210. The Potters’ Tale

Tregurnow pottery

It’s marvelous where a train of thought can lead you in a day, and how sometimes things seem to come together all at once.

Just yesterday I was looking at some photographs I had taken of favorite pieces of pottery and china. I particularly treasure the mug, sugar bowl, and milk jug from Tregurnow Pottery, started by Mag and George when they moved down from London to a fishing village in Cornwall. They were part of my parents’ close circle of friends in London before I was born, and they all had their first children within a few months of each other. Mag is the one who pierced Mum’s ears for her, using a red-hot needle, or perhaps a red-hot safety pin. She is also the one who gave me my pet name. Visiting Mum and me when I was just days old, she first called me by the name that was to supplant my given name until I was thirty, and is still the one preferred by my family and oldest friends.

In the summer of 1971, on a trip to England after we had graduated from high school, Andrew and I took a coach down to Cornwall to visit Mag and George and camped on the clifftop near Treen. We went to a performance of Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl at the Minack open-air theatre, waded in the fantastically cold ocean water at Porthcurno (where George swam year-round), tasted nut rissoles for the first time (Mag and George were strict vegetarians), and learned about the importance of conserving water from George, who was decades ahead of his time in his commitment to a simple, sustainable life.

Porthcurno Bay (wikimedia commons)

So I looked up Tregurnow Pottery on the Internet, and found the website of the couple who, back in 1999, had bought it from Mag and George after they retired, and started their own studio. Imagine my delight when I found that one of them, John Nash, had written a book about my parents’ friends, telling the story of their struggle to establish the pottery. I wasted no time in ordering The Potters’ Tale, and am looking forward eagerly to receiving and reading it soon. I was even more delighted to receive an e-mail message from his wife Mim and to learn that she is now a close friend of Mag’s. This in turn led to an e-mail exchange with my Uncle Ted, who had heard from Mag just last week and had greetings from her for my mother.

One thing led to another. I found myself looking up the Minack Theater and learning that it was built by hand in the  1930s, stone by heavy stone, by a remarkable woman called Rowena Cade, who died in 1983 at age 90, and would have still been going strong back when Andrew and I visited the theatre. I found a video postcard of the Minack on YouTube and showed it to my father. I even found the archive of all the shows ever produced there since The Tempest in 1932, confirmed exactly when we had seen The Italian Girl, and learned that Iris Murdoch herself had participated in the play’s adaptation from the original novel.

The Minack Theatre (from thenakedcreative.co.uk)

This morning, over tea and a doughnut with Andrew, he brought out an old paperback and presented it to me: “I found this while I was sorting through some papers.” Wouldn’t you know—it was Iris Murdoch’s The Italian Girl!  My father-in-law picked it up for me at the town dump (er, sanitary landfill) a long while ago, but it had slipped out of sight and I had forgotten all about it—until just now. Synchronicity.

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209. Retreat

temenosretreatcenter.org

Classes are over, the tulips are already blown, and the spring breeze carries with it murmurs of sultry summer afternoons—elsewhere.

The prospect of getting away is delightful but the reality is daunting. All the planning, booking, advance arrangements, packing—it tires one out just thinking about  it. I never understood those people who spent half the year planning their next vacation and the other half talking about it. Now I sometimes wish I had one of them to take care of it all for me. Surely it would be easier, and almost as enjoyable, just to set up a tent in the nearby conservation area or sling a jungle hammock between two trees in the back garden. Or, easier still, to swing my feet up onto the sofa on the front porch with a cold drink and simply allow myself to drift.

But no, getting away—really away—is imperative. Sometimes to establish the conditions in which to relax fully, one has perforce to engage in a period of planning.

It’s not that I want to escape from reality, but rather that I want to slip out of the rut of everyday thinking, making the time to come alive more fully in a setting where there’s nothing to do but to be. One doesn’t need to go very far from home, but sufficiently far to be out of reach of that never-ending To Do list and sufficiently close that getting ready to go doesn’t have to be such a big hoo-hah.

That place is Temenos, a retreat at the top of a hill just half an hour’s drive from home, but one whose remove has been attended to with such thoughtful, loving care that it seems worlds upon worlds away. Just bring yourself, a sleeping bag, food and drink in ice-filled coolers; the caretakers of the trust provide the rest, making themselves scarce so that a space opens up for you to step into, but giving you quiet assurance that they are close at hand should you find yourself in need. After dispensing with your car a sufficient distance away, you load your things onto a little wagon and trundle it to your cabin, where you will find already-cut-and-split wood in all sizes should you wish to fire up a woodstove, but a propane cookstove as well. A metal-lined, heavy-lidded box keeps your food safe from bears, and there’s bedding, a simple wooden kitchen table, a hurricane lamp for light—no electricity or running water—and a little writing desk complete with log book in which those who have come before you have written over the years. Everything is clean and simple, basic but well-stocked. Large screened windows open up to the woods all round for light, air, and insect-free communing with nature. A sufficient walk away, just down the path from the woodshed,  is the outhouse; but oh, what an outhouse, screened, sturdily constructed, scrupulously clean and fresh, with utter privacy and a view of the woods. There are no lights from the surrounding towns.

photo: Tiffany Hrach (hrachgarden.blogspot.com)

That’s it. Outside and down the road apiece there’s a pump where you can fill gallon jugs with a rust-colored minerally water (the spot used to be a health spa many years ago, and after all, it’s on Mount Mineral); a small pond where you can take a dip with the turtles in the heat of the summer; a small, homemade labyrinth for meditative walks; a bog walk, silence but for the rustling of the wind in the trees, and little red efts everywhere.

I’m gone.

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Blogging from A to Z

On the 31^st of March I decided to participate in the 4^th annual Blogging from A to Z April Challenge, starting with A on April Fool’s Day and posting a story corresponding to each successive letter of the alphabet every day but Sunday throughout the month. Well, it’s May Day and I did it, writing as many stories in the past month as I had in the previous six. Some admirable fellow-bloggers had planned their month in advance, choosing a topic or theme and coming out of the challenge with a completed book; mine were all over the map. But having to write them daily forced me to experiment a little, to take risks with posts because there simply wasn’t time to dither.

Thanks to Arlee Bird of Tossing It Out, the founder of the Challenge, to Damyanti Biswas of Amlokiblogs, who first encouraged me to participate, and to the many fascinating people whose blogs I visited and who in turn visited mine, taking the time to post generous comments and to enter into thoughtful conversations.

It’s going to be particularly busy for me for the next couple of weeks, so don’t be alarmed if Tell Me Another has to take a bit of a hiatus; I’ll be back. In the meantime, you can use the list below to catch up on entries in the A to Z Challenge that you may have missed.

Autoantonyms

Brevity

Common Sense

Drive-ins

Emil and the Detectives

Finn Family Moonmintroll

Goodness Gracious Me!

Hobson-Jobson

The Iliad at Bedtime

Jam Today

Kindling

London, My London

Marathon

Never No More

O, Oh, and The Wonderful O

The Post Office

Quest

Roots, Rock, Reggae

Screaming Women

Tennessee Stud

Ultra

Victory V’s

Weeping Willow

Xenophobia

The Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò

Zee, Zed, Go to Bed

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