The stories we speak out loud

Snatches of the tales that snag in my memory

© Bonnie Radcliffe

The water outside the window is clear, as it has been every day. Today it is flat too, and when I swam through it an hour ago I could see my toes, see shifting lines of light refracted along my limbs. It is everything and it is more than enough, and yet at the very same time it hurts because it will not always be this way. This is not my home. This is not my everyday life. But what if there was a way that it could be?

I want to live by the water. I want to wake to watch mountains changing colour as the day thickens into being, moves from the wispy possibility of dawn into the fast paced promise of a rising tide. I want evenings like the one we had last night, filled with laughter and enthusiasm and stories that snag in my mind, that I struggle to collect, to lock down, that I think to myself, even while listening to them; remember this. Drink it in. Hold it tight.

© Bonnie Radcliffe

But it is in the holding tight that we lose it. There have been many times when I have been so intent on thinking to myself remember this, that I have lost, for a moment, the thread of the very conversation I want so badly to hold. Half-heard snatches that catch something inside me, that hook into my imagination and tug. Conversations that I try to note down, scrambled words that mean nothing later, the frustrating thought that I’ll google it, fill in the details I miss… But that is not the same as the story being spoken out loud around a busy table. A Wikipedia entry is a thing stripped of all joy, of interest and nuance and that very hook which lodged itself in my brain in the first place.

© Bonnie Radcliffe

So. I will turn to Google still, no doubt, because when a thing hooks you have to follow the line, however little there is to be found, however hard to follow. And I will remember the snatches, the stories, the magic of words spoken out loud, the conversation bouncing, my brain sparking.

I will remember that the house we are so happy staying in was once the home of an artist, Reginald Hallward, who may have been the inspiration for Basil Hallward in the picture of Dorian Gray. I will remember he had a daughter, Patience Hallward, who was also an artist, who lived here with a companion/servant (maybe called Mrs Stubbs, my memory is uncertain). I will remember that she illustrated a book and went to America. Perhaps it was the Little Mermaid. I will remember she illustrated a copy of Alice in Wonderland. I will remember stories of printing, and a lithography stone somewhere in the garden, a black and white print of trees found on Ebay and a suitcase catching after leaving a hotel, only to fall open and reveal sausages and bacon, lunch squirrelled away for later.

I will remember that across the estuary from us is a grave called Frenchman’s Grave. I will remember that, as part of a project to create an artistic community, a project planned with John Ruskin and Fanny Talbot, the frenchman of Frenchman’s Grave imported tonnes of Breton soil in order to build a great garden. I will remember french onions being shipped across the sea and plentiful in the town. I will remember Ruskin saying that the view up the Mawddach is second in the world only to the view down the Mawddach. I will remember these things imperfectly, those first sparks, those first hooks in my mind, snagged there, incomplete but tantalising.

© Bonnie Radcliffe

I will remember flagging down a two carriage train, will remember mountains and clear clear water and a jellyfish bigger than my body and a fisherman on the shore with a huge seabream, gills still flapping. I will remember laughing more in the last week, maybe than in the last year. I will remember finding all the things I need to feed my brain at all the moments I needed them. I will remember writing a scene where a character is given a rusty key, and later that day sitting on a bench in the shade and finding, on the wall right behind me, a rusty old key. I will remember stories of sacrifical anodes and rivers running through basements and a ceiling so thick with cobwebs that a branch waved about up there ends up like tacky grey candyfloss.

© Bonnie Radcliffe

I will remember, more than anything, community and enthusiasm and the simplicity of living only for the things that matter to you. Of building a life based on art and thought and beauty. I don’t know yet how I take it home with me. I will take the work and I will take the stories snagged in my imagination and that will feed me while I work the rest out.

I want this. I want to live by the water and I want to lose myself in words and landscape and stories, and I want people around who want that too, who see the value and the joy in it, who base their lives around it. Community - it is the thing all artists need. I will find a way to make it my life. Will you join me?

© Catherine Lovett