CREATIVE NONFICTION
HANNAH LOWE
LUNARIA
1
The man in the dried flower shop is so beautiful, so at ease with himself, it almost hurts. He stands on the middle step, framed by wreathes of heather, the way women are sometimes framed in art deco paintings. He tells us about the shop – only open a few months, neighbour to the boutique gift shops and artisan cafes that line this street, and sister to the shop opposite which sells wildly overpriced hanging plants, the sort I buy but can’t keep alive – String of Bananas, String of Hearts.
How’s business? Jane asks, bending her nose to some lavender.
Not bad, he says. Twink of a smile. Picking up for Christmas.
Jane likes to smell, to lift things and inhale them. Candles, bottles of bath salts in the shop next door. She likes to talk to shop keepers. I’m more of a hoverer. I don’t touch. I feel bad for whoever has to rearrange things when we leave.
Jane chats and lifts and smells, making her way around. I watch the man from the corner of my eye. As we’re about to go, she stops as though she has remembered something. You don’t sell Honesty plants, do you?
Yes, indeed we do, he says, disappearing to the back, returning with a bouquet wrapped in cellophane. They are just as I remembered. Flat, fragile moon-coloured pods, black wire rims.
Oh my god! she says. We’ve been hunting for these. Look, Han. She takes the bouquet from him and hands it to me. We have been talking about these flowers for months. Jane’s mum used to keep them, as mine did.
Hang on, he says and vanishes again, returning with a second bunch, passing it to her. I catch our reflection in the window. Dusk outside. We look like middle-aged bridesmaids, the glow of fairy lights around us, bouquets of dead flowers in our arms.
Yours is bigger, Jane laughs.
I compare, my hands tightening around the stalks. I always called them Lunaria, I tell him.
That’s the proper name, he says. Not sure why they’re called Honesty.
Jane pulls out her purse. Let’s just get your one. How much?
£20 for you, he says, friendly, flirty, pushing his black curls from his face. I bet his name is something like Jack or Ben or Johnny.
Jane pays, and I carry my Lunaria back to the car.
2
Up close, Lunaria are thin, crisp and brittle. Move them, they rattle. Their pods are so thin and skeletal they seem impossible. Each is different, bent or curved in its own particular way. Each moves light and shadow. Some may be a little torn, others perfect in their frailness. They carry a sheen of light, somewhere between satin and silk. They remind me of potato chips I’ve only had in Spain and Portugal – cut more finely than crisps here, transparent. We used to eat them on the beach, when my son was small, before I left his father.
If you place a finger behind the pod, you can see it clearly. But hold one to a window and the longer view is blurred, fragmented. Hold the edges between a finger and thumb, you might feel, as I do, the urge to squeeze, to split the pod – the baffling urge to break what’s delicate and precious.
3
On the wall of the hall in my childhood home, a painting I spent hours looking at. I thought it was Chinese, because the boy and mother depicted in it looked, to me, Chinese – in their faces and hair, the style of their clothes. The boy, who is maybe four or five, is crouched in the foreground of the painting, and behind him, her back turned, his mother sits. They are busy arranging flowers in vases. The artist has painted them in thick black brush strokes with only a little colour – pale yellow and mid brown.
Knowing nothing about my Chinese grandfather, except I had one, I believed, in that way children will try to join dots, this boy must have been him – my father’s father, Lowe Shu On. And the woman was my great-grandmother, whose name I have never known. The painting is signed, ‘Ha Van Vuong’, a title I presumed to be Chinese, never wondering how Ha Van Vuong had come to paint my ancestors. Only later, in my teens, did I understand the painting wasn’t a family portrait, wasn’t an heirloom.
After my dad had died, and the house had gone, and then another and another, the painting became mine. I lugged it through rented flats all over London, to the home where I have now lived for years, as a small family at first, now just me and my son.
Sometimes I show my students a photograph of this painting in a PowerPoint presentation. I ask which of them were born here but have parents from another place. In the dark of the lecture theatre, they raise their hands. I asked them how they know this other place, if they have never been there? More hands. Food, they tell me. One girl says she talks on the phone to her grandmother in Ethiopia every week. Books, photographs. Someone mentions paintings from Trinidad, another a statue of Ganesh.
