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 to 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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198. The Post Office

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.
 —inscripton on the General Post Office, New York City, 8^th Avenue and 33^rd Street

Next to the public library, the post office is probably the public institution dearest to my heart.  Not only do I value the increasingly rare practice of letter-writing, but I think that postal workers, whether they are letter carriers, counter clerks, or mail room personnel, are the life-blood of the community; I hate to think that their days may be numbered. Two of my maternal uncles and my mother worked for the Post Office in England and one of my cousins was a post office employee in India. The cutbacks to the postal services in both Britain and the United States in recent years are sucking the life-blood out of an institution that in my opinion is one of the pillars of a functioning society. (I wonder: is that why British postboxes are shaped like pillars and named accordingly?)

Pillar-Box  (photographer: Oxfordian Kissuth, wikimedia commons)

postman with bicycle, 1940s (postalheritage.wordpress.com)

My Uncles Len and Ted started out as postmen in London, delivering the Royal Mail door to door on push bikes. Mum told me that when my dear cousin Lesley was born prematurely, Uncle Len raced back and forth on his bike between home and hospital delivering milk for his tiny baby girl. He went on to work at the Mornington Crescent Post Office while Uncle Ted went to work for the telephone and telegraph division of the Post Office (which, in 1969, became Post Office Telecommunications; in 1981, under Margaret Thatcher, was made independent of the Post Office as British Telecom; and, in 1984, privatized).

Hoddeson Post Office (photo by jelm6 on omnilexica.com)

In 1969, while my mother, my sister Sally, and I were living in Hertfordshire with my Uncle Ted while waiting for our U.S. immigration visas, Mum decided to apply for a position in the Post Office like her brothers before her. She was sent to London for six weeks of training, and then started as a  counter clerk at the Hoddesdon Post Office on the town’s high street. In those days the Post Office was the hub of the community. Everyone came in there for one reason or the other, and posting letters and parcels was only one of its functions. The elderly picked up their pensions there, mothers their family allowances and, at a time when most Britons didn’t have bank accounts, many maintained Post Office Savings accounts. As a result, Mum’s job was vital and varied, and she was soon familiar with the multigenerational cast of characters who came in on a regular basis.

Having lived far from both sides of our extended family for most of our lives, we’ve always looked forward eagerly to the daily delivery of the mail. Nowadays, though, instead of my heart lifting and fluttering in anticipation as I approach the mailbox, it sinks with dull resignation in the knowledge of the slew of bills and junk mail that will have to be sorted, shredded, and recycled. Letters, on the other hand, I treasure and keep, every last one of them. But it is a rare treat nowadays to receive a hand-written letter by “snail mail.“

photo by Roger Hutchings/Corbis
(guardian.co.uk)

It wasn’t always snail mail. In Victorian Britain there were six to twelve mail deliveries per day, so that two people could engage in several exchanges of letters in the course of a single day. In my childhood, there were still two deliveries a day in Greater London, so that a letter put in the morning post would reach its destination that same afternoon. Due to anticipated public opposition, the Royal Mail has not yet been privatized, but it has been restructured so that it could happen any day now.

When I worked as a feature writer for The Winchendon Courier in north-central Massachusetts, I learned that a hundred years earlier that sleepy, isolated town had been a thriving railway junction. As the New York-bound train came through every afternoon it would slow down and slide out an automated arm to receive the mail, which would be delivered in the City the following morning. This was amazing to me, since in the 1980s it could take a letter posted in Winchendon up to a week to reach New York City.

The process of defunding the U.S. Post Office has continued apace. Now the closing of small branch offices and sorting stations is looming, so that our mail would have to leave the state to be sorted and could no longer achieve next-day delivery to Boston. Though public protest is staving it off, the next service slated for the chopping block is Saturday delivery. The elimination of these services could be the death knell of the post office, leaving us with only private mail companies, and it seems to me that that is the very intent of the cuts.

minuscule mailbox outside Royalston, MA Post Office
(nomadwillie on waymarking.com)

When we fail to support and sustain a noble public institution like the post office, we impoverish our civic society as a whole. I cannot imagine a society where such an institution did not exist, and I hope I never have to live in one.

