Waldensong Saturnalia

REVIEWS

• I was impressed by the sophistication of the language, the sense of place, Iain Sinclair, British novelist, Selection Judge, Eastside Stories Competition, London, U.K., 1995

• Fairly sings off the page, it is that lyrical. A masterful job, Kathy Green, Magazine Editor, New York, U.S.A.

• A novel that spans a century and three continents to delve into the shadows of memory and the imagination, Howard Bokser, Editor, Concordia University Magazine, Spring 2010

• A masterful writer; every word counts, Trevor Lockwood, Chairman, Radio Host, Felixstowe Community Radio, U.K.

• It’s a fictional world that I was reluctant to leave, Mary Fitzpatrick, Artist, Digital Illustrator.

• I enjoyed it very much—well written and dark, Cecile Ghosh, Cataloguing and Reference Librarian, Roxboro and Beaconsfield Libraries.

• It covered about 100 years of history; it went all over the world… with people having every kind of human emotion you can imagine, Leslie Lutsky, Radio host, Jewish Digest, Radio Centreville, Montreal, Quebec.

• Waldensong has gripped me—There is so much, so much to absorb. I don't think I've ever read a family "saga" like this. What a profound effort, Len Richman, Teacher, author, scholar.

• The writing is gorgeous-;lyrical, polished and rife with symbolism. The two characters Greta and Lily are painfully real and alive…this seems like an extraordinary book. What a triumph! Angela Leuck, Haiku poet, Montreal, Quebec.

• Such rich language; I loved it, Ingrid Style, Artist

Prelude

I was weaned too soon, I suppose, so I need to travel back now and then to my birth city to feast on its remains. When my soul shrivels dry and threatens to expire in this saturnine land of my adoption, I come tramping back around London’s East End, soaking in the sooty streets and hop-reeking pubs, the soft buttery dog droppings plastered over the pavement and the damp, open greens—O Mum—the day you tumbled into bed with a ‘bloody foreigner,’ you condemned me to be an exile in my own land.

Thank you, thank you for this double-edged gift—but where will I lay my neurotic bones to rest while I’m still alive? Where is my country?

Drifting through these streets that loop and cross and threadneedle into one another, I eavesdrop on tweed-capped pensioners, pulled strongly along on dog leashes, rumbling out their gentle coughs at every lamppost. I admire the wind-polished faces of the schoolboys as they wade through market trash along Whitechapel. It’s where the glassy red phone-boxes, reeking of musk and dog piss, are vandalized by the local Hun.

My salmon-river journey tugs me past centuries’ old terrace-houses. Blindfolded. Gagged in plywood. Awaiting their death-row demolition. Pounding the pavement like an accidented soul, I’m newly dead—yet still haunting the track-path of my sudden annihilation. Wedged into this purgatory between worlds, I am a displaced sinner, forever atoning for the loss of the motherland.



Along Walden, most doors and windows are boarded up or cemented shut. Our number is still visible though, painted white on faded blue under an arch of bricks crowning the door and fitted together like dragon’s teeth. Our doorstep, the one Aunt Flo faithfully ‘redded’ in wax, is faintly red still as though stained forever and ever in holly-berries or ox blood. The rib-iron grate guards her disused coal cellar, smeared in cobwebs, now an underground shrine.

A sharp draught pierces my eyes as I peep through the letterbox. The passage, arched at the far end and buried in workmen’s ladders, is awash in Walden’s mellow streetlight that filters in through wedges of dark glass, still intact, in their half-moon frames above the door. Guarding its aura of privacy, the sitting-room door to my right is wedged shut as though Uncle Albert still lived here. And a few steps further down into the gloom is the ramshackle latched door through which Aunt Flo’s black poodle escaped daily into our coffin-like yard.

Standing where I am, on this raised red step, with my ‘voyeur’ eyes framed by the narrow letterbox, I can see no further than the twisting juncture of the first and second landing where Aunt Flo and Greta, my sister, faced each other eyeball to eyeball, aeons ago, in a blood-curdling duel of screams and punches. I remember, too, the shadowy stairs around the unseen corner that led up to the lodger’s bed-sit. And climbing further still, as far as Lily’s—my mother’s—attic kitchen, the blackened gas stove (if it’s still there) must be on the topmost landing. This is where she stood years ago, leaning dreamily on one thin hip, frying steak and chips for Greta’s dinner.

“What’s the matter, Angie?” she’d say, a shade reproachful when she saw my face, nose wrinkling, seduced by the perfume, the translucent pearl of chopped onion. “Didn’t you get nothin’ to eat at school?”

My gaze travels upward to what used to be Lily’s bedroom window; it’s surrounded by a baroque pastiche of sooty mauve slate tiles. Each corrugated segment of roof is partitioned from the next by a slope-descending row of bricks. A drainpipe plumbs straight downward from the eaves, incongruously elegant, while, splashing up the brick façade, is a flat gleaming cataract of moss; an exotic weed, rooted reckless between the cracks, offers up its marguerite blossom to the world.

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BOOK ORDERING FOR THE NOVEL: WALDENSONG SATURNALIA
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