Watch: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

In a discussion based a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year, Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year. Thanks so much to everyone who attended and took time out to spend a Monday evening with us. This was the first ever Elsewhere online event, and hopefully it won’t be the last… but equally, we hope to see some of you in person in 2021 too!

The essays:

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

Online Event: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

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Join Elsewhere editors and contributors on 14 December for an online reading and discussion on wanderlust and memories of elsewhere, the places we’re longing for and those we are separated from, whether by time or distance. 

The starting point for the discussion are a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year (see links below) and we are really looking forward to bringing together Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton to talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year.

To register: For Zoom login details, please send an email to paul@elsewhere-journal.com and he’ll send you the info you need to join the event.

Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere
14 December 2020
6pm in Dublin & Cambridge / 7pm in Berlin 

For updates, please also follow the Facebook event page if you are on the platform, or follow us on Twitter

Read the essays by our panel from the Memories of Elsewhere series....

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

About the Panel...

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Marcel Krueger is the books editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books, including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the forthcoming novella In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021).

Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Dan Carney:

It’s a number of things that will keep Westcliff Parade in memory shortly after you’ve left, when venturing further than 500 metres from home will become an exotic and reckless act, and your mind will be constantly occupied by the newly inaccessible.

It’s the curious way it can feel windswept and deserted here even when the air is still and there are people all around. It’s the grand old Westcliff Hotel, brilliant white and offseason-empty, as well as the Cliffs Pavilion theatre just beyond, a strange but compelling blend of art deco and brutalism, a 1950s Butlin’s building imagined as a cruise ship from the near future. It’s the gentle decline, on one side, to the seafront between Southend and Westcliff, and the Cliff Gardens, a multi-tiered Edwardian pleasure garden set into the slope and stretching all the way along to the Adventure Island amusement park. A tastefully verdant point from which to take in the not quite unending view of the never quite empty sea; the first widening of the Thames Estuary, and the Isles of Grain and Sheppey. The Canvey Island skyline to the right and, to the left, Southend Pier, the longest pleasure pier in the world.

The gardens were designed by the renowned architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, whose other works include the palatial Rashtrapati Bhavan presidential residence in New Delhi, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval, and the Cenotaph in Whitehall. Lutyens was also responsible for the memorial to Southend’s own Great War dead, a freestanding eleven-metre obelisk of Portland Stone that also resides here, further along at Clifftown Parade. His daughter Elisabeth, a prominent composer, had a similarly diverse career, pioneering her own technique of serial composition – an approach involving the equal usage of all twelve notes on the chromatic scale – scoring a number of 1960s Hammer horror films, and drawing admiration from Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, and Stravinsky. 

But what will make this short stretch linger, more than its panoramic views, impressive landscaping, or aristocratic architect-composer bloodlines, is the thing that has brought you here. Dad died two days ago, fading away peacefully – and expectedly - in a nearby care home, following a long period of illness. You’ve been here since, staying at the Westcliff Hotel, helping Mum with death administration and trying to provide general support.

Between you, you’ve been working down the list – getting the death registered, cancelling the pension payments, transferring the joint account into a single name, going through the production line notification of friends and relatives. There’s a bleak humour in how mundanely procedural a lot of it is, how the infrastructure of eight and a half decades of unbroken existence can be so easily dismantled or reassigned. There isn’t much humour, however, in how nothing either of you do or say seems enough to fill the new gap, a vast, weird expanse it’ll take time to explore and understand. For now, it’s less complicated to collect the certificates, make the appointments, and sign the forms, all rituals which - at this moment - seem to exist solely to enable the deferral of the more ambiguous stuff.

Even so, you spend a lot of time while you’re here wondering what’s going on. Even when death is foregrounded by decline and inevitability, a release when it finally comes, it’s still a punch in the chest. You’ve been standing on the track watching the train approach, able to do pretty much anything to prepare for impact, except get out of the way. And if it’s hit you hard then Mum, after 55 years of marriage, has been hit harder still. What it leaves is more than just simple sadness or loss. It’s a disorienting blend of the fluid and the fixed. Panic and permanence, everything rising and spinning around a monolithically immovable core. A contradictory thing which won’t settle or be made sense of, leaving you feeling like a switch waiting to be flicked, a punch yet to be thrown.