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195. Marathon

John Blanding/ Globe Staff (boston.com)

My parents moved to Newton, Massachusetts in the late 1970s, onto a street off Commonwealth Avenue just over the brow of the notorious Heartbreak Hill, the one that all Boston Marathon runners dread. The runner who first makes it over that hill is invariably the winner of the race, but just getting that far is an achievement. Actually, the first to crest the hill are the wheelchair entrants. In 1975, Boston was the first major marathon to include a wheelchair division.

mother and daughter set to run the 2013 Boston Marathon (observer.ca)

I remember walking out to Commonwealth Avenue on Marathon Day, stationing ourselves on the side of the road facing west, and cheering our hearts out. The winners sailed by early and, after a bit of a lag, the rest followed, old and young, men and women, many of them huffing and puffing alarmingly. But they persevered. I remember tears coming to my eyes as I cheered on young and middle-aged women, mothers and grandmothers running together. Some labored up and over that hill long, long after most of the pack had passed, but they made it over, and we cheered them until we were hoarse.

There are 29,000 people signed up to participate in the 2013 Boston Marathon,  so many that  it may be hard to remember a time when marathon-running wasn’t a big deal. But in 1970, the year we immigrated to the United States, there were only 1174 entrants, and in 1960, just ten years before that, fewer than two hundred. I remember the excitement when New Englander Bill Rogers won both the Boston and the New York marathons in 1975, and won Boston twice more in the late 1970s; suddenly jogging was all the rage. Apparently, interest in running marathons among the U.S. public had been sparked in the 1972 Olympics by the dramatic TV coverage of  American Frank Shorter winning the men’s marathon after an attempt to steal the race by an imposter was foiled.

Some of the female runners at the 1972 Boston Marathon (Image © Bettmann/CORBIS)

It may also be hard to remember, now that more than 40% of the participants are women, that although the Boston Marathon started way back in in 1897, it was not until 1972 that women were allowed in the race. Now that I think of it, that fact probably accounted in large part for my emotional response to the intrepid women of all ages who crested that hill, determined to finish the 26.2-mile course no matter how long it took. Now that I am middle-aged myself, I am in even greater awe of them.

I have never run a marathon myself, though one Sunday I set out on a stroll and ended up walking 23 miles (see Two at a Time). That was a long, long time ago; more recently, the closest I’ve come to a marathon is this A-to-Z April Blogging Challenge, not 26 miles but 26 entries in 30 days. It’s Day 15, and I’m already flagging, with Heartbreak Hill still up ahead.

Monday evening, April 15th, 2013: This day that dawned full of excitement and anticipation has ended in tragedy, grief, and utter bewilderment. Sending love and deepest sympathy to all those who were hurt and traumatized, and to the families and friends of those who lost their lives.

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193. Kindling

kindling (from megscoutguide.nic.in)

I’m speaking of the material one uses to get a wood fire going—dry twigs, thin sticks, or twists and knots of newspaper that will sustain the first, fragile, licks of flame, so that the larger pieces of wood will catch fire.  Having a supply of dry kindling on hand is essential to building a fire, whether indoors in a brick fireplace or woodstove or outdoors in a makeshift firepit.  As a verb, kindling refers to starting a fire, setting fire to something that will burn or, figuratively, arousing emotion. Etymologically, the word comes from cundel, “to set fire to,” thought to be of Scandinavian origin and related to the Old Norse kynda, also meaning “to kindle.”

How to Build a Campfire (npr.org)

There’s something very satisfying about building a good fire, setting it in the shape of a small teepee, carefully positioning the kindling so that it will get enough oxygen to catch fire and the flames are directed to the larger logs above, slipping the lit match in at the bottom, and watching it all flare up and slowly take hold. It warms your body and also kindles the cockles of your heart. Don’t forget, though, that the art of building a fire also includes the art of keeping that fire safe.

I suppose I have to mention (though I refuse to advertise) a commercial product, on the market only for a few short years (since 2007), that has appropriated this ancient word and still more primal human activity. I resent the fact that this brand of electronic reader seeks to be the object that comes to mind  when the word is mentioned. As a book-lover and former co-owner of a small letterpress business, I resent that this device even seeks to supplant the printed book, repository of human knowledge for more than a thousand years.

