Adelaide Road

Here's another piece of writing from the Workshop:

Adelaide Road 1, January 17th 2011, Local History Archive
Houdini first came to mind – wanting contact with his mother, never giving up hope that one day he'd find it. Oh listen, Aoife says a fictional character. Why him I ask then, today is the 9th anniversary of my mother's death. And also escape from the difficulties of a situation I'm in is always on my mind.


So then K in The Trial, or is it The Castle? And for the same reason but more specifically those authorities seem like those in Kafka's K's scenario and I had seen the leases for sale on Adelaide Road and this is closely allied to my situation – and Ray got it in a trice.

All the worlds a stage on Adelaide Road and this will develop over time into something else.

All in all the spirit
None other than reality itself
The call of the wild
The call of the atom
Cellular sonar
Screeching aliveness
So real this spirit
That nothing is not pervaded by it
Nothing is it, it is no thing,
No, no thing at all

He will ride off the edge of the flat earth in front of him
The man in the pony and trap (in Robert Bevan's painting
Of Adelaide Road in the sunlight.)

An explosion in his brain with whatever thoughts passed through it
A haemorrhage, an aneurism
That the tensions of all relational concurrence
Expounded in his right brain

At the reins of the horse
He fell forward
But Neddy continued
Clip clop clip clop
Down the sandy street.

He shines and shimmers
With triangles changing to squares, to circles, tetrahedrons and on and on
Like Picasso set in motion
Geometrics superimposing themselves
On the blatant primary colour


And then translucence blurring every edge.
Every orifice, every eye and pore dissolved.

Greens of every shade
Brown to shout the earth transcended
Hard to clothe the spirit
So it's seen and still perceived
Dull, dull darkness will hide
And brilliant light that's all he is

Breathe materiality into all he was
And is no more.

Bouncing through space
Each movement easing dissemblance
Each stillness a drawing back together of
The turn of the century male
An out breath sends edge sight into space
An in breath drawing back together
The heavy set
Green clothed appearance
The black hat
The scratching voice.

The touch is warm
So warm, so grateful to be part of life
So glad to be seen, acknowledged
Warm like the blood warmth that is not there
But here.
Here in hairs he touches
The body still born
Consciousness taking form
This touch is here, is now, is today, is
Love, says love it echoes

This breath, light alcohol, light tobacco, light earth, earth light
Tea and cake, sausage and potato.
It reminds you don't it, of
Every day
Of fifty and a hundred years gone by
Smell is taste
Relation point in situe
Here, was there, is here again.

Scratching sound like claws on
Paper
But all-important it passes
Through the ether
From a million years or the sound miles away.
The body lived and loved
And lonely died with
Searing pain
But all in a moment
Over, and all a dream it was
All a dream
No more than this.


The daughter of the man who died, the man driving the pony and trap, she tells the story of what occurred in Adelaide Road in one of the houses that is to be auctioned.

She tells the tale from an inn on Adelaide Road. She is perhaps the small figure sitting beside her father who is driving the horse along. They are related in appearance to the man and woman in L'absinthe, though this occurs later in 1913, on July 13th.

She is telling the story because she has been sought out by someone interested in buying one of the houses to be auctioned. She has a connection with these houses and so did her father.

“Marianne Jacobson lived at 140 and we lived at 142, my father, mother and I. My father found her dead on May 1st 1905. She'd been strangled. A lovely woman she was Marianne, always fond of me. Had the whole house there and tried for years to keep the house in good nick after her parents died.
We lived in 142. My father and mother did for Mr. and Mrs Arlington. Mr Arlington asks my father to call round on Miss Jacobson to take her up to the Royal Free and my father worried she'd be late and went in after rapping the door a good long time.
He found her there on the kitchen floor, marks around her neck and an 'orrified look on her face. And cold as the ocean, he said. Well, it near enough broke his heart there and then, a lass like 'er, alone and so forlorn, never was the same after that, he was. Neither rhyme nor reason could be found but my dad was never the same again.
He had an aneurism they called it, in the July – never recovered. But he'd rarely smiled after finding Miss Jacobson, exploded 'is mind it did. We lost 'im same as we lost 'er. Might as well 'ave tied his neck round too. Ma didn't last long after 'ed gone. Whoever got in there, and they never found nobody for it, well he took a lot of life away that day, more 'n poor Marianne.
I've never the left the road but I'd like to. I'd like to get right out of 'ere. An' I will one day. I will, one day.”

