Out of Place No.04: 'The Summer Book' by Tove Jansson

Out of Place is an irregular series about movement and place, and the novels that take us elsewhere, by regular contributor Anna Evans. 

‘Floating on the water like a drifting leaf.’ – Islands and imaginary worlds in Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book.

The sea is always subject to unusual events; things drift in or run aground or shift in the night when the wind changes, and keeping track of all this takes experience, imagination, and unflagging watchfulness.

In a cabin on an island somewhere in the Gulf of Finland, a little girl awakes under a full moon to find herself alone in bed. Perhaps it is the moonlight that illuminates and sweeps across the island to wake her, like the sea covered by ice at its shores. She remembers that she is sleeping in a bed by herself on the island because her mother is dead. She climbs out of bed and looks out of the window. It is April, and the floor is very cold under her feet. The fire is lit and flames flicker on the ceiling. The black ice on the sea mingles with reflections of the room, and its furniture and objects. It appears as if the suitcases and trunks that are lying open on the floor are filled with moss and snow, and ‘coal-black shadow’. There is a dreamlike intensity to the images and reflections that she sees, a mingling of perspectives of inside and outside, so that we are not sure if she is awake or dreaming. She watches their luggage float out in a river of moonlight, ‘All the suitcases were open and full of darkness and moss, and none of them ever came back.’ As she drifts back to sleep, Sophia lets the whole island float out on the ice and on to the horizon, as if she is letting go.

The Summer Book is full of such moments of space and solitude. Ali Smith writes that ‘the novel reads like looking through clear water and seeing, suddenly, the depth.’ The presence of water is a constant and the book is full of images of floating and drifting, sinking and diving. For the inhabitants of an island, the sea is always there, ‘a long blue landscape of vanishing waves,’ an immersion in water. The book contains beautiful and striking descriptions of the sea and the archipelago, such as the arrival of a storm, when the island begins to look small and insignificant and the sea becomes immense, ‘white and yellow and grey and horizonless’. 

Tove Jansson, known mainly as creator of the Moomins, was a writer, illustrator, and painter, who wrote several novels and short stories for adults including The Summer Book, published in 1972. Running through the book is the relationship between a grandmother and granddaughter, and their shifting perspectives, which Jansson navigates with a light touch. They are companions who explore and have adventures together, arguing and playing together during a summer on the island. Recurring throughout are their thoughts and conversations which touch on questions about life and death in a way that is open-minded and truthful, irreverent, and unconventional. 

There is a sense of displacement and loss that comes from those images of the suitcases gliding away, the black ice and the moonlight, reflections of the darkness outside and the fire inside. This moment of grief is never dealt with explicitly, but perhaps a sense of loss hovers at the edges of the narrative. Jansson wrote The Summer Book after her mother’s death and in some ways the book feels like a remembrance of absent friends, and of an intense spirit of creativity and imagination which seems emblematic of her art and personal relationships. Contained within its pages is a deeply held belief in difference and free thinking, and a tolerance for others. It is a book about age and wisdom – ‘you have to come to it by yourself’ - that manages to be both weighty and understated, philosophical and poetic, moving and very funny. 

It is a book that resists characterisation and one that creates space for the reader through its structure: a series of vignettes, of connecting episodes and stories that are interlinked and overlapping. Ali Smith describes how the ‘profound quiet of the setting’ allows space for all the things left unsaid to be heard. ‘Jansson's brilliance is to create a narrative that seems, at least, to have no forward motion, to exist in lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string, each chapter its own beautifully constructed, random-seeming, complete story.’

It is a book that rewards re-reading, one of those books in which you notice different things each time you read. Reminding me of a time when I sat down to write, with the book beside me, in the early mornings of a long dark winter. I would set an alarm for 5am and sit with a blanket around me, often lighting a candle, and write for an hour or two when daily life would start to intrude again; the rituals of getting ready for school and work. The flame of the candle was the space I was carving out for myself, and sometimes a glimmer of an idea would surface. Writing back through the lens of memories real and imagined, I started to realize that it was places I was seeking to capture in words, a particular kind of longing.

The Summer Book is rich in place with a deep respect for the natural landscape. The setting is a tiny rocky island in the Pellinge archipelago in the Gulf of Finland. Tove and her brother Lars built a house on the island of Bredskär in 1947, and Tove and her long-term partner Tuulikki Pietilä spent many years together on a nearby island Klovharun further out on the rim of the archipelago, where it is possible to visit their summer cottage. The book is set during a summer, or perhaps a series of summers spent on the island: ‘It was just the same long summer, always, and everything lived and grew at its own pace.’ For me, Tove’s writing, and her descriptions of the island, render a landscape I recognize from summers spent in Sweden as a child, the forests, lakes and archipelagos, the moss and granite rocks. The vividness of that landscape for me feels like the experience of summer, a place I associate with space and light.  

The book describes how these tiny rocky islands are remarkably resilient and self-contained. A small island ‘takes care of itself. It drinks melting snow and spring rain and, finally, dew, and if there is a drought the island waits for the next summer and grows its flowers then instead. The flowers are used to it and wait quietly in their roots.’ The human inhabitants of the island are self-sufficient too and the book is full of reflections on island living and island dwellers. In her foreword to The Summer Book, Esther Freud describes her visit to the island and how amazed she is to find how tiny it really is. She marvels at the use Jansson made of her surroundings ‘investing so much detail in every patch of ground’. Here, she thinks, was a writer who understood ‘the proper magnitudes of our small worlds’.

Although its setting is a tiny island, it is a book that is full of travel and imaginary worlds. When a picture postcard of Venice arrives one day, Grandmother begins to recall her travels in Venice and Sophia is curious about this city built on the water. Tove herself loved to travel and had spent time in Italy. The postcard is ‘the prettiest picture anyone in the family had ever seen. There was a long row of pink and gilded palaces rising from a dark waterway that mirrored the lanterns on several slim gondolas. The full moon was shining on a dark blue sky, and a beautiful, lonely woman stood on a little bridge with one had covering her eyes.’ The image of Venice sinking into the sea fuels their imaginations and they build their own pretend version of Venice, carefully constructing palazzos and bridges and gondolas: ‘There is something very elegant about throwing the plates out the window after dinner, and about living in a house that is slowly sinking to its doom.’

For Grandmother, moments of stillness and of careful observation are meaningful. She observes with care a blade of grass, a fragment of seabird down, becoming entranced by tiny details - the way they are constructed, how they move in a draft of air. This attentiveness to details can be revelatory, and Grandmother knows that she must give these moments her full attention: ‘It was important for her not to stand up too quickly, so she had time to watch the blade of grass just as the down left its hold and was borne away in a light morning breeze. It was carried out of her field of vision, and when she got on her feet the landscape had grown smaller.’ A tiny piece of driftwood, a scrap of bark that she finds on the shores of the island, could become a whole world. ‘If you looked at it for a long time it grew and became a very ancient mountain. The upper side had craters and excavations that looked like whirlpools.’ 

Running through the book is a deep awareness and respect for the living creatures they share the landscape with, for every plant, insect, bird, and animal that dwells on the island. The magic forest is a ‘dense, sheltering wall of trees’ that ‘had shaped itself with slow and laborious care, and the balance between survival and extinction was so delicate that even the smallest change was unthinkable.’ They leave the trees untouched, for to clear a space between them or attempt to separate them ‘might lead to the ruin of the magic forest’. Grandmother sits in the magic forest and carves animals from driftwood that she finds: ‘They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest.’ As for the forest, left to themselves, ‘the trees slipped deeper and deeper into each other’s arms as time went by.’

This sense of preservation and letting things be is part of their existence on the island, to leave parts untouched, to not leave too many traces. They are part of a bigger system, a sustainable island environment in which you sense that all things are equal and have their place. The human inhabitants of the island stick to narrow paths by which they wander the different parts of the island, the rocks and to the sand beach, bypassing the carpet of moss and being careful not to step on the frail moss: ‘Step on it once and it rises the next time it rains. The second time, it doesn’t rise back up. And the third time you step on the moss, it dies.’ Their habitation of the island is based on a deep understanding and reverence for the other forms of life with which they co-habit. 

