‘Summer in sandals’

They’ve been around about the place waiting.  First the eyes start squinting for sunglasses, and the shoulders get rid of sleeves, replaced by fine straps.  Freckles come rushing towards the sun galore and, it’s only natural, that her feet, at one with sheepskin lined boots plodding around the mountain all winter long, should be itching for a little mercy….some light relief.  She hasn’t been season shopping, not for years; tends just to sympathise with things getting musty in her wardrobe until the right weather comes along. So her feet might just have an inkling that it’s going to be the same old, the same old…

Some years ago she dived in though; dived into the pool of splashing out, and paid for some very necessary footwear (she does love her feet after all, where would she be without them?)  A pair of simple sandals with a black, capital lettered, 235-year-old trademark embossed on the inner side. A pair of white patent leather, beautiful buckled summer shoes.  They were ready, her and her feet - sole cushioned yet mostly bare, spirits high… and the summer came on…

Not long after there is a picture of her on an English railway platform, surrounded by three little human ducklings.  They are all going back on the next train to the place she had chosen for their nest.  She had once spent a year wearing wellington boots in the northeast of England which was enough for even a tame podophile or, indeed, for any mummy duck who needed sometimes to feel the span of her feet under the sun, or hop to the shade, soles slightly braised.  It was a choice she had made and so there they were on platform 1, waiting for the train which would take her, with six little soles following, back to the warmer country next door, leaving the lady behind the camera to her winters with grandpa and her looking lovely in thick, red jumpers.

She doesn’t look like a duck in the photo despite her gloriously comfortable large feet bedecked in her wonderful flat sandals.  She looks more like a giraffe bending over trying to get into the frame of the photo aimed at three little versions of herself.

(They do look good, go well with what she is wearing, go well with everything and they really do fit like paws.  Honestly.  She was even tempted to write a little piece about them.   She wasn’t pandering.  She wasn’t on any well-known German shoe company’s pay roll!  But she did dream sometimes about getting a little recompense for something she loved doing more than anything in the world. She felt it might give her the validation, the blessing, to sit there and tap, tap, suffering for art - a pay check wouldn’t go so far as buying  happiness- whilst being quietly catered for…well, that was just a Birken dream that she’d have to Stock with the others.[1]  The imagination can run wild sometimes.  Let’s get back to her sandals… )

As a ferreter of second hand shops, bundles of clothes in the market place, and a smile in return for a plastic bag full of ironed rejects, why was she even tempted to go for these sandals that, on that day when she dived in, weren’t exactly flaunting themselves in the display. I will tell you.  They are the brother sister lover cousin of another of her trusted steeds, they simply reminded her of something else she knew and loved.  Like a cousin may remind you of a parent, or a new lover of an old…Or like the summer reminds you of a spring just gone. And so she loved them too, straightaway.  They were of her clog’s family, her fantastic romping red clogs that belonged first to the German company and then to her.  Now this was fashion! London in the nineties, a warm spring and we all felt as young as we were.  Her curly girly friend showed up in a lime green pair and she had to go take a look.  How long did she spend in the store deliberating over colours, walking up and down the floating parquet, a feast of choosing in the full length mirror?  Her purple sari skirt piping up for orange, her dark long dreadlocks swaying for blue, and her knowing in her heart, inside her skinny cage of bones, that it would be red.

And that was that. Spring in clogs.  She gallivanted about.  She wore them for everything – soirées, early morning milk bottle wanders, the city, the sea.  You couldn’t ignore them.  They weren’t wooden, but wonderfully rubber.  They exaggerated her enormous (for a girl) feet, but with such curves that she was proud.  She swung her leg and loved the way her ankle looked.  She never took them off and they defiantly threw off each season as it came.  Wherever she went, they went too.  One would have been forgiven for thinking  that they were attached to her blue flaired dungarees, but they weren’t.  There they all had been with their trademarked clogs, and their messy hair, and their going this way only to find themselves there.  Years later.  Ok.  Or saved.  Functioning.  Or not.  They had been pretty and talented, and their clogs came with them, and they even swapped.

Both lie now in disrepair, separately.  The dungarees worn until the holes conquered decency, and her clogs in the big cupboard at the bottom of the stairs, along with pairs of “too big” shoes-in-abeyance for her growing tribe of six feet.  Her old, red friends peek out from the end of the highest shelf, their sole grave.  She could still wear them, in the garden, or about the house, but the black has become ingrained in the ersatz snake skin red rubber, and the comfortable inner soles got lost along the way; she prefers to leave them in the cupboard, a relic of her spring in clogs. 

So how could she walk past , when it was there on her list and her feet ached and the capital lettered familiar name was calling out Remember?... Yet it was summer this time and she was ripe and they were more classical than clogs and so a perfect replacement for her grown up feet and they had stepped onto her path just at the right moment. And so fatefully, a bit worried that the cheque might bounce, she hot stepped it away with them.  And they are on her feet now, years later, flippy floppy, the swirls of the sole wearing thin.  Dog chews or dumb bells?  Or simply abstract?  Not one to remember to buy after care products, the white patent leather has been patched up with tip-ex and the beautiful buckle pulled as tight as it can go.  Still they are a bit baggy.  Living in this lovely warm country she has been lucky to be able to wear them an awful lot.  But they have not quite lasted as long as her clogs.  She hopes this isn’t a decline in production quality.  Maybe she should write to the German company…She fears more likely that she is heavier on the ground, not as light as she used to be.  Anyway, they really are in a state.  If they weren’t attached to her feet, the first person along would throw them in the bin.  But she is loath to move onto the next pair.  Loath for the disappointment of slight changes.  Loath for that quick flurry of desire as a whole array of unimagined beatitude dallies before her, all with the terrific possibility of entering into her life and meaning something.  No, she thinks, I’ll suffer them through this summer – the flapping soul prevents her natural rhythm, trips her up a bit - see them to the grave.  Then maybe she’ll scribble her next shy cheque as an ode to some sensible shoes for the autumn….

