by Ali Smith
But most of all, I have never met anyone like her.
She is herself.
A child hardly formed, hardly speaking, and yet she is so much an assured and completed self already in some ways that she is often a puzzle to me and clearly regards me as a puzzle too, sometimes looks at me very questioningly.
I said to her one day when she was looking at me, who do you think you’re looking at? She replied, with real seriousness, you.
One other thing. She can sing, already, tunefully, and she knows without being told how to make up harmonies, and does them naturally. She sits and sings to herself and I have heard her sing too with the lady who keeps the room we live in. Now this talent is definitely not one of ours.
It must come from her father.
In fact I owe to her harmony, dear Dani, what I thought tonight lying next to her as she fell asleep.
It’s that the foulness happening every day round us is a growth without roots. Goodness is more like turnip!
The foulness just wants one thing, more of its self. It wants self self self self nothing but self over and over again. I begin to realize that this makes it very like the blowaway moss that spreads fast across everything but can easily be kicked away because its grip is only about surface.
Just the act of thinking this kicks it loose and blows it away.
Big thoughts. You know me. I won’t spare you from them.
When I was a callow schoolgirl full of my own cleverness (yes all right dearest Dani I still am – at least the latter, if well past the former) I thought such a load of rot about things.
I really believed I could hold all the knowledge in me, all the narratives, all the poems, all the art, all the learning – and that this gathering and holding of all of these things meant I now owned these things and that to do this was the reason for living.
These days what do I know?
Close to nothing.
But one thing I do know now is that I don’t hold any of those things I thought I owned.
Instead, all those things hold me. They hold us all under the sky.
I’m about to burn this. Like we said we would.
I wonder if you’ve remembered?
Not that I doubt you. I never will.
Its warmth will reach you one way or another
so rest assured
your autumn sister
sends it with love
to her summer brother.
15 June 2020
—
Dear Hero,
—
We haven’t yet met, and if you didn’t get my last letter you will wonder why someone you don’t know is writing to you. Suffice to say I am a friend and I am writing to send friendly wishes.
How are you?
I really hope you are well.
I’m sending this letter via our friends’ email this time so they will forward it to you wherever you are.
I’ve been doing some online studies into your name. It is an every day kind of thing to you, but believe me to the rest of us it is a pretty amazing thing to be called. First I looked up the Greek inventor and maths genius Hero, who pretty much invented the wind farm, was one of the first people to realize human beings can harness the wind for power, plus he invented the first engine powered by hot water and a very early form of self powering fountain. Apparently he was an atomist. I just shouted through to my little brother Robert who thinks he is teaching himself to play a violin in the next room, in other words he is making an appalling noise, and asked him about the atomists, and he tells me atomists believed that individuals are complete indivisible atoms, separate from each other, and if you take an atomist view then you are looking at separate parts of an idea or a subject rather than all the things that go to make up the whole thing. The good thing is, me asking him stopped him making that noise with the violin. But he has started again now.
I also found in folklore a female character called Hero – and the fact that it can also be a girl’s name really pleased me. Hero, the girl, was a Mythical Figure who was in love with Leander, a boy who would swim every night to Hero’s tower, lit up like a lighthouse. In the end though of course this turns into a tragic story. One night at the end of their summer of love a sea storm blew Hero’s tower’s light out and Leander got lost in the waves and drowned.
Well some old stories are like that!
I suppose this is so that we can deal with the sad things that happen to us.
Anyway the poet John Keats wrote a version of this story saying that Leander pretty much gets drowned by the light of Hero’s beauty. Like she was the lighthouse. It seemed a bit sexist to me, so I made up my own poem:
In the waves Leander
Went for a meander
Hit a spot of bother
And now he is quite other
Dear oh dear oh
Don’t worry Hero
Hero don’t cry
Love will never die
Hope you don’t think it too cheeky. But I wanted to change an old hopeless story to something a bit funnier. I have really had enough of sadness. There is so much this year. And we are lucky. None of us have been ill. But an old lady from across the road who went into a home last year, I don’t want to key in the word died, but she did, she died. So did twelve other people in the home she was in, over one weekend, and a careworker, and the healthworker who saw the careworker, who had symptoms. And one of the teachers from the primary school down the road from here. And an NHS nurse my mother knew.
It is so sad.
Our postman is brilliant. His name is Sam and he works so hard it’s like encountering a small dynamo. He thinks he probably had it in March but he never had a test and still hasn’t been able to get one. It means he can’t go and see his family. His parents are elderly and miles away from here, in Blackpool. We also know more than fifty people in all who have had what sounds like it symptom-wise, but couldn’t get tested by anyone. So they don’t know, and they were really ill at home, like Sam, and scared, and no one helped them, and no official body has listed them in any statistics. A lot of my friends know a lot of people this happened to. Now the government wants them for antibodies and plasma but then nobody wanted to know, they were just left on their own thinking they were dying. And some of them did die.
My father’s business is garrotted. Right now we’d have no money for anything if it wasn’t for his partner Ashley, who is generously paying the bills and buying food not just for him but for us too, till my father can get any money out of the government, who keep saying he’s not valid for any.
Personally I had so many plans that now have had to be chucked out of the window that I am determined to make something better out of this time. These teenage years are supposed to be amazing. I’m 16 and the highlight of my last three months has been watching crap movies on Netflix party with my friends.
But I believe one good thing that will come out of this is that my already trampled on generation will be evermore resilient. We will be aware of how lucky we are to spend time with our friends because we will know what it’s like to live without them. And by God we will treasure our freedoms and we will fight for them in the name of all that is good.
I also feel like we are shortchanging the thousands and thousands of people who have died – just by still being alive.
My brother Robert is holding out for medical geniuses to invent a vaccine. I am holding out for the geniuses who invent the vaccine to also be climate change geniuses.
Then we might have a future.
It is why, Hero, you along with all the key workers in the NHS and the people working so hard keeping things going, like Sam, are my heroes, along with the people fighting to protect climate, and every single person protesting what happened to George Floyd.
I have a vision that the modern sense of being a hero is like shining a bright l
ight on things that need to be seen. I guess that if someone does this it brings its own consequences. For instance if you are a bright light on social media, then people get quite angry and will attack you equally as much as they are drawn like moths to your flame.
But now maybe we will realize that we have to stop being poisonous to each other and the world. I know how naive that is, because poisonous stuff has never stopped happening. Our history class on zoom was zoombombed with a porn image which we all saw, for example. But I guess there will always be porn and poison, and human beings will always have to decide whether to be poisonous to others or not, whether we are in a pandemic or not.
I suppose what has happened here and all over the world in these few months with the lockdown has given us all a very mild dose of what it is like every day for you. I know it is not at all the same, nothing like being kept in prison conditions – and this when you are not a criminal.
It is also amazing to me that you might now not be in detention any more and might be homeless with nobody knowing where you are. Our friend wrote and told us that people in detention have just quietly been getting released but with nowhere to go or to stay and no money to survive on.
Dear Hero, I hope you are okay. I have to say it is amazing to me that the thing that gets people let out of illegal indefinite detention when they are innocent in the first place is a virus – not a more kindly human nature, or understanding, or a good law. I’m also quite worried for someone else I know, who is homeless. The news says homeless people have been give rooms in hotels. I’ve no idea if he got one or not. Why would we do these things for people only when there is a virus and not all the time?
But these are not the only reason I am writing.
I am writing again because the swifts came back! I was shouting with happiness in the street when I saw them in the sky. There aren’t as many as last year apparently, but all the same they are here.
I’ve just realized, if you didn’t get my last letter you won’t know what I’m talking about. In it I wrote at length about my favourite birds – the swifts. They always come back to the same nesting place they left last year if they can, so long as it hasn’t been renovated and made into an AirBnB – which no one except swifts can stay at now anyway because of the virus! I can’t help but find that funny though I know a lot of people will be angry about it.
The swifts have come across the world singly not with their mate. They meet up when they get back to the nesting place. They stay together for life when it comes to having their babies here. Then when they’ve had them they split up till they meet again next year for more mating. It seems to me it might save a few marriages if human beings did this too for 3/4 of the year.
The nests they have are like small flat rings made of feathers and paper or stuff they collect in the air. They glue it all together with their saliva in a little ring shape or shallow bowl or cup shape that will hold the eggs in place. Then they take turns incubating or keeping the eggs warm. Their babies hatch out with a day between each one so that it’s not too full on for the parent swifts. Nature is so intelligent.
In pictures of what their babies look like right now they’re nothing like swifts yet, more like grotesque pink skin bags with no feathers, huge heads that look heavy to lift, eyes that can’t yet see.
But nature’s so clever that the babies can go into a kind of comatose state if the parents for some reason don’t come back with food, and can last quite a long time in case of misfortune to a parent or bad weather.
Even without misfortune the parents have to work pretty hard collecting something like 1,000 flies and insects each and every time they go out, which they keep in pouches in their throats rolled together into a food ball and deliver on their return to their baby swifts.
So if you see or hear them now above you, you can be pretty sure what they are doing is collecting food. Soon their babies will be doing push ups in the nesting place with their wings, strengthening themselves for the long flight back to Africa. What is really astounding is that when they fledge and leave the nest it’s the first time that they actually fly anywhere, and as soon as they hit the air they won’t touch down again for at least a year, more usually a couple of years.
Six weeks or so from now, that’s when they’ll leave.
‘That’s the summer over’ my mother will say when we look up at a swiftless sky.
But not yet!
There are still some weeks left.
Whenever you hear them above you, remember they also bring friendly greetings from me.
Best wishes and good health to you.
I hope you get this letter,
with warm wishes
from your friend
Sacha
(Greenlaw)
3
So, when she’s in her early twenties, at the start of the 1950s, Lorenza Mazzetti arrives in England as part of a group of students invited here from the University of Florence on an initiative to bring people from mainland Europe to help with work on British farms.
She’s the filmmaker whose images I described earlier, the image of the men who can’t speak or hear crossing the rubble conversing with each other and the image of the man with the two suitcases on the edge of the high building.
The Italian students land in Dover and the first thing that happens is a thorough police search of each person bodily, then of each person’s luggage. The police take Mazzetti’s passport from her. When they give it back she is astonished to see that it’s been stamped with the words Undesirable and Alien.
As it happens Mazzetti will be useless at farm work, too weak and too nervy. With hindsight it’s clear that this is because she’s had quite a war: in 1944, when she was in her teens, a group of Nazi officers arrived at the house in Tuscany where she and her twin sister Paola were being brought up as part of the family of their father’s sister, Nina: the Mazzetti twins’ mother had died not long after giving birth, and so far in their lives they’d been passed from person to person, family to family. But now they were finally home, living with Nina and her husband, Robert Einstein, who was a cousin of Albert Einstein, and their slightly older cousins, Luce and Anna Maria.
That summer the Germans in Italy were being driven back by the oncoming Allied forces. One beautiful sunny day the Wehrmacht officers came to the house and when they couldn’t find Robert, who’d decamped to the woods because he knew they were after him, they did two things.
They wrecked the house.
They killed all the Einsteins they could find – Nina and her daughters.
They decided not to kill Lorenza Mazzetti or her sister because their surname wasn’t Einstein.
The twins, who’d been locked away with other villagers while the killing happened, came back into the house to the dead bodies of their cousins and their aunt.
Their uncle came back to the bodies too. Not long afterwards he committed suicide.
In England, now, Mazzetti is as close to nervous breakdown as you might imagine given such a history. She infuriates the farmer to whose farm she’s been assigned by not being strong enough to carry heavy sacks, by not being good enough at picking the bad potatoes off a conveyor belt, by burning the dinner she’s meant to be cooking for the other students and by not being fast enough at mucking out a manure heap.
He throws her off the farm.
So she gets herself to London to find a job and somewhere to live.
But something deeply fractured in her means that each job she takes results in a kind of surreality.
A woman employs her as a live-in maid in the suburbs but ends up throwing all her stuff out into the road, calling the police and accusing her of stealing. (Later Mazzetti discovers it’s she who’s been being stolen from by the woman.)
A lovely happy family in a lovely happy house in the city give her a maid’s position and welcome her warmly into their lovely life. But
in the lovely happy family she is suddenly even more surrounded by the ghosts, standing and sitting and walking all round her, silent, smiling, bleeding from the places the teenage Mazzetti saw the holes the bullets had made in them.
With my suitcase I run away in search of some unhappiness.
She wanders the streets by herself.
Men follow her about, harassing her for sex.
But London policemen, it turns out, are exceptionally kind to her. They take her out of the rain and give her cups of tea and repeatedly allow her to spend the winter night in the warmth of a police station. And one day when she’s wandering the streets lost, a family sees her lostness and invites her in off the street for a meal in their house. It’s the first time she ever tastes curry.
She eventually gets a job serving and washing dishes at a restaurant near Charing Cross that sells nothing but omelettes and soup.
She manages to keep this job.
But it’s not her real job. What she has always been, since she was a child, is an artist. Very late in what will turn out to be a long life (she’ll die in Rome at the beginning of 2020, at the age of ninety two), her friend Ruggero will recall the way his own family would wake after a siesta when he was a child to find paintings by both the twins filling their garden, paintings leaning up against all the trees.
So while she’s been surviving the foggy London years by the skin of her teeth she’s been painting and drawing all along.
One day she takes herself and her work to the Slade School of Art.
She stands in the entrance hall and asks for a place at the school.
They say a polite no. They explain that you can’t just walk in off the street and ask for a place in the school.
She stands in the front hall and won’t move. She says it again. She wants a place at the art school.