Writing
I have a background in academic writing and poetry and have taken Memoir and Fiction Courses at Harvard Extension School, WICE, Paris and Scottish Arts Club Intensive Workshops. I am the grand-daughter of 20’s poster-artist Charles Paine, Great-niece of writers and editors Stephen Graham and Eleanor Graham and great-grand-daughter of Peter Anderson Graham Author and Editor of “Country Life” Magazine.
Drawn From Life is a memoir in episodes which explores the interface between my eccentric bohemian parents, the rootless childhood I shared with my twin-brother in Kenya, Ireland, London and Spain and our tenuous connection to the real-world. It also navigates my development as an artist through art schools and beyond. Comic (think David Sedaris), bittersweet and quirky.
I started to write poems after I moved to the USA in 1992. I was doing a lot of academic writing as a component of my Masters in Fine Art and from time to time, titles for poems would come to me and then came the poems. They often describe a mood which is evoked by moments in specific places where I lived, sometimes in extreme circumstances.
Introduction to memoir
Are you Married, or are you from Kenya?
In 1951, my parents were married in Nairobi, Kenya. My half-brothers from my mother’s first marriage were disappointed. Aged twelve and nine, Steve and Nick had dubbed their new stepfather Nelson, “The Boy”, because he was six years younger than their mother and he had a tendency to cry easily. They thought she should have married her former fiancé, Frank, a colonial stalwart who policed Kenya’s Northern Frontier. Frank had lent Prue his car to get around Nairobi where she had been living post-divorce. While he was away fighting Shifta (Somali bandit) incursions, my mother met my father.
Nelson Paine was a newly arrived Colonial Service town-planner and architect. He couldn’t dance and she was invited by a mutual friend to teach him. They practiced at Nairobi’s Starlight Grille, a romantic nightclub high above the river valley and the main road out of town. They discovered that each had a family background in the arts and so had much in common. My mother later remarked that conversation had been central to their courtship.
When she asked her two sons what they thought of Nelson, they said straight off that she should marry Frank who they liked a lot, and they pointed to the fact that he had lent her his car! Typically, she ignored their advice. Later, we all felt that she should have married Frank. Prue was married to Nelson at Nairobi’s Scottish Kirk by the Minister, David Steel, father to the Scottish politician of the same name.
My twin, Tom, and I must have been conceived on their honeymoon at Tiwi Beach near Mombasa. Nine months later, in the Princess Elizabeth Maternity Hospital, Nairobi, Prue delivered the second heaviest twins recorded that year and she was left with permanent and severe stretch-marks. The heaviest twins that year, Ingrid and Isabella Rosellini, were delivered a few days earlier by the film star Ingrid Bergman. Tom and I were born on either side of midnight. Tom was delivered first, and I followed 40 minutes later, dangerously delayed by being in the breech position. As children we were convinced we had been mixed up with the other set of twins born that night.
We lived in a Civil Service bungalow set in a leafy suburb called Kilaleshwa. The houses were made of red laterite adobe walls, corrugated iron roofs, and dark red concrete floors. Photos of that time, probably meant for Nelson’s mother and aunts in Ireland, show my parents wearing Aran sweaters, while they posed with us in the garden. Our Swahili Ayah (nanny), Joyce, adored us. While Prue and Nelson were at work, Joyce ran a brothel in the garage which was discovered when they came home early one day. Two years later Nelson was awarded a grant from the Bernard Shaw foundation to tour Ireland with a small opera company of puppets. We all moved to Ireland where Tom and I were left in the care of our vague grandmother in Dun Laoghaire.
Things I will never wear again
Tartan
Leopard Skin prints
Frilly dresses
Anything with frills
Cargo pants
Jeggings
Never did wear dungarees.
Mini skirts and hot pants
The colour red
A wedding dress.
Now, I will wear
Austere tweeds
Black cashmere
Low-heeled shoes
plain shirt-dresses
Baroque pearls
Danish silver
Subtle make up, just a trace
plus an off-loading knee brace.
Tea time, New York City
A dim October afternoon
in the Metropolitan Museum Café
Weary and sad,
I chose a table on the balcony –
My treat.
In sight, a gray-haired man
Plays Gershwin
On a black grand piano
Later, a most polite young waiter
Brings me “English Tea-time Tea”
And a blueberry
Or, as he calls it,
“blackberry” tart.
Dream man
I met him in a dream,
Handsome, kind and warm –
He looked vaguely familiar
Like a word that’s on
The tip of your tongue…..
I signed a contract
To be his girlfriend
For a month,
to be exact.
Film star
Last night
I dreamt
I was kissing a famous actor –
An aging roue’,
Popular with the over 50’s.
We stood,
Lips touching
For what seemed like
A very long time.
I glanced up
And saw him looking at me lovingly
Through his vole-like blue eyes
And it struck me that I was
The luckiest woman in the world.
What a catch!
Today I imagine him alone
In a darkened flat
sipping absinthe and sniffing the purest cocaine
Whilst listening to cool jazz.
His repast, some fresh Japanese sea-urchins
Miniature tropical fruits and a pipe of opium
For dessert.
Dean Cemetery monuments
They’ve gone,
All these grand citizens.
Leaving behind
An unfamiliar landscape
Peopled by a society that
Doesn’t know itself.
Atholl Crescent
Once, children played in these slender gardens
close to Princes Street.
Now, the houses are facades
For Law offices.
Commercial properties,
lit at night, but empty.
Good Harbour Beach, Gloucester Massachusetts
Pacing and pacing the beach
remembering all the other beaches
African beaches, Pacific beaches
Mediterranean beaches and Caribbean beaches
reminded by the breaking of the waves
and the glimpses of clear green water
of those other beaches I have sought solace on
and which I now come to, once more in grief
and once more pacing out the beach
Grand Canyon, Arizona
I flew into Denver with my husband John and his daughter. His father had just moved into a final nursing home and when we got there he’d just tried to strangle himself with his emergency cord. Perhaps shaken by this, my step-daughter became impossible (she was 19) on the holiday. We then embarked on exploring the four corners – Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. I promised myself that the next time I visited the Grand Canyon, I’d go alone.
We stayed at a Lodge on
The North Rim – which was run by Mormons.
Manic friendliness faltered
Into quickly-masked disapproval
When you ordered a second bottle of wine.
Ancient trees, strange flowers,
Prehistoric squirrels and wild turkeys
Glimpsed on a dew-soaked upland as we raced to the rim
To try and get there before everyone else.
Mile-deep cliffs and piers
In ginger-striped stone.
A tiny raft, making its way
Along the river below –
The other people
Were mainly European.
Boisterous Italians, aloof
Frenchmen and an uneasily serious African woman
Who looked at you
fooling around on a ledge
And wasn’t amused.
Lazinski Park, Warsaw
You took me there
On the morning
After I arrived.
I might have stayed in bed
Alone in your still-strange
Warsaw flat.
It’s the largest city Park
In Europe, you told me
I used to run here.
You showed me
The little palaces
And the peacocks.
One male resting across a deep threshold
At the end of a colonnade
Guarded by two hens.
A second peacock
Perched high on a yellow painted Trellis
Outside the café
Alone and looking rather uneasy
But keeping, at least, his tail
Aired and elegant.
February, dank and cold,
Only the odd grandmother and child
Feeding birds and squirrels
And on the way out
One of those squirrels
Red, with ears stiffly furred
Chased me – thinking
I had something for him.
Lost jewellery
When I was 4,
My mother’s engagement ring –
not a solitaire from Tiffany’s
or Garrards,
but Egyptian…..
( with a stone that looked like streaky bacon)
lost in a storm drain outside
Nairobi Cathedral when I was playing.
At fifteen in Menorca
My mother-of-pearl pendant,
Oval and engraved with a sheaf of wheat
On a sky-blue silk cord
in the pale sands of Binidali Beach.
When I was 19 –
Three Ethiopian Coptic crosses,
fallen off on arrival
in Central Station, Glasgow
on my way to the women’s Hostel,
at Glasgow School of Art
Then in Edinburgh when I was thirty,
Those turquoise beads
A boyfriend bought me
from the American drug-dealer
which I hid in a sock and somebody stole them.
That Swiss watch from
The African Chief
I taped under a drawer in Boston,
Now in my forties,
The second Swiss watch –
Another gift from the Chief
That I left in a robe at Canyon Ranch
A spa in the Berkshires, Massachusetts
when I was Fifty two and recovering
from surgery.
The aquamarine my husband gave me
Stolen by the cleaner after he died.
His mother’s engagement band
From Denver, left, in a Notting Hill Gate
Bedroom on a visit to London.
Those black pearl and diamond earrings,
To mark the new Century….
A third Swiss watch (!)
Fell off in Princes Street, Edinburgh
In my sixtieth year…..
Lost or stolen – I blame myself,
for carelessness
And I wish it wasn’t my fault.
Jan Leivens
Dear Jan Leivens
I found you again, today
In London’s National Gallery…
You looked the same.
Not sure I did,
Nearly 40 years after
Our first encounter
You are described in your self-portrait as
Confident, relaxed and in your early thirties
And although you’ve been dead a long time,
We still click.
