NOTES: I have always felt great pleasure in finding something in a junk shop or on eBay which reminds me of my childhood. Often banal items, kitchenware, books or old branded packaging from the 1970’s. I would always revel in the joy of revealing it to my sister and experiencing a shared sense of stepping back to the days where adulthood was a distant complication. I have never really moved far from the postcode which I was born in. I have no desire to, I am happy here. Place is important to me. The right house in the right place where everything is familiar and I have all of my belongings inside this place in their designated place. But there are places and objects which are out of our grasp for one reason or another. The lost, discarded or sold which we cannot access. To be physically in contact with such tangible places or objects can sometimes unleash feelings of joy, melancholy or reflection on what was perhaps long forgotten.

Discuss/highlight connections between places/objects to provoke memory

Using my own experience – story telling through visit to no 31

The quotes are signposts to other writers.theorists who discuss

Images act as illustrations in the sense that they are evocative of dreamlike places/objects and memory

The works – like the images sit together with the same outward intention. That is to perhaps evoke viewer experince, interpritation, memory/sense of object/place. Not a telling but a description which may nod to other autobographies.

The compiling of the words is intuitive as with the painitng

The words have been compiled using a piece of ‘stream of consiouness’ writing afte rvisiting the house. The words are a cereabal/thinking response

The paint is a physical response to the tangible yet fleeting. objects rooms, feeling, physical sense of touch, remembering and responding.

FULL ESSAY

Number 31                                                                                                       ______             Julie Ellis

I have always found great pleasure in finding something in a junk shop or on eBay which reminds me of my childhood. These are often banal items, kitchenware, books or old branded packaging from the 1970’s. I revel in the joy of revealing it to my sister and experiencing a shared sense of stepping back to the days where adulthood was a distant complication. I have never really moved far from the postcode which I was born in. I have no desire to, I am happy here. Place is important to me. The right house in the right place where everything is familiar and I have all of my belongings inside this place in their designated place. But there are places and objects which are out of our grasp for one reason or another. The distant, lost or discarded which we cannot access. To be physically in contact with such tangible places or objects can sometimes unleash feelings of joy, melancholy or reflection on what was perhaps thought to be long forgotten.

First Home_________________________________________________________________________

It is body and soul. It is the human being’s first world. Before he is “cast into the world,” … man is laid in the cradle of the house… Life begins well, it begins enclosed, protected, all warm in the bosom of the “house. (Bachelard, 1969)

I was able to step inside the home of my birth and childhood recently. It had come on the market for sale and I had a feeling that I may not get another chance to go inside, I often walk past the house but resist the urge to knock on the door and tell the owner how special this place is. On the day of the visit as I arrive the door is open and I just wander in. I look down at the terracotta tiled path and my school shoes come to mind. The last time I came here was the last time it was on the market over thirty years ago, it was fairly unchanged then, this time it felt different, somewhat neglected. The traditional arrangement of the house is familiar to me, the tried and tested set up common for many dwellings in my city. I am aware of the many feet that have trodden up and down the hall to the kitchen and back, up and down the stairs to the bathroom and back. I think not only of my family but the long frocked ladies of the turn of the century who would proudly have lived here when the house was new. In the front room I reflect on a century of clocks in the centre of the mantles, and table lamps beside armchairs. The coving and ceiling rose remind me of lying on my back studying the shapes of the moulded plaster, I recall thinking it might be fruit or boobs which was amusing to me. I move around far quicker than I would like as I make small talk with the estate agent.

In the dining room there still remains a ‘borrowed light ‘Perspex window to the hall and the serving hatch that mum insisted on. . I played records in here until it got unbearable for everyone and the record player was gifted to me to have in my room.

My parents had many seventies dinner parties, just like Abigail’s party. Mum wore her kaftan and they would listen to ‘James Last Does Classic’ on cassette eating prawn cocktail, Goulash and black forest gateaux around a candle perched onto a Mateus rosé bottle. I don’t think Dad gave a shit about having people over but he usually got wonderfully amusingly drunk

Along the hall was the kitchen, heavy with teatimes, Sunday roasts, chops and mash with horrible white cabbage and no gravy. The kitchen leads only to the damp, cold bathroom where Mum put me and Jayne in that bath together with a bottle of Matey. After the tantrums of hair washing with a Tupperware cup we played until our fingers wrinkled.