‘The Tent’ is an incredibly beautiful and moving section of the book, in which the story seems to echo through the dual perspectives of grandmother and granddaughter. Sophia wants to hear Grandmother’s stories about the past and about her days as a Scout leader, and what it was like to camp outside in a tent. But when Grandmother tries to put her memories into words, they feel fragile and distant; it is as if everything is gliding away from her. Sophia sets out to spend the night in a tent, and as she sets out on her adventure, the creek where the tent is placed starts to feel like a ravine, distant and forsaken. She zips up the little yellow tent which feels small and friendly, ‘a cocoon of light and silence’. In the long summer evenings, it is still light outside, and she falls asleep. Later, waking up in the night, she finds that darkness has entered the tent and now surrounds her. She can hear strange movements and sounds, ‘the kind no one can trace or account for’. In this darkness she finds she really listens for the first time in her life and notices the feel of the ground under her feet which is ‘cold, grainy, terribly complicated’. In this awareness and surrounded by darkness she has the sense that the island has grown tiny, that it is ‘floating on the water like a drifting leaf’. Returning to find Grandmother awake, Sophia begins to tell, in her own words, what it feels like to sleep in a tent.

As the summer nights begin to fade away, the human inhabitants begin to remove their marks and traces from the island, ‘a place for everything and everything in its place’.  Grandmother feels the island becoming cleaner and returning to its original condition. It begins to feel lonelier and more distant and secret. There is a sense of taking leave, as Grandmother sits by the water at nightfall, watching the passing boats. The Summer Book is full of such quiet moments, where the lightness of Tove’s writing reveals depths. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield who lives in Cambridge, with interests in place, memory, literature, migration, and travel. She enjoys writing about landscape – nature, cities, and all the places in-between. You can read more about Anna and her work on her website The Street Walks In. You can find more of Anna’s contributions to Elsewhere here.

Statue in Bronze and Andesite

By Fiona M Jones:

The North Berwickshire coast, from Eyemouth along past St Abbs, wanders through hills and cliffs and narrow fragmented shores. The North Sea, cold even in summer, has cut through centuries and rocks and history and lives. Last winter a vicious December storm swept away the whole autumn’s baby seals, and back in October 1881 nearly two hundred fishermen died at sea or capsized on the very point of reentering their harbours. 

History doesn’t say much about it: a major disaster to a string of very small communities. The story is kept now by a little bronze statue in the middle of the village of St Abbs: a group of women and children standing staring out to sea. The sea that had brought them food and now had taken their loved ones away. 

You are visiting St Abbs on a clear and pleasant weekend afternoon, buffeted a little by the wind and out of breath by the steepness of the path; dizzied perhaps by the vertical heights and awed by the wild beauty of the place. You sense a fierceness of landscape and sky, but it’s hard to imagine the time when fishermen battled the unforgiving North Sea with nothing but sail and oar—and didn’t always win. 

St Abbs itself sits in a partial hollow between cliffs that rise up like towers to break the sky and sea. The sea in turn breaks cliffs, serrating them into deep coves and teetering seaward stacks of wind-weathering stone. If you follow the cliff-path to the north of the village, you’ll wind up and down and over and around places accessible only to seabirds and seaweed and seals. 

And then you’ll pass an eerie rock formation that seems to echo something. A small ragged group of people, standing and staring out to sea. It looks like a rough cliff-formed copy of the statue in the village. It has to be coincidence, or at most an example of the way that a scene from nature will feed the inspiration of a sculptor. But you can’t quite shake an impression that the rocks are grieving in sympathy with the almost-forgotten people from a century and a half ago. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

The Cuckoo's Place

By Rebecca Welshman:

I follow an overgrown track alongside the dark recesses of a Sitka spruce plantation. Although sunshine rarely penetrates these shadow-wrought trunks, a feathered visitor has taken up a perch among the topmost boughs to sing. The sound carries through the air, stands out above everything else. I heard my first cuckoo in Henfield, Sussex where I spent my childhood. The scrubby streams and unkempt meadows surrounding the village at that time were the cuckoo’s ideal habitat. In East Sussex the arrival of the cuckoo has long been associated with a specific place. At the annual cuckoo fair in Heathfield each April a cuckoo was released from a wicker basket to mark the start of spring – a tradition with origins at least as far back as 1315 when the fair was given a charter. In the mid nineteenth century an elderly woman was still known to visit the vicinity at dawn to “turn out the cuckoo”. Today the fair is still held, and pigeons are released from a basket instead by “Dame Heffle”. As a herald of spring, the cuckoo symbolises the return of the light; the life-renewing emergence from the dark dormancy of winter. 

