Author: web author Anthony Fisher

Over the last 60 years I have sometimes unexpectectedly created something that is aesthtically pleasing or successful without knowing why. The first was an oil painting of a girl, Susan, I’d met whilst on holiday in Cornwall. When I first saw Susan she was wielding a heavy sledge hammer breaking rocks in the track leading to her family farm. Walking across a field with her led to me being given a bunch of four leafed clover; they seemd to leap out at her. She kept goats and tried, and failed, to teach me how to milk them. I had taken a photo of Susan with a couple of her goats and, when home, decided to paint a portrait of her in oils. I’d had art lessons at school from the wonderful Ray Butcher, but do not know why I thought I could do this. So I fished out an old sheet of hardboard and probably put a coat of white emulsion on the rough side and started. I love the smell of oil paints. It seems to challenge a painter to create a masterpiece. I didn’t and the painting was binned at some time but recently, as I was putting a cardboard box into the recycling bin, an old slide fell out and it proved to be of my painting of Susan. I quite like it and wish that I had kept the original.

Soon after this, probably when I was 20, I decided to carve an articulated chain of teak. My father had aquited a piece of the old teak door of the Capital Cinema which once stood in Winchmore Hill. There is now a block of flats there. I had recently bought a pen knife that I was quite proud of so perhaps this was why I wanted to whittle but I cannot remember why I chose a chain. So I cut a square section about 9 inches long, pencilled in the profile and started. I would sit in the lounge after lunch with my father and his girlfriend and various others, mainly on a Sunday and carved away as we chatted. I liked the result and still have it by my chair in the sitting room. The chain is light, warm and chimes when I toss it in my hand.

When I lived in Chase Side next to St Michaels Green it was a new build and the front garden was a dreary slab of concrete. I wanted it to be my museum and art gallery so put all manner of things in it, anything whose shape or history pleased me. I sculpted with hub caps I’d picked up from the road and would sell them for a pound to motorists who spotted one for their naked wheels. Some one kindly dropped a pair of very old boots over the wall and I put them in pride of place on a wooden cable drum I had acquired. A local tramp knocked and asked to buy them and refused them as a gift insisting on giving me £5.00. Worth quite a lot in 1987. I then decided to fill the garden with colour and planted geranium, petunia, violets, marigold anything that was bright. I used pots and containers of all sorts. When there was a hose ban I would rush from kitchen to garden with buckets of water. It was lovely and in 1987, unbeknown to me, a lady in the flats opposite entered me into the Enfield in Bloom competition and a certificate dropped through the letterbox. I was astounded and my neighbour furious. She would berate me shouting “You never do any gardening, I spend all my time in the garden so why is it you that gets the certificate?” I shrunk before the onslaught and, of course, had no answer. After I’d moved I discovered that my garden was known as “The madman’s garden” and people used to travel from all over to look at it and it was a popular clue on treasure hunts. I wish I had known at the time. There may be some photos somewhre and I will blog on my garden some more.

A couple of phtographs.

The first is of shrimp fishing in Angoulin just south of La Rochelle on the west coats of France.

I used the panoramic setting on my iPhone and was so pleased with the result that I printed it out on 1 metre wide photo paper. The detail of the image was just amazing.

The second, again in France, is of a dancer. July each year, the town of St Maixent de l’Ecole, in what was the Deux Sevre, used to host an international festival of national music performed by young people. One group was from, I think, Slovakia and I took a shot of a dancer with swirling skirts. There is no motion blur which was amazing and I do not know how or why. I was using my compact camera which may have been a Panasonic. It insipred a poem and here they are.

Finally a poem. It floated into my mind, essentially as it is below, as I was waking up when Valerie brought me a morning mug of tea. The three gandchildren were dancing around her and it seemed as if her skirt was alive, a shaman’s skirt bridging the three worlds.

Grandma’s Skirt

Grandma moves around the house

wearing a skirt of children.

Faces float at her waist

as six little feet dance in orbit.

No need of iron! The skirt has noise enough.

No need to dance! The skirt can leap enough

to pull me back to where,

Grandma moves around the house

wearing her skirt of children.

© Anthony Fisher February 2000

I’m writing my memoirs, Me, My Beard and I.  It was Grandson Jake’s idea and Daughter Megan suggested the title.  I have completed the first draft and, to my surprise, written about 145,000 words and I expect it to be about 150,000 when finished. The idea is to write of my early life, my parents and close relatives for the children and grandchildren and my Mother’s story is part of this.  I was always told that my mother’s first , and I think, only love was a Polish Naval captain whom I only knew as Wiktor.  They were not allowed to marry as he was “foreign” and that he was Catholic I suspect.  I only remember  meeting him once.  Dad financed a fish and chip shop for him after the War and I went there once with my parents in about 1950.  It must have been difficult for him after the excitement of the war being helped by the man married to his Love.

My mother drove an ambulance in and around Rochester during the war and was bombed twice in the depot so she too had an exciting time.  She and her sister Margaret would visit the officers’ mess on one of the Polish Navy vessels where the officers would ply them with vodka and one of them was Wiktor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The three sisters.  My mother on the right, Margaret the centre and Georgie on the left.  At this time Georgie was away in the Wrens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had seen photos of Wiktor in my mother’s wartime album but I could not read her hand writing so could not decipher his last name.  Whilst choosing photos for the memoir I mentioned this to a Polish friend and she offered to see if she could read his name and so I now know him as Wiktor Szabunia and his photo is to the right.  It would have been taken in my Grandparent’s garden.  Though they were not allowed to marry my Grandfather did much to entertain both British and Polish Naval personnel.

 

Justyna Googled Wiktor and, to her surprise found a Facebook page dedicated to the Polish Navy and that Wiktor was one of 12 officers rescued after the ORP Grom was sunk by a Henkel bomber in May 1940. The Grom was the most feared ship in the Norwegian waters because of its relentless pursuit of German naval vessels.  Wiktor must have been posted to a vessel in Chatham where he met my mother.

The featured image is of the 12 officers but I would like to repeat it here.

Wiktor is, I think, on the far right.

I suspect from the coquettish look on my Mother’s face, Wiktor took this photo.

In July 1953, there is an entry in my mother’s autograph book that Wiktor Szabunia and Helen, perhaps his wife,  came to dinner at the same time as Ebba and Torben from Denmark.  It is interesting as Ebba was my Father’s lover when he was in Denmark at the end of the War.  I can remember Torben for some reason but not the others though shadows are beginning to appear in my mind as I write.  It was only eight years after the end of the War so it could have been some sort of reunion.

Named after the family that once owned it, the building is now a restaurant, but the park and ancient woodland are public spaces where we often like to lose ourselves amongst the trees.  I sometimes wonder if I tread in the footsteps of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators;  they are thought to have planned the Gunpowder Plot here.  There must be forment in Enfield’s air, only a couple of miles or so away is Eslynge Manor where Henry VIII planned the restoration.  Reading David Pam’s Histories of Enfield, I was struck as to how unruly and unlawful the citizens were!

Anyway, á nos moutons! We wanted to feed the ducks as there had been reports that they had been seen on driveways and in Enfield away from the water, perhaps because people had stopped feeding them bread and they were hungry.

 

Were they indeed!  when we cast bread on the waters of the lake they actually turned their backs on us and glided away.

 

 

 

 

In fact there were very few ducks and just one moorhen who was mildly interested and ate two piece before it too turned its back on us and swum away.

 

Enfield council have put tape and, sometimes, netting on the benches and seats in the borough in order to discourage group sitting, however I think that the nettles are more effective by the look of things!

We dodged on and off the path as people loomed in our way, as we walked round to the other side of the lake to see if there was a sunbathing turtle. We were excited to see what I thought was a red water lily but of course, it was a rhododendron flower  that had dropped into the water.

 

 

 

Still, an aspiring lily can be beautiful.

 

 

 

There was a turtle sunning itself but I managed to lose it behind a hanging leave as I was concentrating on the not-so-distant socialising on the bench we had walked passed; not the one pierced by nettles.

 

It’s not often I can get close to a horse chestnut blossom.

 

There was a low hanging branch by the lake.  They are very complex, almost Victorian, flowers, quite beautiful.

 

We decided to walk down the main path towards the golf course.  It looked stunning.  Woods are so beautiful and some views are just, well, magnificent.

After five minutes or so, we had to walk away from the path as people approached, though we had our fetching masks on, we wanted to distance our selves and, of course, be alone in the woods.

I find it fascinating that two trees seem to join, become one.

 

 

Some elegantly,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

some rudely.

 

 

 

 

Walking back to the car, we came across a fallen tree that was still sending up branches.  Trees are tough but also receive help in the way of nutrient from surrounding trees through the underground network of roots and fungus.  I am always amazed at how big trees are when they are lying on the ground.

For along time fallen and lopped wood has been left to encourage insects and flora, little animals.  Stag beetles are a favourite with their impossible flight.  Once in France walking back to the house, we were surrounded by a huge cloud of stag beetles in staggering flight.  It was an amazing sight.  I would love to witness it again.  Though they clouded around us none touched us.

We discussed the memory and went home.