Time is quick now. The seasons are like one song.

I won’t mention slippers, or twigs that have grown to trunks.  I won’t mention snow falling, when she pulls on her sheep skin boots.  She won’t go gallivanting and her summer will be all sandal souvenirs.  This summer seems so much shorter than the others. Bare footed at the end, after all.  Naked.  A sheet will do.  At the very end.  So she won’t be faced with two constant companions losing faith in her, wondering why they’re sticking up, and where they would be without her.

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[1] IBAN  1447489F038

Gloves by Lucy Flowers

 A stunning, suave woman in the God-show was wearing your gloves.  Strutting seamlessly down the human runway from where the angels had already taken off, her tuned arms sang in circles, her body a perfect note and her hands slipped inside fantastic blue imitation leather gloves.  An over-size-tadpole-shaped band unnecessarily fastens across the back of them, making of a patch of skin a beautiful oval, rimmed with white imitation leather piping.  The gloves finish just at the bottom of the hand, baring wrist.  She hip pouted an even amount of times at the cliff end overhanging the droves of us, all applauding her parade, her sparkle, the design; we like to watch and dream, our eyes unclosing, our hands tingling… Another girl is already aiming at us, but the girl in the gloves gifts us with a last flick of a sure regard, a wrist in movement, a goodbye.

 You were not so kind.  You certainly didn’t dress up for the occasion.   You left your gloves, your drawings, scribbles, clothes and every little tiny thing you collected in the space of 27 years behind you.  And you didn’t turn around.  Your goodbye was a little final and taken with less advice than we would have been willing to give.

 The boy next to me points open mouthed as the devil crouches on the rafters of the town hall, dressed in black.  A signature bow on the waistband, his half-length trousers reveal his hairy calves, between which dangles his arrow of a tail. A funny creature this devil, terribly stylish tonight.  God (in white) has already taken his seat in the wings and watches unashamedly as the procession continues; the colour, the nerve, the naughtiness.  He brings forth a little comment here and there; nothing more… you win some you lose some but all in all they’re a handsome bunch.  Adam saunters, Eve struts, the angels take five backstage and the devil comes down from the rafters and the snake ends up being caressed by the kids that have come with their parents to see the show.

 Clothes design by Stéphane V.  Hair by Tif’ani.  Hats, Céline.  And one pair of gloves by Lucy Flowers. He saw them at my house and asked if he could buy them for his upcoming fashion show.  I said No Way, they are Not for Sale, but I would donate them for the sake of Art.  I wanted to give them New Life. The only things I ever touched of yours were your gloves and I gave them away. Stranger as you were, I allow myself to be a latecomer watching as the dirty river glimmered bottle bright.  I find my place, but there is just silence.  You are already gone.  She was wearing your gloves, Lucy Flowers.  Strutting seamlessly down the human runway from where the angels had already taken off.

Living daylights

I was always popping up all over the place; the little master of surprise.  I was blessed to have as my willing victim a grandmother who I claimed for myself alone (despite her other grandchildren).  It was me that would trek the ten mile hike to turn up at her door.

 ‘Heya, granny!’

‘Hello, little man!’ she would smile and make me tea, and then, when I was occupied, would telephone my mum to let her know I was safe.

I was the car boot pirate.

‘Oh, little man, you scared the living daylights out of me!!’  But her pounding heart was forgiving, and when we’d get home, she’d offer me a jam tart because I must be hungry.  I was.  Surprises were hard work

I was the oak staircase spy; dinner parties were my work - the swirl of ladies, the guffaw of their husbands; granny handing back some gloves to a lady, a hint of red in the cheek, which she must have left somewhere…

‘I’m sure they don’t belong to me.’

And Grandpa, at the drinks cabinet, swimming at ease in his little pool of pearly smiles.  I can’t remember any of those ladies faces.  Granny beat them at their game just by keeping her living daylights safe inside.  She glowed; they all imitated.  I watched her from the staircase, glad it was only me who could sometimes surprise them out of her.

I was the mini detective.  I’d swipe the garage keys and penetrate my Grandpa’s secret cell: the Jaguar! Inside, the odour of squeaky leather and perfume was overpowering and I never understood the dangling teddies, encumbered by hearts, the emblazoned I love you’s… This was a side of granny I didn’t know!  It seemed far more in keeping with those dazzling, faceless ladies.  One teddy sat above the glove compartment, his seams unpicked with the years, so long had this collection been going on.

*

After Grandpa’s accident on the A17, I imagined the teddy’s strewn all over, the hearts shaken from their laps …. But then I conjured up granny’s liberation; no supper to prepare, dinner parties to arrange, gloves to hand back.  Her postcard from Canada describing  hosts of wild flowers is still on my fridge, as if she was still over there, as if I was waiting for her to come back.  She died at a ripe old age, a happy lady. God Bless her.  Releasing me to disclose something that Little Man has kept with him an awfully long time…

One night, I went down the oak stair case - torch in hand, the keys pinched during the early evening -and made it into the garage unbeknownst to the alarm lights.  Secret detective cool, culprit keen.  Quietly the Jaguar let me in…and  I stuffed the little alarm into the teddy on the dashboard;  a little surprise for grandpa this time, programmed for somewhere along the A17 which - I promise - was only meant to scare him half to death.