I tell them about the painting, how I invested it with meaning as a child, filling in the spaces of my family story, which is also a story of migration. I tell them how I showed the painting to an academic friend years ago, and told him its significance to me. That’s your diasporic imagination, he said, like a medical diagnosis. My students laugh. I laugh with them. It is harder to talk about longing and absence, trauma, violence, the heart simultaneously overfull and hollow.
On the way out, one girl stops to tell me how much she likes the painting. We stand looking at the image on the screen. What are they doing? she asks.
Arranging flowers?
I think he’s peeling them, she says. They’re Honesty plants.
4
Lunaria look like little silver moons, hence the Luna part of their name. They are of the brassica family, along with cabbages and turnips, a fact that makes me laugh – the beautiful, ornate Lunaria related to the ugly and practical turnip.
Apparently, Thomas Jefferson grew Lunaria in his garden. The pilgrims bought them to America on the Mayflower, calling them silver dollars. There are many other common names:, money-in-both-pockets, money plant, moneywort, moonwort. In England, they are also sometimes known as the pricksong-flower, the pods reminiscent of the notes of Elizabethan musical manuscripts, called pricksongs.
5
After shopping, I pick my son up from school. It is dark now, the sky hazed by streetlamps. The boy comes through the gates with his coat half hanging off him, his rucksack slung on one shoulder.
Full moon! he calls, pointing to the sky. I open the door for him, moving the Lunaria to the back shelf. He climbs in, smelling of autumn. Careful not to lean on them, I say.
He is so comfortable in his existence, I think, just as it is, at this moment in time. He likes the simple routines of school and home, breakfast, bedtime, school day, weekend.
King of my life, I whisper into his red hair at night. Best thing that ever happened.
6
As a child, knowledge came from the single encyclopaedia we’d had for years on the shelf – dusty, falling apart at the seam – and full of information that couldn’t be easily updated or revised. Then came the internet, though I remember a time when its cupboards were half empty. You could search for something, say ‘cultures of exile’ (I was taking a Social Studies Masters at this point in time, and one of the modules had this name, a term I didn’t fully understand), and only find a few relevant hits. I would print out whatever was useful and file it in a ring binder.
Now everything, almost everything, is knowable. It was the internet that told me, a decade ago, that Ha Van Vuong was a Vietnamese name, but that the artist was Lucienne Agnes Ha Van Vuong – not Chinese, not Vietnamese, but a woman born in England to French parents, who had studied Art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. She married a Vietnamese student and lived many years in Vietnam, starting to paint, signing her paintings with her husband’s name.
7
Home from school, I place the Lunaria in a vase on a table in my bedroom. The table is really an altar, to Aphrodite, goddess of love, made when I came back from a festival this summer, still broken-hearted over the baby I chose not to have, still finding distraction wherever I could. I had been reading a book on witchcraft. It said this kind of altar had power in two ways – to elicit romance or create love for oneself. I didn’t think the latter could harm me.
On the round brass stand, I laid out a stone statue of Aphrodite, a bowl of sea salt, dried roses, a shell my son found on the beach in Thailand this summer.
Sometimes I kneel there and light a pink candle. I try to meditate, but thought after thought rise up in me like petals in water.
8
I would like to see the purple flowers that become Lunaria. They smell sweet to the bees, I read on a blog. They like the shade of hedgerows. The blogger is also called Jane. She writes of how to dry the seed pods – cutting the flowers on a dry day, leaving for a couple of weeks before the careful peeling of the outer case, brushing off the seeds to reveal the inner casing – the pale moons of the dried pod.
I would like to sit among women – daughters, mothers, grandmothers – in the way Jane describes, intimately engaged in the tasks of the house:
There are activities that keep the hands busy but the mind free to wander, simple repetitive activities that can be done together, activities that enter the fabric of our lives, fondly remembered, passing down generations.
It is, I believe, the attraction of the quilting bee, the podding of peas in June, the carving of crosses into the heels of brussels sprouts on Christmas Eve.
The woman’s work. It sounds harmonious, but a part of me ask where the men are while the women peel their brussels sprouts?
Another part of me longs for a life where you came to Lunaria, not through a posh dried flower shop in Crouch End, but by picking, drying, peeling them yourself.
9
I have been looking for so long – looking, inventing – it is difficult to know what is true, what’s fiction, what misremembered.
This week I found a Facebook group about Ha Van Voung. Members have posted photographs of her paintings. There is a photo of Lucienne herself, from 1985. She must be in her seventies – a thin, pale face, moon-shaped eyes, a white halo of hair.