The estate agent is talking about the age of the boiler and showing me the manual as we move along again. Upstairs polystyrene tiles still remain on the ceilings; they have a broken eggshell pattern which reminds me of childhood Easter egg surfaces. It’s still there I am sure because it’s a complete bugger to get off, everything’s smaller or maybe I am just bigger.

Jayne’s room is tiny; she basically slept in a cupboard. The only thing remaining of her is a shelf which she put all of her cassettes on neatly. The corner of the shelf was curved because Dad didn’t want her sitting up in bed a catching her head on it. My room is dull and I struggle to see how I hold such fond memories. Dance routines, Duran Duran everywhere except the light switch. These four walls were witness to picking my nose, wetting the bed, smoking, starting my period, dying my hair, trying on make-up and constantly slamming the door.

Physical ___________________________________________________________________________

While the home is both a cultural formulation and a building, it is more than either of these, a cluster of tactile sensations and bodily positions that form the somatic groundwork through which we experience it’s emotional sustenance…The home…emerges as a bodily operation rather than an architectural structure. (KRASNER, 2020)

There is a manner in which I move around the house, my hand following the banister rail, looking below or bracing myself for the cold air of the downstairs bathroom.I move physically around it retracing my smaller footsteps with a sense of knowing and understanding which sets it apart from other buildings. I is almost impossible for me to see it as a house like the others that stand either side of it in this terrace, it is not just a collection of materials, brick, cement, wood, ordered in a specific way to function as a shelter. This is not just the place of my birth, it is the the muted witness to my first experiences, it has a part to play in who I am and where I was formed. Being inside the house liberates and facilitates memories in a way which I am not capable of otherwise.

 I move around it’s walls with decades of muscle memory. This is the place where I would have encountered the challenges of physical development, understanding the articulation of my body, my first movements, first steps. Gaston Bachelard describes the “first stairway”…

In spite of all the other anonymous stairways; we would recapture the reflexes of the successive houses in which we have lived have no doubt made our gestures commonplace. But we are very surprised, when we return to the old house, after an odyssey of many years, to find that the most delicate gestures, the earliest gestures suddenly come alive, are still faultless. In short, the house we were born in has engraved within us the hierarchy of the various functions of inhabiting. (Bachelard, 1969)

I was born physically restricted having congenital hip dislocation. I had to wear a plaster cast from my underarms to my toes. I have no memory of this but I am told that I used my arms to drag this cast around the house trashing all the paintwork for over a year. I wasn’t expected to walk at all so I guess that my first steps must have been a special day. Old family friends recall to me their memory of me like this, I have heard it so often I almost feel that I actually remember but it’s my mind playing tricks, the retelling of others stories so vivid in my mind. Occasionally I bump into someone from years ago and they look me up and down and say ‘look at you walking!’

The visit to my place of birth is punctuated by the façade of being a potential buyer which forces me to mentally sweep back and forth in time, unable to settle and ponder in my memories for too long. The estate agent who walks around beside me hands me details for the ‘property’, rooms measured and described accurately and concisely, tiled splash backs, power sockets and stairs leading to…I disregard this information, I am indifferent to this truth. It is unimportant; there are no particulars or numbers which describe this place for me.

What would be the use … in giving the plan of the room that was really my room, …I alone, in my memories of another century, can open the deep cupboard that still retains for me alone that unique odour, the odour of raisins drying on a wicker tray. The odor of raisins! It is an odor that is beyond description, one that it takes a lot of imagination to smell. (Bachelard, 1969)

It’s strange how our senses instantly catapult us back in time, a song, a sound, a smell or taste which reminds us of a moment thought to be forgotten. It is as if the senses store away everything once experienced in the deepest part of our psyche ready to fling forth at the moment of reexperience.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me … immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine…so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea. (Proust, 2021)

At number 31 the smell of home has long gone but still the sight of the kitchen induces the sense of warmth, smell of boiled cabbage, baking and the hot iron. The only place where the smell remains the same is in the garage which is still the dumping place it always was, damp attaching itself to any porous surface, the smell of rot. The debris of saving things for possible usefulness, the ‘too good to throw away’ logic of my Dad. Our garage always smelled of engine oil and Swarfega.There was a triumph herald, a mini and a maroon coloured sports car – mum said dad missed whole chapters of our childhood whilst he was tinkering.

In Dreams__________________________________________________________________________

 I had been wandering through that house every now and again ever since I’d left it at age fourteen. A quarter of a century had passed, and I still wasn’t out of it, in my dreams”. “In dreams nothing is lost. Childhood homes, the dead, lost toys all appear with a vividness your waking mind could not achieve. (Solnit, 2006)

The subconscious has a habit of shifting time. I my mind I often wander through number 31. In my dreams it is blended with other houses which I have lived in but I somehow know its number 31. There is an uncanny sense of fear; everything is recognisable and unfamiliar at the same time. I let myself in with the familiar sweaty metallic smelling Yale key, my own key, given to me when mum got a teatime job at Dr Moore’s surgery as a receptionist. Just as I did then I go straight upstairs to my room and close the door. I spent most of my time here, listening to music and smoking rollups with the window open to let the smoke out. The objects in my room reveal themselves, my favourite monkey t-shirt, a Shakin Stevens album, Blue Peter bring and buy stickers, a glass flower ornament, a Paddington bear lampshade. I am comforted by the feeling that everything is safe in my sub conscious so that they cannot be lost or damaged as tangible objects often are.

Objects____________________________________________________________________________

As I use (Grandmother’s) rolling pin and feel its texture and weight against my floured hands, I think of the hundreds of pies and cookies it helped create. It anchors me in the past, yet continues to create memories for the future. The object becomes timeless. (Turkle, 2011)

I think about the objects which I am the keeper of today, objects which have no monetary value, most of which sit in a box in my loft space. I have inherited some things from people who knew people, who lived before I was born but are connected to me through stories and blood. Paper and fabric mostly, keepsakes and records of my family’s history, evidence of that which set me in motion. These things hold no memories of which I can personally recount, I can only speak of them by retelling the the sketchy misremembered tales of the family member who gifted me the object. I occasionally mull over these objects, ritually uncovering briefly then recovering; they are like old undeveloped analogue negatives. These objects from before my birth different to the school reports, toys and clothes which I read, held and wore. The physical contact and touch is the connection of past to present. Writer James Krasner describes the process of clearing out his parents home with his siblings after they had passed away; He talks of how each time he turned a corner he would find his brothers ‘standing, staring abstractedly at a grimy action figure or a bent cufflink, sometimes smiling, always stalled and entranced.’…‘Each grubby, broken toy, each battered box of school art projects or tacky souvenirs, stopped us in our tracks. (KRASNER, 2020) Krasner said that after two days, unable to continue with the task and decided to hire a cleaning company ‘people to whom such speaking objects were mute.’ (KRASNER, 2020

I continue the ritual saving tangible material for my own family, first drawings, trimmings of hair, baby shoes and old toys. I recently had a conversation with my adult son about these objects as we had been sorting out things as he left for university. He seemed indifferent to the idea that these dusty objects may hold memories for him. Perhaps as he is has not experienced the absence of his family home and its contents for long enough to experience the speaking objects which Krasner describes.

I don’t think I will come back in to number 31 again, I know that it’s a dooer upper now which makes me feel sad. There will be no little remnants of my life here soon. Before we leave I pretend to check out the roof for the benefit of the estate agent as we go back outside. In the garage sits one of the old kitchen units. Really old, from ‘day one’ three or four kitchens back from the one that’s there now. Dad would not throw anything away in case it came in handy. It’s a family joke. Best of all it had a little sticker on it which said ‘Pickford’s do not remove’ placed there in 1984 when we moved to Leicester. So odd it’s still there and tells a little story all on its own. On the way out at the end of our visit I caught sight of the backwards 31 through the porch.

Bibliography________________________________________________________________________

Bachelard, G., 1969. The Poetics of Space. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press Books.

International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2018. Proust Configures Time, Space and Memory to Unveil Marcel’s Artistry in Swann’s Way. 5(2), p.5.

KRASNER, J., 2020. HOME BODIES. [S.l.]: OHIO STATE UNIV PR, p.41.

Proust, M., 2021. Excerpt from Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. [ebook] http://art.arts.usf.edu/. Available at: <http://art.arts.usf.edu/content/articlefiles/2330-Excerpt%20from%20Remembrance%20of%20Things%20Past%20by%20Marcel%20Proust.pdf> [Accessed 17 March 2021].

Solnit, R., 2006. A field guide to getting lost. Edinburgh: Canongate, p.179.

Turkle, S., 2011. Evocative objects. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p.227.

Woolf, V., Bradbury, N. and Carabine, K., 2013. To the lighthouse. Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd.