We’ll start with a probable irrelevance. John Frederick
Lewis, born in London in 1804, was an
artist who worked mostly in watercolour, specialising in what were
described as “orientalist” scenes. He lived for a long period in Cairo, ultimately
returning to England, settling in Walton-on-Thames in 1854, and dying there in
1876. Seemingly a satisfying nineteenth century life trajectory. In 1860 he
painted “Edfu, Upper Egypt”, which hangs in Tate Britain. I’ve never knowingly
seen it.
So why is this irrelevant? Well, almost certainly, J. F.
Lewis was not guilty of a couple of paintings which hung, in reproduction form,
in enormous frames in my grandparents’ house in Flintshire. I think the
originals must have been in oil, with a softer style than Lewis’s, but they featured
the right sort of subject matter, groups of sad-looking people with sad-looking
camels and vaguely Egyptian artefacts – perhaps the odd distant pyramid and a
couple of palm trees – somewhere in the middle of a sandy desert. Sand was much
in evidence. That and more sand. I don’t know whence these monstrous items came.
They may have been purchased at Woolworth’s or one of the big department stores
in Liverpool, perhaps even the dubiously eponymous Lewis’s right next to
Central Station. The effect they had on me was to make me feel tired and
depressed and that life was futile. Sandy camels at bed time were soporific; when
I had pneumonia they were almost lethal, unreachable by antibiotics. At least I
was spared the dreaded malachite Tretchikov, notoriously a Woolie’s favourite.
I think I transferred this morose feeling to the sands of
the estuary of the River Dee, not far distant, where after a day “down the
coast”, on the return journey we would look across towards the
Wirral, at the point near Mostyn where the railway runs right by the water’s
edge. On a late summer evening, perhaps overshadowed by thoughts of return to
school, a new term, I found the scene overwhelmingly melancholy, with wading
birds pecking and poddling about aimlessly, the sand tired and wrinkled, low
tide, the end of the day. Yes, those paintings and this piece of coastline
worked similarly on my early awareness of an underlying mortal sadness. “The
Tragic Sense of Life”. Ha ! Unamuno didn’t know the half of it, scribbling away
in Salamanca; he should have tried Mostyn, just along from the ironworks. Other
authors, though, caught something of the atmosphere of this part of the world, most
notably Charles Kingsley. My mother
sometimes recited to me fragments of “The Sands of Dee”, the cows and poor lost
Mary and all that, but she never remembered the whole piece. Sometimes she
would remind me that it’s a dangerous, moody estuary, much prone to sneaky
tides, quicksands and misleading mirages. She would know, having nearly drowned
in the Dee as a child.
If I wanted to try and pinpoint a contender for my earliest
memory, one of them would be situated a few miles to the west of the point
where the Dee enters the Irish Sea, and would be a mental snapshot of the
old-fashioned wicker beach chairs, sand-encrusted, almost enclosed like
cocoons, badly battered and fading in pinkish red or pinkish blue, then still
to be found, clustered and clumped together by the wind on Rhyl promenade. These
unsatisfactory objects spoke to me of a life past, one that would not be mine,
one that I would never know – or need to know. My mother’s world, my
grandparents’. Old lady chairs. “Missed that”, I may have thought, in some
childish way as my inner self-conscious world began to click into place; on
that day some serious mental processes must have been set in motion. They’re
starting to come to the surface again. Perhaps the sandman is coming.
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