I scroll through images of her artworks, many the same style as my painting – broad brush strokes, pale colours, sometimes poppies or peonies, bowls of fruit, sometimes people – a woman playing a mandolin, two women selling bananas.
I find an image of my painting posted with this comment:
Purchased this today from a local charity shop. I remember it fondly hanging in my parents’ house when I was a little girl. £5 bargain. Called 'Mothers Helper' x
‘Nice…I have the exact same one on my wall’ someone else has commented.
‘One of my favourites.’
10
My son’s class make lanterns for Chinese New Year, hanging the red paper bulbs around their classroom. His teacher stops me at home time. She is young, always in a floral dress and thick glasses that magnify her eyes.
He’s telling the class that he’s Chinese, she says pensively. Perhaps she thinks he’s lying, perhaps confused. I think of how much I’ve told him about his ancestry, my determination to have him understand the different places he comes from, the overlapping histories that have resulted in his life. I don’t want him to know the uncertainty I felt as a child in a house stunted by silence.
He is part Chinese, I tell her, explaining his background while her cheeks blush red as the hanging lanterns.
That night, the boy slips from his bed into mine. I reach for his foot with my hand, holding his warm heel in my palm. This is how we’ve slept for years – my hand under his foot, wanting connection, wanting him to feel rooted.
11
My mother kept Lunaria in pots around the house, along with Pampas grass and bowls of pink and purple pot pourri. We had Chinese wall hangings and art deco style mirrors, like the ones by Alphonse Mucha, the set of reproductions portraying Summer, Spring, Autumn, Winter, each with a woman stood surrounded by plants and colours of the season. We had Autumn. A woman in a kaftan holding a basket of oranges. The colours are beige, umber, cinnamon. I still have it on my wall. I have held on to everything I could.
The Mucha mirrors, and now I realise, the paintings by Ha Van Vuong, were produced, if not on mass, then certainly in significant numbers. Perhaps my parents bought ‘Mother’s Helper’ in Athena, which must have sold printed reproductions on wooden boards, before the huge posters they became famous for. I remember flipping through those posters as a teenager, in the Athena shop in Romford. I bought one of two dolphins leaping in tandem from the water. Another, the most famous, is a black and white photo of a young handsome man, shirtless and muscular, holding a baby. Everyone loved that poster. I was too young then to understand its tropes or its message about new masculinity. Later they made a documentary about what happened to the model and the baby. The former apparently made no money from the photo, slept with over three thousand women, got lost in drug addiction. He’s a builder now. The baby, who was called Stelios, is a lawyer in Cyprus.
I blue-tacked the dolphin poster to the wall of my bedroom. Our house was large, Edwardian, with a front garden full of roses. My mum decorated constantly, a continuous whirl of room renovation, walls painted and papered, floorboards sanded and waxed, new curtains, sofas, armchairs, the fitting of wardrobes, new carpets, kitchen units. Everything was paid for on her credit cards and my dad’s occasional win on the horses or cards. The house looked as though we had money, but the foundations were smoke. It soon blew away.
12
Jane is my neighbour, a woman I have spent hours with, popping into each other’s flats for cups of tea. She lives with her grown up daughters. She is a midwife and a homeopath – strong in her opinions, in a way I have never been. Funny, warm, unorthodox, still beautiful in her late fifties. She is the closest thing I have to family. Her daughters often babysit for my son, who loves them deeply. Jane is twelve years older than me, but I would have loved for her to be my mum.
She has told me about her life as a single mother, living in a tiny damp flat in Muswell Hill.
‘We spent all of our time out,’ she says. ‘Avoiding the flat. Always me and the girls’.
They are three points of a triangle – so obviously related with their long middle-parted black hair, their faces like reproductions of each other’s. Even now they are grown, she helps them with their essays, their job applications, their navigations of love. It is hard to compare. Please adopt me, I say, only half joking.
13
Sometimes I google myself – does everyone? – and find my Wikipedia entry has grown. New details, new books and accolades have been added. My birthdate – wrong for years – has been corrected. I wonder who is interested in me enough to keep this record, who reads it? It is strange to see myself in these encyclopaedic terms – my education, quotations, publication dates – the huge and wavering chasm between this public representation and the self I live with every day, with my neuroses, depressions, my attempts at healing and ways I survive – writing, reading, researching, filling my mind with more and more information. I think of the Swiss ball I’ve recently purchased, how my son and I pumped it up, never sure if one more pump! might be the pump to burst it. This is what my brain feels like – taut and inflamed, endlessly useful.
