44
002 flaxbooks
| Date post: | 11-Apr-2015 |
| Category: |
Documents |
| Upload: | lancaster-litfest |
| View: | 121 times |
| Download: | 7 times |
002
flax
book
s
This edition published in Great Britain by Flaxbooks, Storey Institute, Meeting House Lane, Lancaster, LA1 1TH. Tel 01524 62166.www.litfest.org
All works © their respective authorsWatermark (flax002) © Flaxbooks
All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher and individual creators.
Flaxbooks is the publishing imprint of LitfestLancaster and District Festival Ltd trading as Litfest.Registered in EnglandCompany Number: 1494221 Charity Number: 510670
Editor: Sarah HymasDesign and layout: Martin Chester at LitfestPhotography: Jonathan Bean
AcknowledgementsDavid Borrott’s Love-Rush previously published in ‘How Do I Love Thee?’
Elizabeth Burns’ Vessel and Horse previously published in ‘Island’; Shakespeare Does the Cross-Bay Walk in ‘The Interpreter’s House’.
flax
book
s00
2
flax
book
s00
2
Welcome. Whoever we might be – whatever our tastes, our proclivities – it’s good to encounter new creative work. I’m glad people are doing the work, and I’m glad people are enabling us to encounter it, online or otherwise. You will read poems here, written by five writers – three women and two men.
David Borrott’s poems concern themselves with instability. From the figure of St Francis to the emotional and perceptual upheavals that a newborn brings, the subjects of these poems coalesce around the idea that:
We imagine a sort of security though most of the house is not our home.
Water fills and runs through Elizabeth Burns’ poems; contained and container, canal and estuary, fresh- and salt-water, this element stands for what good is engaged in:
making – as we on earth have always done – from what is broken, separate something whole.
Mark Griffiths writes about ‘The Golden Life’, whose goldenness his poems celebrate through the accumulation of everyday detail. That we can hold hands ‘still greasy from the chips’ and ‘jump the ditch, landing absolutely on our feet’ are the modest delights his poems set about weighing, and finding priceless.
In the darkness of Pauline Keith’s poems ‘the ghosts of heavy horses/sometimes shift’. These poems, about hidden things brought painfully to light, are pungent and moving: in them, water sluices the cobbles of the knacker’s yard and runs on to join ‘the river.../welling, silent, from the underworld’.
Foreword
flax
book
s00
2
And finally, a series of boxes are cleverly evoked in Cath Nichols’ poems. Featuring lifts and their bellhops, magician’s assistants in their cabinets, and vanishing acts, these poems shift vertiginously, disclosing and enclosing as their music ‘fills the wires’.
So here’s to work from a particular somewhere whose music might continue to fill the wires that connect us all.
Jacob Polley
flax
book
s00
2
Contents
Foreword by Jacob Polley
1 David Borrott
8 Elizabeth Burns
19 Mark Griffiths
24 Pauline Keith
32 Cath Nichols
1 Dav
id B
orro
tt
Click here for David’s profile
2 St Francis and the Birds
3 Brooding
4 Divisions
5 Wolf Fell
6 Ultrasound
7 Love-Rush
2 Dav
id B
orro
tt
This is a dawn of doves, of pigeons drawing their loosening spirals across the sky’s canvas. The farmyard crackles and ignites with noise, cock and hen, a grey pool of geese. Still the pigs are asleep in their pens, the cows punctuate the hill’s sweep, Purposeful sparrows divert to the wagon’s rut.
Cassocked and besotted with joy Francesco opens himself to the morning, flinging himself like a twig into the inferno of new light, the birds scatter then gather again. Hens chase his footfalls, doves coo from the roof tiles, geese come dripping. He treasures and ignores them, a magnet, a swell
of enthusiasm that they want to fall into. They pursue him, spreading like a peacock’s tail. He is almost winged himself, they thicken about him in the lane. Starlings quaver on the barred gate, a heron comes cometary from the river, crows wait for him like parishioners, he advances with his bridal-gown of geese.
St Francis and the Birds
Return to David’s Contents page
3 Dav
id B
orro
tt
It’s the annunciation that puzzles me. I’m fairly sure Europa didn’t need telling, and Leda had the precise feathered touch, not an emissary elaborating to let her know.
