I take my cast-iron cooking pot to the seashore, on the edge of the city where I spent my teenage years. I carry with me a dozen tealights and a box of matches. I bring a bundle of things to burn.
Yesterday, we scattered my parents’ ashes in a place where they can hear the wild geese call. Afterwards, my brothers and their wives went to their hotels to freshen up. I went to a café on the seaside pier to see the sun go down over the Solent and watch the Isle of Wight ferries go to and fro.
Coming south on the train the night before, I had carried a rucksack heavy with mortal remains wedged in beside my cooking pot and pyjamas. I made a space on the train table. I had brought coloured paper and a pen to note down a few more things to scatter to the wind, perhaps a demon or two. Yet when I began to write, a floodgate opened in my mind and words poured out in a torrent, flowing like a stream of consciousness onto the page as the train made its steady way south. Each phrase felt like a portal into a myriad of stories and memories. Good and bad. Losses and gains. Pleasures and pains. Horrors, burdens and beams of golden light. Things said. And things never said. Let it flow, let it flow.
Then last night, after the scattering of my parents’ ashes, in the café on the seaside pier, I unfolded those sheets of coloured paper to read them through. I thought about what I might do to be free. I ordered a plate of chips and a glass of white wine, then took out some scissors and cut up the paper, each strip carrying its own phrase. Over four hundred of them – what madness is this?
I drank some wine, then started to sort the strips into three piles – things to keep, things to ponder, and things to burn. I heard in my mind from the book Untamed, “We are alive only to the degree to which we are willing to be annihilated.” I heard in my mind the Blake poem: “In every cry of every Man, in every Infant’s cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind-forged manacles I hear.” A delicious lightness suffused me. I will send my mind-forged manacles to the flame.
So today, I walk down to the beach with my cast-iron cooking pot full to the brim with the strips of paper marked out as those to burn. I carry with me the voice of my teacher Annabelle saying, “There is gold in the dark”, and my teacher Pauline saying, “Burning ceremonies can be really powerful.” As I arrive, an older woman with long white hair walks down the shingle and starts to undress to go into the sea. She has a beautiful body and a clear sense of purpose. I sit down and arrange my pot among the pebbles, then try to get the matches to light in the blustering November breeze.
Inheritance
First into the pot go family voices expressing disapproval of others, belittling their looks, choices and beliefs. I will burn the voices of my father and brothers fat-shaming women, and my father asking me, ‘What’s it like living with a weight problem?’ – said with a thrill of enjoyment. I will burn the family’s contempt of my magical cousin Robert for finding sanctuary from domestic violence in Buddhism and wearing women’s clothes. I will burn the lack of acknowledgment of domestic violence battering loved ones, stretching back through generations of the working-glass Glaswegian side of my family, the tears that made the Clyde.
I will burn the voice of my father responding to me taking the supreme risk of sharing a personal story, with ‘You do know you’re mad, don’t you?’, said with a malicious sense of victory. So too will burn every time I was told to put a lid on it, and not to cause embarrassment in public. The virtue of silence, the impatience with me talking to people in the street, the shame and suppression of vibrancy, and my mother never being allowed to dance. In hospital, in his delirium, my father said again and again how much he regretted not letting her go dancing, and how much he knew she wanted to.
Up in flames too will go the shame of desire, the edict of ‘no sex before marriage’, and the family understanding that nobody should show any part of themselves naked, except in a medical emergency. My mother gave talks about the saints; you’d never see them go starkers. There would be no double beds for the few visitors allowed across the threshold, not even the married ones, with my father evicting a student lodger for daring to kiss her boyfriend under his roof. I hear him raging, “You’re not going out in that,” about my new dress when I was seventeen that looked, from turtle-neck top to below-the-knee ribbing, like an enormous Aran sock (but somewhat less sexy). I burn the dress, I burn the disapproval, and with it I burn the memory of one of my brother’s weird friends wanking on our front doorstep when I was eleven years old and in my school uniform, and urging me to touch his penis. A part of me still hides behind the sitting room door in the centre of that house, the only place where I can’t be seen from any window, urging him in my mind to go away.
So too will burn the assumption, polished to a shine even by my mother, that the Wife’s place is in the kitchen, the supermarket, the cleaning cupboard, and watching the black-and-white portable TV in the cold back room while the Husband watches the shows he chooses, in colour and with heating. And what a mind-numbingly terrible amount of telly. Bring the bellows and pile on the firelighters to see Dad’s Army, Antiques Roadshow, Songs of Praise, EastEnders and Last of the bloody Summer Wine going up in smoke.