When I was thirty-nine, I miscarried at the launch of my second book. I’d known for two days that the foetus had died in my womb. Should I have cancelled the launch? Of course. Instead I emerged from the pub toilet into a room packed with friends, family, fellow writers. I smiled and chatted and read at the microphone, just missing a beat when my voice cracked in the middle of a poem.
‘Not like you to drop a line,’ a male writer-friend said afterwards, sidling up to me with his pint. He was not really a friend, but a man I’d had casual sex with, on and off, for some years. Later, he became a fiction writer. There was judgement in his words and a little condescension, which had always been his forte. How could I tell him that while my body appeared to be in the room, the real me was in a toilet cubical just through the wall, holding her head in her hands?
14
There is an almost imperceptible tousle between Jane and I over the name. I’m married to the word I know from childhood, as she is to Honesty, a moniker the flower acquired sometime in the 16th Century, because of the ‘truthfulness’ of its transparent pods. I understand how this name would be embraced – some words carry such power and resonance. Honesty is virtue, goodness, candour. It is pitched against dishonesty, corruption, deceit. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ wrote Edwin Sandings, sometime in the 1500s, a proverb I heard repeated endlessly as a child.
I think honesty is fraught with nuance. What would Sandings have to say about the way a child forms their beliefs about their life, when those who should love her, instead hurt her? There is no objective honesty when she thinks to herself I’m bad, or I deserve this. If the other option is to see those she knows and loves as people who neglect or torment her. Self-deceit, if that is what we call this, is survival, strategy, the only way to cope with a thundering world. Honesty, at this point, is out of reach.
After my father died and my mum became ill, my throat swelled up and ached for months. I kept going to the doctor, trying not to notice her sigh when I entered the room. It wasn’t an infection. No medicine worked. One night it swelled up so tightly, the gates of my tonsils closed and I could no longer see the back of my throat. When I tried to talk, I couldn’t breathe. My boyfriend drove me to A & E, where a doctor diagnosed quinsy and said I needed an operation. Another doctor took a second look and said it wasn’t. In the morning, the swelling had gone down and they sent me home.
15
Today, I’m giving a guest talk to some Masters students. In the corridor outside, I straighten my face, preparing to be looked at, to hold attention, to present expertise. The topic is truth and ethics in life writing – a subject I have thought over in the way one might stroke a cat for hours, days, years.
In the seminar room, the words rattle off my tongue. I make the students laugh, telling anecdotes about my dad’s small-time criminality, retelling my mum’s words about him, saying nothing of my brother and what he did to me. I talk about writing and trauma, the part I can talk about, not the part I’m living.
16
I ride the bus home, below ivory lit angels strung across the high street. Christmas is coming. It is impossible to ignore, the shops already full of gold-wrapped chocolate, puddings and pies. My son, in his first choir, is learning a song I’ve never heard of, about revving up a reindeer. As soon as Bonfire Night is over, the revving up of Christmas begins, and my heart begins to hurt, for the innocence of Christmas I knew as a child, and for the little family Christmasses we made for my son. There was comfort in doing the thing I had been raised to want, and for which the world approves you – coupledom, family, the sharing of celebration.
These days, I would rather celebrate the Wheel of the Year, the eight celebrations to help turn the months. Mabon, Samhain, the Winter Solstice. On and on. Each with their rituals, rooted in paganism, woman-centred, empowering.
Home, I sit at my desk – salvaged from my childhood house, like the painting, like the Markson piano I learnt to play on, which I gave away fifteen years ago, to a man who made it sound better than I ever did. My hands always stuttered over the keys, trying to connect the notes on the stave to my body. He used to play me Stevie Wonder’s ‘Golden Lady’, improvising bluesy runs up and down the keys.
I had the desk restored once it was mine, the mug stains removed, the screws tightened, the wood polished. Now it shines under the gleam of the lamp. I have moved the Lunaria from the bedroom altar to the desk, so I can think about them as I write. Their outlines look like ovals drawn by the thinnest of fine markers.
Then the light outside is falling. I check the clock, pull on my coat, head out to school to collect the boy.
The man in the dried flower shop is so beautiful, so at ease with himself, it almost hurts. He stands on the middle step, framed by wreathes of heather, the way women are sometimes framed in art deco paintings. He tells us about the shop – only open a few months, neighbour to the boutique gift shops and artisan cafes that line this street, and sister to the shop opposite which sells wildly overpriced hanging plants, the sort I buy but can’t keep alive – String of Bananas, String of Hearts.
