Foot-paced life and Laurie Lee
One of the books I took with me for my recent few solo days in a cottage in Cumbria was Laurie Lee’s memoir of setting out in 1934, aged nineteen, on foot from his childhood home in Gloucestershire. It is a dramatic, lyrical account of wandering through Depression-era England, then Spain on the verge of civil war, but what resonated with me most was something simple: Lee’s evocation of a world – not so long passed – whose speed was set at walking pace. As he walks, Lee notices fine details, like changes in the smell of the soil from district to district, and changes in ‘shades of speech’ from village to village. Reading about that kind of noticing really influenced me, so that as I walked in Cumbria I found myself consciously slowing down to absorb the sight of laundry and daffodils dancing in the wind, the shaking tail of a nursing lamb, the complex choreography of rooks circling before settling for the night. By the time Lee died in 1997, the foot pace, noticing pace of society had been shattered by the arrival of cars.
Laurie Lee had an illicit affair with Lorna Wishart (Bloomsbury Group associate and later muse to Lucien Freud). He’s shown here with their daughter, Yasmin, who became a painter and lived near my family's farm in Devon (and whose daughter married my uncle).
A historian by training, I try not to (over)indulge my nostalgia. Thinking past times were better is an integral part of the human condition and not always rational (I probably would not have been in remote Cumbria at all without a car and an enlightened, twenty-first-century husband willing to care for our children). Yet imagine this: Lee’s mother cooking supper for him and his seven siblings and half-siblings in in the ‘family fug’ of their warm, low-ceilinged cottage kitchen, harassed by lack of money, an absent partner, the fear of the unreliable hearth fire going out. Then asking Lee to play a tune on his violin, and immediately being transported by the – at that point not very proficient – melodies of her son. Lee’s memoirs make me want to reclaim simplicity and the joy in the slow, everyday parts of life that are available to us all (and do not require trained expertise, or lots of money, or motor-powered speed).
Often my painting and writing is about that. Moments that are – as Lee put it – ‘fat with time’. ‘Spring’, above, celebrates the small delights of the season (I am hoping to do one for summer, autumn and winter as well, imagining them hanging together in a child's room). ‘Heart Song’, below, is inspired by my husband noodling at the piano with our children in the gap between breakfast and school drop off: time that seems to me especially rich, simple and good.
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My shop is open until Friday evening, with cards, prints and original paintings (including ‘Spring’ and ‘Heart Song’), then closed until Easter.
With love and hope for a tranquil, observant, foot-paced April,
Anna xxx