the struggle to admit who you were
by uzwi
A quiet morning. I imagine I can almost smell the river. In the garden is a rose so old its best use is to prop up the exhausted, driftwood-coloured trunk of an even older lavender bush. Should I let the ivy grow up both? I like gardens though I don’t know anything about them. This one is dilapidated enough to absorb any effort. New things are naturalised quite quickly. In the beds & borders, bluebells, aqualegia, wild stawberry runners, monbretia, packed & dense around leggy rosebushes. Light falls in at a steep angle between the houses to be fixed by the new leaves of the roses, which show in curiously transparent autumn colours. Each border is edged with two courses of old & tumbled brick, overgrown with herb robert & dandelions. At the sunny end there’s a worn-down lapboard shed, white, windows fallen out. A vine over everything. I think about this when I should probably be reviewing a book. A car passes. A few aimless notes issue from the open window of the upstairs flat, then two chords repeated in an unsteady, clumping rhythm: one of Fiona’s pupils, trying to find her way around the keyboard. In the late 80s I was going to write an HE Bates-ish, VS Pritchett-ish story set in a middle class garden: Elizabeth (60-ish, calm, already in a kind of mild confusion about her life, resilient if a little put upon by her Thatcherite children) would discover exotic species invading a space originally based on the South Cottage garden at Sissinghurst. Global warming, you see. By the end of the story she would have quite taken to them. I didn’t write it because if you cross HE Bates with global warming & the welcoming of bizarre change, all you get is JG Ballard. (Now it’s too late. I’m 60-ish myself & I can see a parakeet here any time.) In my life gardens have always belonged to someone else. I am beginning to be less envious of this, instead just enjoy the spalled and bowed wall, the perfectly broken plant pots in sunlight. Then, between the warm eroded terracotta tiles under the garden bench, a yellow flower with each tiny leaf made up of three blunt heart shapes arranged to form a hexagon. I have no idea what it is; both leaves and flowers have a distressed look, Italianate, as if they were rag-rolled in Fulham in the early 1990s. The cat stops licking its paw & looks up in a brief acknowledgement of some bird’s moving shadow. When I was younger I thought writing should be the struggle with what you are. Now I think it’s the struggle to admit who you were. But I would invent a better past for myself now if I knew exactly how to assemble elements like these, especially without letting myself in to spoil them.
–reblogged from April 29, 2007. All these selections are from the short-lived Uncle Zip’s Window, which ran 2006/2008.
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