Mourning Walk

by Carl Lavery

Performed at Lancaster University, December 2006 Lighting: Stephanie Sims

and Nuffield Theatre, Lancaster, 1 March 2008

In performance, all text is spoken except the lines in bold in the box at the very start of the script. The dates that run throughout the piece serve to mark shifts in direction. They are usually followed by a lengthy pause. Images are similarly projected on a screen behind me. Unlike in the written text, they have a sense of duration, and last as long as I see fit. All the images were taken during my walk. However, in the live performance, I also use additional images such as found photographs of artists and thinkers whose lines are cited in the text. Thank you to Nick Strong for helping to prepare these images for publication. (CL)

On 29 July 2004, to mark the ninth anniversary of my Dad's death, I walked eighteen miles as the crow flies from the town of Market Harborough in Leicestershire to the village of Cottesmore in Lincolnshire. At the end of the journey I performed a ritual in a field. I have nothing to say about that. Certain things ought to be kept secret.

October 1981

In Autumn 1981 my Dad spent ten weeks at an RAF camp in Cottesmore. He was on a course, learning how to fix Tornado fighter planes – the newest form of military jet. He used to work on Phantoms. Once he came home with a MacDonald Douglas holdall bag that an American pilot had left behind in the cockpit. He was very proud of it, and we were impressed. We'd seen nothing like this before. It looked great. Green silk; lightweight; pure style.

But today, I'm sitting at a table trying to do my French homework. I'm bored – I don't get this. I look over at the table and see my father working at something himself. He's got a pen, a geometry set and a calculator – and it looks like he's thinking. This is strange; I'm not used to it. I guess this is what he does at Cottesmore. He seems to like it. Normally, when he comes home from work he's tired and wants to sleep before he makes dinner. My mother only cooks on the weekend. She works in the NAAFI shop at St Athan and doesn't finish work until 6 p.m. On Wednesday afternoons, I stop in and see her at work. I have a job delivering papers to the Officers' mess. She's always pleased to see me and often buys me a chocolate bar. My presence breaks the routine. My Mum hates her job. There's nothing strange about that. Everybody I know hates working on the camp.

According to an American poet:

    The chain of memory is resurrection
    The vector of space is resurrection
    Direction is resurrection
    Time is the face of recognition.

I chose this walk after reconstructing my Dad's journey with the help of my Mum. We think he probably took the M4 from Cardiff to Bristol; the M5 from Bristol to Worcester; the A46 from Worcester to Leamington Spa; the A426 from Leamington to Lutterworth; the A4304 from Lutterworth to Market Harborough via Husband's Bosworth; the A6003 from Market Harborough to Oakham; and finally the B668 from Oakham to Cottesmore.

Although I wasn't following the route exactly – the road from Market Harbrough to Oakham is a busy A road – this didn't bother me unduly. My mum had told me that he liked the countryside between Market Harborough and Oakham, and I imagined him on a Friday afternoon driving through the gentle Wolds of the Welland Valley. He always said that work was an inconvenience between weekends.

October 1994

It's a dog day today – one of the last in an Indian summer – and my Dad's taken the day off work to drive me and Melanie, my wife, through the South Wales valleys to Hay-on-Wye to visit the second-hand bookshops. I buy The Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and something on psychoanalysis. We have lunch and a pint in a pub. Later that night, we watch Aston Villa beat Inter Milan on ITV. I wonder if he knew that he was ill as he walked around Hay.

Saturday, 29 July 1995

My father died at home, in his bed, at about 7.30 a.m. on the hottest day of a hot summer. When I walk to town to buy food for lunch later that day, my trousers stick to my leg. I've never experienced heat like this before in Britain. I don't want to move and the sun is hurting my eyes. I feel sick. I'm at the junction of Stalcourt Avenue and the Beach Road. I can see the comprehensive school – the one I went to – in the distance. It's about 200 yards away. Melanie's with me – she's wearing a dress straight out of the 1950s. It's got big red and green flowers on it. We're both hot, we're both shocked, we both feel unreal. My Dad's gone – they took his body out of the house this morning. Because of the heat, I never see his face again. We buried him on a Friday.

Wednesday, 29 July 2004

Melanie and my son Immanuel drive me to a village just north of Market Harborough. This is where I start my walk. It's a hot day – the hottest day of a wet summer. I feel relieved to get started. The thought of doing the walk has made me anxious for the past week, and I've begun to suffer from insomnia again, waking at 4 a.m. But today the sun is in the sky; the wheat is in the field; and the light is strong. And I'm wishing I had more of a language for landscape.