How’s business? Jane asks, bending her nose to some lavender.
Not bad, he says. Twink of a smile. Picking up for Christmas.
Jane likes to smell, to lift things and inhale them. Candles, bottles of bath salts in the shop next door. She likes to talk to shop keepers. I’m more of a hoverer. I don’t touch. I feel bad for whoever has to rearrange things when we leave.
Jane chats and lifts and smells, making her way around. I watch the man from the corner of my eye. As we’re about to go, she stops as though she has remembered something. You don’t sell Honesty plants, do you?
Yes, indeed we do, he says, disappearing to the back, returning with a bouquet wrapped in cellophane. They are just as I remembered. Flat, fragile moon-coloured pods, black wire rims.
Oh my god! she says. We’ve been hunting for these. Look, Han. She takes the bouquet from him and hands it to me. We have been talking about these flowers for months. Jane’s mum used to keep them, as mine did.
Hang on, he says and vanishes again, returning with a second bunch, passing it to her. I catch our reflection in the window. Dusk outside. We look like middle-aged bridesmaids, the glow of fairy lights around us, bouquets of dead flowers in our arms.
Yours is bigger, Jane laughs.
I compare, my hands tightening around the stalks. I always called them Lunaria, I tell him.
That’s the proper name, he says. Not sure why they’re called Honesty.
Jane pulls out her purse. Let’s just get your one. How much?
£20 for you, he says, friendly, flirty, pushing his black curls from his face. I bet his name is something like Jack or Ben or Johnny.
Jane pays, and I carry my Lunaria back to the car.
2
Up close, Lunaria are thin, crisp and brittle. Move them, they rattle. Their pods are so thin and skeletal they seem impossible. Each is different, bent or curved in its own particular way. Each moves light and shadow. Some may be a little torn, others perfect in their frailness. They carry a sheen of light, somewhere between satin and silk. They remind me of potato chips I’ve only had in Spain and Portugal – cut more finely than crisps here, transparent. We used to eat them on the beach, when my son was small, before I left his father.
If you place a finger behind the pod, you can see it clearly. But hold one to a window and the longer view is blurred, fragmented. Hold the edges between a finger and thumb, you might feel, as I do, the urge to squeeze, to split the pod – the baffling urge to break what’s delicate and precious.
3
On the wall of the hall in my childhood home, a painting I spent hours looking at. I thought it was Chinese, because the boy and mother depicted in it looked, to me, Chinese – in their faces and hair, the style of their clothes. The boy, who is maybe four or five, is crouched in the foreground of the painting, and behind him, her back turned, his mother sits. They are busy arranging flowers in vases. The artist has painted them in thick black brush strokes with only a little colour – pale yellow and mid brown.
Knowing nothing about my Chinese grandfather, except I had one, I believed, in that way children will try to join dots, this boy must have been him – my father’s father, Lowe Shu On. And the woman was my great-grandmother, whose name I have never known. The painting is signed, ‘Ha Van Vuong’, a title I presumed to be Chinese, never wondering how Ha Van Vuong had come to paint my ancestors. Only later, in my teens, did I understand the painting wasn’t a family portrait, wasn’t an heirloom.
After my dad had died, and the house had gone, and then another and another, the painting became mine. I lugged it through rented flats all over London, to the home where I have now lived for years, as a small family at first, now just me and my son.
Sometimes I show my students a photograph of this painting in a PowerPoint presentation. I ask which of them were born here but have parents from another place. In the dark of the lecture theatre, they raise their hands. I asked them how they know this other place, if they have never been there? More hands. Food, they tell me. One girl says she talks on the phone to her grandmother in Ethiopia every week. Books, photographs. Someone mentions paintings from Trinidad, another a statue of Ganesh.
I tell them about the painting, how I invested it with meaning as a child, filling in the spaces of my family story, which is also a story of migration. I tell them how I showed the painting to an academic friend years ago, and told him its significance to me. That’s your diasporic imagination, he said, like a medical diagnosis. My students laugh. I laugh with them. It is harder to talk about longing and absence, trauma, violence, the heart simultaneously overfull and hollow.
On the way out, one girl stops to tell me how much she likes the painting. We stand looking at the image on the screen. What are they doing? she asks.
