Life and death and love and loss on the Norfolk Coast

Resurrection at Eostre....

Part One:  Cromer

The sun doesn't go down over Cromer at this time of year - rather, it goes out, gently slipping away, fading, as the sea washes the shore and the town lights come on.  There's no one about, and the evening is ours.....

There's no one on the pier, no one to claim the crock of gold under the Lifeboat Station:

So we climb the companionway to 

Upstairs at No1

for a traditional platter of fish and chips....

After which we prowl the empty lanes:

Timidly passing the busy Red Lion:

Thinking that perhaps a drink in the bar at the Pavilion Theatre might be a quieter option:

 

However, finding that we are coinciding with the interval, with geriatric rockers spilling out from the auditorium, deafened by the 60's revivalist band, forming orderly queues at the bar, we turn towards the seemingly more sedate Hotel de Paris......

The hotel is part of a chain that caters mostly for busloads of pensioners..... 
Julia Blackburn, Threads

Where the Team welcome us:

And, here, while one aged holidaymaker sits nursing a pint and staring into the void, another group of pensioned revellers are enjoying double shots of Baileys at £4 a go.....

In the lounge the man in a faux-silk jacket and florid bow tie with the karaoke set-up energetically provokes an assortment of uber-retired couples to respond, "Who the fuck is Alice?" to his enthusiastic rendition of "Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More."  We walk on, not really surprised that after 24 years Alice has moved on....

Good night Cromer.....  It's been good to know you.....  [When I first saw the sign below, I misread it as "Germ of the Norfolk Coast...." But that is quite wrong:  make no mistake, Cromer really is a jewel....]

Part Two:  Sheringham

So, after Brancaster smoked haddock, spinach, poached eggs and sourdough, we leave the delights of Cromer, to park at West Runton and brave the full-on wind up and over the 200 or so feet of the Beeston Bump, where the wartime gun emplacement collapsed into the tunnels below and had to be replaced by a wooden effigy.  

It is a bracing, colourful morning, and the waves are coursing in from the churning sea.  Nothing, I guess, to an experienced fisherman, but it puts us in mind of the subject of our visit.

Which is an exhibition at Sheringham Museum:

Called:

OK.  I will be honest (for a change) and admit that I knew nothing about these three until recently [Like now? Ed], but thanks to my friend I have read: 

Which is a beautifully enlightening book about life and death, love and loss, centred on, as it says on the cover, the delicate life of John Craske [you may be able to blow this endpaper up, but if not, don't strain your eyes] - it says that Craske was a fisherman who, having become ill, spent the rest of his life painting and embroidering the sea life of North Norfolk, and that Julia Blackburn, in looking for the life of this man, while her own man died, treads an intriguing path along the Norfolk coast, finding footsteps in the sand, while swimming with her own sadness.

I don't believe this photo is really what it appears to be, but never mind.  The face is John Craske's.

Photograph by unknown, taken about 1901 - in the Public Domain

Rather sadly, although I was permitted to take as many pictures as I liked in the Museum when we visited, I have been refused permission to reproduce any here, despite the fact that I only wanted to share Craske's work and encourage others to visit the museum and appreciate the living reality of John Craske's art and life.....

So, unfortunately, I can only encourage you to imagine this picture, perhaps as John himself would have imagined it, based on his past experience:

And maybe you can appreciate these little pieces, none of which is larger than A5:

But here is one of his textile pictures of the Norfolk coast, which is real, as real as art ever is.  It was woven with love, and found its way, via Peter Pears, to the Red House in Aldeburgh, which doesn't mind sharing it:

Beach Scene: The Foreshore 
John Craske (1881 - 1943)
The Red House, Aldeburgh, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

I love these pictures. John Craske became ill after enlisting in the army in 1917, and never really became an easily functioning man again before his death in 1943. He was loved and looked after by his wife, Laura, who, for some time, was pushing him in a wheel chair from their cottage in Wiveton to Cley (maybe two miles each way) every day so that he could be by the sea....

But he came from a family of fishermen and served his time in his youth on boats that were tossed and shaken by high seas. He was therefore able to express the shifting forms of water around the buoyed shapes of vessels in all weathers....

Here is one of his paintings, again shared by the Red House:

Hauling the Codliner, 
John Craske (1881 - 1943), 
The Red House, Aldeburgh, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

You can feel the shifting waters, and hear the wind, and smell the salt water, whichever way the wind blew, or the sea lifted, or the sails were set....

In the late 1920s, Molly Turpin, soon to be known as Valentine Ackland, wrote that Craske is undoubtedly a very great artist.....  He is middle-aged, tall, burly; he wears a blue sailor's pull-over and his eyes are blue and bright.  He has a stern, intellectual face, with a beaky nose and fine bones.  He is decisive and clear-thinking, but without any blanketing of theory or art-talk. He paints from he calls 'memory' and when he was telling me about two pictures of coastline he said that one's Yorkshire and that one is Imagination. he knows the exact history of every boat he paints, the story of how a boat looked, where she went, what the weather was like and who was aboard her......

We wander in Sheringham, making friends with the local people, who have stored memories of life and death here - of love and loss:

It is not sure exactly what it was that afflicted John, but he was diabetic, and may have had some problem with his pituitary gland. For long periods he was in a semi-comatose state, or just listless, and had difficulty walking. He painted on all available surfaces in their accommodation, but then, when too tired to sit and paint, he took up embroidery and stitched scenes of the life he had known, and the life he imagined (his last, unfinished, work was a five-yard long embroidered depiction of the evacuation from Dunkirk....)

