The Painted Word #14

Delving Yardbarker’s post about Place on their blog Faded Houses Green, started me thinking about what place has meant to me over the years, and how that affects my story making.

My best childhood places and events resonate in me with bursts of color. My first clear self-remembered memory is of the upturned faces of golden dandelion flowers starring the flooded and frozen grassland where my father took me and my little brothers ice skating. I was about six-years-old and had ‘proper’ child-sized skates. My brothers had flat, double-edged pieces of Meccano strapped under their shoes.

Much further on in the same year there were the glory of dahlias in a three-brick high garden bed in the backyard. A riot of pinks, plum red, orange, and golds that pronged into my eyes and heart so that I was rarely aware of the voracious pigeons sharing the backyard, quarreling over the feed scattered over the patio.

The master bedroom was curtained with a pink-orange tinted cotton. When the afternoon sun shone through, the room glowed red-gold, and I loved to be there then. Roundabout when I turned seven, my mother said that I wasn’t to hover at the bedroom door and make a nuisance of myself. She’d loaned the bedroom to a pair of unmarried teenagers expecting twins, and life became grey and ordinary for a while. Grey skies. Grey streets, red-grey brick houses. Seven dried up leaves on the sapling outside the front door.

One autumn we camped at a place called ‘Ommen’ where golden chanterelle mushrooms grew in the pine and beech forests nearby. My mother took us mushroom hunting and to find the little triangular brown beechnuts that fit exactly between my first three finger tips. Fried together on the primus camp-stove, these ‘fruits of the forest’ made dinner that night a feast.

And so I find that most of my clearest, earliest, visual memories of places are to do with warm vibrant colors. Being given my first orange when I was about eight years old, what a delicious thrill that was. I kept it for days in a special tin under my bed, to take it out and drink in its glory. Hot golden potato fries deliciously fragrant with mayonnaise that we sometimes had from a particular shop in De Haag on the way home from a long trip.

My first Lego set, the size of a packet of cigarettes, that had enough red bricks in it to build a little house, and that because I received it as a going-away present, I will always associate with the ship we traveled on to Indonesia.

Of course there were more colors. Skies of washed-out blue, steel grey or unbroken cloud. The North Sea, when I saw it, was usually also steel grey. River boats were brown or slick grey with rain and river water. The Hoogovens (steelworks) had a tall chimney belching out yellow-grey. Shades of green did not particularly impress me in those childhood days. The saddest book I ever read had covers of dark green leather.

When I look back on those years, it seems now that most people then kept their vibrant colors for indoors. Traditionalists had their rich red Persian rugs as table covers—after a meal they swept crumbs from them using a special stoffer-en-blikje, (dustpan and brush), with brass handles. Needle-worked scatter cushions and cross-stitched wall hangings brightened cosy living rooms. Highly polished brass planters and vases reflected firelight and old fashioned oil lamps.

Experiment with watercolor paint and starburst foil