Liminality #2
When you’re a kid - as in primary school level, up to nine or ten years old - the geography of your life isn’t contiguous or continuous but mapped in pockets of familiarity. So you know (probably) how to walk from home to your primary, perhaps even middle school, and you’re oblivious to the fact that there’s another route; maybe the one your dad might take in the car; the shortcut between the butcher’s and
Curl up and Dye at only a metre wide wouldn’t fit an old Wolseley anyway, and besides, around Guy Fawkes’ Night, it was better to walk that way and chance finding spent fireworks.
The route to the park was quicker if you jumped over the wall between your road, and the adjacent cul-de-sac of slightly better housing, called Parkway, rather than walking along the main road. Fishing in the lake was a much quicker journey cutting through the deciduous forest in which the glassy, six-block complex of 1960’s flats called Beechcroft Manor sat like a fallen space station. Getting to Weybridge Railway Station, however, required a walk to the high street at the top of the road, then a Green Line bus from which point, the journey was more or less a mystery as the windows were misted with either condensation or fogged with smoke. There’s a gap in the memory.
Those gaps fill in as you grow older if you stay in the area long enough, and we did till I was 13 (a heartbreakingly poor time for me to move) but the patchwork of routes, of your stamping ground, always hold the same characteristics or idiosyncrasies that made them memorable as a child.
Take the fireworks: Even though you’re forbidden from collecting those spent Rockets, Air Bomb Repeaters, Screechers, Bangers or Devil-Amongst-the-Tailors by your parents, you did it anyway. The smell of those fireworks would always give themselves away even though you had them stored ever so cleverly in a big shortbread tin under your bed. You’d come home one day to find your mother had chucked them. The point is, I can’t separate November 5th (and Halloween, I suppose) from my thoughts of primary school. Even though I have other memories of Oatlands School of an eternal summer. They’re contradictory, but there you have it.
Oatlands Park - a village just outside of Weybridge in Surrey - is where I grew up. When I was in the aforementioned primary school, we’d have Sports Day in what I expect was a municipal playing field only five or ten minutes walk from the school itself. It had the Rich-Tea racetrack pressed in the grass with white paint that never seemed to dry, with a spur coming off to lengthen one flank to 100 metres, and I think that was it. In those sweltering, fledgeling days, it was just relay, sprinting, egg-and-spoon, and sack race events, but there may have been a sand pit for the long jump; writing this I have an image of orange building sand which might be a conflation or might be a half-forgotten memory. That’s because, like all the geography of my primary school life, my knowledge of the field was down to my experience of it. And that was limited to the racetrack and the long ribbon of scrubby path that ran alongside it, all the way past the field’s end, on past the allotments, and finally past the park.
And of that scrubby path, my memory is really only of the huge oak tree and nearby, the floating branch that had been sewn into the chainlink fence separating the path from the field. The branch was about the width of my seven-year-old arm, and about as long, floating within the chainmail diamonds of the fence. I never got an answer as to how it got there until one day as an adult I thought of the place and the logic of it came to me. But as a kid, that barrier between the sports field and the path, and the arm of wood trapped within it was a constant source of intrigue to me. Not just because the rusted metal of the fence went though the branch, but that it looked as if it had been pressed through it, as there were diamond scars where the bark had grown round the metal intruder.
As I thought of this the other day in bed, it reminded me of my reliance on liminality and boundaries - or veils - and how the branch was a perfect bridge between the real and imagined; an interface of conscious and subconscious, and how a child’s mind can take such things on face value, accept them as part of their truth, and not even question it until the unbidden memory came up in their late forties.
As you get older those connective spaces between the geography of your life become sadly, unromantically, connected. I can visualise the route from my flat here in London, onto the A503, all the way to my folks’ house in Bournemouth a hundred-odd miles away. And worse still, connective spaces can come connected abstractly, so in the same way I can visualise the way to my homestead, I can visualise the way from my flat to Brixton, but only via the wormhole of the Victoria Line.
But there is some connective tissue that - irrespective of age - remains magical, marginal and liminal: the hypnogogic state.
I’m around 20k into my new WIP and apart from the enjoyment (as a discovery writer) of seeing the story unfold, is experiencing the tools I use to write; the ones I’d forgotten about because I’ve spent so many years fiddling and rewriting the last book. They’ve come back (whether I was worried they’d atrophy or not, I can’t say - I just forgot about this part of the process) automatically, and my favourite one is the serendipitous wisdom of the hypnogogic state.
Every night as I fall asleep I’m thinking of my characters, my story, in the way a young child thinks about Father Christmas every night (Well, I did!), and every morning when I’m surfacing like a diver from the murk, I think about the same things. And in those moments lighting sparks, and information crosses from one subtle space or dimension into the conscious space, and I wake up excited after the
Eureka! moment. Furthermore, as I mentioned the serendipity of such flashes, when I come to write it, it manages to link in with so many story points. Or, if not, make a deeper sense of something I have already written.
I know this is getting long, so I’ll just finish with one example that happened over the last few days:
There’s a matchworks factory in my story - it’s made from the brick typical of the Victorian buildings, however of its two stacks, Stack B is made of a different grey stone (a stone that was cannibalised in the previous book from a stone circle and appropriated in different ways). I’d written in the second scene that the POV character Henrietta Burwood marvels at how the huge chimney never needs cleaning whereas the other one - and factory in general - always does. I had no reason to put that in, not even to ‘other’ the chimney to the reader, but I did. As I woke up two days ago, the idea of the stone sweating water woke with me, along with a full reason why, and the profound involvement of another character’s story. It felt like alchemy, or something huge had happened in my mind, something bigger than its parts. Not to the reader, but to me as architect, not expecting it, it seemed…well, huge.
Before that, and since, there have been other, small things, but this one struck me as so profound I thought I’d write about it. I had a meeting on WhatsApp with Dan, VenusianBroon, and Peat this week, and when I was asked about my plans for the first book, I was circumspect and vague. Now it occurs to me that I might actually like the act of writing - creating - the story, but lose interest once it’s done.
I think part of that is that communion with the liminal.
