elisabeth_brooke@hotmail.com

farewell to Sally

I had been waiting for the inevitable. And yesterday it began, the sound of feet clumping up and down the stairs, laughing they carried sacks and threw them crashing into the back of the van. A life - a life in sacks. She died as she lived, marginalised, neglected, isolated. The cancer she refused to treat spread across her whole body and doubtless she was in a great deal of pain as her life ended. Cowardly, I did not visit her in her final weeks - but then nor was I invited to- I wanted to remember the vibrant, nutty Sally. She's been my neighbour for nearly twenty years, the batty lady upstairs who'd return home with 'objects trouvees' : flowers discarded by a Mayfair florist, odd and 'unsual' pieces of wood, and occasionally tables, chairs, picture frames, the detritius of the affluent. These OT's would then be added to 'mount stufu'   pile which, when I first met her had been a small pile in the centre of her living room and became, by the end of her life, the four foot high mound filling the whole room and spreading like lava into the hallway and the kitchen, turning the corner and filling up the passage and trickling into the bedroom. It became impossible to sit down in the living room and then stand in the hallway until finally the only place to carry on any conversation at all was to stand very still behind the front door and make no sudden movements. Being a bit of a closet neat freak I was desperate to clear mount stufu  offered to-but there was always a reason, quoted volubly and a great length why it could not be done. I tried once, picking up the flotsum at the edges and saw how anxious Sally became, I stopped. It was not just stuff - she needed the bulk and clutter as a kind of buffer against the world. Her hoarding of random objects, eccentric behaviour and, as it transpired, wilful self neglect developed from mild, lifelong eccentricity.
She was a woman of wide and varied interests. Growing up in a patrician Philadelphia family, by all accounts she ran a bit wild on the early death of her mother, ended up in Art school and rubbed shoulders with Rothko and other edgy artists. Divorcing her husband, she became an artist's model and she moved to London in 1968 to see Fonteyn dance and tracked the ballet to Varna and beyond. An enthusiast for Kibuki she followed a troupe touring in England and was adopted as a mascot. Lifelong devotee of opera and ballet she had encyclopediac knowledge of both or so it appeared to an outsider. Her forebears escaped the pogrums of Eastern Europe and she read obscure and detailed histories of Russia and Eastern Europe and could quote facts about the Polish death camps or the Stalin's famines. Conversations with Sally often begun with, 'I am very worried about the Chinese water table', followed by a long discourse or printing methods or hydroelectric dams or natural medicine. A passionate bibilophile one of her diversions was selling second hand books for the old Commies of Russel Square, where well meaning relics from the glory days of the Soviets, a sprinkling of East German spies and various trades union activists rubbed shoulders, inevitably returning home with armfulls of the more obscure histories of WW2 to add to the three deep, wall lined bookshelves. We went to the Socilaist film co op together, enjoying such delights as Bunel's les Hurdes and talks but old soldiers from the International Brigades. A passionate sauna user, she introduced me to the steamy claustrophobic delights of damp steam. Through these lengthy sweats, any personal enquiry was ignored and replaced with diatribes which eventually became rants as her grip on reality unravelled - like the balls of wool stacked high in her flat, together with birds to hang on the christmas tree, ribbons of every conceivable colour which she used to tie the bouquets she threw onto ballet and opera stages; paint brushes, bubblewrap, kimonos, baskets, empty cardboard boxes, piles of free newspapers and beautiful crystal champagne glasses, for she was after all a lady and had many exquistite objects.

When my daughter went to Summerhill, she was delighted, she had read all of Neal's books and was so excited when 'princess longlegs' came back at weekends. A helpful if slightly dangerous babysitter, once setting fire to some rice cakes the two of them decided to put under the grill.
Endlessly obliging, I have piles of small notes she posted through my letter box with all the lastest news: special offers on essential oils, books I was looking for, interesting radio programmes, tit-bits on the comings and goings of the residents: she was a bush telegraph for Great Titchfield Street, a Fitzrovia farandula.
Always eccentric, in the last five years the rambing got worse. Caught by her, I felt less like a rabbit frozen in the headlights than a butterfly pinned to a board. For my own sanity I had to crawl out under the tsunami of words - an hour was all I could take.
Then a series of disasters knocked her back. First, the gas board changed her gas meter and demanded a huge back payment which she fought over the course of two years. Eventually sorted, Sally never used her heating again, she had learned to live with the cold and now suffered the freezing winters stoically. Next, her handbag was stolen, together with her door keys at the Commie book sale. Breaking down her door after an eight hour wait saw her crouched on the floor wailing in despair.  Around this time I found out by persistent questioning that she had been living on a fixed income which had now run out. She joked about living in shop doorways, but her passivity terrified me. Homelessness, bagladydom are terrifying to me.  Only at the eleventh hour was she persuaded to ask for help. I was impressed, given she was a US citizen, had no passport and no right to remain and had only paid one week of income tax in her forty year residence, she was gathered up in the wide arms of the Welfare State.
Sadly, not even this this good news could shift her doom mongering, she was a fount of misery statistics, anectodotes and warning stories on any topic.  But always good for a laugh, well meaning and open minded  she pounded the streets of Fitzrovia, trailing her voluminous hand knitted bottle green shawls her flip flops slapping unforgiving pavements chatting with anyone who had the time of day. Impish and curious to the end, she sat on the chair lift lifting her into the ambulance grinning with delight as though she were going to her first day at school not an appointment with the grim reaper.

As the bags drag and clatter down the staircase a thick dust of book mites, dust bunnies, broken pens and drawing pins cover every surface - her life is discarded in the same messy, untramelled way she lived. Hail and farewell another London eccentric - goodbye Sally and God speed.