But for many years the cuckoo fell silent in my life. Over a period of ten years, as I moved to Liverpool, to Somerset, then Cumbria, I heard only one. The last place I heard it was in Shropshire, three years ago: a faint distant call, holding memories of fields and woods. Now, in Dumfries and Galloway the cuckoo’s song is once again part of spring. The very real reason for this of course is that cuckoo populations have declined in England, and increased in Scotland. The valley where the male cuckoo has taken up residence lies at the edge of the Ae Forest, a sheep-grazed island within an area of industrial forestry that stretches for miles in all directions. Its gently sloping sides are planted with sitka spruce, with some recently clear felled areas. Its floor is a broad soft tussocky expanse bisected by Garpol Water, a shallow fast flowing burn that has its origins in the Lowther Hills. Many thousands of years ago this would have been a river basin. Domed heads of islands still pepper the landscape, and amongst them are scattered the last remaining native tree species of the valley – birch, rowan, and oak. Although the ordnance survey map draws a clear yellow line along this part of the hillside, the forest has no real boundary on the ground. Miniature spruce grow wherever they happen to put down their resilient roots, in walls, on mounds, or amongst the gritty broken tarmac of forest roads. At the forest edge-lands any sense of ownership dissolves. 

A maverick of the bird world, the word “cuckoo” is synonymous with “strange”, and “eccentric”, suggesting its lack of conformity, a lone existence. While the bird is celebrated as an emblem of British springtime, it has also been maligned as a trickster and thief. Their true breeding habits were strongly disputed until the 1920s when ornithologist Edgar Chance made the film “The Home-Wrecker”, which showed the cuckoo laying her eggs in other birds’ nests. One of only two avian brood parasite species, fledgling cuckoos manoeuvre the eggs of their host bird parents out of the nest to make room for themselves. While these behaviours may seem treacherous or cruel, it is not our place to judge them by human standards.  Cuckoos feel the pull of spring time in the British Isles as much, or deeper, than we do. Their actions are hard-wired into them, set deep in their psyche after centuries of repetition. The instinct that drives them to return here each April to breed is detectable in their haunting two-tone call, which carries a beguiling air of mystery, compels me to listen, taps into my own instinct to pause whatever I am doing. 

This remote Dumfriesshire valley, now the cuckoo’s summer home before it returns to Africa, was once a contested area. A twelfth century castle mound still guards the rough track leading into it, and the rectangular outline of a much earlier earthwork is just visible amongst the green bog grasses beside the burn.  An ancient way visible on nineteenth century maps once threaded the valley from west to east and connected the distant hills with the infrastructure surrounding the Romans and Reivers route a few miles to the south. Deep within the valley can be found the remains of a circular monument with an entrance stone still standing. Remnants of cairns lie scattered around. A single aged oak tree growing from an islanded knoll watches over. Its branching trunks, dead at the ends, are angular and defiant, like antlers against the skyline. 

Scrub and heath – types of terrain that do not lend themselves to cultivation – are some of the cuckoo’s favourite places. As such the bird has long been associated with borderlands and heaths that once lay at the edges of medieval land units. The historic place name Yekheth in Acton parish, near Nantwich, derives from the Old English “gaecc” meaning “cuckoo”. It is a high point in the landscape, as is the neighbouring Wrenbury Heath a few miles to the south. In Irish folklore the cuckoo is attached to landscapes with historic human presence. The field of the mythical battle Moytura, in which the forces of light fought against the forces of darkness, has the highest concentration of megalithic monuments in Europe. A high point once known as “Cuckoo Hill” is marked by Eochaidh’s cairn. According to the writer and folklorist Padraic Colum, in his play Moytura, this spot was once known as “the cuckoo’s starting place”. That this bird of summer haunts the cold stones of an ancient tomb again reaffirms its association with the tensions between light and dark. The cuckoo, which embodies the light and dispels the shadows, has penetrated the human psyche at a deep level. It is no wonder that people all over the country still stop to remark upon hearing its first call.

