Holiday Clues: Owls, Morecambe, Mud, Mice.
We’re back. Back from our hols with an assortment of souvenirs - a pink crystal and a couple of fossils from the the White Scar Caves, two new torches from a camping shop in Kendal, a fridge magnet mouse from Hemingford Grey Manor - and an equally random array of clues in our treasure hunt for a home. We were expecting this kind of random selection of stuff, but there was also a part of us, of course, that wanted to strike instant gold, unearth a chest, to find the answers glittering under the ‘X’ on our map.
We didn’t. No visions. No love at first sight. No dramatic or startling discoveries. In fact, the thing we spent most of our time hunting down, like treasure, were functioning type two charging points for the electric car, which I insisted on buying when I purchased a vehicle a year ago. One of my holiday souvenirs is the sobering experience that my tiny contribution to averting climate catastrophe did nothing to lower the temperature of my immediate environment, resulting as it did in huge inconvenience and family-wide meltdowns.
However, as we unpack, recover, I remember that we have committed to approaching this quest for a home just as we would approach the making of a show. In other words, it is okay - more than okay- not to have any answers at this stage, and even inconveniences may be relevant. If we were in a rehearsal room right now, we would be putting images up on the wall - not interpreting them, not ordering them - just, as we stumble across them, sticking them up there.
In our process now, this is our rehearsal room wall.
Here, then, up on the wall for you to see, are the images we have gathered from the last week..
An owl called Douglas, with his keeper, called Malcolm.
We met Douglas by chance, over breakfast at a hotel, a few miles away from the home of Alan and Griselda Garner, where we had the honour of seeing, with our own eyes, those magical plates that inspired The Owl Service
The money trees, on our waterfall trail walk in Ingleton
They were amazing - the closest thing to real treasure that we found. Thousands of coins pressed into the bark. So many that it made the trees look like dragons, with thick, scaly hides, snaking out of the earth. The children each pressed one more penny into them.
The statue of Eric Morecambe, in Morecambe Bay.
“Bring Me Sunshine”. Photo: Phelim McDermott
We sang ‘Bring me Sunshine’ and then after we had taken the photo we watched the sun sink over the bay. This, at the end of a day of disappointments, in which Happy Mount Park turned out to be less full of excitement than Phelim remembered it from his boyhood, when he went on the “Jumping Jimmies” and sprained his ankle.
A sandy beach that turned out to be a mud one.
Another day of things not going quite to plan. But we enjoyed running along the water’s edge, as if in Chariots of Fire, and then sliding dramatically into a different kind of film altogether.
Hemingford Grey Manor
And last, on the way back, we stopped off (because neither the kids nor the car can manage more than a hundred miles at a time) in the fens, with the eels, and visited Hemingford Grey Manor, which is the house where Lucy M. Boston lived and wrote the Green Knowe books.
I am actually called after those books. My legal name is Linnet. My second name is Matilda. The girl, Linnet, in the books, is one of the secret, hidden children in the house, and my secret, hidden name is hers. Diana Boston, Lucy’s daughter-in-law, showed us round, sharing the many elements of the house that made it into Lucy’s stories, including the wooden mouse, the rocking horse, and the crack in the floorboards where the chaffinch finds the key to the toy box of treasures.
So, our holiday did end with a treasure box, after all, and it was bookended with books- The Owl Service and The Children of Green Knowe - magical children’s books.
I do not know what all these images mean, but one thing strikes me as I look at them as a group - they are pictures of people, and/ or animals, not of places. I wonder whether we have been focussing on the wrong question. We might do well to ask, not ‘Where?’ But ‘Who?’
As we acknowledged in our first Gathering post, we cannot do this alone. We need allies, partners, collaborators of every ilk, who have many kinds of skills that we lack. Gardeners, ecologists, educators, builders, chefs - a whole cherry tree’s worth of different professions.
Maybe you are one of the things listed above, or maybe you know someone who has some of the skills we need. If you do, and you haven’t already got in touch, please write to us. But whoever you are reading this, you are already a ‘who’ who is helping us, with your engagement. Thank you for the fantastic replies to these posts that many of you have written. We will be sharing some of these (with your permission) - other people’s voices that we want to put up on our rehearsal room wall. As Malcolm explained, over our hotel breakfast, when you hear the classic tawny owl’s cry “twit twoo” it is actually two owls - a call, and a response. “Twit,” says one, “Twoooo,” says another. Thank you for all your ‘twoo-ing’ back to us. And did you now that an owl’s ears are on its face? And that, from 25 feet away, it can hear a mouse’s heartbeat?
Mr Barn Owl and Mr Tawny Owl. Picture by Riddley McDermott