If I am walking, I almost physically feel the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as when we have accepted an invitation we duly arrive in a certain house at a given time. And might it not be that we also have an appointment to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?

The land between Market Harborough and Cottesmore dates from the Jurassic period, a layer of rock that runs invisibly through the centre of England from Dorset to East Yorkshire.

A geological mapping of the route: Market Harborough – Lower Jurassic – Clay/Silt; Medbourne – Marlstone Rockbed/Lower Lias; Oakham – Middle Jurassic – Inferior Oolite; Cottesmore – Lower Lincolnshire Limestone.

The Welland River marks the county boundary between Northamptonshire and Leicestershire. From there, the Welland runs to the Wash, and then into the North Sea. This is important for me. I've always lived by the coast, and feel landlocked in the Midlands. When a dreamer of reveries has swept aside all the preoccupations which were encumbering his everyday life, when he has detached himself from the worry which comes to him from the worry of others, when he is truly the author of his solitude, that dreamer feels that time is suspended. There is no longer any yesterday and no tomorrow. Time is engulfed in the double depth of the dreamer and the world. Walking is a technique of solitude, a way into reverie. The walker is not a sleepwalker but a daydreamer. There's a crucial difference here that demands attention. The sleepwalker is dead to the world; he has no engagement with it; he's immersed in the unconsciousness of sleep. The daydreamer by contrast is alive to the environment, and recreates it through his imagination. He's open to the shock of things. When I walk, I go back and forth in an infinite journey between memory and imagination.

Summer 1972

I'm sitting on the steps of a terraced house in Glencolyer Street, just off the Limestone Road in South Belfast. The 'Troubles' are all around me, all in me, but I don't know that yet. My Mum's in the kitchen with my new baby brother, Gareth. I'm waiting for my Dad to come home from work. I'm expectant – it's his payday and he always brings me a comic. He arrives. I'm happy. He runs his hand through my hair and I smell the leather on his jacket. He gives me the comic. I look at it and reject it. It's not the one I want. There's an immediate change of atmosphere. He takes the comic back, and tells me that I'm getting nothing. I panic. I change my mind. I do want it, after all. But it's too late. It's gone. I never see that comic. And to this day, I don't know what it was. This was my first lesson in disappointment.

December 2005: After the Walk

I'm looking for something on landscape in the journal Performance Research. I scan the page of contents on the back cover of a 1997 volume called Letters from Europe, and start to look for two articles, 'From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy' and 'Text as Landscape'. As I do so, I come across, quite by chance, a contribution from the Northern Irish artist Alistair MacLennan in the section of the journal that deals with contributions from artists and creative writers. His piece is called 'MAEL 69/96 to Commemorate All Those Killed As a Result of the Northern Irish Troubles'. The tribute is simple and minimalist. It reminds me of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington D.C. On the top left-hand column of the left-hand page, there is a thumbnail image of a dead bird, quite possibly a swallow. The rest of the eight pages then list in alphabetical order the names of those killed in the 'Troubles'. I pay particular attention when I get to the letter L, and more specifically to the name Lavery. Five Laverys have been killed in Northern Ireland since 1969: John Lavery (1971), John Lavery (1991), Martin Lavery (1974), Martin Lavery (1992) and Sean Lavery (no date).

The name Lavery is an old Ulster name and crosses the sectarian divide. But, with the exception of Sean Lavery, all the Laverys listed in MacLellan's monument have a Protestant ring to them. The Christian names are the give away. I wonder, as I read these names, what would have happened to my family if we had stayed in Belfast and not moved to Llantwit Major in 1976. I also wonder if I'm related to any of the dead.

Unlike my Mum who suffered from it, my Dad, as far as I know, was never homesick for Northern Ireland. He seemed to have no attachment to the place, although he did run around the garden once when Northern Ireland beat Spain in Seville during the 1982 World Cup.

A botanical map of my journey:

Fox Glove, Milk Thistle, Borridge, Dandelion, Dog-Rose, Bracken, Furze, Ling, Tussock Grass, Violet, Meadow-rue, Bird's Foot Trefoil, Burnet, Sorrel, Gentian, Meadow Saxifrage, Clover, Hay-rattle, Rock-Rose, Buttercup, Cuckoo-Flower, Ragged Robin, Self-Heal.