But don’t speak out, don’t speak up, don’t ask for change. All conflict and frustration must be dealt with only at the level of relentless and pedantic bickering and shouting at people to do things but never explaining why. I see my mother’s finger going to her lips, to say shhh, avoid anger at all costs. We iron everybody’s shirts, fold hospital corners, keep the bathroom clean, keep lists of other people’s preferences and priorities, and whistle as we work. We think feminism is a bit sordid, and the ordination of women unholy. As my mother herself said, women’s brains are different, they’re less able to be composers, artists, scientists or great thinkers. And whilst we’re at it, don’t talk about difficulties and certainly don’t talk about mental health. If you’re feeling cross or distressed, wash your face in cold water and come back smiling and ready to work even harder.
My brothers got out of the madhouse. After the scattering of our parents’ ashes, one of my brothers reminisced about driving away from the family home in the north, some time before the move to these southern shores. Now nearly sixty, he remembered heading off to college at the age of eighteen, with a sense of gleeful freedom at escaping from the madness, and knew that he would never come back. He said that years later, he had started to feel guilty about the realisation that he had left me behind at the age of twelve, to weather the madhouse alone.
Send it all to the flame.
Marriage
Into the pot goes the word ‘MARRIAGE’ written in capital letters. Theirs and mine. Followed close on its heels by another stating, “SEXLESS MARRIAGE”. Let it burn.
No sex before marriage? None after, either! Surely that should have got me top marks in heaven? Here in the pot are all of the attempts to be noticed, the corrosive hope and the silently devastating rejections. “Make love to me”, stonewalled, like living in the moat outside the high walls of a locked-up castle. Years of not being able to talk about it. Years of having no words to say it or ask for anything more. Years of falling asleep crying, trying not to let the bed shake. Three years of ultimately pointless sensate sex therapy. Keep the good bits of that, but let the bad bits burn.
All of the frustration and loneliness channelled into work, work, work, work, work, work, work – big ideas and campaigning, being on the telly, creative events, and attempting to do it all. “You’ve got mania,” said his mother. “Just like Stephen Fry,” said his mother. “Take lithium,” said his mother. Let the lithium burn. Into the pot go my remaining seratonin uptake inhibitors, Sertraline and Duloxetine and the Groke of depression. I will live by a new fire, not under a chemical veil.
Let’s stoke this fire with my naivete for believing that the situation could be fixed through devotion. I was seduced by boyish good looks, a beautiful mind, shared values, kindness, creativity and the clarion call to devotion and compassion for his anxieties and terror of loss. We met young and grew up together. Only, let’s face it, one of us didn’t grow up, didn’t want to grow up. When confronted by the realisation of thwarted desire, 30 years later, he clenched his fists in anguish and said, “It can’t be this important.”
And as a result, the years of yearning for a child, followed by mind-bending necessity of doing IVF after being forced into a body-clock corner, despite not being infertile – just sexless. Dozens of injections, hormone head-soup, expensive commercial invoices, a dense forest of tests and percentage chances of having a child with disability, and the pain and humiliation of the speculum. The result was worth it, oh yes indeed. But let the IVF burn.
Into the pot goes a jigsaw treasure hunt made by our friends as a wedding present, and the book of well wishes signed by those friends saying, good luck, you make such a great couple, have a wonderful marriage.
Other people’s demons
Let me raise the subject of whisky. I saw the mind of a friend I adored destroyed by a combination of whisky, disappointment and repressed rage. He turned to murderous violence against his beloved partner and dragged his closest friends – including me – into the path of destruction. She survived, but only just. We survived, though not mentally fully intact. He phoned me and told me he was going to chop up his child and stuff the pieces of her body into his partner’s mouth. I knew that he was capable of it. Then he died, leaving her in penury. I helped to manage the legal mess of land, debt and his previous marriage. By chance or perhaps a ripple in the silver threads that still connect us, his lovely partner, his never-to-be wife, phoned me about an hour after the scattering of my parents’ ashes, on a new number and after six years of lost contact. I talked to her from the seashore, we laughed and the sun came out.
My father raised his hand to my mother only once, at the height of alcohol, and my brother took him out with a right hook at the age of fifteen. Good on you, brother, I was nine and thoroughly impressed. Meanwhile, my father’s brother Donald was knocking back the whisky and dishing out violence to my cousins, and my father’s sister Helen was being violently beaten by her husband. Blessed be my cousins Mike and Robert, two of the sons of my Uncle Donald and Aunt Helen, who broke the chains of violence, becoming a mental health nurse and an eco-architect with Buddhist leanings and some beautiful dresses in his wardrobe. All of the rage and all of the whisky their fathers consumed can go into the fire, gloriously combustible.
I found one of my mother’s demons inside a chocolate box stuffed with letters from a 1950s era of fountain pens and Basildon Bond paper. One of the letters, her reference for going into the secret service, instructed her always to be silent, a bounden duty. My father’s courting letters to my mother were bundled separately, wrapped up with a crusty tartan ribbon that had not been untied in probably decades. One letter fell out, as if eager to be read by a new generation in search of liberty, steeped in anxiety, control, demands, commands, expectations of attention, jealousy over their first son, my older brother. Fury at my mother for staying at her own mother’s house for too long. I asked my mother’s sister Gillian what she thought of my parents’ marriage. Gillian responded that she had only once asked my mother why she stayed with my father when he clearly made her unhappy. The sisters were together on a ferry, going across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. My mother replied that she had made a promise to God, and promises to God cannot be broken. Perhaps not. But they can be burned.
With a wave of sympathy, I also throw into the pot my father’s acres of disappointment caused by the loss of his father when he was six, being brought up in poverty, and longing for status in a class system that shut him out. He was born just too late to take part in the Second World War, but just at the right time to have intense childhood romance for its drama, thrill and machinery. He obsessed about medals, the names of naval ships and words like Duke and Viscount. He printed out reams of genealogical research, stacked waist-high in his room so that there was only a narrow path to get to the door and no room for my mother to hoover. He wrote out in long-hand lists of people who had won the Victoria Cross, and told me he hoped to find that his own father was of ‘reasonable rank’. My father rarely took care of me as a child, but when he did he would have me guess his salary. Such was the attachment to work and status, that when he was made redundant, he didn’t tell my mother. He carried on “going out to work” whilst the household unknowingly racked up debt and defaulted on the mortgage. She found out only when she tried to call him at the office and they said he hadn’t been there for 18 months. Into the pot go the rows and financial trouble that ensued, saved only by my grandmother dying in an horrific car accident and leaving my mother some cash.
While we’re here, and with no sympathy at all, let me throw Brexit into the fire. I can hear my father saying just a few days after the referendum, and with gleeful satisfaction, “Did you see Nigel Farage sticking it to the Europeans? He really showed them,” after a mortifyingly rude, idiotic and smug performance by Nigel Farage in the European Parliament. My mother had died unexpectedly only two weeks before, so all I could do was to be outwardly supportive, whilst consumed with grief and anger at so much loss. My job was to keep the peace and organise a beautiful funeral. When my father started to give me marriage advice, in between encouragements to appreciate the success of UKIP, I feigned a sudden and desperate need to go shopping for ‘women’s things’ and went out walking along this same seafront, where I now return to burn the memory of times gone mad.
My own demons
And so I come to the demons that are my own. I know they cannot be burnt. There is something inside them of obsidian. But I am persuaded that perhaps in this phase of my life, they can be persuaded to be kinder and tell different stories. Hence, into the flames goes their old script, their self-persecutory placards of certainty and over-rehearsed piles of evidence that they bring constantly to my door, with their square-jawed shout of triumph.
I am a threat. I am toxic. I am hideous. I am undesirable. I am an amorphous blob in a dress like an enormous sock. I am ridiculous. I am an idiot. The people I care about think I’m mad. And they’re right. My family are normal and everyone else is weird and wrong. I spoil things for people. I spread cold and freeze the way. I bring people down. I am no-thing. I must do battle alone, in armour with rivets and a visor like a jail. I am flying the flag of surrender, tied with a handkerchief knot to remind me never to forget that I am a piece of shit.
All, all, into the flames. My cooking pot runneth over.
The fire rages in an orange pot on the seashore. It warms me. The smell is like a campfire. Sitting on the shingle, I look out over the waves and feel lighter. My rucksack will contain so much less on my return. The older woman emerges from the sea, her beautiful body shining wet like a mermaid. She smiles at me and nods and I smile back. I watch the flames of glorious fire lick and crackle until everything is consumed and all that is left is soft grey ash. Then I push the cooking pot into the waves for the heat to dissipate and the ashes to sizzle and be washed away.
I put my cooking pot back in my rucksack and go off to walk along the seafront to meet an old friend, whilst pondering the design of a phoenix tattoo.