As if to reflect this, Westcliff Parade dissolves and reforms daily. In the mornings it’s a marvel of Edwardian seafront elegance, the gardens stately and welcoming, the timber- and glass-fronted houses inviting unhurried admiration. It’s not hard, in the bright mornings - even months before the summer crowds will arrive at the beaches below - to feel the energy and possibility that must have crackled through here in the 1800s and early 1900s, when Southend was an exclusive seaside resort, the destination of choice for well-heeled Londoners.

In the evenings, however, the desirability and bustle of years past are nowhere to be seen or felt, overwritten by darkness, dread, and decades of affordable overseas holidays. Westcliff Parade is the chilly precursor to hasty Wetherspoons meals, eaten late and alone in the cavernous converted post office off Southend High Street, before the trudge back to the hotel. It is yesterday’s place, shuttered and embalmed, offering no restorative views or palatable metaphors for death and grief. It doesn’t want you here, and it makes sure you know it. It watches disapprovingly, tallying your steps and keeping track of every minute you stay.   

On the last day you are here, the duties are mainly done. The morning is clear and crisp but the answers, unsurprisingly, are still to appear. You check out of the hotel and find yourself standing at the top of the Cliff Gardens in the rising wind, surveying the choppy estuary. You look across to Canvey, then down at the couple on the bench. In the months that follow, you’ll sometimes feel like you’re on your way through, but more often like an engine sputtering quietly to a halt, a box boarded under the floor.

***

Dan Carney is a musician/writer from north-east London. He has released two albums as Astronauts via the Lo Recordings label, and also works as a composer/producer of music for TV and film. His work has been heard on a range of television networks, including BBC, ITV, Channel 4, HBO, Sky, and Discovery. He has also authored a number of academic research papers on subjects such as cognitive processing in genetic syndromes and special skills in autism. His other interests include walking, hanging around in cafes, and spending far too much time thinking about Tottenham Hotspur.

Memories of Elsewhere: River Ogmore, by Tim Cooke

Photo: Dan Wood

Photo: Dan Wood

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Tim Cooke:

If I try to think of my hometown objectively, images spring to mind one after another like a series of postcards. I see the old stone bridge, from which the town takes its name; I see the derelict bingo hall, a husk that was once a cinema, now a car park; I see the estate, much maligned but not so long ago an architectural vision of hope; I see the playing fields, the site of my worst childhood nightmares; and the dunes, where Lawrence of Arabia was filmed. I see the castle, the woods, the supermarket, the dual-carriageway, the standing stones, and the recreation centre. 

Of course, I cannot think of these places without making connections, fitting them together and applying my own stories and others I’ve encountered; experience flows through each scene, as does the River Ogmore. 

The water rises at Craig Ogwr, in the Ogmore Valley, and runs down through Blackmill, Brynmenyn, Aberkenfig, Wildmill, Bridgend Town, Merthyr Mawr, Ogmore by Sea, and out into the Bristol Channel – I love the sounds these places make. There are parts I know intimately – from childhood and my teenage years – and those I’ve visited once or twice, like on school trips. There are huge sections I’ve not been anywhere near, which I find somehow exhilarating. The more I think about the river, the more I contemplate journeys I might make in the future, or should have made in the past, when I was there. 

My first experience of the river – in terms of place, not time (it runs from north to south and I track it geographically) – takes me all the way back to its starting point, up in the valley. At primary school, we spent a whole term on local waterways. We studied maps and diagrams, drew pictures and trekked out into the field. I recall a coach journey to the source, near Nant-y-moel, eating sweets and crisps and feeling sick. We stopped at a bend in the road, flanked by scarp and crag. Water poured from the mountaintop and slid away to our left, worksheets killing the mood. I did something wrong and was made to stand metres apart, listening alone to the babble and the noise of rolling pebbles.

*

I’m looking at a gallery online and the first image in the sequence is of that exact same spot. The grass is greener than I remember it, and the water is whiter. My first impression is that the photograph speaks more clearly of Wales than my recollections do. Maybe it’s in the detail, like the damp weather, or the colour of the soil – I’m not so sure. I move on. Next is a woman dressed in a dark-green coat, speckled with rain. Her expression is one of awe and wonder, or perhaps she’s been caught mid-sentence by the camera. Regardless, she’s part of the story now. 

I continue through pictures of two men on a bridge, a Welsh-flag towel pinned to a washing line, rows of almost identical flats, a war grave, a post-it note scribbled with ‘Donald Trump’, a swastika carved into a tree, and a schoolboy leaning on a wall with his arm in a pink cast, names signed in black pen. There’s a car, too, parked between lockups, a convertible BMW I think, that appears to have been pulled from the flow, the white paint covered in what looks like algae – a modern sort of river monster. It makes me think of the team of volunteers who dragged two-hundred tyres, five trollies, umpteen traffic cones and wheelbarrows, a large gas canister and a road barrier from the river one Saturday, plus fifty bags of smaller items – detritus dumped in the drift.

I keep going and, minutes later, stop to linger in a car park overlooking the bus station on the opposite side. The sun is about to disappear behind the hills in the distance. I walked not far from here, once, with the photographer, making a film about creativity in Bridgend; it was my response to the international press coverage of the spate of suicides that dubbed it ‘The Suicide Town’. As a child, I spent successive afternoons smoking cigarettes underneath a bridge just down from here, then hopped along a series of concrete platforms jutting out from the artificial banks. I have countless similar memories – I don’t know why I’ve chosen this one. 

*

Back in 1999, this stretch of river was central to a high-profile police investigation, into the murder of a young woman, who enjoyed writing songs and poetry. It was said there was no forensic evidence available, as the fast-flowing water had washed it away, but a hammer was discovered in a clump of trees a hundred yards from the cash and carry. Mud found in the boot of a car was thought to match that of the riverbank. 

*

I follow the river’s course through town, below the subway where, at fifteen, I spent a freezing cold night in a sleeping bag, and along the dirt track I’d take home after too many pints in the pub. I pass the recreation centre, where I played five-aside football and hung out with my first proper girlfriend. I can still smell the chlorine leaking from the vents that warmed our backs on winter evenings. There are no photos of these locations; in their place are images of redbrick housing, a man I vaguely know and a pile of chopped wood below broken glass – all effective in their way. I stop to linger on the sand at the bend in the river, referred to locally as just that, where I caught countless eels and my brother a sewin that tasted like shit. I lost a salmon once, I swear; that flash of iridescent silver.  

Across the rugby pitch, beyond the standing stones, I can see the steps. I was sixteen or so when three hooded figures asked for a fight. One of them was screaming at the top of his voice, as he paced back and forth. We ran and they chased us along the path by the playground, shrieking: Let’s drown them in the river. I was terrified, but they gave up pretty soon. That was the year I started bunking off school, spending hours in the strip of woodland that slopes down to the water’s edge. To get there you had to cross the huge metal pipe like a bridge, a post-apocalyptic leviathan, coated in graffiti and rust. I read a while back that a medieval pilgrimage route cut through this landscape. 

When I was twelve, my older brother and some friends made a raft out of tyres, which they strapped together with rolls of duct tape. I was the only one light enough not to sink and so sailed alone. I was basking in the glory of it, enjoying the scenery, until one of the boys began to hurl rocks from a thin bay of shingle. He had a crazed look in his eye. Dodging the missiles, I pleaded with him to stop. It was only when one struck my knee that I was given the time to disembark and sprint home.

*

One of the last pictures in the sequence is of a repeated curve not far from the estuary. The clouds are low above the ridge, and the river is a murky grey. There are thousands of shades of green and plenty of textures to explore. I see myself in a blue raincoat skimming stones, or trudging along the sand with friends after a beach party in the middle of the night. I’m jogging at the foot of the dunes. I twist my ankle and have to walk miles back to the car.

I’ve written about this place before, in a work of weird fiction based on real events. A child is fishing with his father. He’s being taught to hook ragworm, but is disturbed by their form, the writhe and slither. Shivering, he picks the least obscene specimen he can find from the parcel of paper, wrapped like a bag of chips, and holds it out in front of him, watching it curl around his thumb, turning itself inside out. Following his father’s instructions, he pinches it taut and presses the steel tip down until the skin punctures, or pops. At this point, the creature screams. The boy looks up to see a woman thrashing in the mist on the banking opposite. She’s a version of Jenny Greenteeth, or Wicked Jenny, a river hag from folktales who drags children to their deaths.

There’s a girl crouching on the shore, replaced in the following image by a large splash. There’s a coach parked by a bench on the cliff, and a person stares out to sea.

***

Tim Cooke is a teacher, freelance writer and creative writing PhD student. His work has been published by the Guardian, Little White Lies, The Quietus, 3:AM Magazine, New Welsh Review and Ernest Journal. His creative work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines, including The Shadow Booth, Black Static, New Welsh Review, Foxhole Magazine, Prole, Porridge Magazine, The Nightwatchman, The Lampeter Review, Storgy, Litro Magazine and MIR Online. He recently had a piece of creative nonfiction published in a Dunlin Press anthology on the theme of ports and is currently working on a collection of short stories. You can follow him on Twitter @cooketim2

Dan Wood is a documentary and portrait photographer based in Bridgend. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and he has featured in a wide range of publications. His books Suicide Machine and Gap in the Hedge are available with Another Place Press. He is currently working on a new book about the River Ogmore and was kind enough to share his current edit for this piece.

Memories of Elsewhere: Tre Cime di Lavaredo, by Steve Himmer

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In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Steve Himmer:

There are better hikes. Hikes where you don't wait in a long line of cars and coaches to pay admission. Hikes that don't begin at a trailhead with three terraced levels of parking and tour buses spilling groggy riders by the hundreds. I've spilled from those buses myself in each of the past three years, bringing successive groups of college students to Italy's Dolomites as part of a course.

The trail, reached after a long walk on pavement, remains crowded as it departs the Refugio Auronzo, your last chance for snacks and souvenirs until the next thirty minutes away. It's entirely flat though there are numerous spots at which enthusiasts might veer off to inspect pale rock formations above or green meadows below. There's as much shuffling between oncoming walkers and getting ahead of slow moving clusters as on any Venetian sidewalk (which my students encounter soon after), with the same risk of selfie sticks swung at eye height. Last summer a drone buzzed overhead the whole route and I found myself uncharitably wishing for the invisible pilot to twist an ankle or crash the contraption or both.

There is no reason, in other words, no reason at all, for any person who enjoys hiking or mountains or being able to hear their own thoughts to visit Tre Cime di Lavaredo in summer. I bring my students up other trails in the region, like the exposed, narrow spine designed to cause vertigo at Cinque Torri. But of all the more meditative, more challenging, wilder places I've walked it's Tre Cime I'm thinking of lately, with its trio of spires in pale lunar stone.

That flat, gravel trail hangs on the rim of a valley, offering sustained views toward a far away lake so blue it can't be described without risking cliché. Overhead, set into the faces of the three peaks themselves, are the shadowed mouths of caves left by soldiers who endured the fierce fighting and vertical living of World War I along that contested border between Austria and Italy. The meadows call out for singing — my students reliably belt selections from The Sound of Music — then stretching out among flowers to bathe in high altitude sun and forget, for a while, that the trail a few meters above remains packed with people watching their phones as much as their feet or their world. The longest downward digression reaches a memorial statue to honor the marksmen of the 8th Bersaglieri regiment: a tall angel standing wings folded with one hand pressed to the pommel of his sword and the other holding a wreath as he keeps watch over the towns of the valley below.

After all that, beyond the memorial or at least where its steep path departs from the trail if you choose not to take it, past the rugged Cappella degli Alpini with its steeple low enough to stay out of the wind, you'll arrive at the trail's second chance for food and trinkets, Refugio Lavaredo. The outdoor patio will be crowded and you'll jockey for space at a table — a large group will most likely be scattered — but the polenta and sauerkraut and venison and boar, not to mention the beer, will achieve depths of flavor and satisfaction they never would at sea level with better prices but without the view. All those other day hikers, marvelling in languages from all over the world, are there for the same reasons you are and so what if it's at the same time.

The trail carries on past that second refuge. All told it's a six mile loop that climbs more aggressively after Refugio Lavaredo to reach a plateau with views across the Austrian border. It swings around the far side of the peaks to reclaim the parking lot from the opposite end. But most of those having lunch won't go up, or if they do it will be a short scramble to take in the view and to see what remains of some World War I bunkers before coming back down to return to their coaches the way they arrived.

The way we arrived, I should say, because with my students it's always like that, not enough time to complete the full loop.

What I miss, what I long for right now, are the things that annoy me on that trail: the people, the jostling, the cacophony of human voices and dogs greeting each other, the elbows-in space of the refugio's terrace, and more than anything else the fresh awe of my students each summer through whose eyes that crowded, unwelcoming, less than wild trail and valley and ancient rock face could never grow old. I've watched one of them spring hircine up a steep slope only a day after facing down her fierce fear of heights on another peak. I've seen a sprained ankle risk ruining the day for the group but result instead in a ride back to the coach clinging to the waist of a refugio host straight off the bodice-ripped cover of a romance novel. I've had the privilege and pleasure of introducing that mob scene to new students each year, along with annual guilty grappling with my own conflicted emotions about our contribution to its overcrowding, and I've read what they've written about it.

This year's course is in jeopardy while that region of Italy suffers as badly as any place does, but I daydream of summers and students to come when the world has found its new normal. The Tre Cime di Lavaredo have seen centuries of avalanches and harsh winters and soldiers lost where they can't be recovered, and every hike there, however constrained, is undertaken in the shadow of those many deaths. So the more legs out on the trail walking, the more voices raised and the more elbows bumped while hoisting a beer, the greater the celebration of being there against odds.

***

Steve Himmer is author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram and Scratch, and editor of the webjournal Necessary Fiction. He teaches at Emerson College in the US and the Netherlands.

Memories of Elsewere: The Secret Square, by James Carson

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In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By James Carson

About ten years ago, I was sitting at my desk, and longing for an end to the working week.  As a distraction from boredom, I lost myself in my computer’s wallpaper.

Wallpaper is a very personal preference. Some people choose images of their family, others prefer football or food, the Crab Nebula or Justin Bieber. I’m more inclined towards places that stir old memories, or locations that can make new ones.

In those days, my wallpaper of choice featured a small, cobblestoned square, enclosed by lovely old buildings painted in lemon and terracotta. In the foreground, a jaunty little flag hung from a sturdy stone wall, emblazoned with a single word: Bibliotek.

The image had a magnetic quality, something that beckoned me into the space, and away from the tedium of office life. I had no idea where it was, but I allowed myself the fantasy of visiting this place. I could imagine savouring the atmospheric light and the stillness of the square, exploring the public library, and capturing the scene with my own photographs.

A few years later, I took a trip to Stockholm. Civilised, organised, full of interest, Sweden’s capital city was instantly appealing. The Gamla Stan – Stockholm’s impossibly handsome old  town  – seduced me with its treasury of architecture and alluring alleyways. 

It was here, with great anticipation, that I turned a corner and entered a place that, until then, had been just a photograph on my computer screen. A bit of internet sleuthing had helped me locate it, and now here I was in the square called Tyska Stallplan.

It was oddly exhilarating. But the pleasure of finally achieving a longstanding ambition quickly melted away.

The morning light had failed to penetrate the square. Alone in the gloom, I saw that one of the buildings was smothered in plastic sheeting, and the wall at the rear of the square was adulterated by graffiti. The little library flag was missing, and so was the library.

What to make of this? Had I been deceived by a skilful photographer’s sleight of hand? Was anticipation really the better part of pleasure? 

The truth is I’d forgotten that over time all places undergo subtle and substantial change.

A little more digging unearthed the story of this modest space. Beneath the cobbles of Tyska Stallplan are the vaults of the Blackfriars Monastery. It was built in the fourteenth century, scarcely a hundred years after the name of Stockholm first appeared in any historical record. The Dominican friary proved its resilience through pestilence, fire, and siege. But its luck ran out during the Swedish reformation, when King Gustav Vasa had it destroyed. The outline of the monastery walls can still be seen in the layout of the cobblestones.

By the eighteenth century, the square was surrounded by stables. These, along with a nearby German school, gave Tyska Stallplan the name it retains to this day: German Stable Square.

As for the public library, its fate was sealed by declining numbers of visitors. The collection was moved to a more central location in 2013.

Nowhere stays the same. The picture on my computer screen captured a fleeting moment in the life of this age-old place. Since my visit, the scene will have shifted again, the plastic sheeting removed, the graffiti washed away. As winter turns to spring, it won’t be long until the bare trees on Tyska Stallplan are again in full leaf.

A virus with a diameter of one ten thousandth of a millimetre has changed our way of life, including our freedom to travel. But even when things return to normal, few travellers will be beating a path to this ordinary little square in Stockholm. That’s understandable. Yet, just because places like Tyska Stallplan go unnoticed, they needn’t be disregarded.

For those willing to take a closer look, this secret square has a tale to tell.

***

James Carson is a writer from Glasgow. His work has appeared in various magazines, including From Glasgow to Saturn, The Skinny and ExBerliner, and his stories have also been selected for anthologies such as Streets of Berlin, Tip Tap Flat and A Sense of Place.

Memories of Elsewhere: The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

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In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By Anna Evans:

I can picture the house where we stayed, my grandmother’s house. Painted yellow and white with steps up to the door, and a balcony above. Walking up the steps and opening the front door, the smell of wood and paint. Inside the feel of wooden floors warm and solid under my feet. The kitchen with its green painted wooden cupboards, like being in a ship’s cabin. Together around the table in the evenings eating crispbread and cheese, and boiling water in the saucepan for tea, always served in big cups with saucers, the tea light and delicate. Unwrapping the tea bags and trying not to let the paper get wet. Sitting on the wooden bench at the table, darkness falling and a lantern in the window. The feeling of being away from home, everything is cosy. I plead to be allowed to sleep in the little wooden trundle bed that is made up downstairs so that I can hang on to the feeling of being in a story; and so I become Heidi, tucked up in the little attic room, far away in the mountains. 

Sometimes unexpectedly, the feel and smell of a Swedish summer day will appear from nowhere. In this landscape, with its red-painted wooden houses, its forests and lakes, wildflowers and meadows, I spent long summers. It is a place I have never lived but that I visited frequently as a child, my mother’s hometown of Askersund, at the top of Lake Vättern. 

It is a place I associate with a feeling of space, and of openness. This feeling I have framed, from a trip back to Sweden, in the archipelago where we walked. The road ahead bridges, stretching out into the seemingly unending blue horizon. 

For me, this place will always recall the sense of time and of space I felt there, of the hours spent riding my bike and the sense of freedom it gave me; something like the allure of childhood memory and its summer skies. I think of time outside by the lake, and long summer nights. The rocks covered in moss, and adventures outside; the forests like a picture book. Arriving in Sweden, it is the rocks I look for first - those great expansive rocks which seem to be everywhere. Gathering blueberries in the forest, which tasted so fresh and alive. And the time we picked wild mushrooms and cooked them, the most delicious thing I had ever tasted. Swimming in the lake and walking to the harbour in the town to look at the boats. If you continue walking, you can cross the bridge out to the island. 

There is a peacefulness and gentleness to the forest, the suggestion that there might be places to get lost in, and places where people have never set foot; but it is not a place to feel afraid in. The feel of a world co-existing and of non-human habitation. The forest provides a refuge for all kinds of creatures, not often seen by human eyes; even quite large animals like the mysterious and majestic elks. I am entranced by the lily pads, and the tiny frogs that can be found everywhere along the ground, that are given life in the picture books we read together; for the small creatures have as much value as the larger and more powerful ones. In these books there are trolls, the kind of trolls who watch over and protect the forest and its inhabitants. To look around the landscape, it seems to make sense that they are there, in the skies, the rocks, and trees; in all the hidden places of the forest. They are caught up in my mother’s journeys to England and in the stories of her childhood growing up on the farm. Her artists eye for detail, finding magic in the everyday. 

On a trip back to Sweden, we stay in a house in the forest and it rains for a week. I am looking for summers spent by the lake, the boats and the harbour; the light which brings openness and a sense of space. Every day we drive past and see the sign enticing, as divergences often are. From the house in the forest, we turn off the road and find a hidden valley and meadowland, fresh and bright after the rainfall; wildflowers growing by the side of the road. 

The road to Skyllberg is the turning we take off the main road on the last day of our trip. Not just a location on the map, but a symbol, found somewhere between the past and present. Each recall of memory is like a draft worked over and over. Each time I want to recreate the moment when we turn the corner and find the lake hidden behind trees. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Memories of Elsewhere: The King of Rome, by David Lewis

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

Image adapted from ‘harmonie of civilizations’ by JASOVIC; licensed by CC BY-SA 3.0

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds…

By David Lewis:

The corona virus has made it impossible to travel, but in memory we can revisit places we have not seen for many years. This morning cypress trees against a blue sky reminded me of Rome, before Easter 1995.

We had a strange, confusing night high above the harsh floodlights of Santa Maria Maggiore and were delayed, directed, and redirected, until eventually we washed up at Salvatore's crumbling palazzo on Via del Clementino. A soft midday light fell down the stairwell onto the palazzo’s blood-brown walls, protected by a small Madonna and Child with a flickering electric candle. Salvatore welcomed us with a roar. 'You have the Queen in England,' he bellowed, 'but I am the King of Rome!' The palazzo was being restored. Thick plastic sheeting instead of walls, staircases without hand-rails, rubble. Our rooms had a lopped square of blue sky, three storeys of families, a courtyard of scooters and a solitary battered Fiat. Every morning I ate alone in a tall grey room, the windows open to the clatters of the street below. Billowing muslin curtains, iced croissants and coffee, but I remember no other guests.  

We had no money. Warm days carved the city into slabs of chocolate-black shade and fierce sunlight and we walked everywhere, saw broken arches, crowds, Lambrettas, tombs. The light fell from a strip of blue above the ochre streets, from the oculus of the Pantheon or from a high unseen window, showering dusty light onto angel and cherub - the huge Roman churches were cool and gloomy, as if we walked a cold marble pavement on the floor of the sea.  

Lunch was usually small tubs of olives, fish, tomatoes and rice from Piazza Nicosia near the palazzo, picnics on the dry grass of the Villa Borghese gardens, the Palatine Hill, the old street market in pre-hipster Trastevere; but I also remember lunches in the flower market of Campo de' Fiori, a table for two in the cool gloom, the long tables outside taken by the flower sellers' families.  

And the great ruins - we crept around the giant silences of the Colosseum, the shaggy remnants of the Forum, isolated fragments of towering wall. We saw gold and silver foil eggs in shop windows; sunlight on book spines and vine trellis in the Keats-Shelley House; gleams from golden icons in the Vatican, after emerging blinking from the cold graves of the Catacombs.  

Salvatore's Madonna welcomed us home as the scooter kids roared in from college. An irregular flag of sunlight played on the wall opposite, a cracked fresco of brown-red and cream plaster. As the light darkened, we finished the crumpled tubs of lunch, drank flasks of Orvieto, read Byron’s journals. Sometimes we walked the streets as the soft darkness and jagged splinters of light divided the city, as a door was opened and closed like a lantern veiled and unveiled, a Caravaggio moment when hooded spies were revealed as students turning to laugh at a shout from a passing Vespa. I remember moments – footsteps echoing on snakeskin cobbles, floodlit churches, a night in the bars around Piazza Navona.  On our last night, a Chinese meal near the Oratory of St Philip Neri, where the Saint broke out of the solemn procession of consecration to play football with local boys.  

Memory is as slippery as fishes. How many days were we there? Were we really the only guests in the palazzo? It does not matter. In memory we can revisit lost places, and strengthen our recollections of time and place. In times of quarantine, I find this a comfort.  

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David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter