Notes from a Frontier Town: Some might say, secrets interred

By J. Miller: 

Standing atop the dunes of Echoing Sands Mountain (鸣沙山). At the dunes’ base sits Crescent Moon Lake (月牙泉), where some say that at some point in history flying dragons paraded around the shadowy pond where hidden dragons lurked in the depths. That nearby, a monk translated and hid thousands of religious documents. That it was at this geographical point where Christianity and Buddhism mixed. Some might say that it is speculation. 

Off into the distance, an ancient-looking portico unburdened by a building directs its gaze northward towards Dunhuang (敦煌). Camels jockey at the portico, and off-season 4x4s await riders that never come. Snow blankets the dunes. A narrow path leads up the tallest dune. A rope ladder, a staircase that lifts travelers and tourists up the dune. These dunes composed of grains of sand appear sturdy yet transient. The traveler, a temporary pause. A footfall compresses the sand, leaves an indefinite footshape, and sand granules tumble down the dune leaving sunken lanes.

Coming here from faraway I sink into thoughts that travelers’ desires shape their experiences, that experiences can become a form of folkloric experience, and that writing about these experiences is a chance to grasp dead time, or the past.

I find myself unaware that my feet were sinking into the shifting sands. I find myself imagining others that visited here before, who let their feet sink into the sand. Shifting like the sands, the landscape is recontextualized by a traveler’s desire. Wandering throughout the buildings attached to Crescent Moon Lake – a history museum that reminds the viewer of the lake’s impermanence – is a reminder that through these shifting sands the dunes act as a natural barrier for Dunhuang.

I am grateful that I have the museum and park mostly to myself, and that I can come from faraway to visit Dunhuang, if even for a moment.

It’s imaginable that some of the sand also came from far away. That sand was carried through the thin desert air, and it is imaginable that the crescent lake is always threatened. Most of the time the threat comes from some unknowable force. For a time, I tried to let the dunes speak for themselves. Some might say Echoing Sands’ name comes from the sand that whips across the dunes. What language can they speak, where human-language does not factor into the conversation? At one point in time, Dunhuang along with three other cities were frontier garrison towns. Jiuquan (酒泉), another of the garrison towns, is neighbor to a fortress called Jiayuguan (嘉峪关), which some point out has a gate where the exiled and the travelers passed through on their way into the Gobi Desert.

Exiles that passed through this gate carved a note as ritual commemoration, an attempt to internalize the place while at the same time casting it out from memory. The Gate of Demons or the Gate of Sighs. I could not find it. Some might say that it is the gate wishing not to speak with me; that it is an attempt of the fortress to maintain its secrets from an outsider. Checking every gate and tunnel for etched farewell notes, and desiring to interpret contemporary scrawlings for ones thousands of years old [1], I reached an impasse. As one of the travelers visiting a site and trying to create their own narrative to a place, I was a traveler attempting to navigate the fortress’s physical space: the building, arrangement of rooms and entertainment theatres, the angle and height of its ramparts and bastions, and the labyrinth of its corridors reconfigured for a tourist. At the same time, this fortress contained the secrets and shadows and imprints interred in the building.

Writing down my thoughts in a coffeeshop turned barbecue lamb restaurant, a sense of disquiet pervades me. Pictures aside, this written document is the only tactile item that I intend to bring back from this trip. Even then the pictures are just digital relics on a memory card. It’s proof, like a selfie posted on social media, that at one point in time I visited this place. 

I went to a place that on the map said coffeeshop, but instead it sold different variations of the popular Chinese grain spirit (白酒, baijiu) and the owner told me to turn the corner and walk 200 meters, and when I arrived at that location, the restaurant advertised barbecued lamb and served hot water infused with white sugar and soluble coffee-powder. At some point this document will be an attempt to reclaim something, to resuscitate my immediate present with an experience already passed.

Sitting in the barbecue restaurant, the religious grottoes and fortress’ architectural designs protect their secrets in different ways. Thinking about the material and imaginary facets of places: why do certain facets take precedence over others with some aspects of a place declared irrelevant [2]? What makes my search for coffee in a once-garrison town irrelevant compared to looking for scrawlings in stone by exiles? Each place and person is a relic grasping at the tendrils of dead time. In a time of mass consumption, it is imperative to remember that through consuming articles about place, the writing is an act of commemoration. That commemoration is an act of bidding farewell. That it is a ritual practice to forget, and to welcome that place in folkloric history. 

The tourist is not content to let things lie as they should. An imposition of personal narrative always shines through, where the tourist transforms their experiences into an experience that defies any process of linear time. Each traveler reorganizes geographical space and dead time to co mingle with a sense of commemorating the past and leaving with a sense of relevant story, to share with friends, family and other loved ones.

***

J. Miller is a bicyclist and educator based in Wuhan, China. His writings can be found on A South Broadway Ghost Society (2019) and A Dozen Nothing (2019) with a broadside from Chax Press (2020). J. Miller is a lecturer at Central China Normal University, where he is constantly clipping branches from the Osmanthus trees. He is the founding editor of Osmanthus which has collective focus to publish reflexive poetry and prose chapbooks and related objects. As tea drinker and bicyclist, find him in the Osmanthus branches, or here on Twitter, @yawn_sea

Notes:

[1] Cable, Mildred. The Gobi Desert. London: Readers Union Limited, 1942. pp.13-14

[2] Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Reconfiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, et al. 19-26. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. pp.19-26. 

Zadonsk – a poem by Osip Mandelstam

Painting: A Wooded Marsh by Jacob van Ruisdael

Introduction by Alistair Noon:

Between 1934 and 1937, the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam lived in internal exile in the city of Voronezh, roughly half-way between Moscow and the Black Sea and not far from the Ukraine (the local accent shares features with Ukrainian). He was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda Mandelstam, who was to play a crucial role in the preservation and posthumous publication of his late work, including the poem translated below. He had been arrested and sentenced after he had written and read, at a private reading in Moscow, a poem that has become known as the Stalin Epigram. Not long after his internal exile ended, he was re-arrested and transported to the Soviet Far East, where he died in 1938, in a Gulag transit camp.

Constantly having to change their accommodation owing to the acute shortage of housing in Voronezh, the Mandelstams were able to spend the summer of 1936 in a small town nearby called Zadonsk, after friends including Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak had collected enough money for them to do so. The Mandelstams rented a room from a farmer on Karl Marx Street No. 10, outside of which stood a poplar. While there, Nadezhda Mandelstam returned to painting watercolours (she had studied art in Kiev), and news of the first show trials, inaugurating the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, came over the municipal loudspeakers.

Jakob van Ruisdael (c. 1629–1682) was a Dutch landscape painter.

***

“Zadonsk”

Like a vinyl-thin Gillette
that gently shaves off hibernation,
let's ruffle the memories we've kept
of that summer we lived half-Ukrainian.

Honouring Ruisdael's paintings,
you treetops whose titles are known
give dishevelled woods their saintly
name-days. One bush was a start, alone
in the amber and flesh of red loam.

That land has an upward tilt.
I was glad to see its clear layers,
be lord of the land's simplicity
I grasped in its seven chambers.

Its hills would fly to their target
far off, like loose stacks of wheat.
Across the steppe, the boulevard
laid a chain of tents in the heat.
Hotfoot to the blaze went the willow,
and the vain poplar stood up...
The stubble's camp was yellow,
the frost would steam in the rut.

And the mongrel Don, once again,
was a glittering silver, ungainly,
scooped water by the half-bowl,
then got lost – yes, that was my soul –

when the weight of evening was eased
down onto the brutal bunks,
and we heard the carousing trees
burst, like hawk-moths, from the riverbanks.

15 – 27 December 1936
Osip Mandelstam
Translated by Alistair Noon

***

Alistair Noon's translations of Osip Mandelstam, Concert at a Railway Station, appeared from Shearsman Books in 2018. His own poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. He lives in Berlin.

when the silence comes: a short film by Liang-Hsin Huang

We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to share on Elsewhere the work of Liang-Hsin Huang, an animator whose short film when the silence comes is a beautiful and poetic work about the silent moments in a relationship and the places where they are shared. A Taiwanese animator and director, Liang-Hsin Huang focuses on 2D and hand-drawn animation inspired by poetry. She says: “I love to explore how emotions can present in moving images and how they react in the spaces. when the silence comes is a film about these themes. When you are with others, there are always some awkward moments when you don’t want to say a word and the space turns silent and unreal.”

You can read more about Liang-Hsin Huang’s work via this interview with It’s Nice That, and you can explore her website and follow her on Instagram here.

The Easternmost House... an interview with Juliet Blaxland

As a companion piece to the third of our essays by Anna Iltnere about literary seaside houses – The Easternmost House – we present an interview with Juliet Blaxland...

Interview by Anna Iltnere:

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade. The house doesn’t exist anymore but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. The Easternmost House was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

I contacted Juliet Blaxland to ask her about her relationship with the sea, her view on the seaside houses and what she misses the most from The Easternmost House.

The book is a love letter to a house that no longer exists. Was it easy or hard to write it?

I found it oddly easy to write The Easternmost House because by the time the idea of a book occurred to me we had lived there for ten years or so, and I grew up in the countryside nearby, so it was very much familiar territory. It seemed sad to me after so much had happened at the Easternmost House, and so many people had known and loved the house, its immediate surroundings of the beach and the farm over the centuries, that one day soon, there would be only empty sky where the house had been, and ‘the people on the beach below will not know’.

I don’t know why it bothered me that ‘the people [of the future] on the beach below’ would not know, but it did, and that became the incentive to write, so that they would know. And now, the people on the beach below, and the people of the future, will know. That is how the book ends, with that image of the empty sky over the beach, where the house and the cliff once was.

What is your understanding of ‘sense of place’? What creates place?

‘Genius Loci’, the Roman religious concept of ‘spirit of place’, is perhaps my starting point when thinking about sense of place. A sense of place can be found in all different environments: desert, farm, city, church, country house, town house, skyscraper, mountain, forest, and so on. What seems to define the ‘place’ to me is some sense of its essential character and ‘spirit’. There is a knack to finding the spirit of a place, but I believe that this can be found in any place, and I also believe that some people seem to be more attuned to feeling that 'spirit of place more instinctively, more easily, than other people. Some don't seem to feel a ‘sense of place’ at all, and nor do they seem to need it. I think most people do feel it and need it, even if they might not be able to pin down exactly what they mean or what they need. Most of us know the feeling of being in our own ‘right place’, literally or metaphorically, and it is a great gift if we can find that place of calm in our minds, as it goes with us wherever we are. 

I am an architect, so I have often thought about the idea of a ‘sense of place’, ‘genius loci’ or ‘spirit of place’, and its uncatchable but knowable feeling still intrigues me, as it has done since I was a student and unwittingly since I was a child. The old house and farmyard where I grew up had a 'sense of place' in spades, and my mother still lives there, so it is still an ongoing preoccupation to work out what it is. 

What do you miss most about the Easternmost House?

What I miss most is the visual emptiness of living right on the edge of the cliff, so that from our windows, from our bed, the view was of the sea, the horizon, and often some 'big' weather, far beyond what we normally experience in more sheltered places or inland.

We have been lucky in that we have moved only a mile or two up the coast, and can still walk to the Easternmost House site, and see it from afar, and we still live only about 500 metres from the sea and the cliff edge, but the sea is now a big field away not 10 metres!

Are seaside houses somehow different from other houses?

To me it is the isolation and the open view that is the difference, not necessarily the sea, although the sea certainly adds a vast and different dimension to everyday living. A ‘seaside house’ in a seaside town, perhaps a holiday place crowded in summer, would to me be less appealing than a isolated cottage on a farm or similar. I don’t mind the inconvenience of living in the countryside, as I grew up with it. The sea adds enormously to the different sounds you hear, and the very different birds and animals you see on the coast, seals, oystercatchers, bitterns etc.

Two of my favourite books are The Outermost House by Henry Beston and Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, both of which describe an extraordinary life in an extraordinary house ‘on the edge’, of the land, on the edge of the norms of society and on the edge of the mass of humanity. Both of these houses were destroyed by natural forces, a storm and a fire, respectively. The Easternmost House having been destroyed by coastal erosion seems a natural companion to these two (the books and the houses themselves). 

We have visited the site where the Easternmost House used to be, and it is strange to see an empty space where so recently we lived. The trees and surrounding landscape is still there and completely recognisable. It is only us, and the house, that has gone. It some ways, it is probably a good thing, to leave a nice, clean, quiet cliff, so that the birds and other wild animals are no longer disturbed by our chatter, and our greyhound, and our just ‘being there’.

What the sea means for you?

I think we all have quite a complex and conflicted relationship with the sea. The sea is mesmerising to be near, or to swim in. It connects us to the rest of the world, and that is one of the things I like about being near the sea. I think islanders tend to be culturally less insular than land-locked peoples, as islanders are constantly look outwards not inwards, and have a history of accommodating those who have arrived or invaded by sea. I am fascinated by the sea and sea people in different parts of the world, different fishing methods and so on, and I love the more remote parts of Venice and the Venetian lagoon. On the other hand, I always feel the enormity and dangers of the sea, and at night when we listen to the BBC Shipping Forecast, your mind tends to wander, to think of ‘those in peril on the sea’ as that famous hymns puts it.

***

Read Anna’s essay on the Easternmost House here

Anna is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia and the author of our ‘Unreal estate’ series of essays on literary houses by the sea. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Here were giants...

By Fiona M Jones:

This is a mountain-range on Middle Earth. Twisted folds of rock, precipitous cliffs and narrow hidden glens. Deep caves below, where live the things that hide from the light of day. Confronted with this massif you must scale it or negotiate, at your peril, the subterranean pathways—

OK, it’s a tree stump in a cow field. It’s still epic. By its girth it must have been a giant, shrugging off the centuries, a thing that lived until it had forgotten how to die. This one’s the largest in a widely-spaced row just outside the southern boundary of the Pitfirrane golf course, along from the prisoner-of-war base. 

Somebody, at some point in the mid-to-late 1900s, must have looked at these majestic trees and decided to cut them down. Every one of them, levelled to knee-height. I wonder where the hundred-tons of wood went—how much was burned, which gates and roof-beams came from these. And when. These tree-remains have stood for decades, rotting hollow and silvering, mossing on the outside, concealing who knows what of rodents and invertebrates. 

Perhaps this row of giants would all have fallen by now anyway, succumbing one by one to wind or lightning, untidy in their dwindling. Trees should be tidy, someone must have said; and untidy trees are only worth their wood. 

But how tidy do you need a muddy field, one you can’t even walk through except after weeks without rain? Even before it was a cows’ field it was only a prison camp. Before that it would have belonged to the original Pitfirrane estate. Someone two or three centuries ago planted a row of saplings for the edge of a road or the boundary of a vista. Most land in Britain has changed its use so many times you’ll find a king in a car park or a Roman bath under a shopping centre. I don’t know what this landscape was when these trees first came here. 

Here were giants, at the edge of this boggy field churned deep with the hooves of cattle. Not much of each giant is left. Enough to house a few families of hedgehogs and mice, and a nation or two of woodlice. If you step on top of this tree stump you still stand upon the roof of a world. 