The sense of history and culture and tradition here is very strong:

And the town is proud of its artistic heritage, which celebrates the lives of those who didn't hesitate to give for others:

A pity, perhaps, that I cannot share more of John Craske's loving images with you here, but you can find plenty online:

Given John's ill health, his background, his education, and the cost of materials, his output was remarkable. And, given all that, his optimism and clear love for his subject are to be admired, and his story, as told by Julia Blackburn and evidenced in various sources, is inspirational.  Life, I think, is not just about the living.  And art, I think, is sometimes a gift from one to another, something to share and treasure, something to value not as a private possession but as a common experience.

The sea is everywhere here.  A wall lobster startles me in an otherwise quiet lane:

In the Peter Coke Shell Gallery I am reminded of Ariel's song to Ferdinand:

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change

And on the slipway outside the Fisherman's Lifeboat Museum small boats seem safe:

Until you think about the relentless swash of the sea, even at its mildest:

And then images come to mind of ships creaking and groaning among the waves as a headwind whisks the water to spume.  

Thank you John.

And thank you Julia.

We turn away from Sheringham, walking back into our lives, but stronger, perhaps for what we have seen.

In Threads, Julia Blackburn has written a book about life and death and the strange country between the two where John Craske seemed to live.  It is also about life after death, as Julia's beloved husband Herman, a vivid presence in the early pages of the book, dies before it is finished.

There were some lovely paintings and embroideries.  I especially liked the one of a ship in a storm done in all sorts of greys, but above all I liked the tiny slip of an image that had dropped out of the prayer book.  John Craske had written his name in black paint in careful but shaky capital letters in the bottom right-hand corner and he had written PEACE BE STILL over the top of the image.

Julia Blackburn

Threads

******

The strange thing about growing old is that the intimate identification with the here and now is slowly lost; one feels transported into infinity, more or less alone, no longer in hope or fear, only observing.

Albert Einstein 

in a letter to the Queen Mother of Belgium, 1953

(Quoted in Threads)

******

For my friend and companion on this adventure

******

Into the Mystic

Smell the sea and feel the sky

As the world spins out of control, as insane idiots strike illegal destruction at innocent individuals and unleash unknown costs on domestic expenses the world over, I feel fortunate that I can walk along the shore near my current home.

Around the coast of Norfolk, from the Wash to the North Sea, the tides come and go at the behest of the sun and the moon, exposing miles of sandy beaches, often almost empty of human feet, despite traces of past interventions:

Or accidents:

When the tide is very high, the old coal barn at Thornham Staithe is cut off....

And the remains of the grain store are awash:

Sometimes it's grey and wet:

Sometimes it's windy and rough:

Sometimes it's quiet and calm:

In winter it can be bitter and cold:

And sometimes (forgive me) you might come across a natural death:

But that is life....  Unlike the war crime of, for example, a Tomahawk missile attack on the Sharjarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, that killed 175 people, the majority of them children....

Yes, forgive me, death is all around us, but it should be part of the natural turning of the world:

Don't be horrified, don't shut your eyes and turn away, but spare a thought for those murdered children, and for the thousands of displaced and terrified people, all innocent victims of the war crimes of the deranged, tyrannical POTUS.

Be grateful for the peace that still exists, in our privileged part of the world.....

Yes, we are privileged to live in peace, and it is something to treasure:

Where the birds of the air can still flock and spiral across the sky:

Where innumerable families of waders fill the air:

And migrating geese may freely come and go:

The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness

To the Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf

If only we would listen more carefully to nature. If only we would respect life, in all its forms:

And as life began in the sea, so each of us begins his identical life in a miniature ocean within his mother's womb.

The Sea Around Us

Rachel Carson

Our paths may be uncertain, swathed in mists and of unknown length:

But if we let the the clouds gather and pass, if we let the rain fall and be thankful:

Then we may be blessed with beautiful tranquillity:

And our homes, whether modest:

Economical and functional:

Perhaps more spacious and elaborate:

Or maybe as yet incomplete:

Our homes, if  we are fortunate, may survive and we may live out our lives in peace. ....

We were born before the wind

Also younger than the sun

Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic

Hark, now hear the sailors cry

Smell the sea and feel the sky

Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

Into the Mystic

Van Morrison

And so we walk on our quiet coastline, through wind and rain, winter and summer, enjoying the space and the fresh air, watching the weather change, letting the world turn from day to night, from night to day, spinning as we grow older, living in hope, hope that as the sun begins to fall, that it will return in the morning:

Hope that, as it does every individual evening, 

Sometimes veiled:

Sometimes golden, like the wealth of oligarchs:

Sometimes like the spilled blood of children:

Or smudged like a bruised wound withdrawn from a broken building.....  

I hope that there will be new days, and that with new days hope will again rise.... 

I watch, scanning for that green flash that is said to scar the sky at the moment the sun goes out.  

I love this place, I love being here, but know I am a lucky one, surviving where others have  not....  For me, the apocalypse is not now....  it is to come.....

A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.

The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck

Yes, despite the grapes of wrath, I know we are fortunate that we can walk along the shore in peace.  It is wonderful here, the light inspiring, the sound of the sea, the various sounds of the oystercatchers, knot, dunlin, plovers, lapwings, curlews, gulls, terns, godwits, avocets, ducks, geese, sanderlings and turnstones - all living together in whirling harmony, touched by the sea and the coming and going of the tides, the billowing of the winds, and the waxing and the waning of the light.

And, like my ancestors, I worship the sun in all its glory, giver of life:

We are so privileged that we can smell the sea and feel the sky:

Oh! I do like to be beside the seaside! 

I do like to be beside the sea! 

For the sun's always shining as I make my way,

And the brass bands play, "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay"

I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside

 John H Glover-Kind

1907

Dedicated to the souls of the dead children of Minab

deprived of life and hope by agents of greed