Arranging flowers?
I think he’s peeling them, she says. They’re Honesty plants.
4
Lunaria look like little silver moons, hence the Luna part of their name. They are of the brassica family, along with cabbages and turnips, a fact that makes me laugh – the beautiful, ornate Lunaria related to the ugly and practical turnip.
Apparently, Thomas Jefferson grew Lunaria in his garden. The pilgrims bought them to America on the Mayflower, calling them silver dollars. There are many other common names:, money-in-both-pockets, money plant, moneywort, moonwort. In England, they are also sometimes known as the pricksong-flower, the pods reminiscent of the notes of Elizabethan musical manuscripts, called pricksongs.
5
After shopping, I pick my son up from school. It is dark now, the sky hazed by streetlamps. The boy comes through the gates with his coat half hanging off him, his rucksack slung on one shoulder.
Full moon! he calls, pointing to the sky. I open the door for him, moving the Lunaria to the back shelf. He climbs in, smelling of autumn. Careful not to lean on them, I say.
He is so comfortable in his existence, I think, just as it is, at this moment in time. He likes the simple routines of school and home, breakfast, bedtime, school day, weekend.
King of my life, I whisper into his red hair at night. Best thing that ever happened.
6
As a child, knowledge came from the single encyclopaedia we’d had for years on the shelf – dusty, falling apart at the seam – and full of information that couldn’t be easily updated or revised. Then came the internet, though I remember a time when its cupboards were half empty. You could search for something, say ‘cultures of exile’ (I was taking a Social Studies Masters at this point in time, and one of the modules had this name, a term I didn’t fully understand), and only find a few relevant hits. I would print out whatever was useful and file it in a ring binder.
Now everything, almost everything, is knowable. It was the internet that told me, a decade ago, that Ha Van Vuong was a Vietnamese name, but that the artist was Lucienne Agnes Ha Van Vuong – not Chinese, not Vietnamese, but a woman born in England to French parents, who had studied Art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. She married a Vietnamese student and lived many years in Vietnam, starting to paint, signing her paintings with her husband’s name.
7
Home from school, I place the Lunaria in a vase on a table in my bedroom. The table is really an altar, to Aphrodite, goddess of love, made when I came back from a festival this summer, still broken-hearted over the baby I chose not to have, still finding distraction wherever I could. I had been reading a book on witchcraft. It said this kind of altar had power in two ways – to elicit romance or create love for oneself. I didn’t think the latter could harm me.
On the round brass stand, I laid out a stone statue of Aphrodite, a bowl of sea salt, dried roses, a shell my son found on the beach in Thailand this summer.
Sometimes I kneel there and light a pink candle. I try to meditate, but thought after thought rise up in me like petals in water.
8
I would like to see the purple flowers that become Lunaria. They smell sweet to the bees, I read on a blog. They like the shade of hedgerows. The blogger is also called Jane. She writes of how to dry the seed pods – cutting the flowers on a dry day, leaving for a couple of weeks before the careful peeling of the outer case, brushing off the seeds to reveal the inner casing – the pale moons of the dried pod.
I would like to sit among women – daughters, mothers, grandmothers – in the way Jane describes, intimately engaged in the tasks of the house:
There are activities that keep the hands busy but the mind free to wander, simple repetitive activities that can be done together, activities that enter the fabric of our lives, fondly remembered, passing down generations.
It is, I believe, the attraction of the quilting bee, the podding of peas in June, the carving of crosses into the heels of brussels sprouts on Christmas Eve.
The woman’s work. It sounds harmonious, but a part of me ask where the men are while the women peel their brussels sprouts?
Another part of me longs for a life where you came to Lunaria, not through a posh dried flower shop in Crouch End, but by picking, drying, peeling them yourself.
9
I have been looking for so long – looking, inventing – it is difficult to know what is true, what’s fiction, what misremembered.
This week I found a Facebook group about Ha Van Voung. Members have posted photographs of her paintings. There is a photo of Lucienne herself, from 1985. She must be in her seventies – a thin, pale face, moon-shaped eyes, a white halo of hair.
I scroll through images of her artworks, many the same style as my painting – broad brush strokes, pale colours, sometimes poppies or peonies, bowls of fruit, sometimes people – a woman playing a mandolin, two women selling bananas.