Green and Golden Days

To the park this morning, an unexpected autumnal heat wave. The misty morning sun shining on bedraggled dahlias, roses in the rose garden blooming for the third time this year, still massed ranks of pink, cerise, blood red and cream blossoms. The two bearded men who have made the rose garden home these past three years were sitting companiably under the arbour eating an early morning breakfast. Their beards are waist length now and their faces tanned and leathery. Whenever I see them I wonder what their story is, how come they ended up in the rose garden, but I feel shy, it's like walking into someone's house uninvited, sitting on the sofa and demanding conversation. They're not the only people who live in the rose garden. A young black woman, too young to be in such dire straits, also sits on a bench there sometimes, reading one of the free newspapers and avoiding all eye contact. I guess the gardeners must know they've made the rose garden their home, and leave them alone, but I wonder what it's like, in the long watches of the night listening to the foxes and owls and sirens of inner London. Not to mention the drunks, the hustlers and any number of lovers. During one summer, there was a woman pushing a big luggage trolley from Euston piled high with her suitcases, but she's moved on, I haven't seen her for years.
The men had moved from their usual bench on the left of the circular rose beds  and moved to the right side. Was this their winter quarters? In the warm morning sun one of the men had spread out  a blanket and lay face up to the sunshine drinking in the warm rays.
Perhaps it is they who pity us, as we hurry through the arbours jogging, power walking moving on to the next thing, while they bask in the perfume of sublime roses on a sunny autumn morning.

columbus day

Each year on the 12th of October, I feel a little sad. Columbus Day is a big event in some parts of the world, presumably Columbus Ohio is a major one.But for me it is a day of sadness. Having worked and researched for over ten years on Quisqueya - saving paradise, I feel I know what those exhausted and terrified sailors encountered. The Taino, the happy people, thronged onto the beaches of their paradisacal homeland offering fresh water, fruits unknown to the European palate and barbacued fish.
But his own words say it better

Friday October 12^th 1492

At dawn, we reached a small island, which we later discovered was called Guanahani. I went ashore in the launch with Martin Alonzo Pinzon, Captain of the Pinta and Vincent Yanes Pinzon, Captain of the Nina. I brought out the Royal standard and the captains each had a flag.

 In the presence of all, I took possession of the island for the King and Queen. I had set up a large, wooden cross as a token of Jesus Christ our Lord and I called on Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, comptroller of the whole fleet, as witness, I named the island San Salvador. Declarations were written in my presence.

We saw great trees, streams of water and fruit of many varieties. The people gathered to watch me declaim, naked as their mothers bore them, they are a well built people with handsome bodies and fine faces, but their appearance is marred by their very broad heads and foreheads.

In order that they might be friendly to us and would be better converted to our Holy Faith by love rather than by force, I gave them red caps and glass beads and other things of small value which they delighted in, laughing and showing them around.

Later, they came swimming to the ship in dugouts made from the trunk of one tree, like a longboat all of one piece and so big, forty or forty five men could fit into it. They rowed with a paddle like that of a baker and went fast. If they turned over, they jumped in the water and righted it, bailing them out with calabashes. They brought many green parrots and great balls of spun cotton thread, spears and other goods which they traded for glass beads and small bells or hawks bells, such as jesters use. It seemed they were a people very poor in everything.

All whom I saw were young, not above thirty years, their hair was short and coarse like a horse’s tail, they wore it long, combed towards the forehead, except for a few locks behind which were never cut. Some were painted black, others white, others red and other colours. Some painted the face, others the whole body, others only around the eye and others around the nose. Their skin colour was neither black nor white. Some of them had wounds on their bodies and by signs I asked them what these were and they gestured saying people from nearby islands came and would try to kidnap them and they had to fight them off.

They had no weapons. They did not know iron for when one grasped a sword he cut himself. Their spears were made without iron; some had a fish tooth in the end or a sharpened shell. It appeared the people were ingenious and would make good servants and would readily be converted, for they seemed to have no religion.

I laboured to find out if there was any gold. One man had a piece hung in a hole they have in their noses – they gestured there was gold to the south, that a King there had a great deal.

Within around 80 years they were all dead.

Went to the British Library this week for the first time for months. Always love to see that great red brick building. Once, at a book signing a Chinese woman said the building was remarkably Chinese and I think of her whenever I walk across the great forecourt and feel incredibly grateful to have a fantastic rescource on my doorstep. The inside is buzzing with students and researchers on laptops and family groups and school outings. A fantanstic atmosphere of enquiry and energy. I always feel proud that this great institution has adapted to new learning methods, it was the first wi fi I came across when they introduced it several years ago.
Into rare books and music, my favourite reading room with the air of a cathedral, high, wide ceilings, natural light and the gentle footsteps of readers - as we users are called.
If bankers come from the seventh level of hell, then surely librarians come from a heavenly realm. I can honestly say, hand on heart, say I have never met a nasty one, having visited and worked in libraries on three continents. Those of the BL, as it is fondly known, are professional, helpful (how rare is that nowadays) and knowledgeable. They help find wayward books, those rebels who go AWOL en route from Boston Spa-even the name conjures up exotic locales surrounded by palm trees, mermaids and tumbling waterfalls. And patiently deal with the often eccentric readers, some very doddery who people the halls.
On this occasion, the purpose of this visit was to do some final drawings of Taino artifacts to put on my Quisqueya website: www.saving-paradise.moonfruit.com. Two hours of luxurious drawing to the sound of rare book pages turning. Ah what bliss!

 From the back, a Taino Shaman in deep contemplation made into a ritual vessel. Pottery, found in Higuey, Republica Dominicana.