? What could I say? The house looked blank, like a face. Even this is now a memory to me, that I recalled once again after another ten years had gone by and I glanced from a taxi window to notice the house, almost dispassionately, in passing.
There was a table with a bench seat in an alcove which extended around three sides, like on a ship, so that sometimes as I sat drinking my orange squash while the women smoked their cigarettes, I found myself surrounded and unable to get down even if I chose. At an almost horizontal angle, the morning sunlight illuminated this scene from a window in the rear of the alcove and gave the smoke visible curling forms in the air. After a little time, sitting there, I became aware that my father was absent, that he had gone upstairs with one of the women. I knew this because I heard their eager footsteps ascending.
On one particular day, I sat at the end of the bench with my back to the wall. The staircase was directly on the other side of this thin wall and the women at the table were involved in an especially absorbing conversation that morning, and I could hear my father’s laughter at the top of the stairs. Curiosity took me. I slipped off the bench, placed my feet on the floor and began to climb the dark little staircase.
I could see the lighted room at the top. The door was wide open and standing before the end of the bed was my father and one of the daughters. They were having a happy time, both laughing and leaning back with their hands on each other’s thighs. My father was lifting the woman’s skirt and she liked it. Yet my presence brought activities to a close in the bedroom that morning. It was a disappointment, something vanished from the room as I walked into it but I did not know what it was. That was the last time my father took me to that house, perhaps the last time he visited. Though I could not say what happened on those Sunday mornings when I chose to stay with my mother.
We ate wonderful Sunday lunches, so that whatever anxiety I had absorbed from my father, as we returned without speaking on that particular Sunday morning, was dispelled by anticipation as we entered the steamy kitchen with its windows clouded by condensation and its smells of cabbage and potatoes boiling.
My mother was absent from the scene, so I ran upstairs in a surge of delight – calling to find her – and there she was, standing at the head of the bed changing the sheets. I entered the bedroom smiling with my arms outstretched and, laughing, tried to lift the hem of her pleated skirt just as I saw my father do in that other house on the other side of the river. I do not recall if my father had followed or if he saw this scene, only that my mother smiled in a puzzled fashion, ran her hands down her legs to her knees, took my hand and led me downstairs to the kitchen where she checked the progress of the different elements of the lunch. For in spite of herself, she was a very good cook and the ritual of those beautiful meals proved the high point of our existence at that time.
The events of that Sunday morning long ago when my father took me to the narrow house with the dark staircase by the river only came back to me as a complete memory in adulthood, but in that instant I understood their meaning. I took a strange pleasure in this knowledge that had been newly granted. I understood what kind of house it was and who the “daughters” were. I was grateful that my father had taken me there, and from then on I could only continue to wonder at what else this clue might reveal of my parents’ lives, and of my own nature.
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