By Lynn Marie Harper

WRITING BY LAURA BURNS

Mapping tiny cubes of life
Colour co-ordinated stories behind
Pretty little pockets of destruction.

A flying bomb hits Broadhurst Gardens the worst. Blast damage to the Adelaide Ward, minor in nature… Total destruction of one residency on Adelaide Road, although no bombs were mapped in that area…

I was expecting it, as you must surely know by now. The teacups out, the china we brought back from Lisbon laid out on plaid tablecloth duck egg blue in the room at the back reminds me of the house in Devon before Clive went away.

Flesh-warm skin doused in rose water wrinkles.
Not arson they said
but inexplicable none the less.
The empty shell offering nothing up
from the rubble.
No hint of the savagery that had passed,
only the shelf of china and crockery left unscathed -
dangling as if clinging onto ash and dust
clicking together and chiming in the echoing hollow of the house.

When she came round to peer inquisitively through the decades of her own life, she thought I was a neighbour. Well, I did appear unexpected, mind. Only of course she recognised me in the deep wells of her being, for I had always been there, walking, alive where I am.

Deep crevices of scrawling cursory lined the gouged-out stories of her face. Plump and young and fresh yet too many tales for even a sailor’s crew on a stormy thick night. Something piercing in the way she looks around, uncannily surveying the long awaited end - completely detached - as though her children never grew up here, and her grandchildren never chased the stairs all the way up to the cupboard attic. No sign of her presence, except of course – her –
And the clickety clack of the
plates and saucers
all the way from Lisbon
rocking precarious in the draughty dusty abyss.

She turned with a start,
A young woman, curious and confused.
They contacted her themselves.
Next of kin, they said.
But her grandmother had died years ago.
She never even lived at this address.
They thought it was the shock of the last weeks’ events
causing this disruption in her thinking,
her laying out of the details,
her ordering of trauma.

Yet walking over the crumbling threshold
She knew this was where she was.
Whole and alive,
Whispering to the unknown in a tone she’d heard forever.

I spoke to her of course, she being so familiar to me.
I remember feeling like that, looking like that, and of course she remembers being like me. We all remember being old, however young we start out. The older wiser self has seen the event the happening the occurrences of our lives over and over again. We would write it all down at birth were we given half a chance, indulged the beauty of being instead of letting ourselves be convinced we have everything to find and all to lose. She knew, of course, who I was. I felt it in her eyes, and the way she listened to me and wrote the stories down, one by one, across the burnt fading walls of the house.

Scratching out letters
streaming words dictated from the resounding skin and bones of 39 Adelaide Road.
She wasn’t aware of listening,
yet every time the next word came she felt it rising up
from a deep rooted cradle of her stomach.
Maybe these were stories her mother had told her
in the duck-egg nursery room in Devon?
She didn’t think so. They came out so fluent, so full and whole.
The light fading around her until she had to follow her left hand over the shapes she had made, feeling the rough edges of letters in the burnt grit of the broken home.
Writing and writing into the night
She didn’t notice the elderly woman at first,
Standing in the doorway,
Coming in from the garden with a bunch of roses clutched in her hand
so that the thorns pinched her skin and drew tiny jewels of red out of her wrinkled hands.

Writing and writing telling down the tales etched on a face she caught a glimpse of behind the dimming thin air.
She wrote large round letters in child-like hand, spilling out onto the floor and edging her feet further from the crunched doorframe. She wrote into the hallway, tiny neurotic script that she had to carve out with a broken piece of shrapnel, onto the old mahogany stairwell, anxiously frantically digging away at her past and future and now.

All the while I waited for her, knowing she would keep writing until the wrinkles flowed out of me, dripping onto the floor; until my face filled out, moulding into the plump edges of forgotten skin; until she drew out the stories, one by one, loud, soft, rambling, abrupt; until she let my raspy voice smooth over her hand, guiding her across every tumbling rubble of the house; until the voice was only a hoarse croaking whisper, scrambling through the skeleton of the brick and mortar, scuttling past and out of grip; until I stood there in the doorway waiting for the young woman to finish, gasping for breath, hand limp at her side, bruised by the strength that had lasted for three whole days and taken every story out of her future and her past; until she crumbled her shoulders into her core, the life from her sucked out written from face to place; until, desperate, she turned around following for once the raspy breath, the elderly skin etched with her own stories, until she turned around and was left gazing into herself.

by Laura Burns

WRITING BY BARBARA SAUNDERS

The Forest of Arden

Before you flog off Arden, think yourself a snail,
sell your own shell, do with it what you will,
this sale of the century is underhand.
You say we’ll be free to roam the land,
as if you know what grows or is destroyed.
Don’t privatise the primrose path,
wrapped in birch and oak,
a cloak bespoke for us, the common folk
for dalliance in dappled shade.
Your power is as transient as flowers.
If good means value,
if Flora’s just a brand,
Arcadia a catalogue,
if the highest bidder bars us from Arden
and the Greenwood tree,
what use is your philosophy
far away from the stars, the sky and the sea?

By Barbara Saunders

Great to see the results of that engrossed exercise in print - it rings a different bell than the voice - complementary and filled out. If a visitor from another planet reads our Adelaide Road musings they'll get quite an idea of a murderous time and place, and maybe we'll be unearthing more of it as it goes on.

I saw the half heart of Ruth's foundling child before I read it having visited there only a few days ago and the card has sat on a notice board from months before. And those rough grained hands.....

Some really interesting work. Great to have it drawn back and in. Amazed to see my own therein and thanks for that!

There is resonance here of Aoife's opening words in the Kentish Town workshop last week, in these murdered people and passing spirits too, 'Dramatic Proof that we are everywhere...'

Writing from Ann Barefoot

CAMDEN WOMEN AGAINST CRUSE. ADELAIDE RD.
WINTER 1982

The railing is a common park one, not as high as Greenham Common ones, yet adorned with the same sort of everyday things:- a bra, a cloth book, a doll, a toy gun, a mug and a washing up brush. A big poster with a women’s CND symbol declares 'Women against Cruse'. A small number of women and small children are on the pavement - a little black child in a buggy taking up the right third of the picture, a toddler and three or four women taking up the other two thirds. One of the woman is sitting on the pavement doing something on a piece of cloth or paper - possibly lighting a candle. The child at her left shoulder is smartly dressed, wearing corduroy trousers, a patterned jumper and a jerkin. The other women are quite substantially dressed with jackets, scarves and woolen hats. No one is wearing gloves so it can't be all that cold. It is quite dark however.

Fictional character
The second gravedigger in Hamlet

If picture haunted what kind of ghost?
There is a collection of coffins each with a child or grown woman in it and one object. The coffins are all black and lined with dark green, red, purple or black satin and the object lies in different positions in them.

The woman in the centre with the mug at her elbow died from cancer at old age.

Her face was purple with dark red wrinkles and green ears yet a curiously peaceful countenance. A wry smile, albeit with scarlet lips was on her face and her eyes were as if a flashlight had lit them - round guinea pig eyes.

She was wearing a very smart set of pyjamas - striped alternatively dark blue and light blue and made of brushed cotton; smelling very clean. She had no rings or other jewellery but did have a small Timex watch.

She moved a little jerkily at first, hands firmly on the coffin side, then froze for a short time. Halfway out of the coffin she moved jerkily again as she lifted first one knee then the other upwards and moved her feet out of the coffin onto the pavement.

The touch felt warm and sweaty - I was expecting it to be cold and clammy. It felt like a hand wanting to be clasped by another hand, to be put in another hand - for comfort. It was a child's hand.

Their breath smelt of toothpaste - I couldn't distinguish which brand. ....mouthwash?....onions?

"I'll guide you down the road" she said. "I went to school here, I did my shopping here, I learnt to ride a scooter on this street. I don't know every pothole but I know its length and time needed to walk here. You could do worse than have me help."

The narrator is a tourist, someone who wasn't born in London.....sitting on the back of the 210 bus....
... at 3.0 on March 18th 2011 ...