Here at the edge of the Ae Forest the cuckoo’s mellow wood-note rings with piercing clarity. I draw closer, thinking that at any moment my footfalls and presence will disturb him, but still he calls. At the top of the hill I turn right onto the Southern Upland Way which leads away from the forest into the valley. As I leave him behind his echoing calls gradually grow more distant, and even though I know I cannot see him, I still turn back to look. This wizard of the woods has me under his spell. 

***

Rebecca is an author and researcher who lives in Dumfries and Galloway with her family, and numerous animals. Her publications include edited collections of the works of Victorian naturalist Richard Jefferies, and essays about literature, language, and the natural world. Her writing can be found at: rebeccawelshman.wordpress.com/blog and https://liverpool.academia.edu/RebeccaWelshman

Canal walk, reflections

By Anna Evans:

The canal is a great mirror. The stillness of the water reflecting the landscape, with barely a ripple or movement. The trees and the hills are echoed in the water. The clouds are a floating canopy, creating another dimension, a sense of the infinite, a continuous merging of land and sky. 

It is an idyllic day in early summer as we embark on a walk along the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. The sky is a carefree blue, the clouds dance through it. Along the towpath, dappled light and shade falling from the trees, stretching onwards and ahead in measured distances, marked for walking. Looking back towards Marsden village, to the backdrop of the moors, wanting to absorb, not to miss a single view. The houses and hillsides framed serenely, with wildflowers and thickets, patches of heather on the moors. The colour of the stone always feels like coming home. 

The telegraph wires suspended across the sky in lines. Ferns overhang the water, their elegant fronds distinctive, along with the branches, the dark shadows of trees. A tree spills its branches across the surface of the water, its reflection blurring impressionistically, ending there in the clarity of white clouds. The textures of the landscape layered in brushstrokes, like stepping through a painting. A picture framed in a pool of water below, dark hills above, a scattering of leaves and of light, propelled in a drift, into layers of colours. The pretty tree admires its image in the water.

A few narrowboats are moored, their coloured reflections surrounded by the trees; gypsy caravans on the water, landlocked but ready to move again. Here there are meadows and flowering trees, the scenic pause of a lock, painted black and white. A beautifully restored stone bridge, a cobbled lane leading away. I like these crossings, these intersections preserved in time. Each lock is numbered, and each bridge across. The sunken towpath passes underneath. It is damp under there and we bend our heads and lean towards the water.

The canal opens out wide, almost circular, before narrowing again into a lock entrance, towards which the water funnels. In this basin, the water reflects the clouds, the trees, the gates of the lock. The water level plunges so that it is like peering down into the depths of a dark well walled by stone. It is almost a surprise to see the water flowing, its force and light and movement. These locks of wood and iron turning cogs, using the measured weight of the water, to propel, to lift, to move. 

The path bends under trees, casting their shadows, leaning across and straying into the territory of the canal, as if swaying, bending, walking towards the water. The water has another quality to it, dark ripples shroud the reflections of the trees in mystery. They trail their leaves and branches through the mirror pool mingling with what is unsettled in the water, with a certain unexplained murkiness fragmented and immersed, stilled and agitated. 

Like much of the canal this stretch is wooded and the walls are mossy. A stream runs alongside. There are fallen leaves and hidden paths, the ground saturated by the recent rainfall. The trees bend gently obscuring the light and making it feel damper, the kind of mud that never dries out fully, dark with disintegrating leaves. Reeds and rushes grow thickly, and reflections of the trees make it almost impossible to see what’s below the surface. 

The water is densely covered to saturation with flying particles, seeds dispersed by the wind, blown across in sparkles of light and dark; a silver coated pathway travels onwards. A bright patch of light leading out into the dark canal, like a forest shaded in dark patterns of trees and light. The clouds darken again, shift their shapes in silhouetted, weighted light, outlined by the bright lines of sunlight emerging, changing the view. 

We emerge into the outskirts of Slaithwaite, a thriving Pennine village where people sit outside in cafés and bars near the waterside. The canal is a snapshot, like the cobbled streets and preserved architecture, a remnant of another time. Everywhere there are adaptations, an old mill building converted into modern apartments. Passing through the village, the towpath continues. The day has shifted and become more changeable as we cross into a part of the canal with a more industrial feel. The parts I remember most, that are indented on my memory. 

*

It is a walk I have been wanting to take for some time, to connect with my memories, with the impressions I carried with me. The canals were stilled space where once there was movement. A turbulent history mapped across the hillsides. A landscape reined in and tamed, saddened by overwork; lying forlorn and forgotten, waiting for a time when it might heal its scars. The spinning mills that were emptied and slowly given new life. Standing at the canal’s edge they overhang and overshadow; large windows in rows, reflecting the light.

I always wondered at the empty buildings left there, abandoned, derelict. The windows covered over, places of loss, places to avoid. I grew up around these buildings with their patched over windows and doorways. They followed me like shadows. Across these valleys they were everywhere. Desolate ruins blocking out the light and casting a reminder. When I close my eyes, what I picture are the shells of dark stone lying forlorn and forgotten, empty buildings and broken windows reflected in the dank still water. The shadow always remaining, the ghosts of what has gone before. 

The canal was always there in my memory. Sometimes a lonely desolate place, sometimes the sunny light feeling of walking along by the water. You could walk for miles of changing landscape, along its edges and lost waterways, crossing countryside and the hidden parts of the town. From the windows of a train travelling across the valley to Manchester. From the window of my school bus, as it wound its way through the outskirts of the town. Where the chimneys remain, when the clouds hang across the Colne Valley, the canal looks back at me.

*

The day has shifted, and the quietness is palpable. Each corner, each bend, each stretch of the canal seems to bring a new feeling, a difference to the walk. The canal becomes narrower here and the trees start to feel like they’re concealing something. There are high walls, moss-covered, ferns grow along the banks, and the trees bend closer over the water looking down on their reflections. I turn my camera towards the water and the sky lengthens out into a narrow passage of light, pulling towards the edges of the frame, a tunnel of soft, white light. 

The water feels closer, it is eerily quiet in some places. A sense of neglect, broken windows, barbed wire, and corrugated iron. The bank of clouds darker, overhanging. An abandoned building by the water’s edge, the dark symmetry of the windows reflected, slightly distorted by the water, deep and unbending, unmoving. The texture mimics a solidity the water cannot have, so that I start to wonder what it is about that part of the water that sets it apart?

The trees start to ascend the side of the building, its solid walls refuse to yield. Inside, its empty frame, the windows bricked over to conceal what lies discarded within. Through a web of tree branches, another empty structure, broken windows, semi-hidden. The trees beginning to cover the frame in shadow. Its empty soul lies reflected in the water. 

The canal feels like an intruder into the landscape, that many years later is starting to be claimed back. Over time to reflect and to blend with its surroundings, its edges to soften and become less clear cut, less distinct or separate. Blurring its lines, the hard edges cut from the land are overrun with ferns, with dandelions and grasses. Where the seeds, the falling leaves, and trailing branches corrupt the surface of the water.

Yet I think it always resisted, always retained its other quality. The one that is given away by that tendency of the water: to stand still, to resist the inevitable movement of wind and currents. There is something vacant and still, another quality to this water, as if it had a presence. In some places it looks like another surface, no longer water, lying still and undisturbed. 

We are approaching the outskirts of the town and the towpath seems endless. There is something concealed and desolate about these parts of the canal that intrigued me, that I remember. I am trying to work out where we are, where we will emerge when we leave the canal. The water churned and disconsolate from this angle. Empty buildings reflected in the water. Dark bridges and hidden pathways. In the windows, reflections of other ruins. 

***

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blogThe Street Walks In.

Unreal estate No.03: The Easternmost House

Illustration: Katrina Gelze

By Anna Iltnere:

In the third of a series of essays on seaside houses from literature, Anna Iltnere, founder of the Sea Library on Latvia’s Baltic shore, takes us to The Easternmost House Juliet Blaxland’s book of the same name. Next week, we will also publish a companion interview to this essay with Juliet herself.

“On a stormy night, sleeping at the Easternmost House is like sleeping in a boat.” - Juliet Blaxland, The Easternmost House, 2019

Juliet Blaxland, writer, architect and illustrator, had lived in a coastal house by the North Sea with her family for more than a decade, until the eve of 2020. The house is not there anymore, but continues to live in a book she wrote about it. “The Easternmost House is a portrait of place that soon will no longer exist,” Juliet writes in the introduction of The Easternmost House: A Year of Life on the Edge of England, not yet realising how very soon that will be. “It is a memorial to this house and the lost village it represents, and to our ephemeral life here, so that something of it will remain once it has all gone.” 

The Easternmost House was published last April, when the house was still standing on the edge of the cliff in Suffolk, England, overlooking the sea. It was demolished this February, so it wouldn’t fall into the sea. 

“The erosion process is historic and ongoing, with years of stability followed by great crashes of land-loss in a single tide.” 

The House

“From the sea, it appears as a house from an old fashioned story book,” Juliet writes, a house located “east of London, east of Ipswich and east of all the rest of England”. The name of the house is also a nod to The Outermost House, a seminal book by American author Henry Beston and one of Juliet’s favorites. In both books the land runs out, a fact that Juliet writes you can even sense without seeing, when driving along the road about a mile away.

“It is a windblown house on the edge of an eroding clifftop at the easternmost end of a track which leads only into the sea,” she writes. “There used to be a village here and there used to be several hundred more acres of farmland.” There was a time when the Easternmost House wasn’t a house on the edge, there was another building, which was demolished a few years earlier because of erosion. “Here, the history of houses and farmland being lost to the sea reaches far away back into time, a known unknown.” 

It was originally a row of three estate cottages, built for farm labourers or similar around 1800. “Practical, solid, honest and well-proportioned, with fireplaces and original features intact, but also a bit butchered by ‘improvements’ over the years.” It was red brick, with dark pantiles, “referred to in Suffolk as ‘blue’ pantiles, but actually as dark grey-black, and very typical of the local vernacular.” The wall facing the sea was painted pink, also very typically Suffolk. 

The house had its original bead-and-butt doors with Suffolk latches, “and the old threshold timbers are worn into soft curves by the boots of farm labourers past, hinting that it might be older than it at first looks.” The defining feature of the house, that made it recognisable from afar across the fields and trees, or from some distant part of the beach, Juliet writes, was its chimneys. “Because of being originally three cottages, with two being mirror images of each other in plan, plus the one nearest the cliff-edge, the chimney line goes: chimney, space, space, chimney, space, chimney. “Something like this: I__I_I”.”

The book is organised by months: there are twelve chapters, from January to December. Each is filled with the author’s observations, memories and details that help to re-create a strong sense of place on the page. A coastal house is never just a building. It is a place with a huge view of the sea, ever-present, ever-changing, while Juliet sits at a “clifftop kitchen table” and watches it, day by day, season by season. 

And so the seaside window is married to weather and its dramas, as are the inhabitants of the house. But it is not just what you can see; there are also smells and sounds. “A common sound of life on a windblown cliff is that of hammering nails into timber after gales. Repairs.” 

To help the reader imagine what the Easternmost House feels like inside, Juliet Blaxland writes about her own vivid childhood memories, because she lived somewhere nearby, in a different house as a kid. “A curious aspect of my childhood was the complete absence of modernity about it, even though it was the 1970s.” 

She remembers how old everything was, and not just the big things like the house, furniture or pictures, but the small, everyday items as well; she recalls that even the soap seemed to smell of ‘oldness’. “We went to bed in old beds, with old sheets, old blankets, old pillows, and old eiderdowns with the feathers falling out.” And she still did, while she wrote the book, because the Easternmost House was furnished “with a distillation of those same ‘old things’, it being filled with all the ‘old things’ that other members of our families didn’t want. The house itself is a refugee from a larger estate and most of the contents are similarly refugees from a past life larger than ours is now.” 

Juliet Blaxland keeps returning to scale in her book. The house appeared as a tiny dark rectangle in an enormous skyscape, she writes, “like a little matchbox placed on the mantelpiece in front of one of the larger of Turner’s most abstracted weather-inspired canvasses, sometimes all dark blues and steely greys, sometimes the wildest fires of unnaturally loud pinks and oranges, dazzling vast and bright and all-encompassing.” 

Juliet is an architect and is used to playing with scale in her work, drawing a building 1:50, “each line one-fiftieth of its real size, drawing a site plan at 1:500, making a model.” But it is more than just making models, it has become a mindset for her, and partly because of the place where she lives. “Living on a crumbling cliff with a dark night sky and a view of a sea horizon which hints at the curvature of the Earth, encourages consideration of scale on a grand scale, a universal scale, and the effects of thinking about a scale in this way can be mesmerising and amusing.” 

Time is a scale, a dimension that opens a more philosophical pocket in the book. It is also the time of tides, a clock of coastal erosion, inevitably ticking if you live in a house by the sea. “Living in a place where the church fell into the sea three hundred years ago makes it quite easy to imagine life in the future: not just a decade hence, but fifty years, a century, or three centuries hence. What will be exactly here, at X? What will the world be like?” 

One of the more peaceful passages in the book is when Juliet describes a warm June night spent outside with her family. “For a night on the dune we need no camping kit, no cutlery, no rucksack, no map, no whistling kettle, no nothing. Just an old wool rug and the billy-kid sausages and the rosemary twigs.” Juliet imagines for a moment what would be left if a freak wave would suddenly wash them away: just buttons of their shirts and soles of their sun-bleached canvas shoes, while wool, cotton and wood is biodegradable and would leave no trace. “We lie out on the dune, in silence under the vast universe, as the waves shush us to a state of half-watchful near-sleep, then just the waves and breathing, and then the sleep itself.”

The house has disappeared now, leaving no trace in the landscape. In early March Juliet Blaxland published a photo on her Twitter account. It was the familiar scenery of land, of sea and sky, but now without the tiny matchbox of the Easternmost House.

***

About the author: Anna Iltnere is the founder of the Sea Library in Jūrmala, Latvia. On the Sea Library website you can read reviews, interviews and, of course, borrow a book.

Katrina Gelze’s website

New Music: Nadine Khouri

By Paul Scraton:

One of the joys of being involved with a project such as Elsewhere has been to discover many different artists, writers, musicians and other creative folk who we have connected to through via the journal, our events or our online activities. In the case of Nadine Khouri it was something of a re-connection, as I met Nadine in 2008 in Beirut where she was recording an interview for a radio show. I was staying with the presenter of that show, and after the recording we went for something to eat together.

Nadine was born in Beirut, although was forced to leave at the age of seven during the conflict in Lebanon. She is now based in London, and at some point over the past couple of years since Elsewhere was launched we got back in touch. I was especially excited to hear, and then receive, Nadine’s new album The Salted Air, which was released in January. It has been playing on heavy rotation ever since, a haunting and atmospheric collection of songs that contain a sense of loss, displacement and yearning for someplace or something else that certainly resonated with me as I was thinking about the theme of transition that is at the heart of the upcoming issue of the journal. 

Drowned in Sound describes The Salted Air as “a pocket-sized book of lullabies, and gothic shanties, whose sounds and lyrics evoke a series of wondrous daydreams and sorrowful, mood-filled, late-night tales,” which should be more than enough to get you to go and check the album out. Below are the answers to the Elsewhere five questions, that I fired over to Nadine by email in the last couple of days, and a live performance of 'Broken Star' from the album. For more on Nadine, her music and upcoming live shows, take a look at her website.

Five Questions for... Nadine Khouri

What does home mean to you?

For a person who was displaced from a young age and had to navigate between various cultures, you can end up feeling a bit fragmented, or at least unable to point to a single place.  "Home" is probably more of a state of mind for me, of total presence.  

Where is your favourite place?

Oh, it’s hard to say!  I love my room at my parents' place in Beirut as it’s inspired many a song…  And anywhere on the Mediterranean.

What is beyond your front door?

Some withered trees and a Turkish corner shop.

What place would you most like to visit?

I just got back from playing some dates in Portugal and I’ve always felt I'd like to spend some more time in Lisbon.  Honestly though… the list is long! 

What are you reading right now? 

Carlos Drummond de Andrade 'Multitudinous Heart' (Selected Poems) 
 

'Broken Star (live)' at Urchin Studios features: Basia Bartz (violin) Huw Bennett (double-bass) and Jake Long (drums) DoP: Maeve O'Connell | Assistant Camera: Ignacio Crespo | editing: Jasper Verhooert | grading: Joseph Bicknell | sound recording/mix: Matt Ingram LIVE AT ST.