August 1992

I'm coming down the stairs at home sometime in the late morning. My parents have just come back from Greece, and my brother is getting a bollocking. He's forgotten to water my Dad's tomato plants – and he's 'killed a bumper crop'. Melanie is still in bed asleep. When I tell her about it she laughs. The phrase 'a bumper crop' became a comic memory for my family, and on the night my father died, we laughed about it again, trying to keep him alive in language and memory.

June 1995

My dad was diagnosed with cancer in early June 1995, about a week after my birthday, which falls on 31 May – the same day as Clint Eastwood's. Melanie had bought me a new pair of shoes as a present. I remember throwing them from the upstairs window into the garden. I think it was a Monday. At the time, I was tutoring X, which meant I had to wait until Friday before we could go and visit my Dad. Melanie had to arrange to get time off work too. Anyway, I remember that we took the train from Norwich to Wales on a Friday. It was unseasonably cold when we left Norwich. I left the gas on. When we returned from Wales the following week, I was surprised to see a small blue flame rising from the white bars of the fire.

Because my Dad was in the hospital, my Mum picked us up from the station. The next day was the start of the heat wave which was to last throughout the summer. My Dad was in bed when we arrived at the hospital and he complimented me on a new shirt I'd bought from a charity shop in Norwich. After some random testing, he was discharged from hospital and drove the car back in a very impatient and tense way. This was uncharacteristic; he was normally a careful driver who didn't like to waste fuel. In the afternoon, we watched the Rugby World Cup on TV. He told me off for smoking too much. I told him I was stressed. He nodded and agreed. We talked around the subject of his not being there.

My Dad went back to hospital on Sunday night for more checks. I noticed that he didn't eat anything before he left. The next day, the Monday, we drive to the hospital to see him. He seems frail, but the weight loss means that he looks younger. Almost the way I remember him when I was a child, and he was in his early 20s and looked a bit like Rod Stewart. He walks with us to the hospital doors. Melanie and my Mum are ahead of me – they are almost at the car. I turn around, and watch my Dad walk back into the hospital, alone. This image, an image that somehow for me captures the very essence of loneliness, will continue to haunt me. As I write, I can't get Kafka's short story 'Before the Law' out of my head. I think of the incident in the story when the gatekeeper tells the protagonist that the door he has been endlessly waiting to open is his own unique door. Nobody else can walk through it. Until now that memory has stayed within me, hidden deep in my own private space. And even now as I speak of it, I'm sure of having failed to communicate its real sense.

I feel there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start to tremble and they call us by our name, and as soon as we recognise their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.

'And so it is with our own past. It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it: all the efforts of our intellect must prove futile. The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some hidden object ... of which we have no inkling. And it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves must die.'

Due no doubt to having spent most of my formative years in the countryside, nature, for me, is always associated with childhood. And that's probably why it calms me down so much. It seems to hold out the possibility of happiness, some sense of completion. On my walk to Cottesmore, I was on the lookout for frogs. I remember once playing on a boggy heath in Antrim. The ponds that covered the landscape were thick and full of spawn. I took some home and watched it turn into tadpoles and then into frogs. My Mum didn't know what to do with a bucket of baby frogs and flushed them down the toilet. Frogspawn fascinates me because it's material for change. I liked the tadpoles best when they were at their most monstrous with little legs, arms and tails.

The relationship between the idea for a walk, the walk itself and the physical evidence of the walk is the fundamental issue. The idea is vital in that it defines the structure for a walk. But the walk is equally important in that it realises the idea, actualising the structure as physical movement through time and space so that the work of art has a real – if transient – existence.

August 1974

We've just moved to Antrim from Belfast. The 1974 World Cup is over and I have vague memories of Holland playing Germany in the final. I like the orange jerseys worn by the Dutch. Because my parents are young and have little spare cash, we always go out exploring in the summer evenings. We walk everywhere and go quite far, heading for the hills in the distance. Often I'm so tired they have to take my brother out of the pram and put me in it. I am too heavy to carry. One particular evening comes to mind. It is high summer, and the light is still strong. Summer nights in Ulster are long and seem to last forever. We walk through a field of flowers and come across a farmhouse recently abandoned. Everything is still in place and there are boxes and tins everywhere. There's also an Aga and milk churns. My Dad took some light-fittings from the wall. We returned to the farmhouse in Spring and it was full of flowers.