I find an image of my painting posted with this comment:
Purchased this today from a local charity shop. I remember it fondly hanging in my parents’ house when I was a little girl. £5 bargain. Called 'Mothers Helper' x
‘Nice…I have the exact same one on my wall’ someone else has commented.
‘One of my favourites.’
10
My son’s class make lanterns for Chinese New Year, hanging the red paper bulbs around their classroom. His teacher stops me at home time. She is young, always in a floral dress and thick glasses that magnify her eyes.
He’s telling the class that he’s Chinese, she says pensively. Perhaps she thinks he’s lying, perhaps confused. I think of how much I’ve told him about his ancestry, my determination to have him understand the different places he comes from, the overlapping histories that have resulted in his life. I don’t want him to know the uncertainty I felt as a child in a house stunted by silence.
He is part Chinese, I tell her, explaining his background while her cheeks blush red as the hanging lanterns.
That night, the boy slips from his bed into mine. I reach for his foot with my hand, holding his warm heel in my palm. This is how we’ve slept for years – my hand under his foot, wanting connection, wanting him to feel rooted.
11
My mother kept Lunaria in pots around the house, along with Pampas grass and bowls of pink and purple pot pourri. We had Chinese wall hangings and art deco style mirrors, like the ones by Alphonse Mucha, the set of reproductions portraying Summer, Spring, Autumn, Winter, each with a woman stood surrounded by plants and colours of the season. We had Autumn. A woman in a kaftan holding a basket of oranges. The colours are beige, umber, cinnamon. I still have it on my wall. I have held on to everything I could.
The Mucha mirrors, and now I realise, the paintings by Ha Van Vuong, were produced, if not on mass, then certainly in significant numbers. Perhaps my parents bought ‘Mother’s Helper’ in Athena, which must have sold printed reproductions on wooden boards, before the huge posters they became famous for. I remember flipping through those posters as a teenager, in the Athena shop in Romford. I bought one of two dolphins leaping in tandem from the water. Another, the most famous, is a black and white photo of a young handsome man, shirtless and muscular, holding a baby. Everyone loved that poster. I was too young then to understand its tropes or its message about new masculinity. Later they made a documentary about what happened to the model and the baby. The former apparently made no money from the photo, slept with over three thousand women, got lost in drug addiction. He’s a builder now. The baby, who was called Stelios, is a lawyer in Cyprus.
I blue-tacked the dolphin poster to the wall of my bedroom. Our house was large, Edwardian, with a front garden full of roses. My mum decorated constantly, a continuous whirl of room renovation, walls painted and papered, floorboards sanded and waxed, new curtains, sofas, armchairs, the fitting of wardrobes, new carpets, kitchen units. Everything was paid for on her credit cards and my dad’s occasional win on the horses or cards. The house looked as though we had money, but the foundations were smoke. It soon blew away.
12
Jane is my neighbour, a woman I have spent hours with, popping into each other’s flats for cups of tea. She lives with her grown up daughters. She is a midwife and a homeopath – strong in her opinions, in a way I have never been. Funny, warm, unorthodox, still beautiful in her late fifties. She is the closest thing I have to family. Her daughters often babysit for my son, who loves them deeply. Jane is twelve years older than me, but I would have loved for her to be my mum.
She has told me about her life as a single mother, living in a tiny damp flat in Muswell Hill.
‘We spent all of our time out,’ she says. ‘Avoiding the flat. Always me and the girls’.
They are three points of a triangle – so obviously related with their long middle-parted black hair, their faces like reproductions of each other’s. Even now they are grown, she helps them with their essays, their job applications, their navigations of love. It is hard to compare. Please adopt me, I say, only half joking.
13
Sometimes I google myself – does everyone? – and find my Wikipedia entry has grown. New details, new books and accolades have been added. My birthdate – wrong for years – has been corrected. I wonder who is interested in me enough to keep this record, who reads it? It is strange to see myself in these encyclopaedic terms – my education, quotations, publication dates – the huge and wavering chasm between this public representation and the self I live with every day, with my neuroses, depressions, my attempts at healing and ways I survive – writing, reading, researching, filling my mind with more and more information. I think of the Swiss ball I’ve recently purchased, how my son and I pumped it up, never sure if one more pump! might be the pump to burst it. This is what my brain feels like – taut and inflamed, endlessly useful.
When I was thirty-nine, I miscarried at the launch of my second book. I’d known for two days that the foetus had died in my womb. Should I have cancelled the launch? Of course. Instead I emerged from the pub toilet into a room packed with friends, family, fellow writers. I smiled and chatted and read at the microphone, just missing a beat when my voice cracked in the middle of a poem.
