Notes from April
Blossomings and new additions, losses and grand long walks.
These are indeed notes from April - but then, where are the notes from March? How could a month, and a month that was filled with the nascent glories of early spring, and adventures and books and thoughts disappear so completely? Who knows, but disappear it did. The garden filled with daffodils undocumented, my manuscript expanded unrecorded, and a rather glamorous trip up to a reception at Clarence House for the Queen’s Reading Room, will have to remain uncaptured in print and online. March evaporated, and now it is time for April.
The View from the Kitchen Window
The view from the kitchen window, and into the straggling, blissful wilderness of a garden, has changed, permanently, this April. The usual budding and blossom has come - bright pink of the crab apple, white froth of a plums, dappled tutu colours of the apple tree. I have been decapitating the faded daffodils at a pace, and their yellow and white has been eclipsed by the vividness of bluebells; which were a little shy at first, but as April closed became bolder and brighter. In the vegetable patch, my onions and garlic are once again going into battle with the ground elder. They won last year, and I have hope again for this summer.
The 14th April marked, unbelievably to me at least, five years since I started work at Jane Austen’s House. My clever, brilliant and thoughtful husband has made me the most beautiful, comfortable bench to celebrate. “Bench” doesn’t really do it justice - it is a fairy throne, made from great slabs of ancient oak, and set amongst the flowers and under the trees.
There is, next to the bench, now a great slab of ash, cut from a tree we lost to ash die-back the first summer we were here. Now, it marks the spot where we buried our darling, shouty, determined cat Purdy, who died suddenly and unexpectedly at the grand age of 18, in the early hours of 23rd April. We dug her grave in the dark and the rain, and now she is a part of the chalk and the flint, the grass and the wildflowers. The house is now oddly quite and the garden will miss the little black and white creature that so enjoyed grazing on its long grass. For a cat that so enjoyed resting her head and scratching her chin on piles of books, it is perhaps fitting that she shared her birthday with George Bernard Shaw, and died on the same day as both Shakespeare and William Wordsworth; a truly literary cat.
So there are new nuances to the view from the kitchen window now, and an extra layer to our special place.
Beyond the horizon
April started joyously, gloriously, with a trip to Paris for a wonderful Colloque Jane Austen at Paris Nanterre University and the Biblioteque National de France. April in Paris really does deserve the songs written about it - bright blue skies with the sharp lines of cream-grey buildings vivid against it. Miles of streets, all filled with micro and macro works of art. We stayed in the 13th Arrondissement just below the Place d’Italie, and on the same street as the vast an imposing Gobelins tapestry factory.
The first day, we set out from the hotel, fueled by almond croissants and pains au raison, and then walked and walked and walked. As the miles increased, we passed Shakespeare & Co, Notre Dame, the Arc du Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower - all the stars. The Louvre was shuttered and locked down for filming, but we still stood in its massive courtyard and stared up, and pondered how old, how considered, how magnificent. The Musee Rodin was a palace to sculpture, intricately and carefully considered. For some reason, I hadn’t really thought of Rodin as an ‘artist’ before, not in the modern sense of playing with concepts and ideas, but the museum bought this side of his work to life. Also - the inspiring and show-stealing work of his mistress, Camille Claudel, so unfairly silenced and sidelines.
The Musee Maison Victor Hugo too, an apartment tucked high up in the corner of the imposing Place des Vosges. His home in Guernsey is the first writers’ house I remember visiting as a very small child, and the Paris apartment, filled as it was with art and memories and clever interpretation was no less memorable.
I loved Paris on this trip. A full list of the things I loved would read just as a list of cliches, but I also remember the days as a series of mental snapshots: someone zooming past on a scooter with the bib of their dungarees filled with baguettes; a crow, balancing on a plank of wood in the Tuilleries garden, ducking a drink from a stilled fountain. Armed police at train stations, the tent village along the canal that lead to the Place de la Bastile. Eyes staring out from portraits in the Musee d’Orsay. A city too, full, so it seemed to me, of bustling, bold, older women, all with their little dogs, navigating the streets, entirely and completely themselves. When I am old, you will find me in Paris, followed from bar to boloungerie by daft little dog and all the confidence of a lifetime.
On the Page
There is absolutely nothing to report here. I can’t claim something as grand as writer’s block, rather utter inertia. Perhaps I wrote myself out at Gladstones over the three days I was there in March, those thousands of words not just pouring out, but also draining me. Now, I have just over 2000 words to hit my self-imposed word count, and perhaps May might be the month that they arrive.
Off the Shelf
Joy of joys, I have been reading again. Ulysses, obviously, weekly, in cafes, in bed, on my new bench amongst the bluebells, and I am now nearly halfway through.
I devoured and loved Why Women Grow by Alice Vincent, a masterful document of the connection between women and growth, between nurture and land and space and soil. It was a book that felt impossible to read without a lump in the throat or a threat of the overwhelm of connection and recognition. Read it. And then go plant things.
The magical Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner was another charming companion for early spring, and something I will read again and again. As I write, I remind myself that I haven’t reread Elizabeth Arnim’s beautiful Enchanted April this year, and wonder if it is now too late.
On long journeys and on nights stargazing, we have been listening to Stephen Fry’s retelling of the Greek myths on audio book. This month I finally finished Bettany Hughes’ biography of Socrates The Hemlock Cup. A lesson for the writer as well as the reader, it was an interesting read as I make my own attempts at biography.
I close the month with two books on the go; Jan Morris’s poetic Venice, which is making me want to board a plane a fly back (perhaps when I am old, I shall have a daft little dog and wander the streets of Venice, instead of Paris), and Jonathon Bate’s excellent biography of William Wordsworth.
What’s next?
May brings festivals at Jane Austen’s House, talks, cow parsley in the garden, and hopefully three sisters in the veg patch. Maybe even those elusive 2000 words.
So sorry to read about your loss. :(
But yeah for your other activities!