Burning House/Addresses Project 2019
A collection of words and images in the form of a book.
At some point recently, I realised all the stuff that happened wasn't going to just disappear like I thought it might if I ignored it. And I have ignored it, sometimes wilfully and also sometimes because I was too tired or busy to notice it. But it was, and still is a defining period in my life. There's no great revelation and nothing new about it. It's a childhood that wasn't long because I grew up mercifully quickly. In it's short span it's a childhood that's been eclipsed in years by far more of my own adult years; yet it still wreaks havoc in me. At certain points it might be about being born low economically whilst thriving under a Thatcher government albeit for a short time in the 80's. It's about being a child maintained in the grips of coercive control. Being left eventually -inevitably- by my mum, and the stark reality that followed, being left with my sisters and my dad. What came before and after. Conversations that are still new and unfurling only now, swathes of half memories and pain.
I suppose this book is about two people (my parents), and their two personalities blended together creating this catastrophic and caustic environment, what that meant for me growing up, how much control they had when they were in constant survival mode. Being broke one week then seeing giant rolls of banknotes the next. Moving from house to house, school to school -sometimes through impulse on my mums behalf and sometimes because dad owed money. Being rich one minute and to bed hungry the next. Mum excitedly driving to pick up a new dog from someone or frantically stopping at a 'Puppies For Sale' sign on the side of the road; Then dumping the dog back when she couldn't cope with it, usually within a month later. A new car or van that dad picked up , different ones weekly sometimes. Everything constantly changed, never evolved. It was all just fast increments of swift change for no obvious reason. A constant running from something in a bid to see change or emerge as better than we were.
And so, because everything went at the speed it did I didn't have time to stop and understand. When I would talk out loud about confusing things that had happened along the way, adults would shuffle uncomfortably before rolling their eyes and shutting me down. Because in their world of safe cosy and stable homes that smelled of TCP and toast I was talking crazy. The word fantasist became painted over my brow by adults who really should've known better.
There are these huge vats of memories that I hold, that still confuse me. Recently at a car boot fayre I had a panic attack because of something I touched, how it made my hands smell, the waxy residue as I touched my fingers together. I was taken back to one of my childhood homes with this feeling, that something had scared the hell out of me but I didn't know what. I started looking in to hypnosis, suppressed memory syndrome; false memory syndrome. I began writing down the smallest details that would come in to my head and ended up with pages of long non sensical lists. And for ages I would take them out and just look at them. It was like I had all this stuff floating around in my head that I'd never been able to catch for long enough to study it's shape and form, but with the lists I could now focus on an individual annotation and try to make sense of it, locked down, pencil to paper. The list became removed from my head and placed in my hands becoming a physical and tangible thing: Real.
Through a chance text message conversation I had with my dad I asked if he could remember all our houses. He came back with a fairly concise list. And it was there that I really felt it, this wave of sadness but also relief. The list felt like a Proof of something, the houses were real and locked down, our DNA in their foundations. 13 different homes in 16 years and many more moves to and fro, to whichever house would keep me safest in the short term.
And the memories alongside the house started to mostly make sense. Some I realised weren't even my own but retellings of things happening from my sisters points of view, Dad flicking his cigarette out of the window on a motorway and it flying in the open back window, setting fire to our coats; Entirely my own memory, except -I wasn't there! It belongs to two of my sisters and I had merely painted myself in to their vivid description of it happening. Some of my memories varied a great deal in comparison to my sisters, not because one was truth and the other a lie but because our life experiences had no doubt dredged certain things to the surface of our minds, allowing them to be reshaped by present day before sending them back down again. In Virginia Woolf's essay, A Sketch of the Past, she takes us through a memory she has of lying with her head in her mothers lap, the flowers on the fabric of her dress as they travelled to st Ives. This leads nicely to a memory she has in st Ives of lying in her cotbed listening to the waves. Later however, and perhaps inconveniently, Woolf acknowledges that the light in the carriage is most likely an evening light and is thus more likely to be the train back to London. The force of correspondence makes her want to stick to the facts; the force of coherence wants to tell a better story. With this in mind I decided not to alter the lists I'd written in the flashes of time when everything seemed to be purging from my body. The way these memories had flooded through was a strange thing and the courses the took to reach paper meant that they collided and dragged things from present day with them, small dreams I'd had or recollections of recent events, I have decided to keep them too within the writing. I read recently about a RATKING which is a collection of rats accidentally bound together by their tails -for random and sometimes inexplicable reasons. It feels poetic to think of this book like a mass of rats knotted together.
There are things I experienced alone that were frightening for no reason. Things that happened alongside other people that they simply do not recall. Different versions of memories stored from experience. The accuracy or authenticity of which are neither here nor there, they are either my truth or the idioms of a fantasist. Everything is about making sense of it all, trying to navigate my way through the past whilst being present in my future. There is an awareness often painful to me; that my responses to past traumas exist alongside bringing up well rounded and happy children, there is a collision of both. So effectively I am growing up alongside my children, making sense of my own childhood by scrutinising every detail of theirs. Perhaps I will read something of their childhoods from their adult mouths and all I will be able to say or do is hold my palms to the skies and say I did my best. As one day, my parents might.
