Lost People

In response to 'Listening to Lost People' by Denise Riley

Listening to Lost People

Still looking for lost people – look unrelentingly. ‘They died’ is not an utterance in the syntax of life where they belonged, no belong – reanimate them not minding if the still living turn away, casually. Winds ruck up its skin so the sea tilts from red-blue to blue-red: into the puckering water go his ashes who was steadier than these elements. Thickness of some surviving thing that sits there, bland. Its owner’s gone nor does the idiot howl – while I’m unquiet as a talkative ear. Spring heat, a cherry tree’s fresh bronze leaves fan out and gleam – to converse with shades, yourself become a shadow. The souls of the dead are the spirit of language: you hear them alight inside that spoken thought.

Lost People. Shadows. Hooded shadows walking. Sculpture at Cass Sculpture Park, the semi-circle of hoods, no-one within. Silent communion. Wisdom in the circle. I pulled up my hood and slipped in between them, head bowed. Comfortable there in the silence, the being. Just being, the communication of presence, beyond words. Words grasping to contain the uncontainable, the wellspring of emotion, of experience, of life, of being. Being – I seem to want to write about being. How does it relate to “lost people”? Being and non-being; a question of aliveness in the presence. How to be and hold onto my sense of being in the midst of others’ being, in an unquiet circle. Sometimes inside I howl. Howl with the wind. Howl to the moon. Howl as the rolling waves crash and creep towards me. Sometimes my howl settles to a moan, an endless grieving moaning, a soulful song sung over the bones of my being, the flesh drained away, the pale thin bones of me, bleached by the fiery sun, trying to stir life back into me, to reconfigurate, mantle the bones into a pile, and set me alight. Lost people dancing unseen around the fires, in the flickering flames, the ascending smoke, the hushed surround. Lost people. When I was a child it was commonplace for someone to get lost. Regularly there would be tannoy announcements for so-and- so to come and collect their weeping child. Going into supermarkets we were told where to meet if we got lost.

Lost. Lost in the woods. Lost. Loss. I lost my father. We lost our aunt, my grandfather, grandmother, relatives I never met. Some buried, some scattered, some still in jars waiting for a ceremonious goodbye.

I started thinking about my mother's funeral, logistics, where to have the ceremony. Would friends travel from Italy? Would we need to send her on a last plane journey down to Puglia? She always says she doesn't care, but after we are gone it's not about what we want (or wanted) as much as what's best for the ones who are left behind. I know the basics: cardboard coffin, Ravel's Bolero playing while she travels towards the fire with a cigarette between her fingers, for that last smoke. What does this say about my mother? Sometimes I worry I have spent my life not knowing who she is at all, who she was once, what her dreams were. Perhaps she's more like me that I care to admit.

Scratch scratch scratch these thoughts out of my head. Enough death for this month. I want to think about life and the future. Although death is part of my future – everybody's future. And past. And present.

Looking for lost people. Reanimating lost relationships... How can I do that?

My grandmother Ilse is a lost person. She came to the UK from Nazi Germany in 1939. A Jew, she’d married my grandfather Paul, who was not Jewish. They met at university where she was studying dentistry and he agriculture and politics. He became a double Doctor, she a dentist. In the 30s, Paul could see what was happening in Germany and went to Florida to learn about farming, with a view to bringing the family to the US, leaving behind Ilse and their two children. After Kristallnacht, Ilse sent the children to school in Kent and she followed in 1939, just before WWII broke out. Unable to use her German qualifications, she became a skivvy and then got a job as an alteration hand at Dickins & Jones. She became mentally and physically ill; her mother and sister escaped to Shanghai; her husband still in Germany; her son interned, then in the British army; all she had was her daughter who was trying to earn a living by now. Paul returned to Germany in 1937 and spent the war ‘underground’. He became a politician; a founder member of the Christian Democrat Party, he was Deputy Prime Minister of Schleswig-Holstein when he died, aged 60, in 1955. He was given a state funeral. After the war, with both her children married, her husband now a successful politician and remarried in Germany, Ilse took her life, aged 55, alone in her London flat.

Into my long life many people have come and gone. Some, a few, have left firm traces and rare not lost to me. As long as memory reliably lasts I can recall them at will and engage with them in a one sided manner. The last impressions they made are indelible, unchanging. As The War Poets say about those Killed in Action - “They grow not old.” Having outlived all members of my immediate family, I can look back in memory at my last sightings of them. These memories are vivid and unsettling because, collectively, they seem to be calling to me, “Come and join us!”