Bee
lilyjones
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BEFORE WE LEAVE: A STORY OF MOVING HOME
Non-fiction, nearing completionsomeone will remember us
I say
even in another time—Sappho, Fragment 147PrefaceSome mornings, kneeling with a trowel in the front garden, I come across a sherd of blue and white in the soil. A fragment of a teacup, a plate. I brush it clean with my thumb and put it in the birdbath with the others, where rainwater collects in a shallow pool, and go back to uprooting rye grass. When contractors demolished the derelict farmhouse next door the year before, making way for sixteen new houses, the south-westerly blew the grass seed into the garden. Now it’s rooted in dense fibrous mats below the surface, and if I don’t get most of it out now, it will out-compete the meadow foxtail and the cocksfoot, the columbines, red campion, ox-eye daisies, sorrel, salad burnet and clover. All the species that turn a small patch of our little front garden into a meadow in miniature, around the time of our son’s twenty-eighth birthday come midsummer.For thirty years, I’ve unearthed china from this garden – broken crockery discarded, perhaps, by Williamson, his granddaughter Jane, or later by his daughter-in-law, who sold sweets from the cottage in the 1920s. But the building has older roots still. Our living room was once a cowshed, its shippon gutter running diagonally out into the lonning. Though born nearby in 1923, our neighbour’s father, Mr. Stephenson, later moved to the village and remained until his death in 2013. It was within his long memory that the cottage lost its low profile; he told me he remembered it being raised to two storeys. So today, my husband, son, and I live in a two-up, two-down. We’re on the corner of a crossroads in a village with a far-reaching view over the Solway Firth to, as the crow flies, Southerness Point in Scotland. Centuries of people have trodden over our living room and little front garden. Whoever drank from the teacup or ate from the plate is part of a long line of people whose names I’ve been collecting for years, arranging them in a series of notebooks that have now become a digital archive of the village.I wonder if someone will continue the archive? M and I have been talking about putting the cottage up for sale and moving back to the south-west. Somewhere coastal. An adventure in retirement. There was this holiday romance with Cornwall two years ago we can’t brush off.I want to tell you about my first holiday romance, years ago.In Vitré, a walled Breton town, I was on a reciprocal school exchange visit. We attended school on Saturday mornings and enjoyed afternoons to ourselves until our host families came for us. One Saturday, I explored the cemetery for a second time. I could read French well enough for the inscriptions, but that afternoon I was more interested in what looked to me like forgotten graves. I’d already mapped a section of the graveyard in my rough book, and sketched the wildflowers around the graves, and the period costumes I imagined the people buried might’ve worn.My teacher thinks I have a morbid curiosity, I’d told my hosts when I showed them my drawings. But no! they replied. You are an artist and a romantic. It was true that I was madly in love with my friend Sylvie’s cousin, Phillipe. We’d already been on a date to the cinema to see Va Voir Maman, Papa Travaille.I left the graveyard that afternoon and bought henna powder at the pharmacy, knowing Phillipe would visit Sylvie and her family that evening. But when I heard Phillipe roll into the farmyard on his Mobylette, earlier than I’d expected, I ran from the kitchen, hair dripping with green gunk, through a glass door. I needed twenty-odd stitches in my forearm, just below the elbow, and there’s a lump still, the size of a grape. I’ve this clear memory of Phillipe leaning against the kitchen wall, arms crossed, shaking his head slowly and grinning while everyone around was flapping about what to do, green gunk and blood everywhere. So on these fine April days when I’m not in the garden, you might find me in St Mary’s churchyard because I’m still mapping graveyards, still that impulse to tend forgotten graves. Just sometimes, I wonder what Phillipe is up to these days.The stories in this book, threaded through a memoir of what it takes to know a place before we leave, come from gravestones, parish registers, and a few lines in medieval charters. Other stories come from Dorset, beloved home for much of my childhood, and from a curiosity about the house at the edge of the meadow where we camp each summer.The builders have almost completed the sixteen new houses next to our cottage. I doubt we’ll have moved before the first new resident puts a plate on a shelf. I can’t help but think that the new residents might wonder what was there before. Before we leave, I wanted to honour the village and the lives of the people who shaped it, a way of saying thank you. That’s why I made an archive and how this book came into being.Villages change, grow, decay, and some become gentrified. I am a romantic who favours an old cottage over a new build. But I’ve not written this book to romanticise the past. Farming and mining here, as across the English countryside, meant poverty, exploitation, enclosure and lasting damage to the land. Somewhere under the new driveways next door there’s a sherd of someone’s plate, a name half-remembered in a parish register. This village was shaped mostly by lives that no one wrote down. Your village will be too.Sappho. 2002. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Translated by Anne Carson. New York: Knopf.
Grave
Comic graphic novel, in developmentOlivia moves to the village of Grave and begins researching its forgotten dead, unaware that they’re alive, well, and meet once a month on Saturdays.Chapter OneFour Regency terraced houses opposite the church of St Lazarus, golden limestone with tall sash windows.All was quiet at number one, a second home, save for the songbirds in the long back garden that backed onto the mews where the manor’s horses had once been stabled. At number two, Huw arranged a blousy mass of flowers in a studio pottery jug on his table, and at number three Pearl’s knitting needles click-clacked as she half-listened to her brother muttering about losing his fountain pen.At number four, Olivia sat on the bottom stair pulling on a pair of shoes. The hallway was high, narrow and pale, with a plaster cornice and stone flags worn smooth running back to the kitchen. Two boxes still stood beside the stairs, one unopened, with a lamp, a stack of post and a bowl of keys on it. Olivia got up from the stair with a little difficulty and took a set of keys from the bowl. A Border Collie watched her every move, whining softly as she made for the front door.
“Sorry, Fog. Won’t be long.”At number three, Victor leant into the window, watching Olivia pull away.
“I doubt she’s gone far,” he said.
Pearl opened the door into the hallway, jangling a bunch of keys in her hand, and looked back around the front room as a matron might scan a dormitory.
“I won’t be long,” she replied.Victor remained at the window. He was tall and gaunt; he had to bend his head in the passenger seat of the hatchback his sister had now swung into the space outside their house.Grave was a village, still. The city had never managed to eat up what lay east of the River Gift. One walked over Old Cowgrove Bridge and life slowed as the land rose, the Jane Canal climbing the slope lock by lock, the Gift turning away below.
Bee Lilyjones is a writer, naturalist and community archivist. Her work moves between non-fiction, fiction and local history, with a particular interest in place writing, memory and overlooked lives.