‘Not like you to drop a line,’ a male writer-friend said afterwards, sidling up to me with his pint. He was not really a friend, but a man I’d had casual sex with, on and off, for some years. Later, he became a fiction writer. There was judgement in his words and a little condescension, which had always been his forte. How could I tell him that while my body appeared to be in the room, the real me was in a toilet cubical just through the wall, holding her head in her hands?
14
There is an almost imperceptible tousle between Jane and I over the name. I’m married to the word I know from childhood, as she is to Honesty, a moniker the flower acquired sometime in the 16th Century, because of the ‘truthfulness’ of its transparent pods. I understand how this name would be embraced – some words carry such power and resonance. Honesty is virtue, goodness, candour. It is pitched against dishonesty, corruption, deceit. ‘Honesty is the best policy’ wrote Edwin Sandings, sometime in the 1500s, a proverb I heard repeated endlessly as a child.
I think honesty is fraught with nuance. What would Sandings have to say about the way a child forms their beliefs about their life, when those who should love her, instead hurt her? There is no objective honesty when she thinks to herself I’m bad, or I deserve this. If the other option is to see those she knows and loves as people who neglect or torment her. Self-deceit, if that is what we call this, is survival, strategy, the only way to cope with a thundering world. Honesty, at this point, is out of reach.
After my father died and my mum became ill, my throat swelled up and ached for months. I kept going to the doctor, trying not to notice her sigh when I entered the room. It wasn’t an infection. No medicine worked. One night it swelled up so tightly, the gates of my tonsils closed and I could no longer see the back of my throat. When I tried to talk, I couldn’t breathe. My boyfriend drove me to A & E, where a doctor diagnosed quinsy and said I needed an operation. Another doctor took a second look and said it wasn’t. In the morning, the swelling had gone down and they sent me home.
15
Today, I’m giving a guest talk to some Masters students. In the corridor outside, I straighten my face, preparing to be looked at, to hold attention, to present expertise. The topic is truth and ethics in life writing – a subject I have thought over in the way one might stroke a cat for hours, days, years.
In the seminar room, the words rattle off my tongue. I make the students laugh, telling anecdotes about my dad’s small-time criminality, retelling my mum’s words about him, saying nothing of my brother and what he did to me. I talk about writing and trauma, the part I can talk about, not the part I’m living.
16
I ride the bus home, below ivory lit angels strung across the high street. Christmas is coming. It is impossible to ignore, the shops already full of gold-wrapped chocolate, puddings and pies. My son, in his first choir, is learning a song I’ve never heard of, about revving up a reindeer. As soon as Bonfire Night is over, the revving up of Christmas begins, and my heart begins to hurt, for the innocence of Christmas I knew as a child, and for the little family Christmasses we made for my son. There was comfort in doing the thing I had been raised to want, and for which the world approves you – coupledom, family, the sharing of celebration.
These days, I would rather celebrate the Wheel of the Year, the eight celebrations to help turn the months. Mabon, Samhain, the Winter Solstice. On and on. Each with their rituals, rooted in paganism, woman-centred, empowering.
Home, I sit at my desk – salvaged from my childhood house, like the painting, like the Markson piano I learnt to play on, which I gave away fifteen years ago, to a man who made it sound better than I ever did. My hands always stuttered over the keys, trying to connect the notes on the stave to my body. He used to play me Stevie Wonder’s ‘Golden Lady’, improvising bluesy runs up and down the keys.
I had the desk restored once it was mine, the mug stains removed, the screws tightened, the wood polished. Now it shines under the gleam of the lamp. I have moved the Lunaria from the bedroom altar to the desk, so I can think about them as I write. Their outlines look like ovals drawn by the thinnest of fine markers.
Then the light outside is falling. I check the clock, pull on my coat, head out to school to collect the boy.
Hannah Lowe is a poet, memoirist and academic. Her latest book, The Kids, a won the Costa Poetry Award and the Costa Book of the Year, 2021. Her first poetry collection, Chick (Bloodaxe, 2013) won the Michael Murphy Memorial Award for Best First Collection. In September 2014, she was named as one of 20 Next Generation poets. Her family memoir, Long Time, No See (Periscope, 2015) featured as Radio 4’s Book of the Week. She is a Reader in Creative Writing at Brunel University.