Potency needs no delegation, except, as the sun says it, loud and all day long, while we simplify glory to the chance for a suntan
or a barbecue, where the chicken wings drip fat onto the coals, and some distant aunt, an uninvited guest, takes us aside to whisper why we’re bleeding or not bleeding.
Brooding
Return to David’s Contents page
4 Dav
id B
orro
tt
Spiders in the attic but not just there, their pale trails filter out of ceilings, tenuously silver tentacles to catch dust.
Mice haunt the moist linoleum; birds drown in the dark chimney. We imagine a sort of security though most of the house is not our home.
Inside the head, the piloting brain flies at eye level towards the sunset, observing a singularity and not alone, not alone, not alone.
Divisions
Return to David’s Contents page
5 Click here for Cath’s profile
Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices
Dav
id B
orro
tt
You stand on the edge with your wife, your balding head a wholesome colour in the November sunshine. You are taking a picture of Wolf Fell, air-fuddled in the distance.
Here is the order in which these things shall be lost: your remaining hair, the photograph, you, your wife, this prominence, Wolf Fell, the air, the sunshine.
Wolf Fell
Return to David’s Contents page
6 Click here for Cath’s profile
Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices
Dav
id B
orro
tt
With four point five megahertz of clarity, through jelly on your lifting bulge, we see into our future: a prophecy that flutters against your gut; a resonance vaguely like ourselves.
For you, it is already here; for me, it is as intangible as tomorrow, as if far away, submersed amid oceanic depths, a greening on the scope, looming, rising on anticipation’s winch.
Tonight I may place my hand on the projection of your belly and feel only a warmth, as one feels casually on the bonnet of a car that has been somewhere, has somewhere to go.
Ultrasound
Return to David’s Contents page
7 Click here for Cath’s profile
Click here to hear Cath read from Thinking in Slices
Dav
id B
orro
tt
I wake to your colours; the old mornings – newspaper grey – are torn into a shower of butterflies.
Tangerines have grown and spices raggle the lawn of my tame yesterday.
Into the well of myself, echoing in monotone, you flung your rope ladder,
raised me to this wild exploration of sky, high as the wind hugging its bundle of clouds.
I never knew life was such a treasure chest, till you came jangling along, like a pocket full of keys.
love-rush
Return to David’s Contents page
8 Eli
�a�e
thB
urn
i�a�
eth
Bur
ns
Click here for Eli�a�eth’s profile
Click here to hear Eli�a�eth read Held
9 held
10 horse
11 an eighteenth century experiment
12 creature
13 vessel
14 shakespeare does the cross-bay walk
15 the miller
17 First Day in Amsterdam
9 Eli
�a�e
th B
urns
One-year-old, and he’s discovering the river, dropping stones in at the edge, retrieving them.
He loves containers, says his mother, then wonders, is a river a container?
The riverbed is: it curves its way from Roeburndale down through these woods of wild garlic and bluebells,
letting the winding stony vessel of itself be filled with springwater, meltwater, rainwater,
water which also contains things – you can plop a stone into it, take it out again,
and here are glints of fish and floating twigs, silt, insects, airbubbles, ducklings –
and if the river’s a container, so’s a song, holding words and tune; everything is like a basket
says the basketmaker, the earth contains us, we contain bones, blood, air, our hearts.
We are baskets and makers of baskets, and fresh from the hold of the womb
the boy-child’s discovering how things are held by other things: milk in a cup,
food in a bowl, a ball in his hands, a stone in water, water in a nest of stones.
held
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
10 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
A horse takes shape on a hillside. It is three thousand years ago.
They are drawing the lines of its body, digging and lifting
the skin of turf, exposing the white flesh of earth
which buries its secrets deep, has in its keeping
bones, flints, vessels beads for spindle-whorls
hearth-stones the grave-place of a child;
until time comes to carefully shift the soil, begin to sift
and piece together fragments of a story, making
− as we on earth have always done – from what is broken, separate
something whole: mud and fire that make the pot
chalk and grass the horse, still galloping over the hill.
horse
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
11 Eli
�a�e
th B
urns
If you were to scoop a cup of water up, here where the river mingles with the sea, freshwater, saltwater twisting over rocks could you tell if the droplets were those
which had travelled down the valley from the hills, knowing only silty, pebbly river bed, bearing only twigs, fish, leaves, perhaps the carcass of a sheep?
Would you know if this were water from the ocean brought here by the rush of estuary as it shoves itself inland, a high tide deep enough to bring a slave ship right up to the quayside?