A collection of words and images in the form of a book.
At some point recently, I realised all the stuff that happened wasn't going to just disappear like I thought it might if I ignored it. And I have ignored it, sometimes wilfully and also sometimes because I was too tired or busy to notice it. But it was, and still is a defining period in my life. There's no great revelation and nothing new about it. It's a childhood that wasn't long because I grew up mercifully quickly. In it's short span it's a childhood that's been eclipsed in years by far more of my own adult years; yet it still wreaks havoc in me. At certain points it might be about being born low economically whilst thriving under a Thatcher government albeit for a short time in the 80's. It's about being a child maintained in the grips of coercive control. Being left eventually -inevitably- by my mum, and the stark reality that followed, being left with my sisters and my dad. What came before and after. Conversations that are still new and unfurling only now, swathes of half memories and pain.
I suppose this book is about two people (my parents), and their two personalities blended together creating this catastrophic and caustic environment, what that meant for me growing up, how much control they had when they were in constant survival mode. Being broke one week then seeing giant rolls of banknotes the next. Moving from house to house, school to school -sometimes through impulse on my mums behalf and sometimes because dad owed money. Being rich one minute and to bed hungry the next. Mum excitedly driving to pick up a new dog from someone or frantically stopping at a 'Puppies For Sale' sign on the side of the road; Then dumping the dog back when she couldn't cope with it, usually within a month later. A new car or van that dad picked up , different ones weekly sometimes. Everything constantly changed, never evolved. It was all just fast increments of swift change for no obvious reason. A constant running from something in a bid to see change or emerge as better than we were.
And so, because everything went at the speed it did I didn't have time to stop and understand. When I would talk out loud about confusing things that had happened along the way, adults would shuffle uncomfortably before rolling their eyes and shutting me down. Because in their world of safe cosy and stable homes that smelled of TCP and toast I was talking crazy. The word fantasist became painted over my brow by adults who really should've known better.
There are these huge vats of memories that I hold, that still confuse me. Recently at a car boot fayre I had a panic attack because of something I touched, how it made my hands smell, the waxy residue as I touched my fingers together. I was taken back to one of my childhood homes with this feeling, that something had scared the hell out of me but I didn't know what. I started looking in to hypnosis, suppressed memory syndrome; false memory syndrome. I began writing down the smallest details that would come in to my head and ended up with pages of long non sensical lists. And for ages I would take them out and just look at them. It was like I had all this stuff floating around in my head that I'd never been able to catch for long enough to study it's shape and form, but with the lists I could now focus on an individual annotation and try to make sense of it, locked down, pencil to paper. The list became removed from my head and placed in my hands becoming a physical and tangible thing: Real.
Through a chance text message conversation I had with my dad I asked if he could remember all our houses. He came back with a fairly concise list. And it was there that I really felt it, this wave of sadness but also relief. The list felt like a Proof of something, the houses were real and locked down, our DNA in their foundations. 13 different homes in 16 years and many more moves to and fro, to whichever house would keep me safest in the short term.
And the memories alongside the house started to mostly make sense. Some I realised weren't even my own but retellings of things happening from my sisters points of view, Dad flicking his cigarette out of the window on a motorway and it flying in the open back window, setting fire to our coats; Entirely my own memory, except -I wasn't there! It belongs to two of my sisters and I had merely painted myself in to their vivid description of it happening. Some of my memories varied a great deal in comparison to my sisters, not because one was truth and the other a lie but because our life experiences had no doubt dredged certain things to the surface of our minds, allowing them to be reshaped by present day before sending them back down again. In Virginia Woolf's essay, A Sketch of the Past, she takes us through a memory she has of lying with her head in her mothers lap, the flowers on the fabric of her dress as they travelled to st Ives. This leads nicely to a memory she has in st Ives of lying in her cotbed listening to the waves. Later however, and perhaps inconveniently, Woolf acknowledges that the light in the carriage is most likely an evening light and is thus more likely to be the train back to London. The force of correspondence makes her want to stick to the facts; the force of coherence wants to tell a better story. With this in mind I decided not to alter the lists I'd written in the flashes of time when everything seemed to be purging from my body. The way these memories had flooded through was a strange thing and the courses the took to reach paper meant that they collided and dragged things from present day with them, small dreams I'd had or recollections of recent events, I have decided to keep them too within the writing. I read recently about a RATKING which is a collection of rats accidentally bound together by their tails -for random and sometimes inexplicable reasons. It feels poetic to think of this book like a mass of rats knotted together.
There are things I experienced alone that were frightening for no reason. Things that happened alongside other people that they simply do not recall. Different versions of memories stored from experience. The accuracy or authenticity of which are neither here nor there, they are either my truth or the idioms of a fantasist. Everything is about making sense of it all, trying to navigate my way through the past whilst being present in my future. There is an awareness often painful to me; that my responses to past traumas exist alongside bringing up well rounded and happy children, there is a collision of both. So effectively I am growing up alongside my children, making sense of my own childhood by scrutinising every detail of theirs. Perhaps I will read something of their childhoods from their adult mouths and all I will be able to say or do is hold my palms to the skies and say I did my best. As one day, my parents might.