***

Fiona M Jones is a creative writer living in Scotland. Fiona is a regular contributor to Folded Word and Mum Life Stories, and an irregular contributor all over the Internet. Her published work is visible through @FiiJ20 on Facebook, Twitter and Thinkerbeat.

Memories of Elsewhere: Westcliff Parade, by Dan Carney

Photo: Marc Pether-Longman

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.

Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

Holding Homes

By Amy Doffegnies: 

Believing that there is no place like home is akin to my belief in fate; it brings me comfort, but I stop short of certainty. After almost a decade away, I thought that moving back to my native Cumbrian village of mossy dry-stone walls and black winter branches would be simple. Like the Herdwick sheep that graze the highest fells, I have long been hefted to this home. I have strayed far – making homes in Australia, Thailand and Myanmar  – but never letting go of the secret wish to return. When I arrived back I felt the glee of homing and of finally being stationary. But in past months my mind has remained in flight. It flitters far, even as my body, clambering up the deep fells, has willed it to slow, and stay. 

Some days I see only symmetry. The other days it is more difficult to write and I breathe at the surface. I am a wanderer amongst people who have their place. For people here, home is unambiguous. The snow-haired gent who, with a craned back, ambles past our house, bickering with Dad about the Labour Party and the broken northern rail service. They share the autumn fruits of the tree beside the beck, taking apples at their respective heights. Then there’s the damson-eyed boy from school. In a yellow puffer jacket, he reads Japanese manga comics on his train home, as it laces across the sands of Morecambe Bay.  

The question of whether there is still no place like home loiters around my heart. I wonder if I am the only one – was I mistaken in hurrying back for ‘home?’ Across the countertop, a young woman I went to high school with serves coffee to pay for her next flight. I met with a fellow Cumbrian in Myanmar last year, lanky and handsome, a farmer’s son and now part-time model come English teacher in Yangon; his students speak English in a thick northern accent. 

Wherever I have been, I look to poems to steady me. Alongside poems I have taken to carrying other things, fragments of collected homes, physical symbols of vast parts of me that exist, invisible. I hold on to these proofs my other homes, bicycles and blankets. I orient myself by larger, more containing things than before; I follow the phases of the moon, the very same that hung over me in other places.

Opening a freshly acquired copy of the New Cumbrian Anthology of Poems, I come to Robert Macfarlane’s question, which resonates:

“What do I know when I am in this place that I can know nowhere else?”

Nowhere else do I know being a daughter, at home, by the whip of the hearth, it’s different. Nowhere else do I know the pair of white egrets, homing in the evening to the field’s trees. Nowhere else, the grandfatherly brown buzzard patrolling or, by the level crossing, the wink of a deer; or standing in the rust strewn stream, the glint of an eel (or was it?) 

And still, there’s something other than here that I cling to, on strolls past square hedges, down green lanes. What of those things I knew of other homes? Am I to know them nowhere else? 

*

Sitting on my single bed, under a charcoal fleece and the winter half-light, I hear Pay Pay’s voice at the end of the phone, the rain hammering on his tin roof and the infrequent thud of a mango dropping. Pay Pay (‘Dad’, in Burmese) recently moved back to a small town in Myanmar’s Irrawaddy delta region, where he grew up. From the comparatively modern Thai border town of Mae Sot where we met eight years ago, Pay Pay’s home for a quarter century, it’s a shift. Our life circumstances and the places that we have returned to are worlds apart, but we both find ourselves plunged back into places that we once called home.

This gloomy afternoon, Pay Pay asks with a hint of rascal, “Thamee (daughter), what do you think about fate?” his voice emphatic, accented. My adopted (additional, essential), far-away father is an erudite and graceful rebel. Pay Pay is a former member of the Burmese Communist Party, ex-political prisoner and teacher. 