Amazon Kindle: Digital Book Burning (redicecreations.com)

If you think that this new means of delivering information to readers will be more durable or more enviromentally sustainable, think again. “The printed book is by far the most durable and reliable backup technology we have. Printed books require no mediating device to read and thus are immune to technological obsolescence. Paper is also extremely stable, compared with, say, hard drives or even CD’s,” writes Kevin Kelly in a New York Times article on the Google Books project, digital technology, and the printed book. Librarian and cultural journalist R. H. Lossin has recently given a lecture on book-burning, Nazis, the 21^st-Century digital library, and the fascinating question of why both major brands of e-reader have names that signify the act of setting something on fire. Thought-provoking, eh?

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182. Hot Cross Buns

The Penguin Cookery Book

Mum has two English cookery books which she has carried with her wherever we have moved and has referred to all these years whenever she makes traditional dishes like roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, or scones, or cheese straws. The first one dates from the Second World War, when rationing was in effect and essential ingredients like butter and eggs were hard to come by. The second is a battered old edition of The Penguin Cookery Book by Bee Nilson, which was my source when, one Good Friday in my early thirties, I set out to make hot cross buns.

I am a confident cook when working on the stovetop, but baking is a hit-or-miss operation for me, and I always find the prospect of it rather daunting. Still, I copied out the recipe from Mum’s cookery book, gathered all the ingredients together, and found a warm spot in the draughty farm kitchen for the yeast to rise. A few hours later I emerged, covered in flour from head to toe but triumphantly bearing aloft a tray of piping-hot buns, which were almost instantly demolished by my perennially hungry housemates. I promised myself I’d make them again the following year, and that the next time I’d make a double batch while I was going to all that trouble. I can’t remember now whether or not I ever did go to the trouble again, although I like to think that I did.

Soon afterwards we moved to Amherst, where, after a few years, The Henion Bakery opened its doors, featuring—among its many specialities—jam doughnuts beyond compare, which sustained me through the long years of dissertation-writing. One year, as springtime came around, I visited Henion’s to find a large batch of hot cross buns on the counter, fresh from the oven and perfect in every way, and compared to which my painstaking attempts seemed pitiful. Then and there I ordered a batch, and have done so every year since, never looking back.

The eating of the buns must be heralded by the nursery rhyme, which we sing with glee as we pour the tea and prepare to tuck in; and since I have no daughters, my son has come into a goodly number of these doughy delicacies over the years.

I’m not generally a national chauvinist, but I insist on singing the English version of this song. Having lived in the States as long as I have, I’ve become accustomed to the American versions of many songs, even starting to prefer some of them. But to my ear the American version of “Hot Cross Buns” sounds heavy and plodding, while the English one springs up and down like a bouncing ball, full of life and energy in keeping with the season.

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181. The Silver Hairpin

In 1977 my father travelled to India for his first return visit since emigrating to the United States, after a gap of eight years. (He has only returned  twice more in the 36 years that have elapsed since, once in 1984 and the last time, in 1996.) Nowadays, with so much more back-and-forthing between India and the States, particularly among our children’s generation—not to mention the constant phone-calling, email, Facebook, and videochat contact—it is hard to imagine the fevered anticipation with which we awaited his return.

My parents’ generation didn’t use the phone easily, especially not for long-distance calls. Incoming calls were dreaded, as they usually brought bad news, and there was the additional anxiety brought on by the knowledge of how much one’s loved ones were spending to make the call. Outgoing calls were equally rare because of the cost, and because placing a “trunk call” from India in those days was quite a hoohah, going out to an STD booth, waiting to place the call, waiting again for it to go through and then, as often as not, having to conduct the conversation shouting through the static. It is only very recently that my dad has stopped shouting into the phone at full volume, loud enough for them to hear him in India.

But I digress. The point is, we had not heard from Dad ever since he had left for India, so when the time finally came to meet him at Logan Airport, our excitement knew no bounds. How we waited until we got back to the house I don’t know, but we still have the photographs to show how he opened the full-to-bursting suitcases and laid everything out on my parents’ big queen-sized bed, everything from cotton and silk clothing to stainless-steel thalis and tumblers to silver jewelry to messages conveyed from this or that cousin to a Marathi cookbook to my grandmother’s famous laddus, carefully wrapped to stay fresh for as long as possible. Then came hours of questions and stories and trying things on and more photos of one or another of us modeling the new outfits to send back to the aunts and uncles who had gifted them to us.

Of all those gifts brought back by my father so many years ago, the one I have used the most, practically on a daily basis, is a simple silver hairpin. It was originally one of a pair, and its partner is long gone, but for years, among the plastic Magic Grip hairpins I used to buy at the West Concord 5 & 10 (brilliant in their own right, to be sure), this one gleamed regally out of  the top of my bun.  It still does.

I have always preferred the elegance, the moonlit-evanescence of silver to the buttery opulence of gold. Last time I went to India I asked everywhere I went for another silver hairpin, but in vain. As the middle classes were growing richer even gold, traditionally the most highly prized material for women’s jewelry, was abandoned in favor of diamonds, for which I have even less appreciation, since they look like cut glass to me and put me in mind of men slaving and dying in the mines.

Finally Mandatya, my father’s youngest sister, took me into a little jewelry store in Vile Parle and spoke on my behalf to the proprietor, who rummaged under the counter for a while, eventually re-emerging, not with hairpins, but with an old box of assorted silver jewelry. Its tangled chains, black with tarnish, had obviously been lying neglected for many years. He called a young assistant to clean the one I selected and soon presented it to me shining like new and at a marvellously low price.

Although I love the silver necklace, I just keep it in a box and admire it from time to time. But the old silver hairpin is in everyday use. Just looking at it calls up India faster than a satellite phone.

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178. Talkin’ ’bout My Generation

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Plate 1: Wherefore stopp’st thou me? by Gustave Doré (wisdomcriethwithout.com)

He holds him with his skinny hand,
‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.
‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years’ child:
The Mariner hath his will.
—The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, S. T. Coleridge

It has occurred to me more than once that I am writing this blog to record worldviews, sensibilities, textures of time and place that are passing away. They are shared by many members of my generation, and to some extent, that of my parents. Of course, some of them are specific to my generation in England, India, or the United States, while others are international currents shared across continents, cultures, and even social classes. But the older I get, the more I understand the uncontrollable urge that compelled the Ancient Mariner, that “grey-beard loon,” to grab hold of the young Wedding Guest with his skinny hand, sit him down upon a stone, and, held fast with his glittering eye, make him listen to his long, haunting tale—a tale that cannot, must not be forgotten.

My British generation, very much aware of the privilege and poverty of  the bad old days before and during the Second World War, believed in social equality, educational reform, and the Welfare State. My Indian generation, who grew up in the era of Nehruvian socialism, secularism, and non-alignment very much aware of our parents’ and grandparents’ struggle for Independence, rejected casteism and embraced economic self-reliance. My U.S. generation opposed the Vietnam War and Cold-War paranoia, cast off consumerism, fought for civil rights and proclaimed freedom for all. My International generation were universalists who shared world music and global culture long before the terms were coined. So much to explain, so little time.

(thefirstfew.com)

Why don’t you all f-f-f–fade away
And don’t try to d-dig what we all s-s-say
I’m not trying to cause a b-big s-s-sensation
I’m just talkin’ ’bout my g-g-generation
                                                            —My Generation, The Who

There’s another part of me that, like the Who, prophets of my generation, doesn’t want to proselytize and doesn’t have to explain. I’m under no illusions that my generation is better than the ones that preceded and followed it and fully recognize that there are as many continuities as breaks between us: I’ve never really believed in the Generation Gap. But I do want to share some of the spirit of the times that have shaped me with my agemates around the world who will know exactly what I’m talking about, and with young people now entering their prime who may not, but for whom Tell Me Another might help to account for our antics and attitudes, which can sometimes be exasperating in the extreme.

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175. Make It So!

San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, basalt. Photo: Javier Hinojosa (deyoung.famsf.org)

I had drawn my face absently into a frown. You pointed it out, smoothing my troubled brow. But whatever had furrowed itself into my forehead soon found somewhere else to go. Look out! you warned. It has moved to your mouth and chin. Sure enough, I found my mouth pursed and my chin set. A light toss of the head dispelled it—or at least, I thought it had. More likely, it went underground, only to re-emerge the next time I wasn’t paying attention. That was forty years ago.

I’ll never forget the day Eve had surgery, also nearly forty years ago. Eve has a beautiful round face, softly glowing like the moon. But even so, visiting her just as she was coming out of anesthesia, we found that with all the tension melted away her countenance was of another order, as calm and clear as that of a sleeping baby.

At nineteen, I could still vaporize pent-up energy simply by willing it away. Make it so! And so it was. Once, stricken with a rare headache, I closed my eyes and, breathing deeply and steadily, visualized it lifting, lifting, until it was completely gone, spiralling out the top of my head like a lazy dust devil.

But old habits die hard. Years of treading and retreading any pathway set it like stone. By then, simply pointing out the problem no longer suffices to dislodge and disperse it, neither do a few deep breaths and a toss of the head. It demands energy—active, sustained, focused yet free; relaxation; and a good night’s sleep. Easier said than done? Establishing good practices early will keep your body, mind, and spirit supple and responsive, so that your “Make It So!” is not a command to a sulky (and increasingly arthritic) inner schoolchild, but a natural outpouring, the joyful confluence of your deepest desires and the highest good.

[See a related story, Lively Up Yourself.]

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173. Multi-Timing

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candlelight.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
from Bed in Summer, Robert Louis Stevenson

As my day is winding down, a new one is beginning for our family in India, as they carry out the morning rituals of teeth-cleaning, tea-drinking, poha, and private prayers at the kitchen shrine. As I get ready for bed, too late as usual, my California friends still have their evening ahead of them and are ready for long phone chats. Of a morning I wake in anticipation of news from England, since by the time I am sitting up in bed with my first cup of tea my English family and friends are well into their workdays and their fourth or fifth cuppas. With childhood friends in Australia and New Zealand and dear Alysha in South Africa this year, as I brace for a February nor’easter I am aware that the Antipodeans in my life are enjoying fresh garden vegetables and harvesting early summer fruit (all the more tormenting because they will keep posting photographs of them on Facebook). The diurnal and seasonal rhythms of yesteryear, each in its own time gradually and gracefully giving way to the next,  are now overlaid with the contrapuntal motions of multiple time zones, all competing simultaneously for space in my crowded consciousness.

(from redlegsinsoho.blogspot)

This is my constant condition, now delightful, now dizzying. How much more so when my loved ones are on the move; waiting for the email or text message announcing their safe arrival, I am keenly aware, in every moment, of what time it is there. I read nineteenth, even twentieth-century novels in which travelers or family members working or studying abroad must of necessity remain incommunicado for months, sometimes unable to make a visit home for years on end. Those left behind at home, most of them women, sit down at their writing desks and immerse their whole selves in long, beautifully handwritten, artfully composed letters, pausing periodically to dip their pens into the inkwell and gaze into the middle distance.  In their position, I turn to my laptop, and Tell Me Another.

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169. At the Gates of Dawn

Yesterday morning, after several grey, dismal days, the winter sun burst out of the January gloom, streaming watery-bright through the rising mist of melting snow, and I snapped this photograph. A fragment from a beloved children’s book springs to mind, though it wasn’t dawn. (Strange, that although The Wind in the Willows was one of my first books, I don’t remember ever having read Chapter Seven. Perhaps I  skimmed right over it, mystified.)

Suddenly the sky was washed clear, and we caught a glimpse of what Spring might look like when at last it came. As hard-bitten New Englanders, we knew better than to raise our hopes. But the earth and the woods remain perennially open to the unexpected. Another fragment wafts in on the almost-balmy not-quite breeze, promising,

. . for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—

The January thaw—if that is what it was and not more evidence of global warming—has robbed the fields of their snow cover and taken off with it. The puddles have evaporated, too, and the bare, muddy ground has contracted and hardened. Icy fingers of frost are infiltrating everywhere. Snow is forecast again in the early morning hours, and tomorrow threatens to deliver what the weathermen up this way call a “wintry mix.” But I hear the midnight train rumbling by just across the back fields: moving on, as will Old Man Winter, one of these days.

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