Could you tell if this were water which had floated one of those well-built vessels, its hold full of sugar, cotton, chocolate and mahogany, or glass beads and whisky, or human beings?
Could you tell which were the drops that formed the waves that held the bloated body of one thrown overboard? Or is this simply water from the hills, clear and cold as a spring?
An eighteenth century experiment
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
12 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
New-made, skin thin as lantern-glass that lets the light pour through, you’re still balanced between elements, each one rich in you, and equal, pulling like magnets. Your compass whirls.
The earth is where you live, it takes your shape like a hare’s, rolls you giddily down hills, draws you to itself with mushroom smells and orange leaves. You clamber over limestone, stretch for blackberries, purple-fingered.
Wind takes you: you skitter like a kite, touch clouds, full of bluster, skim the ground like old blossom. Winter mornings, cold douses your lungs. Breath hangs in the silvery mist.
The sun’s your best friend, calls for you, off out to play together. Staying up late on summer evenings, your hoop turns to gold. Night, and a tiny candleflame shines back from the iris of your eye. Fireworks crackle.
Sea-water’s inside you: taste your salt tears. Dip a toe in a rock pool, tumble into spray. Fall asleep to the sound of the waves. Cross the river on stepping stones, set sail your boat into the world.
Creature
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
13 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
Here is where they laid her − bones, flesh, stopped heart −
in a bed of stone carved to her body’s size
taking her form like grass where a hare has lain.
There was a covering once, some kind of lid, long gone
and the space her body filled is outline, absence
holding only air − sea winds, heat of the sun –
or water − spume from a high tide, rainfall, melted ice.
There may have been earth here in the grave shape – grass growing, harebells −
or fire, an offering to a god made over flames of driftwood
kindled in the cold stone that holds a memory of warmth
of hands held round a bowl and humans supping food together.
vessel
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
14 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
Why? Because he could, because the sands were there, a pale flat sheet pulled out between the strong arms of the bay, like a washerwoman’s laundry; and what was seabed is uncovered, laid bare and fresh, untouched. Its huge wingspan. His bare feet squelch in sand. He feels the pull of it around his ankles; plods on; one foot heaved out and then the other. Then a flowing current, clear water washing caked mud off his skin. He sees the ghost of hoofprints fading in wet sand, the hollows made by his companions’ boots filling now with seawater: these little pools, these new-formed landscapes that we make as our footsteps take us over earth. The land ahead, the woven shining cloth that leads to it –
and then he’s deep in, up to his knees, he sees himself drawn down, sinking, mouthfuls of sand: all the words he’s yet to speak and write stopped in his throat. And why? Because he wanted to defy his earthbound life, to walk across the sea, become amphibian, a man turned seal or otter – and he cannot. He yanks his feet up, grabs his neighing horse’s belly like a raft, pulls himself onto the creature’s back. It sways, drags up soaked fetlocks, staggers to a sand bar. They falter on, man and horse; they’ll cross the bay by nightfall, feel flat unmoving land under them again. The horse, rubbed down, will eat its oats and sleep. And he, he will relish being human, not webbed or gilled, but here, splayed feet on solid ground, the tongue inside his mouth not bound by sand.
shakespeare does the cross-bay walk
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
15 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
Then the wolf went to the miller and said, ‘Miller, sprinkle my paws with fine white flour.’ The miller didn’t want to do it. ‘If you don’t,’ said the wolf, ‘I’ll eat you.’ So the miller was afraid, and did it.
‘The Wolf and the Seven Goslings’, Tales from Grimm
It’s the wolf who’s meant to scare you in this tale, the wolf who makes the children jolt and gasp and quiver on your lap, who makes them clutch your clothes in terrified excitement as he sniffs out each gosling, and ‘swallowed them whole in his horrid haste’.
But the miller is the one who scares you more, the human one, the one who ‘was afraid, and did it’
the miller who colluded, who was only doing his job, with the tools of his trade
who whitened the wolf ’s paws who dyed the cloth to make the stars who welded the metal to make the signs who laid the tracks that took the trains who closed the door of her shop to them who barred the children from his school
and in your own dark heart with its nugget of evil you know you might have been the one who dusted the paws of the wolf who disguised and covered him even as someone else’s children were being swallowed up −
T�he miller
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
16 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
‘And when at last the goslings were freed they cried out, The wolf is dead, the wolf is dead and danced round the pond in delight.’
But the miller’s heart was heavy and sank like a stone.
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
17 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
She is learning that the starry coins are Euros, that breakfast can be cheese and ryebread, that she herself is ‘zeven jaar’.
She is learning that a city can be laced through with canals, that bicycles can get you anywhere, that a house can have six flights of stairs
and that people hid in attic rooms like this; that a family could survive for years, that friends will bring you food
and enemies betray you. She only knows that soldiers came, and took them, she does not know yet where the girl
– the girl not much older than she is herself, the girl who wrote a diary, look, here it is, you can see it with you own eyes,
the tiny writing, the tartan cover – was taken. Or that we can do such things to one another. She is learning
that writing can be secret, potent, though it may not save your life. That not all children will survive a war.
Here in the city of frozen canals and straight lines and hard graft she is learning that an artist
may be mocked if people think the way you paint is queer; that all your life you may be poor and your paintings never sell until you’re dead.
Firstrst Day in Amsterdam
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
18 Eli�
a�et
h B
urns
But she is learning too the lovely blues of irises, the way that blossom on a peach tree sings against a fresh spring sky
and those colours in the painting of a river which, months later, she’ll be reminded of by the blur of greens and yellows in her dress.
A secret diary. A canvas turned against the wall. Things that seem invisible
may one day dazzle with their glare. A child marked with a yellow star. A man stoned out of town.
An attic room. Thickness of paint. Canals under ice. Crocuses in flower. The world is cruel. The world is kind.
Return to Eli�a�eth’s Contents page
19 M�ar
k�
ri���
thar
k �
ri���
ths
Click here for M�ark’s profile
20 T�he Golden life
21 outgrowing my sex-object status
22 fernando smith
23 the state of things
20 M�ar
k �
ri���
ths
We sat in the car in the centre of town safe from the hatching November rain eating fish and chips steaming up the windows with our salty breath my son and I having a laugh the radio going on about something or other.
We talked about gravy and the hardest lads in the school and music he liked and which fish was hotter and his mum’s bloke and big sister’s bloke and dinosaurs and other stuff.
Later, we tramped through the woods skimmed stones across the Gelt made a den in a fallen tree played army with sticks for guns held hands, still greasy from the chips, watched a squirrel hopscotch the branches jumped the ditch, landing absolutely on our feet.
the Golden Life
Return to M�ark’s Contents page
21 M�ar
k �
ri���
ths
You emptied your soul for me that I could live in your imagination without distraction
The broad street led to the sea we found the purse
In my memory I kissed you there
In my lust I unwrapped you behind the bushes
Our breath curdled with cinnamon and chocolate
We were naked then young even our faces lost as sleeping children
happy to remain at the foot of the mountain waiting for the football scores
outgrowing my sex-object status
Return to M�ark’s Contents page
22 M�ar
k �
ri���
ths
Oh, Suzanne he never knew your eyes but once heard the boys singing your name in Calle Triana.
He found a note tagged to the cactus ordering him not to follow you.
Spy him there fervent by the harbour gates anticipating the boat that will penetrate his horizon.
Remember him by the fountain tossing in the same coin over and over to lighten the fever he carried in his spine.
Fernando smith
Return to M�ark’s Contents page
23 M�ar
k �
ri���
ths
The little bird stood transfixed by the sun
St Francis bent over scooping the creature in his kind palms
The wind was high urging the poplars to curve like reaching feathers
Ten minutes later the bird, perched in a cage, cursed the sun in a fishbone voice mistaken for delight
T�he State of things
Return to M�ark’s Contents page
24 Paul
ine
Kei
th
Click here for Pauline’s profile
Click here to hear Pauline read Flaying-Knife
25 the knackers yard
26 Childcare in the slaughteryard
27 In the dark stable
29 flaying-knife
30 lip balm for my mother
31 failing
25 Paul
ine
Kei
th
Council-licensed, it lies low in the valley bottom like a guilt. It’s hidden behind the high church and beneath the singing saw-mill; under drifting smoke from engines shunting back and forth across the viaduct; where the river takes on colour downstream from the dye-works.
Those who risk the cinder track, short-cutting past the Yard, know to pinch their nostrils tight, don’t peer through knot-holed boards for sights kept sheltered there. Only the wind slips in by chance, moves among the beams and pulleys, sets up a moaning as it sees.
the knackers yard
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
26 Paul
ine
Kei
th
Knacker Brown, her grandfather, fed her on sights and smells and little presents of boiled meat hauled clean from the seething broth.
In winter, when the carcasses lay cold on the sloping flags, the boiler house breathed warmth; the fierce walls of the vats, thick with their years-old grease, rose into wreaths of steam. Drawn by their dangerous heat she edged carefully between them, hearing the comfortable bubbling she feared to see when lifted tall.
She grew up close-acquainted with blood’s many lovely reds and the sequence of its thickening: an opalescent stripiness that seeped in rivulets and slowed to form flat pads of solid-seeming matter: rubbery, perhaps possible to peel and lift? She prodded with her toe; never touched with fingertips.
Her hands stroked and stroked smooth quiet necks, so slack, deep knife-slits almost sealed. The bleeding done.
Childcare in the Slaughteryard
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
27 Paul
ine
Kei
th
the ghosts of heavy horses sometimes shift (Black Tommy, Bay Tommy and the mare without a name); they shake the harness hanging still from hooks high on the wall above her head. The child works near the doorway in low light filtered from the slaughteryard where real dead animals lie stretched. She’s helping with small jobs she’s fit for: ladles dog-grease into jars, smoothes them flat-full.
She scoops live maggots into old tobacco tins; heaped, they wriggle flat before they’re capped ready for the fishermen who come from the canal. If one falls free, she lets it go, sees how it loops along, in cracks between the flagstones. It doesn’t stand much chance: one way open air and birds, the other back inside the yard where it hatched on a fly-blown haunch. It risks bucketfuls of scalding water
In the Dark stable
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
28 Paul
ine
Kei
th
dashed down to sluice the flags of blood and treacherous bits that make clog-irons slip. Not as cruel as a hook.
Yet she reaches for another tin: her uncle and her grandfather don’t care, screw down fast, so half-maggots fall, twist on the floor. Mine don’t die like that. She gently scoops more maggots, tips them in and waits, lid poised.
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
29 Paul
ine
Kei
th
Worn thin against the grindstone; between times, slicked along a steel to keep its edge; sharp-pointed to slit a throat for bleeding, incise round a hoof, open up a seam down the inner thigh of a draught-horse or a cow.
My uncle’s fingers, flying against time, could make mistakes – ruin the silk of a racehorse hide; his father sliced his wage to match the cost. Neither let a girl-child learn the skill. It’s still an unfulfilled desire to strip a carcass of its perfect skin.
Now, post-mortem, that knife’s mine but lacks its proper purpose. It rests in my kitchen block with carvers, saw-edged bread and salad cutters. You’d know it by its narrow blade and the old string round its handle, brown and greasy with cold sweat.
flaying-knife
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
30 Paul
ine
Kei
th
I could do with some, she said, if you’ll call in Boots. A strange extra to her shopping list: she’s housebound – no harsh wind dries her lips.
It pricks here, where he burned me. She’s almost eighty-nine years old and this the first I’ve heard of it – a new tale of that man who yanked dogs close before he kicked them, cowed his wife and every child, except for this one, his first daughter. At eighteen, she declared she’d kill him if he beat her once again. He laughed, then listened to her new low voice: When you are asleep. From then, his blows were words and they had weight enough.
But four years before that shift, he’d slicked his lighted cigarette along her lower lip. My god! Why? To punish me. What had you done? I can’t remember. She borrows my lip balm, rubs gingerly, to soothe a hurt long hidden.
Write Boots on your list, love, so you won’t forget.
lip balm for my mother
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
31 Paul
ine
Kei
th
The low ebb of the night – my father, thin and pale, sits sideways on his bed, shins disappearing into gloom.
Does he sense which river runs below the shaded lamplight, welling, silent, from the underworld? It flows deep between the beds.
I sit on my mother’s, waiting: he’s too weak to walk, but There’s something I must do myself, under my own steam.
My mother’s raised and propped him, eased his white feet into slippers far too new – now she stands away.
He makes no move and suddenly she sits by me, not him.
We line up, watch his loneliness from the safe side of the Styx.
Failing
Return to Pauline’s Contents page
32 Cat
h�
icho
lth
�ic
hols
Click here for Cath’s profile
Click here to hear Cath read The Tallest Building in the World
33 fear of falling
34 T�he tallest buildng in the world
35 the assistant
36 music in the wires
37 where sixpence works wonders
38 here i am:
33 Cat
h �
icho
ls
A raw egg was placed
gently
in the carriage. Cables were cut and the lift fell fifty-five floors.
Journalists and potential tenants gathered at ground level, waiting.
The lift arrived. As Frank had stated: their safety mechanisms were second to none.
The egg was unbroken.
Fear of Falling (new york, 1913)
Return to Cath’s Contents page
34 Cat
h �
icho
ls
Not a hard interview, no, I was chosen because I’m five foot four, shorter than him that owns this place. We’re all blonde too, and wear white gloves, a smart uniform. Mr Woolworth likes to see me close the doors, press the buttons. I like to sew at home; I have small hands and a neat way with my fingers (I come from a family of weavers). The lifts, they say, have triple safety features, and stop to within an eighteenth of an inch on every floor. I’m the spider plumbing depths between a girdered web. Here, there’s such precision. I think of a shuttle, zooming back and forth, crossing the weft of each floor, filling in the picture of an empire built on dimes and cents. It’s a fairy-tale palace for the 20th century, with electric lights on every floor! They say it’s like the parliament in England. They call it the new gothic. This is a sky scraper. My Dad says that’s what they used to call a ship’s tallest mast. So, in my lift I am a sailor in the rigging, criss-crossing... up and down.
T�he T�allest Building in the World
Return to Cath’s Contents page
35 Cat
h �
icho
ls
Whilst we wait for The Man let me tell you about my lipsticked mouth (my teeth) my beautiful ring (my nails) my sparkling shoes (my toes)...
I want to go home. I want to click my heels together and go home.
I have red shoes with sequins, and though I’m not from Kansas I don’t think that matters. It’s about how much you want it. But I can’t click my heels. My left foot is poking out of this hole and I can’t move my right foot towards it without losing my balance, and that would be dangerous because this cabinet is only just wide enough and tall enough and deep enough to hold me. If I bring my feet together I will fall.
And besides I have no time: the audience is waiting
T�hee Assistant
Return to Cath’s Contents page
36 Cat
h �
icho
ls
There’s a rhythm in the lift, in the cogs and wheels of it, the wires and cables, tensions and a minor third. If you blow through wheat you also get a hum.
There’s a harmonic interval – the sound of whole numbers – whole vessels filled with water, a mathematical equation a resonance that seems just right. Music fills the wires. Sometimes I’m a rocketman; and when the music in the wires exceeds the speed of – we take off, punch through the roof and fly. Else we lift the building too; drag Woolworth’s towering store through clouds and layers of blue – bricks crumbling from our tail – to arrive in steady blackness. From the flight deck I listen to the music of the spheres, glide past the moon, the Milky Way, finally disappear.
Music in the wires
Return to Cath’s Contents page
37 Cat
h �
icho
ls
The VP Twin camera is sold in three parts: the camera body, backplate and a choice of camera case. Each part costing sixpence.
We build an empire, you build a camera.
A way to buy exactly what you need, bit by bit. Ideal for today’s careful housewife or pocket-moneyed child. Nothing more than sixpence, a pricing guarantee. Tin soldiers, tiny tubes of Snowfire lipstick, two razor blades, instead of packs of five.
We build an empire, you build a camera.
Saucepans sold without their lids (or buy the lid for sixpence too), and socks and shoes come singly (for the thrifty, one-legged man). Nothing more than sixpence, a pricing guarantee.
But when playing cards are taxed at thruppence our margins are squeezed. We think you think: It’s good to know where my money’s going, so we keep our pricing guarantee by charging for tax separately. Ciggie lighters, too, are more expensive: sixpence to the store; sixpence to the Treasury.
We build an empire, you build a camera.
We think you think: Every part has its value. VP Twin camera, sold in three parts, thruppence, sixpence, dimes and cents.
Where sixpence works wonders
Return to Cath’s Contents page
38 Cat
h �
icho
ls
a mouth a hand some toes about to disappear.
I am dismembered, and my slices stay stacked because I am held upright by this box. The wounds heal. But I get scared when I lie down.
I was in bed this afternoon, with the curtains drawn. I thought: if I lie still, the mattress might catch the loosened parts as they fall away from me; the duvet might stop them as they roll away from me; slide off the bed, and run away from me.
I thought: if I shut my eyes I might not be here anymore.
H�ere I am:
Return to Cath’s Contents page
002
flax
book
s
Colophon