On my days off in Mae Sot, usually on Saturday mornings, I would make my way by bicycle to my Burmese teacher’s front room. His small classroom, like an open shop front, doubled as Pay Pay’s kind-eyed wife Ei Ei’s tailoring business. At the front of their home sat a line of carefully nurtured pot plants: rosella, yellow roses, a small papaya tree, and Pay Pay always standing to greet me, hands on hips. He taught me the basics of Burmese language and though I didn’t yet know the colours of the rainbow, the vocabulary list he gifted me across the desk included ‘democracy,’ ‘demonstration,’ and ‘election,’ – start with the essentials. 

Quickly, I learned that Pay Pay was a poet, a fact that sang in his speech. In that Thailand life, Pay Pay woke at dawn to teach a full load of classes. He drove an old motorbike and stayed up late at night, busy with translation work and absorbing international news. As my friends played a weekly women’s football match across from Pay Pay’s house, I’d stop by. Over tealeaf salad he told me of the letters that he and his wife wrote to each other while he was in prison, and the story of his exile to Thailand, away from the regime that had imprisoned him. In the place where Pay Pay became my family, I grew my first home away from home; home expanded and was added to. Silently, the place was taking hold and nestling deep within, made of slowly forged connections. 

Jolting me back to the moment, “Do you believe in fate, Thamee?” Pay Pay asked again. “I think so,” I say. It’s something I want to believe in, but in truth, I’m not sure.

*

A year on from this phone call, I’m back again in the Cumbria of my school days, time suspended. The pandemic struck and I bolted from the city to the shelter of space. But being back here last year, after so much time spent away, I had learned the difficulty in coming back to a place where I once belonged, having since belonged in other places, and still belonging elsewhere. A jigsaw piece grown huge from holding other homes, my heart sways here perilously between disquiet, loss, and deep love of this place. The paradox that my (former?) home can be the loneliest place is something I didn’t anticipate. 

Some days, the fields have been a tonic. The first days back I lived that phase that always comes first after returning: every corner is alight and for a time I fully draw in the air: half-sea, half-mountain. Nettles, jagged-edged stamps of spring line the verges, and bluebells shine in the woods, an uneven amphitheatre. One day, a red deer, this time in full view, an injection of bandy limbs vital after a day inside. More common, but still my favourite sight, is my Dad’s sheepdog plaining through the shallow stream, part-seal, part-collie, her black tail a thick, white-tipped whip above the water. 

The questions have not left, they swirl around stubbornly still, questions of my place and purpose, and where I fit, and where is home? I sometimes feel far, far from my other homes. I won’t give up my anchors set down in disparate spaces, spread far across continents. 

Sometimes, coals of knowing glow, in unexpected moments. Walking out on the cold sands surrounding Humphrey Head, bare feet, careful to step where it’s firm enough to tread, Dad’s lone figure is metres ahead – yes, this is home.

Sitting on my bed, again, I watch a video clip of Yangon during the pandemic, its streets are naked now, but it’s the same jungle city, masses of trees and silver skyscrapers, scattered through with golden pagodas – yes, this is home.

And appearing in my dreams, the luminous backyard wattle tree I could see from my Canberra bedroom window, a kookaburra too, on lucky days. Out the front bony bicycles slumped against our resident Terrence pine, its needles treaded into the ropey rug inside – yes, this is home.

As my chunky Aussie boots feel through the grasses of Morecambe Bay, I know, in the space that bodily movement allows, that home is everywhere I have been long enough to love. I know these waves of comfort will not stay, skimming in like sheets of water over sticky sands. For home to be amorphous is not straightforward, but it’s the only way I know. 

I used to think that fate might eventually fix me to one place. Now I don’t know a fate that will show me where to go and where is home. On good days though, I think it shines light through my way, from home to home, through bluebell lit woods, and on.

***

Amy Doffegnies is a writer and poet currently living between Cumbria and Oxford. Her work has been published in Mekong Review, New Mandala, Frontier Myanmar and Kendal Mountain Festival Review. She has a PhD focused on human rights and Buddhism in Myanmar.